Speaker 1: I want you to do something for me right now, like, seriously,
wherever you.
Speaker 2: Are, Yeah, play along with us for a second.
Speaker 1: Right, whether you're commuting or sitting at your desk or
just relaxing at home. I want you to physically reach
out and touch something, tap.
Speaker 2: The screen of the device you're listening on.
Speaker 1: Or you know, if you're sitting down, just knock on
the arm of the chair, press your hand against the
nearest wall. Yeah, it feels definitively solid, like it physically
pushes back against your hand.
Speaker 2: It has weight, It has permanence.
Speaker 1: Exactly, It has this very clear, defining presence in your reality.
You don't have to worry about your hand of suddenly
melting through it.
Speaker 2: Or the chair just blinking out of existence entirely.
Speaker 1: Right. But what if I told you that this solidity,
this absolute concrete certainty you feel beneath your fingertips, is
just a complete and utter.
Speaker 2: Illusion, a total fabrication.
Speaker 1: What if the universe is like fundamentally this alien, shifting
cloud of probabilities, and that chair you are sitting on
only decide to be solid because you, simply by existing
and interacting with it, basically forced it to.
Speaker 2: It is without a doubt the ultimate rug pull of
human existence. It really is, because I mean, we evolved
over millions of years to trust our senses. On a
macroscopic scale, We're wired to believe that a rock is
a rock, a tree is a tree, and the empty
space between us and the stars is exactly that empty, right,
just empty. We are biologically hardwired for classical mechanics. But
the closer we look, the more we isolate the fundamental
building blocks of everything around you, the more that comforting,
intuitive version of reality completely unravels.
Speaker 1: It unravels into something that honestly borders on magic.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: So Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is the show where
we take a stack of fascinating scientific sources, cutting edge research,
historical transcripts, and we completely unravel them to find the
most mind bending insights.
Speaker 2: We aren't here to just read off a list of facts,
you know.
Speaker 1: No, definitely not looking for the cheat codes to the
reality we live in. We want to explore the very
mechanics of existence, even if we have absolutely no idea
what kind of game we're actually trapped inside. Well said, thanks, So,
today we are exploring twelve quantum mysteries that science still
cannot fully explain. And because you were listening to this,
I know you already understand the basics. You know the
cliff notes of the double slit experiment.
Speaker 2: You've heard the buzzword quantum thrown around in sci fi movies.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. But today we are going way past the
surface level. We're going to look at the actual machinery,
the history, the math, and the deeply unsettling philosophy of
the quantum realm.
Speaker 2: And to truly set the stage for how bizarre this
machinery is, I think we need to briefly anchor ourselves
in the world. We thought we lived in the classical world,
right for centuries. Classical physics, so the physics of Isaac Newton,
James Clark, Maxwell Galileo. It told us a very specific,
highly comforting story about the.
Speaker 1: Universe, a very neat and tidy story exactly.
Speaker 2: It told us the universe was a cold, logical, predictable,
mechanical machine, like a clockwork cosmos.
Speaker 1: Right where cause and effect are locked in this perfect,
unbreakable chain.
Speaker 2: Yes, Pierre Simon Laplace famously proposed this area called Laplie's.
Speaker 1: Demon Oh I love this concept.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating, right. It's the idea that if a super intellect,
a demon knew the precise location and momentum of every
single atom in the universe right now, like every single one,
every single one, if it knew all that data, it
could perfectly predict the future and perfectly reconstruct the entire past.
Speaker 1: Because everything is deterministic.
Speaker 2: Everything. If you throw a baseball, you can calculate its
exact arc. There is a place for everything, and everything
is in its place.
Speaker 1: But then the twentieth century happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Niels bor Werner, Heisenberg. They
didn't just tweak that classical model.
Speaker 1: They took a sledgehammer to it.
Speaker 2: They absolutely shattered it. They proved that at the fundamental level,
determinism is debt completely dead.
Speaker 1: So in this de dive today, we are going to
journey through the absolute breakdown of matter, the profound lie
of empty.
Speaker 2: Space, the physical illusion of distance, extreme.
Speaker 1: Malleability of time, and finally, the terrifying universe altering power
of your own observation. It's a lot to cover, it is,
so let's start at the very bottom, the absolute foundation
to understand just how weird the universe actually is. We
have to completely redefine what stuff even is.
Speaker 2: The breakdown of matter itself, right, and.
Speaker 1: This brings us straight into the historical nightmare of wave
particle duell.
Speaker 2: Oh the classic argument.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now, you and I and everyone listening know the
basic concept light and matter can act like both a
wave and a particle. But what always strikes me when
diving into the source material is the sheer historical whiplash
of this discovery.
Speaker 2: Because for hundreds of years physicists fought bitterly over this.
Speaker 1: They really did. Like Newton insisted light was made of
corpuscles little bullets, and.
Speaker 2: Christian Houygen said no, well, it's a wave.
Speaker 1: And then Thomas Young does his double sled experiment in
eighteen oh one proves it's a wave, and everyone settles down.
Everyone's happy. But then nineteen oh five happens.
Speaker 2: Yes, Einstein's Anismerabulus, his miracle year. He just ruins the piece,
he really does. Einstein looks at the photoelectric effect, which
is essentially how light knocks electrons off a piece of metal. Now,
if light were purely a continuous wave shining a really bright,
low frequency light should eventually build up enough energy to
knock an electron loose.
