Superhero Science: StarTalk Live! With Charles Liu

25:29In fact, there's a James Bond, I forgot which one is it, Quantum of Solace? One of those where his Aston Martin has an invisibility button, and he presses it, and it just becomes invisible, but it shimmers into invisibility, of course. You can still shoot it, you just can't see it, okay? You don't know where to aim. And so there is research now, because what does it mean to be invisible? It means light from behind you continues to your sight line as though you're not there. So what you do is instead of blocking the light, they have a series of reflectors that coherently moves the light around your body and then sends it forward as though it didn't take this detour.

26:20and you're sitting on the other side of me, you just see the wall behind me and you don't even know that I'm there. There are demos of this online. There are YouTube videos. You can see this. Authentic. It's not AI fake. The problem is now it works only if you're exactly aligned with it. If you go offline, then the effect collapses. But that's a start. And you're functionally invisible when you can pull that off. Marvelous. Yeah. I was not aware of the technology at that point. But there's different types of invisibility. Yeah. If you look at a stealth bomber, for instance, right? It's invisible on the right.

26:58But that's only in that particular area. Very important fact. So the stealth bomber has a radar cross-section of a bumblebee. Okay? So a dangerous bumblebee right there. Yeah. Imagine that radar, like, okay? A hell of a sting. So if you are trying to detect planes with radar, so just at the risk of stating the obvious, the radar hits your intended object and it reflects back to you in the shape of what the thing is. And you can look at the blip and if it's got any kind of detail and you put some AI on it, it'll tell you what the plane is. The stealth bomber is designed very specially so that any incident radar reflects in a different direction than straight back.

27:52Wow. Okay. And can we get a version for this for speed traps? Because... Yeah, because to try to send it, then it doesn't go back. It doesn't go back. It'll whiz by, it'll just say there's nothing there. Exactly. So if you look at how the surfaces of the stealth bomber and other stealth technologies are shaped, take a line and hit it, and it'll never send you back in the direction you came. On any surface. Okay. So it's all faceted and... Correct. Yeah. Correct. And just a side fact, the earliest of the stealth bombers, I think it was the F-117, used now decades ago, had flat surfaces on it. Okay?

28:36Take a look at a fascinating history of this. You know why it had flat surfaces? Because the computers were not powerful enough to perfectly solve the equation to have a continuously curving surface. So it had to approximate it with flat surfaces. So that still reduced the radar cross-section, but it didn't take it to as low as the bumblebee. Once we could fit it with high-performance computing, you can curve the surfaces so that hardly any signal goes back. So here's the problem. Exactly your point. Its radar cross-section is a bumblebee. But if you just step out and look up, there it is. Okay?

29:16It's optical cross-section is the full plane, okay? So, where you are in the electromagnetic spectrum... Exactly. ...matters here. Totally. Well, invisibility isn't all that great of a superpower by itself. Let's face it. Okay. If you can just hide, that's great. But you gotta do something other than hide, right? And so, in fact, with the superheroine, the invisible woman, the Marvel comics back in the 60s developed an extra power for her. Not only did she have the ability to turn invisible, she also could project invisible force fields. She could actually do things invisibly to you without even touching you.

29:58All she had to do was to envision a shape of something made of force that was invisible and then be able to lift you up as if you were sitting in a chair or to move you around or to push you back. It had the ability to protect and be invisible at the same time. So that's effective even if the force is not invisible. That's right. It's a field around you if you can do that. Now, we know in quantum physics, there's an effect. Quantum is spooky, weird stuff. And that's why everyone, it attracts people because they want to understand it. And quantum physics is not there to understand. Charles, correct me if I'm wrong.

30:39No one comes out of a quantum physics class and says, Oh, I understand that. No, you don't. Okay? It is just what the universe does on the small scales. We can describe it. We can calculate. But we scratch our heads every single time. And one of the effects, fascinatingly, is if you take two very smooth, very flat metal plates and evacuate the space between them, so it's a vacuum, you start making them closer and closer to each other. there is a point where there's a whole new force that pulls them together. It's not electromagnetic. It's not gravitational. It's not the strong nuclear force. It's some new thing.

31:27Maybe they just really like each other. Good point. They pull each other together. And that discovery won a Nobel Prize. And so— The Casimir effect. Yes. The Casimir effect. That's a Casimir force. The Casimir Force. So what causes that? The Casimir effect is caused because there are things called quantum fluctuations in our universe. Even when things have apparently no energy or no change at all, at the quantum level, levels far smaller than atoms, with energies far tinier than a single, say, electrical pulse, there is a little bit of this happening all the time, all around you. So if you are getting a smaller and smaller space between these two plates, you get to a small enough point where the quantum fluctuations are actually bouncing off of those plates.

