Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Dick Bond: Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Dick Bond is a theorist who has helped reshape our understanding of dark matter, entropy, and quantum mechanics. Dick is a renowned astrophysicist known for his significant contributions to cosmology and the study of the universe's large-scale structure. He has worked extensively on topics such as dark matter, dark energy, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and quantum cosmology. As a treat for all my members, Dick has graced us with a lecture titled Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb. Don’t miss out! Join my YouTube membership to watch the full 90-minute lecture recording: Join this channel Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Dick Bond: 💻 Website: https://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~bond/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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in the cosmos, including his thoughts on the cosmic super web and his many, many strong interactions with some of the greatest physicist in history from Hans Beda to Richard Feynman and beyond. I hope you'll enjoy this episode. It's extracted from a video that is available only to members at my YouTube channel. A member of my YouTube channel is somebody who supports my channel financially so that I can continue doing the work that I do. But really, it's to engage you in being a participant in this cosmic journey that we're all on. So I don't really make that much money from it. The starting memberships are only 99 cents a month. So I think many of you who are interested and can forward this will very much be interested in hearing the rest of this lecture and many of

the other members-only content postings that I blit. on the YouTube channel. So I'm putting this on the audio feed so that you can get a taste of what the lecture is all about. It'll cut off at about 14 and 15 minutes, and that's when the lecture slides really started in earnest, but I wanted to get a flavor of the brilliance of Dick Mon in the lecture that he gave here at UC San Diego in March, and hopefully what your appetite to join and support the channel in any way that you can. And the way that is least most indicative of your support is a tiny amount, 99 cents or more, that goes up to 1999 a month, and that's for one hour per month conversation with me and what I call private cosmic office hours.

I hope you'll consider that as well, but it's by no means necessary, just giving you an idea of the spectrum of support levels. And each one has some different perks. So you can click the link below and join the channel, and then you get access to the lecture. Now, without any further heat deaths, ramblings from yours truly, please enjoy this. Intro to Dick Bond's lecture on cosmic entropy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Entropy everybody thinks about is this kind of thermal heat with no correlations and all of that.

And it seems to be completely opposite to the concept of coherence, where things are organized It's over the larks. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast.

That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed, Sponsored. sponsor jobs. Scales, but the two go together, and it makes quantum mechanics in quantum cosmology, which is what quantum mechanics is because cosmology is everything. And so that's the title.

But the point that it's not in the abstract, but I want to emphasize here, is something that, you know, well, I think it's true for everybody in every age in science, that cosmic science is done by cosmic friends. that it's people who are close friends with each other that collaborate together. And usually it's sort of your era of PhD, post-Phg., but if you're lucky, your great collaborations extend throughout your entire working life. So I'm going to inject you with a very personal view of my development, which starts from actually being an undergraduate in choice. And it's a very personal kind of history, but it's all about how entropy has been underlying this. And there are many fellow travelers on this journey with me at the many places I've been at,

and these are some of the lists of those places. Caltech is where George and I first crossed paths. So the general picture is one of quantum cosmology. and this is kind of things that you all know, but we should celebrate anyway. Unvealing fundamental physics from complexity to simplicity to complexity to simplicity to simplicity, simplicity may or may not be the ultimate long-term future. Complexity is whatever things emerged from.

Simplicity is how simple that seven-parameter description is, that has been so hard won by cosmology in what we'd like to call the golden age, that got culminated by the various microwave background experiments, plus all the large-scale structure experiments. My goal is to actually write a book or maybe pamphlets or something, a tomb. But the issue is whether it'll be interesting. enough for other people to hear about.

But what we're going to see is a lot of relationship of quantum mechanics to the flow of the universe. And so this is the master equation, which you probably never seen before, which is the wave function of the universe is the exponent of the minus of the yin-yang simple. And so that mysterious thing I'm going to try and someone explain, But this, number one, it kind of looks like an S, but I'll explain that it's even more profound than that.

