Science Friday - Oceans And Climate, Quantum Mechanics. Sept 27, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

A new report issued this week by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change paints a troubling picture of the world’s ice and oceans. The ocean effects of climate change, from warming waters to ocean acidification to sea level rise, are already altering the weather, fisheries, and coastal communities. The authors of the report state that the ocean has already taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system since 1970, the surface is becoming more acidic, and oxygen is being depleted in the top thousand meters of the water column. All those conditions are projected to get worse in the years ahead. Ocean scientist and former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco joins Ira to talk about the risks to the ocean, its effects on the global ecosystem, and how the ocean can also help to blunt some of the worst climate outcomes—if action is taken now. In his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, quantum physicist Sean Carroll offers a different ending for Schrödinger’s imaginary cat. Carroll ascribes to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, originally proposed by American physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950’s. According to Everett, when you look inside the box you are also in two states at once. Now there are two worlds—one in which you saw the cat alive, and one in which you saw the cat dead. If thinking about this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone. Carroll joins Ira to talk about the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, and why he thinks not enough physicists are taking on the challenge of trying to understand it. Plus: World leaders convened in New York City this week for the United Nations Climate Action Summit. But there wasn’t a whole lot of action at the Climate Action Summit, at least not from the greenhouse-gas-emitting elephants in the room: India, China, and the United States. Umair Irfan, who writes about energy, tech and climate for Vox.com, catches Ira up on how countries around the world are tackling—or ignoring—the climate crisis.  And Sarah Zhang, staff writer at the Atlantic, tells Ira about NASA's new infrared telescope to detect near-Earth objects and other science headlines in this week's News Roundup. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, an update on this week's UN Climate Summit and a red flag about the health of the oceans. But first, in July, an asteroid, the size of a football field, whizzed by the Earth, and it was close. Just a fifth the distance from the Earth to the Moon. There's a nickname for asteroids that size. City killers. But the most important detail about this space rock called 2019. okay is that no one knew it was coming. It was a complete surprise to astronomers until just a day

before it's flyby. And it was a wake-up call that we might need to keep a more watchful eye on the skies. Now NASA has announced a new telescope to do just that. Here with the details on that and other selected short subjects in science is Sarah Zang, staff writer at the Atlantic in Washington. Welcome back to Science Friday, Sarah. Hi, Ira. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, tell us about what is this new telescope? Yeah, so NASA announced we're going to go ahead with this telescope called a Near Earth Object surveillance mission. Near Earth object being a fancy term for asteroids that might kill us one day if they got too close to us. So the reason that, as you were saying, we miss this asteroid that came by so close is we are largely relying on ground-based telescopes.

Obviously, on the ground, you might be foiled by things as, you know, as common as clouds. And you just can't see as well into space. And asteroids are really hard to see because, one, they're particularly small, and they're very dark since they don't give off any light of their own. So we're really relying on light that's being reflected off of them. So the point of this telescope is that's going to look for infrared, which is really good at looking at dark objects. And the idea is to catalog all of these, quote-unquote, near-earth objects and try to figure out what their trajectories are and if they are going to come close to Earth. So hopefully we have more than 24 hours. Well, this big rock that just flew by this summer, would it actually have been detected?

buy this new telescope? Yeah, that's the idea. It wasn't too small for the new telescope to see. No, a football-sized asteroid is pretty big. If it hit the earth, it would have taken out a city. All right, let's move on to our next story about a bit of news from the Department of Justice on how law enforcement can use consumer genealogy databases. Tell us about that, please. Yeah, so the idea that genealogy could be used to solve crimes kind of burst onto the scene about a year and a half ago with the case of the Golden State Killer. This is a cold case from the 70s and 80s where police had really exhausted all the leads they had,

and finally they had this idea. What if we upload DNA from the crime scene to a genealogy database that genealogists have been using to find family members and help adoptees find birth parents? And so what they did that, they didn't get any really close hits, but they did find these third and fourth cousins,

and with that they were able to build out family trees and eventually tracked down and arrest the suspect that they had. And since then, this idea, has just really exploded. It's been used successfully in something like 70 or 80 cases. But it's also just really moved forward with like absolutely zero regulation. And there's a lot of questions, right? Like most people can agree, serial killer do like, you know, everything you legally can to catch him. But, you know, what types of crimes should this be used for? What types of violent crimes should it be used for nonviolent crimes? And genealogists have been really bitterly divided over

some of these questions. So finally, the Department of Justice put out a set of interim policies this week. Some of the highlights are that, yes, you can only use this for violent crimes. You can only do this when you've exhausted all other leads first. And law enforcement can't pretend that they're just an ordinary person when they're using these databases. They have to say we're actually law enforcement and follow the rules that these sites have set forth. That's interesting. At least taking some of the mystery out of what's going on. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of been a black box for a while. Yeah. Next up, you have an update on the so-called sonic attacks on diplomatic.

