The Smallest Ideas in the Universe with Sean Carroll

Chuck, my brain is exhausted.

Yeah, I gotta tell you, first of all, I don’t even know if I’m here right now.

I’m not sure what field I’m in.

I don’t know if I exist.

This is what happens when you spend time with theoretical physicist, Sean Carroll, and we just did.

Yes, we did.

He took us into the quantum realm, which apparently was not even barely contained in the universe itself.

Exactly.

Right, so when you do this, don’t even think.

It’s not real.

You don’t even know.

You don’t even know what you’re doing there, okay?

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe, where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Got with me Chuck Nice.

Hey, Neil.

Hey.

What’s happening?

All right.

What are you holding in your hand here?

I’m holding a book.

Oh, okay.

A book that I, you know, that I 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.

Like the qualifier.

Yeah.

So…

This is written by the one and only Sean Carroll.

Sean, welcome to my office.

Thank you so much.

New York, your office.

These are the best places, the most exciting places that I’ve been.

We have corresponded and e-mailed 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 e-mails.

Delighted to have a meaningful exchange with you at this point.

Right.

With microphones in front of us.

Cameras trained.

Cameras trained.

Meaningful.

Exactly.

Okay.

So just before we delve in, which Sean Carroll are you?

I’m the physicist one.

The physicist Sean Carroll.

Yes.

And the other Sean Carroll is who?

My evil twin.

He has beards.

You know which one is the evil twin.

But is it like that?

Is it a…

It’s not quite as evil.

It’s more like bushy Santa Claus.

It doesn’t really look like it.

But he’s a very accomplished biologist.

Also writes books.

You should buy those too.

Okay.

Very nice.

All right.

Very good.

So Sean Carroll, let me get your bio going here.

The Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy.

That’s very retro.

Oh, man.

Just like Newton.

Ike had some title like that.

Natural Philosophy 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.

It is right there.

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.

Yeah, pretty cute.

And you can’t get cuter than that.

No, you can’t.

I mean, unless there are a bunch of Sean Carroll’s who are tinier and look exactly like Sean Carroll.

Oh, to continue the fractal.

To continue the fractal.

Move on in.

Sean Carroll at all scales.

Right, exactly.

Frightening.

And your research areas, quantum physics, space time, cosmology, emergence.

I love emergence.

Maybe we can hit on that.

Entropy.

I’ve seen a lot of that lately.

Can you do something about entropy?

If you can’t do anything about it, I have nothing for us.

I can increase it.

We can do that without you.

Dark energy, symmetry and origins of the universe.

You’re all in.

You got a podcast of your own.

Mindscape.

I think I’ve been on that.

Have I been on that podcast once?

No, not yet.

Not yet.

Okay.

My invitation is in my inbox.

Maybe I haven’t gotten to it yet.

And this latest book, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, the second in a trilogy.

This one, Quanta and Fields.

Quanta?

Wouldn’t that be the smallest idea in the universe?

Oh!

The smallest thing can be the biggest idea.

Oh!

Oh!

Oh dear!

Oh!

You gotta put Chuck in his place early, otherwise he’ll just run ran-shuttle all over you.

Yeah, he got you on that one.

Yeah, that’s true.

He got you.

So, if this is a trilogy, the first Big Ideas book was what?

It was called Space Time and Motion, which is like publisher speak for classical physics.

Regular, ordinary armchair physics.

Isaac Newton physics.

Yeah, Isaac Newton physics.

And Albert Einstein for that man.

Well, yeah.

He was the star.

Isn’t it funny at this point, Albert Einstein is the old physics.

The old classical physics.

Now we’re going quanta 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 gonna be, it’s basically appetizer, main course dessert here.

So, the third one’s gonna be fun.

Okay, very good.

You’re an active research scientist, you, you publish books, you’re active on social media.

You would, so this is great just to see kindred soul out there.

It’s very tiring, isn’t it?

Why do we do this?

Who’s idea was this?

