Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Classic Episode - Is the Universe Random?

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

If you repeat the same experiment, do you get the same outcome?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Now, hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use.

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This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were, like, riding the line.

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founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. core idea in science that experiments should be repeatable. If you do an experiment the same way, different times, you should get the same result. However, there is a loophole. There's a loophole in science. Yeah, and that loophole opens a window into everything we think is true about reality and the universe and everything. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.

In which we try to take the entire universe and break it into bite-sized pieces so you can enjoy them with your afternoon coffee. I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist. I draw comics online. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I spend my day smashing protons together at the Large Hadron Collider to try to reveal the secrets of the universe, mostly so that I can tell them to you in this podcast. Basically, only one of us is qualified to be explaining things to you on this podcast. That would be the cartoonist. Physicists are not qualified usually to be explainers. Mostly, we just try to solve the mysteries of the universe.

We don't try to tell anybody about them. Right. Mostly physicists just need explaining. That's right. That's where the cartoons come in, right? Yeah, and spouses also. Spouses are physicists. Probably have to do a lot of explaining.

You've got some splaining to do. Exactly, yeah. So we're here to talk to you about big questions about the universe, and today's question is a really deep and basic question. And it's about the very nature of reality. What is it, Jorge? What are we going to talk about today? Is the universe random?

Or is it just chaotic? And what's the difference? Or is it run by some super being, and we're actually just in their simulation. But that's a whole other episode. That's a whole other podcast. Right. Today, just the two sinister options, random or chaotic.

You might feel like, ooh, neither of those sound very cozy. I don't want to live in either of those universes. Well, the question basically breaks down to, is the universe predictable? Like, can you predict what the universe is going to do? Or is it that nobody can predict what the universe is going to do? Right. And I think that's why it's an awesome question for science. Because for so many thousands and thousands of years,

I think humans probably felt like the universe, around them was totally unpredictable. I mean, they invented gods for this and for that to try to describe how the universe was out of their control and doing things that didn't make sense, as if it had some, you know, will and agency, right? And then science comes along and says,

actually, there are rules and you can discover them. And slowly, science starts to creep in this description of the universe that locks out this agency, this idea, this personality and gives you the sense that maybe the universe follows these rules. Right. So we went out and, as usual,

ask people on the street, do you think the universe is random or chaotic? And here's what they had to say. That's going to, okay, that's a, that's a thinker right there. I would say, surely random. With randomness comes chaos, you never know what will happen. But there's, there's always a probability and a chance of things, of certain things happening. I'd like to say random. I'm religious, so I feel like everything happens for a reason. And yes, it is. is random, but there's a purpose behind everything. I think it's a mixture of both. Like, it's random, but it can appear chaotic because of how everything is.

Truly chaotic because, like, on a smaller level, everything is, like, moving really fast. But at, like, a bigger level, we don't see any of that. Wow, so what do you think of those answers, Jorge? I think they were all over the place. They were actually kind of random. Yeah, they were random and chaotic. I feel like people had no idea what I was asking them. I feel like people just...

I feel like they had no idea what they were answering. Some of those people, I remember recording these interviews, and some of those people, as the words were coming out of their mouth, I felt like they surprised them as much as they did me. Like, it was all over the place. Yeah. Well, I feel like some people, it's interesting, some people related to that question to the other question,

which is like, does the universe have a purpose? Like, do things happen for a reason or do they, is it just like a random role to die and nobody's really in charge? Like, that's the question, right? Like, is somebody in charge of the universe or is it impossible for anyone to kind of predict what it's going to do? Yeah, I think you're right. That does get at the heart of the question. You know, what's going to happen in the universe and can we tell and can we influence it, right? Is the universe sort of churning on without our ability to change its direction at all in some sort of way that's been determined since the dawn of time?

Or can we nudge it and push it in one way or the other, you know, make the calves win? Or can you, if you jump up and down in front of your television enough, will the warriors win another NBA championship, you know? Can you influence the world? I think that's an interesting and deep question. Yeah, that's probably the one people we're actually having in their mind. Yeah. So, May, let's go back in history. And I like how you think about this question a lot, Daniel, which is that you sort of start with early man, like the caveman.

And woman. And woman. early humans were really just kind of at the mercy of all the elements and all the animals out there and the weather and so they to them the universe was this crazy random and chaotic place right?

