Quantum Physics and the End of Reality | Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli, Eric Weinstein (2022)

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welcome everybody to what promises to be a delightful mid-summers event at least here in the northern hemisphere we have joined together forces from the upper echelons of theoretical physics along with yours truly the token experimentalist Brian Keating and we are going to debate the nature of quantum mechanics and the end of reality we will be looking into our crystal balls and thinking about the future of an interpretation that is only about 100 years old and I can't really think of anybody more astute and more renowned to join us than the guests that we have array today and that's Dr Sabina hasenfelder Dr Eric Weinstein and Professor Carlo ravelli I'll read you a little bit more about them in just a bit but I want to frame the nature of today's debate on the institute for art and ideas this is a phenomenal opportunity for free content for folks around the world to hear from the brightest minds and I'm just so delighted to be your humble host for today's event with three of my friends and past guests on my podcast and renowned authors who inspire me and thinkers that inspire me as well so I want to tell you what the nature of this debate is and it's kind of ironic in that people think of physicist as the most equipped to talk about the nature of reality and yet physicists themselves battle tensions uncertainties anxieties about the very topic that we're going to be talking about today and that's the nature of objective reality many scientists assume that there is a central role of what's called an observer and the question of whether or not what we observe is nature itself or not and that was a question framed a hundred years ago by the great Werner Heisenberg for which one of our guests Carlo ravelli recently wrote a wonderful book I'll recount that in just a moment but in our studies of reality in nature The Observer plays a role and yet what is it can we fully understand the Bedrock laws of physics and there is no Bedrock more firm than quantum mechanics it's given us our most precise tests in all of science as to the nature of what is knowable about our universe and human beings as we are called Homo sapiens sapien means to one who knows and the question of what do we know if the nature of quantum mechanics is not as solidified as we have come to think about it at least in the popular imagination so should we recognize science uh and the reality that we study myself as an experimentalist my guest is observers and and theoreticians should we really have to formulate it in a way that's independent of an observer and how could we do that without understanding the the role of the three pound super computer that sits on our shoulders namely our brain how do we interact with the things that we measure can we not remove the Observer as our friend and Roger Penrose suggest that Consciousness he has said reeks of something quantum mechanical and we all discussed with him his various ideas Nobel Loria Roger Penrose uh which are controversial but at least stem to make a connection between fundamental reality observation and the human mind and how they all might play into the theory of Consciousness itself and how that in turn impacts our understanding quantum mechanics so I want to read to you the biographies it's kind of formal for three of my friends um and in one case a co-author co-producer uh so first is my good friend Dr Eric Weinstein who is a podcast host who has a PHD in mathematical physics and has been on these IAI events in the past and uh that is Eric Eric you want to wave to the many millions of fans that are joining us out there um Sabina hasenfelder again is a great friend of mine and a friend of of the show that I house called into the impossible she's a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity and she's also the author of a second book which is called existential physics which has a not an insignificant amount of interpretation about quantum mechanics reality and the role of the Observer this is coming out soon she has a book uh that already exists called Lost in Math if you just can't wait to get your hands on this in the next week or two or until she appears on my YouTube channel into the impossible but she also has a YouTube channel of her own uh which is called science without the gobbledygook uh Savina how are you today yeah I'm great good to see you all excellent and last but certainly not least is my friend salviati himself Carlo a theoretical physicist who's made groundbreaking contributions in uh physics of space and time his books uh seven brief lessons on physics reality Is Not What It Seems the order of time and his most recent book Helga land is actually about this very topic actually I shouldn't say his most recent book because he did read The Voice along with myself lichu picarillo Frank wilchuk and Fabiola gianati and James Gates of uh salviati in the first ever audio translation of Galileo's dialogues you can find that uh wherever audiobooks only are sold so I want to outline the debate today what we're talking about it is a debate we're all friends but uh even friends you know show their love as it said you know what's not important is is uh the things that we go through it's the friends we we lose along the friends we make along the way and today we're going to continue the friends uh friendship but we're going to talk about uh three fundamental questions we're going to talk about three questions which I'll Define in just a bit a lot of it involves questions of Observer of what is reality how do you know that you're real and not uh famously a brain and a vat uh these are questions that can be answered perhaps for the first time or may not be able to be answered but the first question is are they important to the understanding of it I I never go to my lab and say do I exist before I do a particular cosmological experiment um so we're going to have uh three questions first we're going to have kind of an opening statement from each of the discussions then we're gonna I'm gonna ask uh the following three questions three questions about three themes involving observation analysis if you will and the role of the Observer and then there's going to be questions from you the audience that we've taken on YouTube on the Ia Channel where you're listening to this I've taken some questions on my channel Dr Brian Keating and you can tune in and retweet your question and we'll try to pick up as many as we can so we this is going to run a little bit longer than the normal hour and so hopefully we'll be able to get to the most interesting questions possible so if that all sounds good Fighters put your hands up in the Universal signal that we're ready to do battle okay um so the first question um that uh I want to oppose is just kind of an opening statement from each one of you I want to get your position on where you believe uh this conversation should go I'm going to give each one of you three minutes um and I want you to kind of discuss what is this question of the nature of reality is it hype is it reality is it something that is important to the average viewer out there remember we're not only talking to the three exceptionally qualified physicists and me but we're also talking about uh or talking to the general public and I view as people know listen to my channel I think scientists have a moral obligation to give back to the public who pay our salary so anyway Carl I'm going to start with you opening statement what are your general thoughts on conscious and on Quantum reality and the nature of reality and then we'll get into these three theme debates Carlo take it away please thank you Brian it's a pleasure um fast on on reality to um then we'll have time to go more in depth uh reality of course is essential for a physicist but the reality is subtle uh 300 years ago the copernican revolution jump started modern the modern development of Science and essentially it was a discovery that to make sense about the um the motion what we see in the sky the the planet the moon uh the sun and the Stars we have to take into account that we're viewing this from our own perspective to take into account Observer not because there is something in our mind and not because it's this Consciousness involved not for some mysterious reason but because we're sitting on a spinning Rock so we're seeing seeing things spinning because because of that so um The Observer it's always has always played a role in science we view the world from our perspective with our instrument with our eyes and we have to take this into account I think quantum