Speaker 1: Like weights crashing against a wall until.
Speaker 2: It breaks exactly, but it doesn't do that. Einstein proved
that light must be arriving in discrete, indivisible packets of
energy quanta photons.
Speaker 1: So he brings the bullet theory back from the den.
Speaker 2: He brings it back to explain this phenomenon, which.
Speaker 1: Completely breaks our brains, because you know, you can't have both.
In our everyday macroscopic world, things are fundamentally divided.
Speaker 2: They fall into neat categories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you cannot throw a rock and have a diffract
and ripple through a chain link fence. You cannot touch
a wave of ocean water as if it were a
solid stone. The categories are mutually exclusive.
Speaker 2: And this is where the human brain really starts to misfire.
When you strip away the macroscopic world and you peer
down at a single electron, or a photon of light,
or even an entire molecule like a buckey.
Speaker 1: Ball, it just completely refuses to obey those categories.
Speaker 2: It does. An electron is not a little spinning sphere.
It is something completely alien to human experience.
Speaker 1: And the sources are very careful to point out that
It's not just a matter of our instruments being confused.
Speaker 2: No, No, the math dictates its reality.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a chameleon, but like a chameleon on
a foundational mathematical level. Instead of just changing its color
to match a leaf for a branch, this quantum chameleon
fundamentally changes its entire species depending on how you interrogate it.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it, because if.
Speaker 1: You set up an experiment like the photoelectric effect to
measure an electron as a solid particle, it obliges. It
acts like a microsc topic billiard ball, bouncing off detectors,
leaving a very distinct, localized impact.
Speaker 2: But if you take that exact same entity and you
force it through a diffraction grating, changing your measuring device
to look for a wave.
Speaker 1: It suddenly behaves exactly like a ripple of water.
Speaker 2: It interface with itself. And what is so crucial here,
what most pop science summaries tend to gloss over is
the mathematics of the wave.
Speaker 1: Function right or when Schrodinger.
Speaker 2: Formulated in nineteen twenty six. The wave function, often denoted
by the Greek letter CI, is not a physical wave
of matter like a sound wave, in the air.
Speaker 1: So what is it.
Speaker 2: It is a mathematical probability cloud that exists in a
realm of complex numbers, numbers involving the square root of
negative one.
Speaker 1: So it's imaginary math, well, complex math.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a wave of probability.
Speaker 1: Max Burne was the one to figure that out. Yeah,
the Born rule exactly.
Speaker 2: He realized that if you take the square of the
absolute value of Schrodinger's wave function, it gives you the
exact probability of finding the particle in a specific location
if you were to look for it.
Speaker 1: That is just wild to me. We are literally constructed
from mathematics that we cannot touch. Yes, the chair you
are sitting in right now, the device you are holding,
they are entirely made of these ghostly vibrating probabilities.
Speaker 2: Which perfectly brings us to the concept of superposition, because
if an unmeasured particle is just a wave of probability,
it means that until you make that measurement, it doesn't
have a single definitive.
Speaker 1: State, hasn't made up its mind, right.
Speaker 2: It exists in a linear combination of all possible states simultaneously.
Speaker 1: It's doing everything everywhere, all at once.
Speaker 2: Precisely. If an electron has the option to spin clockwise
or counterclockwise and you haven't checked it, it is doing
both at the same time, at the exact same time.
A photon traveling toward a half silvered mirror is both
passing through it and reflecting off it at the exact
same moment. The mathematics absolutely demand that the particle is
physically smeared across a spectrum of contradictory reality.
Speaker 1: And I want to pause here and dig into Schrodinger's cat,
because the common cultural understanding of this thought experiment is
completely backward.
Speaker 2: Oh entirely.
Speaker 1: People use it to say, look, how cool and weird
quantum mechanics is. A cat can be alive and dead.
But when you read Erwin Schrodinger's original nineteen thirty five paper,
he wasn't celebrating this.
Speaker 2: He was mocking it.
Speaker 1: He was being incredibly sarcastic.
Speaker 2: He really was. Schrodinger created the cat in a box
scenario to show his colleagues how utterly absurd their Copenhaggen
interpretation was when you scale it up to macroscopic life.
He basically said, Okay, let's link the life of a
cat inside a sealed steel chamber to the random decay
of a radioactive atom, and if that atom is in
a superposition of both decayed and not decayed, the math
of quantum mechanics insists that the macroscopic cat must also
become entangled with the atom, So.
Speaker 1: The cat enters a superposition.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it is simultaneously physically alive and dead until a
human opens the box to check.
Speaker 1: And Shorting was basically shouting, do you see how ridiculous
your math becomes if we apply it to everyday objects?
Speaker 2: Yes, he thought it was a flaw in the theory, and.
Speaker 1: This leads us to the giant elephant in the room
of modern physics. The measurement props a big one because
I have to push back a little on the standard
physics narrative here. Modern physicists talk a lot about decoherence.
Speaker 2: Yes they do.
Speaker 1: They explain that the environment is messy, the air, molecules,
the thermal radiation, cosmic rays, they are all constantly bumping
into objects, effectively measuring them and stripping away these superpositions
before they can get to the size of a cat.
Speaker 2: Right, the wave function gets tangled up with the environment.
Speaker 1: But to me that feels like a dodge. I mean,
it explains how a superposition leaks into the environment, but
it doesn't explain the fundamental why.
Speaker 2: The actual mechanism of collapse exactly.
