Hi everyone. Hello, I'm Lauren and I'm a quantum physicist and lecturer and I'm Colin and I'm a science communicator. We both work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Perimeter is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics, research, training, and educational outreach. We're so excited to bring you this new series called Conversations at the Perimeter.
We've recorded some really fascinating conversations with scientists about black holes, and about quantum computers and the beginning of the universe, the end of the universe and basically everything in between. Almost any time that someone finds out I'm a theoretical physicist, they tell me that they have no idea what that means.
And I think that's exactly what we're hoping to dive into in this series. As someone who grew up a little bit afraid of math, when I see the equations on the blackboard, I can get a little bit daunted and I think a lot of people feel that way about theoretical physics. So this is a way to introduce people to the scientists behind the work and what drives them and motivates them and keeps them up at night.
I know for myself as a student, when I would attend lectures, I would always have a huge list of questions saved up, but I would usually feel too nervous to ask them in front of the whole class. So I love that within this series, it's actually part of my job to ask those questions. It's a pretty amazing experience. Let's have a listen to some of the episodes we recorded so far. I probably shouldn't laugh at the destruction of the universe.
But it's hard, I mean yeah, I mean it's it's not it's not an immediate fear and yet it's so overwhelmingly huge that you kind of have to laugh because like what else are you gonna do? Like the the whole universe is going to be destroyed. Problems come up when you get an answer, when you start to get a theory and you can't really anticipate that in advance. Who knows when, when someone comes up with the theory of quantum gravity I think we'll be surprised by it.
It will be interesting and I think it will lead to questions that we can't possibly anticipate at this stage. In principle quantum theory should merge as we scale up the size of the object or as we scale up the temperature or something like that of the system. Quantum theory should very smoothly merge into classical physics and we should be able to understand that convergence. Definitely we have to conclude there's life out there.
I mean in just a philosophy that there's billions of stars in our galaxy and we're the only life forms, that's well boring. There's a mistake in the understanding of physics and science in general. Science is just collecting data and writing equations that predict this data. I mean that's just a little part of it. The largest part of it is figuring out a set of notion concept and the concept of structure,
how to think about that. When you go from, you know, the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system, you don't just collect data and make, you rearrange the order of the world in a different way. The beauty of quantum mechanics is you have this Hilbert space of possibilities that's, that's exponentially large. And so there are all these possibilities out there. You know, many of them that are probably not terribly physical,
but a large portion are surely physical and we have yet to to reach those portions of Hilbert space. That definitely keeps me going, this wide space of possibility. I have this approach that I questioned the validity of everything and Niayesh has this approach that no, of course that's the way it is. And I'm like, no, sit down, let's write. But he's more optimistic and like taking a leap to the next big thing.
And yeah, universe goes from this and then cycles to that and I'm like, no, no, no You know, there's a lot of things can go wrong, let's work it out. Is that an accurate depiction? I think that's very accurate, yes. We're so excited to have you part of these conversations. Please subscribe to Conversations at the Perimeter wherever you get your podcasts, and you can check us out on the Perimeter Institute Youtube channel too. Let's step inside the Perimeter together.