Cosmic Queries – Grabby Aliens with Charles Liu

0:00Yeah, you jumped into the quantum soup on this one. We did. Add some flavor to it. Add some flavor. Spice it up. And I learned a little more. You know, we had our Geek in Chief with us. Yes. We always learn something. We got the Geek in Chief. I learned that it's delicious with crackers. Coming up on Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And it being Special Edition means we got Gary O 'Reilly. Gary, in the house.

0:41Hey, S in the house. In the house. Yes. Former soccer pro. Love your wiki page with your sexy legs. You're looking too much. Stop it. Excellent. Chuck, nice. Always, man. Hey, what's happening, guys? Yeah. All right. So we brought in our geek in chief for this. A returning hero. Charles Liu. Charles, welcome back. Thank you so much. You've got your own podcast. Yes. The Luniverse. The Luniverse. That's clever. That's clever. Is that a play on Luna as in Moon too? I mean. I can't take credit for it. Oh, you didn't? No, no, no. I'm sitting at the table for dinner, right? And we're like, well, what do we call this podcast?

1:23And our youngest kid says, the Luniverse, of course. And I was like, what? Well, there you go. And that's it. Don't overthink it. Okay, so compared to your kids. Wait, and then Chuck went like this. That's a dumb idea. And then he named it the Looniverse. I said no such thing. I just sort of said, wow. So I happen to know your wife is really smart. So it sounds like your kids are even smarter than both of you at this point. I am so pleased that my wife and my children are all way smarter than I am. Yeah. And it is a great privilege to be. You know what Michael Dell said? What? The day you wake up and you're the smartest person in the room?

1:57Right. Change rooms. Very better. Guy, before you introduce the show, Chuck, what are you wearing? Today, I am mostly wearing... I feel like I'm on the worst red carpet ever right now. What are you wearing? And your hand was in your groin a half a second ago. Could you pull your smartphone out of your groin? That's not my smartphone, Neil. Here we go. No, don't. What? So we were playing a little baseball, softball earlier today. And I don't believe in showering. I do that once a week. And that's it, baby. Only if necessary. And that's only if necessary. And so, you know, you guys changed. And so I'm like.

2:38You did not change. I'm not changing. We look clean. Yeah, you look clean. And, you know. You still got your leg braces on? Those aren't braces. Those are, what do you call them? augmentations that were placed in me by DARPA. Yes. You are now a superior augmented human being. That's right. Don't ask me to jump up and get nothing off the roof because I can do it. That explains why you were tearing around the bases so fast. It's amazing. And DARPA, Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency? Defense Advanced Authority? So this is a branch of the military. Yes, it is. But people might not know. Where there's a subset of budget that goes to very high-risk projects that probably won't work, but if they do work, they'll be amazing.

3:29Yeah. And nothing is higher risk than Chuck Nice. So they expect a high percentage of the proposals to actually not work to fail. And they don't care. Because the idea is the one that works is going to make us badass. DARPA. Yeah. Gary, what'd you put together for that? All right. So these are questions from our Patreon listeners. And as you know, they have a curiosity that is almost endless. Boundless, yes. Yes. So let's kick it off. So this is Cosmic Queries. For sure it's a Cosmic Queries. Yeah, it's a grab bag. And we had 42 pages of questions. Whoa. Well, we better shut up and get to it. They're not all on there, but thank you so much for your curiosities.

4:10All right, let's start with Danielle's. Hello, Neil, Dr. Lou, Gary, and, of course, Lord Nice. could quantum particles possibly be connected in a higher dimensional space and only appear to be separate particles in three dimensions? I love that. Would a connection like that affect quantum entanglement? Over to you, gentlemen. Oh, my God. I thought you were going to take that. Oh, yeah. I'll see how well you do. I'm going to defer to Charles, but I'm going to introduce this. Tee Charles up. Because we see particles popping in and out of existence and tunneling through space and time. and we're trying to make sense of it, but I don't see why a higher dimension wouldn't help that out.

