Speaker 1: It is February first, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: And if you have a calendar nearby, or maybe you're
driving and you can see the dashboard, I want you
to really look at that date, because historically speaking, we
might be standing on a precipice. We are exactly five
months away from the Large Hadron Collider, the single biggest
machine humanity has ever built, going dark.
Speaker 3: It's right long shut down three. It begins in July.
It's been on the schedule for years, and usually that's.
Speaker 2: Just a schedule update, you know, it's like saying, hey,
the office is closing for renovations.
Speaker 1: We're going to paint the walls, upgrade the servers.
Speaker 3: Sure it's a massive engineering project, but it's a routine one.
Speaker 2: But this time, this time feels different because something happened
in January, just last month. And honestly, it's the kind
of thing that makes you want to sit down for
a very strong drink and I don't know, just stare
at a wall.
Speaker 3: For a while. It is certainly unsettling. And I don't
use that word lightly.
Speaker 2: When it comes to physics data, unsettling is understatement of
the century. Here welcome everyone to thrilling threads.
Speaker 3: Great to be here.
Speaker 2: This is the show where we pull on a loose
thread of information, something that seems small, maybe a little
out of place, and we keep pulling and pulling until
it unravels the very fabric of what we think we know.
Speaker 3: And today that fabric might literally be the fabric of
the universe.
Speaker 2: We are definitely testing the tensile strength of reality today
for sure.
Speaker 1: So let's set the scene.
Speaker 2: We have a stack of reports, some technical transcripts, historical
data in front of us, and they all seem to
point to one specific event in January twenty twenty six
Stern's Anomaly Detection AI, this super advanced watchdog program. They
have it flagged a pattern. It did, but not a
normal pattern. It wasn't a new particle. And the way
we usually think about it, like you know, finding a
shiny new rock on the beach. No.
Speaker 3: Usually, in high energy physics, you're looking for a bump
in the data, a spike on a graph that signifies
mass or energy at a very specific point.
Speaker 2: That's how we found the Higgs, right, clear signal.
Speaker 3: This was different. This was a behavior, right.
Speaker 2: They call it a collision signature. But here is the
kicker and This is the part that to me, it
sounds like a ghost story told around a campfire. Uh oh,
this signature it changes its behavior based on who is
standing in the room, or, to be.
Speaker 3: Even more precise, it changes based on whether the room
is occupied by humans at all.
Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, I need to be the wet blanket
here immediately.
Speaker 3: Please do. Skepticism is the first tool of.
Speaker 2: Science, because every few years we hear about a ghost
in the machine at CERN. Remember twenty eleven, the whole
faster than light neutrino thing.
Speaker 3: Oh, I remember the opera experiment. That was a wild
couple of months.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: The headlines were everywhere Einstein was wrong, time travel might
be possible, and what did it all turn out to be?
Speaker 3: A loose fiber optic cable, A loose.
Speaker 2: Plug, a literal loose plug. So before we all freak
out and decide the universe is conscious or something, why
isn't this just another loose cable?
Speaker 3: That is the most important question ask And believe me,
the thousands of physicists at CERN, that's the first question
they asked. No, they didn't just jump to ghosts, of
course not. They spent weeks, months checking cables they checked
the voltage stability, they checked the atmospheric pressure in Geneva.
Speaker 2: But what about the software. I mean, if I have
a bug in my code, it could look like a pattern.
Speaker 3: Right, they did. But here is the fundamental difference between
a code bug or a loose cable and this anomaly. Okay,
A loose cable doesn't care if it's three point zero
zero pm on a Tuesday or three point zero am
on a Sunday. A software bug doesn't care if the
shift manager is Bob from France or Serah from Germany.
Speaker 2: And this data, this data did.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is much harder to explain away.
Speaker 3: We are looking at a potential breach in the most
fundamental boundary in science, the one between the observer and
the observed. And the terrifying part, the thing that adds
all this urgency is the timeline the shutdown. We only
have five months to figure this out before lights go
out at CERN for four years.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's untack this properly. We need to start with
the context. Where is CERN right now in early twenty
twenty six, Because twenty twenty five wasn't just a normal
year for them, was it?
Speaker 3: No, twenty twenty five was a record breaking year. To
understand the anomaly, you have to understand the sheer scale
of what they're doing. In twenty twenty five alone, they
delivered one hundred and twenty five inverse femto Barnes of data.
Speaker 1: Okay, step right there, inverse femto Barnes. I love that word.
Speaker 2: It sounds like something straight out of Star Trek, but
I guarantee nobody listening, including me, really knows what that
actually means.
Speaker 3: Laughs. Yeah, that is completely fair. It's a terrible piece
of jargon. We physicists love them, so break it down
in the simplest terms. An inverse femtobarn is a measure
of how many particle collision events you've managed to generate
and record as a density metric.