32:20And so you create an attractive or sometimes a repulsive force that kicks in only just before they touch because the quantum effects, small as they are, are definitely there. And so you can imagine actually influencing something without actually pushing on it or pulling on it. It's actually just the quantum work that's being done because the universe is shimmering on that tiny level. You have to get really, really close. Super close. So I'm a villain, just your average villain, but I want to upgrade to supervillain. How am I using... The Casimir effect? The Casimir effect. Is it like your hair kind of stuff?

32:58Yes, that's a great point. If you somehow were a superhero or a supervillain that could take advantage of quantum fluctuations, You might be able to say, I hereby declare that the quantum fluctuations in this part of the universe are going to be reduced. In exchange, the funds in this part are going to be increased. All of a sudden, you have all this extra energy over here and much less over there. So you can imagine something literally being sucked from here to there due to quantum effects alone. Because the object naturally wants to go from high energy to low energy. That's right. So you could move something without doing anything other than just changing the quantum fluctuation.

33:37So you're creating a gradient. You're creating that gradient. And the problem, of course, is that this is a much larger space than the quantum fluctuation space is. Anytime you have a quantum fluctuation, we're talking things that are billionths of billionths of inches, right? Going from this part of the room to that part of the room. If you wanted to carry me from here to there, that's many, many, many, many, many billions of inches. So by the time that happens, I think we're all going home. Yeah, so there's a... Not yet, not yet. There's a physicist, George Gamow. He's a hero of mine because he was an active physicist and he wrote for the public.

34:11And he was one of the first people who hypothesized the hot Big Bang theory. Yeah, that's right, that's right. And so he had a series of books called Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. And each book, it's fanciful, and he illustrated it with cartoon illustrations. Each book was you living in a world where the universal constants have different values. So, for example, instead of the speed of light being as fast as it is, speed of light is 60 miles an hour. Oh, wow. So you drive down the street. He's describing this. Yeah. And as you go to 30 miles an hour, he's describing how all your scenery changes.

34:52And so it was such a world to jump into, which has me wonder, if you had real power over the universe and you could adjust the value of the physical constants that control quantum physics. Maybe you could dial that up so that we respond to quantum physics in the way particles do. Yes. There is an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation called Q Who, where this exactly happened. Really? Yes. The great creature named Q, who was being punished by his other fellow Qs, had been powers - As one would happen. Yes, right. Because he was being too mischievous. So what happened was that they were having a problem on a planet and trying to solve that problem and they couldn't figure it out.

35:35And so they asked Q, said, what would you do? He's like, oh, it's obvious. Change the gravitational constant of the universe. And all the rest of the humans are like, we can't do that. But the engineer, Geordi LaForge, said, hey, maybe we could, right? That's the superhero you're talking about. Somebody who could actually change the gravitational constant of the universe, and boom, suddenly your planet is as light as a feather. Just because you changed the force of gravity. Just because you changed the force of gravity in that location. That's a badass power right there. Incredible. You're thinking like a supervillain now.

36:05No, I'm not. Stop. Don't bring me into your category. So, what intrigues me about, I think most about what has happened in this world is there are some writers who know that matter is mostly empty space. Ooh. is we think we're solid objects and we're just not. And you can say, how empty are we? Well, let me first, let's go back to Ernst Rutherford, who's a New Zealand physicist. Turn of the previous century, around there, I think, or a little later. 1900, 1900. Yeah, around there. And he did experiments where he hammered gold very thin. Gold is very malleable, so it's the most malleable substance on the periodic table.

36:58So you can hammer it. That's why gold makes very good... Leafing. Leaf, gold leaves. Yeah. On cakes. What is this word for it? Gilding. Oh, I wonder how that happened. Guild hall? Gilding? Yeah, okay. So anyhow, if you gild a statue, you take gold leaf. And using very little gold, you can greatly shine something up. And that's why the Oval Office looks so tight. Don't leave everywhere. Absolutely beautiful. No. Don't encourage him. Don't encourage that. Okay. No, he hammered it really, really, really, really thin. Okay? So the old leaf is just dangling there. And he fired particles into it. 99.999 % of the particle went through as though nothing was there.

37:54Oh. And occasionally one would bounce back the other way. And when he did the math on this, he realized that atoms are mostly empty space. And it is rumored that the next day, he alone on Earth knew this, that he was afraid to step onto the floor from his bed out of fear he would fall through. Just like the nightmares of a classical physicist transitioning into the world of the quantum. Believe me, I have been that high in my life.