in Cuba and appears there's nothing sonic about it. I remember that when they kept saying the diplomats were being attacked with sonic waves of some sort, right? Yeah, this was a really perplexing story that I started a couple years ago when diplomats Canadian and U.S. in Cuba were getting these strange symptoms of head injuries like dizziness and deafness and difficulty concentrating. And as you say, one of the theories was a sonic weapon where maybe microwaves or maybe it was the form of mass hysteria even. A bunch of scientists have said maybe it's pesticides.

And the way they arrived at this is that they looked at the brain damage that these diplomats, Canadian diplomats had, and they seemed to be specifically focused on an area of the brain that had a particular enzyme that is known to be affected by pesticides. And around this time, Cuba was also going through a Zika outbreak. So there was a lot of pesticides being sprayed. So they looked at the blood of the diplomats, and they did have pesticides in their blood,

and they looked at the records for where the embassy was being fumigated and found that they kind of matched up to when these symptoms started appearing. It's amazing when you collect the evidence, isn't it? But you come up with the facts. You know, it seems like a pretty straight thing. I mean, you've been spraying chemicals at the embassy, then a bunch of people get sick. Why did we jump to such crazy conclusions like a sonic or a microwave attack?

Yeah, it is definitely a less out there explanation. So in the beginning, there were some reports that maybe these symptoms started when diplomats heard these really, really loud noises. And one of these sound files was actually released, and it turned out that some cricket scientists heard the sound file. I was like, wait, those are actually just crickets. So it's unclear. There may have been other sounds, and this is, you know, still no one is exactly sure, but this is one plausible and, you know, kind of less out there explanation. Interesting. Okay.

Your last story is about the beloved Cavendish banana, which is the banana everybody eats, right? It's the standard banana, but now it could be headed for extinction, right? Yeah, that's right. So the great and also a terrible thing or problematic thing about the banana is that they're all genetically identical, which means that they're identical. They're susceptible to all of the same diseases, too. So there's this fungus that's been going around that's just been really devastating banana plantations around the world, and it's spreading.

So scientists have, are trying to find ways to make this banana resistance. So one of the things they've done is take a gene from a wild banana, a wild banana that is, in fact, resistant to his fungus and put it into the cavendish banana that we all eat. But there's, you know, people are wondering, like, you know, well, people really eat a GMO banana. So one of the other strategies is using the new gene editing tool called CRISPR. So instead of taking a gene from another plant and putting into a banana, it's actually just turning on a gene that's already in the,

cabbage-bished banana, and hopefully that will make it a little bit more resistant to this fungus. And maybe that'll be a little bit easier to, you know, get into the supermarket. Yeah, but it's not going to happen anytime soon, right? No, unfortunately not. Well, those little bananas are quite tasty also. We don't need to have just a cabatition. Yeah, but they're harder to transport. Oh, well, there you go.

We'll talk about some other times, Sarah. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Good to be here. Sarah Zang, staff writer at the Atlantic in Washington. Next up, after last Friday's climate strike around the world. International leaders convened here in New York for the United Nations Climate Action Summit this week. But there wasn't a whole lot of action at the Climate Action Summit, at least not from the greenhouse gas-emitting elephants in the room, India, China, and of course the U.S. Here to catch us up on the global players and their promises is Zoumerifan, a staff writer at Vox, who covers energy, tech, and climate research.

Welcome back. Thanks for having me. All right. So what was going on there? What's your overall impression of the United, what's your overall impression of the Climate Action Summit Plan. There was some action, but it came from a lot of the smaller players. The small island states that are extremely vulnerable to climate change, particularly sea level rise, they put forward some pretty aggressive commitments. Some of the countries that were already ahead of the curve pushed a little bit harder.