mechanics is more of that it's telling us uh basically the same thing first we talk about reality what else but reality is subtle because we view it through our eyes and we are a physical system like any other in the universe so we your reality as a physical system interact with the rest of the units so yes we're talking about reality what else that what we want to talk about uh yes we have to take into account Observer no in any way this has to do with Consciousness uh the mind or anything like that I think that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with that I think that the mind is a fantastic problem but it has to do with our neurons the complexity and not in any way that I can understand directly with the quantum mechanics but certainly and I close here quantum mechanics is telling us that uh this interactive way which makes reality so the fact that like in the political system what we see it's interaction between the sky and US goes very deep and in a sense all properties of all physical systems come about in interactions with other systems uh so um yes quantum mechanics tell us that The Observers are important but not because our mind is important or Consciousness important because reality is interaction so we describe always from the perspective of some physical system that's where I stand very good and Sabina you have on many occasions uh talked about the hype that surrounds this particular topic there's no small amount of uh of insults hurled at people that talk about Quantum healing uh Quantum all sorts of things uh in your work talk about your position on this manner yeah so um I would say scientists can't understand reality independent of the Observer and they never have because scientists are observers so we can't get rid of the Observer um but maybe I should say that I can't understand reality independent of the observant I never have because I'm not sure that you actually exist for this reason I'm not a realist I saw I saw that Eric um made a remark on Twitter uh that he's guessing he's a team team reality um I guess it puts me in in the team anti-reality whatever that means um so I'm not a realist because I think it's scientifically indefensible you know I I can't prove that anything exists besides me so from the scientific perspective I would say I am an instrumentalist the task of science is not to figure out some truth about reality whatever that might mean um but the task is to find descriptions of our observations uh not more and not less but I have to admit um realism is good working hypothesis so for practical purposes I think it makes sense that I assume you exist for the time being um that seems to describe quite well what I observe um so I'm I'm happy you know to to use realism um as a kind of an assumption but I think we have to keep in mind that uh after all it's just it's just a philosophy this doesn't mean though that measurement outcomes um depend on the Observer um we we know that measurement outcomes depend on the measurement this isn't something which is specific to Quantum Mechanics is generally always the case if you're measuring a small system with a big apparatus then you're changing the thing that you're you're trying to measure this is something we always have to take into account uh like Carlo I don't think that there's a particular role to be played by Consciousness but I can't really exclude this either it's just that I personally think that the problems which we currently have uh in quantum mechanics and cosmology um can be solved with without retreating to talks about consciousness and Eric is team reality similar to Team America what exactly is team reality and do we have to worry about the end of reality in any meaningful sense and at least not today hopefully hopefully not today um I I think that in a certain sense we're all trying to figure out what would a productive fight be um and and to do it constructively and collaboratively so let me just say that I agree with Sabina that um we can't for sure say that anyone else exists but what I would say is that there's a simple Article of Faith many of us try to hide in our science and in my case I would say it's that the universe is not maximally pathological you could imagine a pathological Universe in which you could not discover the nature of its rules because it's it's sort of constructed to occlude your vision and happily we have not seemed to find ourselves in that situation and I think that there's sort of a tale of two narcissisms here there's the narcissism of believing that you're at the center of this story as an observer and that you have um in some sense failed to recognize that that you're present and then there's another narcissism um where you put yourself at the center and you you talk about relativism endlessly and the inability to remove yourself from the system and of course it's hard to get out of that sort of devil in the deep blue sea problem so I would say that observers are important but they may not be absolutely dispositive you know the status of the Observer may not in fact be the the Crux on which everything hangs the last thing I would say which is probably the most meaningful is that there's an expression the map is not the territory and when the world was not mapped well maps changed frequently as discoveries of new lands were made or filled in as a more specificity one of the great dangers of stagnation in theoretical physics is the general relativity is now over 100 years old and our modern picture of quantum theory is about 50 years old and so as these maps have not been changing for effectively a human lifetime uh maybe a short one 50 years we're in danger of seeing the same map over and over again and starting to believe that the map is the territory and so if we were adding to the standard model into general relativity I think we would be in less danger of codifying these things as reality themselves as opposed to Simply models of them on our way to something where the map might finally be the territory and that would be sort of a final Theory very good well yeah that kind of dovetails into their first theme of today which is going to involve The Observer and I'm reminded of a quote that Sabina mentions in existential physics available whenever books will be sold in the future if the future exists and that is from Bertrand Russell I'm paraphrasing here the role of The Observers is very subjective and and also very biased because it depends on past events to construct you know prior probabilities and and Bertrand Russell's you know uh conjugation in this sense uh he he mentions well I'm going to change it he he basically is referring to the turkey you know who all throughout the summer is getting nice and plump and fat at least here in America and then you know he's got a good life he's fed every morning uh and then uh and then October rolls around to get some extra corn or whatever and then November comes and all of a sudden he gets his head chopped off um or for you vegans out there I had to make a vegan version Sabina so so in America at least throughout October the farmer takes care of the pumpkin uh all through the month of October and then some kid carves its face open okay on Halloween um can we really talk about the and I'm sorry for for any Europeans who don't get either one of those references uh but the question that I have is is is really one of you know do we get mired down uh merman I think it was said you know shut up and calculate for me I was told by Jim peoples shut up and measure you know make observations rather you know the question is what is the importance if any and I'll start with Carlo what is the importance of talking about uh uh than an observer can we uncover uh objective reality without understanding the structures the mind the limitations of an observer as Carlo could you address that is it do we have to talk about the nature of the of the person doing the operation of observation [Music] um well uh let me let me address this question of the light also what's Sabine and Eric said uh before of this debate of sort of realism statement that is as a certainly put at the beginning um I I think I'm not too far from any of of the two of air you can uh and and Sabine and I'll come to your question in in the following sense Sabina started off by saying um I uh I cannot say for sure that there is a reality out there uh beside uh beside me and of course just right this is uh this is a well-known fact uh but I think you should agree in continuing this uh by saying well and this is not very interesting after all because I don't think that signs this is the main point they're going to get it I don't think that science is about uh uh find certainty about