Quantum Physics Woo - Sixty Symbols

I've read something from the mail online right now this Brady Brady sent me a link to this and it combines all my worst I don't know bug bears or all of the things that really irritated me gray my gears get me under must get under my skin first of all it's the Daily Mail that's why I send it to you I know I know it's a Daily Mail which is the bastion of reactionary right-of-center news and storytelling in in the UK the UK would be a hell of a lot better britain would be a hell of a lot better if we didn't have a deal email that's the first thing then it's combined with them well as you can see quantum physics proves that there is an afterlife and claims like yeah one expert claims use evidence to confirm an existence beyond the grave and it lies in quantum physics so now we're getting into the area of quantum physics whoo and the whole idea that you know there's a fantastical element to quantum mechanics we're all one part of one integrated interconnected whole the the weird and wacky and wonderful stuff that that happens right down at the atomic molecular level and we are done wacky and wonderful stuff does happen down there somehow magically transmute so magically you can scale up to the real world so we've got all these fascinating effects happening and sort of everyday land scales it's really frustrating because this this doesn't seem to be new stuff I don't quite know why this has suddenly come to the fore but it's this guy called Robert Lanza now Robert Lanza is obviously a very clever guy he's done a lot of really neat working stem-cell research it seems I'm not a stem-cell researcher so I haven't read his work in detail but what I do know is that he's got no background in physics and of course the usual argument is or that means that's great because he's coming from left field he controlled the establishment I take the ideas away and he'll come up with these radical new ideas that's sort of like me going well you know I've absolutely no background in surgery but I'll tell you what I'm going to go in I'm going to get in there at the operating table I'm going to develop some really new techniques oh dear I've made a mess it's you know the the argument that you know left of failed ideas can come from you know very different places than you might expect that's true but you know what's what's the quote of fortune favors the prepared and you know there has to be some level of background oh you've got to think about what the history of the field has been you've got to try and work your way through what he's basically saying it's actually not that much different from a book called the tower physics very famous book has been out there an hour I guess since the 70s I can't quite remember maybe even the 60s and what it does is it connects New Age ideas sort of Eastern mysticism with quantum mechanics and quantum physics the idea that you know quantum physics means that there's an interconnectedness to all things and with his own universal spirit it said all these type of things which are deeply deeply frustrating because your quantum physics really says no such thing at all and what Lance has done is he's gone a little bit further and he's basically taking the old idea of the observer affecting a measurement of the observer affecting an object to say that actually there is no objective reality out there there is no universe that are there it's our consciousness it's our biochemistry that creates a universe I need a bit of deep breath because it is frustrating ah how can I put it off a lot of nonsense in this let's be sympathetic for a minute what has the world of quantum mechanics and physicists done wrong that allows people to start making these connections that you think experience that's a really great question and I think I was guilty of this as everyone else because when you're down at the atomic molecular single particle level weird things do happen things that we don't understand but because we don't understand them doesn't mean we can just make up any nonsense we can't just say alright we don't understand some aspect of quantum mechanics then I don't know that's because invincible pixies which are undetectable to us or popping in and out of existence and affecting the forces between these particles we don't have a license to just make a ball problem is all the weird and whacky stuff that happens at the atomic molecular level like particles of this jute jewel or schizophrenic character where they have behaved like waves you know we haven't got to the bottom of that we really don't understand what's going on there in particular something called quantum entanglement where you know which lands have describes but at length and he's right that it is weird and it is strange in that you get two particles you couple them together in some weird state is called an entangled state I'm not going to go into details for the physicists among you you you know it's all about spin and all that type of thing but you couple them in some state called an entangled state that's all we need to go into you send one particle to one end of the universe if the universes ends the other particle to the other end of the universe you make a measurement on this one and here's the the weird bit the bit that course causes so many physicists so many sleepless nights is that you make a measurement in this one and this one responds instantaneously not at the speed of light instantaneously there's clearly something you know that we're lacking there we don't understand that it's a remarkable effect but physicists work extremely hard to try and see these effects they ultra-high vacuum and very very very low temperatures those type of effects do not scale up to the macroscopic world the reason all this quantum weirdness we don't see it in the macroscopic world you know I don't diffract like a wave when I go through a door Brady is a fairly solid object in front of me it's you know it doesn't seem to have wave-like characteristics at all and that's because we interact with ultimately it's because we interact with our environment and that doesn't require consciousness it's just you know there's just a very fact that these waves these