Let’s go out and have a drink.

We’ll talk about it.

In service to the universe.

We are servants of cosmic curiosity that permeates within us all.

We know that the idea of fields, 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.

He certainly played a huge role in figuring out that…

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-Simon Laplace, circa 1800, realized that Isaac Newton had this idea of gravity, the inverse square law, 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?

It is nothing in between them.

Nothing in between them.

Action at a distance, right?

And Laplace 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 his name was Frank Larisse.

We had just learned about some of these great French physicists, mathematicians, Lagrange, Laplace, and over lunch one day said, one day there will be the Larisse equation.

This was just a fun little dream state that we all occupied in high school.

Okay, so Fields, are Fields real, or are they just a convenience?

Because by the way, you are partially in the Department of Philosophy there.

So I 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 questions.

You actually have to answer it.

That’s my job.

Okay, 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, peoples and chairs, was made of particles, stuff.

We knew about electrons, we knew about atoms.

And you would have thought that the forces between the atom were mediated by fields, the rotational 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 fields.

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 particle.

The particles come out of the field.

Is this an early variant of what would later be string theory, where they’re saying particles are vibrations 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, et cetera?

That’s a speculative idea, very, very promising.

But we just don’t know.

Yeah, much smaller.

We don’t need to know for predicting what’s gonna come out of the Large Hadron Glide.

Okay, so let me ask you a blunt question, which sounds stupid, but I think it’s a meaningful question.

Do electrons exist as a…

Now wait, is that a science or a philosophical question?

Well, because, as I understand…

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 gotta ask you a preliminary question.

How truthful do you want me to be?

I love it.

Okay, 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.

The lie is, what is real is the electron field, and little vibrations in those electron fields show up in our detectors as particles.

Though it’s not that we haven’t measured the size of the electron, it’s 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 wavelengths.

So it shows up as the particle.

Yes, that’s right.

Yeah, that’s right.

I mean, it comes to the party that way, but otherwise it’s not.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, that is so trippy.

That is so freaky, man.

So you and Einstein both were bothered by this.

I am very 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, because you keep asking where it is, and 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 the lie or the truth?

That’s definitely the lie.

I haven’t even gotten to the truth yet.

Okay, now give me the truth.

Okay, when quantum mechanics came along in the 1920s, we realized that instead of an electron-

Let us celebrate.

We are in the centennial-

We’re very close.

Of the discovery of quantum physics.

The Centennial Decade.

The quantum year, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, the Centennial Decade.

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.

Yeah.

The roaring 20s.

We live in shame that we can’t live up to that anymore.

I know.

I think about that all the time.

Yeah, it was too bad, 100 years later.

Let’s be honest, they weren’t working with much to start with.

Low-hanging fruit.

You guys are building on top of everything that they’ve actually discovered.

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, et cetera, that’s the wave function of the electron.

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 fieldiness on top of fieldiness.

And finally, you say that, okay, what if you have like different fields, different particles?

Do they each have a wave function?

No, there is one wave function for the whole kit and caboodle of them, the wave function of the universe.

That’s what’s real, the wave function of the universe.

You know, you’ve been smoking something.

That’s crazy.

You know, where was he before this?

Where were they?

Are you just talking this or is this hypothesized soon to be experimentally verified?

I encourage all of the listeners out there to check out my paper entitled Reality.

This will be your 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 physicists It’s your personal truth.

can’t agree on what quantum mechanics really says.

So we have this idea that everyone uses in quantum mechanics, Hilbert Space, which is the space of all possible imaginable quantum states of the universe.

And someone like me, who is a purist and 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 make predictions for experiments.

Other people will say that’s part of reality, but there’s other parts as well.

We don’t have a consensus on this.

Okay.

I like the absence of consensus.

Yeah, exactly.

It wakes you up in the morning.

Whole thing sounds very political.

All right.

So, how do you square all the successful predictions of quantum physics with any intuitive understanding of what’s going on?

