The Blindboy Podcast - Quantum Quarantino

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

I chat with Dr Michael Brooks, host of Science(ish) podcast who is a science writer and expert in Quantum Physics. We talk about everything from lightbulbs to Quantum computing to birds who have evolved a type of quantum technology in their eyes. I also give ye a recipe for a delicious cocktail. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roll over on your bellies, feel the warmth of my breath, you slithery quarantine lizards. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. What's the crack? I hope you've been having a fruitful week and a not too stressful time. If you're listening to this podcast, when it comes out, it means it's April 1st, 2020. Otherwise known as April Fool's Day.

I think in 2020, April Fool's Day can go fuck itself. Because, it just, it's just annoying. It's like, you know like when newspapers do a fake story on April 1st

it's just you can't do it anymore because the internet is too mad and fake news and do you ever like come across an article and it's ridiculous and you're like in June

and you share it because it's in the Irish Times or it's in the Guardian and you believe it and then you don't notice that the the date is April Fool's and then you look like a dickhead like I remember sharing an article

it was like an Irish Times article whereby the government was suggesting that they reintroduce wolves to the wild in Ireland and I thought it was a great idea I was like yeah bring back wolves but then it's like the article was an April Fool's joke

from like 2016 delete the fucking article then because I'm reading it article then because I'm reading it in December buddy I'm reading it in December expecting some fucking wolves and I just end up looking like an idiot so maybe yeah if

if the newspapers are running April Fool's jokes maybe just do it today and then delete the fucking article for the poor people who are going to be reading it in November or whenever April Fool's actually before I tell you why April Fool's is important to me

I want to give you a little recipe for a drink and the thing is with this recipe i was thinking fuck it i can't wait to tell you about this quarantine drink recipe but then i thought the recipe is so odd that you're gonna think it's april fool's recipe and that I'm talking out of my hole. So I have to assure you. This is not an April Fool's recipe. It's actually a real thing. So if you're in quarantine at the moment.

Like I am. Because of the coronavirus. I'm guessing you're eating a lot of canned food. Because you're trying to minimise the amount of time. That you're going to the shop. So you're buying a lot of canned goods because you're trying to minimize the amount of time that you're going to the shop so you're buying a lot of canned goods so that's what i'm doing i'm guessing that many of you are acquainting yourselves with chickpeas chickpeas are fantastic they come in a can very tasty full of protein anything that's canned you can keep for fucking ages so i'm assuming a lot of you are eating chickpeas and if you're not you should be tasty great source of protein

fuck it into a stew fuck it into a curry whatever you want to do there's a chickpea stew recipe actually that's gone viral at the moment because of quarantine I think it's New York Times started it but it's delicious it's like a can of chickpeas and a can of coconut milk and then ginger and onions look it up, chickpea stew

delicious but anyway if you are eating chickpeas out of a tin do not throw away the chickpea juice. Alright? Hold on to the juice from the tin of chickpeas. Because this juice is known as aquafaba. And it's actually got multiple uses.

It's fucking fantastic. it's actually got multiple uses it's fucking fantastic vegans use chickpea juice as a substitute for egg whites so if you're even baking a cake and you're stuck for eggs

you can get chickpea juice and you can whip it and it forms a foam you can make you can add sugar to it, you can whip it up you can make a fucking meringue what else it you can whip it up you can make a fucking meringue what else can you do with chickpea juice if you're making granola in the oven you mix chickpea juice in with it and i think it sticks it together you can make chocolate mousse using chocolate and chickpea juice look it up aquafaba the many wonderful things you can do

with chickpea juice so don't be throwing away that fucking chickpea juice out of the tin it's very valuable so anyway here's a little drink recipe and because of quarantine so it's a twist on a whiskey sour except it doesn't use egg white it uses chickpea juice so first you need a cocktail shaker not everyone has a cocktail shaker right if you don't have a cocktail shaker use any container with a fucking lid on it use you know your your bottle that you have for going to the gym a jam jar an empty clean jam jar is perfect so get your jam jar put a few ice cubes into the jam jar and then i want you to get a lemon i know a lot of you have lemons because if you're kind of paranoid

about getting a flu you're going to have some lemons. So get a lemon, cut it in half, into your jam jar, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon. Then on top of this put in two tablespoons of the juice from your can of chickpeas then get whiskey any whiskey technically it should be bourbon but it can be any whiskey I've been using Jameson put in either a shot or two shots of Jameson onto your lemon juice and tablespoon of chickpea juice again two tablespoons of chickpea juice whatever works for you then the last thing you need to put in is something sweet

I put in a tablespoon of sugar you could put in maple syrup, you could put in honey whatever works, you're just trying to sweeten up the lemon put the top on to the jam jar shake it like mad for about 20 seconds pour it into a glass with some ice cubes in it

and what you'll get is what the chickpea juice does is it it takes the place of the egg white so it kind of emulsifies the whiskey and the lemon juice and you get this gorgeous foamy drink that's cold because you've shaken it nice and it's incredibly it's delicious and refreshing and it can be as sour as you like or as sweet as you like depending on how you add the sugar to it and yeah egg whites are used in cocktails a lot and i i don't like it what i do i, I like egg white cocktails because they're very smooth, and they have a head on them, and they're foamy, so the texture of them is incredible, but egg whites, raw egg whites, sometimes in a drink, they have a kind of a sulfur type of smell,

and I'm not crazy about that, but when you use chickpea juice instead of fucking egg whites i'm telling you lads it's perfect and it's actually nicer because you get this lovely there's a kind of a protein flavor to it to the chickpea juice so there you go and that's not an april fools that's why i had to say it no one's gonna fucking believe me that I'm putting the juice of a tin of chickpeas into it into an alcoholic drink there you go so this week I've got a most wonderful distraction for all of ye I have an incredibly engaging interesting podcast that I'm just really happy to deliver it this week for two reasons

number one April 1st to me I don't really think of it as April Fool's Day, for me April 1st is the day when the writer Flann O'Brien died Flann O'rien is my favorite writer

an irish writer um who wrote very surreal comedic books that mixed philosophy and science and flan is just amazing look if you're looking for a book to read pick up The Third Policeman by Flan O'Brien or At Swim Two Birds but Flan O'Brien's book The Third Policeman which is probably my favourite book of all time

it is, it is em The Third Policeman which was written in the 30s, it explores Einstein's atomic theory. Einstein's atomic theory is a central part of the book, but Flannery O'Brien explores it in this Irish vernacular way which takes, you know, something as cutting edge and as groundbreaking and highfalutin and as advanced as Einstein's atomic theory in the 1930s

he manages to describe it in the book using the simple language of the Irish peasant do you know, and he uses atomic theory in the book he basically I don't think, I don't need to give a spoiler alert, but a huge tenet of the book The Third Policeman, it's about people who gradually turn into bicycles.

And the people in the book turn into bicycles because the atoms in the bicycle start to mix with the atoms of the person and then their personalities get mixed up so you have bicycles that have human personalities and then humans with the personality of a bicycle and this is a huge tenet of this book that he wrote so in honor of flan o'bBrien and how he beautifully used the atomic theory for hilarious creativity in The Third Policeman this week I'm going to be speaking to a doctor of quantum physics a fella called Dr Michael Brooks

who did his PhD in quantum physics a fella called Dr. Michael Brooks who is did his PhD in quantum physics he's an expert in quantum physics a really complicated and difficult subject but Michael Brooks is one of these people who is

not only an expert in an area, they're also passionate about the area to the point that they're creative and how they speak about it and michael brooks is he's gifted with the ability to communicate very complicated complex ideas in simple terms so it was a hugely enjoyable uh interview to fucking do and i'm looking forward to showing it to you. So before I continue. And before we go into the chat with Michael Brooks.