But as you noted, the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world really didn't commit to doing anything more than they're already doing. And that's really where we needed action. Yeah. And did the U.S. have anything meaningful to say? Not at all. Even though President Trump briefly attended the summit and he was there for Greta Thunberg's speech at the beginning. He was there for like 10 minutes. He was there for 10 minutes and then immediately bolted. But the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Gutierrez, specifically said,

I'm only going to let the countries come speak on the stage if they have something big to announce. And the United States was not on that list. Indian and Chinese leaders did announce some big developments that they're going to be deploying a lot more renewable energy. China announced that they have a lot of deforestation. plans for the country, but not much in the way of actually cutting greenhouse gases, which is the big figure to pay attention to when we're talking about climate change. All right, so give me some bright spots. Give me anything bright.

Sure. I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on outside of governments. A lot of private institutions stepped up. There was a consortium of about 130 financial institutions that said they're going to divest their holdings from fossil fuels. This is roughly $2.4 trillion under management. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced a new initiative of 700. $190 million to help small-scale farmers that would be affected by climate change, developed

techniques to help cope with that, and also reduce their impact on the environment. And then, yeah, there were countries that did step up. Before the summit, there were about 23 countries that had previously committed to ramping up their ambitions to fight climate change. And after the summit, it was about 70. So we saw about 40 countries commit to doing more. But if you add them all up, that's less than 10 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions. And that's the fundamental problem of climate change, that you have a few very big

emitters that are dominating the overall portfolio and you really need action from them in order to move the needle. And they are not agreeing either on what year they'd like to move that needle on, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, one of the big things is that the checkpoint for the Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015, the next one is in 2020, and that's when countries have to come up with plans to getting to 2050, to being able to get to zero. And some countries are just not, don't think that they can get to zero by 2050 and others

want to push past that. Meanwhile, activists are pushing countries to be... even more aggressive, that we need to get zero out by as soon as 2030. So we're not even going to see the promises made or the goals that were headed for in Paris being achieved either. Well, that's the current risk. Right now, with the summit and with all this youth activism, the hope is that they will continue to pressure countries between now and the next big UN meeting in Chile in December and then the next regrouping of the Paris Agreement next year. And so they're hoping that the summit was maybe the start of something, but again, that remains to be seen. Well, it looked like the summit was the start of the youth movement with Greta, you know, and mobilizing people around the world.

This was one of the largest environmental protests we've ever seen. Yes, four million people last Friday took to the streets, and it was certainly a presence felt in the room that a lot of world leaders did acknowledge that there's a lot of youth pressure. And there are protesters still protesting today. There's another round of youth strikes today. So they're not letting up. Many of the youth activists are also not happy with the turnout either, and they intend to keep the pressure up. Did you get to see Greta? I saw her very briefly.

I unfortunately did not get to ask her a question. Is she dynamic looking just standing there? I think what's so remarkable about her is that she's very ordinary. She doesn't dress up. She's not very floored in her language, and her affect is just like a normal teenager. And I think that's kind of why she's been so phenomenal as a messenger. Her message is not about her. It's not about what you should be doing other than.

listening to the scientists. And being on that message has been kind of revolutionary for the climate movement. Thank you very much, Romer. Thanks for having me. Romer Fon is a staff writer at Vox covering energy tech and climate research, and we have a link to his article up there at ScienceFriety.com on our website. We're going to continue talking about the climate. We're going to talk about a troubling new IPCC report about the health of the world's ice in its oceans, plus also some helpful, hopeful possibilities. So stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

A new report issued this week by the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change. You know that as the IPCC. Well, that report paints a troubling picture of the world's ice and oceans and says that immediate action is needed to prevent more drastic changes. The ocean effects of climate change from warming waters to ocean acidification to sea level rise are already altering the weather, fisheries, and coastal communities. Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions, the IPCC report says.

With the exact degree of change, well, it's going to be controlled by our levels of greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, the ocean is in peril, can it also help us to lessen some of the effects of climate change? What is the ocean doing for us to sort of limit the ocean? immediate effects. And our question for you, for you out there, listeners, what concerns you most about the health of our oceans in the wake of the UN report? Let me repeat that again. What concerns you most about the health of our oceans in the wake of the UN report? Our number is 844724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI, 8447248255. Joining me now is Dr. Jane Lubchenco.

She's a marine scientist, former administrator of NOAA, and now a university, distinguished professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis. She's here with us in New York. Always good to see you, Jane. Thanks, Ira. Great to be back. Let's talk about the new IPCC report on the oceans. It's an immense report.

