Astrum Space - How Quantum Physics Destroys Common Sense

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

The universe doesn’t work the way you think it does. At least, not on the smallest scale. This compilation of ‪Astrum videos explores the mysterious and baffling properties of the quantum universe. These quantum experiments defy common sense, will make you question your reality, and are even changing the future of technology. ▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds.

Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 3.3. 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.S. College PC. A unified theory of everything has a monumental task on its hands. It must bring together the strangest elements of quantum mechanics and relativity,

the rules on the macro scale and the micro, which is really hard to do, because there are some very weird things going on in the quantum world. Uncertainty. Quanta. Superpositions. So, let's begin there. After my last video on this topic, I got loads of different comments from you all, eager to hear my take on the answer to everything.

I claimed last time that I believe some form of string theory offered the best chance of a unified theory of everything. It's time to show you how much heaven. heavy lifting strings can do on the quantum scale. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. While I don't claim to have solved the theory's mathematics, I believe that I've come up with a model that pieces all the phenomena together. Quantum physics's mathematics has rapidly overtaken its understanding of why the things

we observe are going on. Let's try to help conceptual understanding catch up. As I said in my last video, it all starts. with strings. Let's discuss a few properties of a vibrating string. This will help us to see why they lend themselves to quantum principles. We need to start with that first word, quantum. Simply put, quantum is derived from the same root as the word quantity.

It's the strange principle that, on a small enough scale, the universe seems to work in discrete quantities rather than operating on one continuous scale. This is a little unintuitive, much like many things in quantum mechanics. So let's illustrate what we mean with an example. If you are running, I could ask you to half the speed you're running at. You could half your speed again and again and again. Is there a limit to how many times you can half that speed? While you might struggle with the precision necessary to do it, in classical physics, there's

no reason you couldn't keep halving and halving. halving your speed indefinitely, as there's no limit to the number of times you can divide a number by two. There's always a smaller number. In the quantum world, this is not so. When it comes to energy levels, momentum, and other attributes, when you reach a small enough number, you discover that the universe does not work on a continuous scale, but rather in discrete quantities. An electron in a hydrogen atom can have exactly minus 13.6 electron volts of energy, or it can have minus 3.4 electron volts, but under no circumstance can it have an energy level between those values. This has been proven experimentally.

A theory of everything must make use of an underlying universe geometry that is fundamentally quantized. The concept of some kind of web of strings fits that bill well, particularly when you bring in the transverse standing waves and harmonics. When plucking a guitar string, a standing wave can form that has one peak or two, but not a value in between those. This is because harmonics are formed by a combination of waves traveling along the string in one direction, perfectly resonating with waves traveling in the other. If the speed or frequency of the waves don't line up perfectly, the two waves will ultimately

disrupt each other, leading to the collapse of the standing wave. Only waves with just the right amount of speed and energy can create standing waves on a given string. So immediately, we have an interesting mirror to our observation that subatomic particles have quantized momentum and energy levels. So do standing waves on strings. The next interesting point to note about waves is that by combining the correct sequence of sine waves, you can create any wave pattern of wave you might desire, handy for creating the rich complexity of a universe. This mathematical principle was first discovered by Jean-Baptista Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician,

and is very useful in the study of heat transfer and vibrations as it works the other way too. Any wave can be broken down into a number of constituent sign waves. When two waves try to occupy the same place, they will amplify each other if they're both rising or both falling, but will cancel each other out if they're in opposition. This can lead to all sorts of waves being formed, square waves, intermittent waves, and even waves that only have a single peak and are flat at all other locations. This becomes easier to do. the more waves you have to overlap. This is an interesting observation, as it helps answer an important question that any theory of everything must be able to answer. Where do particles

come from? When I say particles, I'm not specifically talking about molecules or atoms, but the components that make these objects up. Atoms split into protons, neutrons and electrons. protons, protons split into quarks, and there are leptons and bosons. Without needing to go into exactly what all of these things are, or why they have some of the weird names that they do, I mean, who decided to call a quark strange, charm, or bottom? It's enough to say that they come in many different flavors. These are the smallest building blocks of reality that we know of so far.

Why do they exist? Well, in a model using strings, they are the rising and falling of a wave. This matches Einstein's observation that mass and energy were essentially just the same thing in different forms, as laid out in his E equals MC squared equation. A wave is the motion of energy. Mass can be that too. The narrower the peak of the wave, the more defined a particle is in terms of its location on that string.

might take issue with the idea that both of these waves represent the location of a single particle. However, curiously, this matches another important facet of particles. They sometimes are a little vague about where exactly they are in space. If you know much about quantum mechanics, you have likely heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This is the idea that we cannot know a particle's momentum and position at the same time. We get a decent approximation at large scales. It's pretty easy to see where you are and where you're going, but at small enough levels

this becomes impossible to do. The more precisely we know where a photon is, the less information we have about its momentum, and vice versa. This isn't just because we have bad techniques for observing them, this is apparently a fundamental truth. If we think about particles being the sum of many overlapping waves, however, we think about particles, However, this suddenly makes a lot more sense. Take a look at this wave.

