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

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

If you repeat the same experiment, do you get the same outcome? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. 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 her gone.

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. 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 and physicists probably have to do a lot of explaining.

You've got some splainting 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 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 gonna, 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 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 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. we're really just kind of at the mercy of all the elements and all the animals out there and the weather and so 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 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, you know, that's physics. Right. Well, it started with, like, 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 the 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 really 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, I 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 came 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. 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 to 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, 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.

Right. 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 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? Yeah.

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 like rejecting this idea that we're trapped, right? Everyone wants to feel like they have free will. Like 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 for well 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 if they just read some more Nietzsche you know and some some carl and some popper or whatever yeah they would be easier to be around. Yeah. Forget those picture boats. Let's introduce me.

Let's predict the universe. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra Light, Ultra Powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel Core Ultra processors, Blazing

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. 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 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 OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 T-Dub. AWA 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 hard. 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. 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 see, 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 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, 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, you know, 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 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, you know, 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 on the other side of the world. Right. 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 it seems random, but actually it's chaotic. Exactly. And that's exactly what scientists are trying to do. They're 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 things, 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 canadol 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, yeah. 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 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 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, you know, how it's implemented is not important, but, you know, 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 being 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, you know, 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. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,

ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, 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 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. 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 So the question is, is our universe like a computer simulation, right? Like the question is, is our universe also being crunched by a logical computer that can't be random?

That's right. And for a long time, people thought the universe was deterministic. I mean, we were able to predict the outcome of their. 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, then made it happen. If you 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 M.A, 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 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 air, airplane, you rely on it working the same way it did yesterday, right? Right, right.

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 like 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 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, wait, 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 were 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 size 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 tradeoff 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? 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 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, 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.

Maybe it just looks fuzzy to us and we can't tell where it is. But inside, that particle really actually knows. it is. 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. 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 an 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 like the position of particles in their 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 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 unit 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 to 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 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 determining things. 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 to shoot out two particles in opposite directions. And those particles are therefore connected because they have to conserve momentum and 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. Wow. 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 buts.

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 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, just 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 had 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

and all the things you want to cram into your universe right 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 dismantled the deterministic watch-like universe that we thought we had. So just because something is random doesn't mean you have free will. It's just random. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so to answer the question, 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. 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 answer

with such a such streams of gibberish to 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

promise. The answer is yes. So I think it's fun to think about that in sort of 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 seems deterministic.

And then we got this crack thanks to quantum mechanics that says it's random, but I don't really know how comfortable people are with that crack, you know, 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 in 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 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 flat exactly if you still have a question after listening to all these explanations please drop us a line we'd love hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word.

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