Speaker 2: So it's not just how long the machine was on,
but how much stuff happened exactly.
Speaker 3: And to get one hundred and twenty five of them,
you are talking about roughly fifty quadrillion individual collision events.
Speaker 2: Fifty we drillion. That's a fifteen wait, a five with
fifteen zeros.
Speaker 3: It's a number of my brain refuses to process.
Speaker 1: Find too.
Speaker 3: It's more data than any physics experiment in human history
has ever generated. It is a mountain of information so vast,
so colossal, that human beings physically cannot look at it all.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 3: If you tried to print out the data from just
one second of the LHC running at full power, it
would fill a library. It's impossible for humans to analyze.
Speaker 2: Which is precisely why they built the watchdog, the AI exactly.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty four, CERN deployed a new anomaly detection system.
It's a specific kind of AI, an auto encoder.
Speaker 2: And let's clarify this too, because when people hear AI,
they think chat GPT. Right. It's not sitting there writing
poetry about quarks or hallucinating new recipes, not at all.
Speaker 3: It's much more focused. Think of an auto encoder like
a very very obsessive quality control inspector in a factory.
Speaker 2: Okay, like that analogy, Let's say this.
Speaker 3: Factory only makes perfectly round, perfectly red balls. You show
the AI fifty dty million of these perfect red balls. Yeah,
you train it on them. You teach it the exact size,
the exact shade of red, the precise bounce, the weight, everything.
Speaker 1: So it learns the definition of normal precisely.
Speaker 3: It learns normal so perfectly that it can dream about
red balls. Then you put it on the conveyor belt
and you get it. One instruction. Don't tell me when
you see a red ball. I know all about those.
Only shout if you see something different, like a blue
square or a red ball that's slightly dented, or a
red ball that floats. It's designed to find the unknown, unknowns,
the patterns that human physicists would miss because humans, we
have biases. We look for what we expect to find.
Speaker 2: We look for the Higgs boson because the math says
it should.
Speaker 3: Be there exactly. The AI just looks for difference, for weirdness.
Speaker 2: So late twenty twenty five, early twenty twenty six rolls around,
the machine is humming, the protons are smashing, and this
AI starts pinging, it starts shouting, it.
Speaker 3: Starts flagging a specific statistical distribution of anomalies. You need
to be very precise here with the language. In physics,
we talk about.
Speaker 2: Sigma sigma, right, we hear that thrown around a lot
five sigma event. But let's really visualize it, Okay.
Speaker 3: Imagine you have a coin, a perfectly fair coin. You
flip it, it comes up.
Speaker 2: Heads, Okay, fifty to fifty, no big deal.
Speaker 3: You flip it again, heads again, heads. It's a little weird,
but it happens. Right. To get to what we'd call
a three sigma event, you'd need to flip heads about
nine or ten times in a row.
Speaker 1: At that point, I'm starting to suspect the coin is weighted.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at it.
Speaker 3: Funny, right, you're raising an eyebro. Now, the auto encoder
found a two point nine sigma anomaly at an energy
level of four point eight terra electron volts or TV.
Speaker 2: So just under ten heads in a row. Is that
a big deal in the world of particle physics.
Speaker 3: It's a hint. It's interesting. In particle physics, five sigma
is the gold standard for a discovery. That's when you
call the Nobel Committee and pop the champagne.
Speaker 2: And five sigma is what in coin flips.
Speaker 3: Five sigma is flipping heads twenty one times in a row.
Oh wow, Okay, at that point you don't suspect the
coin is rigged. You know the coin is rigged. There's
no weather explanation. So two point nine sigma is it's
just a hint. It's enough to make you look closer.
But usually these things vanish when you collect more data.
They regress to the mean.
Speaker 1: But this one didn't vaning No, and.
Speaker 3: This is where the story shifts from standard physics procedure
to beat mystery. Researchers started analyzing when these two point
nine sigma hints occurred, and they weren't random.
Speaker 2: They were clustering, clustering in time, so like a bunch
of them would appear on a Tuesday afternoon and then
nothing for a.
Speaker 3: Week, exactly like that. So naturally the physicists go into
troubleshooting mode. This is what they do best. They check
the usual.
Speaker 2: Suspects, the loose cables.
Speaker 3: The loose cables, of course, but also was the temperature
fluctuating in the main tunnel even by a thousandth of
a degree.
Speaker 2: Because that could affect the superconducting magnet?
Speaker 3: Of course? Was there a drift in the equipment calibration?
Did one of the thousands of power supplies have a
slight variance where cosmic rays interferings.