It is perfectly defined in terms of where it is going, but if we consider the peaks of this wave to represent the location of the subatomic particle, or at least the possibility that the particle is at this location, there are a lot of places it can be. So for this given string, we have perfect knowledge as to its speed and direction, but are uncertain about its position in a given space of string, perfectly in line with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. If we converge several different waves into a single point, we can take advantage of Fourier's mathematical trick to cancel out some of the peaks of our wave.

The more waves we add coming in from different directions, the more our particle becomes defined in space. But look at our particle now. many strings are running through it. Each of these is a separate vector line, representing momentum in a different direction. It's no longer quite so possible to pin down where this particle is going next, as there are several options that could be true. Perfectly pinning down a particle in terms of its location would require vector lines that

could lead anywhere. This is starting to get into territory where you would need information from the entire universe before a single particle can be truly solved in terms of its location in space and time, which is a little headache inducing. Perhaps the universe makes do with close approximations most of the time until someone looks closely. For this model, we must discard our concept of a particle as a localized object, but instead we define them as the convergence of different waves, coming together at a single point and then diverging again. This divergence doesn't feel right to us. We are uncomfortable with the idea of our particles

only being really there at a given moment and dissipating afterwards. However, those of you familiar with the double slit experiment, which I have covered in an earlier video, recognize that this is an uncanny match to another odd experimental result. A single photon released from an emitter and passing through two slits will somehow pass through both slits, interfering with itself on its journey. The photon reaches the far detector as a single particle again, indicating a new convergence at that point, but by sending many photons along this path, it becomes clear that interference is taking place in the intervening space.

The photon seems to leave as a particle, and arrive as a particle, but in the intervening space, it takes on the properties of a propagating, rippling wave. Already we begin to see how some of the strangest aspects of the quantum world fit with the idea of strings carrying waves of energy. But this is only the first part of my model. To really see how much a theory matches the universe around us, we need to explore the motion of particles across time and space. To better understand entanglement and superpositions, and to do that, We need to explore how strings lead to gravity, time dilation, and other principles of relativity on larger scales.

We need to have a clear concept of how time works. My model accommodates that, but it will have to wait until my third video in this series to fully explain. In the meantime, do you agree with what I've said so far? Are there other aspects of quantum mechanics that you feel suit or do not suit the concept of strings, leave a comment in the description below to let me know. You've been hacked. Those three words can be the ultimate gut punch.

When you read them, any feelings of safety and security get ripped away. Whether it's your personal messages, your social media passwords, your bank details, your company files, or anything. The consequences of having messages that were once private become public is an unlawful. awful feeling, with potentially dire consequences. So it's no wonder that truly unhackable encryption is such a sought-after technology, and China may be leading the way to just that. How? It's all thanks to a tiny Chinese satellite, a record-setting experiment, and a tantalizing new technology, one relying on that magic word, quantum. And according to scientists, the method China used, quantum key distribution, promises to be unhackable

due to fundamental principles of quantum physics itself. But what is actually going on beneath all the hype? Are we really at the dawn of an impenetrable secrecy forever? Or will that enigmatic word, quantum, be the death of secrets instead? I'm Alex McCulligan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we dispel the Merck and the mystery around the new era of quantum satellites and communication and reveal exactly how quantum encryption could change our world forever. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.

Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit USAA.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. Tricks to keep our messages secret have been around for thousands of years, almost as long as humans have had written secrets. For example, Julius Caesar used a cipher in his messages to appear like unintelligible nonsense to an enemy, but they could be easily decoded by his generals or friends who knew the trick.

The idea Caesar used was simple. For every letter of the alphabet, he simply replaced the letter with another letter, a set number of places further up or down the alphabet. For example, if he moved everything right three spaces, then A would become D, B would become E, and so on. X would wrap around the alphabet to become A. In this way, Caesar could keep vital information secret, garbling phrases like this one. But as long as you knew the number of places he moved the letters along, in this case three

to the right, then you could easily move everything back to reveal the true and important message, Astrum is great. In this case, that single piece of information, 3 to the right, is the key that allows you to unlock the cipher, and encryption has been making use of this same essential concept ever since, albeit with a little more complexity. Unfortunately, this cipher has an obvious weakness. There are not that many letters in the alphabet, only 26. So if you came across a message encrypted with Caesar's cipher, you could try moving everything

along once, then twice, and so on until the words started making sense. At most, you'd only need to try moving letters 25 times, and you could crack Caesar's code. It would only take a few minutes to know if you were on the right track. This method of encryption hacking is known as a brute force attack, making guesses at the key again and again until the encryption lies decoded at your feet. It is a valid strategy, provided there aren't too many options of what the key could be. Of course, encryption experts over the years worked out more and more complicated ways of jumbling up the letters to make it harder and harder to crack through brute force.

For instance, why keep all the letters of the alphabet in order? Keyword ciphers, don't worry about that. This second type of cipher works by simply deciding on a keyword and then laying the rest of the alphabet in their normal order after that keyword. Using the resulting jumble as the starting point of your cipher means that a code cracker will never be able to break your code by simply moving everything along. Now they need to know the keyword. Or do they?

