Schrodinger's cat everything in the Box the air the light you know everything moving around in the background interacts differently with the awake cat running around trying to get out and the asleep cat just snoring peacefully on the ground is there a world where I open the box and I see the awake cat as a different world from the one in which I open the box and it's asleep there will be two worlds and it happens long before you open the box because as soon as the other stuff in the Box as soon as the photons and the atoms and everything become entangled with the cat boom there's two worlds so where are those two worlds or is that the wrong question that's the wrong question the worlds are not located in space space is located in each world holy CRA I got to go I got to go believe be anymore it's over there is no God oh [Music] no this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson here your personal astrophysicist got with me Chuck Nice Chuck hey hey Neil hey what's happening all right what are you holding in your hand here holding a book oh okay a book that I uh you know that I um picked up off of the coffee table the biggest ideas in the universe well that's what this episode is going to be about yes but I know some big Ideas right but I don't know the biggest ideas there's a the in the front of this title right and like the qualifier yeah so this is written by the one and only Sean Carol Shan welcome to my office thank you so much New York your office these are the best places most exciting places that I we have corresponded and emailed and talked and we have never been in the same space no I think we did in La once right I think so I think briefly very very briefly but yeah many phone calls many emails delighted to have a meaningful exchange with you at this point right with microphones in front of us camera trained TR meaningful exactly Okay so just up before we delve in which Sean Caroll are you I'm the physicist one the physicist Sean Caroll yes and the other Sean Carol is who my evil twin he has the Beards you know which one is the evil twin but is it like is it a is it a it's not quite as evil it's more like bushy Santa Claus be it doesn't really look like but he's a very accomplished biologist uh also writes books you should buy those too okay very nice all right very good so Sean Carol let me get your your your bio going here the Homewood professor of natural philosophy that's very retro man just like Newton I was going to say yeah good Ike had some title like that natural philosophy at at the Johns Hopkins University down in Baltimore which is the home of the headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope the Space Telescope Science Institute is right there cool uh and you're also on the faculty at the Santa Fe Institute but you're only on a visiting faculty so they got really cute here fractal faculty you got pretty cute get get CU you can't get cuter than that no you can't I mean unless there are a bunch of Sean carols who are tinier and look exactly like Sean Carol oh oh to continue the fractal continue the fractal right move on in Sean Carol at all scale exactly frightening and your research areas quantum physics SpaceTime cosmology emergence I love emergence maybe we can hit on that entropy I've seen a lot of that lately we can can you do something about entropy if you can't do anything about it I you have nothing for us I increase it we can do that without you Dark Energy Symmetry and origins of the universe you're all in you got a podcast podcast of your own mindscape I think I've been on that have I been on that podcast no not yet not yet okay we see maybe it's in my inbox maybe I haven't got to yet and this latest book the biggest ideas in the universe the second in a Trilogy this one Quant and Fields quanta well wouldn't that be the smallest idea in the universe smallest thing can be the biggest idea oh [Laughter] dear snap you got to put Chuck in his place early otherwise he'll just run ramp all over you yeah he got you on that one just he got you so if this is a Trilogy the first Big Ideas Book was what it was called SpaceTime in motion which is like Publishers speak for classical phys regular ordinary armchair physics Isaac Newton physics yeah Isaac Newton physics and Albert Einstein for that matter he was the star isn't it funny at this point Albert Einstein is the old physics classical physics classical physics now we're going Quant and Fields two very big ideas and can we get a hint in what you'll be happy to hear it's complexity and emergence is volume three that's going to be it's basically appeti is her main course dessert here so the third one's going to be fun okay very good you're an active research scientist you you publish books you're active on social media you so this is great just to see kindred soul out there it's very tiring isn't it why do we do this who idea was this let's go out and have a drink we'll talk about it in service to the universe yeah we are Servants of cosmic curiosity that permeates within us all we know that the idea of field as my memory of the history of physics began with Michael Faraday is that correct or does it go farther back than that that would be fine if you gave it to Faraday I mean he certainly played a huge role in figuring out mid 19th century mid 19th century electricity magnetism both had Fields associated with them technically no one ever mentions this but our old friend