38:36So if you want a physical example, The nucleus of an atom is to the size of an atom as a crackerjack kernel of corn is to the entire stadium in which you may purchase it. Are you sure we got the right analogy here? You said one crackerjack to the size of a stadium is the nucleus of an atom to the atom with the electron. The structure of an atom itself. Yes. I'll give you another analogy, Chuck. Please do. If we took all of the Hamptons, took the space out of it, all of the Hamptons, including us, would fit in my fingernail. Man, you just messed up a lot of real estate value. Let's do it. No, but it's true.

39:29The universe is 99.999999999999999999 % empty space. And that's just the atoms of the molecule. Why don't we... Here, double-edged question. Okay. Firstly, why don't we just keep falling through stuff or putting our hands through things and... Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Is this the serial probability? So, having asked that question, I know the answer to it. So, how is a superhero using this to their advantage to walk through walls? We've got the Flash can run through walls and... But the Flash can run through walls. I thought he just ran fast. He can vibrate. He can vibrate. And you have Dr. Manvalid.

40:13You can just move through things. Wait, wait. So the Flash can do what? He's like, hey. And that can get him through a wall? And he can get through a wall by like shimmying, vibrating. Wait, wait, Charles, is he moving through the empty space of the atoms as he goes? He's quantum tunneling. Yeah. Quantum. Okay. We better talk about that. Quantum tunneling. Here we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, here's the story. Don't leave me hanging. See, because you have this 99.999999 % emptiness, the reason we don't keep falling through the floor is because those itty-bitty bits of material actually produce force fields.

40:49I would like to force fields. There are fields of force, mostly electromagnetic, some nuclear, some gravitational, around the particles that make us up. So, for example, when I'm clapping my hands together, it is the force fields of the atoms in my fingers that are touching each other. And that is what's creating the sensation in my hands. And that's why your hands don't pass through. That's right. Because they just tap each other because the fields are there. But it was shown 100 years ago that every once in a while, because there's all this empty space and there are fields involved that make this all not fall through, that every once in a while, something will go through just by accident because the shimmering quantum fluctuations every once in a while will shimmer just right so that a little particle will actually go right through.

41:35That's called quantum tunneling. And this can happen, and in fact happens all the time. And I was so surprised to find out when I was writing the handy quantum physics answer book that this was part of electronics technology for decades. There's a thing called a quantum tunnel diode that was in many radios and other transitioning products that were for sale in the 50s, 1960s, 1970s. They are now obsolete. This is quantum technology that's now older than our non-quantum technology that's in our cell phones, for example. But quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon and it happens all the time. But the Flash is supposedly so good at this that he can vibrate his entire body, all of his trillions and trillions of molecules, and go right through and figure out exactly the jigsaw puzzle way to get through the other side.

42:24Oh, it's like that game show where the wall comes at you and you have... Yeah, uh-huh. It's exactly that. But he's able to do it with every single atom in his body and every single atom in the wall. He doesn't leave the body hole through the wall. So is this basic probability that it's a continual working out of which molecule is going to pass through it as opposed to which is? That's right. The odds of any single molecule doing something like a quantum tunnel is tiny. Now you add it up and multiply it by every single probability of every single other quantum tunneling possibility, and you have a number that's so beyond anything that even our current supercomputers can't even computer for one tiny layer.

43:04But the flash can do that. But the flash can do it all. So is this the same thing as quantum teleportation? Yes. Oh, a little bit different. Oh, okay. A little bit different. Okay. Oh, do tell. Quantum teleportation is not beam me up, Scotty. Okay, the term quantum teleportation actually predates the idea of teleporting, say, a human from one place to another using some sort of machine. But it was the idea of communicating information from one place to another. So copying a message perfectly and then sending that message perfectly to a different location without any kind of degradation would be what we used to call teleportation.

43:43Okay, so - I didn't know that. So you're saying material objects were not part of that original - That's right. It was an informational thing. So Morse code, for example, was actually a way of teleportation because your dots and dashes here could be translated exactly as dots and dashes there. With low error. With very low error. Ah. Quantum teleportation now is a little bit different. You want to move quantum information from one spot to the next. And then when you do that transportation, there is always a massive amount of noise and energy lost and your information gets lost. But if you can quantum teleport and you can get this information from one spot to another without losing, you literally have an unbreakable code, a way to transmit information that nobody else in the universe can actually ever intercept.