Speaker 1: Why does the universe tolerate impossible overlapping realities when things
are isolated and tiny, but forces a definitive classical choice
when things get big? What actually constitutes a measurement? That
is the question does it require a conscious mind or
just a rock bumping into it?
Speaker 2: You've just hit on the deepest, darkest open debate in
all of science. Decoherence, as you correctly pointed out, only
explains how the quantum interference gets scrambled, does not explain
the actual collapse of the wave function into a single
localized reality.
Speaker 1: It just sweeps it under the rug kind of.
Speaker 2: We have the Shreddinger equation, which perfectly predicts how the
superposition evolves over time in a smooth, deterministic way.
Speaker 1: It's a nice, clean wave But the.
Speaker 2: Moment a measurement happens, that smooth evolution violently breaks. The
wave function collapses, and the transition from a probability cloud
to a single point in space is a complete mathematical mystery.
Speaker 1: Wait, there's no math for it.
Speaker 2: There is no equation for the collapse itself none. It's
an ad hoc rule we had to staple onto the
math to make it match our everyday reality.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's like the universe has two completely separate rule books,
one for the ghostly quantum realm and one for the
solid classical realm. And we have absolutely no idea where
the boundary line is drawn or why it exists.
Speaker 2: We really don't.
Speaker 1: But speaking of breaking the rules, we have to talk
about how these probability clouds interact with solid objects. Let's
look at quantum tunneling.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is a fun one because.
Speaker 1: If matter doesn't have hard edges, it means it doesn't
really care about walls.
Speaker 2: Exactly in classical mechanics, if you walk up to a
brick wall and try to push your hand through it,
the electromagnetic repulsion between the atoms in your hand and
the atoms in the wall pushes back. You are stopped.
Speaker 1: It's a physical barrier.
Speaker 2: If you roll a marble up a hill and it
doesn't have enough kinetic energy to reach the top, it
rolls back down. It doesn't matter if you roll it
a billion times. Classical physics says it will never magically
appear on the other side of the hill.
Speaker 1: But in the quantum realm, walls and hills are apparently
just suggestions.
Speaker 2: More than suggestions. They are probabilistic hurdles in quantum mechanics
because the particles disc buy that wave function we talked about.
The wave doesn't just abruptly stop when it.
Speaker 1: Hits a barrier, It bleeds into it.
Speaker 2: Yes, the mathematics show that the wave function decays exponentially
inside the barrier, But if the barrier's thin enough, the
wave function doesn't reach zero before it gets to the
other side, which means.
Speaker 1: There is a non zero probability that the particle just
completely bypasses the wall.
Speaker 2: Yes, the particle disappears from one side of the impenetrable
wall and instantaneously reappears on the other side. It tunnels
through the impossible. That is wild and what's truly fascinating.
What really grounds this for you and me is that
this specific quantum glitch is the only reason we are
alive to have this conversation.
Speaker 1: The Sun.
Speaker 2: The Sun. Think about what is happening deep inside the
core of our star. The temperature is around fifteen million
degrees celsius, the pressure is incomprehensible.
Speaker 1: It sounds hot enough to do anything you'd think.
Speaker 2: So protons are being smashed together to create nuclear fusion,
which releases the immense light and heat that sustains all
life on Earth. But in the nineteen twenties physicists realized
there was a massive problem with the classical math.
Speaker 1: Fifteen million degrees isn't hot enough.
Speaker 2: It is nowhere near hot enough. Wait, really, really, protons
have a positive electric charge. Like magnets with the same poles,
They repel each other violently.
Speaker 1: They push each other away.
Speaker 2: To get them to fuse, they have to overcome that
mutual electromagnetic repulsion, which is called the cooloam barrier. At
fifteen million degrees, the protons simply do not possess enough
kinetic energy to breach that barrier.
Speaker 1: So they should just bounce off each other exactly.
Speaker 2: By all the strict laws of classical thermodynamics, the Sun
should not be able to shine. It should just be
a cold, dark, inert ball of pressurized hydrogen gas.
Speaker 1: So the fact that the sun is shining outside your
window right now is essentially a cosmic physics glitch.
Speaker 2: It is entirely relying on quantum tunneling. Because those protons
are quantum wave functions, a tiny minuscule portion of their
probability cloud literally leaks past that impact netrible kooloom barrier.
Speaker 1: They cheat, they do.
Speaker 2: The probability is incredibly low. I mean, any given proton
might only tunnel once every billion years. But because the
Sun has such an unimaginably massive number of protons, enough
of them are tunneling at any given second to sustain
the nuclear chain reaction.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. The existence of our entire solar system, the
creation of all complex elements like the carbon in your DNA,
relies on matter occasionally ignoring its own physical boundaries.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. Really.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've established that the solid matter making up
your body, the chair you're sitting in, and the stars
in the sky is actually just a shivering ghost of
mathematical probability that routinely teleports through solid walls, right, which
is unsettling enough. But what if we zoom out from
the matter itself. What if we look at the empty
space between the matter.
Speaker 2: Ah, the void?
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I take a box and I pump out
all this weird probabilistic quantum stuff, the empty space left
behind is just normal, boring, classical nothingness naturally assumes.
Speaker 2: So if you evacuate a chamber of all atoms, pump
out every molecule of gas, remove all the photons of light,
and perfectly shield it from all magnetic and gravitational fields,
you would think you have achieved a perfect vacuum.
