From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Noel is on a big adventure, but will be returning shortly.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Let's get physical physical Remember that song I do?
Unfortunately I remember this song.
Yes, it's not exactly you know, Politzer or Nobel Prize material. But Matt, this evening, you and Dylan and I are getting into physical ideas in a literal and oddly enough abstract sense. This is going to be a kind of loose exploration and conversation with us and with our fellow listeners, because we're going to the very first science, a subject that has thoroughly baffled humanity since antiquity, the study of what we call physics. Did did you take many physics classes in your school days?
It took me a couple physics. Yeah, I did that mostly in the college sphere, but you know a little bit in high school. Physics are very interesting because it's really one of the most basic sciences, yet it seems to or it feels as though, at least from my perspective, to be one of the most difficult to fully grasp.
Yeah, agreed. Right, we're coming to you as a collection of nerds from the alma matter how stuff works.
So in Georgia State University just stayed.
And Georgia Tech and all the hits, Georgia.
Tech's a little different. That's probably a little better in a physics course. No offense Georgia State.
Oh man, I don't know the professors at Georgia Tech. You know this, and we know some of those professors. They pride themselves on being pretty brutal, especially for those poor first year students in STEM. They are you know, I didn't go there for STEM. I went there for International Affairs, but they they pride themselves on like failing a certain number of students per course.
Oh yeah, I have several friends who were so excited to be at Georgia Tech. They're like, oh man, we made it, got those good grades. Got into Georgia Tech. Holy crap this first year.
Yeah, it's sad like the second year students in engineering, mathematics and physics. They look like they've been in a war. They've got that seven league stare, you know, the haunted sunken eyes and yeah, anyway, shout out to Walkee Mount Pizza.
Yeah, well, strap in everybody, because you've got over in this corner. A fine arts degree in video and film production slash journalism and in international affairs student and oh even Tennessee Palell. He says physics classes were the bulk of his fine arts degree.
Yes, good to know. We are we are as always unlike the nature of reality. We seek to be transparent and understandable, like the snark there. So we're going to go in several directions in tonight's exploration at varying velocities. We by no means as you can tell, folks are physics professors. But even you know, Matt, even from a lay perspective, it's astonishing to note just how much strange
stuff is come from this ancient discipline recently. So Tonight's question that we were talking about at length off air over the past few months could civilization be close to breaking physics, as in, will new discoveries soon fundamentally rock our understanding of this crucial science?
Yeah? What happens if the math doesn't work out for some reason? We base everything and whether or not the math works right with the equation? Okay, is that? Does it function in that way? What if that part doesn't matter?
Right?
Right?
Right?
Why is there so much emphasis put on the observable part of observable universe? And what happens when we start observing things we simply could not observe previously? Here are the facts all right? Well, as we always do, we decided that it is important to understand what physics is for all of our fellow non physics professors in the crowd. We got to answer that question before we get into the nerdy controversies and conspiracies surrounding physics today. I mean, look,
the basic story of physics is amazing, dude. How it is a discipline today, a field of study, What it is? How it came to be? I think we got really close right there at the top, But let's just spell it out for everybody. What is physics?
Okay? So you are a form of consciousness hearing this. You're inside what we call a body, probably hopefully, and that body interacts with stuff that's outside of the body and everything that you can interact with, and everything your body is, and all like, all the way up to the largest things, all the way down to the tiniest components. Physics is the study of how all of that stuff works together to give you this experience that we call consciousness. Is that a way to put it in?
I like that. I think you've got some poetry to that one, Matt, because it's a We call it the first science, and that is also quetic, but it is not hyperbole. It's just what you described there, the structure of matter, the interactions between the fundamental components of again the observable universe. So as you were saying, everything from the mighty macrocosmic movements of galaxies and the heavens to the activity at the tiny, tiny, tiny sub microscopic levels
all the way down to quarks itself. For etymology, Fans in the crowd comes from Latin physica, which just means study of nature, simple enough. That comes from a Greek word thusik natural science, and that comes from another Greek word, theusis meaning origin, nature, property. In this sense, physics is the grand attempt to learn how everything called reality works and what can be observed from it. So, no, biggie, you know, it's like, what are you doing this weekend? Just figure out physics.
It really is the great work. I mean, there are different versions of the great work, but the great work is just figuring out what in the hell is going on? What is this stuff that we're moving through? And within physics you get studies of time, because ultimately that is how does this stuff, all these components, how do they work together from this moment to this moment to that moment to you know, to two hundred million years ago to a billion years from now.
Yeah, exactly. And what happens when linear time, one of our foundational assumptions or axioms, no longer seems the whole true?
This gets nuts so quickly, all right. The goal of physics has always been to create a streamlined, consistent collection of just a few principles that apply to everything, explain all the apparent contradictions between different interactions and processes, and also to explain how those things work together to create this culmination of mechanics right that we call the universe
and indeed consciousness. And to get a little ridiculous historian about this, Yeah, it's the oldest, most fundamental branch of modern science, and its origin story as a result of being so important and so baffling, the origin story is inspiring and super frustrating, mainly because civilization learns one thing and says, Okay, we got it right, thermodynamics super solid. Good, that great job, team, that's lunch. But the more new stuff we seem to learn, the more challenges arise to
things that we thought were conclusively solved. I mean, you know, this reminds me of our series on Weirdly enough astronomy or astrology, I should say, and governmental figures, right, because modern physics comes about because people started practicing astrology.
