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Doctor Leue, what would you say about artificial intelligence? Is it dangerous or beneficial or both?
Well, George, I think it's both. I mean, let's think about this in your life. Do you know intelligent people that are both harmful and helpful to you?
I would probably say in deep thought.
Yes, yeah. And so if we think about it that way, it's a tool like anything else, right, whether fossil fuels, for example, they're great, they have done tremendous good to our society, but we also see that there is some harm if you use them unwisely, and if you want, you can even make bombs out of it, which would be terrible. But it really varies on how you use it.
And so right now, a lot of my artificial intelligence colleagues are saying, be careful when we build some thing that is AI based that can work faster than our human minds can, Let's be sure that we set it on the right path before we let it go without any restriction.
Explain Charles Schrodinger's cat.
Okay, Schrodinger's Cat is one of the great stories of quantum physics and it's history. It probably is the best known sort of thought experiment about quantum physics and this concept called quantum entanglement. Imagine if this is what Erwin Schrodeger said to Albert Einstein back in nineteen thirty something.
Imagine if there were a cat in a box, and this is an air tight box, and inside that box there's a capsule of poison, and that poison will be released only if a certain atomic effect happens, like one atomic decay or something like that. Now, physicists can predict when a lot of atomic decays can happen on average, how long it would take. That's called a half life. But in any given particle, we cannot know whether or not this thing is going to decay today or tomorrow
or in a few seconds. So what Schurgeger said was, if you put this cat in this box and you don't open the box, you don't know whether or not that atomic decay occurred, and therefore you don't know whether that cat has been poisoned or not. Is that cat dead or alive? You can't tell until you open the box. Before the box is opened, the cat could be alive or it could be dead. Mathematically, it could even be alive and dead at the same time. Sixty percent alive,
forty percent dead. Who knows. And this is the thought process that Schurteger presented to Einstein and to others to say, this is how quantum physics is fundamentally different from classical physics.
Why is physics so fascinating.
Terms because it really provides an insight to everything around us. Originally, right when physics was first being thought about, guys like Aristotle, right the ancient Greeks are trying to figure out why things move, why things fall, and they came up with ideas, but they didn't know how to really explore those ideas. They sounded good, but they didn't know how to test them. And then it took a thousand plus years before people whom we call scientists today in the Arab world, in
the European world, in the Asian world. Galileo Galilei, well known guy from the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundred in Italy, was really the one who wrote down sort of this is how I am studying the universe, not just thinking about it, but exploring it by experimentation and by testing it and figuring out whether something not necessarily is right,
but whether it's wrong and so over time. I think physics fascination is that it gives us a chance to test things, not just guess at things, but really help us know what's there. And once you test them and figure out what's not right, you can slowly reveal what's right. And from there we can build on that and work further and further till today we can use quantum physics to make things like computers and cell phones, and use general relativity to make GPS systems and things like that.
That's really pretty cool.
I always qualify this statement by saying, if you can take God out of the equation for a moment, how did this universe get to be so magnificent in the form that it is. I mean, it's truly remarkable.
It is, and it's so remarkable it exceeds our human ability to understand it so far. Right, The reason we keep making so many discoveries in physics today and in astronomy and talking about the origins of the universe and so forth, is indeed that it's so much more complicated than us because we were built inside it. Right, If you take the basic laws of physics, as we understand them right now, and just add all the matter and the energy that we have in the universe and give
it space and give it time. Then it organizes itself just in ways that we can't even begin to imagine, the ways that we have been able to imagine already explain amazing things like the Earth, the Sun, our galaxy, life, we humans, and then there's still more to discover every time because of the strategy of looking at things that we can show are wrong, testing our hypotheses and ideas, and then we can slowly figure out what's right by proving that thing is wrong. That's really I think why
it's so cool. It's just the amount of time that we've had to allow all these things to organize, and that complexity has led to all these amazing things.
Do you think do you believe there's an intelligence behind it?
There is no evidence. People have looked really hard to see if an intelligence is necessary to do this, and it turns out that at the moment, despite looking for it, there is no concrete need for that intelligence behind it for all this stuff to happen. We used to think that it had to, but as we go further, we see that those unknown things that we thought, oh, surely must have been the hand of some divine or some superintelligence. Turns out that it just happens naturally, and it can
happen naturally. This has been a question from a law a long time ago. It was a very famous quote. I don't know if this story is apocryphal or real, but Napoleon once asked his favorite scientist, a guy named Lejandre, said, uh, do you think there is a god? And he said Legendre said, as of this moment, I have as yet no need for that hypothesis. Interesting take, Yeah, I think so. And there's no thing that says that an super intelligent creature or a god, or many gods for that matter,
does not exist. Right, We just haven't been able to show that it's necessary.
How did it start?
How did all the whole universe start?
Yeah?