Technically, with sufficient patience, this type of encryption is still crackable even without the key. Of course, there are approximately 403 septillion ways you could rearrange the alphabet, which naturally would take far too long to try each option individually. If you tried one arrangement, it would take longer than the history of the universe. But it is still technically crackable through brute force if you find a way of a special speeding this guessing process up. It would take humans far too long to do something like this. But once the computer was invented in the early 19th century, encryption that were not robust enough

could fall to computers making guesses much, much faster. If a human guessing is like a hammer hitting the door, computers are like jackhammers. Modern 7 CPUs can perform billions to trillions of calculations per second. While it would still take a computer a long time to crack a keyword cipher, trillions are far less than septillions after all, this time can be consistently reduced by bringing more computing power to bear. There is a fear that government agencies like the CIA have secret supercomputers with endless CPU, brute forcing their way through the encryption.

of messages. To combat this, modern encryption does not specifically rely on ciphers anymore. Instead, many types of encryption, such as the widely used RSA crypto systems, rely on complex mathematical problems for which there is no known algorithm a computer can use to solve them. RSA works by taking two massive prime numbers and multiplying them together. The resulting number, called the modulus is part of the public key that is shared with others. To unlock the encryption, a hacker needs to know which two prime numbers were used to create the modulus, and there's no easy way to factor it back into its prime numbers, even a supercomputer would struggle. Ultimately, the principle behind encryption has increased in complexity, but mostly

works under the same basic idea. Messages are muddled, by mixing them up according to some kind of rule. And if you possess a certain key, the message can be unscrambled. Technically, those messages can be unscramble through brute force methods even without the key, but the keys have become so complex that even with powerful supercomputers, brute force methods supposedly would take thousands of years to be effective. So, our messages are safe then? No, because there is a point of vulnerability.

If you want to decode an encrypted message, the sender of the message still needs to give you the key. If this key can be intercepted, the encryption can be undone without any need for brute force methods. And so we turn to quantum encryption, and what China just achieved with the Mosey satellite. For four decades, scientists have theorized. about a method of sending encryption keys that is completely irrefutably unhackable. Very cleverly, they don't rely on simply being too complicated for hackers to bother,

but rather utilize the fundamental principles of the universe, the principles of quantum superposition and uncertainty. We know that particles, although they appear solid and immutable up here in the regular world, very strangely on a small enough level. Specifically, they behave like particles and waves at the same time. Now, you can measure the position of a particle, but you'd struggle to determine its momentum. On the other hand, a wave's momentum is easy enough to measure, but you'd have to settle for measuring its wavelength rather than its exact position. The result of this is that we cannot actually know both the speed and position.

of particles at a quantum level at the same time, at least not with a good deal of uncertainty. This is known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and is a proven fact of quantum physics. Weirdly enough, we also know that once the particles are observed, they settle on one of the two states. It has been proved through experiments like the double-slit experiment, that a single particle can travel through multiple paths at the same time, and only settles on one path or the other once it is interacted with. Until then, it travels down both paths in what is known as superposition, left and right. Like Schrodinger's famous cat, neither alive nor dead, until the box is opened and it is seen.

These principles of quantum physics make it so that once a particle is observed, it behaves differently from when it is not observed. And in the early 1980s, scientists realized that you could incorporate this into a very safe way to send encryption keys. If you converted your encryption key into something physical, a stream of photons for example, and came up with a clever enough method, it would be possible, through statistics, to see whether your photons had been observed or not between the sender and the sender. receiver of the key. In other words, it would be possible to see whether some sneaky hacker

had intercepted your encryption key in transit, noted it down, and then sent it back on its way to its original recipient, hoping to remain undetected. According to the principles of quantum superposition, the moment such an observation occurred, the key would subtly alter, and this alteration could be detectable with the right know-how, and knowledge is power. If you know whether your encryption key is observed or not, you can hold off on sending the private message until you have confirmed you have an unobserved key. The message itself can then be safely transmitted through the regular channels. This is brilliant. Of course, getting particles to travel long distances in a state of superposition.

is not actually very easy. If they bump into an atom along the way, it could collapse the superposition. But scientists realized that this problem could be minimized if most of the journey was done in a perfect vacuum, or in other words, if the particles could be transmitted through space. And it is China that first brought this theory into reality. Just one month ago at the time of writing, on the 19th of March 2025, Chinese scientists announced that they had broken a record for using a satellite to distribute a quantum key between Beijing and a South African university near Cape Town.

To do it, they used a tiny micro-satellite called Mozi, which sent pairs of entangled particles across the massive 12,900-kilometer distance. Each individual entangled pair had a risk of collapsing on route, but with enough pairs, recipients on each end could compare parts of their code and statistically verify that their particles, and thus the key they were carrying, were either observed or unobserved. Mosey is only 23 kilograms, an order of magnitude smaller than previous attempts at a quantum satellite, and the successful completion of its mission opens the way for an entire distributed network of interconnected quantum satellites, transferring quantum keys across the globe so that

people can send messages in safety. Imagine a world where every financial transaction, every email, and the entire internet was completely unhackable, where true privacy was a guaranteed fact of life, thanks to watertight encryption. For those who value such privacy, it will be a utopia. Or will it be? Is it all a little too good to be true? There is one facet of this that gives me pause that nobody seems to be addressing. Quantum key distribution works via satellites distributing quantum keys, which are completely unhackable, all well and good. But note what I'm saying. there.

They distribute the keys, not the messages themselves. In my research on this subject, I have repeatedly seen the assertion that the encrypted messages can be safely sent via the normal channels, because you are able to confirm via quantum key distribution that no one has intercepted your key. The reason they do this is because quantum technology is not yet very good at sending large amounts of data. A key is fine, but a larger file is better sent through. conventional means.