Oh yeah, well, and it pops up independently. I'm not kidding when I'm not trying to be weird when I say you are a point of consciousness, and everything we
observe from that point of consciousness is reality. I just mean that's what every human being has experienced that is born and then can see and can hear and is just looking out and I'm looking around and you see the stuff, right, and you can figure out that that's a tree because somebody hopefully tells you it's a tree, or you named it a tree, or in whatever language you speak, right, But every one of those people also was able to look up at those times, wherever they were,
whenever they were, and see the heavens and that thing, that moment of being able to observe something that is so far away or just all you can do is see it. You can't ever touch it, you can't ever smell it or use your other senses on it. You can just see it and you know it's there. I think all of humanity across the world, when they look up, they go, what is that? Why is that? And what does that mean? Right?
What does it all mean? Yeah, to quote Philharmonic, what's it all mean? I used to say, and you remember this, I used to often in more nihilistic days, just note that everything, including humans, were simply objects in space. But I think it's more appropriate to say, from the standpoint of physics, it's more appropriate to say, everything and every consciousness is a series of processes existing in space. Right. You are kind of a song that you sing to yourself. Right.
That gets us to the other things like we said, this is going to be loose. But that gets us to the idea of duplicating consciousness through electronic means. Could you simply emulate a pattern? If so, does that mean you could zeros a soul? Or what passes for a soul? These are deep questions, But these are also the kind of deep questions, surprisingly, that physicists will deal with because their roots come their roots arive from astrology, a natural philosophy.
You know, in those early evenings that you just described, met science and spirituality were inseparable, and these were smart people. Early scholars could say, predict eclipses, the passage of the seasons. They would know about changes in the weather up there with a lot of modern meteorologists. But the difference was they were much more likely to assign divine or spiritual agency to those observations. So now it's not it's not necessarily a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse because of
the passage of Earth in a heliocentric system. Instead, God is angry, right, and God told you God was going to be.
Angry later certainly, absolutely all right.
This whole spirituality science, it begins to change back in the sixth century BCE, as we call it now. This is where scientific thought emerges in ancient Greece, and this is where we introduce our first hero of the story. You can hear him coming, a guy named Tales of Militis, who is often cited as the first physicist ever.
Oh yeah, this dude's awesome. This dude's super awesome. He thought that water was the basis of all matter, but I would argue he wasn't that far off. It just would be the basis of all known life. Water is certainly, yeah, the basis of all known life, but not matter. There's other stuff going on.
Right, Yeah, and this guy, you know it is defense. He had have a microscope, right, He didn't have a particle accelerator or any of the cool new toys we have in modern evenings. But he did spend a lot of time in deep thought. And you could argue then, with that ability, he had a distinct advantage over a lot of modern society today, which does not really prize deep thought. So he gets that part wrong, But I agree with you, man, he was onto something. Another thing
he and his contemporaries did. This is their real sleeper hit. They said, we're going to attempt to explain the world around us without resorting to mythology or spirituality. Sure, Zeus is the god who commands lightning, right, but what if you know, what if we could explain it without Zeus? Is he was gonna get mad? Or can we just figure out what's going on? Well?
Yeah, even if it is still Zeus making the lightning, how does Zeus's lightning work? What happens here physically? An hour plane? When Zeus decides to throw some lightning, that's pretty cool.
Right, because there has to be some process, right, there has to be some sort of method to the madness. In their pursuit to do this, they create a philosophical basis for rational inquiry, and the roots of this are still very much the formative basis of modern science today. They called this natural philosophy, meaning let's think about natural processes without leaning on gods and spirits as a crutch. Now this sounds very obvious, of course, in a secular
modern world. But this was like a banger. This was a banger dangerous idea when it happened. And then you got folks like Pythagoras, a favorite of both of ours. Pythagoras supertomath, and he said, look, everything you see or encounter can be explained, discovered, understood via the beautiful art and science of mathematics. And then you got folks like Democritis, who speculated. He walked up. This is brilliant. This is
so weird. This guy thousands of years ago walked up one day and said, you know what, I've been working with one of my teachers, and we think all matter is not necessarily made of water, no shade on a thalais. But we think all matter is composed of tiny, tiny little things. They're called atoms. They're the smallest thing. They're so small you can't see them, you can't divide them. He was wrong about that. History would show and people said, oh,
ty dude, do you have any evidence for this? And he went, ah, I just I got a hunch, I got a feeling, I got a spidy sense. And people said, okay, yeah, that's interesting. We're going to put your ideas right here on the fridge.
Uh yeah, it was no fridge.
There was no fridge. Two thousand years later, though, atomic theory proves the the broad strokes of his philosophy to be correct, and there there are plenty of missteps along the way.
Uh.
A lot of the scientific shibbylists have informed Western thought for centuries and centuries, like the you know, we've all heard of this, the idea that, uh, the universe can be described as four elements earth, air, fire, water. Later someone says quintessence, right, is is a fifth state of matter, and that is the uh that is the great bull or sphere of the heavens. Uh.
That's cool. That's a cool thought. It's a really cool thought.