quantum waves are getting scattered of objects that's enough we don't need a consciousness to be an observer and that's one of the difficulties with this is the sort of anthropomorphic aspect of this is that you're assuming that nature that the reality has to be observed by a conscious observer to create this stuff to come back to your question Brady which is a great question you know to be fair we're so desperate to put across look at how weird and wonderful this stuff is it's it's it's fascinating and it is fascinating but the difficulty is is that sometimes that's misinterpreted and quite how we get beyond I quite how women Tay and look at how exciting this is and yet get across that well actually you've got to be very careful before you extend this to larger skills physicists are very guilty for various reasons of borrowing language from the macroscopic world to describe this world don't they you know we talk about colors and flavors of quirks and we talk and you borrow all this language to help people understand yeah and then it's misinterpreted yeah I agree quirk is actually a pretty good one cuz that's a I would argue that's a you know of all the words leeward it doesn't connect really to the world around us color is a problem but one of the things being is a problem spin is a big problem because spin is is not spin that's the difficult it's not spin as we think it cuz if you do the calculation it turns out that if spin at the quantum level was actually spin things would be spinning around it so many times the speed of light so it's yeah that it is a problem what's Thank You brilliant we didn't even prepare this at all so I've been reading this as opposed in principle which it's remarkable you can see the origin and validation of a scientific principle and this principle I'm not going to go into it but it's to do with spin and actually without this principle we wouldn't have a periodic table but it's absolutely remarkable because Pioli didn't introduce it as spin he called it something I'd translated vaguely from the German something along the lines of a two valued electron thing and that eventually became spin and it's not quite spin it's definitely not spin it's a I think most physicists would think of it as it's a property of an electron and we label it as plus or minus 1/2 but actually what it physically represents is something very very difficult indeed Lancer it basically exploit that I would say there's another line in this Daily Mail article answer uses the example of the way we perceive the world around us a person sees a blue sky sky and is told that the color they are seeing is blue but the cells in a person's brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red yeah ok that's that's that's fine I'm not an exponent biochemistry but yeah I can see how that might be the kids but that's like arguing that there isn't an objective color there but we can measure an objective color because we know the wavelength or we can measure the wavelength of the light that might Oh brains might perceive that as red or green or blue whatever but when you know what that wavelength is or what the frequency of that light is so there was an objective color there and it's this mixing of you know quantum ideas with the idea of what is subjective and what is objective I guess that makes this for physicists so painful to read but for others who don't you know don't have the background in physics they read this and go well he's using lots of big words here physicists use those same type of big words then therefore I don't send too patronizing but you know there could be an argument well you know the language there seems to be the language of a physicist so maybe he's um maybe he's onto something here and when you couple out with her you know he's coming from left failures no training in physics it's it's really oh it's it's really a neat story it's a compelling story in terms of the loan are really battling against the system to show that he's got a wonderful new out you know out of left field theory why does it matter because no physicist is going to accept this and he hasn't said anything that's going to make the average reader go and jump off a cliff or do something stupid why does it matter that some people think that maybe a misguided article is accurate because it changes the perception of physics it changes the perception of the world around us and my job as a physicist and everyone's job as a physicist is to understand the world around us and moreover we're funded were funded by the public the reason we do these videos the reason we produce papers is to disseminate our work to say look this is the way the world is and that's why it hacks off so many physicists is because it's false it's just fundamentally wrong it's like I don't know it's you're a journalist Brady it's like somebody coming up you you work really really hard to you know get the detail of a story and tell that is accurately as possible and then some likely in the Daily Mail journalist comes along and gives a completely distorted version of the facts they put they would hack you off and for physicists it's it's not only dangerous from that perspective in terms of the overall public perception it's also dangerous in terms of you know where how politicians view what's what's happening because you know politicians who are in many cases don't have a strong scientific background may well read this and think oh wow and if they've got any sort of influence I guess on the funding system and the funding ecosystem if you want to call that then you know this could direct funding away from something which is a hell of a lot more valuable into this this type of nonsense in this particular system you can't it doesn't work for this system and it doesn't work for so many systems because what you have to do is to have a limit to have an upper limit on the total amount of energy you can have

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 580,662

Rating: 4.8805585 out of 5

Keywords: sixtysymbols, Quantum Mechanics (Idea)

Id: 8DGgvE6hLAU

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/EGKW]

Deepak Chopra's 2009 interview of Lanza comes to mind. We know where that's headed.