About quantum physics. First we'll have our. What time are we there? 12 minutes in. We'll have our little ocarina pause. To get any. Adverts out of the way hold on a minute on April 5th

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for you no no don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil.

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What's going on here? That was a lackluster ocarina pause right there. I don't know what went wrong. I couldn't get any purchase on the ocarina with my fingers. So, before we get into it, just I'm going to give a plug to my Patreon. If you've been listening the past few weeks, you are aware that i had to postpone some gigs as a result of coronavirus one of these gigs in particular london because i postponed that it left me with quite a large debt penalties for postponing it so i've inherited a large debt and i don't have any live income for the next few

months so i'm really pleading with you if you listen to the podcast and you've been listening to it for a while or whatever now is really the time that i really need you to financially support the podcast patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you can financially support the podcast. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. If you can spare me the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee once a month, please fucking do. It's now my sole source of income. And you'd truly be helping me deeply if you do it. And thank you to everyone who...

Thank you to everyone who has done it the past few weeks. Thank you so much. Alright, that's all i can say um if you can't afford it you don't have to the rule still applies but if you're someone who can please do what else have i got to say yes so as you know a few of my gigs got postponed i now have dates for when these gigs will we'll actually be able to go and do them all right so we'll say vicar street i had three vicar street gigs they were sold out couldn't do them they've been rescheduled so the new dates for vicar street are 21st of August, the 8th of October and the 15th of November. So if you've

bought tickets to these gigs that were supposed to be this month, they were supposed to be today, tomorrow and the day after I think. First, second and third of April they were supposed to be but they've been rescheduled to August, October and november so if you bought tickets to those gigs they're completely valid hold on to them if you can't make those dates fair enough you're entitled to a refund everyone's entitled to a refund but i'm asking you please hold on to the tickets and come along to the new dates your tickets are valid for them right this coronavirus bullshit is going to be over we're going to come out the other side of it I think we'll all

have a new fucking appreciation of things we used to take for granted and let's fucking celebrate once it's done let's celebrate so come along to the fucking gigs and we'll have crack alright Belfast

that's been rescheduled to the 12th of September in Ulster Hall and London has been rescheduled to the 24th of October those are the dates I have at the moment for gigs that have been postponed postponed

every other gig lads that was supposed to be on i haven't cancelled any gig they're all going to be postponed if you bought a ticket everyone's going to get an email with the new date i'm just giving you a heads up on the podcast i don't have a rescheduled date for cork yet and a few other ones strata and things like that but don't worry you will be. And you're entitled to a refund, but I'm asking you, come along to the gig and hold on to your ticket, if you can.

All right. Dog bless. Without further ado, yeah, this is a chat I had with Dr. Michael Brooks. We talk about everything. We talk about Michael Brooks. We talk about everything. We talk about quantum physics. We talk about Einsteinian physics. We talk about quantum computing.

This is... I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Michael is so interesting. It was a pleasure to do. And I hope you enjoy this bit of escapism. Right? This is going to take your mind out of

wherever the fuck you are right now into a lovely fantasy place of thinking alright, yart nice and cognizant because I've got an expert in quantum physics, their name is Dr. Michael Brooks

come on out, Michael. Thank you. What is the crack, Michael? Where do I begin? That's ironically a nice little metaphor for quantum physics. Where do I begin? That's ironically a nice little metaphor for quantum physics. Where do you begin? So you're a PhD in quantum physics, but also you specialise in democratising science, making the language of science accessible to everybody,

because it's not only a problem with science, I think it's a problem with general academia even art you know yeah which which is a total scam the fact that you should have to explain art i can understand quantum physics needing to explain that simply to people but sometimes people describe art in too many words and it doesn't need to happen but um i'll ask the most basic question, right? What is quantum physics? All right, so quantum physics is the rules that govern stuff that's very small usually. So atoms, electrons, you know, the little things

that you learned about at school that sit inside the atom. Photons, which are particles of light, although we think they're waves as well, we don't really know what they are. We don't really know what anything is, to be honest. I mean, we don't even know what an atom actually is. So, I mean, all the stuff that you learn at school, like once you learn some, you know, quantum physics,

basically, you realise your teachers were just making it up. Is it... One thing I enjoy about quantum physics when I'm reading about it is that we have this understanding of the world as it works. Like something like gravity. Look. Yeah.

I knew that was going to happen. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it's... Is that Newtonian physics? Well, that is kind of Newtonian there. Nothing extraordinary is happening. Newton's sort in that nothing extraordinary is happening Newton's sort of description of gravity works to a certain degree but it doesn't work on like huge scales

across the universe and things like that so you have to that's why Einstein basically invented general relativity yeah that's what I want to know about yeah like everyone knows that Einstein was pure smart but no one really knows what the fuck did he do but it is one of them you'd be having an argument with someone and you'd go who do you think you are Einstein no one knows what the fuck he did

no one can really well I don't like I knew it was general relativity but like what does that mean so he worked out and the first thing he did really of note was that he showed that quantum, that things come in lumps so energy comes in lumps

In lumps? In lumps So you can't You know when you roll a dice and you can get one or you can get two but you can't get one and a half Yes That's how quantum stuff works

So you can have one lump of energy or two lumps of energy, but it's not infinitely indivisible. You can't have one and a half quanta. A quantum is the basic thing. What is a quanta? So it's just a lump of energy. So energy comes in lumps.

And we call them photons when it's light. And basically, we found this out by trying to work out how a light bulb works. Okay. Sorry, what's a lump of energy? Well, the energy that's coming, say, from the spotlight, it's coming at you in lumps. There's a lump of energy that's a particular color of light that's coming at you, and then there's another lump that's a different color.

And you can basically have these fundamental particles so am I being is that like a hose of lumps of energy yeah yeah yeah and it's spraying me with lumps of energy exactly yes I mean you know you don't have to feel any differently about it it's just what it is you know Wow so but you know would you be happier if I said it was waves? Because I can say that No, I like the idea of lumps You like the hose Because, I don't know, there's something very humble about lumps There's something, there's a humility to a lump

But a wave has got opinions about itself A lump is just like, I'm a fucking lump, what do you want from me? Like in Ireland we call people lazy lumps. Yeah, okay, so that works quite well. Does the lump have a shape? That's the other thing, waves have a shape, but a lump... No, not that we know of. We literally can't think of it as having a physical space that it inhabits.

You can't think of it as, oh, it's this big, because it's energy, or it's just because it's energy so it doesn't work in the same way so is it is a lump of light made out of atoms no so a lump of light is made out of pure energy and at the beginning of everything at the big bang everything was just energy and some of that energy sort of condensed down, sort of coagulated, however you want to think about it, into stuff like matter, like particles. And then we've got atoms, and then we've got stars, and then we've got planets, galaxies, people. So we're made of different stuff than the lumps of light. So this lump of energy that's hitting me with this light, what other lumps of energy do I

encounter in my day that aren't light? Are there any other lumps of energy that's hitting me with this light what other lumps of energy do i encounter in my day that aren't light is there any other lumps of energy yeah so um uh magnets they basically work by these lumps of energy that are exchanged between sort of bits of the magnet if you like and and so a magnet's relation so if two magnets if you put the two magnets together and they're like, fuck that, get the fuck away from me, I'm not interested in you. Yeah. Are they like exchanging lumps of energy that don't agree with each other? It's like a lump argument. Exactly.