This is very clever and seems logically very sound, but how is this any safer from brute force methods than current encryption? Brute force methods work by guessing keys, one after another after another. They do not work by intercepting keys. Certainly there are hacking methods that do work by trying to intercept the key, as this is far easier than the vast computational power required by brute force. But if you do have access to a powerful enough computer, I've not found an explanation for why you care if the key is quantum or not.

Either way, it's the encryption itself that is the defense, not how well you've hidden the key. I also imagine a world where hackers don't care if they're noticed or not. While this would mean that the secret message was never sent because a safe key was never found, if hackers just kept their eye on it. satellite, it would effectively deny the use of that satellite to its owner. Denial of service attacks are a nefarious method hackers use to bully people into giving them what they want. Imagine if your vastly expensive quantum satellite could be rendered a useless hunk of metal because too many messages were getting intercepted. But back to the

first concern. Certainly you might point out that most people do not have access to powerful supercomputers, so for the average hacker, root force methods are simply not an option. But a new technology is coming, that could change all that, and it is also using that magic word, quantum. Experts believe that the first publicly available quantum computer is just a decade or so away. Quantum computers likely won't replace all classical computers, they're a bit niche, and some general, everyday tasks like browsing the web are actually just as fast on a classical computer as a quantum one.

But thanks to a quantum computer's ability to compute using qubits that can be in a variety of superpositions at once rather than just bits that can either be one or zero, there are certain specific tasks quantum computers are much faster at, scarily fast, unnervingly fast. And one of the tasks it's thought they'll be much better at is brute forcing encryption. This is not a hypothetical technology. Quantum computers are already here, in the hands of powerful corporations and governments. In 2015, Google claimed that its D-Wave computer had proven itself 100 million times faster at performing certain tasks than a regular desktop computer.

For reference, it supposedly did in a second what a very computer. regular computer would take 10,000 years to do. Think of the implications of that. Modern encryption is only safe from brute force methods because encryption is so complex nowadays that it would take a computer thousands of years to work through all the possibilities for keys. But what happens when quantum supercomputers get into the hands of every hacker out there? When those encryption methods praised for being safe because they would take

thousands of years to hack are crackable in moments. Suddenly, no regular encryption is safe anymore. This is not just me being alarmist. The US government fears this too. The International Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the US Department of Commerce, is so concerned about the arrival of this technology that they are telling companies to start preparing for it now by changing the fundamental nature of their their encryption.

After all, although quantum computers are not here yet, there's nothing to stop hackers from collecting encrypted messages and financial data now, and then just holding onto them until the day arrives that they can get their new quantum computer from the shops. Passwords, financial transactions, and certain sensitive messages will still be sometimes relevant a decade from now. And once those messages are all cracked with ease, a way. wave of crimes and expose secrets will sweep across the world. But there is hope. The NIST has been compiling a defense against the threat posed by quantum computing,

and this defense does not lie in unhackable quantum keys, but something more mundane, algorithms. Yes, similar in idea to the algorithms that are protecting encryption already. However, rather than protecting messages by scrambling them with complex mathematical problems that will take a long time to solve, the NIST is preparing five algorithms that don't care how much computational power you have. For instance, their FIPS 204 standard makes use of mathematical lattices, points in space, with an arbitrary number of dimensions to work in. The key requires you to find a particular pattern within the lattice, like locating the

specific path in a 5D maze. As there is no known mathematical algorithm that can find this path efficiently, there's no algorithm that you can give to a quantum computer. They struggle with the extra dimensions and can't solve the problem any faster than a classical computer. To put it simply, it doesn't matter how strong your muscles are if you don't know where to hammer. Phipps 204 is an example of a quantum-resistant or post-quantum algorithm. And we're back to where we started.

A new technology has emerged, and both hackers and encryption experts are handed the same new toys. Each made massive advances in their field, but as with the rise of computers, the situation stabilizes. Computers threatened privacy, but then ultimately restored it. Quantum technology both improves privacy and finds new ways to threaten it. The cycle of history repeats itself, with developers creating new algorithms and hackers trying to find points of weakness, and each success on one side drives the other to try all the harder. So have quantum satellites ushered in an era where privacy is guaranteed?

I highly doubt it. Even if the key is completely secure, hackers can always find another way in. equally, has quantum computing ripped down every defense and ended secrecy forever? I also find myself skeptical. Brute Force might soon be more effective as a hacking tool, but already companies and governments are pivoting to new defenses that can weather the coming storm. But who can say for sure? Right now the future is in a sort of superposition of its own, both secure and un-

unsecured, private and public. And much like all things quantum, that superposition will only collapse once it is observed firsthand. On a day 35 years ago, a collection of atoms and particles combined into a discrete, complex structure that, somehow, was more than the sum of its parts. The elements involved were mainly oxygen, 65% of the total mass, to be exact,

But the structure also included 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, 3.5% nitrogen, and a touch of calcium and phosphorus. These elements combine in our universe all the time. But what was surprising about this particular structure is that it got up one day and identified itself with the name Alex McCulligan. It was me. The same thing happened to the elements that made up you and everyone that you know, and the elements that comprise everyone that has ever lived, which, when you think about it, is decidedly odd. How does what is essentially a pile of rocks, air, water and chemicals have a sense of identity?