Speaker 2: Pick grays are always the scapegoat. Oh star exploded a
million light years away and it ruined my experiment.
Speaker 3: They are they're a real factor. But none of those variables,
not one matched the pattern of the clusters. The anomalies
were appearing at specific times and disappearing at others, with
a rhythm that didn't match anything physical in the machine.
Speaker 2: Until someone had a crazy idea.
Speaker 3: Until someone, probably as a joke at first, had the
bright idea to overlay the anomaly chart with the staffing schedule.
Speaker 2: The staffing schedule, you mean, like the HR roster who's
on shift.
Speaker 3: The shift roster for the main control room, and it matched.
It matched, the pattern matched human presence. The anomaly rade
shifted based on which teams were in the control room,
and it changed almost like clockwork during the shift swaps.
Speaker 1: Okay, pause, we have to pause here.
Speaker 2: This is the part where if I'm a physicist at CERN,
I laugh, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the joke of the week.
Speaker 2: It has to be, because particles don't care who is
working the Tuesday shift. A proton doesn't know that Bob
is on due instead of Alice. A proton is one
hundred meters underground, encased in tons of steel and magnets,
flying at ninety nine point nine nine nine percent the
speed of light.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it sounds absolutely ridiculous, and the immediate reaction at
CERN was, as you'd expect, extreme skepticism.
Speaker 2: So they tried to debunk it with everything they had.
Speaker 3: They brought up something called the look elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Effect, which is what exactly.
Speaker 3: It's a statistical principle. It basically says that if you
look at a big enough data set, and remember we
have fifty quadrillion collision events, you will inevitably find correlations
that look meaningful but are actually pure random coincidence.
Speaker 2: Right, if you look at enough clouds in the sky,
eventually you'll see one that looks exactly like Elvis.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean Elvis is in the sky.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean Elvis is floating up there exactly.
Speaker 3: So they thought this was just a statistical elfis. They
assumed it had to be maybe the A team brings
their phones closer to the monitors than the B team,
creating some tiny electromagnetic interference, or.
Speaker 2: Maybe someone on the C team taps their foot and
it causes micro vibrations in the floor that propagate down
to the detector.
Speaker 3: They checked all of that electromagnetic interference, thermal variance from
body heat, vibrations from footsteps, from doors opening, and closing.
They put sensors everywhere. Nothing explained it.
Speaker 2: And this is where we get to the turning point,
the big one, the inversion. Because up until now this
could just be a really really weird equipment bug that
nobody understands yet.
Speaker 3: It could. It's improbable but possible.
Speaker 2: But what happened next that for me is the smoking gun.
Speaker 3: It is the detail that moves this from coincidence to phenomenon.
To test the human noise theory, the idea that people
were just physically interfering with the sensitive equipment in some
subtle way, CERN ran a series of fully automated data
collection runs.
Speaker 1: So nobody in the room, just the machine, the computers
running itself.
Speaker 3: Empty control room, lights off toor locked. Now, to understand
why the result of this test is so profoundly weird,
you have to understand how noise works in an experiment. Okay,
if I'm in the control room and I'm tapping my foot,
as you said, that creates a vibration frequency. Let's say
it's fifty hertz. The detector picks up that fifty hertz signal.
Speaker 2: Right, it's extra data you don't want exactly.
Speaker 3: Now, if I leave the room, what should happen to
that fifty.
Speaker 2: Herd signals to drop to zero, it should be gone.
Speaker 3: It should disappear. That is how noise works. It is additive.
You are there, the noise is there. You leave, the
noise is gone. Simple subtraction. But in this automated run,
the signal this anomalous pattern at four point eight TV,
it didn't drop to zero. It didn't just disappear.
Speaker 1: What did it do?
Speaker 3: The pattern inverted inverted?
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: The statistical distribution shifted in the exact opposite direction. It
swung to negative sigma.
Speaker 2: Negative sigma. How can you have negative coin flips?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. Means the data became less random
than pure chance implies. It became structured in the opposite way.
It's the difference between a noisy room going silent versus
a noisy room suddenly playing a perfect symphony, but in reverse.
Speaker 1: Whoa.
Speaker 3: The absence of the observer didn't just remove the interference,
It fundamentally reorganized the probability distribution of the particles themselves.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes my stomach drop, because noise doesn't organize itself.
Speaker 1: When you walk away.
Speaker 3: It doesn't a.
Speaker 2: Loose cable doesn't start fixing itself and then overcorrecting when
you live the room. An artifact doesn't reverse precisely.
Speaker 3: It's as if the particles, or more accurately, the probability
waves governing them, somehow knew they were unobserved, an artifact
or in error. It just ceases to exist when you
remove the cause. This behavior implies a dependency, a relationship.