They're exchanging photons between each other. And that's what the force is that acts between them. Is a photon the name for one of these lumps of energy? Yeah. So I'm getting battered with photons. Yeah. And magnets are exchanging photons too. But is a magnet's photon the same photon as a light's photon?

It's just a different frequency or wavelength or colour, if you like. So it's not a colour, but, you know, because we attribute colour to a few bits of this whole electromagnetic spectrum. So some of it is just magnetism. And there's UV light and there's infrared which is heat. So when you're hot,

again it's photons. Lumps of energy. Is it friction? Is that hose of lumps of energy hitting me so hard that it's creating friction and that's why I'm warm? No. Okay.

Why? Why? Okay, so. Now, it doesn't happen anymore because they're LED lights. Right. But if this was 15 years ago and we had old school incandescent lights, we'd be fucking really warm up here. Yeah.

Do you know why? No. I could see. Because all of the energy that those lights give off, or most of the energy is heat and infrared. And this was a huge problem. So when they first invented the light bulb at the end of the 19th century, they were trying to fix this so that you got more light than heat because you were just getting so

much. All the electrical energy gets turned into heat. Very little light comes out. Because an incandescent light is essentially a fire that doesn't go out, isn't it? It's a fire that doesn't really start, I guess. Really? Yeah, because it happens in a vacuum. With tungsten?

Yeah. So you have your tungsten, and your tungsten gets heated to about 1,500 degrees. And what it's doing then is all the atoms in the tungsten are re-radiating the electrical energy as light and heat, but mostly heat. So they wanted to fix this and get more light, and that's how quantum theory started, basically with a light bulb. Light bulb, really? Yeah. And to be honest, we still don't know how light bulbs actually work.

Really? Yeah, because the theory that said, oh, here's how to fix light bulbs and make them better is quantum theory. That's how to fix light bulbs and make them better is quantum theory. That's how we decided. We said, oh, it comes in lumps of energy and not just a continuous set of infinite numbers of energies. That was the fix by a guy called Max Planck, who said he only did it as an act of desperation.

He never understood why that worked, but it did work. That solved the whole that's how we basically got quantum theory instead of the previous theory which is known as the classical theory so just back to the light bulb so

that's pretty bright and it's an LED and it's probably only using maybe 60 watts, right? Yeah. But if it was 15 years ago, that would be incandescent.

It'd be using maybe 1,000 watts, and we'd be very warm. Yeah. But it'd still be the same amount of light. The people out here would be experiencing the same amount of light that we're getting on stage. So why is that LED light

able to use less energy, yet I'm still as bright as I would be if it was a fucking 1,000-watt incandescent? Precisely because of quantum theory. It's been designed using quantum theory, using the maths of quantum theory, to give out more light than heat. So turn all the electrical energy into light rather than heat.

So quantum theory is applied in the making of light bulbs. It's applied in the making of all electronics, phones, everything. By the way, Michael is selling light bulbs after the gig. That's the thing. Again, and this is something I'm just after learning now, is i think of quantum uh theory and quantum physics as one of these grand theoretical things and i never actually thought it has a practical application that's used to benefit my day so what is quantum how is my day on an everyday basis benefited by quantum physics so what we do is we sort of take, say, an atom,

and you sort of work out how you make that atom emit radiation in a certain way. So you can work out where, using a thing called the Schrodinger equation, from Erwin Schrodinger, the guy with the cat, right? And you sort of take that and you say, okay, so if I adjust this atom or if I put that together with this other atom, then I'll have this kind of thing. And I can put a small amount of energy in.

And that will stimulate it to then sort of give out lots of other energy. So it's like you have a map of the system, effectively. And you're like, oh, if I take a shortcut there, then I can get a lot of stuff out of here. And so that's how you get, for instance, things like lasers, which are everywhere now obviously like supermarket scanners and that comes directly from understanding quantum physics

yeah how does it like alright before I get on to the cat so again just I'm going to go back to the the hose full of lumps because it's a nice metaphor so that hose is showering me with lumps but it's quite like it's not nice metaphor right so that hose is showering me with lumps yeah but it's quite like

it's not a very concentrated hose like if it was out the back garden i'd be annoying my neighbors with it it'd be going everywhere yeah whereas i want one of these hoses that are like really you could wash the windows with it it's like like that is that what a laser is a laser is yeah so a laser is is concentrated lumps basically Basically, the lumps are all linked together. Yeah, how does it do it? Because I can understand how water does it. I mean, it's a phenomenon called coherence. So they're sort of locked together, basically,

because the atoms are controlled in the way that they will emit these things. So you get this kind of locking, which means that they don't just all go spraying off at random. And what is laser light? It's photons. It's still the same basic thing, lumps of energy, but they're just all much more controlled in the way that they're emitted. But is it the same? It's the exact same as that. Why is it a laser green or red? Oh, so that's just to do with the materials you make the laser from. They're not

the same as that. So a light emitting diode is a different kind of technology. A laser is just a much more powerful way of locking things together. This is just designed so that it doesn't waste a lot of light, a lot of energy as heat. So back to,

you mentioned there Schrodinger and you said the guy with the cat. Yeah. Can you tell us what is Schrodinger's cat? Explain the experiment. Yeah, so I mean, it's not an actual experiment. I should say it's a thought experiment. So no cats were harmed in the making of this experiment.

So the idea was that actually, and the interesting thing, so Schrodinger's cat, the thing everybody knows is it's alive and dead at the same time. It's a weird thing where it's like, there's this cat, and it's alive and dead at the same time. And everyone thinks this is the cool thing about quantum physics. When Schrodinger came up with this, this was his actual proof that there was something wrong with quantum physics, and he wanted to get out of it, basically. He felt like this was just going nowhere.

There was too many problems to deal with. So what he said was, well, look, we have these sort of weird things that happen in quantum physics where I can have two things that happen at once. And so I can describe it with my wave equation. And, you know, like you throw two stones into a pond, right? And you get the waves coming, and they meet each other. And actually you get a thing called interference from that.

So they actually become another wave, effectively. And the characteristic of that wave is determined by the initial two waves. And that's how quantum things are described in quantum theory, as waves. So you can have these two waves that effectively meet and produce this effect together. But they're not waves of water or physical stuff. They're actually waves of probability. So they're not waves of water or physical stuff. They're actually waves of probability. What?

They're waves of what might happen. They're waves of what might happen, exactly. If you do a measurement, if you actually look at it. So it's almost like there's two waves, and they coexist together, and you can't separate them. And then you do a measurement, and you just get one of them. So you only get one or the other. You can't have both in the real world.

But in the world of quantum theory and the maths of that, you can have both of them existing simultaneously together. And so when you're talking about describing a quantum thing, like say a lump of uranium, right? Yeah. And it's giving out radiation. And that's a quantum event. It just gives it out at random.