Give me some highlights, some bullets from that report. So like all IPCC reports, this one synthesizes the state of science. and it has great gravitas because the authors are global experts, and they have combed through all the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and so what they say is really what we know. What we know about the ocean, according to this new report, is that it has already changed in very dramatic ways as a direct result of the greenhouse gas emissions

that human activities have put into the atmosphere. We know that today the ocean is higher. We know that it's much warmer. We know that it is more acidic and less productive. And it holds less oxygen than it has in the past. All bad things. All bad things. And those bad things have very important consequences to people and the things that we want from the ocean.

So it's a very dire, very gloomy report. And as you noted a minute ago, the report goes on to say, it's bad now. It's really bad now, but it's going to get a lot worse unless we take very strong and strategic bold action to change the course and lessen the impacts. One part of the report that struck me was the idea that the oceans have already soaked up 90% of the extra heat. You know, you keep hear people saying, well, where did the heat go? We now know where it went, right? Went into the oceans. That's right. So it's actually more than 90 percent, and that's a lot.

And we used to think that the ocean was so huge that we could really have very little impact on it. But the fact that it has been absorbing this heat has been very beneficial to us. If it hadn't been doing that, we would be seeing a lot more warming. But the reality is the rate at which the ocean is warming has now doubled since the early 90s. And so, yeah. So it is not only absorbing heat, but it's absorbing heat faster

because we keep pumping more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And you mentioned the acidification, which is also a major problem, right? It is. The ocean is also absorbing carbon dioxide. It's absorbed nearly one-third of the carbon dioxide that we have put in the atmosphere.

And what happens when it absorbs that carbon dioxide is that it changes the fundamental chemistry of the ocean. The ocean is becoming more acidic. Some people refer to that as osteoporosis of the sea. Things that make a shell or a skeleton of calcium carbonate, think clams, oysters, corals, muscles, the lobsters, crabs. All of those things have a much harder time making their shells or skeletons, and they dissolve faster. So we are already seeing the consequences of ocean acidification, and it's going to get much worse. So it's imperative that we get on with solutions and with reducing carbon emissions. Did the IPCC have solutions, make suggestions for what to do in the short, long term?

The IPCC focuses on what do we know about what's happening. And it is a wake-up call, I would say a salty and wet wake-up call that's adding to all the voices that are saying we need to be creating solutions. You co-authored a policy paper this week in the journal Science title, The Ocean is key to achieving climate and societal goals. Tell us what would you mean by that? So much of what's in the IPCC portrays the ocean and people as a victim of climate change. The ocean has been changing the ways we've just been describing. A new report from the high-level panel for a sustainable ocean economy that was an independent scientific report from 19 experts around the world was released this week and concluded that in fact, the ocean can also be a powerful source of solutions to climate change.

For the first time ever, the authors of this report quantified the actual reduction in carbon emissions or sequestration or storage of carbon that could be achieved through five different ocean-based activities. Those five include ocean-based activities. Those five include ocean-based. renewable energy, number one. Number two, ocean-based shipping, transportation. Number three, protection and restoration of coastal and marine ecosystems, blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves, salt marshes, coral, mangrove, salt marshes, and seagrasses. Number four, changing diets to include more seafood. And fifth, storage of carbon in the deep. And if you add all five of those together, the maximum potential we could get from those,

it is an astounding 21 percent of the emission reductions that we need to get us to 1.5 degree target by 2050. So there's a lot more potential in the ocean to help mitigate climate change. Most people, when they think about mitigation, we think about renewable energy on land. We think about making transportation more efficient on land, buildings more efficient. So we think about land-based activities. And this report is saying, hey, there's another source of solutions that we haven't even thought about. And they actually could be very, very powerful. But at the same time, that would mean everybody needs to work together on this. Absolutely. And that must be a

stumbling block to get, you know, getting a consensus on how to do this? That is one of the reasons that, in fact, we haven't made as much progress that we need to. It does take collective action. Countries of the world came together and agreed upon the Paris Agreement, so that's a good start. We can build on that.

It's non-binding. Countries are making nationally determined contributions, so-called NDCs. Those are not as bold. and as aspirational as they need to be. All of the marches that we are seeing today around the world, last Friday, around the world, are really saying enough of this, you adults, let's fix this problem. And so we're seeing, I think, increased appetite for fixing the problem, not just talking about it.