Yeah and actually it touches on sort of my personal theory of consciousness which is that we develop this awareness because we are looking out into the world for other people or other ideas other intelligences and we have this hyperactive ability to see agency to see

intention in something that we don't understand And we imagine that there must be a mind behind it. And so I think for a long time, people's view of the world was that it was controlled by other greater minds. You know, what controls the lightning? Why do some people die of disease, all this stuff? And then as... There must be like a consciousness that is shooting out these lightning bolts or making it rain or, you know, making the sun come out. Or killing my baby of some horrible disease, right?

Like there must be... It's hard to live in this world if you don't have the sense that there's somebody out. else in charge, right? There's a lot of suffering and a lot of pain and a lot of unexplained events and it's nice to think somebody else out there is taking care of it or somebody's in charge of it. But there's a reason, right? Yeah, that there's a reason, that there's some design. It's not just random. But then as history progresses, as we were saying earlier, you know, science comes along and says, well, there are seem to be some rules, not just like that anything can happen. You can't have an ostrich here and then all of a sudden the ostrich is gone. There are

some rules that limit what can happen. If you know what's happening now, there's a certain set of possibilities for what can happen in one second and two seconds. And that's physics. Right. Well, it started with noticing patterns, right? Like lightning doesn't just come out of nowhere. It comes out when

there's these dark clouds in the sky, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And people started noticing patterns and started putting those together and then asking themselves, can I use what I've learned in the past to predict the future, right? Like, if I have the same set of events that happened yesterday,

am I going to be able to tell what's going to happen next week if the same thing happens? If I roll a ball down the hill yesterday and it goes up to a certain speed, will the same thing happen tomorrow? Right, right. Or if I throw a ball in the air and I know which direction it's going and how fast it's going, can I predict where it's going to land? Exactly. Or if I build a catapult, can I basically aim it, right?

Exactly. And that's how military technology drove science, even hundreds of years ago, right? Where do I shoot my cannon, exactly, to get, over that wall. Yeah. Well, that's kind of where Newton came in, right? Isaac Newton. And that's why they say he kind of gave birth to science, right?

Or at least the scientific revolution. No, I think it was earlier than that. Newton came along well after folks like Galileo and Francis Bacon and those guys. They really were the first ones to do experiments and to say, let's see what rules the universe is following. And let's see if we can try to deduce them and use those to predict the outcome of future experiments. They were the first ones to connect the idea of a scientific universe to the actual experiments they do to influence those ideas and to predict future results. And I think that's the key is that here we've developed a system, science, which can not only explain what we've seen before, but can predict the future. You are about to fire a cannonball at your enemy.

You want to know where is that ball going to fly. And it's incredible that physics can do that. It can literally predict the future if you know enough about the situation, right? Right. It's kind of like Google Maps now. It can totally tell if you're going to be late to a meeting or not, or to a podcast recording. They're going to, they're like, how long will it take me to get home? They're like, oh, you're going to be late. It's not always a hard problem, though, Jorge. For example, it says, if person equals Jorge, then late equals true. Every time. Every time. You don't need a lot of data. I am so predictable. You need a lot of data. Some of these things are simple. But some of these things are complicated. And it's incredible to witness as physics sort of builds confidence and science develops,

our ability to predict, you know, chemical reactions and biological function and all sorts of things. And then it gives this creeping sense of, is there anything that can escape science, right? Can science predict everything? Like, if you knew enough about the world, could you break it all down to cannonballs, predict where all those cannonballs are going to fly and then tell exactly what's going to happen? Yeah, and it's kind of like if you know that force equals mass science acceleration, like Newton figured out, then you can predict things like cannonballs and catapults

and you could possibly predict how a room full of particles move, right? Yeah. Possibly you can extend that to can you predict how the whole world works and what it's going to do and what people are going to do.

Extrapolate to the whole universe, right? Yeah. I mean, and that's the principle of determinism. It says, look, if things follow rules and the future is dependent on only two things. One, the rules, and two, the things that are happening now, the current state, right? Given if you know exactly where things are, imagine the whole universe is just a bunch of tiny cannonballs. And you know the rules of those cannonballs and you know the position and direction of motion of all those cannonballs.