Speaker 1: Absolute nothingness, a completely dead stage waiting for actors to arrive.
Speaker 2: But the universe absolutely forbids true emptiness. The void is
not empty, which brings us to the Casimir.
Speaker 1: Effect, the idea that empty space is.
Speaker 2: A lie, a profound mathematical lie. In nineteen forty eight,
a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Casimir was studying colloidal solutions,
but his mathematics led him to propose something that sounded
like absolute magic.
Speaker 1: What did he propose?
Speaker 2: He suggested that a perfect vacuum, pure nothingness, actually contains
measurable energy, and that it exerts a physical force.
Speaker 1: From nothing from nothing.
Speaker 2: It took decades for our precision instruments to catch up
to his math, but in nineteen ninety seven experiments conclusively
proved him right.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break this down, because on its face it
makes absolutely no sense. How can thing exert a physical force?
Where is the energy coming from?
Speaker 2: It comes from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Speaker 1: Wait, well, you usually apply that to particles right position
in momentum.
Speaker 2: Exactly, but it also applies to the fundamental fields of
the universe. The uncertainty principle states that you cannot perfectly
know both the energy of a system and the exact
time interval. Okay, the equation is delta E times delta
T must be greater than or equal to planks constant
divided by four pi. Because of this baked in uncertainty,
a field can never sit perfectly at zero energy.
Speaker 1: Why not.
Speaker 2: If it did, it would have a precise energy which
is zero for a precise amount of time, which violates
the quantum speed limit.
Speaker 1: So to satisfy the math, the vacuum has to constantly fluctuate.
Speaker 2: Yes, the fabric of space is boiling, boiling, we call
it quantum foam. It is violently churning with virtual particles,
pairs of matter and antimatter, like an electron and a
positron that literally tear themselves out of the void, borrowing
energy from the future.
Speaker 1: Borrowing from the future. That sounds like a sci fi movie,
it does.
Speaker 2: But it's real. They exist for a billionth of a
trillionth of a second, and then they annihilate each other,
returning the energy to the vacuum. They pop in and
out of existence so fast they can't be directly seen,
but their aggregate energy, the zero point energy, is very real.
Speaker 1: So the darkest, quietest, emptiest void in deep intergalactic space
is actually a roaring ocean of phantom matter. It is.
That is a terrifying concept.
Speaker 2: And Casimir figured out how to measure the pressure of
this phantom ocean. Scientists took two incredibly tiny, perfectly flat
metal plates and place the microscopic distances apart. We're talking
nanometers inside a perfect vacuum.
Speaker 1: Now, why do they have to be so incredibly close together.
Speaker 2: Because of the wave nature of these virtual particles, the
gap between the plates acts like a resonant cavity, kind
of like a guitar string. Okay, only virtual particles with
specific wavelengths that fit perfectly between the plates can physically
pop into existence in that gap. The longer wave links
are mathematically suppressed. They are forbidden from existing in that
tiny space.
Speaker 1: It's like trying to fit a huge ocean swell into
a tiny bathtub. It just physically cannot form precisely.
Speaker 2: But outside the plates and the rest of the vacuum chamber,
the full infinite spectrum of phantom particles is allowed to
boil and crash against the outer surfaces.
Speaker 1: Of the metal Oh I see where this is going.
Speaker 2: This creates a literal pressure differential. There are more virtual
particles pushing on the outside of the plates than there
are pushing.
Speaker 1: From the inside, so they get pushed together.
Speaker 2: The chaotic, invisible ocean of nothingness physically pushes the two
metal plates together. The vacuum crushes them. Emptiness contains real,
measurable kinetic energy.
Speaker 1: Wow. So right now, wherever you are listening to this,
the empty air around you is completely submerged in this
boiling sea of mathematical phantom, every inch of it. And
if that wasn't enough to make you feel completely untethered
from classical reality, let's talk about how this unz mathematical
world reaches out and touches the physical world. Let's look
at the Aharnau Bom effect.
Speaker 2: This one is brilliant because it is a profound philosophical
shift disguised as a dry physics experiment well. In classical
electro dynamics, causality requires contact. Faraday and Maxwell establish that
if a magnetic field is going to alter the path
of a piece of metal or an electron, the object
must physically pass through the magnetic field. You have to
experience the force to be moved by it.
Speaker 1: Right, It's basic logic. If a hurricane is raging in
Florida and you are standing in a sealed bunker in Nevada,
the hurricane cannot blow you over exactly. You cannot be
moved by a storm. You never encounter cause and effect.
Speaker 2: But in nineteen fifty nine, physicists Yakir Arnoff and David
Baum proposed a scenario where this logic is completely bypassed,
and when it was finally tested in the lab, it
shipped the foundations of how we view the underlying math
of the universe.
Speaker 1: What do they do?
Speaker 2: They set up an experiment where they fired electrons through
a vacuum tube. Inside the tube, they placed a tightly
wound magnetic coil, the solenoid. But here is the critical part.
They heavily shielded the magnetic coil so that absolutely zero
magnetic field leaked into the path.
Speaker 1: Of the electrons zero leaks.
Speaker 2: The magnetic field was completely contained inside the shielding.
Speaker 1: So the electrons are flying down a perfectly clean highway.
There is no magnetic storm, there is no physical force
touching them whatsoever. They are completely isolated.
Speaker 2: Completely isolated. Yet as the electrons passed by the heavily
shielded magnet, their wave function underwent a measurable phase shift.