And one of the things that gives me hope is not only the young people demanding action, but the increased interest by the private sector in helping to be part of the solution, not just part of the problem. They're seeing business opportunities in these solution spaces for both mitigation and adaptation. And that can be very powerful. Let's go to the phones, 844724-8255. Adam and or is it Adrian in Cleveland. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Let's go to Richard in Fort Myers. Hi, Richard. Hi there. Yes, I was calling about the oceans. I mean, they, I'm 73, and when I was probably about 20, I saw a movie called Soylent Green. in that they portrayed the oceans as dying

as the reason for the problems with humanity. They described the rich living wherever they wanted to and everybody else there was overpopulation, etc. And we all seem to be heading down that road. And the certainty of it all is, pardon? I'm just wondering, so you're worried that the oceans may be dying like it did in the movie now? I think the trend is indicating that's happening.

Let me ask, Jane. Are the oceans dead or dying? Richard, you're right. The oceans are in trouble, and they are in trouble because of a broad suite of activities, including but not limited to climate change. However, we also know that the ocean can be very resilient if we give it a chance, and that underscores the importance of reducing carbon emissions using some of these, ocean-based solutions to mitigate climate change, but also creating marine protected areas

that can help mitigate as well as adapt to climate change. There are a suite of things that we can do, also including reforming fisheries to make them be healthier and better able to withstand the impacts of climate change. So, yes, there are problems, but we also have solutions. Let's go to Adrian in Cleveland. I think I have that right now. Adrian, you're there. Hi, how are you?

Hi there. Thanks for having me. My concern is biodiversity and ocean, similar to the last comment. And what steps can we take to support that? And maybe the conversation about habitat, is that something that we could focus on? Okay. Adriene, great question. Biodiversity.

Biodiversity, absolutely. We lose it because of climate change? Biodiversity is in serious trouble. We had another international scientific assessment earlier this year that focused on biodiversity, and it said that the biggest driver of loss of biodiversity in the ocean is, in fact, over exploitation, is overfishing. And so that points to the importance of two, three solutions. actually. One is fixing overfishing so that we can restore our fisheries. Two, though, is creating protected, fully protected areas in the ocean that can protect habitats and protect biodiversity,

and, by the way, store carbon and help replenish fisheries. So we've got a triple bottom line from marine protected areas, which today represent less than 2% of, you know, of the ocean in fully protected, marine protected areas. Many people are saying we need probably on the order of 30%. That's not impossible, but it's a tall order. So multiple solutions to many of these challenges. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking with Dr. Jane Lubchenko, former administrator of NOAA. Were there any mentions about weather or climate changes from the changing nature of ocean currents. And where, you know, we talk about, well, if all this cold water, cold, fresh water keeps coming off of Greenland, it's going to change the ocean currents that keep, you know, Great Britain warm. Right. Are you talking about that at all?

Yep. There are two things that are related to that. One is the ocean circulation itself, what's called the ocean conveyor belt. And there is evidence that it is beginning to slow down. There is concern about that, and it is driven by the cold freshwater that's coming from Greenland and the Arctic. But that freshwater is also causing increased layering, what we call stratification in the ocean. And that inhibits the mixing of ocean waters.

And we're getting one of the things that's described about impacts of the ocean, the changes that are underway, is that it's losing oxygen. And it's because it's warmer, but it's also because the ocean is more stratified. Interesting. We've been getting a lot of people have been asking about changing our diet about what kind of seafood to eat

and what they can do to. What should they be eating? So the new calculations that for the first time ever have looked at what are the carbon consequences of our diet, not just the human health consequences, but the carbon consequences suggest that if we eat more protein from the sea

instead of land-based animal protein, it's not only better for our health, but it is much better for the climate system. We can reduce carbon emissions by eating more seafood. Obviously, we have to be eating seafood that is sustainably caught or farmed from aquaculture, and I go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch app to see what kind of seafood I can eat with relish and abandon

because it has been sustainably caught or farmed. One last question in the last couple of minutes we have is a tweet. Crystal asks via Twitter, what is the story from my son's generation? He's five. How can we as parents, teachers, consumers, prep ourselves for the future climate effects we will face.

What we do now is going to have huge consequences for our kids and grand children. My grandkids are six and eight, and I care very deeply about the world that they inhabit. What I try to do with them is to have them love people and love the natural world, have them love the ocean and be exposed to critters in the ocean as well as on land, so that that connection to nature is a very real part of who they are. But it also means that we need to give them hope by being as responsible as we can in how we vote, in how we act in our daily lives, in what we spend our time and energy doing.