Pierre Simone LL Circa 1800 realized that you know Isaac Newton had this idea of gravity the inverse Square law and and Newton was very puzzled like you have the Earth here you have the moon over there there's a gravitational force how does the moon know what the gravitational force is there's nothing between them nothing between them action at a distance right and llas figured out you could rewrite Newton's theory of gravity in terms of a gravitational field so I kind of give him credit wow look at that so in my high school I had a friend who uh his name was Frank lce and we just learned about some of these great French physicist mathematicians lrange La PL and and over lunch one day he says will there will be the Larice equations this was this was just a fun little dream state that we all occupied in high school okay so Fields why are Fields real or are they just the convenience Because by the way you you are partially in the department of philosophy there get to ask you philosophically leaning questions I'm not allowed to say that's a philosophy question and ignore it I actually have to answer those question to answer that's my job good all right yeah so the story that we tell in the book is if you were 1895 right if you were just before the turn to the 20th century you would have thought that matter tables and chairs was made of particles right stuff we knew about electrons you knew about atoms and you would have thought that the forces between the atoms were mediated by Fields gravitational field the electric field the magnetic field and one of the great triumphs of quantum physics in the 20s and 30s was it said it's all field electricity magnetism are Fields but so are electrons and quarks and neutrinos and they vibrate in different ways and through the miracle of quantum mechanics when you look at those vibrating Fields they appear to us as particles the particles come out of the field is this an early variant of what would later be String Theory where they're saying particles or vibration in the strings well particles are vibrations in the fields and that's absolutely accurate in the regimes we're talking about here is there something deeper that they could be vibrations of strings Etc that's a speculative idea very very promising don't know yeah much smaller we don't need to know for predicting what's going to come out of the Large Hadron cide okay so you so let me ask you a blunt question which sounds stupid but I think it's me it's a meaningful question do electrons exist as as as now wait is that is that uh a science or a philosophical question well well because philosophy as I understand it we have never measured the size of the electron it is smaller than the smallest capacity we have ever conjured to measure its size okay I got to ask you uh a preliminary question how truthful do you want me to be I love it okay give me give me what you say in the back room in the back room with the cigars no first lie to me then tell me the truth okay the LIE is what is real is the electron field and little vibrations in those electron Fields show up in our detectors as particles so it's not that we haven't measured the size of the electron is that there is no such thing as the size of the electron the electron is a vibration in a field it can have different vibrational wavelength but so and it shows up as the particle yes that's right oh my God yeah that's right to the party that way but otherwise it's not yeah yeah okay that is so trippy that is so freaky man wait wait wait wait wait you and Einstein both were bothered by this bothered by this so you cannot measure the electron in its wave state to be a particle because the act of measuring it turns it into the particle the way that we usually measure things you say where is it and you get a little track in your particle detector cuz you keep asking where it is you always get a definite answer to the question where is it but when you're not asking that question it's spread out all over the place okay is that a lie or the truth that's the lie I Haven even gotten to the truth yet okay now now give me the truth okay when quantum mechanics came along in the 1920s we realized that instead of an elect let celebrate we in the Centennial we're very close of this of the of the discovery of quantum physics the centenial decade the quantum year yeah yeah yeah the Centennial decade and and that was a watershed decade where Hubble discovers that the Milky Way is not alone among galaxies in the universe and he discovers the universe is expanding and I'm just saying we got to tip our hat to the 1920s here the Roaring 20s we live in in shame that we can't live up to that anymore think about that all the time yeah it was too bad I mean let's be honest they weren't working with much to start with like you know low hanging yeah low hanging you guys are building on top of everything that they've actually discovered you know absolutely all right we're building up to the truth here so you realize in the 1920s that you thought the electron was a little particle in fact you should describe it in quantum mechanics by a wave function if you ever took chemistry if you ever saw those pictures of the orbitals of electrons Etc that's the wave function of the electron mhm soon thereafter you realize no actually you should be doing field Theory Quantum field Theory and so there's a field that the electron is a vibration in and you're asking what