Transcription
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 all at once.
Wait, wait. Is that correct that way?
Well, how many know Dr. Manhattan?
Wait. Yeah. First, Dr. Manhattan.
I know we're geeking out here. This has turned into four guys at a bar.
Does everybody know who Dr. Manhattan is?
Yeah. Dr. Manhattan was created in the Watchman 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 his blue.
Is that your most obvious fact about him?
Well, the man is the most powerful entity ever created and you're just going to say he doesn't wear clothes.
I got to tell you, uh, he looks pretty good naked. [laughter]
Anyway, the idea is that he is by himself a kind of quantum particle. He 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 and our sizes.
So for him his personal quantum constants are just larger.
That's right. As if George Gamoff himself was talking about earlier he's got he's Mr. Tommpkins in Wonderland except he is the Wonderland. That's right. Right. So I don't think it's that he was simultaneously in those places. He just like a particle has a probability. It can be found in any one of the places in its what should we call this the wave function.
The wave fun anywhere 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.
Yeah. So 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. M
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 Hampton's news. That's a different
No, [laughter] it's summer. Okay,
I heard some people on the beach the other day talking about [laughter]
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 as they want and they will still stay the same particle. Okay. So you
and know about each other.
That's right. So you have something that could be uh 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. 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 and we in the classical world think of particles as like a piece of stone or a rock or a 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
there's a contest who can create the most distant particle pairs. Yes,
in this exercise and the leaders in this in the world is China. China has the farthest separated particles.
Yes.
Not for long. [laughter] I'm here to say that I'm going to take care of this two weeks. Two weeks [laughter]
and China
will lose.
So, so it's a contest. We don't know like it it's like an arms race, but we don't know why
we 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. 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. What we do know is that if you entangle some things you can create this thing called a cubit which is a piece of information that's not just one or zero that we use on our current computers
which they call bits.
That's right. called bits. But these cubits 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. Okay, 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 in kinds of computations or communications.
The future of quantum computing that you're very
we're on the doorstep of this
the doorstep of it. We're way way way well the door is very thick.
Okay. But but we are at the doorstep. Yes.
So what you're describing is the I guess the 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 is 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. And so then you collapse the wave function.
There it is.
Then there's the particle over here. So this so Dr. Manhattan would collapse his own wave function and show up on the lapse it again and he's back here.
Right.
That's the manipulation.
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.
Is it because you don't know?
Enlighten us. [laughter]
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. Oh,
okay. Imagine if, for example, I go out there and I get hit by the
jity.
Okay.
All right. By the way, I have a good lawyer for that.
Thank you. Okay.
As we determined,
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 jity 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 jity. 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 jity, I am in a universe where I live forever.
Yeah. You all 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 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 jity a few thousand times. 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. It'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 copout? 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.
So it is copout.
What 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
significant. Yeah. And and why should I embrace that?
You shouldn't.
Okay,
you don't have to. That this is actually one.
That's one of the universes, by the way. [laughter]
That's right. In one universe,
in another universe, you're just like, I love many worlds. [laughter]
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. That makes our universe right now unique. If we allow the existence 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?
Well, Charles, you're dead in this unit. We've established you've been hit by the
Yeah, you're you're under you're under the bus, buddy. [laughter]
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