44:32And that's what quantum teleportation is really cool about. And that's its greatest value going forward. At this moment, that's right. It would be a perfectly secure internet, for example. Yes, that's right. So what's our energy source for this? The energy source is merely the fluctuations that are caused by the quantum system itself. You're sending bits of information, bits of quantum information, we call them qubits, and then you package them in whatever physical system you want, whether it's an ion or an electron or some other set of particles. And then you send them either in a beam or along a wire or a fiber or something like that to another spot.

45:11And you want to preserve the coherence of information inside that qubit for as far as possible. All right. And, Sculpt me. Is that happening tomorrow? Right now, people are actually able to quantum teleport little bits of information for actually many miles. So you can do pretty well, like send just a few pieces of yes, no, up, down, so forth, without losing coherence. But the moment you have too much noise, the moment the temperature goes up above a few degrees, above absolute zero, you start losing information. Because things vibrate and they create a thermal noise. just overwhelm whatever you find.

45:51It's not good for texting. Depends on what you're texting. Guinea pigs. You mentioned absolute zero. Yes. That comes up quite a lot in quantum, doesn't it? That is true, it does. Do things actually have to take place at absolute zero? If it is, then we might just be out of the equation. Yeah. Absolute zero is 459.16 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ouch. Give or take. Okay. At that temperature, no motion of atoms or molecules happens above the quantum fluctuation. That means that the reason we are warm is because the different atoms and molecules in our body actually vibrate and move and rotate and things like that.

46:36When all of that stops, that's the temperature known as absolute zero. Well, can you blame them? No. I mean, it's pretty doggone cold. It is pretty doggone cold. And at that temperature, see, what's interesting is it has been shown physically that we can never make a machine that reaches that temperature. It is only a theoretical minimum because you cannot create any kind of refrigerator that can get a temperature of absolute zero in a space. So what is the coldest spot in the darkness of space? What would that temperature be? Ah, the coldest temperature we've been able to achieve is actually colder here in a laboratory than out in space.

47:14Here in a laboratory, we've been able to get down to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. But out in space... Oh, what a failure. Right, right, right. But out in space, we have the leftover heat from the Big Bang. It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. Can't escape that. It's everywhere. And that's about three degrees above absolute zero. It's still damn cold. It's still damn weird. Yes, you don't want to go out there. Wear a jacket. So cool. But it is very cool. So the Big Bang itself is hanging around in such a way that it's warming space to the point where we can't get to an absolute zero.

47:51That's absolutely right. And that heat is actually very important in the universe because we have these cold clouds of hydrogen gas floating around in the universe. These clouds would be doing absolutely nothing and having no emission of energy or signal of any kind except the cosmic microwave background warms them up just enough that once every 10 to 20 million years on average, a hydrogen atom floating around in space will do a spin flip and release one single photon of radio wave emission at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. And so that... And that means... It's like, the two of them are just like, one photon.

48:38And it releases at... And Neil is just like, 21 centimeters. What the hell are you talking about? It's the best inside joke in the universe. Okay. Okay. See, we tried hard not to laugh during that time. But as Neil can explain better than I can, because this was actually part of the area of research he was doing more than I was, 21 centimeter radiation is what tells us where the hydrogen material is in the universe and how it's moving to make new stars, new planets and new galaxies in the universe. So the excitation of these clouds... That's the right word, too. Yeah. What? That alone, is it now a chain reaction?

49:24Yes. Okay. You create that bath of 3-degree Kelvin cosmic microwave background photons, which in a turn causes these gas clouds to do something. And that allows us as astronomers to figure out how the universe is aging. and what its processes are going on billions of light years away. But just to put this to bed, if absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature, then you need something to draw the heat away from what's there. And as you do that, it's still kind of in contact with what's doing the drawing of the heat. So, in principle, it may be physically impossible to reach absolute zero.

50:12Because it's always, like you said, it will always be in contact with something that's not absolute zero. Got you. Because otherwise, everything is absolute zero. And it's not. Right. Okay? There's some enclosure. So, no matter how good your Yeti is, okay? Your Stanley Cup. All right? No matter how good it is, the ice in there eventually melts. Right. Okay? Because there's heat transfer, however slow, it's not a perfectly, if it were perfectly insulated, it would never melt. That's right. But that's not how the actual world works. That's right. So even without quantum effects, you will wind up with thermodynamic losses.

50:54But even at absolute zero, we're now pretty sure that there are quantum fluctuations. The quantum. Yes. So what about the superheroes that breathe fire or something? Or whatever, they make fire. They're called dragons. You mean like Godzilla or something? Well, I don't know. Any of the ones that... Or when Superman burps. Oh, we're back there. We're back there with it. Sorry, everybody. I'm just wondering thermodynamically, the fire has energy. So that energy has to come from within. Torch. Fantastic Four. Yes. The human torch in the Fantastic Four supposedly is able to convert chemically. Like fire is basically a chemical reaction, right?