Speaker 1: It implies the system is aware of the observer.
Speaker 3: That is the terrifying, exhilarating implication. And you can just
imagine the atmosphere in the labs when this data came in.
Speaker 1: I can imagine a lot of very very smart people sweating,
just looking at the graphs and thinking, did we just
break physics?
Speaker 3: Silence? That's the atmosphere we're here caring about from our sources. Yeah,
utter silence. Nobody wants to talk about.
Speaker 2: This officially because it's too crazy.
Speaker 3: Internally, they started calling it the observer correlation anomaly, but
it's whispered. It's not in the newsletters, it's not in
the official.
Speaker 2: Brief Because if this is real, I mean, it breaks everything.
Speaker 3: It breaks the fundamental assumption of objective science since the
time of Galileo. The core belief. The bedrock is that
nature exists independently of us. The planet orbits the Sun,
whether we look at it or not. Gravity pulls the
apple down, whether Newton is watching or napping under the tree.
Speaker 1: Right, reality is real, whether we're here or not.
Speaker 3: If this anomaly is what it appears to be, it
suggests that at the most fundamental level of high energy physics,
that independence is an illusion.
Speaker 2: That is, that is terrifying and exciting, but mostly terrifying.
Speaker 1: From a scientific standpoint.
Speaker 3: It's professional suicide. If you announce it and you're wrong,
you become the next cold fusion.
Speaker 2: And that explains the public stance right, the total radio
silence because I looked, we both looked. CERN has said nothing,
saying no press releases, no preprints on our equips, no
viral tweets, just run three is preceding as.
Speaker 3: Planned, complete and total silence. And you have to understand
the politics here. CERN isn't just a clubhouse for physicists.
It's a massive international organization funded by twenty three member states.
Speaker 2: We're talking billions of euros, thousands of careers on the line.
Speaker 3: You can't just walk out to a press conference and say, hey, guys,
so it turns out magic might be real without having absolute,
ironclad proof.
Speaker 2: You need that five sigma. You need more than that,
probably you need ten sigma for this.
Speaker 3: You need a result so robust that no one could
possibly question it. Remember the Higgs Boson discovery, of.
Speaker 2: Course, twenty twelve, Nobel Prize in twenty thirteen, a huge deal,
a huge deal.
Speaker 3: But the Higgs was safe. It was predicted by the
standard model fifty years earlier. It completed the puzzle. Finding
the Higgs was like finding the last missing corner piece
of a jigsaw puzzle you've been working on your whole life.
Speaker 2: Everyone clapped, This isn't a corner.
Speaker 3: No, this discovery, if it's real, it is like finding
a piece from a completely different puzzle box, one with
a picture of a dragon on it. It doesn't complete the model.
It flips the table and sets the puzzle on fire.
Speaker 2: So they are keeping quiet, but are they really? Because
our sources point to something you called soft disclosure, which
sounds like a conspiracy theory term. But it's actually about
how they publish scientific papers.
Speaker 3: Right right, It's about reading between the lines of what
they are publishing. They might not be shouting about consciousness,
but they are publishing papers about weird energy signatures.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me more.
Speaker 3: We have to look at a paper from late twenty
twenty four, the CMS collaboration that's one of the two
big general purpose experiments of the LHC. They released a
paper about something called soft unclustered energy patterns suease.
Speaker 2: The acronym is sue SUE signals.
Speaker 3: Yes, it sounds harmless. It sounds boring, oh, which is
probably the point.
Speaker 2: So what are they?
Speaker 3: They're subtle energy signatures, don't form clear particle tracks like
an electron or muon wood. They like whispers in the
detector instead of shouts a little bit of energy here,
a little bit over there, not really adding up to
anything we recognize.
Speaker 1: And what's the official theory for these SUE signals.
Speaker 3: The paper links them to a theoretical framework called hidden
valley physics.
Speaker 2: Hidden Valley. Now we're getting back to cool names again.
I like that.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: Can you explain this to me? Like I'm five years old?
Speaker 3: I can try. Imagine you are a drawing of a
stick figure and you live on a flat two D
sheet of paper. Your whole universe is that sheet. You
can move left, right, forward, back. That's it.
Speaker 1: I'm a flat lander, got it right.
Speaker 3: Now, imagine that just one millimeter above you sheet of paper,
there's a whole other sheet of paper with its own
stick figures and its own rules, a hidden valley, a
parallel universe, basically a parallel sector. Now in our universe,
the standard model forces like electromagnetism, which is what light is.
They are stuck to our sheet of paper. They can't
junk that one millimeter gap. That's why we can't see
this hit valley with light or radar or telescopes.
Speaker 2: So it's dark to us. This sounds like dark matter.