really exists well there's a wave function of that field so there's like fieldin on top of fieldin and finally you say that okay what if you have like different fields different particles do they each have a wave function no there's one wave function for the whole kitten Kaboodle of them the wave function of the universe that's what's real the wave function of the universe is you know he been smoking something that's crazy you know was he before this are you just talking this or or is this hypothesis ized soon to be experimentally verified I encourage all of the listeners out there to check out my paper entitled reality this be a research paper research paper called reality as a vector in Hilbert space okay that's what reality is so look first let me explain not everyone agrees with the true thing I just said so there's disagreement because of this fact that physicist it's your personal truth can't agree on what quantum mechanics really says so we have idea that everyone uses in quantum mechanics Hilbert space which is the space of all possible imaginal qu imaginable Quantum states of the universe and someone like me who is a purist an extremist about this says we have all possible Quantum States the actual universe is one of them and it changes with time other people will say no that's not reality that's just a tool we use to describe predictions to you know make predictions for experiments other people will say that's part of reality but there's other parts of as well we don't have a consensus on this okay I like the absence of consensus yeah exactly keeps you it wakes you up in the morning and and whole thing sounds very political oh yeah oh my God all right so where how do you square all the successful predictions of quantum physics with any intuitive understanding of what's going on because I I've said many times and I'm I'm happy to say it again the universe is under no obligation to make sense sense to us so once you accept that why try to make sense of it and and jump through hoops and brain twists just to say well it's got to be this or it's got to be that but it calculates and it works move on the universe is under no obligation to make sense but remarkably it keeps making sense once we really let ourselves listen to what the universe is trying to tell us Universe seems to be intelligible it's not deeply ineffably mysterious and it's a give and take it's not like our intuition just maps on to reality reality is like no you're intuition was a little bit off there try to update and if you're open-minded about it and you buy the right books very updatable you can absolutely get there is what I'm saying yeah hey Star Talk fans I don't know if you know this but the audio version of the podcast actually posts a week in advance of the video version version and you can get that in Spotify and apple podcast and most other podcast Outlets that are out there multiple ways to ingest all that is Cosmic on Star talk I'm reminded of the the the Charming illustrated book series by George cam uh Mr Tomkins in I guess Wonderland or and what he would do is he's a business famous business is mid 20th century okay lived only just died only 20 years ago or so but he yeah George gamma he was one of the original predictors of the temperature of the universe yeah if the universe began as a as an explosion with the big bang could you measure that and then he was on a paper that that okay so what what temperature did he get for it was like uh factor of 10 yeah no was it 10 factor of 10 no I within a factor of 10 they had different I think it was like 5 de he said the universe is 5° and the universe turned out to be 3° oh okay okay so rich God okay friend of the show has said that's like predicting that a 50 foot fllying sorcerer will land on the White House lawn but a 30 foot flying sorcer lands on right yeah yeah it's not even that that the numbers are different it's that it's a prediction at all that would come true right but this story you're telling right here is exactly why this crazy talk about Hilbert spaces in Quantum Fields has some plausibility because we have some data in front of us we try to explain it we invent an equation that explains it and then we extrapolate that equation to Wild places that it's never been before and it comes back telling us yeah that's what I said that's what I said was going to happen and the Big Bang is an example Quantum field theory is another example but Mark Twain did this first you know you know the Mark Twain ISM yeah yeah yeah so he had read that there was some research paper about the rate at which the Mississippi River is depositing uh silt in the in the Delta and so it's growing in this direction and then he says oh uh that means you know 30 million years ago the Mississippi River ended in Canada and then he says the great thing about science there's such uh wholesale conclusions drawn from a trifling investment fact oo man that's brilliant yeah that's Mark Twain doing it in Mr Tomkins in Wonderland what made it entertaining especially if you're a budding scientist is he changes the values of the physical constants in an Ordinary World okay so and then you get to see what happens in an ordinary way otherwise these phenomena are inaccessible to us one of them he said all right 60 miles an hour is the speed of light and now you're driving down the street what do you see and then another one I think he changed planks constant yeah sure and so