Each atom gives out a bit of radiation at random. So if I take one atom of uranium, I don't know whether it's going to give out that radiation in five minutes or five million years. It's literally, you don't know. There's no cause in quantum theory. It just happens spontaneously, randomly. And so how you describe that in quantum theory is you say, oh, it has given out the radiation and it hasn't. You can have both options at once and that's fine, right? So Schrodinger said, okay, well, if you can do that,

then surely you can, like, then link that to a radiation detector and you can say that radiation detector has detected radiation and not detected radiation at the same time because the atoms given out radiation are not. So he said, and he literally said, I can write the equation for

this and he did he wrote the equation down and that's all fine this phenomenon is called super position right and then he said like so imagine i now link that geiger counter to a hammer and the hammer's up but if it falls it breaks a vial of cyanide right and it can write the equation where the hammer is up and down at the same time because the Geiger counter has detected and not detected the radiation. So you can write a superposition of the cyanide being smashed and not smashed. And then he said, what if there's a cat there? And the cat, therefore, is actually, and I can write the equation for this as well, the cat is dead and alive.

It's poisoned and it's not poisoned. As long as this is all in a sealed box, so nobody's doing the measurements, and so there's no observation of what the actual outcome in the real world is, then that gives you a cat that's dead and alive at the same time directly because of quantum theory. And he said, so that's absurd, that's ridiculous, there's something wrong with this theory. I didn't know that! Because here's the thing. Someone definitely, like someone definitely made the box.

Someone definitely did it. So, without question, we don't know whether it happened or not. There is no way that that experiment has been around for so long for someone not to go. But you kind of know that when you look in the box, the cat will be alive or dead. What? But until you open the box, the cat is alive and dead. How? Because everything is one thing and the other, because that's how quantum theory works.

No, no, hold on now. but like how could like if i open the box and and and the hammer went down then the cat's definitely dead yeah but then if it didn't happen he's definitely alive but what quantum theory effectively says and this is this was stroding his big problem with it is that he said that until somebody actually looks and makes a measurement, all those things can be both things at once. So the problem is we don't know what it means to make a measurement. Is it just when we open... I mean, you know, I would have thought the cat gets some saying

whether it feels a bit sick or not. I mean, that might be a conscious... The cat's consciousness. Yeah, the cat's consciousness should play into it, really. But we've never resolved this. We literally... This sort of comes all the way from trying to work out how a light bulb works.

And then you get to cats that are dead and alive at the same time. And we don't know the answer. And it's been 120 years. So the thing is, when you hear shit like that, right, essentially, there is a box and there's a cat in it that may be dead or alive, and we only find... Its state of dead or aliveness

depends upon whether it is being observed. Yeah. And then you hear that and you go, how do quantum particles know someone's looking at them? And then people go, does that mean there's God? Yeah, I mean, that's a big leap isn't it it is a big leap but religious people do use quantum mechanics i mean if god's looking all the time then the cat's definitely one thing or the other so it can't be about god it can't be about god because god's supposed to be omniscient and can see everything so presumably

if you had god in there god would know know whether the cat's alive or dead. So God's actually quite problematic in this situation. Okay. Do quantum physicists ever, in an experiment, account for there might be God? Not really. Or not even God, there might be a creator a creator really so so there's a famous quote where einstein said um i don't believe that god plays dice you might have heard that one right

christians always appropriated to say einstein believed in god yeah and he didn't he really didn't and the phrase he actually used in german was the old one so it was a kind of way of saying you know this whole universe can't be about just chance. Oh, that was his critique of quantum physics. Yeah, it was. So he hated a lot about quantum physics, as did Schrodinger at the end. And Schrodinger, like, you know,

had various things that he wanted to sort out and he couldn't sort them out. And he said right at the beginning, if we don't sort this stuff out, then I'll be sorry I ever had anything to do with it. And he actually, we didn't and he was. So he and Einstein both

sort of buggered off towards the end and just went and worked on something else. You worked with Schrodinger? No. Oh, okay. What is the Higgs boson? And since we found it what has it done for us?

Oh, so, I mean, the Higgs boson was basically a particle that we predicted must exist in about the 1960s, about 1965. And the God particle, which is what got everyone interested. It got called that, yeah. And all the physicists hated that it was called that, but they quite liked the attention at the same time yeah you know it's a difficult one isn't it so um so they they said um this thing must exist because in order for some of the stuff in particle physics to hold together and for some of the mass that we experience you know the kind of resistance

to force that we have we need to have particle. We need to have this thing called the Higgs field, which sort of fills all the space. What do you mean the resistance? So your mass is the thing that, like, keeps you in a chair because gravity is acting on it. And if I were to push you, then I would feel, like, your mass. Resistance to my mass, yeah. Resistance to movement, basically.

So we get some of that. Does the Higgs boson give mass to subatomic particles? It gives some of the mass. Does that mean it's a really tiny priest? I've walked right into that. No, that was pre-prepared. That wasn't. That joke, it's my joke, but it's about seven years old.

Infinitely recyclable. Yeah. And yeah, so it gives us a little bit of our mass, not all of it. But the idea is that it's the last thing that we had to discover. So we discovered all the other particles in this sort of thing, this puzzle that we're putting together. And the last one,

we predicted it in 1965, it must exist. It's taken us this long to build an accelerator big enough to find it. And what is a particle accelerator? Like, what is CERN engineering? So what they do is they produce particles, subatomic particles, mostly protons, and they accelerate them sort of in a big ring that's like about 27 kilometres across or something like that.

And they accelerate them up to nearly the speed of light so that when they smash together, basically, they're almost smashing together at the speed of light, which means they've got energies that are kind of close to where we were at the big bang ah and the idea is that if you then like look at what you get out of that collision all the debris that comes out of it you can start to see the real sort of fundamental things that make up the universe because you're close to that kind of energy so in order to get the higgs boson you basically had to smash things together at almost the speed of light. And then you look at the debris that comes off and the

way it's thrown off and you can say, oh yeah, that's the thing that was a Higgs. I mean, you don't actually see the Higgs boson itself. What you see is the stuff that it turned into afterwards as it all kind of fell apart. And then you infer from that, oh yeah, the Higgs boson is there and it has this kind of energy. And basically what happened in that experiment was we confirmed everything that the theory said. It was all perfect. And physicists were really annoyed because it made everything else really dull. It was like there were no questions left to ask. And so now they're sort of thinking, I think we're going to need a bigger accelerator.

Okay. So, I mean, I'm not even sure what's... I mean, there's still stuff going on Is it true that that accelerator discovered like elements on the periodic table that only exist for like a second I don't know

You'd probably know man That's something I read on the internet that obviously isn't true because I'm guessing you'd have probably heard about it I can't be across everything. What about when the Large Hadron Collider opened and some, like, scientists were like, this is going to end the world? I don't think any scientists thought that.

Okay, who taught it? There was some people in India. There was, so there was a guy who basically i think in america who said i've read the health and safety report on this and i can't see any mention of the problem of like mini wormholes being many black holes being created yeah and then they might if they are created they might blow up and like become huge black holes and destroy the universe yeah and um and all the scientists were like what uh and then cern had to go back and do another health and safety report basically but the media got a hold of it the media got a hold of it and of course as soon as it's reported people start panicking and saying when this thing turns on

we're all going to die yeah um not many people thought that i don't think but enough for the media to write about it. Yeah. And I think... Well, it's a beautiful story. It's like, in terms of the media, that's a good media day. It's like the scientists are going to create something that swallows all known reality. Yeah.