Then in principle, given a super powerful universe-sized computer, you should be able to predict the future. One, two, five, ten seconds into the future, a thousand seconds into the future. Like every single molecule, atom, subatomic particle, you should be able, if it's, follows rules, you should be able to kind of track where it's going to go. It should tell you, based on where things are now, what's going to happen? Exactly. It's kind of like this idea of a clock, right? Is the universe a giant clock just kind of clicking along, or is there some kind of magic inside of it that makes it unpredictable? Right, exactly. And the idea of the universe just being a huge clock is both exciting and terrifying, right? It's exciting because, like, wow,

can you imagine we could understand the universe that well, that we could predict? the future? Think about what we could do, right? But it's terrifying because it's sort of like you're trapped in this science cage where you have no influence over the world and everything you do and know and say and that joke you're going to make and that fart you're going to let slip are all predictable, right? All those things are predictable. That's scary. It makes you feel like you are part of that watch and you're just clicking along because you're reacting to things around you and your initial conditions. And so that's terrifying. And I think we have kind of an innate sense of

rejecting this idea that we're trapped, right? Everyone wants to feel like they have free will. Everyone wants to know that they have a choice, right? Well, I guess so. My kids don't feel that way. You know, like, why did you hit your sister? Well, she hit me. You know, like, well, so what, do you have no free will?

Like, you're completely determined by her behavior. I have that argument with my kids so many times. I'm always thinking about the philosophical echoes of that. My kids are always rebelling. They're like, we want free will. Don't tell us what to do. I see. But they want you to follow rules.

They're like, you promise, Daddy, we could have ice cream, right? And so therefore you have to. There's no more decision to be made. Kids are so unfair. They're philosophically inconsistent, I think, is really the problem with kids. Yeah, they're cute, but inconsistent. I know. If they just read some more Nietzsche, you know, and some popper or whatever, they would be easier to be around.

Yeah. Forget those picture books. Let's introduce Michi. the universe. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion. Actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone now hold up isn't that against school policy that sounds totally inappropriate well according to this person this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age it's even more likely that they're cheating he insists there's nothing between them i mean do you believe him well he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet so do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not to hear the explosive finale listen to the okay Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation. and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees

when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying,

don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast.

We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athletes? athlete. The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to the locker room every morning just to shit talk.

We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica.

And I'm Mila. And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffin.

I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class.

I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. I think there's something fascinating about the deterministic view of the universe, but probably people out there thinking, okay, maybe in theory you could predict the whole universe, but in practice, that's impossible. I mean, you don't have a universe-sized computer.

to break the whole universe, and even to predict, like, you know, a person is a huge number of particles. And so to do that calculation just seems impractical, right? Right. It's practically impossible, but I think people rebel just to the idea of it, right? Like, are my thoughts, my thoughts, or just something that I'm programmed and that I will inevitably have and do? Yeah, and that's a really deep question. And so we started out with prehistoric man feeling like the universe is full of random, not random, but unexplained agency and intelligence all the way to like now scientific physical determinism says

actually the universe just clicks along like a watch right and there's no free will so let's take one step back from that and that's chaos that says well maybe the universe is deterministic sure but that doesn't mean it's necessarily practical for you to predict it because the way things play out is really sensitive to exactly how things started well i think i think some people who responded to our question, maybe weren't sure about the difference, right? Like, what's the difference between something being chaotic and something being random? Right. And so let's drill into that. So let's take for an example, the roll of a dice, right? People think of rolling dice as random, but actually it's chaotic, meaning that it's hard to predict, but it is deterministic.

Oh, what do you mean? If you knew exactly how I threw the dice, like exactly the direction and the spin and all the molecules of the air, then you could treat the molecule like little cannonballs. little particles and you could model how it rolls and you could in theory predict exactly how the dice rolled every time. Meaning like if I'm seeing footage of you throwing the die and like I pause the video just as to die leave your hands, then I could know where they are. I know which direction they're going, how fast they're going. I could run some kind of computer simulation to like follow the die and predict what they're going to do when they bounce off the table and roll around, I could

potentially predict what the die are going to show. That's right, because we're saying that the universe in that case is deterministic, and so you should be able to predict the future given enough information about the setup, right? Now that's a hard problem, and that's why we use dyes, right, because it's really difficult.