4:51For example, suppose we all lived in just a plane, a flat with 2D people, okay? You know some of my friends, I see. They have no depth. Yeah, no depth at all. So we're here and then like a dot shows up and we all gather around the dot and then the dot sort of becomes a circle and it slowly grows. and we get our top scientists to analyze this. Where did this come from? What is it? What's happening? And then it shrinks back to a dot and then disappears. We would invent a whole quantum physics to try to understand this, when all it is is somebody passing a sphere through the two-dimensional plane in which we live.

5:34Because the first contact is the point, and then there's a circle. As you go through, it maximizes at the diameter, comes back out, but here we are touching. We're thinking there's something magical, and from three dimensions, it's completely simple. So, Charles, this question sounds like, let's up the game. Can we explain all this mystical, magical, quantum spookiness by just, it's ordinary people in four dimensions playing marbles? Not only can we do it, some people have already tried. It's called string theory. The idea is that every particle we see in three or four dimensions here might actually have many more dimensions attached to them.

6:18And interactions on those other dimensions, like the sphere with our particle, but imagine two spheres interacting, not on our two-dimensional world. And bingo, you have additional weird things happening. So you, Danielle, are right on the cusp of exactly what physicists have been trying to figure out for decades. Is there perhaps another explanation where we can say the reason this thing is acting so weird is because there's connection elsewhere. Now the problem is - How do you test for that? Right. We can't have any good experiments. Because we can't access those dimensions. And there are so many - And you're like, and we never will thinking that way, Chuck.

6:57Don't be such a downer. There are so many different ways to think about it that you can have essentially an infinite number of solutions to a finite number of questions that we see or phenomena that we observe here in the world. So we don't want that. So the more a theory is simple and the less it requires additional pieces attached to it to explain observed phenomena, the more likely it is to be something that we can test and confirm. So that's what's going on here. And history says the more likely it is to be right. Generally speaking, that's right. I mean, the famous term, Occam's razor, right?

7:34Just the philosophical - I'll tell you exactly what he said. He said, multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity. Right. That's the actual quote from Occam. Right. And that we convert that to just his Occam's razor. Right. The simpler idea is more likely to be true than the more complicated idea. That's only a philosophical idea. Yeah, exactly. It's not exactly confirmed in every instance. Nature doesn't have to obey you in that regard. So in this instance, that's right, it could well be that that helps to explain quantum entanglement. But entanglement is a yet another phenomenon, which is a little bit odd.

8:08And we're still working on that. I know right now it's a hot topic and a lot of people talking about it. We've got top people working on it. Yeah, but there's still many, many questions about it. So we could relate it to entanglement, but it's not yet there enough for us to be able to answer that question, yes or no. Or it could be like when Einstein did general relativity, where he was solving some other problem and bada-bing, the mysteries of Mercury's orbit were solved overnight. Mercury's orbit was not behaving the way Newton would have it go. And all of a sudden, Einstein's general theory of relativity just explained it without even trying.

8:40Without trying. And so it became a side benefit of it. And one thing about your negativity, okay? Okay. Uh-oh. I feel a reed coming on. So I was on the Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox in London. Okay. You're stopping, Greg. How many monkeys are in an Infinite Monkey Cage? Let me guess. So that's the name of his show, his podcast. It was a radio show. And so we were talking about wormholes. And I said, well, with a wormhole, you could do this and travel through. And he jumps in and says, well, wormhole is not stable. It'll collapse immediately, so we need to think about it. Someone from the audience, a Brit, said, that's what distinguishes Americans from us Brits.

9:26They're always so positive about what can be solved. And we're always saying what can't happen. That's funny. And he... That shut him up. That's culturally accurate. Not always, but on a number of occasions, you will find an American positivity against a British... Yeah, so, yeah, till we go there. I mean, it has its drawbacks, you know, when it's just like, I'm the biggest, the best. Many people don't realize I'm the most positive. Keep going. All right, Chuck, you want to hit the same question? Chuck's got them too. This is Ryan Harris, who says, Dr. Tyson Lord and I's geek and Professor Lou and Gary.