Uh.
The just the Adams thing. We're already breaking things down as far as they can go, even though there's no microscopes, as you said, humanity is attempting to go as deep as we can, right, and we are also in this time building pieces of glass that can see further and further into space, therefore larger and larger things at the same time.
So it is just.
Really it's cool to think that humanity is exploring the concepts of above end below simultaneously, and those two different disciplines or those two different pursuits are increasing on this line that we can kind of follow. We can look at this graph as like man's ability to break down things and get deeper is not exactly simultaneously, but increasing in the same way. That is, to see larger, deeper, older.
Things, absolutely expanding concurrently toward both ends of an observable spectrum, and then getting to the edge of that spectrum and asking what else is out there in that horizon or indeed, that chasm.
And then the next piece of technology comes along and you do get to go a little bit further right, just a little bit, just a little.
And then you look back and you realize, oh, crap, yep, the other stuff was wrong. So you know, we got to shout out so many people. We're not going to get to the mall, but let's shout out Aristotle. He's kind of the Lebron or the Michael Jordan of physics during his time. So this guy sits down, hey, looks at everybody else's ideas. They're all the ones that he can access, right, all the stuff he's read, and he's very well read for his time, and he says, let
me bring all these things together. Let's make one sort of posse mixtape theory about the way the universe and reality works. He also is imperfect. He popularizes the cartoonishly incorrect idea of a geocentric heavenly system, meaning Earth is in the middle. But hey, even Michael Jordan didn't make
every li up. The thing is, people respected Aristotle so so much that he got just enough right for both his correct ideas and his incorrect ideas to dominate European science and Islamic science for thousands of years after his death. At that point, the modern world does owe a lot of debt to the Islamic Golden Age, wherein Muslim scholars preserved and elaborated on Greek thought, as Europe largely languished, you know, and a lot of people have a problem
with describing that era as the Dark Ages. But Europe was, you know, fallen. I was going to say falling off the horse. I don't know if that's an idiom in English. Europe has fallen behind, and some of this knowledge could have been lost to antiquity had it not been for the brilliant Muslim scholars of the Islamic Golden Age. And now we see. Physics therefore becomes this intergenerational global historic epic. It spans all races, all creeds, all cultures, all religions.
There are too many luminaries for Matt and I to shout out here. I mean, just think of the scientific revolution alone, right, But we could argue this is a good thing, because it turns out it takes a lot of people working together over time to understand what we call the universe, or even to define the universe.
And with all of that, years and years pass, at least as we experience them, and human beings are born and die, and born and die, born and die, and finally we arrive at the modern day, where there are scientists across the globe attempting to search for things we have yet to fully grasp, and even the things that we think we grasp, there are scientists attempting to break those systems and those thoughts so that we can move forward in maybe a different way, because just like back then,
as we described in Europe, maybe our thinking is stuck in some ways or you know, went back the wrong way and we just haven't realized it yet. And that is super freaking cool.
Yeah, Yeah, I think physics is best understood as a conversation rather than a set of tablets and directives, almost a philosophy stone. Yes, very much so. Yeah, especially when you get to the edges, which we'll talk about. You know any as any hapless undergrad student can assure you and shout out, by the way to all the up and coming college students who just got their acceptance letters,
congratulations and good luck. But if you are a hapless undergrad student, then you know well that physics is deceptively deep water. It starts out simple enough, right, Thermodynamics, I get it, the creation, destruction, et cetera, transformation matter, I
get it. But then you turn to the next page, and this quickly becomes so complicated and like you were saying, if you go far enough into the outskirts of accepted thought, if you go out there to the bleeding edge, the ink of science that has yet to be determined, you'll hit a conceptual landscape that feels a lot less like stem and a lot more like philosophy or metaphysics. They'll readily admit this the world's greatest physicist, especially with the
crazy questions they're essentially guessing. They're leveraging thousands of years of knowledge beforehand, their own deep acumen, theoretical analysis and experiments. But these guys literally make bets with each other about a possibility or a theory, and it's almost never a huge amount of money. It's like, I bet you a dollar that this is the thing about black holes, and the other guy says, all right, tally hope you know.
And then nobody gets paid ever, because when will we find out about black holes? One day?
Maybe? Oh gosh, hopefully in time. So this is inspiring, frustrating stuff. And here we are twenty twenty five. That's just a brief look at the origin of physics. There seems to be something new ever on the horizon, and I think a big part of that is due to technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to prove some of these guesses, models or theories. The question is, could these end up breaking the concept of traditional physics as we know it?
Yes, yes, and we'll tell you about those in just a moment.
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So, as we know, like actually yes, so bizarre, how bizarre? How bizarre? There are different branches of study in physics. We all know that classical physics is concerned with the stuff you see every day. I pick up a I pick up a wallet, I drop the wallet. Gravity, right, and you can always encounter gravity on the planet in your day to day activities.
It's kind of a Goldilocks zone of phenomenon, right, So we're dealing with speeds that are always much lower than the speed of light. We're dealing with sizes to your point, matt that are much larger than atoms, but there's still like in astronomical terms, they're T T and T tiny, and really human civilization is pretty good at understanding stuff
on this level. The problem is, as you alluded to, once we get the very extreme ends of the spectrum, the very very tidy stuff, the very very big stuff, those rules are less sacro sanct They get fuzzy, they start to erode.