Speaker 3: It's a candidate for what dark matter could be. Right,
These hidden valley particles are ghostly to us simply because
they don't reflect light. But they have mass, they have
energy and gravity. Gravity might be able to leak across
that gap, so.
Speaker 2: We can feel them, but we can't see them exactly.
Speaker 3: And the theory goes that if you smash cotons together
hard enough at the LHC with enough energy, you might
be able to knock one of our particles into that valley,
or knock one of their particles out of it and
into our detectors.
Speaker 2: And that's what these SUE signals might be the debris
from that interaction.
Speaker 3: That's the conventional theory. Yes, and here is the crucial connection.
The very same AI systems and analysis techniques they developed
to search for these faint, weird SUE signals are the
ones that started flagging the correlations with human presence.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. So they might be using the official, respectable
search for hidden valley particles as a kind of cover story.
Speaker 3: Cover is a strong word. I would say it's a
safe scientific container. If you are a physicist investigating bizarre
anomalies that seem to react to human consciousness, you don't
write a grand proposal called the Consciousness.
Speaker 1: Project, You'd be laughed out of the room.
Speaker 3: You never work again. But you can write a proposal
called an investigation of anomalous soft unclustered energy signals in
the invalley sector. It allows you to do the controversial
science under a respectable banner.
Speaker 2: It's clever. It keeps the funding flowing while you stare.
Speaker 1: Into the abyss.
Speaker 3: Precisely.
Speaker 2: Okay, so CERN is being very very careful. But as
you said, this isn't the first time science has bumped
into this particular ghost, is it.
Speaker 3: No? Not at all. And this is where we have
to zoom out from Geneva. CERN is acting like this
is a completely new, isolated incident, but science has been
tripping over this specific ghost for at least forty years.
Speaker 1: We just keep sweeping it under the rug.
Speaker 3: We do. Usually when it happens, the lab gets defunded
or ridiculed into oblivion. But now that it's happening at
the world's biggest, most expensive, most precise machine, we can't
ignore it anymore. So where do we look first to
understand what's happening at CERN today? We actually have to
go back to a basement, a basement in Princeton, New Jersey,
in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Nine, A basement, not a billion dollar tunnel, a.
Speaker 3: Very humble basement which housed the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab,
or Pair for short. And what they found there is
basically the beta version of what the LHC's seeing now
on a much grander scale.
Speaker 2: I writ about PEER in the notes for today, and
I had to double check it wasn't a sci fi novel.
Speaker 1: This was Princeton University Ivy League.
Speaker 3: Yes, the dean of the Engineering department, Robert John, This
was not some guy with tinfoil on his head in
his garage. This was a serious Ivy League research program.
Speaker 2: And they ran for how long, nearly three decades.
Speaker 3: They finally closed their doors in two thousand and seven.
And their central question was elegantly simple. Do human intentions
affect quantum random number generators?
Speaker 2: So a machine that generates pure on predictable randomness.
Speaker 3: True randomness, not the pseudorandomness your computer uses, which is
just a very complex mathematical formula. We're talking about using
electronic noise or the quantum tunneling of electrons. Process is that,
according to the laws of physics, should be completely fundamentally.
Speaker 2: Unpredictable, the ultimate coin flipper, exactly.
Speaker 3: And they would put ordinary people in front of these
machines and say, okay, for the next fifteen minutes, try
to make the numbers go higher, or try to make
them go lower, just with their minds, no toutching, And
over millions upon millions of trials across dozens of participants
over twenty plus years, they found a shift. A shift,
a tiny but consistent and repeatable deviation from pure randomness
in the direction of the person's intention. It was statistically
significant to the tune of seven sigma.
Speaker 2: Seven Wait, seven sigma rewind you said five sigma is
a discovery. Five sigma is twenty one heads in a row?
What on earth is seven sigma?
Speaker 3: Seven sigma is? It's like flipping heads roughly twenty six
times in a row. The odds against it being a
rare and chance fluctuation are billions to one.
Speaker 2: That's a grand slam. That's not a hint. That's a
mathematical certainty. Why isn't this in every physics textbook?
Speaker 3: Because scientific acceptance is about more than just the math.
It's about fitting into the existing paradigm. Peer was heavily
heavily criticized. People attack their methodology, their data selection, their
statistical analysis.
Speaker 1: They tried to find the loose cable.
Speaker 3: They did, and the scientific community at large was basically
allergic to the results. It didn't fit the materialist worldview,
so it had to be wrong. It was rejected and
the lab eventually lost its funding and closed.
Speaker 1: But the data remained.
Speaker 3: The data remains, and here is the absolutely critical connection
to what's happening today at CERN. Cerns detectors their baselines,
they're triggers. They rely on the same fundamental physics for
their randomness quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling. So if the Peer
lab found a tiny but real seven sigma effect at
room temperature with a desktop machine.