things that's never have been the uh motivation at least or the best scientists around and for the people I think who have in different manners understood what science is through the same person today science is not about um uh uncovering the final objective reality or finding complete certainty about something so this is a process in which we learn about what is around us through our interaction with with the rest and we come up with a a story a tools for thinking about what we call reality which is the thing we interact with um are we sure of any of this no of course like the turkey of your story uh we're not sure of anything but we have extremely good reasons for taking very seriously uh facts like that the Moon is there even if I don't see it that there are um the kind of astronomical things the two Brides uh so Brian see in the sky in the in the in the in the sky and that inside the Sun and there are actually the nuclear reaction so so science is credible it's credible it's reliable it's credible in its uh in its predictions without any need of uh making philosophical ultimate state statement about yes we know the absolute reality uh but nevertheless using heavily the notion of reality because this is one of the main tools that um physicists that and scientists in general work scientists work with a mixture of instrumentalists they're very ready the best ones to take what they what they know for for reality out there and as Eric was saying be able to change the mind about that is the thing that is that is real right I mean the the the what we think is out there in the world that the world is made of changing and it will be changing again so reality changes the best way we understand it the way we understand it so what we do with science I think we are uh evolving a best way for interacting with what we call reality um outside and uh we can use the Expression objectivity we can use especially of reality without being afraid of but also without overplaying uh overplaying this we're never certain about anything that's in um that's the bottom line and then you ask do we have to take into account the mind of the Observer um I would say not in any substantial way but very often in a useful way of course I mean you say you don't ask about your mind if you go to the to the laboratory but maybe you were drunk and they take into account your your mind of what you you say and we what do you mean maybe and well I don't know and I have to cut how my instrument work and the limitation of my brain which certainly are and uh and all that and ultimately I've also to take into account that of course what I'm interacting with uh it's a reality I'm interacting with so I see through the through the interaction and I should not follow and I close here in what Eric called the two narcissism especially the analysis of saying well the only thing I'm sure is myself and therefore I start by assuming that I exist everything everything else no I'm an only child this is a kind of mistake that only child children make when they're very small but then maybe perhaps a little bit later than those who have brothers and sister even the only children learn that no it doesn't make it's not useful to think about universe that as you the only existing thing you being me Carlo we Humanity we have a language or anything like that we are part of a story and we understand aspective as part of the story and we have to cross a circle um because that story of course we access it through our connection with the rest of the reality well thanks yeah I'm also an only child but I'm not my parents favorite child um Eric we think about this I'm reminded of you know kind of this statement you know the hard problem of Consciousness you know David charlmare's uh famous statement but I think it's more like the hard problem of uh of the measurement problem um can you talk a little bit about that maybe respond to Carlo um but but also aren't we really just talking about stuff that's been trodden ground for 100 years as you as you said 50 years certainly it's a measurement problem at some level of of of uh Bedrock right yeah and you know the problem is that I would like to just dispense with this all but I would not be fair to the system because uh like Bell's inequalities were done relatively late uh in the quantum story so that even though I have a Prejudice that says we shouldn't uh wallow infinitely in the foundations of quantum theory that's a good counter example where I would have been wrong is that I probably would have discouraged Dr Bell from uh doing his work um so it may be and it's possible that all of this theorizing about Quantum foundations and the measurement problem will be productive I mean to the extent that I've tried to contribute it all to that discussion I've tried to take the point of view that classical um theory is either deterministic or mute uh if you ask a good question it's deterministic and if you ask a bad question it doesn't attempt to help you out in any way to pretend that your question was good quantum mechanics uh is exactly as deterministic as classical Theory when you're asking a good question and we should say what a good question is the state of the system is presented with a huge infinite list of multiple choice answers are you in this state are you in that state are you in the other state and we call those eigenfunctions or eigenvectors but we might as well just call them multiple choice answers and you know they have different values those would be you know is it seven is it 17.3 those would be called eigenvalues and the key question is is the state of the system on the list of good answers for that question the question would be called an observable so let's try to make this a little bit less physicsy and a little bit more just common sense a bad question would be a question in which the state of the system is not represented by any particular answer on the list so you've come back from let's say Europe and you get a landing card which says is did you accumulate uh funds answer a all in pounds B all in euros see all in Swiss Francs all in Swedish kroner you in fact have a bunch of different stuff in your pockets so that's a bad question classically you just can't answer the landing card Quantum mechanically if you ask the question suddenly all of your change transmutes into Euros or Swiss Francs based on the percentage of the amount of money that you had in each currency and so that weird accommodating Nature has been my little contribution to try to reframe the quantum weirdness debate which is why not why is quantum theory probabilistic but why is quantum theory so accommodating of lousy questions uh which is a completely different sort of feel to it because it is deterministic we don't talk about the other part of quantum theory which is the amazing propagation where physicists do most of their work learning how to propagate an initial State into a final State because that in fact is a deterministic process and it doesn't give us those sort of quantum fields that we're used to talking about so I find it very strange that physicists don't talk enough about Quantum propagation which is deterministic we talk about the weirdness of the collapse of the state function but in my mind that's the sign that you're trying to work in an effective theory that doesn't really have full ability to to wrestle with reality and so I'm very unmoved by um the attempts to answer those questions within our current framework I'd rather expand the framework and then try to get at those questions rather than imagine that we can solve the puzzle of quantum measurement from this particular set of models and when you hear people say that space time has got to go and that we need a really big new theory in order to to make progress what they're effectively saying is there may be new maps of this territory and in the new maps these are not huge paradoxes but I really feel like if we want to answer these questions the thing to do is new models new equations new lagrangians rather than trying to figure it out from here because I think we have a pretty solid answer that this is state of the art for the most part relative to the maps of reality that we've built and I think that it's going to be the new maps of reality that are going to allow us to make progress great um Sabina um you're sort of a vocal opponent if I'm not mistaken of pan psychus them and the role of an inanimate physical objects playing a role keep in mind that there's over 1500 people observing us right now on YouTube all of whom should push the Thumbs Up Button like And subscribe to this Channel please uh but where do you fall in this debate I mean if I'm not mistaken you you don't