10:07Ryan Harris from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Given the laws of science, if they hold true, when it comes to quantum entanglement, staying on subject, would there not be some sort of energy slash force being exerted slash used by entangled particles? and can it be qualified as of present? I am trying to understand how two particles across vast distances are influenced by each other instantaneously and if there are some sort of exotic, scary, or otherwise force that has been associated with this phenomenon. So what I would say, how can a thing happen at all without there being an active draw on energy or some other thing that we can measure changing for them to be permanently connected or while they're connected, they're connected.

10:59Something's got to, some clock is ticking. Something should be measurable from that. This is one of the big differences between quantum physics and classical physics. We are, we're conditioned, we're trained to think that there had to be something exchanged back and forth, energy, a particle, whatever, between two things. That's a classical. That's a classical bias. Yes. Perception. Quantum entanglement, again, as we said earlier, is still not completely well understood. In fact, we don't even know if it's a special thing or if it happens all the time. Well, I have to clarify. We understand that it happens.

11:37Yes. And we can measure that it happens. Right. So what you're saying is we don't understand why. Yes. But you know what? That's a very important distinction. Before we go any further, before the why and all that, somebody ought to tell somebody who might just be joining us, what is quantum entanglement? because this person... Just because you don't know, don't assume everyone else in our audience doesn't know. Oh. Okay, well, somebody should tell me. It's a perfectly legitimate question because even if you ask, say, 50 quantum physicists, you might get 51 different answers as to what quantum entanglement really is.

12:13Okay, that I did not know. It's kind of like if you ask 100 biologists what life is, you'll get 101 answers. Same sort of situation. But the fundamentals, biologists know what life is when they see it, right? The same is sort of true for quantum physics and quantum entanglement. But boiled down to its most basic point, you can basically think of two entangled particles as being one particle that somehow gets separated. But even if it's separated in space and in time, they are still the same particle. You're just stretching it. So imagine if you have a little ball and you break it in half and then you're kind of moving it.

12:56It's kind of like this quantum taffy or caramel almost that continues to connect them, even though there could be a huge amount of space or time between those two parts. They are still the same part. And that's a quantum thing that you're describing. That's right. Not a classical thing. That's right. Because classically, there's nothing between them. Yes. But I'm speaking with a classical brain to say that. And we all do that. It's very, very hard for us, even those of us who have done a lot of work in quantum physics. And just to be clear, these two particles, I like the way you're saying it's the same particle, but they have slightly different properties that complement each other.

13:34Gotcha. To make the whole particle. Ah. Right? So they have... Very well said. Each side took out some features of that same particle. So is this like the twins, where if you slap one on the butt, the other one goes, ow? Sounds like you've done that. I think that's, I don't want to say that's true, but I think that's true. Well, that requires an additional assumption about classical physics of twin butts. Yeah, interacting with quantum butts. Okay. And then you have some real issues. So do we get to the point where we say the universe is one single particle and that's just all of a sudden done its thing?

14:11Great question. We are definitely not all one particle, but the universe could be one single entity that contains a multitude of very, very small, more complex parts. This is something that happens a lot. We think of, for example, atoms as being some sort of indivisible piece of matter. But then we've learned since. Well, the Greeks thought that, yeah. Right, we've learned since that atoms. Atoms means indivisible, that word. In Greek means indivisible. Nice. We've learned since that atoms are made up of. Did you know you didn't know that? The Greeks any good at anything? The Greeks sucked. Those idiots.

14:43They did pretty well in the World Cup back around 60 years ago, right? No, they won the European Championship a few decades ago. And the democracy thing is overrated, you know.