Speaker 2: Then CERN is the high energy, super cool, billion dollar
version of the Pair lab.
Speaker 3: Exactly if human consciousness can nudge a tiny random number
generator in a Princeton basement, what happens when you have
the most sensitive machine ever built running at thirteen point
six terra electron volts, literally smashing the fabric of reality
at part.
Speaker 1: You're suggesting the effects scales with energy.
Speaker 3: That's the hypothesis. Perhaps CERN isn't discovering something new so
much as it's built a giant amplifier for an effect
that's been whispering at us for decades.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just Princeton, was it. There's the Global
Consciousness Project too, Yes, that.
Speaker 3: Grew out of the pure research. It's been running since
nineteen ninety eight, a separate project. They have a network
of about seventy of these true random number generators scattered
all over the world.
Speaker 2: They call them eggs eggs I like it.
Speaker 3: The premise of the GCP is to ask, do these
random numbers all over the planet become less random during
global events of mass coherent attention.
Speaker 1: Like what kind of events?
Speaker 3: Nine to eleven is the most famous and dramatic example,
but also things like Princess Diana's funeral, the World Cup finals,
the global meditation events, New Year's Eve every year as
midnight sweeps across the globe.
Speaker 2: Moments when billions of people are all thinking or feeling
the same thing at the same time.
Speaker 3: Correct and according to their decades of data, Yeah, correlated
deviations occur. The random numbers separated by thousands of miles
start to march in step just a little when humanity
focuses its collective attention.
Speaker 2: That gives me shills. I mean, it's like the planet
has a nervous system we're just now detecting.
Speaker 3: It suggests a link a field perhaps, and again the
skeptic scream, selection bias or hacking. But if you take
the peer data and the Global Consciousness Project data and
now this new high energy anomaly from CERN, the dots
are starting to form a very straight, very provocative line.
Speaker 2: And that line points directly to the idea that our
minds are consciousness are doing something tangible to the physical world,
which leads us to the heavy hitting physics. We have
to talk about the why, how is this even possible?
My brain is made of meat and electricity? How does
that change a proton and a tunnel in Switzerland?
Speaker 3: You have to go back to the classics. We have
to start with the double slit.
Speaker 2: Experiment, the gateway drug to quantum weirdness.
Speaker 3: Absolutely is so a quick recap for anyone who hasn't
been in a physics class lately. Ye, you fire particles,
say electrons, at a barrier that has two vertical slits
in it. Okay, if you don't look to see which
slit the electron goes through, it behaves like a wave.
It seems to go through both slits at once, interferes
with itself and creates a striped interference pattern on the
detector screen behind.
Speaker 1: It, the classic wave pattern.
Speaker 3: If you put a little detector by the slits to
measure which one the electron goes through, the act of
observing it makes it behave like a bullet a solid particle.
It goes to only one slit and the interference pattern vanishes.
You just get two solid bars on the screen.
Speaker 2: Right, observation collapses the wave function. This is quantum one oh, one,
it's weird, but we've known it for a century.
Speaker 3: We have, But usually physicists try to sanitize it. They say,
observation just means interaction with a measuring device. It doesn't
imply a human brain or consciousness. But then you have
people like John Archibold Wheeler.
Speaker 2: Wheeler, the participatory universe guy, one of the last great
giants of physics.
Speaker 3: A Titan, he worked on the Manhattan Project. He coined
the term black hole, and in nineteen seventy eight he
proposed a thought experiment that is, well, just fundamentally brain melting.
Speaker 1: Let's melt some brains. I'm ready.
Speaker 3: He took the double slit experiment and added a twist.
He asked, what if you decide whether or not to
observe the particle after it has already passed through the slits?
Speaker 1: Wait? After, how can you do that?
Speaker 3: You set up the experiment so the particle passes the
barrier and it's already on its way to the final
detector screen. It has theoretically already decided to be a
wave or a particle. Then nanoseconds later, before it hits
the screen, you make the choice to either put a
detector in its path or not.
Speaker 2: But it's too late.
Speaker 1: The action has already happened. It's in the past.
Speaker 3: Common sense says yes, Quantum mechanics says not quite. Wheeler
predicted that the choice you make in the present would
determine how the particle behaved in the past.
Speaker 2: That's retroactive causality. You're changing the past.
Speaker 3: You're retroactively defining the past. And the crazy thing is
they tested this. In two thousand and seven. A French
team led by Elaine Aspect actually ran the delayed choice.
Speaker 2: Experiment and Don't Leave Me Hanging, and it.
Speaker 3: Worked just as Wheeler predicted. The decision made after the
photon had passed the slits determined whether it had gone
through one slit or both slits back in time.