Their physical interference pattern on the detector screen changed.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, yes.
Speaker 2: They were measurably influenced by a force they never touched.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it wasn't the magnetic field itself, what
reached through the impenetrable shielding, What actually touched the electrons?
Speaker 2: The vector potential of the field, The vector potential?
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: In classical physics, electromagnetic potentials were considered just theoretical accounting tricks,
abstract mathematical numbers on a chalkboard used to make the
equations easier to solve. We thought only the resulting electric
or magnetic fields were physically real, just numbers on a page, right,
But quantum mechanics forces us to accept that these purely
mathematical potentials carry actual physical reality. The wave function of
the electronics stends through space, and its phase is directly
altered by the vector potential. Even in regions where the
magnetic field is mathematically zero.
Speaker 1: The math itself has an invisible hand that reaches through
physical barriers.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: We are literally ruled by the unseen. Okay, let's synthesize this.
Solid matter is a shifting probability cloud. Empty space is
a roaring ocean of boiling phantom math and mathematical potentials
can reach through solid lead to physically alter matter.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. If all of this is true,
it completely begs the question what does physical distance even
mean to the universe? If unseen math connects things, what
are the limits of space?
Speaker 2: If we follow that thread, we discover then in the
quantum realm, physical distance might be a complete fabrication, a
persistent illusion, which brings us to quantum entanglement.
Speaker 1: Ah. Yes, the phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously and bitterly
referred to as spooky action at a distance.
Speaker 2: Einstein was deeply troubled by it, and honestly for good reason.
It violated everything his theory of relativity stood for.
Speaker 1: How does it work?
Speaker 2: Quantum entanglement happens when two particles interact in such a
way that their wave functions merge. They become a single
mathematical entity, no matter how far apart they are. The
bizarre part is what happens when you separate them. You
can take one entangled electron and keep it in a
lab here on Earth, and take its entangled partner and
send it to the Andromeda galaxy, millions of light years.
Speaker 1: Away, so far that it would take light, the absolute
speed limit of causality in the universe, millions of years
to cross the gap.
Speaker 2: Yes, but if you measure the spin of the electron
on Earth, forcing its probability cloud to collapse into a
definitive state, Let's say it randomly collapses to spin up,
the entangled electron millions of light years away, will, instantaneously,
in that exact same plank length of time, snap into
the exact opposite state, spinning.
Speaker 1: Down instantaneously, not a delayed reaction, zero time delay.
Speaker 2: Zero time delay. It happens faster than the speed of light,
entirely defying the absolute cosmic speed limits set by relativity.
It implies that the two particles are somehow communicating instantaneously
across the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to really dig into Einstein's objection here,
because he wasn't just being stubborn. He had a very
logical counter argument.
Speaker 2: The nineteen thirty five EPR paper Einstein, Podolski and Rosen right.
Speaker 1: They argue that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete. Einstein
refused to believe in faster than light communication. He believed
that the particles must have secretly agreed on their states
before they were separated.
Speaker 2: He called these hidden variables, and honestly, from a macroscopic
human perspective, it makes total sense. Think of the classic analogy.
Imagine I have a pair of gloves, one left and
one right. I put them in separate identical boxes. I
give one box to you, and you take it to Mars.
I keep my box here on Earth. If I open
my box and find the left glove, I instantaneously know
that you have the.
Speaker 1: Right glove right, because they are a pair.
Speaker 2: Exactly. No faster than light communication happened. The state of
the gloves was hidden, but it was predetermined the moment
they were packed. Einstein essentially said, the particles are like
the gloves. They are carrying hidden data we just can't
see it that.
Speaker 1: Feels incredibly logical. It restores local realism, it restores our sanity.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: But then comes an Irish physicist named John Stuart Bell
in nineteen sixty four, and Bell ruins the glove analogy forever.
Speaker 2: Bell's theorem is arguably one of the most profound mathematical
discoveries in the history of science. Bell figured out a
way to actually test Einstein's hidden variables.
Speaker 1: Idea, how do you test something hidden?
Speaker 2: He created a mathematical inequality. He proved that if the
universe was run by these secret predetermined agreements, if local
realism were true, the statistical correlations between separated particles measured
at various different angles could only reach a certain maximum limit.
Speaker 1: He essentially said, a mathematical speed limit for how synchronized
the particles could be if they were acting like classical
clubs exactly.
Speaker 2: And for decades it was just a math equation, but
eventually our technology caught up.
Speaker 1: Starting the nineteen eighty tra Yes.
Speaker 2: With a Laine aspect and continuing with John Clauser and
Anton Zilinger. They all won the twenty twenty two Nobel
Prize in Physics for this work. By the way, scientists
built the machines to test bells inequality. They separated entangled
photons and measured their polarization at incredibly fast speeds, closing
every possible experimental.
Speaker 1: Loophole, the locality loophole, the fair sampling loophole. They shut
them all down, every single one.
Speaker 2: And the result nature broke the math limit. The universe
actively repeatedly violated bells inequality. The experiments proved definitively and
permanently that hidden variables do not exist.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The particles truly do not have a predetermined state before measurement,
yet they still instantaneously coordinate across the cosmos. The glove
analogy is dead.
Speaker 1: So let's look at the fall out of this. If
we throw out Einstein's hidden variables, the sources outline that
we are left with two terrifying choices regarding the fabric
of our reality.