Yeah, that's where you get, you know, miles and miles of a tube that's filled with magnets, and then we throw at single atoms around and accelerate them until they get crazy fast, almost the speed of light, and then smash them together and see what happens after. And then you find new particles that you didn't know existing, or sub atomic particles and stuff that goes even deeper than that.
That's uh, that's when you get the black hole stuff, and you try and speculate on what does the black hole actually look like and how does it actually function? This thing that we kind of observe out there.
Right, Yeah, this is the rise of what we call modern physics. And you have to wonder what history we'll call modern physics in the future. It's just a trick term, you know. It's like that irritating term in literature, postmodern. The heck is postmodern anyway, So.
Just quantum correct, But there we go.
I like that. I'm more into quantum literature. I've written all the novels at once shut out Borges. But okay, modern physics. Now we're talking high velocities, very tiny, tiny distances, very large energies. This is where you find relativity, very high energy, special relativity speeds kind of like the speed of light, and of course the infamous quantum mechanics. That's the thing, man. Despite the fact that many undergrad or high school students may feel physics is a series of
commandments set in stone. As an overall concept, it is riddled with unsolved problems and what appeared to be a lot of self contradictions. You know, some existing theories. No existing theory can explain everything, right, we we can explain some observed phenomena, and we're like, okay, under this theory, this works, This makes sense. And then someone else from like across the hall in the lab goes, oh hey god, uh Matt, Matt, you gotta dude, you gotta come see these quarts, bro.
What that doesn't fit with my models?
We need we need new models. As they say in Vogue.
Uh.
In short, I don't know. It's weird. We know a thing does happen, and we can prove it, but we're not sure how it happens or why, and perhaps most importantly, we don't know how to square it with other related areas of inquiry. That's why you know, the Golden Goose, the Holy Grail is the idea of a theory of everything.
Oh yeah, well, and we still have that pesky little problem of we're unsure if observing something changes what happens. We still don't know if that's certain or not. Does it matter that we're observing it? Since we're observing it, is it different than it would have been if we weren't here.
Like the double slit experiment. Yeah, that's a famous example. It's still a thing, oh very much so. Yeah, no one's answered that one. It's the theory of everything? Is this ancient game, right dating back to Aristotle. If we could just have one set of rules, hopefully a brief set of rules that explain how all of these seemingly contradicting things work together, work in concert to form what we observe is reality, then boom, We've won physics. Spoiler,
civilization has not won physics yet. I was remembering in our research for this, I noticed an interesting pattern. Every few decades or so across the span of human history, someone comes forth, like a profit of old with their explanation, their theory of everything. There was a surfer who proposed
an idea a few years ago. There have been various artists, various scientists who have done the same, but none of these ideas have been fully accepted by the scientific community at large, because it is incredibly common for someone to propose something like a reconciliation of existing theories, or a grand theory of everything, a grand unified theory, and then have some other guy come out, you know, from like across the hallway in the lab or in the academy
or something, and say, yeah, but it doesn't explain this part though.
Yeah, Well, imagine what would happen if somebody truly came forth with a new theory of everything that was the real one, the actual one, and got everything right. It would disprove so many other things that we take for granted right now as being true that it would be really difficult for us to accept, and we might just throw it out immediately and we say, no, that's hogwash. But it was the right one, Like the tiny little vibrating strings I'm still.
Bidding strings theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty interesting one too. Yeah. I think that's a great observation, man, because now we see that it may be inconvenient to accept a theory or a unified theory might require such a vast, comprehensive overhaul of existing accepted thought that it would feel like all the other work was for naught, you know, which is something you have to be ready for in science. Science is I can't remember if I
sent this to you. There was this great stand up clip where this guy was saying, I hate when people say they don't believe in science. You know what that makes you? A scientist? Scientists are constantly skept and dissing on accepted science.
Right, Well, that's the whole point.
That's the whole point.
Prove it to me. Oh yeah, tiny little vibrating strings show me.
Yeah yeah. This is this a rounding error or is this the most important discovery in human history? I mean, as a result, we can say new discoveries aren't really breaking the laws of physics, and law in physics means
something way different than law in regular human terms. Instead, what we find is these discoveries, which I think we'll go into in a moment, they could be more correctly said to break our own incorrect earlier assumptions about the quote unquote laws of reality, because physics, it's it's fallible, The rules aren't absolutely Okay, I was thinking of it
this way. Okay, we're driving right, we're all all four of us are in the car together, you listening along at home, Thanks for going on road trip with us. We see a stop sign. A stop sign is an absolute You are driving it, you approach it, you stop.
That's the law. But I would argue in this analogy, we can learn about physics because the laws of physics are much more like a bunch of extremely intelligent people saying okay, Like if the physicists are in the car, they're saying, we believe there is a stop sign here. Everything we know predicts it was probably there yesterday. We can observe that it's here now, so logically it should
be here tomorrow. But then sometimes, depending on what you discover down the road, that stop sign could change to a yield sign. It could be a totally different sign that stop sign. That law could disappear entirely, like Newton's law of gravity. Still can't fully explain how the orbit of mercury works. And we've been looking at mercury forever.
That's weird. I wonder I stop doing that, Mercury.