And for me, that means trying to help share, scientific information, but also be as responsible as we can be to minimize climate change and the other adverse impacts. I think it's really important for people to have hope. This is not hopeless. It is dire. The ocean situation that the IPCC report portrays is a dire situation, but not hopeless. That's a good way to end it, Dr. Lovchenko. Jan Lubchenko, former administrator of the National Ocean Act and atmospheric administrative. Now a university distinguished professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Thank you for being with us today.

My pleasure, Ira. Thank you. When we come back, Sean Carroll joins us to talk about the many worlds view of quantum mechanics. Maybe Schrodinger had more than one cat in there. We'll be back right after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You remember Schrodinger's cat, right?

That most famous imaginary cat in physics? Well, if not, let me explain. I'll go through it briefly. Austrian physicist Edwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, is most well known for his famous thought experiment. Now, this is what he did. He imagined sealing a cat inside a box

with a quantum device that had a 50-50 chance of killing the cat within the next hour. So at the end of the hour, what's happened to the cat? Well, the answer, according to one interpretation of quantum physics, is that before the box has ever opened, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. It's only when we open the box that we see the cat in one state or the other.

Does your hair hurt yet? Well, it's going to get even weirder. Because according to my next guest, there is a different view of quantum mechanics that says, at the moment you open the box and view the cat, you are in two worlds at the same time, one in which you see the cat alive and one in which you see the cat dead. And not just two worlds, zillions of them, multiple cats, multiple ewes, multiple worlds.

That's the view taken by my guest physicist Sean Carroll in his new book, Something Deeply Hidden. And he joins me now to talk about it. Welcome back, Sean. Thanks very much for having me, Ira. Did I describe that experiment correctly in the outcome? You did very, very well. I'd like to say in my book that I can change that gas in the box for sleeping gas rather than poisonous cyanide gas.

So the cat's in a superposition of being awake and asleep. But that's okay. That's the way Schroeder did it originally. He killed the cat. Well, let's talk about your title. Something deeply hidden, isn't that a quote that you take from Einstein? It is. You can't do better than quoting from Einstein.

And I think that part of the message of my book is that Einstein has a bit of a bad rap here when it comes to quantum mechanics. There's a feeling on the part of some folks that Einstein just couldn't handle quantum mechanics. He was getting old and crotchety, and he couldn't quite understand what was going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anybody. He just wasn't satisfied with it. He wanted to find out what was going on beneath the scenes, the something deeply hidden

that would show us how reality really works. And in his view, and I think that he was right, the rest of physics was saying, you know, no, let's not care about what happens in reality. Let's just make predictions and be happy with that. So why have you come down on, you know, on the side of Einstein on this, is there something deeply hidden. What is it that's hidden? Well, we don't know what's hidden, and part of the message of my book is that many worlds

is my favorite theory, and we can talk about that. But even more importantly, there's got to be something, right? Even if my favorite theory isn't the right one, there's some theory that actually explains why quantum mechanics is so weird. We have several good candidates, and any one of them might be right, and yet the majority of my physics colleagues pretend not to care which one is right, which is weird to me. You're right. Let me go into that line of reasoning because you brought it up, and you write in a wonderful New York Times opinion piece. You would naturally think that understanding quantum

mechanics would be absolute highest priority among physicists. Just to paraphrase, you write, what you would be wrong if you thought that. That's right. Why are they not interested in figuring out the mysterious parts that are going on here. You know, that's a great question, and honestly, it's a mixture of different things that happened in a weird way. You know, part of it was just that there were other interesting things going on, right? If you think about the 1920s and 30s when this discussion was happening, they were inventing particle physics and nuclear physics and quantum field theory, as well as inventing things

like the atomic bomb, right? So they had other concerns, and understanding the mysteries of quantum mechanics seemed a little more philosophical, less down to earth. You don't exactly know how to make progress. So they put it on the back burner and then they forgot to take it off years later. And so you argue in your book, as you were saying, that you think that the correct interpretation is the many worlds idea. Tell us what that idea is. Well, Hugh Everett was a graduate student in the 1950s. And he said, you know, the whole weird thing about quantum mechanics, as you explained Schrodinger's cat, is this idea that when you open the box, the cat, the cat,

suddenly changes. It was in a superposition of both alive and dead before you opened it, and then pang, it's one or the other. And he says, look, just forget about all those weird rules about measurement and observation. Take quantum mechanics seriously. You, the observer, are a quantum system that can be in superpositions also. And what happens when you open the box is that you and the cat go into a superposition of the cat was alive and you saw it alive, the cat was dead and you saw it dead. but we should treat those as two separate worlds. That's what quantum mechanics is trying to make us do. Let's just accept it.