could you just give me a handle cool on things that would happen if Plank's constant were macroscopic like if I walked through the doorway I would like defract right right wouldn't I yeah you would defract and we wouldn't be able to know exactly that you had a position and velocity at the same time right you know the old joke about verer Heisenberg being pulled over and the cop says you know how fast you were going and Heisenberg says no but I know exactly where I am because you can't know according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle both your velocity and position at the same BR at physics conf I was going to say who wrote that can I try that out I don't know yeah that's the uncertainty principle no one would pin you down in quantum mechanics you're fundamentally not a set of particles you're a set of waves if the plun constant which sort of sets the scale for quantum physics were much bigger macroscopic then we would all be these kind of undulating waves moving through the universe interfering with each other and becoming entangled and then measuring things and you we don't want to live there it's not no place to be really and so you mentioned entangled that's been a buzz phrase everybody loves it everybody loves it's one of the biggest hits hearing about it's one of the biggest hits right now entanglement entanglement so uh one of the the goals is what's the farthest particle that you can entangle on the premise that maybe that'll be useful one day and from all the news articles I've seen China leads the world uh in in Tangled particle distances so so what do you have to do to I'm sorry I because I'm I'm just losing something right here I'm missing something if something is entangled what difference would it make about the distance I'm missing that who knows I'm saying in science you just push the envelope if you've never pushed it before I got you one day are they we heard in Congress that just did you hear in Congress China is going to land something on The Far Side of the Moon and Congress wants to know why how come we're not landed something on the far side of this was an entire conversation in Congress right right no but Chuck is completely right about entanglement it doesn't matter how far away things are but the problem with two entangled particles which we haven't even defined what that means but you have a very sophisticated audience so they know what this means is that as soon as you measure one of them the entanglement breaks so it's not that they get further apart just that as you bring them further apart the chances that one of them bumps into something gets bigger and bigger and so therefore so that's what makes this distance record meaningful as a as a record so one of them was they entangled particles between orbit and Earth's surface and another one was they entangled particles inside a fiber optic uh uh Network okay 50 km which which is about City size and so then the suspicion is with entangled particles you might be able to make a secure internet undecodable un unhackable you can't you can't it encryption wouldn't make a difference at that point right because it's instant so is this is this a pipe dream well it's very hard because once you get Beyond a few particles it becomes harder and harder and harder to remain all of them being entangled with each other and that's ultimately what you need but that's a technology problem it's not like you're violating the laws of physics so we're setting our best Engineers on it trying to build quantum computers etc got a brad Engineers you fixed it you do that we've shown it's conceivable what are you want from us yeah what more do you need the math works all right Johnson there's no law of physics against it right exactly you know the the the engineers who said we will never fly faster than sound did not get that from a physicist that's right okay because we bols went faster than sound the crack of a whip is faster than sound you know we we we had that so I but so back to this can you foresee a value to a 50 kilometer Quantum entangled Network the size of a city you know mostly that's just showing off I think it's much more important technologically to have a thousand or a million Quantum entangled things very close to each other then you can manipulate them build a computer do isn't that what goes on in a Quantum chip isn't there a lot of entangled would like it to be you don't it's very very hard because literally any Photon that bumps into them messes things up that's why you need to push it down to absolute zero or very very close oh I not fully appreciated that the photos I saw most of that was just like refrigerator the door the freezer compartment just to to have the little bitty thing in the middle otherwise cuz like you and I radiating our infrared all over the place would would totally decohere those Quantum bits that would be the opposite of cohere which which is what this conversation makes me feel like are you de decoherent decoherent I'm decoherent catch us up on entangled particles well this is part of this fact that we said before that there's not a separate Quantum wave function for every individual thing in the universe there's only one wave function for all of them at once and what the wave function tells us is the probability of observing something so if you have two particles and let's say they have positions you don't know where it is in fact literally when something