And nobody can practically like bring a mini-computer into Las Vegas and use that to predict who's going to win at craps, right? Though in theory, in theory, you could. If the universe was deterministic, but very sensitive to exactly how somebody's rolling the dice, right? When you

throw the dice at craps, if you flip it this way or that way, then it's going to bounce slightly differently and how it's going to hit that the felt on the table, it's all very, very sensitive and a very small change in how you throw it can result in a totally different number. That's what we mean by chaos. It means

that it's like the butterfly effect, right? Like the idea that if you butterfly flaps his wing here, it's going to have a huge effect maybe potentially on the weather and on the other side of the world. It's like a very sensitive system. That's right. The weather is a great example because we understand

all the processes of weather. I mean, it's hot air, it's cold air, it's water. We know that stuff. It's pretty simple chemistry. But all together an entire planet is really difficult to describe because it's huge and it's really sensitive. Like, as you say, a butterfly flapping its wings in China could change the way

this air flows, which could change the way that air flows, which bounces off this building, which turns into a rainstorm which collides with this cloud and causes a hurricane, right? It's not true that every time a butterfly flaps its wings, you get a hurricane, but sometimes. So weather is chaotic, but it's not random. Is that what you're saying? Like, if we could keep track of every single butterfly in the world flapping its wing, we would be able to predict the weather if we had a giant supercomputer the size of the solar system.

But since we don't, then weather seems random, but actually it's chaotic. Exactly. And that's exactly what scientists are trying to do. building bigger and bigger and faster computers to try to simulate more and more of the Earth's atmosphere to get better and better predictions of weather. In fact, I think like all the top 10 supercomputers in the world are devoted to that problem, like modeling the weather, because it's important. But you're exactly right. It's actually chaotic, meaning it's deterministic, but really sensitive to exactly how it started, but it seems random because it's too difficult for us to calculate. In principle, we should be able to, but we can't. Another example is flipping a coin, right?

Based on how you flip the coin, you should be able to model how it spins through the air and how it bounces off air molecule and how it hits the ground and where it lands. But it's a difficult problem. So we can use it to model randomness to say it's kind of like randomness. Really, it's just chaotic, though. But then if I flip the coin a hundred times,

most likely half of those times will be head and half of those times will be tails, right? So where does that fit into chaos theory? Like, why is it predictable on a statistical basis? Okay, so that's fascinating. That's an emergent phenomenon, right? That says if you understand the tiny little local laws of physics, like the laws of how the particles inside the coin move, you should be able to predict some larger effect.

And it's true. There is a simpler description of that larger effect, right, if you understand how these things work. So physics works on these layers, right? You can either understand it at a very low layer and try to model it all the way up to a higher layer, or you can just try to get an understanding at a higher layer. Just the same way, you could say, well,

I can understand the way a cannonball flies by modeling all the particles inside of it, or you could just use F-Equels MA, which treats the whole cannonball like one particle. That's just a question of at what layer you're modeling something, right? Okay. So a coin is chaotic, but not

actually random. But not actually random. If the universe is deterministic, then a coin is chaotic, but not actually random. Yeah. Okay, got it, got it. But then there's the question of, that's the really the nugget of the question is, is the universe deterministic? You know, if you have a particle or a billiard ball or a cannonball or whatever and you understand direction it's going, can you predict its future out into infinity, right? Right.

Can you tell exactly what's going to happen? But there's so many factors leading up to me tossing the coin that it's so unpredictable that it feels random. That's right. And so we have to separate between what's practical and what's, that's in theory possible. Okay. Anything that's chaotic, we're saying, in theory, if you knew enough, you could predict it, right? Whereas, but in practice, that we can't.

So it's, it's, it's, it's can't. So it seems random. It seems random. Random number generators and computers, when they try to come up with a random number, it's not really random. You're saying it's just an algorithm that's very, that's chaotic. That's right. Computers, by construction, are deterministic, right?

We've built them to be deterministic. Every time you run a program, it should give you the same answer. if you give it the same input, right? Right. There's no way for a computer to do anything but that. It's like a series of logic gates and how it's implemented is not important,

but it's a system for doing deterministic calculations. That's what a computer is. So it's impossible for a computer to be truly random. All the random number generators in your favorite Python code are actually pseudo-random number generators. They're just chaotic. They take a seed, a number to start from,

and then they spin off of that and generate a sequence of numbers. But if you give them the same seed twice, they'll generate the same sequence of numbers twice. Wow. So like if you're playing a video game and you're inside of a virtual world, that world is totally deterministic.