And it was the start of clickbait as well. It was like 2013. Yeah. I don't think... I'm not sure they really check their sources on that very much I mean the interesting thing is so you get these little black holes and the possibility does that actually does happen

well it was supposed to but it didn't so I mean it was a possibility that we would create sort of mini black holes and they never turned up which is actually really disappointing because black holes sound scary will our sun eventually turn into

a black hole? No, because it's not big enough, it's not massive enough, you have to have quite a serious amount of mass. So,

can you tell us what the fuck is a black hole and how does it happen and why are they important? So, when you get a certain size of star

and at the end of its life it stops burning because it's run out of all its fuel and that's when all of the size of the whole thing has end of its life it stops burning because it's run out of all its fuel. And that's when all of the size of the whole thing has been held up by the fact that it's burning. It's like pushing itself out with all the energy. So at the

end of that it just collapses. And then it collapses so far on itself that it becomes so dense that basically it just keeps on collapsing because it's pulled under by its own gravity. So all the matter it still has but it's just gone into a tiny space. And it's pulled under by its own gravity. So all the mass of the star... So it still has all the matter it still has, but it's just gone into a tiny space.

And it's got this intense gravitational pull on it, so it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And it gets to the point where all that mass then is contained in a region of space and time that's so small that it effectively rips a hole in space-time itself. And that is the centre of a black hole. So, like, if you had a car and a car is really big and heavy

but you melted it to the size of that... It's that kind of thing. No, but can you do that? It's something that was once large, but now it's tiny, yet it's still the same amount of heavy. It doesn't ever stop shrinking

because it pulls on itself so hard because of gravity. So it doesn't ever stop shrinking because it pulls on itself so hard because of gravity. So it doesn't ever stop shrinking and it just breaks space. But wasn't Einstein the fella who said that space and time are the same thing? Yeah. So now you've got this star

that's after ripping into time. Yeah. So what the fuck's that about? Well, so it rips a hole in... So you have to think of the universe as being... So three dimensions of space is quite easy. We know that. And then you add one of time as well.

And normally... Is time the fourth dimension? Yes. Okay. So time is the fourth dimension. And we just move... We can move anywhere we like in the three dimensions of space, up and down.

We can sort of move ourselves around. Time... I mean, time has basically got us. And we're just moving forward in time. And and down, we can move ourselves around. Time has basically got us, and we're just moving forward in time, and there's nothing we can do about it. The idea is that actually, Einstein said, well, it's exactly the same as space. It's not clear why it behaves so differently for us, but it is the same. When you cross the event horizon of a black hole, in fact, which is the sphere beyond which you can't go back because you're always going to be pulled in

even light can't escape once you cross that point then you're actually heading into your own future so time becomes space on the inside of a black hole and one dimension of space becomes time and I mean it's impossible to get your head round what that actually means but it's there

in the equations. And so you end up falling into your own future. And it's inescapable. Oh, my God. I just hear that as some fucking, some old lad. Did you hear about him last week? He fell into his own future. Fuck. fuck I'm trying to think of the right question

hold on so like so this is the stuff that I love about this territory of science is and I said it to you backstage a special fuzzy feeling it gives my brain when I'm now confronted with

something way beyond what my mind can understand, but also at the same time, knowing that it's true. Do you know what I mean? And like... I mean, true is a difficult thing, right? Because knowing that it's true is... So you can read stuff and you can read the maths

and you can say this is what I think the maths is saying but what actually is the case? We used to think that... But haven't they gotten clocks? Haven't they gotten a clock and put it on an airplane? Oh yeah, yeah. When I heard that I went, fuck, this is real. Tell me about that.

So this was in the early 1970s I think. So this was basically the way to prove that Einstein's special relativity was right. And Einstein's special relativity says that when you move fast relative to something else, then your time changes. The passage of time is different for you

than it is for that thing that's just stayed still. So they got two atomic clocks, and they basically sat one in a laboratory and put the other one in an airplane. And they actually bought it a ticket. They had to buy a ticket, but they got a reduced rate because it wasn't going to eat anything. Seriously.

And it said on the ticket, Mr. Clock. It's amazing. Brilliant. It's amazing. And they flew it around the world. So basically it moved on the ticket, Mr. Clock. It's amazing. Brilliant. It's amazing. And they flew it around the world. So basically it moved on a jet plane fast enough so that its experience of time, and this is because of basically the ticking of its atoms.

I mean, the clock itself is just about the vibration frequency of the atoms, so the resonant frequency of these atoms. And that gives you a measure of time. And as it flew around the world, and then itant frequency of these atoms. And that gives you a measure of time. And as it flew around the world, and then it came back and stood next to the other one, and they measured different times. So they showed that moving fast relative to something else through space actually messes with time.

Yeah. And what it means is that astronauts who go up to the space station, they're actually sort of traveling forward into the future faster than we are. But does that mean that, like that a pilot or an air hostess ages differently to the rest of us? Yeah. It does, doesn't it? Yeah, it's sort of

billionths of a second throughout a lifetime, pretty much. So it's not great. It's nothing to write home about. Yeah. It's not big and clever. Is this the other one with twin theory, then? Yeah, so exactly the same thing. So if you have two twins,

and you can only have two twins really. Not in Kerry. Triplets were born down in Kerry. And this fella goes, did you hear about then they had the three twins? But go on. So you've got twins. You separate them out.

So one stays on Earth, and the other one gets in a rocket and flies off to the nearest star, basically. Yeah. And then you bring them back together. And when you bring them back together, one of them has aged. So the one who's traveled has aged much less than the one who stayed on Earth because their relative sort of movement through space has been different. Obviously, we haven't done that because we can't fly off to stars or whatever.

But the theory stands, and the atomic clock thing proves that that would be the case. And what that means is actually that when you're traveling fast through space, your atoms slow down effectively in what they do. So actually, all of you is experiencing less time and and so you would come back to earth and you would have had a little bit less time than everyone else and does mass also like if i was able to spend a year on jupiter because on jupiter gravity is more or something is this yeah it's, it's higher, yeah. Would I age differently on Jupiter if I managed to get back to Ireland?

Yeah, so you would be in... Ireland! I'm not sure that's the first place you'd go, is it? No. Earth, I mean. Ireland. God, go on. Don't worry about Houston.

So you're in a position where you're in basically a stronger gravitational field, and that slows down time. So a strong gravitational field slows down time. And so, yes, you would have less of an experience of time. So the idea is that you can build a time machine, possibly, by putting one end of a wormhole tunnel sort of near a neutron star, which is incredibly dense,

incredibly strong gravitational field. And at that end of that wormhole, basically time goes much slower. So you can kind of work out how to travel through time. If you could get through a wormhole, you'd travel to a different region of time and slow it down. So here's something I heard,

and I don't know is it true or not. So I heard that like, if you've got a black hole here in this part of the universe and then another black hole there in that part of the universe, that you can just go like this. And then... And make a shortcut. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's, I mean, I say that's true. I mean, that's a good example of true being a difficult word. Because in theory you can make a wormhole. So it's not two black holes. Yeah, what's a wormhole? So a wormhole is a rip in space like you would have at the center of a black hole.

Yes. So the theory is that maybe if you go into a black hole, you actually exit the black hole somewhere else in the universe because it's like just a shortcut to another place. So it has to have an arse, basically. Yeah, yeah. So is... another place so it has to have an arse basically yeah yeah so is is see this i think they use the word throat actually yeah yeah so it has an arse i'll send a throat yeah the arse end of the wormhole but again this is where it's like how much that is getting into science fiction but

do scientists seriously look at wormholes and go maybe this is how we get to another galaxy maybe this is how we cheat light years as such not every day um so i mean you don't wake up in the morning thinking that that's what i'm aiming to do right yeah so um we look at the possibility of time travel everyone wants to be able to travel through time the only way you can do it is through things like wormholes, right? So you theorize about it and you sort of say, if I had a wormhole, and we don't have a wormhole, we don't know how to make one. But do they definitely exist?

