Ned: Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Microsoft 365 portals—of
which there are many—somewhere in there, there is a setting
that says, “Bounce emails if they’re not originating from
a client in the United States.” I’m certain that is there.
All of my furious googling has resulted in nothing, and
trying to actually, like, pry open the various layers
that Microsoft has created is an exercise in futility.
Chris: I mean,
you saying you can’t do it with PowerShell?
I was told you can do everything with PowerShell.
Ned: I hate you.
So, much.
Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast.
My name is Ned, and I’m definitely not a robot.
I’m an illegal immigrant coming in from
Canada to steal all your… American dollars?
Is that what we steal?
I don’t know.
With me is Chris, who is also here.
Chris, I’m still in the same timezone, but somehow I’m jet-lagged.
That’ll happen.
I assume you drove.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
That was one of the bonuses was that we didn’t have to
go to an airport and deal with the TSA, and children.
Right.
Wait, which one’s worse?
Yes [laugh]
. Fair.
Fair, fair, fair.
[laugh] . Am I calling the TSA a bunch of children?
That’s for the listener to decide.
Oh, don’t revoke my TSA PreCheck, please.
Yeah, we crossed the border with nary an incident into
Canada because the Canadians make it easy, and then
it took an hour-and-a-half to cross the border back.
Nice.
Because, America.
[chanting] USA.
USA.
There was more to it than that, but that’s the bit that I’m going with for now.
That’s fair.
I
Chris: mean, I’m sure it had nothing to do with the five
tons of contraband maple syrup you were trying to sneak
Ned: over.
Four tons, and we had it in a compartment that they’ll never find.
That’s what the minivan is for: the false bottom and all.
It’s like the TARDIS, in a number of ways.
Indeed.
The border guard had a lengthy conversation with us about college sports.
It went on for, like, three minutes, and I was like, [laugh]
there’s a line going back [laugh] , like, a mile-and-a-half.
And you’re like, “So, how’s Villanova doing?”
And we’re like, “Good?” Can we go yet?
[laugh] . I was like, “I think I might know why this is taking so long.”
Might have an idea.
Little Chatty Cathy going there.
But he let us through, and we got back into
the United States with my cover intact.
So, that’s good.
The perfect… not crime.
Chris: Yeah.
Ned: Right
[laugh] . So, I took a break from my bath in maple syrup
to come record this episode, so I guess we should do that.
What are we talking about, Chris?
We’re going to talk about—and
Chris: not talk about—eh?
Oh, I know what’s going on.
Eh?
2025 has been declared by the United Nations
as the year of quantum science and technology.
[singing]
Ned: Do-do-dooo.
Does the United Nations often declare years as having a scientific theme?
Apparently they do it every
Chris: year, and by that I mean, they’ve at least done it twice.
I’ll get back to that point later.
Ned: Have you pretended to read Infinite Jest like the rest of us?
Chris: No, I actually read it, unfortunately, and it’s affected me.
Ned: Deeply.
Yeah, I was going to make, you know, the year of the Glad trash bag joke.
Chris: Ah, yes.
Ned: That’s also the book that taught me what ‘disseminate’ means.
So, that’s exciting.
And ‘eschatology.’
Indeed.
So, quantum [laugh]
? Chris: [laugh] . So yeah, that’s—it’s, you know… the United Nations, man.
It’s cool that they did this, right?
Yep.
Why not?
They decided on it because it is officially unofficial that 1925 was the year
quantum mechanics became a real, formalized, accepted mathematical thing.
Mmm, okay.
All right, now it’s hazy, but that’s the year, and we’ll figure out why maybe.
Because there’s a lot to talk about, and we should talk about it.
Because without quantum mechanics, obviously,
you wouldn’t have quantum computers.
Ned: I mean, who’s going to fix the quantum computers when they break down?
Quantum monkeys with quantum wrenches.
Would you call them quantum mechanics?
Chris: [laugh] . Ohhh, my God.
Go back to sleep.
One major reason that people don’t understand quantum
computing is that they don’t understand quantum mechanics.
Ah.
Nailed it.
First try.
Every time.
Absolutely
[ Ned: laugh] . Fifty percent of the time,
you get it a hundred percent of the time.
Chris: So, here’s the thing.
Quantum mechanics flies in the face of everything
that seems logical about the world that we live in.
So, there’s also a lot of vocabulary.