Is it just two worlds, or are there many, many uncountable worlds that are created? We don't know how many. There's certainly more than two. There's two that get created in that particular experiment, but there can be many, many more. Maybe an infinite number. We honestly don't know. In my mind, I would say that the fact that we don't know reflects the fact that we

haven't been thinking about this for the past 80 years like we should have been. I've talked to lots of physicists over the years, and many of them say, you know, to understand what's really going on, we need new physics. You don't say that we need new physics here. I don't. Actually, you know, this is, again, this is a reflection of the fact that we haven't thought about it very hard. We do need better understanding, whether it's from better physics or better philosophy or something. And there are versions of quantum mechanics, which do qualify as new physics. Many worlds, actually, in a sense, is the most lean and mean version of quantum mechanics.

It doesn't require new equations. It doesn't require new variables that are hidden from our grasp. All it requires is that we face up to what quantum mechanics is trying to tell us. And as I try to argue in the book, doing that will help us with other puzzles like gravity and other longstanding features of the real world that we haven't quite yet been able to grasp. Our number 84472485 talking with Sean Carroll, author of the new book, Something Deeply Hidden. You know, in science we say everybody quotes Richard Feynman and you did in your book. He once said, you know, science is very simple.

You come up with an idea and then you collect the data to prove it. It's that simple. Now, how do we collect the data? What kinds of experiments can we do to prove which worldview is? correct. You're much better at the Richard Feynman accent than I will ever be. So congratulations from New York. Yeah, exactly. You haven't had a leg up on me there. So the problem with many worlds as far as public relations is concerned is that it sounds like one is positing the existence of a huge, maybe infinite number of extra worlds. And then you say, well, how would you ever

test that postulate? But that's not the right way to think about it. The many worlds are not part of the theory that is put in as an axiom or postulate, they are a prediction of the theory. The postulate of the theory is just that the Schrodinger equation, which should be even more famous than his cat, but that's okay, you know, the Schrodinger equation is the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics. It's the equivalent of Isaac Newton's laws of motion, but for quantum mechanics, not classical mechanics. And all Everett said was the wave function, the way that we described the quantum mechanical

state of something always obeys this equation. That's it. In the ordinary Copenhagen or textbook interpretation of quantum mechanics, the wave function obeys the equation sometimes but not other times, and that's kind of weird. If you want to test many worlds, all you have to do is ask yourself, do wave functions always obey the Schrodinger equation? And people are doing that. The tests are ongoing right now. So is an extraordinarily testable theory. Is there any test you can explain to the layperson and what's going on in such a test? Sure. There's one alternative to many worlds, which says that randomly and spontaneously,

electrons or any other particles have their wave functions suddenly change. They tend to want to spread out over time, but they suddenly snap back to one particular location. And if that's true, you get a whole bunch of atoms together and you cool them down close to absolute zero. And if you wait long enough, one of them will jiggle a little bit because of this snapping into place, and that will heat up the collection of atoms. So this is a very tangible experiment that's going on in laboratories, and if they find the heating up that is predicted by these theories, many worlds will have been falsified.

We have a tweet from Lynn who asks, could your guest talk about that, what you're talking about, versus the transactional interpretation? No, I can't. I don't understand the transactional interpretation. Sorry about that. You know, I understand like four or five different interpretations of quantum mechanics, and at some point I say to myself, I'm going to pick one and run with it. Maybe, you know, I'll be proven wrong down the road, but I think that's enough for me to get off the ground.

Okay. Let's talk about in a little bit detail about what the wave function is that you're talking about. Yeah, it's a terribly boring name for the most important thing in the universe, right? You know, it goes back to the days when in the early 20th century, we were trying to understand electrons, moving in the orbit of an atom. And someone said, well, maybe we shouldn't think of electrons as particles. Maybe we should think of them as waves instead. And this got promoted by Schrodinger to the idea of a single wave function that describes

everything in the universe. And you can think of the wave function as basically a black box in regular quantum mechanics that says, if you want to know the probability of getting a measurement outcome, take the wave function and you square it. The wave function assigns a number to every possible. measurement outcome. So it's the machine we use to make predictions in quantum mechanics. We've got a, let's got some calls coming on. Sam in Baltimore. Hi, Sam. Hi, how are you guys? Hi there, go ahead. It occurs, great. It occurs to me that something like a black hole is a deep