But the wave function is E to the I action minus, it's actually half entropy because it's the square limit of number when you do the derivative. And so the two ingredients, which are fundamental in the title, phase, which is what action is, and information or, entropy, that those go together and they make quantum mechanics. And so after all of the efforts in my career that took me that these two clearly go together, which was obvious, I guess, from the beginning, but it takes a while to actually see things. And then you'd say, yeah,

but everybody knows that. And the worst thing that you can say, well, it's just quantum mechanics. But the universe is just quantum mechanics. So it's not a tiny thing. And You know, Feynman, as I quoted, Von Neumann in his response to Shannon about his information quantity, he should call it entropy. Feynman famously said nobody understands quantum mechanics. And then there was the other dictum which is shut up and calculating, which means that you try not to go down the rabbit hole of metaphysics, of physics. although you'll see that I'm probably going down that rabbit hole. Our goal, actually, from the beginning, using the CMB large-scale structure

with this fantastic convergence towards a standard model has always been to find something that's beyond that standard model, and we're still in quest of that. And I can tell you, if we don't get it, our subject is going to become anemic. So we need to find things to look. look for that are beyond the standard model of cosmology and tilt the Lambda CDM, while great is not got the sense of newness that we would like to have.

Okay, so I'm going to go back to cosmic information and some of the people whose pictures you will recognize if we go into it in detail, but I don't have time for that. I'm going to emphasize, though, Pythagoras, because we are all Pythagorean's. We ascribe to the fundamental view that you can describe the universe in terms of mathematics. He also introduced digital, that is to say, counting numbers, but also harmonics, you know, playing the... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

string instrument. And so, you know, with the, and we'll see this later, one, two, three, infinity ideas, the abstracted this to be a full description of the universe. And you say, well, oh, yeah, but that's a long time ago. They didn't really know anything. And my contention is they actually knew a lot.

It's just that they didn't know the microcosm and the macrocosm that we know now because we've dug so deep. But the information is there at the mezzo level that we inhabit. of what is fundamental in physics. The other person I'm highlighting here is somebody that if you read him,

you say quite profound, maybe it's just because he was Socrates student, but he emphasized the concept of idea with a capital I from idea with a little eye. And we just did a V-log with my good friend Brian here. And we got into this story that everything is information

and you're going to hear a little bit too much about that. Okay, so Play-O ideas, right? And the asymptotic middle ideas is capital idea, of which you probably never get to because it's too ideal. This is

Fred Hoyle. This is Gamoff. And I won't name the others. This is the Matra. So I'm not going to name all of these others. I'll name this character. Newton just because you may have, I don't know if you have, you may have seen the movie, the mask.

You ever seen the movie The Mask that my fellow Canadian starred in that movie. And so I was in Edinburgh behind Curtain, as it were. And this is Newton's Death Mask. And so I was able to take Newton's Death Mask. and I did not get insight when I put it on my face and became the mask. But I find this a joyous picture. The connectivity that we all have to these characters, that's what we're trying to move forward.

That's the goal of our existence. I could spend arbitrarily long time on everybody else here. Oh, yeah, there's epsilon of T, which looms large. You all know about it. It's sometimes called the slow roll parameter. Complete misstatement of what it actually is. The parameter is the acceleration parameter of the universe. Epsilon approximately zero is inflation.

Epsilon equals one is end of inflation. Epsilon is three halves is ordinary old matter. And epsilon of two is radiation. Epsilon of three is if it's completely kinetic and doesn't have the spatial, the plasians ingredients associated with that. Anyway, so epsilon extremely important for understanding evolution of the universe. Okay, so now I'm going to go back to how I learned about thermodynamics. And I'm going to emphasize some words here, which you've heard,

but I hope that they will really sink home. Gravity is not gravity. thermodynamics is not thermodynamics. It's called gravothermal. And they're deeply connected to each other. And a long time ago, in cosmology and the dynamics of galaxies, they understood that there was something they called the gravothermal catastrophe. And I'll get into this in more detail.