Here’s an example quote describing the critical
difference in weirdness about quantum computers.
Quote, “The principle of superposition, fundamental to quantum
mechanics, is what gives quantum computers their power.
In quantum computing, performing an operation on a qubit in superposition is
equivalent to performing the operation on all possible values simultaneously.”
All right.
Got all that?
Yep.
Yeah, me too, completely.
Okay.
End of episode.
And that’s all the time we ha—
[laugh]
. So, for everybody else that might need to have a little bit of help
understanding what in the hell is going on, how it’s possible, and
why—which is a really—that’s the hardest one to answer—I thought
it would be fun to take a little gamble through space and time—but
not space-time; we do not have time for that—and just try to shed a
little light on how the hell we got wherever it is we are right now.
Okay.
And so, I wrote that expecting to get to today, and I did not get to today.
So, we’re going to get a lot of the way there.
Fair.
So, we need to do a little history to understand where we came from, and
how we got here, and I swear to God, there’s not going to be any math.
Well—okay.
There’s definitely math involved, but since I am not a mathematologist,
I’m just going to tell you what the math proves without delving into any
Ned: formulas.
And I appreciate that because I suspect all
those formulas have zero actual numbers in them.
There’s a lot of Greek symbols.
You know, just as a quick aside, when I started taking trigonometry,
and then later, calculus, no one ever sat me down and explained what
the different Greek letters were and how to properly write them.
Oh, that makes it more difficult.
And they were just like, “Here’s a delta.
You know what delta is.
And lambda, here’s a la—there’s a sigma.” And you just had to, kind of, either
pick this up on your own, or hope somebody else filled in the gaps for you.
Maybe just one day?
Or maybe I was absent that day.
Who knows?
But like, here’s the five Greek symbols we’re going to
use this year, how to pronounce them, how to write them.
How to do it on a keyboard.
Eh, we’re way too old for that.
Chris: What am I kidding?
[laugh] . Oh,
Ned: no.
Chris: Ugh.
Keyboards.
Anyway, let’s go back to the beginning, where we began.
And we can only say this with a little bit of an asterisk because
I am certain, and historians are certain, that humans have been
wondering about this question since we learned how to wonder.
But we can only work with what was written down.
One of the first major efforts to understand the world around us that
was not “Obvious,” in air quotes, was trying to understand light.
And it goes back a long time.
Because you don’t have to be a scientist to
know that light, in and of itself, is weird.
Yeah.
Some light is harmless, like, you know, the 60 watt bulb in the closet.
Some light is so intense that it can burn your skin.
Light doesn’t even have to be generated by electricity.
Or fire.
Here’s an example.
Go get a framing nail, you know, one of the big ones—
Okay.
—and a solid piece of wood—not a word from
you—and just blast that nail a few times.
As long as you hit it square, and you hit it hard
enough, eventually, it’ll start to glow, aka, emit light.
Now, I know you’ve never actually worked
with your hands, but I promise this happens.
That’s fair.
I’ve been called panda hands in the past.
[laugh] . I am not delving into that.
No follow-up questions.
Fair [laugh]
. So, if you look at sources, even ancient philosophers, scientists—because there
really was no separation between those two for a long time—recognized that there
was a correlation between light and heat, and it has something to do with eyes—
Yeah.
Because you need those to see the light, right?
But light can affect other things.
Like, what the hell’s going on?
Ned: Yeah.
If something was underwater, you could see that
it kind of refracted things in a weird way, right?
Right.
Or if you were underwater yourself and looking up, you could see that,
I sort of see the reflection of myself, but I also see what’s—like, does
a lot of weird things in different mediums, and why is it doing any of
Chris: that?
Right.
So, in order to save time, and make this less than a 12-episode arc, I’m
going to skip roughly 2000 years of exactly this kind of philosophizing.
And I’m not exaggerating.
In terms of what is written down, this shit goes all the way back to
Pythagoras, who, yes, he was a real person, and he was fucking weird.
Ned: He was real weird.
The word cult is thrown around, and it’s not wrong.
A number of times.
Chris: It is not just a squared… you know the rest.
Yeah.
Anyway, this is going to come up with a lot of these scientists, where
there’s going to be an aside where I’m just like, “And he was fucking weird.”
Yeah.
The next person you bring up, I suspect.