15:02Hello, I'm Vicky Broke-Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

15:18Should we jump into the next question? Yeah. Let's go for it. Ezekiel Reeves. Hello, Neil, Chuck, Gary, and Lord Lou. My name is Ezekiel from Wawa, Ontario. I love this already. Well, it's not Lord Lou. It's Geek in Chief Lou. Okay. I accept any title. I adjudicate titles here. So, quantum physics is rooted in observation and particles deciding which state they are in depending on probability. Can this explain how we evolve the conscious mind and free will? Wow. I did not see that. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. That's great. The key question in my mind, based on your question, Ezekiel, is the word deciding, right?

15:59The decision of something to go this way or that, that suggests that there was something behind the ultimate outcome, right? When you and I decide to have a ham sandwich or we decide to - No, I won't want it. Now you said it. Yeah, right. Or we decide that we're going to dive left for a penalty kick instead of dive right. That has a whole bunch of stuff behind it. And the causality of it is dependent on everything from the goalie's life experience to the muscular twitches of that very moment and everything in between. So when individual particles are switching or landing in certain states, Niels Bohr would have called it the wave function collapsing.

16:41Niels Bohr, a physicist from 100 years ago. Yeah, when you have that kind of an interpretation, then you can ascribe, perhaps, intention. But we just cannot say, even now we still don't really understand what free will is. The definition of it varies from person to person. The philosophical ideas. You know how you know we don't know what it is? Because people are still writing 500-page books on it. Sure. That's the evidence that we don't know anything about it. Right. Interesting. But keep going there. So we've got quantum probabilities so that a particle, quote, decides is it going to decay or is it not?

17:19Yep. And we know that probability precisely. That's what's fascinating. That's right. Here's something that's completely probabilistic that we know with precision. It's a weird combination of facts there. So you're not prepared to analogize. I love the thing. the goalie leaning right or left to the particle decaying in one moment or another. You're not prepared to have your free will be a similar kind of expression. That's right, because that's the problem, right? If you decide that free will is something where say we humans decide to do a thing, right? There's a whole host of events that happened before that moment that helped us to make that decision.

18:00And there's also a number of events that lead up to the moment before the event that also influences that. Isn't that what he just said? No, he was talking about immediately before the event. It's okay. Yeah. So I'm saying that you can take that all the way down. You can keep slicing those layers all the way down. Turtles all the way down. That's right. Turtles all the way down. Okay, so. And there's. And do those psychology experiments. That's right. Where they put probes in the brain. I'm gonna mess up the details here, but the results are what I'm landing on, where they can trigger you to stand up.

18:41And then you're standing up to say, why did you stand up? And then they make up some reason for why they stood up when the neuro signatures, the neuro signals, already were prompting him to stand up and he made up a reason after the fact. So the signals were generated externally, but you internalize it and say, oh, I stood up for this reason. So you think you had free will to do it when in fact it was predetermined. That's spooky. It is. You talked about probability and the certainty of probability. What is it? Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? So where does that fit in? Because you don't really - I'm not certain about that.

19:22Well, I didn't expect anything else. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that's a great question, Gary. It actually has a little bit - Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, once again, from 100 years ago. Right. It has a slightly different connotation because what we're saying is that we cannot measure things precisely with infinite precision. That uncertainty describes how much you don't know, no matter what. So Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is actually describing a minimum amount of uncertainty in any measurement. Any measurement. Not necessarily uncertainty about what's going to happen or what's going to happen or not going to happen.

19:58And part of that is because, yeah, I can know that you're sitting here, and the measurement of that is completely sufficient for anything I might do to you or with you. But when particles are involved, which is the whole world of the quantum, if you try to measure it, the act of measuring it changes what it is you're trying to measure. Right. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the interaction with the particle confounds your ability to measure what that particle is doing with precision. and I think that's what's foundational. That was so hard to accept by classical physicists. That's hard to accept by anybody.