Because I’ve said many times, and I’m happy to say it again, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

So once you accept that, why try to make sense of it and jump through hoops and brain twists just to say, what’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, the 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, nope, your 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.

I’m Olicon Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I’m reminded of the charming illustrated book series by George Gamow, Mr.

Tompkins in, I guess, Wonderland.

And what he would do is, he’s a physicist, famous physicist, mid 20th century.

Lived only, just died only 20 years ago or so, but he, yeah, George Gamow, he was one of the original predictors of the temperature of the universe.

The universe began as an explosion with the Big Bang.

Could you measure that?

And then he was on a paper that, okay.

So what temperature did he get for it?

It was like, five degrees.

He was in a factor of 10, yeah.

No, it was a factor of 10?

No, I don’t, fuck.

He was within a factor of 10.

They had different.

I think it was like five degrees.

He said the universe is five degrees and the universe turned out to be three degrees.

Oh, okay.

Okay, so Rich Gott, okay, friend of the show, has said that’s like predicting that a 50-foot flying saucer will land on the White House lawn, but a 30-foot flying saucer will land on the White House lawn.

Right?

Yeah, it’s not even that the numbers are different.

It’s that it’s a prediction at all that would come true, right?

But the story you’re telling right here is exactly why this crazy talk about Hilbert spaces and 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, the Mark Twainism?

Yeah, so he had read that there was some research paper about the rate at which the Mississippi River is depositing silt in the Delta, and so it’s growing in this direction.

And then he says, oh, 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 wholesale conclusions drawn from a trifling investment of fact.

Ooh.

That’s brilliant.

Yeah, that’s Mark Twain doing it.

And Mr.

Tompkins 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.

In 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 Planck’s constant.

Yeah, sure.

And so, could you just give me a handle on things that would happen if Planck’s constant were macroscopic?

Like, if I walked through the doorway, I would like, diffract, right?

Wouldn’t I?

Yeah, you would diffract, 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 Berner 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 time.

That joke rocks at physics classes.

I was going to say, who wrote that?

Can I try that out?

I don’t know.

That’s the uncertainty principle.

No one would really open you down.

In quantum mechanics, you’re fundamentally not a set of particles.

You’re a set of waves.

If the Planck 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 we don’t want to live there.

No place to be, really.

And so you mentioned entangled.

That’s been a buzz phrase.

Everybody loves it.

It’s one of the biggest hits.

You’re hearing about it.

It’s one of the biggest hits right now.

Entanglement.

Entanglement.

So one of the goals is what’s the farthest particle that you can entangle on the premise that maybe that will be useful one day.

And from all the news articles, I’ve seen China leads the world in entangled particle distances.

So what do you have to do to…

Well, I’m sorry, because 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, it 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 landing something on the far side of the moon?

We’re going to have an entire conversation in Congress.

Right.

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, it’s 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 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 network, 50 kilometers, which is about city size.

And so then the suspicion is with entangled particles, because you might be able to make a secure internet, undecodable, unhackable.

Unhackable, you can’t, you can’t.

Encryption wouldn’t make a difference at that point.

Right, because it’s instantly, so 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 it’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, et cetera.

Engineers, you fixed it.

Yeah, you do that.

We’ve shown it’s conceivable.

What do you want from us?

Yeah, what more do you need?

The math works.

All right, Johnson?

There’s no law of physics against it.

Exactly.

You know, the engineers who said we will never fly faster than sound did not get that from a physicist.

That’s right.

Okay, because we, the rifle bolts went faster than sound, and the crack of a whip is faster than sound.

You know, we had that.

So, but back to this, can you foresee a value with 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 things.

Isn’t that what goes on in a quantum chip?

Isn’t there a lot of entangled…

You would like it to be.

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 had not fully appreciated that.

Yeah.

The photos I saw, most of that was just…

Refrigerators.

The door, the freezer compartment, just to have the little bitty thing in the middle.