[laugh] . I will leave the bulk of that research out
though, as you know, a fun little exercise for the reader.
So, let’s fast-forward to the 1700s, and a guy
you might have heard of called Issac Newton.
And he was fucking weird.
His cookies
Ned: are weird
Chris: too.
So, Newton posited the theory—or supported the
theory, I should say—that light was a particle.
It traveled in a straight line unless it interacted with something,
in which case it would bounce off, reflect, reflact, et cetera.
Reflact?
Yes.
Refract.
We’re all reflacting.
Every day, I’m reflactin.
[laugh] . “Tough acting Reflactin.”
[laugh] . This is going good.
It is.
He did this in direct contrast to another scientist named Christiaan
Huygens—apologize, by the way, in advance for all pronunciations.
Huygens, in 1680s, had the idea that light was a
series of waves that were emitted in all directions.
Now, you can see that there was philosophical
reasoning behind both positions, though, right?
Wave theory, as we understand it, you know, you write
a wave, it’s got peaks and valleys, and it’s regular,
and it goes across for as long as it needs to go across.
This was understood because even in the 1680s, we had water.
Yeah.
We had ponds.
You could throw a rock in a pond, and watch the waves come out from the impact
point, perfectly concentric circles, evenly distributed in all directions.
So, understanding what waves were: pretty natural.
Newton, by contrast, showed—using his own mathematics—that he could
explain reflection and refraction without waves being involved.
He could do it as particle science.
And he published it in, I think, the book is called Opticks with
a k at the end because they spelled things way more fun back then.
Indeed they did.
And his argument held sway for a century, primarily because A, he
was the hottest shit in science, and the most influential, and let’s
just say he didn’t treat his competitors kindly, but B, there wasn’t
what we could consider evidence that proved the case for either side.
This was just theoretical at this point.
And experimental science and theoretical science often lag one behind the other.
They don’t follow evenly, and you see that through all
of scientific history, not just physics or mathematics.
Ned: Right.
It’s the fundamentals of the scientific method.
You come up with a hypothesis, and then you test it.
Right.
And until you can test it, it’s really hard to make it a theory.
Chris: And as we will see later on, sometimes, especially as
we get more and more modern, testing this stuff gets real hard.
[laugh] . Yeah.
So, we were in the 1700s.
Light might be a wave; light might be a particle.
Let’s move forward to 1801.
And an interesting scientist, who I don’t think was a fucking lunatic, named
Thomas Young, had an idea for a way that this could actually be tested.
First, though, let’s think about this from
his perspective, as a thought experiment.
Let’s say you have a, I don’t know, a flat piece of wood, two feet
square—just something hand-holdable—and in the middle of the block,
you cut two perfectly parallel slits, each one about half-an-inch
wide, maybe half-an-inch apart, something very consistent.
Now, hold that about a foot off the ground, and pour a bucket
of sand so that the flow of the sand hits basically exactly
in between the slits, both slits at the same time, right?
What’s going to happen to the sand?
Ned: I mean, in my mind’s eye, I would see the
sand would fall pretty evenly through both slits.
Chris: Right.
You should basically end up with two piles of sand roughly
the same size and shape, directly below the slits, right?
That’s what your intuition tells you, and also what should
happen with light, if crazy old man Newton is to be believed.
Ned: Right, if there are particles—like, sand is made of
particles—they should go through the two slits evenly.
You should have the same concentration of light under both slits.
And since light particles are so
Chris: infinitesimally small, it should also be very sharp edges—
Mmm.
Okay.
—not like little haze or anything like that
because light is way smaller than grains of sand.
Well, Young decided to test this, setting the stage for
what has become one of the most famous experiments ever.
Using a dark room [laugh] and basically an index card, Young
proved that, far from behaving like a particle, light clearly
showed interference patterns as though it were a wave.
This so-easy-a-caveman-can-do-it experiment was then double-proven
with a more scientific and rigorous double-slit experiment.
Okay.
Which, amazingly, is also super easy.
And you can do it at home.
I know this because I did it at
Ned: home.
Wow.
I am impressed by the level of rigor for this episode.
Chris: I know.
I’m waiting for my PhD to arrive in the mail.
Now, similar to the example that we talked about with sand above, in order
to do the double-slit experiment, you get a source of light—in modern
times, it’s usually a laser pointer because that’s the easiest way to do
it—and you get two slits that are parallel together on an opaque surface.