Speaker 1: So we really can change the past.
Speaker 3: On a quantum level, it seems we can define it.
Wheeler's conclusion from this was profound. He said, we are
not passive witnesses to the universe. We are co creators.
He called it a participatory universe. He believed that by
the act of observing the universe, we are building it.
We are turning quantum possibility into concrete reality.
Speaker 1: We are building it.
Speaker 2: That sounds beautiful and also like a terrorifying amount of responsibility.
Speaker 3: He even took it to its most extreme conclusion. He
suggested that our participation might reach all the way back
through time, that us conscious beings looking at the stars
and measuring the cosmos today might be what caused the
Big Bang to resolve out of a quantum fog and
into this specific universe billions of years ago.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's too big, My brain just blue screened. I
need to reboot.
Speaker 3: It's massive, really, but it connects directly to what's happening.
It's CERN because what is CERN doing. It's creating energy
conditions that haven't existed since the fractions of a second
after the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Right, the energy is the thirteen point six TV. It's
a time machine in a way.
Speaker 3: It is the bare fabric of reality. If Wheeler is
right and observation is the act of creation, then CERN
is the front line of creation. It is the most sensitive,
most powerful interface between consciousness and reality that humanity has
ever built.
Speaker 2: So if there's ever a place where these ghosts of
consciousness would show up in the machine, it would be
there exactly.
Speaker 3: It's where the veil is thinnest.
Speaker 2: But there's one peace to this puzzle, we have to
talk about Sir Roger Penrose.
Speaker 3: The Nobel laureate collaborator with Stephen Hawking on black holes,
an absolute giant.
Speaker 2: And he has a very specific and once very controversial
theory about what consciousness actually is, right orchestrated objective reduction,
which is a mouthful orchard arg for sure.
Speaker 3: Yes, Penrose has long argued that consciousness isn't just an
emergent property of complex computation, like a software running on
the hardware.
Speaker 2: Of the brain, So the brain is not a computer,
not just a classical computer.
Speaker 3: He believes that consciousness, our subjective experience, arises from actual
quantum processes occurring inside tiny structures in our brain cells
called microtubules.
Speaker 2: I remember reading about this years ago, and everyone in
neuroscience said he was wrong. They had this killer argument,
the brain is too warm, wet, and noisy.
Speaker 3: Correct. That was the big criticism for decades. Quantum states
like superposition are incredibly fragile. They need near absolute zero
temperatures and total isolation to survive. The idea was that
in a warm, messy, thirty seven degrees celsius brain, any
quantum state should collapse instantly. It's called decoherence. They said
Penrose was dreaming.
Speaker 1: Science advances, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It does, And in twenty twenty four there was a
major update that kind of vindicated him. Researchers at Princeton
and in Japan reported observing quantum coherence lingering quantum effects
in warm biological tissues, specifically inside these microtubules.
Speaker 2: Wait for real, For real.
Speaker 3: They found that these structures can actually shield the quantum
states from the noisy environment of the cell. They validated
the biological possibility of Penrose's theory. It's no longer just
a wild hypothesis.
Speaker 2: So the brain might actually be a quantum computer.
Speaker 3: It's looking more and more likely. And here is the
direct link. Discern Penrose believes that the quantum superposition, the
state of being in two places at once, doesn't collapse
because of an observer. He thinks it collapses on its own, objectively,
due to gravity.
Speaker 1: Gravity. How does gravity get involved.
Speaker 3: It's a complex, but basically, a particle in two places
at once creates two tiny separate space time curvatures. Penrose
thinks this separation is unstable, and when it reaches a
certain threshold, it collapses into one state, and that collapse
he proposes is a moment of proto consciousness.
Speaker 2: A single conscious thought, a single.
Speaker 3: Frame of the movie of consciousness. Now think about what
CERN does. It creates the most extreme quantum and gravitational
conditions possible in a man made environment.
Speaker 2: It mimics the density of the early universe, where gravity
and quantum mechanics were one and the same.
Speaker 3: If Penrose is right and consciousness is fundamentally linked to
the gravitational collapse of quantum states, then CERN is basically
grabbing and shaking the very box that consciousness comes in.
Speaker 2: So to recap we have the AI finding the anomaly.
We have the inversion experiment suggesting it reacts to human presence.
We have the historical precedent with Peer and the Global
Consciousness Project. We have Wheeler's theory saying we are co
creating reality. And we have Penrose's theories saying the brain
is a quantum device that interacts with reality via gravity.
Speaker 3: It's a compelling and frankly, a very unsettling.
Speaker 2: Stack of evidence it is, but we have to be
grounded here.
Speaker 1: We have five months. The clock is ticking.