Otherwise, because you and I, radiating our infrared all over the place, would totally decohere those quantum bits.

That would be the opposite of cohere.

Which is what this conversation makes me feel like.

Are you 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 Higgs boson decays, decays into an electron and a positron, the anti-electron.

And you say, well, what direction are they going in?

And 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 momentum is conserved.

So now you know the other one is going in 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!

Because I said so.

That’s what they…

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 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 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?

Wow.

Okay.

That’s…

I got to admit, that makes a lot of sense.

Can I take two random particles that were not born together and entangle them?

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.

Let me just give you a down-to-earth example.

Schrodinger’s cat.

You’ve heard about this.

Schrodinger, who apparently didn’t like cats, goes to a great amount of thought experiment effort to put a cat in a superposition.

That’s right.

That would have never worked with Schrodinger’s dog.

That would not have flown.

Schrodinger’s daughter said that he didn’t like cats.

That’s why he picked the cat.

So it’s in a superposition of alive and dead.

I’m a cat person.

In my version, they’re in a superposition of awake and asleep.

It’s very sweet.

You don’t have to kill the cat.

You don’t have to kill it.

I didn’t know you didn’t have to kill the cat.

You don’t have to kill the cat.

But the point is there are different places in the box.

And what that means is that everything in the box, the air, the light, 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.

I don’t know that that’s more clear to me.

So, you’re sleep and awake cat.

But we declared that without actually sticking asleep and awake cat in the box.

We’re just asserting that.

Could the cat just be drowsy?

In between.

I’m in and out.

This is Schrodinger’s whole point.

This is why he set up in the experiment.

There’s a radioactive substance.

Thought experiment.

And he didn’t do it.

So radioactivity.

And there’s a Geiger counter.

And the Geiger counter will click when it detects radioactive decay.

In radioactivity, you have no idea which particle is going to decay.

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 good a random as we can produce.

100% random as far as we know.

Yeah, as far as we know.

Nothing better.

And this is, you know, the 1930s when Schrodinger was very unhappy with the state of quantum mechanics.

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 there’s a wave function for the particle, and it is in a superposition of I have decayed and I have not decayed.

And the part of it that is decayed sets off the Geiger counter.

Now the Geiger counter is in a superposition of I have clicked and I have not clicked.

And the Geiger counter in the part that clicks, knocks over a hammer, breaks a vial full of sleeping gas, and the cat goes to sleep.

So the cat goes into a superposition of being awake and being asleep.

That’s the whole point of the sort of Rube Goldberg gizmo that Schrodinger builds in there.

But how does that help anything?

Well Schrodinger is trying to say in the way that we thought of quantum mechanics back then, there was these giant debates between Bohr and Einstein about what quantum mechanics really means.

Niels Bohr.

And Niels Bohr would have said, look, when you open the box and look, the cat suddenly changes from being in a superposition of awake and asleep to being one or the other.

And Schrodinger is like, come on.

You think that when I look at it, it changes like that?

I gotcha, I gotcha.

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 superposition.

You just gotta accept that.

Should have said that.

He blinked.

He lost courage at the last second.

And it was a decade and a half later, or two decades later, a graduate student at Princeton named Hugh Everett said exactly those words.

He said, just believe what the formula is telling you.

And what the formula tells you is, when you look at it, guess what?

You enter into a superposition.

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 because 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, wait.

You just mentioned in that world.

I have some memory that I haven’t heard about lately, but that it was a Copenhagen interpretation.

Yeah, that was Niels Bohr.

Niels Bohr is Danish.

And so they credited, I guess, the city.

But it was really a Bohr 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 of Bohr.

So this was the idea.

Heisenberg, Pauli, there’s a bunch.

There’s a bunch.

Okay, so can you catch us up on the many worlds interpretation?

Right, so the Copenhagen interpretation really frustrated people like Einstein and Schrodinger 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 Bohr and his friends seemed 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 and Schrodinger 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 Schrodinger and 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 Everett is just saying that in this world of superposition that quantum mechanics always describe, you should just take them all seriously.