Now, if you want to do this at home, the easy way to do
it, you can just buy a scientifically designed slide that
is built to do this experiment in, like, high schools.
If you want to do it, the Etsy way, you can just cut two slits in
aluminum foil with an X-Acto knife and then paste them onto a card with
a hole in the middle to hold the aluminum foil so it doesn’t crinkle.
If you do that, make sure you’re using the non-reflective side because… reasons.
And yes, aluminum foil has a non-reflective, or at least a less reflective side.
Ned: Okay.
Chris: It’s true.
I’ll give you five minutes to run to the kitchen.
Also pour one out for all of the index cards and aluminum foil that
were lost in this scientific endeavor because it was substantial.
You have your slits, you have your card, all you
do is aim the laser pointer right at the slits.
Okay.
Now, once again, what do you expect will happen?
You think it’s the same thing?
Or do you think it’s something else?
I kind
Ned: of know it’s something else
[ Chris: laugh] . Let’s just jump to that.
I should have interviewed your dog for this one.
You’re right, of course.
You do not get to hard-edged bars of light
illuminated on the wall, like the sand.
What you get is a long line of bright, then dark, then bright, then
dark, then bright, then dark, et cetera, moving outwards until it
stops being visible on the periphery, called an interference pattern.
Which is exactly what would happen if you were using waves.
The light waves hit each slit, separate into two separate expanding semicircles
of waves that are interfering with each other in a regular geometric pattern.
And the way that it works is very simple: you
have a wave that has a—what’s it called up top?
A crest.
—a crest—and another way that has the—again?
The trough.
No dumdum.
A crest.
Two crests hit together, and it makes a bright point.
Two troughs hit together, and it makes a dark point.
A crest and a trough hit each other, and you get nothing.
So, what do you end up with?
Bright, then dark, then bright, then dark,
then bright, then dark, all the way across.
And honestly, the light goes way farther than we can actually see.
If you look this up on YouTube, there are some people that did this
in serious laboratory areas, and it is consistent for really long
distances, and it does not matter how bright your light point is.
It only matters—like, the one of the main reasons you use a
laser pointer is it’s incredibly bright, and it’s incredibly
concentrated, so it’s easy to see with the naked eye, right?
If you didn’t have the naked eye, if you had, say,
photosensitive paper, you could see this no matter what.
Wow.
Ned: Okay.
Makes sense?
I mean, what you’re explaining makes sense that’s
acting as a wave, but it still seems weird.
It is weird, and it only gets
Chris: weirder.
Now, interestingly, and I brought up the lake earlier for a reason,
which is you can simulate this experiment on a calm body of water.
If you create a repeating wave pattern by say, I don’t know getting
a paddle and smacking the water rhythmically, and you put two
separate slits out X amount in front of you, you can actually watch
the wave, the single wave hit the two slits become a double wave and
cause the same interference patterns as they go out into the lake.
That is cool.
That is pretty cool.
And sometimes messy, and it upsets the frogs, so don’t do it for too long.
I won’t.
Now, in order to create those interference
patterns, you need more than one wave, right?
I mean, obviously.
We just talked about that.
One wave hits two slits, causes two waves, they interfere.
Right.
We’re going to fast-forward a little bit, and we get
to a point with experimental equipment where you can
literally send only one photon at a time at the slits.
What do you think you’re going to get?
Ned: Well, I would think if it’s just one photon,
it would have to go through one slit or the other.
It can’t go through both.
Oh, you sweet summer child.
Chris: We tested this and actually, it took a long-ass time.
It took until, like, the ’80s to do this experimentally.
But—
Ned: Well, isolating a single photon is not easy.
They’re super tiny.
Yeah,
Chris: they weren’t doing that in the 1800s for some reason.
Egh, slackers.
But if you put a photosensitive paper or plate behind the two
slits and fire one photon at a time and wait, they will show up
as an interference pattern exactly like if it was a full wave.
That makes no sense.
Now, here’s my question to you.
How in the hell is this possible?
Well God, I hope you’re going to tell me because I got nothing.
What ends up happening, and the easiest way to explain it is, the
single photon going through this apparatus is interfering with itself.
And to quote my main source for this episode, which is the amazing
book Through Two Doors at Once, quote, “This is rather curious.”
[laugh]
. How is that understatement?
Ned: Holy shit.