Speaker 2: Two nightmares.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Either objective reality simply does not exist before we
measure it, meaning the physical properties of the universe are
not real until interrogated, or the universe is entirely non local,
meaning everything everywhere is instantaneously connected to everything else, and
the entire concept of physical three D distance in space
is just a convincing interface. I have to ask you,
as someone who studies this, which existential nightmare is worse,
oh Man?
Speaker 2: From a human perspective, they both strip away our fundamental
understanding of existence. If reality is an objective, until measured,
we are unmoored from the physical universe, which is flood.
But if the universe is strictly non local, it implies
that space itself is essentially a holographic illusion, a graphical
user interface hiding a deeply interconnected matrix where here and
there simply do not exist. At the foundational level of reality,
the particles aren't communicating across space mathematically, they are still
occupying the exact same point in the quantum configuration.
Speaker 1: Space, which makes the reality of quantum teleportation suddenly make
a lot more sense and also seems significantly more horrifying.
It really does, because when we talk about quantum teleportation,
we are talking about beaming Captain Kirk down to a
planet in a flash of light.
Speaker 2: Not at all. We are talking about transferring the pure
quantum state of a particle to another location using that
very entanglement we just discussed. Scientists have already done this
over massive distances, beaming quantum states between ground stations and
the imacious satellite in orbit.
Speaker 1: But I want to be clear on how they do
this because it involve the no.
Speaker 2: Cloning theorem exactly. The universe strictly forbids you from making
a perfect independent copy of an unknown quantum state. You
cannot hit copy and paste.
Speaker 1: You can only cut and paste right.
Speaker 2: To teleport the data of a particle, say particle A,
from Alice to Bob, Alice has to perform a joint
Bell state measurement on particle A and her half of
an entangled pair she shares.
Speaker 1: With Bob, and that measurement is violent.
Speaker 2: It completely destroys the original quantum state of particle A.
The original particle is utterly erased from reality, reduced to
a scrambled mess.
Speaker 1: It's gone.
Speaker 2: Then Alice sends two classical bits of information over a
normal channel to Bob. Bob uses that classical data to
apply a specific mathematical operation, a polygate, to his half
of the entangled pair, and instantly Bob's particle transforms to
perfectly match the original state of particle A.
Speaker 1: To the universe, Bob's distant particle is now the original one.
The information is teleported. This immediately brings up the ship
of theseus thought expair.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1: If you replace every plank of wood on a ship
over time, is it the same ship? But here it's
so much more extreme. Let's scale this up to human terms.
If all of your quantum information is perfectly scanned, completely
erased from reality in New York and perfectly rewritten onto
a pile of blank carbon and oxygen atoms in London,
are you the same person?
Speaker 2: That's the question?
Speaker 1: Does your consciousness transfer or did you just die into
York while a perfect clone woke up in London.
Speaker 2: According to quantum mechanics, the universe treats the new entity
as if it is the absolute original. Because particles are indistinguishable.
An electron in New York is completely identical to an
electron in London. The only thing that differentiates them is
their quantum state their information. So matter is secondary, which
strongly suggests that matter itself is entirely secondary. The physical carbon,
the hydrogen. There are just blank canvaes the pure information.
The quantum digital code is all that truly exists.
Speaker 1: We are just massive localized strings of code running on
a cosmic substrate. That is incredible.
Speaker 2: It's a matrix.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have dismantled the solidity of matter. We have
dismantled the emptiness of space, we have dismantled the physical
reality of distance. Now let's look at how the quantum
realm completely breaks our understanding of time and, more importantly,
what we are fundamentally allowed to know about the universe.
Let's talk about Heisenberg's uncertainty.
Speaker 2: Principle, formulated in nineteen twenty seven by Werner Heisenberg. The
principle states that it is fundamentally mathematically impossible to know
both the exact position and the exact momentum of a
particle at the same time. The more precisely you measure one,
the less precise the other becomes.
Speaker 1: We desperately need to clear up a massive public misconception here,
because when I first learned about this in high school,
I thought it was just an observer effect caused by
clumsy humans.
Speaker 2: A lot of people do.
Speaker 1: I thought, Oh, electrons are so tiny that if I
try to look at one under a microscope, the photon
of l life from my microscope physically bumps into the electron,
knocks it off course, and changes its momentum like using
a bowling ball to measure the position of a marble.
Speaker 2: That is exactly how most people rationalize it. Even Heisenberg
used that analogy early on to explain to lay people,
but it has caused a century of misunderstanding. People think
it preserves the classical idea that the particle does have
a specific hidden location and speed. We just are too
clumsy to measure it without messing it up.
Speaker 1: Right, But that's false.
Speaker 2: That is fundamentally false.
Speaker 1: Right the game would crash. The universe seemingly only allocates
so much resolution or information bandwidth to a given piece
of matter. If you force the universe to zoom in
and give you the absolute precise, high definition position of
an electron, it literally runs out of processing power for
the momentum. The momentum smears out into infinite, unknowable static.
Speaker 2: That is a remarkably apt analogy. The universe has a
built in information limit. It actively censors itself. It refuses
to let you see the deepest mechanical workings of nature
with absolute precision.
Speaker 1: And if that rendering engine analogy holds up, then the
quantum Zeno effect is like finding the cheat code to
hit the pause button on reality.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: This is the concept that observation literally halts the flow
of time.
Speaker 2: We all know the old psychological idiom A watched pot
never boils, time drags when you're staring at the clock.