believe in pan psychism so does is there any sort of crisp measurement where we could really dissociate an observer from The observed or not foreign [Music] and so on so I agree with this I was a little bit perplexed because um Eric's answer wasn't the one that I expected uh to Carlo because um Carlo kind of questioned this idea that we would ever have a fundamental final description of reality uh whereas Eric said earlier uh one day maybe the map will be the territory so so I'd be kind of interested to hear how um how you reply to that kind of um thing but to come back to the measurement problem I mean there's a reason the measurement problem is called measurement problem and not Observer problem because you don't necessarily need an observer to make a measurement would you need to make a measurement is an apparatus um so I I really don't see how anything like Consciousness uh even comes into the question um but this doesn't mean that the role of the Observer doesn't play any role uh in physics I mean for one thing I see yourself certainly know um our own position and what we can observe with our telescopes introduces a bias in the in the data that we get which we have to take into account like if we look out in the cosmos um there are certain Stellar objects or galaxies and so on that we can observe and other stuff we can't observe and if we want to make some statistics out of this we have to take into account uh which direction did we look into uh what's the kind of data that our telescopes can even um capture um so this is certainly something that we need to take into account again this doesn't really have anything to do with Consciousness and so on but it certainly has something to do with with what we can observe and also this whole story of the anthropic principle comes in there um which um you know a lot of people I get easily offended about this um but let's be honest physicists never really talk actually about life when they talk about the anthropic principle um right they they talk about certain preconditions for life like uh carbon or sufficiently complex molecules and that kind of stuff and um we certainly know that carbon exists right and this puts a constraint on the kind of theories that we can write down they have to allow for the existence of count and and and so I think that these are certain in a certain sense those are Observer constraints uh Observer created constraints to some extent and then let me mention one final point which I understand isn't really the focus of the debate or we have to um keep in mind uh how our brains work because Carlo brought this up uh it's um that in the end um the way that science progresses is not just um by one individual but we have to work together in a community and we have to evaluate other people's proposals and um there are certain cognitive biases that come into this and they are based on the way that our brain works right um and this is something that we have to take uh into account I think um if we want science to work properly so yeah that actually dovetails beautifully Sabina I'll send you some euros uh rapidly plummeting Euros for that uh beautiful Segway into a man who had a huge influence in my life uh which is Sir Roger Penrose who's lately gotten uh his his Emperor's New Clothes have kind of dovetailed into uh not only a discussion of an alternative model for the origin of the universe for Gravity Etc but also of Consciousness itself venturing into actually making uh and and conducting experiments on uh on systems at room temperature and so forth and these involves are called microtubules and other things with Stuart hammeroff um also friends of many of us on here today uh so but but of course as I said in the very beginning uh sir Roger you know mentions that this whole issue you know as he says reeks and I can't do his voice I mean I I would none of us are British unfortunately uh but we could do it so he said that Consciousness reeks of an observer and so it seems to be again not to rehash this this all but but I think you know this this notion that now Carlo has has stated on other on other occasions that you know there's a relationalism to both uh to to these issues and I wonder as an experimentalist I actually saw salute the work that Roger and Stewart are doing to actually try to do you know we have this canonical kind of quantum experiment you know Paradigm of of something being perturbed but but I wonder Carlo um is there something that we could do that make the measurement independent of the Observer is there is there anything that we could use maybe it's a cosmological experiment it's Sabina might have been hinting at but but do you agree with sir Roger that this you know that Consciousness is so deeply embedded it almost cannot be extracted from this issue no no not at all um it's good to explore extreme ideas and somebody can explore extreme ideas it's never bad if somebody exploded and if a Nobel Prize and you know one of the smartest people around and they have proved that black holes are generic and you have invented speed networks on which might work is based I'm listing the achievement of Roger uh Henry was uh if you're a great scientist you're free to explore uh extreme ideas so I immense uh respect and estimate of Roger who is a great friend and a lot of my work in based on his on his mathematics but this extreme idea he has been exploring that somehow Consciousness is directly affected by quantum mechanics to be understood quantum mechanics I find it totally unconvincing and I'm with uh Sabina here and I would say with the majority of my large majority of my colleagues um this doesn't mean dismissing somebody who extreme ideas but uh I definitely can you elaborate on that why can you for the audience again there's 1500 people at least watching it's probably more like two or three thousand can you elaborate why do most of our colleagues as you claim which you know Roger might dispute why why do they dismiss it well for the reason Sabina said so simply and clearly because the the measurement of quantum mechanics we're talking about uh it suffice a piece of uh an apparatus made by uh by by metal and and copper copper and glass uh to to collapse away fanfiction so it's not to do with the Consciousness at all zero uh it's uh it seems pretty obvious to me uh I may be wrong but I also may be wrong that the earth goes around the Sun uh for for what we know so um again that's a uh an idea which I think is a fringe idea it has much more traction in on on YouTube and on Facebook than in scientific conferences having said so let me go back to the main debate because I think we are mixing two things here one is that whenever you do science uh you're doing science as a human with the limitation of the of a human um as a existing being which has a a perspective on the world with look at the world from um from a culture from an inside a language with all sort of limitations which are others this is generic about science it's true and it's a reason for which we should understand science so our uh best ways to address reality but not as the uh absolutely unquestionable ultimate certain statements about what's real and what's not real that will be silly it's not it's human it's best we can say about reality uh where reality is what we say about it so that's about science in general but then we should not confuse this with quantum mechanics in the city Quantum mechanic has a measurement problem which is basically and it has puzzled everybody for long something with more some period less and it's still puzzling because uh Quantum mechanic doesn't give us a picture of what goes on uh there between one measurement and the other so the community is sort of uh split there are those who says well who cares it works very well and we do all our current technology with it then those who tell to fill up the dots say okay so Quantum again doesn't tell but I add something maybe there is a hidden world of hidden variables as it's called a thing happening that I can add to the theory nothing really changing the prediction but it gave me a sense of what is going on or others maybe there are many multiple worlds we only see a a sort of emergent little picture of a multiplicity of universes um which are beyond what we see that's one group of people another way of solving the puzzle of quantum mechanics is to really think that to really take a very strong instrumentalist perspective I don't want to know what's happened there I make a series of measurements and I don't ask what happened in between I think that there is a third way and I've worked all my life on the Third Way like many others um which addresses directly the question of Observer which is a following I