Get it together, Mercury, Come on, why are you so mercurial? Yeah? Worth it keeping it? So laws have been broken, you know, we laws of physics. So Paul M. Sutter explains this beautifully in Discover magazine. He says, giving points to one of the most famous broken laws of physics, a thing
called Bodes law. Bodes law was proposed back in seventeen fifteen CE, and it stated what seemed to be quite rational at the time, and said, based on what we know, each planet should be roughly twice as far away from the Sun as the next planet inwards. And this law seemed pretty it was hot stuff because it works for series C E, R, E S. And then the law predicted there should be something in the region of the
asteroid belt. But the law broke down after the discovery of Neptune, so people had to throw this one sacrisanct law out with the bathwater. As of this recording, we don't know which laws of physics may stand the test of time. We don't know which ones will be broken next. We can, you know, we can give you some of the established laws that you've probably heard in school, laws
of motion, relativity, universal gravitation, thermodynamics, stuff like that. But we think it's more important to talk about how humanity, almost like the myth of Icarus, sales ever closer to things that were once thought unattainable. One of the most recent examples that we've had our eyes on is, of course, the concept of nuclear fusion.
Yes, okay, so Ben and I are pretty close in age when we were coming up, I want to get your opinion on this bin when you were coming up in both what I was being taught in school and what I was looking at in popular media was the concept of nuclear fission, breaking apart an atom and breaking apart atoms to create a chain reaction was very much a thing. That's how nuclear weapons work, that's how nuclear
power works. Understandable, This concept of fusing atoms together and creating a chain reaction of fusing atoms was a theoretical thing that we might be able to do one day in the future. But right now it's just I don't know, I don't know. There's it seems almost it seems impossible at this point.
Because we knew we knew it was possible for it to occur as a natural process. Yes, we did not know whether humans could jerry rig up the technology to do it on our own.
Yeah, how could we create an environment where that type of plasma would be formed and then be steady and you know, to be able to function and continue that reaction right at least in a chain reaction that lasts until you turn it off. Basically, Well, gosh, it was the early this year when that we I think we talked about it on Strange News or at least maybe you mentioned it at least been Yeah, the artificial sun that China's been working on out broke. It broke one
thousand seconds of steady looping plasma. Hm, would you know, incredible, Like if humans can actually harness that type of power that changes everything.
Yeah, and this is a fantastic example. We did mention this on Strange News, I believe briefly, but this is a fantastic example of how things that can look academic and maybe the fiscal conservatives look like a waste of time. This is a perfect example of how this does apply. Right. Physics, the theories, the models, the principles of physics, as imperfect as some may be, do give us entry into amazing technology infusion. Of course, fusion can be scary to a
lot of people right for a lot of reasons. But it's important to do the cost benefit analysis. If fusion is possible, especially under a certain price point with the right constraints, then this could mean clean energy for the world, And the implications there just like the implications of an apple falling on Newton's head, right, The implications there go
far beyond the initial foray into the field. So you know, I think it's also worth us noting that despite rising geopolitical tensions, which almost always hurt scientific endeavors as much as they power them, a lot of the scientists who exist in China or India or the US or Brazil or Russia wherever. Right, they are always trying to hang out with each other. I mean, yeah, they're humans, so
they might have egos and stuff. But if you were a person who had spent your life researching and experimenting with something that only like twenty other people could understand, you'd want to hang out with those twenty people, you know what I mean. It's like it's like, be very into a specific genre of music, you want to hang out on that subreddit.
Oh sure, or somebody who's into MTG. It's very similar. Anyway. You just want to hang out with people that understand what you understand, so you don't have to go explaining everything to everybody at all times, right, or you don't want to feel like a weirdo that wants to talk about something real specific like how much manna it costs anyway.
And why some cards or tournament legal in some or not. Yes.
Absolutely, And we also have to remember that all of these, you know, the people who want to hang out and talk with each other, are also working for I was going to say companies in the Fourth States, it's.
The MIL the military industrial legislative complex.
Yeah, kind of. But if you look at what's happening out in Massachusetts right now. Just if we're going to take this concept of nuclear fusion as a possible game changer for how countries can operate, how the world could operate. There's a fusion reactor that's being built in Massachusetts right now. There's one out in Chesterfield County, Virginia that's being built. This concept or maybe betting on the future of what physics could achieve, happens within the state. You know, the
functional countries where they are betting. They're betting on this stuff that it's going to work out, and spending tons and tons of money on it because if you do win, then your country is ahead of everybody else.
Right.
It's a real shame that is not that is that it isn't more of what you're describing Ben with all the intelligent people getting together and figuring out how to do this new stuff and then everybody gets to do it so that the whole so that all ships can rise.
Yeah, but they don't know like that. We have to remember there the shadow of Kissinger and real politics still looms large. And quite a few, quite a few world powers who control scientific endeavors they see they see humanity as not a collaborative game of long form improv. They see it as a zero sum rush for resources, with benefit being defined as detriment to another culture, civilization, society, or player. So this style, this stymis the research. And
it's really interesting too. This is not unique to the current era and the current discourse intentions. It shows us that throughout history, political machination has stymied scientific endeavors's. It would be fascinating to travel to a universe maybe one spin to the left or whatever, and see what would what twenty twenty five would be like if people had just worked together more often, you know what I mean?
