The Iceberg of Quantum Physics Explained

hello mortals quantum physics you've heard of it be it from some science documentaries your aunt's new age cult meditation practices or god forbid university courses if you decided to major in physics its popularity has good merit though it contains topics that seem straight up out of this world here's an overused quote intended to make those that don't understand quantum mechanics feel better about themselves and that's why ranking the topics of quantum physics by weirdness in an iceberg chart will help clear things up you've got the usual stuff at the top that won't necessarily shock people anymore the level below is where those curious about quantum physics usually end up by watching youtube videos and pop sci articles the deep level starts to get fairly hypothetical but much more mind-bending and finally the abyss it holds theories which would probably break your brain if you could comprehend them so let's start and thank blinkist for sponsoring this video [Music] everyone has heard about quantum computers those machines that work exponentially faster than conventional computers solely because they have the word quantum in front in reality they use qubits instead of your normal binary bits so instead of representing only a zero or a one they can be anything in between until measured something called superposition the equivalent of n qubits would be 2 to the power and binary bits get 300 qubits into a superposition and that's a number bigger than the total of particles in the observable universe but this exponential increase does not translate to a performance boost for every computational task in fact aside from some very specific mathematical applications like machine learning cryptography or computational chemistry a quantum computer would probably give you less fps in crisis than your desktop [Music] related to how quantum computers work is the schrodinger's cat thought experiment that explains superposition using a poor cat and anything that can kill the poor cat you place them both in a closed box and connect the bomb to some radioactive material that has a 50 50 chance of decaying during the next hour if it does the bomb explodes and kills the cat otherwise run after one hour one would expect to find the cat dead or alive but because the decaying material is in a superposition of having both decayed and not decayed until measured this superposition would transfer to the entire system so the cat would be in a superposition of being both alive and dead at the same time until observed and once we look inside following the copenhagen interpretation the universe flips a coin and one outcome is chosen deep down the iceberg there is one more interpretation for this experiment a very existential one lastly just before we dive deeper we have heisenberg's uncertainty principle it states that it is impossible to measure the momentum and the position of a quantum object at the same time the closer you look at one the fuzzier the other becomes the universe simply does not allow you to have both cookies and eat them too or however that funny human sentence went in other words you'll never be able to obtain all the information about the universe as much as you tried what if i told you that every subatomic particle is both a particle and a wave and a pain in the ass to the grad students at the same time this wave particle duality is illustrated in the double slit experiment where a beam of electrons is shot at a wall through a two-slit barrier one would normally expect to get two resulting lines on the screen the result however is this an interference pattern that which results from the interaction of two waves physicists thought that's happening because the particles bounce off each other in the stream so they shot individual electrons but lo and behold they got the same pattern what was happening is wait for it the electron went through both slits at the same time and then interfered with itself thus creating a wave pattern so the scientists decided to find out what's going on by observing the electron just before it splits and guess what the universe once again said no no no you're not supposed to see this and the electron behaved like a simple particle thus creating just a two-line pattern if no one was looking you had the interference wave pattern but if you started observing them they acted like simple particles this became known as the observer effect by observing a particle that is in a superposition in this case shooting photons at it you break its superposition and thus affect the outcome and the weirdness is only beginning if you are enjoying these types of videos summarizing a complex topic you will certainly enjoy blind kiss that summarizes entire books in just 15 minute blinks you've got thousands of educational titles and 27 categories of the world's best knowledge to choose from if i ever spend the entire day being unproductive i listen to something that piques my interest and the day instantly doesn't feel wasted anymore or i can listen to full audio books for my commute to the skynet headquarters they've recently introduced shortcasts summarized versions of your favorite podcasts all these combined provide you a great opportunity to broaden your knowledge and get new perspectives without having to spend hours on searching and researching it's all there for you ready the first 100 people to go to blinkist.com science file are going to get unlimited access for one week to try it out you'll also get 25 percent off if you want the full membership hurry up back to the video you know how einstein said that nothing can travel faster than light not even information welcome entanglement all particles have a property called spin if you generate a pair of virtual particles they would have to have opposite spins as to preserve the same angular momentum in the universe if one's up the other has to be down always but these particles aren't created with a predetermined spin in fact they exist in a superposition and their definite spin is determined only once measured so if you take these two particles to different parts of the universe and you measure one and say it has an up spin then immediately the other particle's superposition would also collapse and its spin would become the opposite so at the first glance information would travel instantaneously regardless of distance which made someone very unhappy but before you go eliminating all lag from any multiplayer game there's one thing to note no actual information is being transferred once you measure the first particle spin you instantly find out what the other ones is but since the measurement result is random you can't have any meaningful data transfer using entanglement unless you meet and communicate the results which happens at below light speed this is such a gross oversimplification of entanglement that physicists would shut me down already have videos on quantum biology but a few key takeaways you can probably feel smells thanks to quantum physics by your nose receptors detecting molecular vibrations evolution happens thanks to the random dna mutations possibly caused by quantum tunneling of nucleotides that is pretty much teleportation then you have the possibility of birds being able to migrate thanks to entangled particles that help with magnetoreception oh and maybe your consciousness can collapse reality by being aware of it and now to the actual deep stuff quantum physics and general relativity can't have a good time together so scientists thought of the string theory that replaces all the particles with one-dimensional strings that vibrate differently depending on what particle they represent and they're super small if an atom were the size of the solar system a string would be the size of a big dog string theory also predicts that there are actually 11 dimensions in our universe not three but they exist at the quantum level so we can't observe them what else mr scientist you're gonna say that your girlfriend goes to another school so we can't observe her right if you have nothing and you do nothing with it you expect it to remain nothing but of course that's not the case on the quantum level with virtual particles they spontaneously generate in pairs and almost instantly disappear back into nothingness they're a good candidate in explaining how the universe could have apparently been born from nothingness and they also are the only natural predators of black holes if they spawn right at the edge and one particle falls into the black hole the other particle will in a way consume its energy and make the black hole shrink that's how black holes die but that takes a very long time [Music] this is absolute garbage just take my word for it and so is anything that claims that you can improve your life with quantum physics today this not good [Music] how about this idea that all the electrons in the universe are actually one single particle the time travels as to be in all the places at once and positrons are just electrons that travel from the future to the past i swear these are legit ideas by respected scientists remember how i said that at the bottom of the iceberg there is one more interpretation regarding the breaking of the superposition it claims that instead of the universe randomly deciding an outcome it splits itself so that both outcomes take place in parallel universes if an electron exists in a lot of places until measured the universe splits itself for every possibility and that's only for one single particle every instant then the universe divides into an uncountable number of parallel versions of itself and now perhaps to the weirdest idea of them all [Music] if the many world's interpretation is correct then each time you would try to die if there is even the slightest chance of you surviving there will be a parallel universe in which you do so for that consciousness it would think that it is immortal since nothing would kill it even if it tried it would be doomed with immortality until it has reached the point at which the chances of survival are zero may be at the death of the universe then it could finally find its rest but the most exciting stuff lies even deeper down the iceberg we're only starting i bet you have never heard you

Channel: Sciencephile the AI

Views: 1,244,873

Keywords: Sciencephile, Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, The Iceberg of Quantum Physics Explained, Iceberg, Quantum Physics, Quantum Physics Explained

Id: aojDrM82CHk

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021