And yet, somehow that is what happened. consciousness arose from dust and seemingly keeps arising. Which begs the question, where exactly did consciousness come into this equation? At the end, with a fully developed human brain, with an animal brain, a plant, a single bacteria? Or can we make the claim that if matter can be conscious, a single atom of matter is conscious too? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me down the rabbit hole today as we enter the Wonderland that is consciousness. Our best theories on how it arises and as we attempt to answer one simple question,

can a particle be conscious? To begin with, I'll acknowledge that on the surface that seems like a facetious question. Most people have a fairly good gut instinct about what is conscious and what isn't. You are conscious. After all, you have a sense of identity. You make choices and you consider the information your senses bring you and you ascribe value to what you experience. To paraphrase a famous philosopher called René Descartes, we cannot doubt our own consciousness because otherwise who would be doing the doubting? We think, therefore, we are. Beyond that, we are usually quite confident of the consciousness of the fellow humans around us.

Although we cannot see inside their heads, we can usually ascribe to them the same capacity for thought and experience that we enjoy, except, of course, when they're on the other side of the political spectrum to us. But our instincts start to get a little more hesitant after that. Researchers into animal behaviour were asked in a survey whether they believed the animals they were studying were conscious. While 92% of the respondents were happy to say non-human primates were conscious, only 73% extended this attribute to other mammals. For octopuses, it dropped to 64%, birds, 61% and for insects, only 51% of the sampled researchers believe them to

have an intrinsic sense of self. It's likely that the general population, feel a similar way. However, here we have already strayed into the big problem of consciousness, belief and feelings. The above survey was based on the gut instinct of those surveyed, as conscious experience is very difficult to prove. Just consider the debate surrounding whether artificial intelligence counts as consciousness, when it can mimic humans quite convincingly. Is a recorded message conscious? A written note? All this is hardly a solid foundation for good science. We need something a little more precise and measurable

if we are to answer whether matter itself can possess consciousness. Which is unfortunate, as no such test currently exists. In fact, there is very little consensus among philosophers and cognitive scientists as to what consciousness, or qualia, instances of subjective, conscious experience, as they call it, actually even is. There are plenty of theories as to how we get it. Global neural workspace theory notes that particular parts of the brain light up when we think about certain things.

It attaches consciousness to these areas, the parts of the brain doing front of the brain thinking. It points out that we can only perceive one thing at a time in the stage of our mind. For instance, have you seen the optical illusion of the vase in the face? If you look at this image, you might see a vase or you might see a face, but your mind flicks between the two interpretations without trying to see both simultaneously. Consciousness is a stage, and only so many things can have prominence there at once. However, another prominent theory called integrated information theory takes a different tact.

It claims that consciousness is a product of information, and thus consciousness is not formed in the parts of the brain that do the same. the thinking per se, but rather in the parts of the brain that do the perceiving. A large enough pool of information that can influence itself will always be conscious according to this theory. An interesting case study that supports this idea is what happens to you when you're asleep or unconscious. Now, you might consider consciousness to be your ability to perceive events, evaluate them, form opinions on them, and then make decisions as to what to do about them. But even when we are asleep, when we are unconscious, this ability doesn't completely go away.

For instance, what happens when you tickle the nose of a sleeping person? After a few moments of tickling, they might move to swat your hand away, or at least move their face to avoid it. Which means that some part of their brain, despite being unconscious, still evaluated information, assigned value to it, like, I don't like having my nose tickled, and made and carried out a decision to do something about it. It might lack the conscious experience, but something in the brain was clearly aware of what was going on. Can you be said to possess consciousness even in this scenario?

This is not the only instance of our brains doing thinking quietly, behind the curtain, so to speak. Some people with sight impairment have been found to possess something known as a blind sight. They are blind, they have no conscious awareness of sight or anything around them. And yet, the neural pathways in their brain that carry visual information are still intact. As a result, patients with blind sight can navigate rooms without bumping into things, in spite of not being able to perceive what is there. Their brain knows where to go, even if they don't. Consciousness is about more than just the higher level thoughts we experience. In spite of all the advances in brain scans that have taken place over the years,

it is still no clearer which of these theories about the origins of consciousness are correct, if either of them. Because neither really explains the nature of consciousness itself. Yes, they might try to explain where in the brain it happens, but what it actually is, That's still up for debate. Which brings us back to our original question, can particles be conscious? If there is no consensus amongst the investigators studying this phenomenon, it seems that we need to ask a few questions of our own.

Let's try pairing down what we mean by the word consciousness. How much thinking needs to occur before we can say that a thing is conscious? We are usually fairly generous in this regard. If we are happy to say that even small infants are conscious, even if the thoughts they might be thinking might be a little more than happy, happy, oh, what's that sad? Then it seems that not many thoughts are acquired before we can call a thing conscious. In fact, if you looked at a rock and could prove with absolute certainty that it thought even a single thought, I believe it's reasonable to say that for a moment that rock possessed at least a slither of consciousness.

Second, let's describe the apparatus of consciousness. As has been alluded to already, consciousness is a product of the brain. You likely have an innate sense of this. Consider your whole body and ask yourself, where are you in that body? Look at your hands, look at your chest, your legs. Those belong to you, and yes, you can. can control them, but are they where you are? The bit of you that is aware?