51:35Something like a nuclear detonation or say the interior of the sun, that's a nuclear event. And so somehow that energy gets converted to heat depending on what the processes are in the sun or in the person or in the campfire. Okay, so the fire superheroes don't need quantum effects. They don't. That's a simple burning. Yeah. Okay. Even thermodynamics is extremely powerful. A lot of us don't understand just how powerful, but you know how there was this industrial evolution based on the steam engine, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just the heat energy in this room right now. And it is hot. You people are hot, I'm telling you.

52:14If you were to convert that into mechanical energy, you could take an 18-wheeler and drive it right through the wall from that side to that side and all the way out. You have so much kinetic energy from the thermal motions in the air alone that it's easy to see how you can have tremendous superpower, even if you don't have quantum power. So coming out of the Industrial Revolution. That's right. Yeah.

52:55Let's keep this going with the fact that we know if most of matter is empty. Yes, most of the universe is empty space. And most of matter is empty space on top of that. If you had the power to collapse particles down and then restore them, okay, you get... A smaller version of yourself. And then a bigger version of yourself. That's Ant-Man. Exactly. Ant-Man. Yes. By the way, worst name for a superhero. It is. It is. It is. Really bad. Well, but he's a pretty powerful guy. But that's the quantum mechanics. That's exactly the quantum mechanics. And the mystical Pym particle, right? Yes, that's right.

53:35They are borrowed from another dimension. So are we looking at quantum mechanics being able to enlighten us and our understanding of higher dimensions? What a great question. Thank you. It won't happen again. Don't worry. the the so-called pym particles a fictional thing invented by marvel comics there's a scientist named henry pym p-y-m and by using these harnessing these particles which are sort of super dimensional you're able to make things big and small you're literally in in a sense taking something like this making it small and then making it big or making it huge because you're taking advantage of the space in between your molecules and your atoms that we were just talking about.

54:19So this fictional particle is exploiting known physics. That's right. Okay. Yeah, but this fictional... Let me ask you, because what you just said, if you keep the same mass and you make me super big, I'm the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man now. I'm a beach ball. Yeah, I'm a beach ball. That's right. And so therein lies the extra-dimensional part to which you refer. The only way that these particles can work in our world, as if they were actually in our world, But if they were really working, you would have to add mass to things as you were growing them. And you would have to reduce the mass of the things that you were shrinking.

54:54Otherwise, if you shrunk down your vehicle and put it in your pocket so that you could ride it later, you would not be running very fast. It would still weigh thousands of pounds. That's right. In your pocket. That's because it fits in your pocket. It doesn't mean it belongs in your pocket. That's right. Okay. So somehow, these PIM particles... That's kind of deep, actually. I was saying that. Just because it, oh, wow. That covers so many problems in life. Doesn't mean it belongs there. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, so this material, this matter, had to either go into some dimension that doesn't weigh anything in our space-time or be drawn from somewhere that previously didn't have any weight in our space-time and suddenly becomes having weight.

55:40So you're really shunting these things in and out of space-time. Otherwise, your challenge would be the creation and destruction of mass in our own space-time. That's right. And we know what happens when that happens. Mm-hmm. Those are nuclear bombs. Right. If you take mass and make it energy, that's the end of your situation. I'm sorry, I don't know why I got all excited just then. Yeah, that worries me, Chuck. No, no, no. Okay. Because nuclear fusion also powers the sun. Yeah. It's a very benign thing. We often think about it on our world as being dangerous. But in fact, without it, we wouldn't be here.

56:16Okay. We talked about quantum tunneling. Yes. There's another term that comes up. And if I think of a superhero, I go back to Dr. Manhattan. And that's the superposition. Where I am simultaneously in different parts, in any part of wherever I want to be. And Dr. Manhattan could be in many places at the same time. He would be on Mars and on the moon and in his laboratory. and, you know, all at once. Wait, wait, is that correct that way? Well, how many of you guys know Dr. Manhattan? Wait, yeah, first of all. Dr. Manhattan. I know, we're geeking out here. This has turned into four guys at a bar.

56:55Does everybody know who Dr. Manhattan is? Watchmen. Yeah. Dr. Manhattan was created in the Watchmen universe by Alan Moore in the 1980s. Yeah. And this is a superhero which didn't really want to be a superhero. But he's essentially blue and he's played by Billy Crudup and he doesn't wear any clothes. And he just sits around in this blue. Is that your most obvious fact about him? Yes. The man is the most powerful entity ever created and he's going to say he doesn't wear clothes. I got to tell you, he looks pretty good naked. Anyway, the idea is that he is, by himself, a kind of quantum particle.