like the higs boson decays decays into an electron and a positron the anti-electron and you say well what direction are they going in the answer is they're both going in all directions their wave functions are coming out sort of in a spherical pattern but then when you observe one of them that's where it is that's where it is and and momentum is conserved so now you know the other one is going exactly so you know where the other one is without having detected it yet that's entanglement so what entangles them the rules of physics okay that doesn't that's not stop it that's just out of here that's my mother saying because I said so that's what Mom why can't I have ice cream for breakfast because I said so that's why what law of physics prescribes this quantum mechanics that's the nature of quantum mechanics it's sort of that this is how science works you sort of conjecture an idea then you say is that right or not and so in quantum mechanics the the fundamental way things work is that the state of the universe is a vector in Hilbert space which means that the combined state of every particle in the universe and every field and every everything is described by one single mathematical object and in fact I don't like the word entanglement because it kind of it it makes it hard to update your intuition it makes it sound like what really exists are these two particles and you measure one then you're like why did the other one change if you just accept that what exists is the combined Quantum state of everything in the universe then it's no surprise at all that when you look at a little bit of it it affects the rest okay but interesting can I just take two random particles okay that's I gotta admit that makes a lot of sense can I take two random particles that were not born together and entangle them sure okay yeah entanglement happens whenever you have two objects that are not entangled but they interact with each other in different ways depending on different parts of their wave function so let me just give you a down toe example Schrodinger's cat you've heard about this schinger uh who apparently didn't like cats uh goes to a great amount of thought experiment effort to put a cat in a super position that's right that would have never work with Schrodinger's dog that that would not have flown sher's daughter would had it said that he didn't like cats this why he picked the cat so it's in a super position of alive and dead I'm a cat person so I in my version they're a super position of awake and asleep oh it's very sweet you don't have to kill the cat you don't have to it I didn't know you didn't have to kill the cat point is you don't have to kill the cat but the point is there are different places in the Box okay and what that means is that everything in the Box the air the light you know everything moving around in the background interacts differently with the awake cat running around trying to get out and the asleep cat just snoring peacefully on the ground and so the environment as we say entangles with the cat right away because it interacts with it but interacts with it differently depending on different parts of the wave function okay I don't know that that's more clear to me so you're you're sleep and awake cat but we declared that without actually sleep and awake cat in the Box I mean we just asserting that why does that make could the cat just be drowsy you know this is in out this is sher's whole point this is why he set up in the in the experiment there's a radioactive sub thought experiment he didn't do it so radioactivity and there's a Geer counter and the guer counter will click when it detects a radioactive decay in radioactivity you have no idea which particle is going to Decay well okay just statistically you know very accurately what fraction of them will but the fact that you don't know creates a brilliant beautiful random number in a sense yeah okay so if you needed a random thing you get a decaying set of particles and you can build you can draw Randomness from that that is as is that that's as good of random as we can produce 100% random as far as we know right as far as we nothing nothing better and this is you know the 1930s when sheringer was very unhappy with the state of quantum mechanic he was not bragging about quantum mechanics he was saying surely you don't believe this and he says when we say this particle has a probability of decaying what quantum mechanics actually says is that there's a wave function for the particle and it is in a superposition of I have decayed and I have not decayed uhhuh and the part of it that is decayed sets off the Geer counter now the guer counter is in a superposition of I have clicked and I have not clicked and the guer counter in the part that clicks knocks over a hammer breaks a vial full of sleeping gas and the cat goes to sleep to sleep so the cat goes into a superp position of being awake and being asleep that's the whole point of the sort of Ru girl Ru Goldberg Gizmo that schinger builds in there but how does that help anything like well schinger is trying to say in in the way that we thought of quantum mechanics back then there was these giant debates between bore and Einstein about what quantum mechanics really means Neil and Neil bore would have said look when you open the box and look the cat suddenly changes from being in a superp position of awake and asleep to being one or the other okay and shinger