Like the space The fact that the space race happened is amazing because it kind of happened out of spite. I don't know if world governments would have paid if they saw it just as pure science. I think they felt, like Cold War style, they needed an enemy, which is ridiculous.
Yeah, and they also wanted to have a cool new place to shoot missiles from.
Sure, yeah, and a cool vantage point, a new perspective for other missiles. And you know what's going on in the stands. Anyway, This gets us to this gets us to larger conversations. We said this was going to be pretty loose. Maybe we take a pause for a word from our sponsors, and we dive into some more things that allegedly break, if not laws, some assumptions about physics. All right, we're back. Okay, you might be saying, I
get it. Physics is best understood as a continuing conversation. Okay, fine, very few principles are really set in stone. But come on, guys, we know some basics, right, Like, give me states of matter. At least tell me states of matter? Is you know we figured that one out. You got your gases, you got your liquids, you got your solids, you got little plasma, right.
And you've got earth, air, water, and fire, well ice.
Maybe. As David Neild explains writing for Science Alert, quote, states of matter describe how particles can interact with one another, giving rise to structures in various ways of behaving. So if you lock atoms in place, boom, you got a solid. You allow those bad boys to flow. He doesn't say bad boys. I'm saying bad boys. You allow them to flow. You have a liquid or a gas, you force charged
partnerships apart, and you have a plasma. So boom done, right, we at least figured out matter, except we haven't.
Yeah, we kind of did, except we figured out through those particle accelerators and smashing atoms together, that certain subatomic particles spin.
They spin in different ways, They spin in cycles, sometimes up, sometimes down, and those little bitty things that spin in different directions do different things. And when you can get them spinning in certain ways, you can create literally new forms of matter.
Yeah. Back in twenty twenty three, scientists working in the US and China discovered a new state of matter, the chiro Bo's liquid state c h I r al Bo's liquid nothing to do with the bo speakers. Sadly, you're not going to find this form of matter sold in your grocery store. Instead, Okay, we can't get too deep here because we're not professors. But instead, this matter exists in a thing that is so confusing it's literally called
a quote frustrated quantum system. Yes, which sounds like, you know, an album name for a post rock band.
Yeah, it's fair. Look, and here's the guy with a video degree saying this is confusing you, Ben, I'm not even gonna try.
Okay, here, we'll try we'll try together and then Dylan, if we get it wrong, we're gonna forward the emails to our complaint department. Jonathan Strickland at iHeartMedia dot com.
Okay, uh, let me give you something that is a quote. Here's a quote from tiggerin Sedrican Sedric Jan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is how the constraints are controlled for the particles and they get frustrated. Here's the quote. It's like a game of musical chairs designed to frustrate the electrons. Instead of each electron having one chair to go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities in where they sit.
Yeah. So okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it, allergy. That's one of the best ways to learn. Right, this system that they created, this frustrated quantum system ten ten on the name guys, no notes, Like you said, Matt, it prevents particles from doing the normal predictable interactions that they would have in any other system. Right. The musical chairs analogy is pretty cool. It's important to note this is not just a theory that sounds good on paper.
These folks actually got together and the boffins built a system, a real life physical system. It's a semiconducting device, and it's got two layers. The top layer has an embarrassment of electrons and the bottom layer has a bunch of holes for the electrons to naturally traverse into thing is as said Rakken, saying, there are not enough holes for all the little electro buddies. So essentially, by these poor electrons and leaving some homeless, these physicists redefined some of
our most basic assumptions about the nature of matter. I think the Greeks would be impressed or you know, maybe terrified, maybe both. Maybe they would say, hey, guys, stop.
Like why are you doing this?
Guys? We told you it's earth, it's air, it's water, and it's fire.
Please stop be dicks.
We forgot heart, and of course heart which comes with a monkey. So we were also talking about this briefly off are. That's one example, but it turns out there are multiple examples of what technically qualifies new states of matter.
This is the one that okay, we got to talk about it for a second. Fire and ice half ice, half fire, right, Why, it's a new thing. That's what I was talking about with the spin. It's it's quantumly linked particles that have weird spin that are both fire and ice but not really. They have upspin and downspin cycles, and when they do that, they get weird and they do weird stuff that I don't understand. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it goes back to a quote we'll get to in a moment, which means so much to all of us and hopefully to you listening along at home. Yeah, the half ice, half fire phase of matter they call it. You can read more about it in fizz dot org, phys dot org. A great article by Lauren mcdrichian west Over at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Half eyes, half fire physicists discover new phase of matter in a magnetic material. Look.
We read through this, and we also read through a description of the work by the researchers responsible for this discovery, and gotta be honest, deep water right counterintuitive if we're
being diplomatic. And the idea here is that if they find a new state of matter with what are described as exotic physical properties, and if they can take that learning and control the movement between those two states, the ice and the fire as it were, then it could lead to some huge advances in quantum computing like it could have real world applications. This is not just a bunch of people growing rock crystals or sea monkeys, you know what I mean. This could change the world.