57:33He has the powers of doing anything that quantum particles can do, but he is the size of a house. And therefore he has... an unbelievably large amount of power because he can do all the things that can happen on microscopic scales, but out on the scale of us and our size. So for him, his personal quantum constants are just larger. That's right. It's as if George Gamow himself. As we were talking about earlier, he's Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. That's right. He is the Wonderland. That's right. Right. So I don't think it's that he was simultaneously in those places. He's just like a particle has a probability it can be found in any one of the places in its, what should we call this?

58:14The wave function? The wave function. Anywhere there's wave function. He can say, my wave function includes Mars. I'm going to be on Mars right now. So then he's on Mars. Right. Yeah, and he was. He doesn't actually have to travel there. He doesn't travel there. He's already there all the time. All the time. Right, because he's entangled with himself. Yes. But is it entanglement or is it manipulation? Great question. Let me try to break that down a little bit, okay? You guys might have heard of quantum entanglement. lately. It's in the news. It's very exciting and so forth. But actually... It's not in the Hamptons news.

58:44No? It's summer. Okay. I heard some people on the beach the other day talking about it. Quantum entanglement is the idea where you can take a particle and literally split it into two identical particles, and they can be as far apart or as old or as new or as kept or as heavy they want, and they will still stay the same particle. Okay. And know about each other. That's right. So you have something that could be the size of a solar system. And yet, if you got information on one particle, you would instantaneously get the information on the other particle as if they were entangled. When in fact, in the quantum way of thinking about it, they are still one particle.

59:32One particle. They just still happen to be connected as both a particle and a wave that keeps changing size and shape. So you have this particle, and we in the classical world think of particles as like a piece of stone or a rock or a piece of metal or something, just a particle, right? But in fact, if you think quantumly, the particle and the wave are interconnected. And so the concept of size and the concepts of age are very, very different. And as long as you can keep that coherence and make sure that there isn't noise or static that interrupts the connection between these pieces, they are one particle no matter how far.

1:00:13In fact, there's a contest who can create the most distant particle pairs in this exercise. And the leaders in the world is China. China has the farthest separated particles. Not for long. I'm here to say that I'm going to take care of this two weeks. Two weeks. And China will lose. So it's a contest. We don't know. It's like an arms race, but we don't know why. What good is it? Right. At this moment, physicists are still trying to figure out whether entanglement is a perfectly normal thing that happens all the time and we just never noticed it. Right. Or whether it's actually something profound that can be used in a way, for example, for instantaneous communications or other kinds of storage of information and so on.

1:01:07What we do know is that if you entangle some things, you can create this thing called a qubit, which is a piece of information that's not just one or zero that we use on our current computers. Which are called bits. That's right. They're called bits. But these qubits can take positions between zero and one doing strange things in between until such time as you read them out as a zero or a one. This is a very odd concept in our heads, but what it is, it means that we as particles or conglomerations of particles could in fact communicate or otherwise interact as waveforms of energy in ways that we can't imagine now, but might be able, for example, to break computer codes instantaneously or allow us to do any kinds of computations or communications.

1:01:56It's the future of computing. Very, very possible. We're on the doorstep of this. The doorstep of it. We're way, way, way, well, the door's very thick. Okay. But we are at the doorstep, yes. So what you're describing is the, I guess in the lingo, the collapse of the wave function because the particles are waves, the waves are particles, but when it's manifesting as a wave, the wave occupies all the space that you're describing. When we think of particles, it's here or there. The wave is, whatever you calculate the extent of the wave to be, the particle can manifest at any point within that volume.

1:02:31And so then you collapse the wave function. There it is. Then there's the particle over here. So Dr. Manhattan would collapse his own wave function. And he'd be over there. Collapse it again, and he's back here. Right. That's wild. Right. That's the manipulation. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. There you go. If we've gone through the collapse of a wave function and we understand that there's a duality of particles and waves, where does it go when there's a many worlds theory? Because you're not quite, are you certain about that one? The many worlds, I'm... What is the many worlds theory? Ask Charles. Charles, please.

1:03:06Is it because you don't know? Enlighten us. No, no, no. Neil knows, he just doesn't like it as much. We've had this conversation a little bit before, but maybe we can expound on it later. See, here's the deal. About half a century ago, some physicists noticed that the mathematical equations that describe wave functions and quantum physics and so forth don't necessarily have to reflect our universe alone. In fact, those equations are consistent with the picture that every time a quantum particle does something or doesn't do something, a whole new universe is spawned. Who? Okay. Imagine if, for example, I go out there and I get hit by the jitney.