20:36Any step of science going forward, whether it be classical quantum has been hard to accept. It takes time and we should allow ourselves that time. Don't feel like a matter. Yes it was. It was Max Planck, was it? Who said, no great discovery in physics gets accepted by the guard of the day. They just get old and die, and the next generation takes it on as though it has always been. Well, the cosmological constant might be an exception to that. I know, but he predates the cosmological constant in that quote. But Aya, go, what you got? I'll go with the next one. George Valakis, back with the Greeks.

21:20Hey. From New Jersey. Can someone please tell me what a cubit is made of? Is it an electron stuck inside some type of magnetic box? Is it an atom with multiple electrons frozen in multiple quantum states? How is one made? What a wonderful, wonderful question. Thank you, George. But let me just preface this by saying, our Geek in Chief, in the past year, published an entire book on quantum physics. What's the title of it? The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. There you go. There you go. So we're not going to answer your question. Just go buy the book. And we can go have a beer right now. Okay.

22:00Give that back. Buy the man's book. And then we can all just have a beer. Okay. The handy quantum physics answer book. Man. It's not designed to be a textbook or anything like that. It's just if you have Q &A, you can do no stuff. With a title like that. Well, again, I cannot claim actually having made any of those discoveries. I was just trying to put together a little guide for people who had questions and answers. And they are. I will go out for your quantum questions, as one would have. Someone come along and hold your hand. Okay. Walk you along. It's great, amazing stuff that our colleagues have done over the centuries.

22:36Yes. And this year being, of course, the 100th anniversary, as designated by the United Nations, of international quantum physics. Did they declare that? Yeah, the International Year of Quantum Physics. Right in the middle of the decade, yes. The whole decade goes to quantum physics. It's really quite amazing. So a qubit actually doesn't need to have a physical form. It's a piece of information. Let me make an analogy to regular bits, okay? Bits are just pieces of information. So for example, if you've got a 64-bit chip in your computer, all that is, is that it can carry or hold 64 pieces of information that are either zero or one.

23:18If you have a bit, it's just a piece of information, and you can store it either electronically in a chip, you know, with a plus 5 volts or minus 5 volts or something like that, or you could, say, store a bit of information in a QR code, which is just a square that's white or a square that's black. Or you can do a coin flip, whether it's heads or it's tails. So the bit— With the QR code, that's the little thing we scan. Yeah, the little scan thing with the— I always thought of that as a two-dimensional barcode. This is exactly what it is. Yeah, because barcodes, are you white or black? And how thick is the black?

23:53That's right. And that's all the information. That just goes across the one dimension, right. Yeah, so I presume because we added a dimension, the QR codes can hold way more information. With the same amount of area. Than a barcode. Than a barcode. So you have QR codes that have entire web addresses on them. Yes. Right. And they can be little things. But in the end, it's just squares. So a square that's white or a square that's black, square that's white, black next to each other. And that is the information. So the bit is the information. It's not the thing that it's stored in. So George, your question, what is a qubit really?

24:28It's a quantum bit, but it's a piece of information. And you can store it in any kind of container that quantum systems can hold this information in. Didn't Microsoft just bring out a quantum chip within the last few days? That's right. It's the very beginnings of using quantum computing in regular computing that we're used to. But they are far, far away from a true quantum computer. Okay, you just said that it's not a thing, it's information. That's right. Now tell us the difference between a traditional bit, which is a zero or one, or a black or white, and a qubit, which is a statistical occupation.

25:07So just go there. Okay, well, a bit is either a zero or a one. Or a black and a white. Black and a white. Just a piece of information that is or is not. So it's binary. And so it's a binary piece of information. Binary, thank you. Right. The qubit is binary when you read it. But before it becomes read, it is not yet settled. So it can be somewhere between zero and one. And the complexity of the amount of zerowness or oneness a qubit has fluctuates and varies until such time as you read it. Right. So if you have a computer nowadays, we want to make a bit switch as quickly as possible. All right.