Not necessarily, no, no, it's not proven. So are they only theorized? They're only theorized. Okay. Yeah. So you know that if you have enough mass and density, then you can rip a hole in space time in theory, right? And in theory, you could do that twice and you could create a wormhole. The trouble is, a wormhole, space-time is basically elastic and it wants to snap shut. So you have to keep it open. And in order to keep it open, you need this stuff called

negative energy. And we don't think that exists either. So there's a lot of ifs and buts on the way to time travel. But in theory, yes yes you can do that kind of thing and you can you know you can see how it could be done and then you have to have the problem of like well what does time travel actually mean you know what's back to the future right do you sort of erase yourself like everyone talks about going back and like doing killing a grandfather as a baby and stuff which is a weird thing to do a bit odd i i'd be wearing flares or something or going to discos.

I don't think I'd be killing my grandfather. No, because it doesn't sound quite so bad when you talk about killing your grandfather. But actually, you're talking about killing your grandfather when he was a baby. It's a bit odd, isn't it? What would you do if you got, I'm going to go back and murder a child.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no. Way better things to do than that. I'm not really down with that. I'd rather have a good day. So, you know, it's all theory. And, you know, there's very huge practical problems to putting it together.

So it may be that the laws of physics don't allow us to travel through time and then we can't do anything about it. Here's a question for you, and it's something... So if I look up at a star right and that star will say is 360 million light years away so if i was on that star and i had a telescope if i was looking at art i'd be looking at a lot of dinosaurs like today if i was on that star i'd be seeing dinosaurs because the light from the dinosaurs took 360 million years to reach that star. So when I look up into the sky,

how do I know that the star that I'm looking at isn't already gone and dead? It might well be. I mean, there must be stars that we can see now that no longer exist. Because you're only getting the light. Yeah. Because the light has taken maybe as much as hundreds or thousands of millions of years to get to us. So it might have imploded and gone.

But when the star is gone, though, does that not, like, change everything around it? Like, does that not, like... What I'm trying to say is, is it just the light that travels? What about, we said, the gravitational force of it, or the absence of it? So they die in different ways. So you see like the matter,

some of them will turn into things called white dwarfs, where they're just really sort of collapsed and they're no longer giving out light. You've got different sort of endings for these stars and the matter eventually sort of, you know, just sits there really, because it's all held together by gravity. So it's not going anywhere. And there's nothing really in its environment you know we're what 93 million miles away from the

sun and and so you know if the sun disappeared obviously it would be huge for us but it would take seven minutes but it would take seven minutes before you know we noticed and so i guess with yeah that's the universe just evolves and stuff happens that That's the question. So let's just say you had a button and the button could make the sun disappear, right? Right. But if the sun disappeared, what that would do for gravity would fuck everything up. So...

You mean it disappeared actually from the universe? Like literally gone. All right. So then that would... It would be like... This is quite a hypothetical. If you're jumping... Yes, it's never going to happen.

Like if you're jumping up it's never going to happen like if you're jumping up and down on the bed yeah the ripple of would it be a gravity ripple a gravitational wave yeah yeah

would we feel so if it takes seven minutes for the light to get to us how long does it take us to notice that the sun would be gone from a gravity point of view

well gravity we think travels at the speed of light or does it take us to notice that the sun would be gone from a gravity point of view? Well, gravity we think travels at the speed of light. Oh, does it? Yeah, so the influence of gravity travels, so it would be the same time. Okay, okay. There's no fun there at all. Okay, no, there's no fun at all. I didn't know that gravity traveled at the same speed as light.

Yeah. And why would you? I mean, whoever thinks about that? I've fucking had a few thinks about that. So I had to not talk to you backstage because I'd waste all the good questions. I mean, it's a good excuse. Yeah. So one thing I want to get onto. So I have a story in my my new book

right and it's about it's about this fella who's he gets addicted to wearing tweed but he gets addicted to wearing a specific type of tweed because

what he gets addicted to is how itchy it is so he starts to try and seek more and more to get the itchiest tweed available so he ends up making this tweed out of goat's hair

which is so itchy that when he moves it gradually rips the fabric of time and then he figures that like, because he starts walking around and seeing dinosaurs and stuff you know and he starts to figure there's dinosaurs and stuff, you know?

And he starts to figure there's something about this abrasive tweed that can rip the fabric of time. Does it have properties that can be applied for real life? So he puts it into smartphones and it allows people to edit time the way that we can edit our timelines on like Twitter and Facebook,

but it uses the multiverse theory. So every time you edit it's like a new version of yourself is created so that's what I'm trying to get at can you tell us about this idea that okay I'm going to touch this water bottle but

now some other cunt who's also me in I'm going to touch this water bottle. But now some other cunt, who's also me in another universe, didn't touch it. Yeah. I mean, that's effectively, the idea is that there's a near infinite number of universes and every quantum event, so like, you know,

whether an electron goes left or right when it's got a choice, creates a new universe. Or one happens in one universe and the other happens in another universe. And the guy who came up with this is a guy called Hugh Everett III third and there's good reason for it so so when you go all the way back to the start of quantum theory you have to like bring in extra dimensions of space right

straight away in order to explain you know how a light bulb works basically you need extra dimensions of space how many dimensions um, one for each quantum thing. So literally there's like one for an electron and then one for the other electron. And so you get this near infinite extra number of dimensions if you want to explain how all the particles in the universe operate. So Hugh Everett kind of took this and ran with it and said, well, maybe that means that actually what's going on is that we're just accessing this infinite array of universes

and other people have sort of taken this further and said that means that there are other versions of me in another universe. Actually Hugh Everett thought there was, so he said he would never die because he told his wife, he said I will never die, I might die in this universe but a version of me will always live on because that's how the the multiverse works and he said so when i die don't worry about it just get me cremated and put me out with the rubbish and um and i mean they got divorced quite soon after that yeah it's a pretty heavy one to bring home but when burn me and put me in the bin yeah and but that's exactly what it's our anniversary i don't care she did and that's and so he believed in it so strongly that he was kind of thinking you know there's a version of me that's

going to live forever and there are lots of people around who think that this is actually the kind of the way things are that there are other versions of us you know out there doing different things um so it's every do you mean is there okay so evolution does that mean that there's universes out there where there's different animals that evolved

or I don't know a universe full of humans but our knees are on the backs of our legs yeah I mean I don't think we'd stay that way

for long would we no what would bicycles look like so easy to take well nobody in that world would have invented the bicycle, would they? No.

It'd be like an ostrich on a bicycle. But that's one of those... So scientists take that seriously. Yeah, yeah. So I know quite a few people who work at the frontiers of quantum physics who think this is a very viable way of thinking about the world. And it's not something... Is it something they're trying to prove, or just...

Is it kind of, if I think about reality this way, it means that I can work in a certain direction? So what they do is... I mean, they don't... It doesn't really affect daily life. It doesn't affect the way you do your research. It just means you can explore it philosophically, and it's kind of fun and interesting. And it's not really something you can prove.

So this whole thing comes down to the problem of interpreting what it means that that cat is dead and alive at the same time, right? And the idea is that there's one universe where the cat's alive and the other universe where the cat's dead, and it sort of solves it quite neatly in a way. And the basics of it are that you can kind of think like this and work like this, and it allows you to do the maths, and it allows you to kind of play around with ideas, but it doesn't affect what quantum stuff does.