Unlike. Most people when asked about it would say that their core self exists in the space behind their eyes, i.e. the exact same location as their brain. And this makes sense. Remove the brain and the body is no longer alive. Cease all brain activity and the sense of self vanishes entirely. Conscious experience is connected to brain activity. And what exactly is brain activity? Electrical impulses moving through neurons.

Anytime we think neurons are lighting up. We might not be able to explain exactly why this leads to human consciousness, but that is what the evidence indicates is happening. So how many neurons are required before we can say we are thinking a thought? A billion? A million? Just one? That seems to be down to your own personal viewpoint. What threshold of activity is necessary before you're willing to say a thing is conscious? Is there a line something must cross? Or is it a scale where anything above zero is good enough? You yourself will have varying levels of brain activity between sleep and wakefulness. Are you conscious and unconscious? Or do you possess a certain level of consciousness all along.

Perhaps the answer really is that consciousness is a spectrum, just as the IIT theorists would have it. And if we are willing to agree that only a single thought or even a single firing neuron is necessary before we can agree to a thing being conscious, albeit barely, then it becomes possible to conclude, consciousness must be present in almost everything that exists, anything carrying electrical impulses. That may well include things that don't have brains at all. And how much further down does this go? If we claim that a single neuron firing represents an infinitesimal speck of consciousness because of the chemical and electrical

processes going on within it, does that mean we can go even more fundamental with consciousness? A neuron fires when electrical charge changes, causing an action potential. to fire, sending an electrical signal down the axon. If that electrical signal is the source of consciousness, does that mean consciousness exist because of the electrons and the ions themselves? Are other things with electrons moving also slightly conscious? Wiring, carrying electricity, atoms chemically reacting with each other, exchanging electrons and altering their charge?

Or do we go even deeper again? deeper again, down to the quantum level. We know that particles exist in a state of superposition until something happens that collapses the waveform and a particle is forced to decide if it's here or there. Is it actually deciding at that moment employing a tiny level of consciousness? I don't know. This is pure speculation at this point, as science has no universally agreed upon idea of what causes waveform collapse.

All that we know is that it happens, and oddly enough, it happens somewhere between the start of the waveform's propagation and when something consciously becomes aware of that waveform in a way that measures it. Do with that information as you wish. Consciousness down on the scale of particles themselves is certainly strange to consider, but there are some heavy-hitting physicists today who are open to quantum. effects playing an important role in consciousness, including Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose. There's even an official term for it, and psychism. The concept that everything contains at

least a tiny bit of consciousness, which is how consciousness can arise from matter in the first place. And what are you other than organized particles you've consumed throughout your lifetime? It seems counter to common sense, but then so do a lot of the universe's laws. Strange or not, it has advantages over the alternative, which I find a little worrying. When we say that some kind of threshold is necessary before we are willing to say that a thing is conscious, there's a lot of room to be arbitrary in where exactly we put those goal posts. We might say, everything with a brain is conscious, animals and humans. We're You might say all humans are conscious and all animals are not, but worryingly a smarter

human with more brain power and more firing neurons might decide that every human with fewer firing neurons than him doesn't pass the consciousness test. Or maybe one day we'll discover an alien life form and find ourselves in the disturbing position where no human is smart enough, or possessing the correct threshold of electrical activity in their brain to be considered conscious by an alien's definition. And a particle be conscious? Certainly, I don't believe that atoms are bumping around, thinking to themselves that electrons just aren't the same as they were back in the good old days, or that protons feel neutrons are a little bit bland. But if all our consciousness derives these fundamental elements

of physics, and we have not yet found some extra ingredient beyond that, then, Is the idea that particles are conscious really that far-fetched? At least a tiny bit? Naturally, it would be impossible to measure. But in that respect, particles are in good company. It's currently scientifically impossible to prove that anything or anyone in the entire universe is conscious at all, with only one exception. You.

Scientifically, you can't prove consciousness in anyone else. So how many people do you want to include in the club? What are your thoughts about consciousness? Are all particles conscious? If not, what is consciousness and where does it come from? If you like this topic, there's a similar one I would like to do on a video about free will. We didn't really get into that in this script, but it's a fascinating topic. Let me know in the comments below if that's something you'd like to see.

Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere of the crowd. But too often, life gets busy. Or the price holds you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip.

Book it with Price Line. Download the Priceline app or visitpriceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Can information travel backwards in time? It's the sort of thing that would be really useful if it were true. You could tell your past self not to eat that burrito that didn't agree with you, or you could reveal to yourself the winning lottery numbers. But it just doesn't happen.