Absolutely. It's been crunched on by a logical computer. Exactly. You do the same move every time you'll kill that boss character every single time. And not even in silly video games, like punch out where the guy is totally predictable. But even in more complicated ones, you know,

if you're in the same world and you do the same thing, the same thing should happen because computers are not capable of true randomness. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging. he out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other,

but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Brandford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal.

Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird,

watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate.

You can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed. on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well.

So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica.

And I'm Mila. And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe.

With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school.

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That's right. And for a long time, people thought the universe was deterministic. I mean, we were able to predict the outcome of our experiment. Things were going along really well. And then, of course... You can throw a spaceship and land it on the moon. That's pretty crazy, right? Yeah, well, that's pretty risky, but yeah, that's pretty amazing.

You have to certainly have confidence in our ability to predict the future if you're going to get into that cannonball and get shot out into space, right? Well, I remember in grad school, I was in this class, it's called linear dynamical systems. But I remember in class, this guy was so, the professor was so cocky, he's like, of all the technologies that contributed to putting a man on the moon, this is the one that made it happen. Linear algebra. If we hadn't had this linear algebra equation, we would not be able to put a man on the moon. And so that's how powerful this idea is, right? Like if you can predict F equals MA, you can put a man on the moon.

Yeah, no, it's exactly right. And it's given us great power over our environment. I mean, everything that we have is because we have mastered a lot of the laws of our environment and used them and bent them to our will to improve our lives, right? So it certainly works. And we rely on every day. Every time you get into a car or an airplane, you rely on it working the same way it did yesterday, right? Right, right.

And so that's a relief. But it was about 100 years ago when people started seeing things that they couldn't explain, and it was quantum mechanics that told us that maybe the universe is not deterministic, Maybe these little particles don't follow the same rules that like billiard balls and basketballs and larger objects follow. And maybe they're not even deterministic, meaning you do the same experiment twice with tiny particles. You could get different outcomes, even if you do it exactly the same way. And this all came about when people started noticing that light and things had a minimum size, right? Like light doesn't come in infinitely small bits of light.

There's chunks of light. That's right. Yeah, Einstein was looking at some experiments that didn't quite make sense. And the only way he could explain them was if light came in little packets. And that's what quantum means. Quantum means a unit or a packet. And so he suggested that maybe light comes in these little packets. But then it had all these far-reaching consequences, you know,

about light going through mirrors and through prisms. And the way people could understand that was only if there were various probabilities for things to happen. And it began this whole revolution of quantum mechanics. which then Einstein tried to put the brakes on, right? He was like, way, hold on a second, guys, this is crazy talk. There's no way the universe works this way. Meaning, like, this idea of quantum stuff only made sense if the universe worked based on probabilities,

not like deterministically. You know, you have to describe things with wave functions and things aren't really like point particles or kind of fuzzy things. That's exactly the point, is that there's this fuzziness in the universe. And quantum mechanics, because there's these minimum-sized objects, and the way they interfere with each other and the way the calculations happen, quantum mechanics predicts that the universe is fundamentally random,

and it means that, for example, you have an electron, you don't know exactly where it is, there's a probability distribution that says, most likely it's here, maybe it's there, maybe it's somewhere else. Is it that we can't, is it like a randomness? Like we can't know where it is, or that there's this trade-off between, like, momentum and position? Right, that's exactly the right question. And that's exactly what people were asking. They looked at these equations and they said, well, is it that we can't predict where the electron is?

Like, it's totally impossible to predict? Or is it that we just don't know where it is, that we haven't figured out how to get that information, right? Does the information not exist or do we just not have it? And so Einstein is one who said there must be some hidden variable. There must be something that these particles are carrying some piece of information that determines exactly what's going to happen to them. But we just don't know what it is. Oh, I see. To him, it was crazy to think.

think that you could shoot an electron into an experiment twice and get two different answers. But that's what appeared to happen. I see. People set up these careful experiments where you would shoot a photon, one at a time, you would shoot photons into an experiment, and every photon would do something different. And then as you would accumulate a bunch of photons, it would add up to give you a distribution that made sense to you. Just the same way when you flip a coin, you get heads, you get tails, you get heads, you

get tails. It seems random, but eventually it builds up to. 50-50, right? Quantum mechanics tells us all we can do is predict the eventual distribution. We can say, if you measure a thousand electrons,

some of them will go here and some of them will go there. It says you can't predict any individual one. All you can predict is the distribution of outcomes. So Einstein was like maybe a photon is kind of like the coin we were talking about before.