So you don't get to sort of say, oh, if this is true, this experiment will come out differently, because it just doesn't matter, because it'll come out differently in another universe, basically, and you'll never get to see it. So the only way you can prove that this works is in an experiment called quantum immortality, because it just doesn't matter, because it'd come out differently in another universe, basically, and you'll never get to see it. So the only way you can prove that this works is in an experiment called quantum immortality, where you rig up a gun that basically fires its trigger

according to some quantum event, like whether an electron goes left or right in a circuit or something like that, which happens at random. And the idea is if it goes left, it pulls the trigger and shoots you. But there will always be a universe where it went right, and that's the universe that you'll stay conscious in. So you'll constantly know. And if it goes the other way, it gives you a beep so you know you survived.

So your consciousness is immortal? So your consciousness in this idea is immortal and you're just hopping through parts of the multiverse. The trouble is that proves to you that you're alive in that you've done this hundreds and thousands of times and you've never died. So it's like, oh, that's pretty good. But nobody else in the other universes will believe you

because all they can see is an idiot with a gun taped to his head. Fucking hell. Sometimes with stuff like this what allows me to get my head around it and to feel comfortable with it is video games.

Right. So when I was trying to figure out like the multiverse, there are certain video games whereby choices you make in that game define the rest of the game. So you'll have characters in that game and they can do one of six things.

And depending on what you choose there that's how the game goes and I'll never know what the game would be like if I make these choices and that allows me then to feel comfortable with okay that's a bit like the multiverse yeah and it's manageable but then the other thing is like trying to understand that like you know time is something that can be bent and warped, which fucks up my head, because time for me is just... It's what's happening. It's all around us.

It's now. It was. See, it wasn't. There you go. But when I play a video game like Grand Theft Auto, which is very detailed, and it has a little city and loads of characters and the characters have like even characters that you're not playing directly they have little lives and they carry on yeah and then and a day in grand theft auto is an hour in my time and when i'm there playing it

it's like yeah this makes sense but my character Theft Auto, that's reality to them. But I'm outside in a fucking living room sitting in my jocks on television and I have a whole different reality. And then I was like, fuck, that has a name. That's called simulation theory, isn't it? So tell us about simulation theory. So what simulation theory says

is there's somebody sitting in their jocks in the living room controlling you, effectively. Yes. And is that person God? Well, no, they don't have to be God because there's probably somebody doing the same to them. So the idea of simulation theory is that it just goes all the way. And eventually you sort of think

there must be some base civilization that made the first simulation. And then the people in that simulation became conscious or were conscious and liked gaming and they made their own one. And then they made their own one and then they made their own one so it goes all the way down it doesn't really solve the problem

but we're probably statistically we're somewhere in the middle probably so almost then there it's like the meaning of life is to create your own sentient universe and then that sentient universe

creates its sentient universe yeah but the problem is that I mean we've sort of had this in philosophy this has come out in the last decade or so, well before the Matrix, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and the philosophers who are looking at it are sort of saying, so if this is true, what should we do?

So their big problem is like, if we've worked this out, does that mean that actually they're just going to delete us? Is it better that we just pretend we don't know that we've worked this out? Or should we make ourselves really interesting so that they delete everyone else but not us because we're great and that we'll go to level two or something like that? So, I mean, that maybe is the meaning of life is be interesting so that you don't get deleted from the simulation. fuck like I have to stop getting do you know I have to stop getting

such an interesting guest because I can't fucking continue my line of questions that's like getting kicked in the head by a donkey. Hold on, I'll just consult the sheet, because that's after wiping my head. I'm sorry, Michael. Tom Dunn, who's a radio DJ from Ireland,

asks, what was there before the Big Bang? Well, I mean, in some ways I can cheat that question because time came into existence with the Big Bang because as we said, space and time are the same thing effectively. They're just the fabric of the universe. There was no time before, there was no such thing as before

before you had time. So, I don't know. What's north of the North Pole? So, I don't know. What's north of the North Pole? I... Ah! I see where you're going with that. I can't answer the question, really.

But are you suggesting there that time is kind of cyclical or loopy? Well, there's some people who think that time is... The universe is cyclical and just sort of blew up in a big bang, will collapse in a big crunch, and then we'll just do this endlessly again.

But we're in the realms of where you can't really do experiments now, so you're just thinking about what might be and what might not be. And why should something exist rather than nothing is the biggest question that nobody can really answer. And you could say, well, because you know there's quantum laws that say you can't have exactly nothing so the uncertainty principle says you can't have exactly nothing therefore

there has to be something right but that implies that the quantum laws were existing sort of in order for that to happen and maybe the quantum laws are sort of a product of our universe rather than the cause of it is the middle of a black hole nothing we don't know so we don't know and we literally we don't have any physics that describes what happens inside a black hole so relativity breaks down as soon as you break space-time apart it doesn't work and. And we don't have a theory for a quantum version of gravity, which is what we're sort of trying to develop. You might have heard of string theory. This is an attempt to... That's what I was going to ask you to talk about, yeah.

Yeah, so this is an attempt to try and marry together quantum stuff and relativity stuff. And it's like quantum theory is built of Lego and relativity is built of Meccano, and you try and put them together, and you just can't. So you have to start again and sort of try and do something. Make them out of elastic bands. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So the string theory is these little loops of energy that are fundamental, and they vibrate in one way, and they create a photon. They vibrate in another way, it's an electron. And that's how you build up, and then you sort of build up forces and matter

through these lumps of energy, the strings of energy that are vibrating, and that's the basic theory. And I mean, it's all a math. When you say string,, the strings of energy that are vibrating. And that's the basic theory. And when you say string, is the model of this string, is it a circle or is it just a string just doing its own thing? It's usually a loop.

So it is a loop of energy. What that means, I'm not really sure. Do they intertwine with each other then? So the idea is they interact with each other. But it's all mathematical. So it's all geometry and numbers, effectively effectively so it's sort of slightly cheating and in order to make it work you have to have you have to add in sort of i think seven extra dimensions of space yeah um which is inconvenient maybe but and then you sort of say well where are they and they say well

they're rolled up really small so so you can't see them. And they call that compactification, because that sounds clever. It's sort of a way of making the whole thing work. And is it taken seriously? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the best we've got.

String theory is the best. It's the best we've got in terms of quantum gravity theories that hopefully will eventually explain what happens inside a black hole and how maybe even how the universe began. And the idea is that you just have to sort of put all the maths together and then you get a description of the universe and you'll get one universe that has these properties

and another universe that has different properties and you just sort of take your pick which one's closest to the one we know. So it produces something like 10 to the 24 universes, which is a lot, obviously. 10 followed by 24 zeros. It's a lot of universes. But, you know, maybe there are all those universes. What is quantum biology?

What is quantum biology? Oh, quantum biology is basically the study of quantum effects that might have had an effect in evolution. So the idea is that you look for ways in which quantum theory might have influenced certain things in biology. So one of the examples is bird navigation. How do birds navigate? How do they actually see and sense the magnetic field of the Earth?

There's a theory that actually does have some evidence behind it that says that the birds have a sense that comes from quantum entanglement inside the retina of their right eye, I think it is. These experiments are done on a bird called

the European robin. And they basically disorient them really badly and cover one eye. And then sort of watch how they respond to magnetic fields. But there's a chemical inside the retina of their eye which, when you do the quantum maths on it, you can see that actually

under certain injections of energy it would become entangled. And then maybe you sort of get a sense of like, there's something not quite right, or I've got to face this way or that way. They don't really know how it works. Why do you mean quantum entanglement? Is that like the slit experiment?