Uh, yeah, that’s a bit of an understatement, to say the least.
Okay, so a single object is interfering with itself to create
an interference pattern that, in my mind, should not exist?
Correct.
And this is
Chris: absolutely provable, and there’s no question that it happened.
It has been tested hundreds of times in hundreds of apparatus.
Ned: Are we sure that aliens aren’t just fucking with
Chris: us?
[laugh] . Are aliens even real if no one’s there to observe them?
Think about it.
Yes, yes, they are.
I’m not a solipsist.
I’m not going to go too much further down this particular rabbit hole today.
I might do it later.
The reason that I bring this stuff up is not to do a math lesson.
It’s really more of a open your mind to the
insanity and wonderment that is the quantum realm.
And it is far, far weirder than you could possibly imagine.
And something interesting comes of this that starts to really
inform how we have to handle anything at this size—and by that
I mean in the quantum realm—and that is, you can never know for
sure where in that interference pattern the photon will land.
You can not even know for sure which slit it goes through.
You can only calculate—and I promised that there would be no math—you can
only calculate the probability of it landing somewhere within the range
established by the conditions of the slits and the photosensitive receiver.
And that forms the basis of all quantum mathematics.
It is—remember, a qubit plays this same game: a qubit can be any value
between zero and one, and it is a probability that we are going after.
And that’s also the reason that quantum computing calculations are
run hundreds and hundreds of times, which is an interesting thing that
I’m not going to get too much more into today, but I might do later.
As soon as I get to that chapter.
[laugh] . Okay.
So, I’m asking the audience to just embrace the weirdness.
And I’m going to ask another question.
If you set up a mechanism wherein you know for certain which
slit the photon goes through, what do you think happens?
Ned: You collapse the wave and the interference pattern goes away.
And I’m saying that because I know that’s the
answer [laugh] and not because it’s obvious.
That is correct.
Chris: Now, like I said, these single photon experiments
didn’t happen until much, much later, but the behavior
I talked about, was known and explained mathematically.
But I did promise that there would be no math.
I won’t do a math.
In short, between 1901 and 1928 was some of the most interesting
and dramatic changes in the way that math was talked about,
by some of the smartest people who have ever lived on earth.
There was this one guy, an obscure little dude called Einstein.
Doesn’t sound familiar.
He proved that light was quantized into a discrete
series of packets, or quanta—hence the time that we
started using these terms colloquially—called photons.
Now, the idea of quantize is an amount.
The idea of quanta is the smallest possible amount, aka, for these
equations, for these experiments, et cetera, this is as small as it gets.
And that’s an interesting concept too, which again, I don’t have time to
get into because it’s not like you can have a third of a photon, right?
That stands to reason.
But what does that mean?
You can’t have a third of an electron, you can’t have
a third of an electron having certain amount of energy.
How do they jump between one level or another?
Like I said, there’s a lot that I’m not talking about.
I know it.
And yet, I’m talking about it.
But Einstein did that in 1905, and he won a Nobel Prize.
Eventually.
Because Nobel Prizes are weird.
You can win them, like, a decade later.
I don’t get it, but whatever.
I always thought it was like the Oscars.
It’s not like the Oscars.
Ned: It’s actually kind of like the Oscars because people tend to win
Oscars not for the movie that they starred in, but as a, “Sorry, we
didn’t give you the Oscar for the movie you were in ten years ago.”
Oh, that’s true.
Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it.
It explains Scent of a Woman perfectly.
Wow.
Chris: Yeah, so long story short, fun fact for the episode, Einstein
didn’t actually win the Nobel Prize for E=MC^2 or relativity.
He won it for this work on the photoelectric effect.
So, there.
I just answered an impossible question for you.
You’re welcome.
Aw, thanks, buddy.
So, at this point, things do get obtuse and very, very mathy.
It’s really annoying for me to do this, but
I’m just going to say a lot of stuff happened.
There was a huge argument understanding what an atom really looked like.
Spoiler alert, the image that you have in your head of electrons is wrong.
Yes, completely wrong.
Once again, it is not like a planet in the middle with moons orbiting it.
The planet in the middle part?
Sure, even though not really, but around them is a cloud, and in that
cloud is electrons, and where the electrons are in there, in mathematical
terms, the only way we can describe it is, “Who the fuck knows?”
[laugh]
. Ned: They’re somewhere around there.
Right.