Like maybe it seems random to us, but really it's just kind of this chain of little local events that actually make it predictable. That's right. If we knew all that information inside. Like maybe it just looks fuzzy to us and we can't tell where it is, but inside that particle

really actually knows where it is. That's exactly right. That's what he wanted to believe, right? That's what he wanted to believe. And you've got to sympathize with the guy, right? It's hard to imagine that the universe would not be deterministic. I mean, we spent hundreds of years building up our confidence in science and its physics especially as being able to predict

the future. And just of saying basically, the universe follows rules, right? So now all of a sudden you're telling us what? There's like dice in there? Right. Is there some randomness? Like every time you shoot an electron to experiment, somebody or something or the universe is making a like a random decision about where it's going to go,

it seems crazy. So you're absolutely right. And he suggested that a simpler explanation is that they're carrying along another piece of information that we just don't have access to or can't measure or didn't measure and that that's actually determining in a totally predictable way what's going to happen to each particle. That was his solution to the problem. Well, he famously said,

God doesn't play dice, right? He's famously quoted as saying that. I'm not sure he actually did, but it's... Oh, really? But it's a pretty good summary of what he believed. It's fake news about Einstein. Well, like a lot of fake news is the kernel of truth in it. He certainly wanted to believe in a deterministic universe.

And it made sense to him. And you know what? It makes sense to me. I mean, the idea that there's like a true random number generator somewhere in the universe that's making a decision every time you shoot in a electron into something, it doesn't make any sense to me intuitively. Not that the universe has to make sense to me

intuitively, but it doesn't. So you're saying, the quantum mechanics says that there is a randomness in things, and so where is that randomness, actually, in the position of particles, in the velocity, in their, like, very being,

in their energy level? Where is this randomness of everything? Well, there's randomness at every level. I mean, There's randomness between every time you look at something. So say, for example, you measure an electron, you see it's a certain place. Then you look away, right? Because you can't monitor an electron every moment or every nanosecond even. You look away.

What does the electron do between when you last saw it and when you'll next see it? Meaning, like, if I know where it is and how fast it's going, and then I look away and I look again, is it going to be where I think it's going to be? Yes, exactly. And so every moment of an electron or a particle, 's life is determined by quantum mechanics, which says there's a probability distribution. It's not like the electron is doing something behind your back. It's got one particular path that you're just not aware of behind your back and you just don't know it. It doesn't

have a specific path. It's not like it goes from A to B via a particular path. It has a probability of different ways to get there. And if you don't look, then it's sort of doing all of them at once. They all have different probabilities. And those probabilities are the things determined by the laws of physics. So there still are laws. Physics still does tell the universe how to run. It's just that those laws are probabilistic. It says, look, Mr. Electron, instead of telling you exactly where you're going to go,

I'm going to say you have a 70% chance to doing this and a 30% chance of doing that. So that's where the fuzziness and the randomness comes in. It's not that it looks fuzzy. It's just that it's just hard to predict where it's going to be. It's impossible. Even if you know all this information, it's impossible. It's impossible to predict the future. Impossible.

Exactly. You can predict the various likelihood of this or the likelihood of that at the particle level, but you can't say what one particle is going to do. Now Einstein said, that's crazy, right? There's no way that's true. There must be a way to predict. It must be there's some piece of information there. And then some guys came up with an experiment. They came up with this crazy experiment. It's based on an idea called Bell's Inequality to test this theory. They said, let's see if the universe is really random or if there's some hidden piece of information that's actually secretly deterred. like let's see if I really can't predict where that electron is going to go or if it's actually like the electron knows it just won't tell us yeah right exactly and so they set up this cool experiment where they took a particle and they had a shoot out two particles in opposite directions and those particles are therefore connected because they have to conserve momentum they have to conserve energy and have to conserve spin and so if you know something about one particle then you know something about the other particle right but both particles have equal probability to be like spin up or spin down or point this way or point the other way. But you know something about the combination of the two. And so they came up with this really ingenious experiment to measure how often

you saw one spin up and one spin down for example. And based on the outcome of that, you could tell whether there was a secret hidden piece of information that was controlling both particles or whether they were both truly random. And the experiments are conclusive and it's been done a zillion

times. And the experiment tells us that the universe at its core really is random. That is making a random decision every time you look at these particles. So beyond the shadow of a doubt, we know that the universe is random. The universe is random, absolutely.