The resulting paradoxes alone would make the whole thing laughable. In our universe, time always seems to flow in one direction, forward. The idea of travelling backwards in time, or even simply communicating with your past self, seems so outlandish, it can't possibly be true. So why is it that on the quantum level, information seems to be doing just this? What? You haven't noticed particles communicating backwards in time? Well, perhaps we need to talk about the strangeness that is quantum mechanics. It is an effect that, if understood, could one day bring us technologies like faster than light communication,

or faster than light travel? At least, if we could some sort of, how harness it. But even if we can't, it's an undeniably strange insight into the unseen world around us. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrom. You're about to see some real-world experiments that are mind-bendingly weird. And if by the end of this video, you enjoyed what you learned, feel free to give this video a like and subscribe to the channel. Just please don't break causality when you do. So what do I mean by part of the particles travelling backwards in time. By all accounts, it doesn't seem possible. In previous

videos, I mentioned that objects would require infinite energy to even go fast enough to reach the speed of light. So how could something go so fast as to reverse the usual direction of time and arrive at a destination just not instantly, but before they left? Not even light can do that, and it's the fastest thing we know of. Well, this rule about nothing travelling faster than light is mostly true for the macro scale universe that we live in, and by macro scale I mean everything significantly larger than an atom. But physicist John Stuart Bell noticed an exception to this rule when it comes to quantum entangled particles.

Okay, so let's start there. What is a quantum tangled particle? In quantum physics, it's possible to hit two particles together in such a way as the to link them together so that by measuring the one particle, you learn things about the other. For instance, if you know that the particles originally had a total of zero momentum, and you learn the momentum of one of the newly quantumly tangled particles, you know the momentum of the other particle will be the exact reverse, making sure the total remains zero. Effectively, by measuring the one particle, you can learn things about the other.

This works for other particle properties too, such as position, polarization, or spin. On the surface, there's nothing too weird about this. It's no different from me meeting up with a friend and discussing our plans for the evening. We agree to go out and we agree that I will pay for the evening and my friend won't. Then, no matter how far we go on our night out, or even if at some point separate, I know I will be paying and my friend will know that he won't. This is how Einstein thought it worked, only it turned out that Einstein was wrong. Because as it happens, me and my friend did not discuss in advance who would be paying, and the strangest of all, we still both agree with each other anyway, 100% of the time,

no matter how far apart we are. This is the strange thing about quantum entanglement, and quantum physics in general. We like to think of particles as having fixed properties. However, our first mind-bending experiment shows that particles only have properties when you detect those properties. Until then, they're kind of vague about the whole properties thing, instead only relying on probabilities as defined by a quantum wave equation. This doesn't make sense intuitively.

Looking at a thing shouldn't be what gives it properties, right? Well, how would you know? If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? According to quantum physics, not necessarily. Let's talk about the first mind-bending experiment, the Bell experiment. The maths for this is pretty complicated, but bear with me, it's worth the ride. The experiment was first conceptualised by John Stuart Bell, who wanted to know if particles really did have secret properties that they carried around with them, knowing. as hidden variables, or whether they really were making some of it up on the spot. He noticed an interesting mathematical fact about the spin of particles.

Before we go any further, I should probably mention that quantum spin isn't the same as normal spin. Misleadingly, quantum spin actually defines whether a particle is influenced, pushed or polled, by a magnetic field. The name isn't important, but it is important. to note that these particles aren't actually spinning, and so can have different spin values in almost any given direction. Now, let's take two quantum entangled particles, and let's say that we've arranged it so that their spin adds up to a total of zero between them. This means that if one particle would be pulled by a field, the other will be pushed by it,

an equal amount along that direction, with the understanding that this doesn't tell you anything about their spin in other directions. One of the features of quantum spin is that if we measure an entangled particle spin in any given direction, let's say up and down, it will have a 50% chance to be spinning up and an equal 50% chance to be spinning down. But remember, once you measure the other entangled particle, it will have a 100% chance to be spinning in the opposite direction to the first particle. On this fact alone, there is no way to tell if the two particles already knew their spin

or are somehow deciding it on the spot and conferring it with each other now that they've been asked. But Bell noticed a clever thing by asking a clever question. If you measured two quantum entangled particles from two randomly selected directions, what are the odds that their spin for different directions would match? Now let's define that at any time a particle is spinning towards a detector, it spin is up, and any time it is spinning away from a detector, it spins down. What are the odds that both particles would be spinning up up or down down when tested,

and what are the odds that they would contrast? Let's formalize this with a little experiment. Here we have two entangled particles, with three detectors reading their spin in different directions. If particle A and B are both red with the top detector, then one of their spins will be up and the other will be down. They are entangled. This is what we looked at previously.

However, if particle A is red using the top detector, while particle B is red with one of the other 2, these two directions of spin aren't opposites. So particle B has flexibility in which way it goes. Quantum physics claims the particles are making up their attributes on the spot. So once you'd measure the spin of particle A using the top detector, it was a 50-50, whether the spin on the other particle using one of the other detectors would match or contrast. But this is not what classical physics produced. Let me show you what I mean.

Classical physics claims that particles each carry around secret information defining their spin in any given direction. So for our three tested directions, each particle would have a value already. They aren't making it up on the spot. Let's say, hypothetically, our particle's hidden information states up, up, down for particle A and down, down, up, for particle. particle B, as B must be opposite to A for each of the directions 1, 2 and 3. Let's pick out a random detector for A.

We select Detector 1. Detector 1 tells us that A is spinning up. Now let's select a random detector for particle B. We select 1 there too. This detector gives us a reading of down. 1-1-up-down. We can actually map out all the possible outcomes of this process of random selection in the graph. There are nine possible outcomes if you were to only measure from two detectors at a given

time. 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-1, 2, and so on. For each of these possible selections, we have fixed hidden variable results that we know already, because we hypothetically define them earlier. Let's fill them in now. Of course, if you detect particles using the same detector on both particles, you'll get a contrasting result because they're entangled. But we're not interested in these results.