Yeah, it is for Qanna because because again, the quantum computing is the concept of having a thing that is both on and off essentially simultaneously. Right, So in human beings are using it for computing purposes right now. Who knows what else we could be using it for that
we're just not thinking about yet. Which is one of the coolest things about this That Life Science article was written just on April first of this year, which means we're just on the cusp of understanding what the heck, what does that mean and how do we use it? Even the amazingly brilliant people who discovered it are saying, hey, despite this is a quote, despite our extensive research, we still don't know how this state could be utilized. We're missing pieces of the puzzle.
Mm exactly.
Yeah, sorry, it just it blows your mind. It blows my mind a little bit, agreed.
I think if that doesn't blow your mind, you're either what of the most intelligent physicists on the planet, or you're not really thinking about it.
Oh okay, well let's think about it. Let's go to the quantum level. Some of the crazy stuff we talked about on Strange News recently. Didn't we talk about how energy was quantumly telep pretty recently?
I can't remember if we talked about an air but yeah, they were able to transport it outside of the usual constraints, which would be very very low temperatures.
But they're saying it. They're saying, okay, because I don't fully understand it.
Guys, they're saying they could move energy on a quantum level without the same assumptive constraints that have always existed in classical physics.
Yeah, they wormhold energy from one place to another without going without that energy traveling through the space in between the two points.
They essentially teleported it.
That's exactly what And this is twenty twenty three.
What I mean superpositioning alone is you know what, let's do it first. There are even more new states of matter that are well on the way. We want to thank everybody's doing the research for that. May regrets saying this, but if you're a physicist, let us know the most exciting unsolved problems in physics. Let us know the experiments that weird you out the most. Let's go to quantum jazz.
While we're waiting on those emails. One of our favorite quotes about quantum mechanics comes from a legendary professor, Professor Rama Murty Shankar. And if it's okay, Matt, I'd love to play just a brief clip of his bigger line.
Oh I know this one.
You remember this one?
Man, one of the big figures in physics used to say, no one understands quantum mechanics. So in some sense the pressure is off for you guys, because I don't get it, and you don't get it, and Fineman doesn't get it.
The point is, here's my goal.
Right now, I'm the only one who doesn't understand quantum mechanics. In about seven days, all if you will be unable to understand quantum mechanics, then you can go back and spread your ignorance everywhere else.
Boom. Not really because we don't understand it yet.
What a cool guy, though, you know what I mean. I've watched I've watched other lectures by this professor and just an amazing, an amazing mind, and that I think that stands out to us because it is one it's super humble, but it's also one of like the best descriptions of how learning quantum mechanics works. You learn enough to realize that you don't get it, and that's from that's from multiple professors echo that statement.
Yep.
And so why are people so befuddled? It's because quantum mechanics, which is the fancy way of saying science dealing with the behavior of matter and light on those atomic and subatomic scales, quantum mechanics has a different set of rules of the road and we haven't fully figured those out yet. It seems to agree with some established principles, models, and theories, and then it kind of plays jazz with the rest
of it. You know, it treats the stop sign in our earlier analogy like a suggestion, or it both stops and doesn't stop at the same time, or you know, it does every imaginable action until you look at it.
Yes, yes, and there are actual quantum computers right now that are functional in being worked on and being used to simulate like we were talking about energy transportation right or energy energy teleportation. There are quantum computers that use these concepts right now to simulate what using those concepts would be like to harvest energy from far falling places and then store them inside themselves or inside other little
cubits in the same way. And all of it just seems it just seems impossible because because for me, a kid that grew up on the basic physics that were understood in the mid nineteen nineties, all of this stuff was so outside of the realm of possibility that it
really does. Man, I don't even know what I'm saying here, just other than it doesn't seem possible that there is a thing that exists as on and off in the way we understand transistors, that is so tiny and you can link those things up in some way and then use those things to figure out stuff that our best supercomputers can't do today. It doesn't compute there it is.
Yeah, it's enough to make some people understandably want to retreat back into Plato's cavern, you know what I mean, Like, yes, okay, I get that it's possible, but I've feel like it should not be possible. Where that's where, you know, you get the old trope of the king shutting down the research or people punishing Galileo. Sometimes current society will have issue, will take issue with truths that science is figuring out, or perhaps more dangerously, in this case, questions that science
is asking. You know, we're civilization is a little bit better about it now, but the track record is not great. There's a dirty jacket at play. Yeah, okay, let's go to Cody Mure, writing for Quantum Magazine, who shares some popular characters from a lot of thought experiments. There are two infamous characters who are used pretty often, Alice and Bob. So let's say Alice and Bob having a nice night at home cooking dinner. All of a sudden, a series
of events occur. List drops a plate crash. The sound startles Bob. Bob is cooking, he burns himself on the stove, and reasonably he goes h. In another version of events, Bob burns himself first and then cries out uh, and this causes Alice to drop the plate crash. In classical physics, only to your point, Matt, only one chain of events is true A to Z one to two to three
right in linear time. In quantum mechanics, both of these things can be true at once due to the phenomenon known as superposition, and superposition is so cool, man.
Well yeah, it's just Alice and Bob forever linked together, burning themselves and dropping plates. Yeah, yeah, so cool. What do you what do you think? What do you think? The quantum quarks think about that or whatever they're called.