is like come on you think that when I look at it it changes like that I got you I got you so his thing is that superposition exists at all times everywhere no matter what and it has nothing to do with the fact that I looked at it it's in that super position you just got to accept that should have said that he he blinked he lost courage at the last second oh and it was uh a decade and a half later uh or two decades later a graduate student at Princeton named Hugh Everett said exactly those words he said just believe what the what the formula is telling you and what the formula tells you is when you look at it guess what you enter into a super position there's a part of you that has seen the cat awake and a part of you that has seen the cat asleep and Hugh Everett says that's cuz both of those possibilities exist just in two separate worlds because what we're dealing with is a probability in the first place so that always exists it doesn't change because you observed it it's still the same wait you just mentioned in that world I have some memory that I haven't heard about lately but that it was was it the Copenhagen interpretation that was Neil B Neils bore is is Danish okay and so they credited I guess the city but it was really a a bore interpretation not a Copenhagen well he had his people who would come into His Institute and hang around and go out you know spreading the gospel abore so this was the idea yeah Heisenberg poy there's a bunch there's a bunch okay so uh can you catch us up on the many worlds interpretation right so the Copenhagen interpretation really frustrated people like Einstein and schinger because it seemed to give up on arguably the single most crucial feature of science which is realism about the physical world you know before quantum mechanics came along you knew there was a real world out there even if you didn't know exactly what it was doing and bore and his friends seem to be saying that before you open the box and look at the cat there is no fact of the matter about what the cat is and Einstein schinger said you know even if you don't know what the fact of the matter is there should be some and so Everett sort of lives up to the dreams of Einstein and schinger says yes there is a reality there but sadly for you the reality is there's many different worlds and they don't interact with each other so ever is just saying that in this world of superpositions that quantum mechanics always describes you should just take them all seriously they're all actually there it's not just a mathematical trick that is real really really tough that is rough you got the sleepy cat you got the awake sleep cat you got the awake cat is there a world where I open the box and I see the awake cat as a different world from the one in which I opened the box and it's asleep there is there are will there will be two worlds and it happens long before you open the box because as soon as the other stuff in the Box as soon as the photons and the atoms and everything become entangled with the cat boom there's two worlds so where are those two worlds or is that the wrong question that's the wrong question I see that you quickly got it as soon as you asked it you knew no I knew but the worlds are not located in space space is located in each world he knows it get got I got to leave I Need You Chuck Chuck I need you I don't believe you anymore it's over no there is no God oh no I mean that's also true but okay another podcast wow that is so cool I mean that is really really freaky trippy cool and many many people believe this not everyone does so it's a it's something we don't have a consensus on people don't believe it have a better I was going to say if you don't believe that then you got to go back to what we were just talking about which is the Neil's boore now you're actually I'm sorry that sounds more like magic that doesn't that sounds like magic to me like I opened it up or I looked at it or because I looked at the electron that's when it is where it is and became what it became why would that be why I mean why would that I have to clear something up here go ahead just before help me out okay no let me just clear something go ahead in physics we talk about the Observer uhuh okay on on many levels and okay in quantum physics The Observer is not simply some conscious entity look if you want to a measurement you have to like shine on it you have to interact with it in some way and what happened over the years over the decades is like the there's like a New Age movement that was convinced after hearing this kind of vocabulary started saying oh it's our Consciousness that's affecting the outcome look at it it's your your brain energy going into the thing yeah that's like some Quantum field of dream stuff right there yeah that's crazy that's crazy so do you get a lot of this new age folks com back absolutely respectable physicists who said exactly things like that who really oh yeah bner howy yeah they oh yeah oh yeah okay but they're all dead now look quantum mechanics is forcing you to make some hard decisions about how reality works and so they're all freaky one way or the other either there's many many worlds or you bring it into existence by looking at it or there is no reality and you know none of them are exactly what we grew up thinking the Star Talk interview with physicist Sean Carroll had some spillage that didn't fit in what we posted to the general public it was