But my view is that that's the fundamental thing that is defining how gravity is working and how the universe evolves, it is by a splitting of something that collapses into a core and something that has entropy radiated into it, which is effectively voids and things like that. So that that's universal. We usually think about it in terms of the formation of red giant stars or in terms of very dense star clusters doing this gravitational catastrophe, but in fact it's very general. These are some of the great champions. This was a textbook from me being an undergraduate

of the thermodynamic history. This is Boltzman. This is the great beginning of American physics, Gibbs. And you know all the names of all these characters. There's a name here which you know, but... Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly,

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extremely young, but made this profound thing by looking at heat and engines. And that's, of course, how you were taught thermodynamics back in the day. And one way of doing that, here we have what's called the ideal carnal cycle for engines. And the ideal carnal cycle has entropy in this direction, temperature in that direction, and it goes up and down and it can go around and around and around. But in the real world, at the macroscopic level, there is always, what does it affect,

you might call it a hysteresis in which the entropy is positive and increasing. And so that's sort of the thing that one learned about. But that wasn't the only thing that one learned about because you're doing physics, you probably did chemistry. And chemistry entropy plays an extremely important role. But that's not really the way one is wording it. It is the balance of chemical potentials, which is occurring in reactions where this is in ingredients and this is the out ingredients for a reaction, which is in thermal equilibrium. And so this is the sort of thing that I was steeped in in my youth. the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, curiously enough, I passed much of my career

at the same university I was an undergraduate in, which is a rare phenomenon. I don't know how many of you will have done something similar to that, probably not many. Some of the books that were on my shelf, not just this, which was the textbook of the time, is Fermi. Little book, really profound, but classical thermodynamics. the whole sense of the word and not into the statistical physics of the whole thing. And another book here. So I went from the University of Toronto to Caltech 50 years ago, 51 to be short, and I was keen about seeing the universe as a coherent entity all interacting together.

And part of that was because as an undergraduate, among other things that I worked on, I worked on superfluids. And so superfluids are supposed to be this collective quantum phenomenon that's effectively macroscopic, just like superconductors. And so I was intrigued by that. And then with the neutrinos, the way I was envision in through my thesis and all of that, it was that the neutrino comes in, it tickles the medium. and the medium is a unit and a collective response,

which is what happens, and you can describe it in terms of current current correlation function response, so I'm getting a little bit too technical error. But then as you will see what should have happened right at the beginning because I was well steeped in it, but the entropic went closely connected to the coherent. But why we all became anthropologists will be revealed in the next slide. So then my whole career, out of all of the time, from that period to now,

with every problem that I've worked on, it is in order to go from the ultra-year-less, the ultra-late universe. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top-brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer, and host in style with a fridge-serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop Applant Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more.

See Store Online for details. With these two concepts in mind to try and explain to myself, and hopefully to you, but to myself, how things are put together and how they work. Thanks so much for listening to this intro to wet your appetite, this little hors d'oeuvre in the cosmos, hopefully not too hot in the subject of cosmic entropy. The lecture really gets going in earnest and lasts for about an hour and a half or a little bit more, some questions throughout it, and the slides are quite informative and really quite beautiful. If I don't say so myself, Dick puts a tremendous amount of information on each slide

approaching black hole information density entropy. So I hope you'll do that again. You can join for 99 cents or more, going up from there, to whopping 1999. And that's for those of you that want to share your ideas about the cosmos, your theories of everything, your thoughts on unified theories, as well as cosmic information and so forth, I run these group chats for those of you at the highest tier level of membership

here on my YouTube channel, at least. And you can join there. And that's really a way that you can support me in the mission that I do and really be an indicator, a signpost. a cosmic luminosity indicator that will help me understand how you guys appreciate this show if you do. And so I thank you very much. And last but not least, if you're made it all the way to the end of this and you're not too mad, please give a five-star asterism, a review of the podcast.

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