They think everything at once, depending on how they're spinning. You know what I mean? Sorry, man, this is familiar right to any fan of fiction or film. You might hear this loosely translated or popularized as the multiverse, And like you were saying, Matt, all the particles exist in all possible realities at once, up until the moment they
are measured. Maybe we think we're not sure. And I feel like at this point in these conversations, just again for transparency, Look, Tennessee, and Matt and I are not currently high. It makes you feel like you're high when you have to think about this stuff.
Because you can hear this, my voice exists, and because my voice exists, my mom had to exist, and because she existed, the trees in the forest where my grandfather grew up. You know, like all of that, all of those things, when you think about the reality of it, the true the true thrust of physics, trying to understand why, why is? Why is right?
What is? What is?
And why right?
And again the damning dilemma, the bag of badgers that we call the observable universe, which factors in human observation of time. Right is the concept of linear time and illusion filtered through senses that are inadequate for the totality of reality. Is time simply one uh one nonlinear eternal moment of the universe in some way experiencing itself through
different aspects? Is there as we're recording right now? Is there still a moment in time where wherein Matt pursues a different degree at Georgia State or at an entirely different institution. Is there a world in which something like meat does something very similar? Impossible questions to answer because we only know the reality we can observe, and at the risk of sounding cliche, that poses a logical issue when we say observation may change things.
Well, yeah, yes, I want to say it was last year around this time, when I can't remember the Scientific American or New Scientists on one of those publications wrote something about how human brains alter time, But it's not actually altering time. It's altering our perception of time. And when it goes back to the observer concept of whether or not just us observing anything, us observing the quantum level, you know, for the first time in human history, does
that somehow alter how it functions? Or is it? Does it all just function that way? And we're trying to harness something you know that maybe maybe is outside of our possible grasp just because of scale. Right.
See also our conversation about the possibility of prescients or prognostication and dreams right. And the quantum the quantum scale function of the human brain. Right, it gets into some very enjoyable but very treacherous waters. And with that idea of you know, if we conflate, if we could correctly conflate observation and consideration, think a consciousness thinking about a thing, and then that counts as observation, right, And then that
could mean that we run into certain cognitive dangers info hazards. Right. It's crazy, man, But I think all of this shows us just how some purportedly ironclad laws of physics can be and how they can truly fall short of explaining the mechanics of what we know as reality and Matt, we have not even explored black holes. We talked a little bit about quarks, but we haven't gotten down into the great pickle of what comprises a quark right now,
that's like the smallest thing. No matter how much energy we throw at it, we can't break it into sub quarks just yet. We haven't talked about that. We've alluded to but have not examined technological breakthroughs that are both powered by discoveries in physics and at the same time powering new breakthroughs in the future. I mean, maybe it's a story for another evening. Is this a part two? Do we have a part two on this?
You think, well, there has to be. There's a part infinity of these episodes if we keep making them, because stuff's getting weirder and weirder. There was a thing that came out recently about fifty six Cuba quantum computer that officially, for the first time, demonstrated certified randomness. Yes, we talked about random number generators for a long time on the show, and what does that mean and how do you get that? And the new quantum stuff that we're talking about just
officially did it? Pretty pretty awesome.
And there's a new pope, you know what I mean. It's all Abouty's game.
It's like maybe he can come in and really solidify some of the stuff, you know, like yeah, how things.
Weren't And Dylan asked, what if infinite parts of this series already exist? Love it? Love the optimism there. Well, well, at the very least, there is a universe, this universe wherein we continue this show most importantly with you, fellow conspiracy realist. I don't know, Matt, you know, in some way to wax a little, a little too poetic. Perhaps the first science isn't just this exploration of reality. It's
kind of a metaphor, right for humanity's unquenchable curiosity. I sound like I'm in a weed shop or a dispenser in California.
Yeah, man, science be cool. Science is badass. It's just some of the things that are happening. I can only see them being weaponized some of Like when you're talking about quantum advancements, it'd be a beautiful world if we could actually use that stuff to make everybody's life better, to make you know, to clean up the earth, to make everything cool and hippie like that. I'll be down
with that. But it's not it's gonna be weaponized. It's all gonna be weaponized until we can somehow drive all the weapons you know, into dust.
Weaponized, commodified, Yeah, leveraged. I agree, especially with the constant hunt for funding. Right that is, the best explanation or the best historical pitch for funding is ultimately going to be some kind of geopolitical edge or military application, which is a shame. You know that war should be such
a great driver of innovation. But since the first moment early humans looked at the stars, millennia and millennia go, civilization is still I would say, even without the military applications.
Civilization is searching for a pattern right where we're taking our thumb and forefinger and rubbing the weft and weave of realities fabric, and we're always seeking a hole in that substance, right, and maybe we can get behind the curtain, maybe we can discover a vast conspiracy, right, the truth that scientists and religious institutions have sought ever since we thought to seek things. So, I don't know, man, it looks like we just arrive at more questions than answers.
Is that a fair statement?
I think so I'm just gonna sit over here and rub the waft and weave.
Well. While we do that, we want to hear from you. What will we learn next? Should humanity? Should civilization keep asking these questions? Or is there a moment where everybody collectively says that's enough. We don't need to learn more. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. You can find us online, YouTube, Instagram, any social media that you may sip. We are conspiracy stuff, conspiracy stuff, show some derivative thereof. You can also find us via telephone and email.
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