think that what science is in fact what reality is or better or better the best way we have to think reality we can think reality now as at the light of our experience what we know is not that reality is a set of individual self-standing object with properties but rather that reality that every object has property only when interact with something else so um not with us as a human not with us as a as a living being or as a human or as a male or as a white male with PhD I don't know uh but us as a physical systems so systems affect one another we interact with one another and that's this that's when the properties come about so the fact that we describe an atom through its interact with an apparatus has nothing to do with us as subserver special has to do with the fact that this is the best way to understand in reality how things affect one another so there is a deep relational structure of reality revealed by quantum mechanics and that's one possible perspective on quantum mechanics is the one eye and a part of my our colleagues consider particularly interested well Sabina you've uh you've had conversations about uh hammeroff and Penrose and what Carlo just said uh I'm not going to give them an opportunity to to correct me when I'm wrong but it did have some kind of um I would say pan psychic adjacent maybe views that Consciousness is is all you know participatory where do you fall I mean obviously you've spoken against it and that it sort of doesn't fall all in the in the purview of traditional science talk about Penrose and hammeroff who you've criticized I I'm actually supportive of them they're doing experiments which is what I do they're trying to take the role of the Observer out by putting people under sedation you know in the case of hammeroff and in the case of my students when they go to my lectures uh but but why do you criticize Penrose and hammeroff or what specifically do you criticize them for and then what how do you react to Carlos's thing that smacks of reeks of pan psychism at all okay I was about to say it doesn't sound pencil because to me but he beat me to it so yeah of course let me say a few words uh in defense of oh so this isn't working great um so this is my book which you've already seen earlier um which yeah there it is um which has an interview with Roger Penrose uh exactly about this topic uh so you can read what he said in his own words and also my next video coincidentally on Saturday uh will be about what what Ken Rose's argument uh actually is so in a nutshell he says um Consciousness can't be computable therefore something weird has to be uh happening and he he puts the weird thing into quantum mechanics um because that's uh into the measurement process because that's the only thing that we don't understand to make a long story short he doesn't say that Consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function or something like this it's rather the other way around he says that um the the collapse of the wave function is responsible for our experience of Consciousness and um this has been criticized for the obvious reason uh that Quantum effects are generally fragile and it's kind of hard to see how they would play a major role in the brain and uh Penrose and hammeroff have counted this by saying so this was an estimate which I think was done by Max tigma can you find it on the archive and they have um rebutted this by saying well you can't make an estimate using quantum mechanics uh to constrain a theory which isn't quantum mechanics right so this makes sense so principle it could be internally consistent um I think there's some mysterious stuff going on in their explanation like even if you believe all this stuff with the career it's taken in the microtubules then collapse every once in a while what's it got to do with Consciousness I don't know it's like this is like this little asterisk where suddenly American house right and it's going to do something with Consciousness uh but yeah I mean God who knows yeah I mean I think we we don't really understand Consciousness uh it it is conceivably possible like Quantum effects play a role in the brain maybe they actually do play a role for Consciousness right uh I don't know um I uh my friend Tim Palmer who is also in the book I have interviewed him as well so um he has pointed out that um quantum mechanics is a source of uh noise and noise quite possibly plays a major role uh in our brain right it's not it's not just something that you sometimes need to get out of uh what he could call a local option if you wanted kilometers right yeah yeah I know so so if if you get stuck with your competition it's also that noise it doesn't um I mean if you think of stuff like um stochastic resonance maybe you can actually use it to amplify a signal so it's not necessarily A Bad Thing well Eric I can hear the audience you know kind of getting frustrated rolling their eyes at all of us agreeing with one another and I'm counting on you but but I want to ask you a question Eric um what is the most you know kind of quantum mechanical question it seems almost tautological that an observer observes something and has an effect on it uh ever since the double sled experiment which is you know kind of the canonically most classically to mix metaphors uh experiment in quantum mechanics um so for the audience members again what are they talking about what do they argue about what do they agree about uh where do we fall on this you know do we have to think of the role of the Observer or not it seems patently obvious to me but um uh what do you have to think uh to to upon here now you're muted Eric all right I'm unmuted now I couldn't hear you we could observe you uh that was preemptive um look I hate it I I just can't stand the whole discussion about Consciousness and quantum mechanics and then somebody will mention mushrooms and say mushrooms are from outer space and they're aliens and maybe we need psychedelics to perturb the Consciousness to explain the quantum mechanics and I feel like okay now we're off in recreational philosophy land because we don't have work that's working uh for us to be doing right and when you had Penrose on your podcast you explicitly said I'm not going to talk about Consciousness why did you do that because it honestly it's boring is look it's it's it's not that interesting compared to things that we actually are good at and we've done and that we there's a weird thing where people want to talk about Consciousness and quantum theory because they understand neither and then the idea is well maybe maybe it'll be better if we just mix these two things so you can picture a kid with a chemistry set with two vials of things they don't understand putting them into an Erlenmeyer flask before the house blows up um I think that in general we love uh Penrose because he's willing to make such a completely crazy and insane uh statement in theory and that what we are short on in the community is courage we all have crazy ideas and in general we try to make people regret the day they were born when they when they make the mistake of sharing them so I think it's a terrible idea I think it's wonderful that he's shared it I think that there's some interesting things to note about us as uh as as a non-reliable narrators as literary theorists would call it so for example Sabine is very focused on the community but she also isn't sure that the community exists right and so you have these paradoxes where she's convinced that she exists she can't necessarily prove that the rest of us do um that's an example of these sort of fundamental tensions that we have when we try to operationalize these things and explore them in the case of quantum um you could ask the question which of the body's systems uh are quantum aware so I believe that we know that cephalopods in the case of cuttlefish use polarized light and maybe doing quantum mechanical uh measurements with their eyes I have it on the authority of Nima arkani Hamed who explained to me uh in his office that geckos um are in fact using the Casimir effect uh Luca Turin is focused on olfaction and the idea that the brain is using quantum mechanics in the nose in the olfactory bulb in order to discern different sense we're not nearly as interested in all of those things being quantum mechanical as we are in Consciousness being quantum mechanical and I think this gets back to the narcissism issue if we want to talk about Quantum effects in biology we've got a bunch of stuff where we're on pretty solid ground and if we want to jump to Quantum Consciousness I do worry that what we're hoping is is that the problems of Consciousness and the problems of quantum mechanics will miraculously kill each other