1:03:50Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. By the way, I have a good lawyer for that. Thank you. Okay. As we determine. In most cases, I would not be in good shape. But you could imagine a scenario in the universe where I'm hit by the jitney and I'm fine. Just that one tiny possibility. If that happens, then that universe has me in it just fine. And then all the other universes, they continue to coexist, but I'm not fine. Now imagine tomorrow I get hit again by the jitney. And then that process happens all over again. There's a tiny little possibility that I'm fine. and that person survives. If I keep following the surviving me in front of the jitney, I am in a universe where I live forever.

1:04:37Ooh. Eh? Yeah, but you keep getting hit by the damn bus. Yeah. Right. That sounds like hell. That ain't so good. I agree. But you see, the vast majority of other universes that exist in this mathematical many worlds, I'm not fine. And that's the one that we are most likely going to share, right? Because the chances of me being fine after being hit by the jitney a few thousand times are very, very small. Very, very, very small. Right. But you can see the problem with this many worlds hypothesis of quantum physics, right? You're generating essentially a nearly infinite number of new universes every single second that the universe is around.

1:05:18It's not quite infinite because the universe isn't infinitely old. but in every single circumstance, you can imagine literally anything happening. Charles, isn't this kind of a cop-out? What it's saying is we have the wave function. Yes. And the wave can collapse here or there and we don't know until you poke it or until it does collapse, but it might have collapsed over there. In fact, maybe it did collapse over there and you're telling me it did collapse over there and that's a whole new universe. It is a cop-out. What you're saying, you're taking our statistical ignorance and trying to step out the back door by making multiple universes so that we're no longer statistically...

1:06:00Significant, yeah. And why should I embrace that? You shouldn't. Okay. You don't have to. This is actually one of... That's one of the universes, by the way. That's right. In one universe... In another universe, you're just like, I love many worlds. Chuck is exactly right. You can literally imagine any kind of universe and it has just as good a chance of existing, assuming the laws of physics are the same in that universe as in your universe, as your universe. Our universe, the one that we share right now in this room, is a collective collapse of the wave function, where all of our wave functions that make up who we are and where we are have all collapsed to this moment in this place.

1:06:43that makes our universe right now unique. If we allow the existence of all those other universes, what does that make this universe? Right? Mathematically, those universes are just as valid as this one. But we're in this one. Doesn't this one have some greater validity than those? So Charles, you're dead in this unit we've established. You've been hit by the bus. Yeah, you're under the bus, buddy. Right. So then what about the Marvel universe where they keep going in and out of the multiverse? Oh, yes. The quantum realm. Yeah. Is this some of that? Yes. Was that some of this? Here's the point.

1:07:23If you get that small, right, your wave function becomes pretty much melded with all the other wave functions in this many worlds universe. Right. As a result, if you figured out some way to navigate this quantum realm, which is far smaller than even what the Big Bang was just before it began to bang. This is a millionth of a billionth of a trillionth of a quadrillionth of an inch. You know, really, really, really tiny. This Marvel Universe fake quantum realm thing suggests that if you just, all you need to just be able to navigate this really weird quantum tiny space. and you can emerge in that universe where I am living forever, despite being hit day after day, right?

1:08:07Then you can come get me from that universe and say, here's the guy who can't be killed by the Jitney, bring him back navigating through the realm to here and then bring me over there and then you can engage in the most amazing insurance fraud in history. That's the quantum realm of Marvel Comics. Okay. Wow. Should we believe it? Yes. I wonder just what's possible. Yeah. Right. We're not quantum-sized. We can't play in Mr. Tompkins' Wonderland. Fun to think about, though. But you said the math works. The actual math works. Yeah. So, the curious fact is mathematics, as expressed by the physicist, is a representation of our models of how the universe works using symbols, which allow us to manipulate the ideas perfectly logically.

1:09:03You can argue what's true or not, but once you've set it up mathematically, then manipulate the math. And that's tantamount to manipulating your understanding of the universe if it's the correct model of mathematics. So everything else about this math is working in our universe. So I step lightly towards these other realities that are so mind-blowing. But again, is it more mind-blowing than what quantum physics might have looked like to the original classical physicists? But there is no IT revolution without the exploitation of the quantum. There is no creation, storage, and retrieval of digital information without quantum physics.