But in the quantum realm, the quantum Zeno effect, named
after the Greek philosopher Zeno of Valea, proves this is
a literal physical law. Continuous observation freezes a quantum system
in its tracks.
Speaker 1: How is that mechanically possible?
Speaker 2: Think about a radioactive atom left alone. It naturally exists
in a smooth superposition of two states, decayed and not decayed.
As time marches forward, the Schrodinger equation dictates that the
probability that it will decay smoothly increases. At short time scales.
The probability of transition grows nonlinearly proportional to the square
of time. Okay, but, as we established early with the
measurement problem, the moment you interrogate the system, you force
the wave function to collapse into a single, definite state.
Speaker 1: The chameleon is forced to pick a color.
Speaker 2: Exactly, So if you measure the atom and find it
hasn't kayed yet, you collapse the wave function back to
the absolute starting point. The clock completely resets, the probability
of decay drops back down to zero. So what physicists
did in the lab is they took an unstable system,
say beryllium ions, and they began rapidly and continuously checking
their status. They blasted them with incredibly brief laser pulses
millions of times a second.
Speaker 1: They just kept bombarding them with measurements, asking did you
change yet? How about now? How about now?
Speaker 2: And by constantly forcing the system to answer by continuously
collapsing its wave function back to the initial unchanged state
before the probability had time to grow, they trapped the particle.
They completely suppressed its ability to evolve. The mere act
of rapid continuous measurement acts as a f physical break
on the progression of time for that particle.
Speaker 1: We can halt the fundamental processes of nature just by
refusing to look away.
Speaker 2: Just by looking at it.
Speaker 1: But if observation can freeze the present, can it reach backward?
Can it alter the past? Because this brings us to
what I consider the most staggering brain breaking experiment on
our entire outline.
Speaker 2: I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 1: The delayed choice quantum eraser John Archibald Wheeler proposed the
cosmic Thought experiment for this in nineteen seventy eight, and
a team led by Eunho Kim actually pulled off the
lab version in nineteen ninety nine. Can actions in the
present retroactively rewrite the history of a particle.
Speaker 2: To understand the sheer gravity of this, we have to
look deeply at the mechanics of the setup. It builds
on firing particles through an interferometer maze.
Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through it.
Speaker 2: The scientists take a single photon and fire it through
a double slit, But immediately after the slits they put
a BBO crystal, a beta barium worate crystal.
Speaker 1: What does the crystal do?
Speaker 2: This crystal takes the photon and undergoes spontaneous parametric down conversion.
It perfectly splits the photon into an entangled pair of
lower energy photons. We will call them the signal photon
and the idler photon.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have twins. Yes.
Speaker 2: The signal photon heads straight toward a primary detector screen
to register a hit. The idler photon is sent into
a massive complex maze of beam splitters and mirrors. The
entire purpose of this intricate maze is to figure out
which of the two slits the original photon passed through.
Speaker 1: So we are gathering the witch path information. And as
we know from the basic rules of quantum mechanics, if
the universe knows we are tracking its exact path, the
photon loses its superposition. It acts like a solid little
bullet and creates a clump pattern on the screen not
a Woife pattern.
Speaker 2: Correct. But here is the genius and the absolute horror
of the delayed choice eraser. They design the physical distances
in the labs so that the signal photon hits the
primary detector screen first. Its impact is definitively recorded. It
acts like a classical bullet, But after it has already
hit the screen its entangled twin the idler photon is
still flying through the mirror maze. At the very end
of the maze, the idler photon encounters a semi silvered mirror,
a beam splitter. This acts as a random quantum switch.
It has a fifty to fifty chance of reflecting the
photon into a detector that reveals the witch path data,
or transmitting it into a detector that completely scrambles and
erases the witch path data.
Speaker 1: I want to emphasize the timeline here for everyone listening. Yeah,
the first photon has already completed its journey. It is dead.
Its history is already permanently recorded on the screen. The
decision to erase the data of its twin happens microseconds later.
Speaker 2: But the results defy our understanding of time. When they
run the experiment thousands of times and look at the data,
they find something impossible.
Speaker 1: Are they find?
Speaker 2: For the Idler photons, whose witch path data was preserved,
their signal twins formed a clumped bullet pattern on the screen.
But for the Idler photons, whose data was randomly erased
by the team splitter in the future, their signal twins,
who had already hit the screen in the past, somehow
formed an interference wave pattern.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, the photon that already hit the screen seemingly
knew that its twins information was going to be erased
in the future, so it retroactively went back in time
and behaved like a wave instead of a bullet.
Speaker 2: It seems that way.
Speaker 1: That completely breaks the arrow of time. Cause and effect
are running backward.
Speaker 2: Now. Physicists will strictly, almost desperately assure us that no
actual usable communication is traveling backward in time. You cannot
use this to send lottery numbers to yesterday because the
wave pattern only emerges when you compare the coincidence counter
data after the fact, so classical causality is technically mathematically
preserved philosophically philosophically, what this absolutely proves is that the
physical concept of the path the particle took in the
past has absolutely zero physical meaning until the entire measurement
of the entangled system is fully complete in the present,
regardless of time delays.
Speaker 1: The past is not a solid, fixed objective history waiting
to be uncovered in an archive. The past is a
malleable probability cloud. The history of that particle is only
definitively written at the exact moment the present demands it
to be known exactly. It's exactly like the rendering engine again,
the universe doesn't bother rendering the historical footprints of a
digital character until the player actively turns the camera around
to look at them. Until you look the footprints both
exist and don't exist.