at that meeting where I met Seth McFarlin oh cool if she continues to do what she does and uh successfully so it will ruin Neil's chances of ruining every other movie you stop stop when I saw the Thor movie I always wondering how much does that hammer weigh we we all Wonder this right Miller forged in the heart of a Dying star and I said yes I got this the heart of a Dying star if you want to get the rest of that content either become a patreon member and that gives you access or if you're already a patreon member go right on in and continue that episode quantum physics uh is would you'd agree it's the most successful idea of the universe we've ever had yes yes there's nothing comes close so I can exist in my macroscopic state because the quantum averages of me make me a physical object that's fair probably to say that okay I see what you're say I got so I can still be described by quantum physics that's just not as convenient as Newtonian physics and all the light in the room is constantly measuring you and localizing you okay yes exactly exactly okay so now now are you here at the moment you're here right now okay so if all the quantum phenomenon average out into my macroscopic state is there any Quantum manifestation in the large scale Universe oh yeah sure um our favorite has to be the microwave background the cosmic microwave background right now we don't know this for sure but you look at the Relic radiation from The Big Bang okay big bang 14 billion years ago was hot and dense and glowing about 300 and some 100,000 380 I think 100,000 years after the big bang it became transparent and so we see the Relic radiation from The Big Bang and for reasons we don't completely understand it's super duper smooth it's almost exactly the same temperature radiation from place to place but it's not exactly the same direction you can look at this direction opposite direction two completely opposite directions the temperature in this office is nowhere near that stable right right in this corner it's like 2 degre higher 3 five and what's it's you're saying one part in 100,000 one part in 100,000 difference in temperature from this side of the universe to that side and it's that uniform all the way across yeah that's insane it's insane that's insane and my office can't wellow that but that that really does kind of say that you know that all of that that the Big Bang happened and that you know it came from this one thing it had to come from the one thing because that's how that's the only way as it spreads out that you can get that kind of uniformity is that it comes from this one thing that's right and the best theory that we have for why it's so uniform is called inflation okay you might have heard before the universe expands at some super fast rate very very early on and it's very much like stretching your sheet on your bed and smoothing it out right it wants to smooth it out but something gets in the way quantum mechanics so quantum mechanics says you're trying to smooth out the universe the best you can but when you measure it there'll be little Ripples and we think that those tiny variations in temperature one part in 100,000 come from the quantum mechanical uncertainty in the state of the universe at Early times and of course those grow into planets and stars and galaxies the quantum it has left its paw print in the picture of the early Universe right oh man another way to is am I right to say that had it been completely smooth it's not clear that we would have made Galaxy I was going to say would we even be here EXA we even be here these fluctuations give us the seeds on which you collapse matter yeah all right that is so nutty but let me bring up one other important manifestation makes us understand it better hopefully it will not if it regresses the chair is solid that's all because of quantum mechanics you know you've seen the picture the cartoon of an atom right little nucleus in the middle electrons orbiting around like it's a solar system that can't be right cuz if you get a bunch of atoms together and they're all little solar systems they would just squish together it's not right that picture because the electrons are not little Point particles moving in orbits they're wave functions that have a size they take up space and the reason why the chair can be solid is because the wave functions of electrons in the atoms take up space and don't want to over La APAP and therefore matter has extent in space one of my favorite stories was was it from the book Night thoughts of a classical physicist oh yeah LS oh no that's not no or no no maybe no I'm I'm misremembering so either it was fictionalized in that novel or I'm remembering it as a as as a memoir from Ernest Rutherford who first showed how empty the atom is MHM by passing uh was it neutrons or alpha particles alpha particles okay so he's got he's got um helium nuclei and he has a very thin sheet of gold because you can Hammer gold very very thin and so he wants to get like the fewest width atoms of gold foil that he can possibly then he starts firing particles through it and like nearly all of them just go straight through untouched UND undiverted nothing and then he alone at that moment realized how empty matter was mhm MH and and and this is the story what I hear that the next morning he woke up he was afraid to step on the ground out of fear he fall fall through the floor is this just apocryphal that the last part