Speaker 3: July twenty twenty six, Long Shot Down three.
Speaker 2: Begins the machine turns off, and it stays off until
twenty thirty, four years of silence.
Speaker 3: That is the pressure cooker. Whatever they hope to discover,
whatever data they can possibly gather on this bizarre anomaly,
they have to get it now, because when the machine
turns back on in twenty thirty, it will be upgraded.
It will be a fundamentally different machine. The conditions might
not be the same, the anomaly might disappear.
Speaker 1: They have a deadline to solve the potential mystery of
the universe. No pressure.
Speaker 3: Guys and we looking for the outside are left with
two stark possibilities, and as an objective observer, as a scientist,
have to weigh them both equally.
Speaker 2: Okay, lay them out for us. Option one, the safe, rational, boring.
Speaker 3: Option Option one is systematic error. We are dealing with
one of the most massive, incredibly complay machines ever built.
There could be a subtle, complex, unnoticed variable we haven't
found yet.
Speaker 1: The loose cable again, a.
Speaker 3: Very very complicated loose cable. Maybe the specific electrical load
of the lighting in the control room creates a harmonic
resonance in the detectors that only shows up in the
four point eight TV range. Maybe there is a deep
software bug in the AI's training data itself that just
happens to sync up with the periodicity of the shift.
Speaker 2: Changes the look elsewhere effect. We are patterns seeking animals.
We see faces in the clouds, and this is just
a very complex cloud.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It's the most rational explanation. It's boring, but it
keeps the known laws of physics intact and probably the
most likely.
Speaker 1: Okay, but what is option two? The thrilling thread?
Speaker 3: Option two is the new physics. It says the observer
correlation anomaly is real. It's not noise. And if it's real,
it means the universe is not a stage that we
just walk around on. It means the universe is a
fabric and we are not just on it, we are
woven into it.
Speaker 2: Consciousness is a fundamental.
Speaker 3: Force, as fundamental is gravity, as fundamental is electromagnetism. It
means that the act of knowing, the act of being
a conscious entity is a fundamental driver of physical reality itself.
Speaker 2: That gives me what I call cosmic vertigo. You know
that feeling when you look up at the stars on
a clear night and you suddenly feel very very small.
Speaker 1: This is the opposite of that. This makes me.
Speaker 2: Feel huge and dangerous, almost like if I look at
the stars, am I actually changing them? Is my observation
helping to hold them in existence?
Speaker 3: That is the question, isn't it? And even if it
is true, science moves incredibly slowly. We might not get
a big press conference in July where the Director General
Asseran walks out and says, good news everyone, we are
God's laughs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, probably not going to happen.
Speaker 3: We might just see a few quiet papers appear over
the next few years with titles like Anomalous Environmental correlations
and high Energy Regimes. We might see a shift in
how experiments are designed, with more focus on automated, unobserved runs.
It will be a slow, quiet revolution, not a sudden explosion.
Speaker 2: But the door has been kicked open. That's the thing.
Speaker 1: The AI kicked the door open.
Speaker 3: Oh, we can't pretend we didn't see what's on the
other side. We can't close it now.
Speaker 2: So here we are February first, twenty twenty six, standing
at the edge of a cliff. CERN has an AI
that is staring at a ghost in the machine, and
we have five months of data left to collect.
Speaker 3: And thousands of the world's smartest physicists trying to figure
out if they are debunking a very complex s glitch
or if they are discovering the soul of the universe.
Speaker 2: I want to leave you, our listener, with a thought.
You mentioned Roger Pinrose earlier and he said something that
I wrote down because.
Speaker 1: It just haunts me.
Speaker 3: What was the quote?
Speaker 2: He said that consciousness is the phenomenon whereby the universe's
very existence is made known.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful, isn't it?
Speaker 1: It is?
Speaker 2: But if he's right, then are we just passive observers
discovering a pre existing universe or are we active participants
inventing it, creating it by the very.
Speaker 1: Act of looking at it?
Speaker 3: That is the ultimate question. That's the end of the
And I.
Speaker 1: Want to ask you, listening right now.
Speaker 2: Wherever you are, if this is real, If your attention,
your observation actually changes the physical world around you even
a tiny bit, does that make you feel more powerful
or does it make you absolutely terrified? What is your
stand on the nature of reality?
Speaker 3: I would genuinely love to read.
Speaker 2: Those comments you too, Take a minute, ponder it, let
us know what you think, because this isn't just about
Adam smashing together in a tunnel under Switzerland.
Speaker 1: This is about you, and in.
Speaker 3: The meantime, keep watching the data.
Speaker 2: Keep pulling the threads. You never ever know what will unravel.
This has been thrilling threads. We'll see you next time.