There's no escape clause. There's no if hands are butts, there's no asterisk, there's no loopholes. The universe at the particle level is really random. Now, you said something really interesting earlier. Yeah. You know, even if the universe is random at the lowest level, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's random at other levels, right?

Like, we still got to the moon, right? It's not like we're saying science doesn't work or you shouldn't get in that airplane, right? Science works at different levels. And even if it's random at the very, very small level, doesn't mean that on average, it's really predictable, right? Like, we do know how basketballs bounce, right? And that's because the randomness only applies to these tiny little particles. And over the 10 to the 30 or whatever particles in a basketball, that all averages out to something very, very predictable. Wow. So, like, random events can add up to predictable events. Is that kind of what you were saying?

Yeah, exactly. Like, you can tell how any individual voter is going to vote, but if you've done enough polls, you can tell, you know, how the nation is going to vote at a certain election. I worked out so well in the 2016 election. Yeah, maybe that wasn't the best example. Totally predictable. At the level of particles, there is. randomness, but maybe in the macro scale, things are fairly predictable.

But how does that affect things like free will? Does that mean that, like, my brain, does quantum randomness give me some sort of unpredictability or free will, as you might call it, or is my brain also very predictable in the long run? It's a great question. And into this tiny crack in determinism, you know, saying that at the particle level, things are truly random, there's flooded an enormous literature. of consciousness and all sorts of philosophy that try to connect free will

to quantum randomness, you know, to say that this is the whole we needed, this is what breaks determinism and allows for me and my soul and God and all the things you want to cram into your universe. I'm not convinced that quantum mechanics allows for free will or for souls or, you know, for all that kind of stuff,

but it certainly does dismantle the deterministic watch-like universe that we thought we had. So just because something is random doesn't mean you have free will. Like, it's just random. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so to answer the question, you know, is the universe random or is it chaotic? Turns out it's kind of both, right?

It's random at the particle level, but it's chaotic at the macroscopic level, right? Things do seem to be fairly deterministic at the macroscopic level, but then again, they're too chaotic to really model. So it's not like you can predict the weather. It's kind of a progression. like it's random at the particle level it's kind of deterministic at a medium range level but then as you get to larger and larger systems then it's chaotic and it's practically unpredictable

yeah yeah exactly right so any answer you want there's some place in the universe that satisfies it for you yeah just pick a random random answer and it'll be so maybe that's why people answered with such a such streams of gibberish to our question because they really deeply understood that the universe was both random and chaotic. Wow.

The wisdom of the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd. Exactly. You average over 10 random people, and there is some insight there. Exactly. That's the whole premise. The answer is yes.

So I think it's fun to think about that into the larger context. You know, like we started off thinking the universe was crazy. Then we started to get some grips on it. Then we felt like, uh-oh, maybe the universe is sort of too tight a grip on us because it seemed deterministic.

And then we got this crack, thanks to quantum mechanics. It says it's random, but I don't really know how comfortable people are with that crack. To think that the universe doesn't know what it's going to do

at any moment. Like, it could do this, it could do that. That's sort of terrifying. I understand Einstein's fear of that. Einstein's dislike or disdain for that. And that leaves us in a sort of uncomfortable position.

And it might get even crazier, right? Like, let's say that we build quantum computers and then there's AI based on quantum computers. That would be even crazier, right? Yeah, I'd love to read that science fiction novel. That's how AI develops free will, right? Quantum Computers. Yeah. Maybe more than us. That's exactly right. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. I hope that didn't seem like a random,

random or chaotic discussion. Those are really fun topics. I think it's super fun to try to wrap your mind around those things. And, you know, one of the basic questions of physics is not just what is the world made out of or what are the bits and pieces, but like, what are the rules and are there rules and, you know, can we ever understand it? To me, that's one of the deepest questions of science. And this goes right to the heart of it. So if you're a butterfly out there, keep on flap. Exactly. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word,

or email us at feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Core Ultra processors. That's the power of Lenovo with Intel inside. Maximize your edge by shopping at Lenovo.com during their back-to-school sale. That's Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looked. for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about

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