Classical physics and quantum physics both agree on this, so let's remove them. What are the odds that two different detectors for particle A and B will see the same result, and what are the odds they'll differ? Remember, quantum physics expected it to be 50-50. Particles are making up their values on the spot, and so it's perfectly random which they'll choose, as they aren't confined by the opposite's rule here. But in this table, classical physics says that contrasting results only happen a third of the time.

The other times, they're either both up or both down. we do this many times, assigning different directions each time, and ignore exceptions, for instance, where the spins of the particles are all up, up, up, or down, down, down. Once you crunch the numbers, the important thing to take from all of this is that according to the maths, classical physics predicts a matching outcome 55% of the time, while quantum physics continues to simply predict 50%. table be damned. This percentage difference was the key.

By quantumly entangling particles and running this test over and over again, you could now see which percentage was correct. And it turned out the winner was quantum physics. Particles were just apparently making up their spin results on the spot, which is spooky. Because not only does that call into question our perceptions of reality itself, but that also means that the moment one particle decided on its spin result, its quantum entangled partner instantly knew that that decision had happened. You could test both particles at once, no matter the distance, and this same result would come back. Somehow, information had travelled

from the one particle to the other in no time at all, far faster than light itself. So already, something strange was going on here. This result disproved Einstein's predictions and showed that some information does seem to go faster than light. But we can take this one step further and have information going back in time. There is another experiment known as the delayed choice test. Its primary purpose was to explore the fundamental nature of light, whether it was a wave or a particle, and to figure out when it decided to be one or the other.

Experiments like the double slit experiment had done this in the past to mixed results. Sometimes light behaved in a wave-like manner, creating interference patterns on detectors that could only happen if a wave was interfering with itself. But sometimes it behaved like a particle, hitting only a single point on a detector. But most baffling of all, it seemed to change. change which it behaved like, depending on whether you are observing its path through space or not. If it could go through multiple paths, and no one was watching, to see which it did go through,

light simply went through both, like a wave, but observed it went through just the one, like a particle. This result was baffling enough, and deserves a video on its own, but in 2006 a number of scientists took it one step further by asking an interesting. interesting question, what would happen if you try to observe the light after it had to pick a path? Consider this experiment. A single photon is sent into a beam splitter, with a 50-50 chance of either being allowed

to carry on its way along path one or getting reflected up along path two. Once on either path, the photon is bounced off mirrors, with both paths reconverging here, the other beam splitter is inserted. Once again, the photon has a 50-50 chance to go either way, with an even chance of arriving at one of the two detectors. If light were just a particle, sending a single photon into this experiment would give you an even chance of it arriving at one detector or the other. You'd not be able to tell which way it went, as the two beam splitters make that impossible

to know. But you could see where it ended up. However, this does not occur. When the second beam splitter is present, the light produces an interference pattern, indicating that the single photon went down both paths, ultimately bumping into itself before moving on to both detectors. This seems like strong evidence that light is a wave, it certainly behaves like one here, but what happens if you remove the second beam splitter?

Suddenly, you know which path the light travel down. If light arrives at the top detector, it must have arrived from path one. If it arrives at the side detector, it must have come along path two. And something about this knowledge spooks the light. It stops going down both paths, and suddenly each photon only arrives at one detector. Here's the question. What happens if you insert the beam splitter after the photon has already started down either one or both routes.

This is why the test is called delayed choice. If you delay choosing how exactly you intend to detect the photon, whether by knowing which part it came down, or making that ambiguous to you, what happens to the light? What happens is a very strange thing. When this experiment was performed, it was done multiple times, with the beam splitter randomly being inserted or not, but always being inserted. after the photon had entered one or both paths. And yet, the results came back unequivocal.

If the beam splitter was present, the photon suddenly, and seemingly retroactively, stopped picking a path. If the beam splitter was removed, the photon seemingly knew it would later be detected and picked a specific path to accommodate. somehow, the beam splitter being added or removed in the future, change what the photon did in the past. So what is happening here? Is it really true that particles somehow saw the future?

Did the experiment cause information to be sent back into the past? Or is there some other principle at play here that explains this whole thing, that accounts for the instant transmission of information between quantum particles, and allows it to be perfectly rational that light could travel down one path or both at the same time. Personally, I'm inclined to think that this is more likely. We clearly don't understand what is happening here, but it must be admitted. If we don't understand what is happening, there's nothing to say that causality isn't being ignored.

In some way, maybe on the quantum level, time really is more fluid than it is up here in the larger universe. space and time simply do not apply down there. And maybe one day someone won't be able to come up with a theory that allows all these strange phenomena to finally make some sense. Until then, we'll just have to keep asking the same question. Can information travel backwards in time? Until then, we'll just have to all agree on one thing.

Quantum physics is strange. We are nearly 1,000 members on Patreon, and it's so exciting. to see our community grow. If you want ad-free videos, wallpapers, and to join a community of hundreds that love space, sign up below so we can finally reach 1,000. It's more than a number. It's a milestone for everyone who's been part of Astrom's journey. Each new Astromnaut makes this constellation bigger, the conversation deeper, and the experience richer for everyone. So if you've been watching from the sidelines, now is the perfect time to join the community. Thank you.