in a Mexican standoff which is yet to happen thank you very much and for being so succinct so we have audience questions that'll be coming up in just a bit after our final topic which I'm going to throw to the Sabina which has to do with looking into the future into your crystal ball you're so perspicacious and and you love to think about these big picture topics and you've you've thought and talked about you know the Nexus of quantum uh mechanics quantum physics and cosmology is it another you know kind of opportunity for as Eric said you know to put two things together that we don't understand maybe one will come out um so first I want to ask uh Sabina about uh are there you know potential fruitful avenues that we can learn about the cosmos uh from the cosmos about the quantum in other words in my field we talk about learning about inflation we talk about Quantum perturbations gravitational waves Carlo's written a beautiful new book about gr Etc but I want to ask you um is that really true is there any manifestation in cosmology of the quantum or is it just extrapolation and and essentially modeling um that might be going too far well there should be uh right in principle it should be possible to see imprints of Quantum fluctuations in the CMB and people have calculated what they would look like and exactly what you would have to look for the problem is just it's uh Beyond current measurement precision and it'll probably remains so for a long time um so yeah I mean as you as you've noticed uh as you mentioned in the beginning I've worked on quantum gravity for some for a long time and this is one of the possible observables of quantum gravity that you can look for it's one of the very conservative I should say there are also less conservative ones like you know probably um that uh yeah yes of surely has this idea that you might be able to see Echoes In gravitational waves emitted from black holes because the black hole Horizon might have a Quantum structure um so I'm not terribly convinced of this but I mean you can look for it uh it's it's there in the data and then I guess I mean the the obvious things to say like if you look back for the in time um you'll be able to learn more about the quantum processes that happened back then though maybe cosmology is not the best way to do it because um you might prefer to build a bigger collider and bring things into each other very good now Carlo you are one of the world's experts in uh things revolving quantum gravity is it well first of all how do you react to What Sabina said um and then second of all can we have a theory of quantum mechanics that without a theory of quantum gravity uh of course we we do have a theory of quantum mechanics uh that works very well with the best theory we have and uh quantum gravity uh we have tentative theories I I work on Theory I'm very keen of it I'm very uh enamorous of it but it's it's far from being an established too it's important to gravity so we don't have a quantity of gravity on which there is agreement we certainly have a quantity a quantum theory um I agree with you we had a lot of quantum uh phenomena in the sky in fact we wouldn't not understand the sun without quantum mechanics who would not do the same Supernova without quantum mechanics who would not understand uh helium abundance in the sky without quantum mechanics so quantum mechanics is that use the not in the laboratory just for for small things it's used enormously to understand it it works fantastically well um let me say a few things about uh about the the the the the previous discussion so just to express the first of all I insist I brought upon psychist at all zero there's nothing cycle there's nothing cycle in the in nature cycle is the name we give to the kind of things that humans do okay psycho is the kind of things that we give to uh the kind of things that humans and maybe cats do right uh is that mysterious no it's not particularly mysterious I never understood the mystery of Consciousness it's like The Mystery of Life uh 50 years ago uh biological talk about a lot about the Mystery of Life nobody does there are open questions about how life developed first what is the actual detail of how information goes through uh let's say with Consciousness nobody can say what Consciousness is consciousness is the name we give to what we're confused about we cannot put in the in a clear we want to understand memory we want to understand uh emotions we want to understand the desire we want to understand friendship but we want to understand love all this is a good problem culture is not a good problem it's just the name we give to all the things which we know how to address but we haven't figured out so Consciousness in my opinion is a known problem quantum mechanics is a fantastic Theory okay about which we have some confusion and I this is the only thing I disagree with my core panel friends I don't think we're gonna understand it better when we change the equations okay um Maxwell equations people were very confused about it they were not understood by changing the question they were understood by Einstein arriving and say oh look they're invariant at the lower International nature and T Prime is what clock's major wow now we got it okay even copernicum uh Theory once after Newton it became clear okay we got it there's no reference frame the velocity is relative it's very hard to digest but then we got it I think a Quantum mechanic will understand it in the same manner we will um understand that is telling us that reality is different that the way we talked before it's subtler it's more relational nothing to do with cycle at all um and it's more beautiful more beautiful than Quantum Academy small life it's more interesting it's more intelligent very good yes thank you Carl I didn't mean to put words in your mouth I was just saying uh yes you meant uh well I did mean I should say that you know to say that everything participates in Consciousness I guess my question to you uh and maybe all of you is you know if if the uh observed plays a role then it should be that there's something non-fungible uh not nft but there should be something non-fungible about the human experience as opposed to like removing an electron I mean all electrons are fungible all you know protons and pions my favorite and most delicious particle are are fungible right they only have three properties um and Sabine is written and we'll talk this week when she comes to my show about mathematical universes and tag Mark's ideas but if if there's something non-fungible then that seems to be interesting so I guess Eric um you know again we we focus on a lot of stuff that I don't think you were you know I think I misled you when I asked you to come on this this way but I want to ask you what what where do you stand are you in the shut up and calculate or should up in measure for those experimentalists out there where should the future go look into your crystal ball and tell us what what what is this I mean we talk about entanglement all the time I I know that frustrates you where where should we be going if you could uh if you could uh set the tone and then we'll take questions from the audience well I mean are you asking to uh this is for Eric to respond I mean roughly speaking it's this mug and we should be talking about um what we know general relativity what no General activity no maybe it's on the back maybe it's on the back um apology now I mean we should be talking about our core theories and why this 50-year when we begin to incorporate and keep in mind who's on this panel Carlo is uh Central to the loop quantum gravity um effort as a as a Founder Sabina has been absolutely Central to talking about some of the excesses of the string community and trying to bamboozle the world as to how beautiful everything is while their Theory hasn't uh managed to ship a product um right now is the time for courage to go back to the things that we stopped looking at 40 years ago when the string Revolution came in and told us that anybody who didn't understand that the green Schwartz anomaly cancellation was going to immediately lead to a theory of everything and dancing and rejoicing was an idiot and they were wrong and we need to we need to now reconcile that the fact that we've had a 40-year catastrophe in the field that when we have that when we recognize that the leadership of a small number of individuals was misguided and that we get back on track there's an enormous number of people who've never had a go at trying to say where the field should head and I guess what I think is that um I'll just make a very simple uh observation uh physics is about the physical objects in physical reality and we found out