Speaker 2: Which brings us perfectly to our final overarging theme. The
thread that ties this entire deep dive together. The ultimate
mystery observer the observer because every single bizarre phenomenon we
have unpacked today, from matter teleporting through the Sun's core,
to the vacuum boiling with energy, to space acting like
a non local illusion, to time and history acting like
unrendered digital code, every single one of these traces its
lineage back to one core terrifying truth about our relationship
with the cosmos.
Speaker 1: The double slit experiment and daddy of them all. Richard Feyman,
one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century,
famously said that this experiment doesn't just contain a mystery
of quantum mechanics. He said, it contains the only mystery.
Speaker 2: It is the beating heart of the quantum enigma.
Speaker 1: He really is.
Speaker 2: It is the simplest demonstration of everything we've talked about.
As our listeners know, firing solitary electrons one by one
through two slits builds up an interference wave pattern over time.
Each individual electron passes through both slits, simultaneously interfering with
its own probability ghost and deciding where to land on
the screen based purely on the Schrodinger wave math.
Speaker 1: But the moment you place a detector at the slits.
The moment human curiosity demands to know the precise mechanics
of the universe, the universe changes its rules.
Speaker 2: The interference pattern completely vanishes.
Speaker 1: It's gone. The electrons drop the wave act entirely, and
they hit the screen in two solid, distinct bands.
Speaker 2: We don't block the slits, We don't interfere with the
flight path. The energy of the system remains identical. We
simply extract information, and the unit knows. The universe senses
the active measurement, the extraction of knowledge, and it frantically
alters the fundamental behavior of matter to hide its true
superpositional machinery from us.
Speaker 1: And as we've discussed with Wigner's friend thought experiments, the
von Mooyman chain of measurement, where does the collapse actually happen.
Does it happen at the detector in the computer hard
drive recording the data, or does it only happen when
the photons from the computer monitor hit a conscious human
retina and enter a conscious mind.
Speaker 2: What fascinates me most about this is the stark contrast
between our mathematical mastery and our absolute philosophical ignorance. The
equations work with staggering, unprecedented precision. Quantum electrodynamics is the
most precisely tested theory in the history of human science.
Speaker 1: We have the math down perfectly, perfectly.
Speaker 2: We can calculate the probabilities perfectly. We can build lasers,
MRI machines, and quantum computers based on these principles. But
no scientists on Earth can tell you why. Why does
the act of extracting information force reality to crystallize?
Speaker 1: We hold the mathematical cheat codes to the cosmos, but
we have absolutely no idea what they mean. John Archibald
Wheeler argued for a participatory universe. He believed we are
not passive observers sitting in a dead, mechanical universe watching
it tick like a clock behind safety glass.
Speaker 2: No, we are active participants.
Speaker 1: Our gaze, our extraction of data, has physical universe altering weight.
Reality is participation game. We are actively forcing the universe
to crystallize just by existing, by measuring, by looking at it.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally dismantles the Cartesian divide between the observer and
the observed. You cannot separate yourself from the universe you
are measuring. You are entwined in the outcome. The act
of looking changes the thing being looked at.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a deep breath and recap the unbelievable
journey we've been on today here on Thrilling Threads. We
started with a comforting universe of solid objects, empty space,
and ticking clocks, and we've completely systematically dismantled it.
Speaker 2: Piece by piece.
Speaker 1: We've learned that the dark void of space is actually
violently boiling with phantom energy. We've seen that solid matter
is a shifting, probabilistic ghost that can teleport through impenetrable barriers.
We've discovered that physical distance is a massive illusion hiding
a deeply interconnected, non local matrix, that the flow of
time can be frozen by rapid observation, and that the
history of the past can be retroactively rewritten by our
choices in the present.
Speaker 2: And tying it all together is the staggering realization that
reality itself only seems to bother existing in a definitive
congreat state when we force it to through observation and interaction.
We are swimming in an ocean of probabilities.
Speaker 1: It is deeply humbling and honestly a little vertigo inducing.
But as we wrap up this discussion on the quantum realm.
We want to leave you, the listener, with one final
provocative thought that builds on everything we've just discussed, especially
the observer effect.
Speaker 2: Right, if the universe fundamentally requires observation, if it mathematically
requires a measurement to collapse the infinite chaotic probability a
cloud into a single, concrete reality that can be experienced.
Does the universe fundamentally need consciousness to exist?
Speaker 1: Oh man?
Speaker 2: Did the universe exist in a hazy, undefined superposition of
all possible histories until the very first conscious organism opened
its eyes and forced the cosmos to pick a timeline.
Speaker 1: That is the million dollar existential question, and that is
exactly what we want to know from you. Think about
the room you are sitting in right now. Think about
the walls behind you that you can't currently see. If
reality only solidifies when it is measured or observed, what
do you think happens to the universe when every conscious
being closes their eyes.
Speaker 2: Is the moon still physically there when absolutely nobody is
looking at it? Or does it dissolve back into a
wave of probability.
Speaker 1: We want to hear your theories, drop your thoughts, your
existential crises and your quantum interpretations in the comments, and
let's keep unraveling this incredible, impossible universe together. Thank you
for joining us on Thrilling Threads. We will see you
next time, assuming the universe decides to keep rendering itself
for us