you might have made up I don't know about that one but but the story you can read about in my new book Quant and Fields where I explained this but the the idea that it's empty you know I don't like it when people say that because uh what what what Rutherford really figured out a field guy the fields are they matter but what he really figured out is that most of the Mass is at the center in the nucleus right and so it's not just that they mostly pass through that's important also very occasionally one Ricochet is right back at you so it's not just that the gold is sort of spread out and diffus there's some oomph there right at the middle in the nucleus of the atom just while we're like fired up here uh what's what's the latest thinking on Dark Matter Dark Energy where we where should we see future advances these are you know these are the looking for a dark matter partic is that are you all in on the particle thing you got some other exotic I'm happy for it to be a particle you know I've proposed theories where it's not a particle but they're not very good these theories the dark matter is probably kind of a particle we haven't found it yet and I would say that you know we we had a chance of having found it already the experiments are pretty good but it wasn't like a 99% chance it was like a 50% chance we would have found it already so the fact that we haven't found it already is not yet cause for concern okay um the dark energy is interesting again i' I've written papers about different possibilities for that but the simplest one is the best Einstein's idea that there's energy in empty space it's just a fact of the matter every cubic centimeter of space has a 100 millionth of an urg of energy inherent in space itself is a unit of energy pushing the universe apart and so we don't know in fact there was a provocative recent result from the Dark Energy spectroscopic instrument which claimed that maybe the dark energy is declining very slowly Desi Dark Energy but there's like three different experiments who nickname is Desi so I I actually like to used all the words this one L A Different yeah yeah so we don't know that would be very very fascinating and exciting that the that the Dark Matter field is changing dark energy field declining with time yeah declining now is that allowed if the Einstein's cosmological constant which was our first indic suchy gravity that is identically a Conant the way it comes out that's right so if this is true then the cosmal constant is not the dark energy the dark energy is something else the cosmal constant the vacuum energy uh which are equivalent that was a candidate that's one possible thing the dark energy could be simp appreciate that and it's a leading candidate because it comes out ofate we're using the equation anyway and it was already there that's right and and everything else is is a little bit more delicate a little more fragile hard to figure out butal constant is pretty easy to put in there this has been exhausting okay one one last thing just just as a teaser for your next book yeah yeah um when I think of emergence I assume you mean it in the in the tree of life there are life forms that have have features that cannot be deduced from their their biological form like flocking birds right you can't analyze anything about a bird that we know of that will tell you will FL with other birds so you will not be surprised to learn there's a lot of philosophical controversy about these Concepts but basically yes you know the point is we can as you said before we can get through the day talking about people and tables and chairs without knowing that they're made of atoms or Quantum Fields right so there's different levels of description that all seem to work they have to be consistent with each other but you don't need to know about your Quantum fields to get through the day or balance your stock portfolio just go through yeah emergence there we are there you go emerg Consciousness free will yeah all part of that package part of emergency Yeah the more I think about free will the less I think we have it it's it's I've I've not reversed in this Vector Direction I'm headed about fre a momentum yeah it makes sense I mean but what if you Stripped Away everything would you then have have free will so if if you don't have free will then what you're talking about is there has to be an influence put upon you no no I'm going to take the whoever said it you'll know um I I don't think we have free will but what choice do I have somebody said that who said that that's fun I I don't know that one there's a there's like philosopher joke like you know you walk into the restaurant and they say what do you want and say I'll what have whatever the universe says I'm going to have like I have no choice about what it's going to be but I don't think that's the right way to talk I think I do have the ability to make choices well I've heard you on other podcasts give for me what was most resonant account of free will that I can think of While others were spouting off all manner of things so I felt very in the in your Club all right I got your back on this one good so we don't have time for that here but I I other oh man you can't leave me hanging like that no look there's another book coming out we got to bring him back'll be good we'll bring him back he used to be in California he's now just down the street excellent right yeah one train right away totally