that these things are described by an incredibly beautiful framework known as bundle theoretic differential geometry and topology at present if you think in terms of bundles you generally don't think in terms of particles and Fields that we encounter and if you think in terms of particles and Fields that encounter you don't bother with bundles something very bad has happened sociologically and if we were saying instead of trying to solve cool sounding questions we would get back to work immediately with a large number of groups pursuing very different indications of what is likely to come next as opposed to not dealing with the elephant in the room which is that we haven't done much of anything for 50 years that's a huge statement and one I'm prepared to back up I believe that when it comes to the quantum the most important thing that nobody discusses here is something called geometric quantization which said that Hamilton who has one of the great two Frameworks in in in in in in the business with LaGrange didn't go far enough that the hamiltonian structures are actually predictive of a quantum theory that is that the relationship between position and momentum forms something called a curvature tensor of a line bundle whose sections provide a Hilbert space on which we do quantum theory and we had tremendous innovation in the Frameworks of physics with zero Innovation essentially proven in the physical systems that those Frameworks are supposed to analyze so my belief is that we would do well to get off of this topic get back to work and listen to a bunch of people we've never heard from saying well what went wrong with supersymmetry grand unified theories extended objects asymptotic safety what are the new things that we've forgotten to do who has an idea and then that kind of a community we're waiting effectively for certain people to retire I'm not sure what we're doing we should be holding a conference that tries to say here are the 73 ways that we might go differently when we from the period when we only really had one or two guiding lights that you know I'll just say it very clearly quantum gravity is not clearly the question we were all supposed to be working on 40 years ago and I I don't even know whether Carlo and Sabina would agree with me but my feeling is is that I'd much rather know why are there three generations why is nature flavor chiral why these particular internal quantum numbers what do we believe is the pattern of the masses those are the questions that excite me in the way that conch business and the Brain seems to excite others okay well I'm going to get to something exciting for me I I do want to get Carlo and sabina's response to that but you did have an event with Brian Green on this very Channel with Sabina and with Michael Shermer uh about the theories of everything we're not going to talk uh more about that but it does show the level of interest in the field uh by the way there's thousands of people watching this online guys this has really been such a smashing success hit the like button and subscribe to this Channel please if you want to see more of these with uh same speakers different speakers different hosts um but I want to take the host prerogative and and kind of modify a question from our audience now and that comes from a person whose name is Sir great which you know I'd like to be known as that I try to ask my kids to do that call me that um he's asking or she's asking I guess uh oh what does the G minus two muon experiment say is about reality I want to rephrase that I want to ask two questions starting with with uh with Sabina and then Carlo um we see these measurements Eric was just talking about we should have conference well like they did it was called Shelter Island they brought together experimentalists what are some of the exciting experiments that people are doing you talk about fifth forces and stuff on your channel and in this wonderful new book but shouldn't we be really kind of confronting existing data do we need new data do we need new ideas um and and I'll have a follow-up question um for Eric on this very topic but Sabina experiment physics new forces do they fit in to the framework of reality quote unquote like G minus two uh and uh the lhcb experiment Etc okay so you've totally lost me there was the question but let me just say something so we need both data and ideas to say the obvious uh and we right now we're getting new data from the web telescope which I think is really really exciting and I think all astrophysicists are excited about this uh it can really tell us something about how dark matter works or doesn't work in the early Universe uh with the formation of galaxies like uh because the the standard Dark Matter Paradigm says that galaxies should build up very gradually so basically there shouldn't be any big galaxies uh Way Way Back uh at very high red shift and this is something that the web telescope will will allow us to tell um now the question was about the muon G minus two what does it tell us about reality uh I have no idea the only thing we know is that um the prediction from the standard model for the value of the G minus two is is his standard deviations away from the measured value I think it's now at 4.2 Sigma or something that's the discrepancy however those calculations are really really really difficult and it's not just quantum mechanics Quantum field Theory and there's a lot of uh Nuclear Physics hydronic physics and stuff uh going in and I think a lot of people including me uh think uh there's probably something wrong maybe that's too strong to put it something weird with the calculation going on that probably underestimating uh their uncertainty and if they're misjudging the uncertainty then the discrepancy it might actually be uh much smaller yeah Carlo when we see new data do we have to ask uh if that it can be reconciled but with already understand about quantum mechanics or do we have to come up with a new Theory of Everything we're very peculiar situation in which physics has been uh other times the past very rarely uh usually I think physics has been in a different different situation than I was for instance when I was a student at University there were zillions of data saying strong interactions and nobody could make sense to them or there was very very rough ways of making sense of them that worked very badly today we are in a funding situation in which this sector fundamental theories that Eric showed on her this couple without without gravity without cosmological Concepts um there is no indication almost I'll I'll come to the almost in a moment but anything we measure Escape those theories so uh what kind of okay so what found this series maybe some unification why why those numbers and the constant why why the cosmological cost is small why the situation so one can I ask these questions okay um but we don't have uh what previous scientists usually have which is daily uh but we do have some I agree with Sabine that g minus two is not very convincing my bet on G minus 2 is exactly what Sabine is saying namely that the theoretical the the experimental calculation seems reliable the theoretical not at all in fact their friends think UCD on the lattice that have arguments to say that the thematical calculation um it's very complicated users to indirect things and it probably uh uh class itself to match and and it might move toward the experiment so I don't see that it's very tempting especially since uh um for 40 years we have heard experimentally say oh we see a deviation from the standard model they've all come back they have old uh being reabsolved the standard model is extremely successful so I would take our successful theory for what they are a successful Theory like Einstein took um uh Maxwell Theory an extremely successful theory on which to build more and address the open questions and there are open questions we don't know what our pattern is this is another question it's real these are the data which we don't understand we have 23 of dark matter which means non-reliable um but there's more for instance we have this beautiful picture of black holes in the sky right we all were amazed about this the picture is actually the the the the plasma is super hot that rotate the blind black hole which is matter spiraling and falling into the hole right we essentially see the matter falling uh half an hour after that it goes inside we know generativity so we know what happens inside the Horizon we know it goes to the center and then we know nothing we don't know what happened to all that matters we have a whole everything falling in we have no idea what happened going in it's a perfectly well closed physical question because