Well, therein lies a fascinating question too. We can figure out by going backwards in time from our current universe and the way that it has developed, that at about thirteen point eight billion years ago years as measured by a total number of seconds, right, not by the number of times Earth has gone around the Sun, because the Earth hasn't been around that long right, If you count backwards thirteen point eight billion years ago, our universe should
have been far smaller than any subatomic particle that exists today. We're talking a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of.
An inch, smaller than microscopic.
That's right, far smaller than any mine.
Amazing.
Yeah, And so how it got from that point to our present day. We have a pretty good sense based on the physics that we've been able to understand up to this point, the astronomical observations, the theoretical work that we've been working on. That that's pretty good. But below that, how it got to that point in the first place is the subject of a lot of controversy, in part because we can't design an experiment yet to prove that our idea is wrong.
We can't duplicate it.
Nuts, right, it's only happened once before. The cool thing about we can't duplicate it, George, what you mentioned is that one of the hypotheses about how the universe got to the way it was involves a kind of expansion of the universe that happened after it first began to exist.
There's this thing called inflation, all right, Not inflation like economic inflation, but inflation, like space gets blown upward like a balloon, it balloons outward and a huge, massively fast expansion doesn't pop, but it just grows so fast that all future expansion depends on how that inflation happened. So the thing is, if that kind of inflation is true, then there's nothing that stops it from happening again and again and again, but just in an environment and in
a way that we can't detect. So if inflation happens, there is this hypothesis that there's this thing called eternal inflation where a nearly infinite are certainly a huge number of these universal bubbles can pop up and we could just be existing in one of them, while there are a multitude of such inflationary bubbles all around us and we can't interact with them.
Do we know why a jump started, though.
That's something we don't know yet. The current hypotheses vary widely, and again the problem is that they can work out the math. My colleagues who are doing this sort of theoretical cosmology stuff, but there's no experiment yet that can
show that their math is wrong or right. One really promising idea, which I think is kind of cool is to imagine that our space time, our universe here, which has the dimensions of length with height and time time, is actually like a four dimensional projection of something that's
a five dimensional shape or structure. Okay, have you ever played with soap bubbles and like taken two bubbles and pushed them close together, and then they kind of combine and they form a little skin between the two of them.
Not many years, yeah, one though, Yeah right?
It actually physics teaching physics in part gives me excuse to play with bubble bath the way that I used to when I was a kid. Right, you can imagine taking three dimensional bubbles and making them come in contact with each other, and then they create a two dimensional skin in between them. Right. That skin lasts for a period of time, depending on how long the bubbles last,
and they form the skin when they come in contact. Now, imagine if two five dimensional structures they're currently called membranes, if they come in contact, then they would create a skin between them. But instead of going from three to two dimensions as in the soap bubble analogy, it would
go from five to four dimensions. And so our four dimensional space time may be the consequence of the contact between two five dimensional membranes, and when that happened, that was when the universe, as we understand that this four dimensional space time first began to exist. We just don't have the experiments or the observations yet that can prove or disprove this mathematically really interesting hypothesis.
What is the possibility that we may be living in a holographic universe?
Ah, A holographic universe, for all intents and purposes, is an idea that suggests that we see three dimensions and observe three dimensions, but all of our information is preserved in two dimensions. It's kind of like the holograms on our debit cards, right, even though they're flat, it looks like there is a three dimensional object in there because the information for the three dimensional object is preserved in two dimensions. So could we be in a holographic universe? Possibly?
We have to try to prove or disprove that though, and that's the problem. We can't design an experiment yet that allows us to understand whether or not we are all projected on say two dimensional space that has time, But we think we're in a three dimensional space because that's what we see, or the other way around. We are two dimensional or projected on the three, or four
dimensionals projected on the three. These kinds of projection ideas could work and mathematically, but we don't have experiments that can confirm them yet.
This is dramatic stuff. Charles is that it's a lot of fun.
I really like thinking about them and telling this with people. It's fun stuff.
Tell us about the title of your book, The Handy Quantum Physics answer Book.
Okay, well, you see, I use quantum physics in my research all the time. I'm an astronomer, right, Like I said earlier. I study galaxies when they're crashing into each other. I study the super massive black holes that are inside them. I study the star formation history of the universe, things like that. So I use quantum physics every day, but I don't actually conduct research in the debts and the
details of quantum physics. Right. So I wanted to show everybody who wanted to be curious about it what quantum physics specifically is like on a regular basis. You know, you look for handy books or handy guides to things when you want to know stuff that's cool, but you don't need necessarily to get into the weeds right. And so that's what the Handy Quantum Physics answer Book is a out. You want to know a little bit about quantum, you want to know a lot about quantum. Here it is.
But it's not written in a way that's for the technical people or for the researchers. It's for you and me. We're just taking all the cool ideas and concepts that have been expressed through mathematics and through physical research and just giving it for all of us to be able to use and to enjoy.
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