They’re all actually there.

It’s not just a mathematical trick.

That is really, really tough.

I get it.

That is rough.

You got the sleepy 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 open the box and it’s asleep?

There is, 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.

The worlds are not located in space.

Space is located in each world.

He knows it.

Chuck gets it.

He gets it.

I need you, Chuck.

Chuck, I need you for this.

I don’t believe anything anymore.

No, there is no God.

Oh, no.

I mean, that’s also true.

Hold 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 something we don’t have a consensus on right now.

I don’t believe we have a better explanation.

Yeah, I was gonna say, if you don’t believe that, then you gotta go back to what we were just talking about, which is the Neil’s Boar.

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 ever be?

I have to clear something up here.

Go ahead, please, help me out.

Okay, let me just clear something up.

Go ahead.

In physics, we talk about the observer, okay?

On many levels.

In quantum physics, the observer is not simply some conscious entity looking at it.

Right, I understand that.

If you want to make a measurement, you have to like shine light on it.

You have to interact with it in some way.

And what happened over the years, over the decades, is like, there was 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 brain energy going into the thing.

Yeah, that’s like some quantum field of dreams stuff right there, man.

That’s crazy, man.

That’s crazy.

So do you get a lot of this new age folks coming back to you?

Look, there were absolutely respectable physicists who said exactly things like that.

No, really?

Oh, yeah.

No.

Figner, Howley, yeah.

Consciousness?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

OK, but they’re all dead now.

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 none of them are exactly what we grew up thinking.

Quantum physics, you’d agree, is the most successful idea of the universe we’ve ever had.

Yes.

Yes, 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?

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, 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.

Our favorite has to be the microwave background, the cosmic microwave background.

And 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 hundred thousand, maybe, I think, 300,000 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 of radiation from place to place.

But it’s not exactly the same.

Direction, you can look at this direction.

Every direction.

Opposite direction.

I’ll comment to you everywhere.

Two completely opposite directions.

Right.

And we have…

The temperature in this office is nowhere near that stable.

Right, right.

In this corner, it’s like two degrees higher, three, five degrees.

And what’s…

So you’re saying for the…

One part in 100,000.

One part in 100,000 difference in temperature.

From this side of the universe to that side of the universe.

And it’s that uniform all the way across.

Yeah, that’s right.

That’s insane.

It’s insane.

That’s insane.

And my office can’t…

Wow, but that really does kind of say…

That forces your hand.

That, you know, that all of that…

That the Big Bang happened and that, you know, it came from this one thing.

One thing.

It had to come from the one thing because 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, it’ll be a little ripple.

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 has left its paw print in the picture of the early universe.

That’s right.

Oh man.

In other words, am I right to say that had it been completely smooth, it’s not clear that we would have made galaxies.

I was going to say, would we even be here?

Exactly.

These fluctuations give us the seeds on which you collapse matter.

That is so nutty.

Let me bring up one other important manifestation of quantum mechanics.

Only if it makes us understand it better.

Hopefully you will.

Not if it regresses.

The chair is solid.

That’s all because of quantum mechanics.

You’ve seen the picture of 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 because 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 overlap.

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, Lewis.

Oh, no, that’s not Lewis.

No, no, maybe.

No, I’m misremembering.

Either it was fictionalized in that novel or I’m remembering it as a memoir from Ernest Rutherford, who first showed how empty the atom is by passing, was it neutrons or?

Alpha particles.

Alpha particles.

Okay, so he’s got 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 oil that he can possibly get.

And then he starts firing particles through it, and like nearly all of them just go straight through, untouched, undiverted, nothing.

And then he alone, at that moment, realized how empty matter was.

And this is the story we’re hearing, that the next morning he woke up, he was afraid to step on the ground, out of fear he would fall through the floor.

Is this just apocryphal?

The last part, you might have made up.

I don’t know about that one.