scientific concept that's penetrated the popular consciousness. It seems that this idea of uncertainty is almost theological in nature and that a lot of people would refer to it more, maybe if it weren't behind the wall of the words quantum mechanics. Do you think that the concept has reached its full flower culturally outside of science? And how might that happen? Yeah, you know, the concept of uncertainty is crucial to quantum mechanics, but it also appears in our everyday lives. But in different ways, you know, and I think this is one of the barriers that people have

to really appreciating quantum mechanics. Because if you think about the cat again, you can always have a cat in a box and you don't know, whether it's alive or dead, awake and asleep. That's uncertainty because you lack some information. But quantum mechanics is saying something much different than that. It's much more deep. It's saying that there is no fact of the matter about whether the cat is alive or dead until you measure it. So it's not that we don't know what the answer is, it's that the answer doesn't exist until we look at it.

Now, Everett says what happens when we look at it is that all possibilities come into actuality. But one way or the other, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. is really just a relationship between what exists and what you see. Hi, Myra Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Sean Carroll, research physicist at Caltech, author of the new book, Something Deeply Hidden. It really is a great read.

I don't know whom you aim the book at, but I think there's something for everybody at every level in there. That's the goal. Yeah, I think so. You know, there's certainly some parts of it where I'm at least trying to persuade my physics colleagues, but mostly I want the person on the street who doesn't know anything about quantum mechanics to be able to pick this up and get a true understanding. You know, I really don't want to be yet another book that says quantum mechanics is bizarre and weird and we'll never get it.

I want to be the book that says, yes, we can get it. Let's do it. All right. I want you to get something for us, especially for me because the more I read about spooky action at a distance or entanglement, the more I want to know how that works. Entanglement is great, and it's really the crucial thing. You know, I said whenever it tries to explain Schrodinger's cat, he says, there's part of the universe, which is the cat was awake and you saw it awake. There's part of the universe, which is the cat was asleep and you saw it asleep.

And that means that you and the cat are entangled with each other. There is, again, no fact of the matter about whether the cat is awake or asleep, but relative to whether the cat's awake or asleep is you being in the state of, having seen it one way or the other. That's all entanglement is. It says that if you insist that something is doing one kind of thing, that tells you something about what the rest of the world is doing. Now, your approach to this seems very practical, very pragmatic.

You say it's very simple. But does it really reflect reality? You know what I'm saying here? Yes, it does. People say, oh, you know, physicists, they do this math. They're doing math all the time, but does it really reflect something real? I think this is an actually, you know, I get that it's a curmudgeonly question, but it's a really good one. It's a crucial one because this is the issue, I think.

Whatever reason people like or don't like many worlds, there's this sort of attitude that, you know, it's certainly very, very different than our everyday experience, right? Maybe someone like me will say many worlds is suggested by constructing a mathematical formalism, which attempts to explain our experience. our experience, but the formalism you're left with, the description of the world is so bizarre and weird and something we've never seen before that I should still be skeptical of it. And people like me will say, you know, I think the best strategy is to take the equations that describe our world and believe them even beyond our world until we have a reason not to. You can invent other versions of quantum mechanics which chop off the other worlds, which get rid of them because you don't like them. They are uniformly uglier, less simple, harder to understand than many worlds is, but if that's the direction you want to go in, plenty of room for new theories to be invented. So why don't we see all the other worlds that are happening around us? Well, basically, there's a lot of room in the set of all possible wave functions of the universe.

The short answer is that what's happening in one world never interferes with or interacts with what's happening in another world. Again, you know, quantum mechanics, it turns out, despite all the weirdness, it's a very simple theory. Like, once you have these two separate worlds, they don't mess with each other anymore. You can't send a signal. You can't, you can have multiple copies of you. You know, one of them said, all right, I'm going to have pizza. The other one said I'm going to have salad because you observed some quantum system and did what, you know, you said you would agree ahead of time to do. But you could never say, well, which one tasted better?

You can never talk to the other one. And I get that that's disappointing. but unless you have a better theory, I think it's what we should accept. Well, I think it's a great idea to read your book. It's a terrific book. Sean Carroll is a research physicist at Caltech, author of Something Deeply Hidden. It's out now. Another great book, Sean.

Thank you very much. I really do think that this stuff is important, so I'm glad that people enjoy the book. Yeah, it's a great book. We'll have you back waiting for your next one. All right. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Before we go, we're brewing up trouble in New York City just in time for October.

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