And
Chris: sometimes, they’re not.
So, that all got weird.
And then in
1924, another scientist named Louis de Broglie made a shocking proposal.
What if it wasn’t just light that behaved as both a wave and a particle?
What if matter did, too?
[singing] Dun, dun, daaaa.
Long story short—too late—this was proven to be correct.
In 1925, we got there.
Yay.
Matrix mechanics was developed by a guy called Heisenberg—not the one that
sells drugs—to formalize the mathematical descriptions of probabilistic
calculations because by this time, everybody understood at least this much:
there is no definitive answer to the question of, “Where is this particle,
and how fast is it going?” Now, this is the Uncertainty Principle, right?
I did not exactly say it the way that it is written
because we as non-scientists tend to oversimplify it.
But really all it does is reinforce the concept
of certainty not existing in the quantum realm.
Observation changes things, and if we’re not observing things, things
get even more complicated, which I’ll get to in the conclusion.
So, matrix mechanics happened.
There was a lot of argumentation, there was the Copenhagen thing,
where very famously, a couple of scientists spent about four months
hanging out in their attics, and arguing with each other about this.
Which I’m sure was fun for the housekeeper.
Ugh.
Sounds like a disaster.
What else happened?
Oh, Schrödinger.
You might have heard of him.
He’s the guy with the cat.
He did the cat thing.
He did a lot of other stuff, too.
The cat thing came later.
Early on, he invented what’s called wave mechanics, another form of math, that
calling it a replacement for matrix mechanics doesn’t make sense; in reality,
they both are still used, and they’re used to solve for different problems.
And the matrix mechanics—just to be as precise as I can—matrix mechanics
was an algebraic approach, employing the technique of manipulating matrices.
Wave mechanics, employed differential equations, and had
a basic partial differential wave equation at its heart.
And I could explain that, but we’re running out of time.
Indeed.
Ned: And you can’t explain
Chris: it.
Sh—ehhh.
Ehhh.
[laugh]
. Ned: I like that you tried, though.
Chris: All of that happened, among a few other things.
I want to stop here, though, because it’s a good point to stop at.
Because it does—honestly, we could probably do an entire episode
just on 1925 through 1928, but we also don’t want to go too deep
into the physics, per se, because this is not a physics podcast.
Not yet [laugh]
. Dude, you don’t know how close it came to being a historical weirdos podcast.
Ned: Oh… Chris, I have something to tell you [laugh]
. Chris: [laugh]
. That may have already happened.
But anyway, there we have it: the short, short version
of how we went from Newton to quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics, as again, proven to work over the past
100 years, many, many times shows clearly that all matter
is composed of small, individual stuff that we call energy.
It becomes mass, it adds up to atoms, which
become molecules, which become Xboxes.
The quanta simply don’t behave like the Xboxes do.
Quanta do things like superposition and
entanglement, which makes quantum computing possible.
The Xbox just lets you play Fallout for seven
hours when you should be writing term papers.
So, I’ve heard.
Right.
The amount of weirdness that I read and ultimately left out for
clarity and a minimum of tangents was absolutely astounding.
Like this: did you know there is a huge argument about the observer
effect, to wit, the theory that if we don’t observe something—or
something isn’t observed, I should say, because it really is not
humanistic in this way—but if something isn’t observed, it doesn’t exist.
Ergo for certain arguments in quantum physics, the question,
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does
it make a sound?” Could theoretically have a different answer.
Nobody could hear it, then nobody could see it so, uh, what tree?
[laugh] . I don’t like that, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Oh boy, will I send you a paper that will ruin your day?
Einstein famously rejected this all through his life, and
spent most of the rest of his life trying to disprove it.
One of his biographers, A.
Pais, recalled, quote, “During one walk Einstein suddenly
stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed
that the moon exists only when I look at it.” Which, fair?
I mean, one thing we know for sure is the moon is absolutely not a dragon egg.
Ned: Mmm.
I will say that—you mentioned video games in passing earlier—and the virtual
worlds that we build with video games, and the way that they’re rendered lets us
put this in a different perspective of the fact that as an observer inside the
video game, are things happening outside of what I can observe inside the game?
The answer is yes.
So, that’s why I think that the answer broadly, “Are things happening
in the universe when I’m not there?” The answer is also yes.
Where’s your
Chris: physics PhD from again?