But the story you can read about in my new book, Quanta and Fields, where I explained this.

But the idea that it’s empty, I don’t like it when people say that because what Rutherford really figured out…

It’s because you’re a field guy.

Well, the fields matter, but what he really figured out is that most of the mass is at the center in the nucleus.

And so it’s not just that they mostly pass through that’s important.

Also, very occasionally, one ricochets right back at you.

So it’s not just that the gold is sort of spread out and diffuse, there’s some oomph there right at the middle in the nucleus of the atom.

Just while we’re fired up here, what’s the latest thinking on dark matter, dark energy?

Where should we see future advances?

You’re looking for a dark matter particle?

Are you all in on the particle thing?

You got some other exotic…

I’m happy for it to be a particle.

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 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.

The dark energy is interesting.

Again, 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 as a hundred millionth of an erg of energy, inherent in space itself.

Erg 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.

But there’s like three different experiments whose name is Desi.

So I actually like to use all the words.

This one says, yeah.

Desilu.

Desilu is it.

That’s a different one.

Yeah, yeah.

So we don’t know.

That would be very, very fascinating and exciting.

That the dark matter field is changing.

Dark energy field is slowly declining with time, yeah.

Declining.

Now, is that allowed if the Einstein’s cosmological constant, which was our first indication that there might be this thing such as dark energy working opposite gravity, that is identically a constant, the way it comes out of the equation.

So if this is true, then the cosmological constant is not the dark energy.

Dark energy is something else.

The cosmological constant, the vacuum energy, which are equivalent, that was a candidate.

That’s one possible thing the dark energy could be.

The simplest, most basic thing.

I didn’t appreciate that.

And it’s a leading candidate, because it comes out of the…

Leading candidate.

We’re using the equation anyway, and it was already there.

That’s right.

Everything else is a little bit more delicate, a little more fragile, hard to figure out, but cosmological constant is pretty easy.

Put it in there.

Oh, this has been exhausting.

One last thing, just as a teaser for your next book.

When I think of emergence, I assume you mean it in the tree of life.

There are life forms that have features that cannot be deduced from their biological form.

Like flocking birds, right?

You can’t analyze anything about a bird that we know of that will tell you that they will flop with other birds.

So you will not be surprised to learn that there’s a lot of philosophical controversy about these concepts, but basically, yes.

The point is, 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.

Consciousness, free will.

All part of that package.

All part of emergence.

Yeah, the more I think about free will, the less I think we have it.

It’s, it’s, I haven’t, I’ve not reversed in this vector direction I’m headed about free will.

That’s the momentum.

Yeah, it makes sense.

I mean, what if you stripped away everything?

Would you then have free will?

So 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 whoever said it.

You will know.

I don’t think we have free will, but what choice do I have?

Somebody said that.

Who said that?

I don’t know that one.

There’s a philosopher joke.

Like, you walk into the restaurant and they say, what do you want?

I’ll 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 your club.

I got your back on this one.

So we don’t have time for that here, but I other.

Oh man, you can’t leave me hanging like that.

There’s another book coming out.

We gotta bring him back.

That’ll be good.

We’ll bring him back.

He used to be in California.

He’s now just down the street in Baltimore.

Right, yeah.

One train wide away.

We can totally do that.

But are you gonna make that trip?

I mean, seriously.

I’m literally here right now.

Where are you?

I was gonna say, how would I know?

His vibrational energy is here.

It’s a probability.

Otherwise, don’t know.

Sean, delight to have you in my office here at the Hayden planetarium, the American Museum of Natural History.

Thanks for making the trip.

You’re on a book tour right now.

So good luck with that.

Sometimes you need a little bit of that.

And keep the physics coming.

I will do that.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me on.

There’s surely an unlimited appetite for the cool stuff.

Lots of cool stuff.

Big ideas.

Chuck, always going to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

This has been the latest update on the moving frontier of the universe through the lens of theoretical physicist, Sean Carroll.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always.