1:09:50It's not some other thing that other smart people worry about in the lab. It is with us. We are embedded in it. There is no modern industry without it. Yeah. So... And if you were to go back to like 1910 and show somebody an iPhone, you know, they'd burn you at the stake. Yeah, they'd resurrect the witch burning wall. Yes, they would. Yeah, they were like, we were wrong about witches! And you know... So are we gradually inching towards the practical of quantum theory, rather than it being able to be achieved with immediacy. So I'm going to say it and then I want to get Chuck's reaction. There's those parts of quantum physics that we need, that we want, that help us in our technologies and our computers and everything.

1:10:39Then there's the part of the quantum physics that's just kind of floating out there that we have to take seriously because it's the extensions of what we know works mathematically and conceptually. So now you go to the edge and you explore the edges of those equations, oh my gosh, you just gave me a whole new frickin' universe. And what does that mean? And where is that gonna take us? And I got entanglement, and I got all of this. That's why people are taking it seriously, because the rest of it works. In fact, quantum physics is the most successful theory of physics ever put forth. It has never been shown to be wrong.

1:11:15And that's spooky. Well, that's because nobody understands it.

1:11:24All right, let me try to land this plane here. Is what you're telling me that this sort of probabilistic understanding of a particle, the wave-particle duality, when it's manifesting as a wave, we don't know where the particle is. The question doesn't even make sense. It's the wave that takes up the space. And depending on how you poke it, it will manifest the particle here, there, or somewhere else. Okay. Yes. Now you want to create universes in which the particle can be in those places, turning what is probabilistic, statistical, and quantum into something that's deterministic. Mm-hmm. So Einstein's quip, declaration even, because he was slow to adopt the weirdness of the quantum physics, he said, God does not play dice with the universe.

1:12:18And if you're in our realm, it kind of looks that way. God is playing dice with the universe, but in your realm, God has loaded the dice and knows exactly what role is going to get. Because every role is happening in a universe that's out there spontaneously created in the act of the collapse of the weight function. Have I said that accurately? You have. God is playing all of the dice All at the same time And that's why the house always wins And it's just a matter It's just a matter of which table you want to roll at That's all it is Beautifully said, Neil Beautifully said Yeah, so if the casino If it says God's casino Right Stay away

1:13:09So, Charles, give us a thought to take us out When we first thought of quantum physics, heck, when I first took quantum physics in college, I was like, this can't be right. But that's only because I didn't have a good sense yet of reality as a whole. Today, we understand as I see more and more of reality happening, all the things that I don't understand is only what I don't understand, not how the universe works. So I'm hoping that as I continue to go in my journey of discovery and studying things like galaxies and supermassive black holes and things like that, that I am open enough to see those things which I could never conceive of, things that in my gut I know are wrong, and yet be able over time to see that actually that is reality.

1:13:59And let's throw yourself short there. It's not that in your gut you know it's wrong. It's that in your gut your life experience is insufficient to absorb that which stands far outside of your life experience. So it's not that it's wrong. It's just it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit. Yeah, don't be so hard on yourself, man. I know. Thanks. These guys are the most supportive friends I could ever ask for. If I can embrace that part of me, which I don't understand and don't know and perhaps even fear, then I'm going to be a better off in this world. And I hope all of us would share in that with me. All right.

1:14:36Well, thank you for that. Thank you for that.

1:14:42As I'd like to do at the end of our shows is offer a cosmic perspective, the summation of what we've discussed and perhaps a perspective on what it means for us today, tomorrow, and beyond. This, as a scientist, it's kind of your job to stand at the frontier. You put a foot in what is known and a foot in what is unknown. And you sort of work your way out there. Now, what we do know is that, of course, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of your ignorance. So we can feel good about what we do know, as Charles surely does. He's worked hard for his expertise. But as you walk the perimeter, oh my gosh, there's so much more we don't know than what we do.

1:15:41And for me, I celebrate the ignorance. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke noted, one needs to learn to love the questions themselves. Because those questions are not just, I don't know, and then walk the other way. They draw you towards paths of discovery. And what I enjoy about our world is that we have creative people who maybe took a few physics classes, maybe read your quantum handy question book, whatever it's called. Sorry. Quantum handy that. And these are people who are creative storytellers, cinematographers, comic book illustrators, people who are not content with just the world. Let's reach out to all the places science can take us and stoke our imagination beyond what is otherwise visible, just looking at what we know today.

1:16:51And so I celebrate the fact that we live in a world where science is accessible to enough other people who are not scientists that we can celebrate science as a fundamental part of our culture, not just an activity conducted by pointy-headed intellectuals in laboratories. And that is a cosmic perspective. Thank you, Dild Hall.

1:17:23Gary. Pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much. You can see. Look nice. Yay! That was StarTalk Live, special edition at Guildhall, East Hampton. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, wishing you to keep looking up.

1:17:51Thank you.