uh most likely I mean those are big black holes so stay there forever but it's very possible there are small black holes produces we don't know we're not sure produce an early universe and there may have ended up the life already so that's physic to understand there's stuff in the universe we don't understand and we have tools to try to do theories about that try to expand our theories about that so I'm very much with Eric that we sort of wasted 40 years running uh big theories like spring supersymmetry that has uh have uh most likely failed um and the problem was not to explore those theories not a beautiful Theory extremely beautiful Theory they were worth exploring the mistake was that everybody was doing that the few courageous people uh and others who were trying other directions I am pretty confident to look at the gravity I'm just coming back from the big loop quantum gravity conference early on it was fantastic the new result new attempt do I know it's right no I don't I if I have to bet I bet of this of course uh but there are and I hope that gravity is going to tell us for instance more about the early Universe what might happen closer to the big bank or inside the black holes and perhaps even for that matter these are the interesting open questions for me lost Consciousness let Consciousness to the neuroscientists yeah they're good if they're good enough yeah although if you leave it to Stuart hammeroff he'd sell you he already has the answer um last question uh before we start to wrap up and and just so appreciative and I will give you all a proper send off in just a minute uh as questions about again about uh um sir Roger Penrose this is about gravitational collapse of the wave function Sabina talked about in terms of Consciousness and perception we're not talking about that now Eric and then Carlo and Sabina um what do you what is this notion of gravitational collapse does it perhaps provide any illumination first maybe Eric if you could explicate it a little bit based on your wonderful interview with with Roger um what what is it and what are it's promising and it's drawbacks features well since I didn't have a book to promote let me promote a theory um I think that uh maybe the most interesting model of how gravity is harmonized with the quantum without being quantized in the most direct fashion is that gravity is the engine of observation and so my claim has been that um if you imagine that space time as we are told is doomed uh my favorite candidate is to replace the four dimensions one of time in three of space with those uh four dimensions together with those plus 10 additional dimensions of Einstein's theory uh for his symmetric two tensor and then what would happen is is that you would have a 14 dimensional structure and every metric would be a bridge between that 14-dimensional world and the four-dimensional world and then what you would have is that every time you chose a metric that is gravity you would pull back different data from something that looked like a Multiverse and you start to understand that the real problem this is the thing I was hoping we were going to get to so I'm going to squeeze it in here because it I don't think we did one and a half minutes the big problem in this area is trying to go after every theory that you've never thought of as if it were something called hidden variables and then you want to prove something which is that no hidden variable Theory can exist that blah blah blah it's an attempt to knock out your competition from the get-go which is that you're going to speak about all the theories that haven't been discovered now if you think about locality if you're listening let's say to a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin and you're doing it on an old style record you may hear a skip where suddenly it jumps a track and you're two minutes you're two seconds rather in your future now that's a local operation on a phonograph because the phonograph is a two-dimensional surface but in time it's a non-local operation because your your stylist skipped a track the issues with locality with unitarity with stability all of these things that Quantum field theory has to take into account is that if you're not in the proper Theory you can't really evaluate them so my my personal belief is that gravity has to be harmonized but not necessarily quantized and that gravity may be the Observer and the way in which you avoid a Schrodinger's cat problem between you know a superposition of two Quantum planets let's say is is that whatever gravity field you throw up always pulls back data from a different space to the four-dimensional space that we perceive that is compatible with where the stylus landed on the record where the record is the 14-dimensional object okay great Carl I'm sorry we only have 30 seconds if you'd like to respond to anything you've heard today or the specific question from the listeners about penrose's gravitational collapse of the wave function 30 seconds please I'm sorry I feel like you know Einstein had a couple of two or three wrong papers and I feel like if you keep asking me about the two or three wrong paper by Einstein I mean look at the Fantastic things from Japan did it's marvelous Lucas be Network look at tiling look at quasi Crystal look at gravitational class look at the uh uh uh Twisters I can't even remember that it's a marvelous amount of signs that Penrose does why looking at the only two that don't make sense okay yeah that's true the Einstein uh could have had a good career if he didn't have those blunders um guys I want to thank you all so so much and I want to just uh enter now we're in the we're in the Spin Zone now we're going to increase the angular momentum because I do want to promote uh the work of this phenomenal uh panel of uh friends and guests uh starting with Carla ravelli he's written so many books is such a gracious generous person spent 10 hours last summer recording uh of the voice of a 400 year old dead Italian man named salvia for me and all the riches that he will get from that project but his book Helga land is not to be missed I did interview with him you can find that on Dr Brian Keating YouTube channel we've done three or four interviews so far he's a phenomenal and gracious uh human being one of my favorite thinkers original thinkers I want to thank you you can find him on Twitter at Carlo ravelli uh next is my good friend Eric Weinstein could be found at Eric R Weinstein you could find many interviews he's my most frequent guest on the into the impossible podcast or Dr Brian Keating YouTube channel he has a website Eric weinstein.org you can find out about geometric Unity there and other places and join and watch wonderful videos and animations he's available at Eric Weinstein on Twitter and then last but certainly not least Sabina hasenfelder who has a wonderful new book which I've read and devoured uh and I love the the beautiful butterfly on the cover um I'm gonna ask her about that when she comes on this week uh onto the YouTube channel and she can be found as kdh on Twitter and on her she has a newsletter which I subscribe to and you should all subscribe to uh speaking of subscriptions if you do subscribe to my newsletter Brian keating.com list and you live in the US I'm sorry you folks in the UK and elsewhere I will send you a piece of space dust a piece of genuine 4.3 billion year old meteorite sample from the early solar system and that's at Brian keating.com list I'm Brian Dr Brian Keating on Twitter and YouTube and I want to thank you guys so much and thank the audience for the wonderful questions remember hit the Thumbs Up Button if you haven't already uh and leave a comment do you want to see these speakers back again what else would you like to learn about from the wonderful Institute for art and ideas and I want to thank you all so much have a wonderful rest of your day and tune in next time thank you
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Channel: Dr Brian Keating
Views: 103,790
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Keywords: Dr Brian Keating, into the impossible, brian keating, cosmology, Theory of Everything, Theories of Everything, Experimental cosmology, Brain Keating, Into the impossible Podcast, Science Podcast, Scientific interviews, exploring the universe, Universe Facts, Scientific podcasts, space news, Brain keating, Cosmology podcast, Black hole, Space discovery, Eric Wienstein, Space, Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli, Quantum mechanics
Id: RT50FTICrxI
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Length: 77min 53sec (4673 seconds)
Published: Tue Dec 26 2023
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