Ned: Shut
Chris: up
[ Ned: laugh]
. I’ve
Chris: got a PhD from Ultima Online.
That’ll tell you.
[laugh]
. So, of course, like I said, this is an argument.
Other scientists have refuted Einstein on it with even crazier, but apparently,
mathematically feasible statements, like, quote, “Observations not only disturb
what has to be measured, they produce it… we compel [the electron] to assume a
definite position… we ourselves produce the results of measurements.” Unquote.
As the kids say, quantum physics be cray.
Yeah.
And they’re right, man.
It do be cray.
Cray-cray, even.
And I want to end—I’m actually going to throw in one bonus craziness.
Let’s pretend—I’m going to do a thought experiment, and it’s not
going to take too long—let’s pretend we have an electron that
we have control of and can fire through detectors at will, okay?
The electron has two properties to it, and only two
properties: it is either a black electron or a white
electron, and it is either a hard electron or a soft electron.
That’s it: two categories, either-or.
And we have built detectors for the color and the hardness.
So, the electron goes into the color detector, and it
comes out of one or two chutes: either black or white.
So, we know for certain, it goes through the white one, it’s a white electron.
If we test it again, it’s a white electron.
If we send that electron through the color detector and
then through the hardness detector, what should we get?
We should get both properties.
Right.
You should know for sure that, for example, it’s a black, hard electron.
Okay.
Right?
Because these were 50/50 questions.
There was no ambiguity.
Now, here’s my question to you.
We take that electron, we send it through the color, we send it through
the hardness, and then we send it through color again, we go through, and
it’s a black electron; we go through the middle, and it’s a hard electron.
So, it’s black, hard going into the color detector again.
What are the percentages of it coming out as a black electron again?
Ned: It should be a hundred percent that it’s going
to be black, but the probability is still 50/50.
That is absolutely correct.
Chris: And that is bezaco.
[laugh]
. Now, honestly, the only thing that I changed about this to make it more
understandable is the types of things that we can measure with electrons.
So, we could also measure spin, momentum, blah, blah,
blah, but this is a much simpler crayon example.
And again, it has been proven experimentally hundreds of times.
There are certain things about the quantum world that are just so
insane that even people that understand it, kind of don’t understand it.
And I read [laugh] I read something about trying to understand
it and the pointless nature of that, and the quote read something
like, “Trying to understand the nature of these probabilistic
experiments is like trying to ask the weight in grams of
Catholicism.” It’s just not a question that needs to be asked.
Or
Ned: can
Chris: be
Ned: answered.
It’s 26.
But—you know because it’s double-13.
Don’t worry about it.
It all makes sense, theologically.
Chris: Oh, and one last note.
Remember how I said that 2025 was going to be
the year of quantum from the United Nations?
Yeah.
And that was pretty cool of them to do.
Yeah.
And that there were other things.
You want to know what 2024 is the year of for the United Nations?
I’m going to let you guess.
Is it blockchain?
No, thank God.
Okay.
I would have had to start a United Nations war.
Phew.
Ned: Is it the year of peace?
Oh, angel.
[laugh] . Sweet angel, baby.
All right.
I give up.
What is it?
Chris: [sigh] . 2024 is the year of camels.
Oh.
Or camelids, or camel…camelaires.
And while I was writing this joke, I realized that actually
camels are probably pretty cool too, so whatever man.
Tune in next week for our deep-dive into camels.
[laugh]
. But not quantum camels.
Ned: Or are they?
Ooh.
And if you really want us to do an episode on camels and how they’re
related to technology, I would a hundred percent fucking do that.
Just… go to chaoslever.com and leave us a voicemail, or a
message, or a comment, or whatever, and say, “I want the
camels episode,” and we will make it happen somehow [laugh]
. Oh hey, thanks for listening or something.
I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the
end, so congratulations to you friend, you accomplished something today.
Now, you can go sit on a couch, grab an index card,
and some tinfoil, make your own double-slit experiment.
You have earned it.
You can find more about this show by visiting our LinkedIn page,
just search ‘Chaos Lever,’ or go to the website, chaoslever.com—yes
I redirected the apex domain so it all just works now—
Wow.
—you’ll find the show notes, blog posts, and general tomfoolery.
We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us.
Ta-ta for now.
The redirect was actually really easy.
Then why did it take you six weeks?
Shut up
[ laugh]