Joe Rogan | What Everyone Gets Wrong About Quantum Physics w/Sean Carroll

the Joe Rogan experience so over the weekend I got in your book whoo yes yes it's great thank you I mean I really appreciate someone like you who's trying to break down quantum mechanics and quantum physics for someone like me it's very hard to follow and there was a lot of backing up and trying it again and backing up and trying it again and like going over paragraphs and trying to figure out exactly what it means but uh it's it's really excellent and really perplexing at the same time well thank you and you know it there are different styles when it comes to writing popular books I think there should be different styles and my particular style is look it's not gonna be a breezy page-turner raaah but if you read it carefully like it's not prerequisites you don't have to come into it as an expert would you have to come into it is someone who's willing to sit and think about every paragraph and then hopefully you'll be rewarding and you'll truly understand what's going on after doing that well it is rewarding because it is fascinating and the history of quantum physics is also pretty fascinating cause I've always wondered like how did anybody even want to come up with this stuff like yes and the fact that it was so long ago what the beginnings ever were in the 19th century night well 1900 is the typical literally that year the turn of the century when walks plunk first got the first hints of it and then yeah it was took another 27 years to put it into final shape now for regular people that don't have a background of physics or that don't this is like the whole idea behind it is so bizarre it's like why would anybody try to figure out something that one of the things that you said that's really interesting is that you quantum physics is used all the time it's used with exact calculations but yet we don't really understand it yeah yeah no that's the main message of the book really because physicists of course do quantum mechanics every day whether it's you know straightforward quantum mechanics quantum field theory quantum information clung computing clearly we're pretty good you know like transistors and lasers depend on quantum mechanics the sun shining figure you let that out depends on quantum mechanics the Higgs boson etc so to claim that we don't understand quantum mechanics is a little bit weird but then we have quotes from people like Richard Feynman saying nobody understands quantum mechanics right and so if he says that then there's some authority behind it and the reason is what we have is sort of a black box right we say you know what I think what I said in a New York Times article I wrote recently is physicists understand quantum mechanics in the same way that someone who owns a smartphone understands the smartphone like they know how to use the apps they can call people they can make phone calls they can take pictures they don't know what's going on inside and that's physicists with quantum mechanics they they use it they can make very very precise predictions but if you ask them what is really going on like what is actually happening what are all the details are like yeah no that's not our job let's just stick to prediction but to someone like me that's so terrifying because like the very nature of reality is being examined by people like if it is a smartphone it's being examined by people like me yeah who don't really understand the smartphone I have no idea what what's going on inside a smartphone I've know I know some words that have used to describe RAM and process all the electrons moving out of there right but yeah yeah and I think and it's in some sense that's fine like most of us don't need to know what's going on inside the smartphone to use it but somebody should know right and my argument in the book is look the if 500 years from now when historians write the history of 20th century physics they will say two things one is my god these people were so brilliant and creative to invent quantum mechanics and then they were so afraid to really take it seriously and try to understand it like they said like stop asking questions about the meaning of reality and what the world is doing in my mind what physics is all about is understanding reality and what the world is doing it's not just about making predictions making predictions is good but we do that you know mostly because we're curious about what the world is doing well for people outside the world of academia when I read someone like you saying that you were discouraged from pursuing this and you literally told that you should be pursuing your work in cosmology and gravitation is that's where it's at a serious work yeah that seems to me be so crazy it's like if anybody should be pursuing it it should be people like you you know I mean I want to be fair so of course twentieth century physics was incredibly successful and and there was part of the attitude was look we have to understand nuclear physics and particle physics and you know a lot of it was the center of physics shifted from Europe to the US and and Europe is much more philosophical and you're willing to think about the deep ideas and Americans are pretty pragmatic and want to build things right in particular at the time they wanted to build nuclear weapons and so the idea of just really putting aside deep philosophical issues and putting stuff to work was attractive and the other issue is you know okay let's say we do demand that we understand quantum mechanics better how do you do it like what experiment is it there that you can do as far as we know the cookbook that we have even though we don't understand it works pretty well like what what could you type into your smartphone that would help you understand what's going on inside it's kind of hard to figure out so I think those attitudes were wrong but at least you know they're not completely crazy it's not just that they were afraid of the truth or anything like that and I also think that it is finally changing now I think that there's slowly slowly slowly more people are appreciating the understanding quantum mechanics is important well what do you attribute that to a couple of things one is I mean there's good news and bad news that part of the good news is technology has gotten better so we're trying to build quantum computers for example and guess what you know some of the ad hoc rules that we had for doing quantum mechanics might not be up to the task we need to understand the details a little bit better the other sadder thing is that so much of fundamental physics is kind of stuck right now right we haven't we literally have not been surprised by a new experimental result in fundamental physics since the 1970s the one there's one exception to that which is the universe accelerating in 1998 which is the dark energy we've had amazing accomplishments in experimental and observational physics we've found the Higgs boson we found the top quark we found gravitational waves the microwave background many many things but they were all predicted decades ago right so progress is driven by being surprised and it's been a long time since we've been surprised so some people including myself say well one of the things to do in that situation is to take a step back and re-examine the foundations maybe maybe we can take a broader look and think that we were walking down the wrong path now for people who don't have any background in physics there there's a bit of an issue with public perception and one of the things about public perception is films like what the bleep yeah that sort of throw this sort of cultish monkey wrench into the you know quantum physics is weird enough as it is yeah without adding that that movie was literally created by a channeler right my first of mine David Albert who was one of the leading philosophers of physics and I should also give credit to philosophers here because they have been taking quantum mechanics seriously longer the physicists have to be honest so David is one of many people who got a PhD in physics and then switched to philosophy because he cared about the foundations of quantum mechanics and no physics department would ever hire him right and yeah I tell the story went through the back door yeah I tell the story in the book like he wrote a bunch of influential papers as a graduate student and then he went and said I would like to you know make these papers my PhD thesis and they said no that's not really serious physics and they punished him by making him write this incredibly technical mathematical paper on quantum field theory just to prove he could do it and then he's like this I I don't take this anymore I'm switching fields but anyway he was in that film he was in what the bleep and they lied to him they misrepresented themselves they said we're doing a documentary about quantum mechanics and they sat him down for three hours and asked him all these questions you're leading questions like doesn't this mean that we're bringing reality into existence by looking at it and he's like no that's not what it means let me explain to you then in the final film there's like 30 second clips of him going yes that is a really important question right like completely misrepresenting what he said and so he went public after that and and complained about and about the film and he did in a hilarious story there was a event some sort of convention put on in Santa Monica by supporters of the film that they thought it'd be fun to get all of the people who are in the movie that what the bleep do we know and get them at you know and talked to them and charge people money to listen to them but these people were not affiliated with the filmmakers so they didn't know the David Albert had been completely misrepresented in the film so they invited him and he goes to this event in Santa Monica and he gave a talk you know he decided you know he wondered like should I just go at all but okay look why not let's reach a different audience and he he gave a talk and he said look there's two things you can do when you are faced with fundamental puzzles of reality one is you can face up to what the world is trying to tell you and you can accept it and take it as what it is no matter what you like the other is you can choose to tell a flattering story about yourself and the people who made this movie have decided that the mysteries of quantum mechanics are really stories about how they are powerful and have influence over reality and so forth but it's all nonsense and the punchline is the audience loved it they went nuts because what they wanted was a guru of some sort and like he was just as good a girl right so yeah he had a better story a reality based reality guru yeah yeah yeah so I think you're right I mean I think that quantum mechanics I've said before is uh of all the theories in the history of science the most easily distorted and misrepresented in the popular mind [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

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Id: JroeteV7twI

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019