So quantum entanglement is this weird property that only exists in quantum physics, where two things, so like say two photons, I can basically bang them together or whatever, make them interact. And now when I describe them, they're not separate things. They're one thing. Even though I can separate them physically in space away from each other.

But if I do something to one over here, it affects the outcome of what I do to... So that's when they can communicate across distances and no one knows why. So they can't communicate because communicate is transfer of information. And you can't transfer information. But I can basically influence the outcome of an experiment on this one by doing something to this one. Would it be like if I cut this table in half and we put one side over there and one side over there and if I hit it with a hammer at that side it smashes over there?

Kind of, yeah. Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah. It's just, it's weird. I mean, Einstein said it was spooky action at distance. Yes, spooky. Didn't believe it could be true. And he was wrong.

It is true. So what happens inside the bird's eye that's... So we think that what happens is some kind of energy thing happens. So you get two entangled atoms, basically, inside the retina of the bird. And it sort of senses the bwyd yn newid. Yn yr un ffordd rwy'n gweld bwyd, felly rwy'n gwneud y ffordd bwyd. Ond mae'r ffordd bwyd yn ymateb i ffordd magnegol. Ac mae'n rhoi'r ffordd i'w ddysgu, fel arddangos, fel y ffordd yma yn y nof.

Neu'r ffordd y nof. Ac mae'n ymwneud â'r ffordd y maen nhw'n gallu gweithio. kind of thing or a sense of north and this is how they manage to navigate and interestingly it takes the wavelength of light that would cause that entanglement is exactly what you get at sunset so when you see all these birds on the wires at sunset it's uncanny

that that should be the case so it's not conclusively proved but it's quite strong if you grew up in a city, especially at the summer, the swallows that are ready to go down to Africa, we know them on the pylons at night time. Yeah, just as the wavelength of light gets to that exact wavelength

that will cause its entanglement. Oh, my fucking God. It's cool, isn't it? Is there ever at any point in your work, when you find shit out like that, that makes you not an atheist or makes you wonder if there was a creator? No, not really.

Stop giggling, you fucking... I'm not into God either. I mean... It's just a question for a fucking scientist, you pricks. Fucking Richard Dawkins in the background, giggling. It doesn't do that i think it hits the same spot in some ways it's like it creates wonder it creates awe you know the quantum entanglement for instance it just freaks me out i have to say it freaks me out because you know i i talked to the guy who's done the most experiments on this who's sort of you know laid it all out and made it clear that it's real.

And I say, so how does it work? What's going on? And he says, well, actually, there's no story I can tell you within space and time that explains this. He said, so this stuff, which is now routine, like we use entanglement all the time. Why is it not communication? That's what I can't get my head around. How is that not communication?

So what you get is you can influence the outcome of a statistical process. So it all relies on probabilities. So you can't ever say what the outcome of that individual action is going to be, which means you can't encode information. You can't send information using it. All you can do is, like, when you do it multiple times, you can see that you've effectively biased the coin, you know, and you've no longer got 50-50.

It's sort of 80-20 or something like that. But you can't ever on one single occasion send, say, if I do this, you go left. That means go... It's not a communication in that way. Is entanglement the technology that's now being used for quantum computing?

Yes, and quantum cryptography. So the idea is that you can... This is so, like, normal now, everyday technology, that you can literally buy off-the-shelf machines that use quantum entanglement, even though, you know, they work outside of our universe, effectively. And, like, what? What can I buy? You can buy a quantum cryptography kit,

which basically will allow you to encode or send messages where you will know if there's been an eavesdropper. I mean, that's basically what quantum cryptography is. Fucking hell, why isn't that on the front page of the news? I don't think there's many buyers. But it's like, that's almost

magic. Yeah, it's kind of indistinguishable from magic in a way. It's like nothing else can explain it. No, literally, if you ask for an explanation, they say well, something clearly happens outside of space and time. Fine, great.

It doesn't say that in the manual, by the way. For me, it's like we're fucking with a technology and we know it's working for us, but then when you ask what's going on, they're like, I don't know. But it's the same with, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you just don't ask. So everyone's building quantum computers, right? Google, IBM, Intel, everyone's building quantum computers. Fundamentally, they work by the Schrodinger's cat principle. Yeah, what's a quantum computer and why are they important? So there's two big questions.

So, a quantum computer uses these strange laws, effectively, to be able to manipulate information in a way that you just can't in any other technology. And what it enables you to do is do things that are mathematically really, really difficult with any normal computer. So the classic example is that you look for the factors of a large number, which is the basis of all security, like national intelligence, internet, shopping. Everything is based on

the fact that you can't find the two numbers that multiply together to give this third big number. So if I say 21, you can say the factors of that are 7 and 3 and 21 and 1. That's great. But if I give you, like, a 50-digit number and say what are the two prime numbers that multiply together to give that, you know, it's hard to do. It's really hard to do.

And for normal computers, it takes a hell of a lot of effort. So that's why it's hard to break these codes. Quantum computers can do it effortlessly because it basically uses these kind of weird quantum properties to kind of sift out all the wrong answers and give you the right answer. And that obviously worries governments enormously.

But where are we with quantum computing? Are we like... Do you know in the 1950s there'd be a computer that's about as powerful as a calculator now, under the size of this room? Yeah. Are we there now with quantum computers? We're not even there, I would say.

So we're probably... Like, what does a quantum computer look like? It looks like a, it depends, there's lots of different technologies. So there's, the technology that Google's using is superconducting quantum information. So basically loops of superconductors. And the way they're arranged, the current in the superconducting loop goes around clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time. So it sort of basically can do two things at once effectively. Another technology is use a string of ions.

So atoms with the outer electron removed. And you can just basically use the energy levels as like there's a one, that's a zero for binary code. And then you can put them into this superposition state where it's both at once. So regular computing is binary, everything is one and zero, but quantum computing is where it can be one and zero at the same time?

Yeah, yeah. And what happens if I stick my head into it and look? You ruin the calculation. So the whole problem with quantum computing... the same time yeah yeah and what happens if i stick my head into it and look you don't you ruin the calculation so the whole problem the whole problem with why it's so hard it's because everything in the universe is effectively sticking its head in and and disturbing it so any vibrations any heat like disturbances electromagnetic fields or whatever they're all causing these things to fall apart and then you have to start again. So how do you create the environment inside the computer whereby it's doing its thing and it doesn't know anyone's looking at it or anything is looking at it? So you basically cool it down

as far as you can. So you cool it to as near absolute zero, the lowest temperature you can get as possible. So you've got no thermal vibrations. You do it all in a room where all the electromagnetic fields are screened out. So you've got no interactions with any kind of stray fields. Have you ever been in one of those rooms? Yeah, I did my PhD in one of those rooms. Does it feel weird?

It's just claustrophobic. It's really claustrophobic. So I did my PhD on the superconducting loops thing many years ago. Fuck off! No, yeah, I did. PhD on the superconducting loops thing many years ago. Fuck off. No, yeah, I did. And it was literally...

The same superconducting loops that we're talking about now in quantum... Exactly. And it got to the end of my PhD, and I thought, this is going fucking nowhere. I'm getting out. And then along comes Google Intel, poured billions into the whole thing. Well done me.

Did you get to benefit from... Did they come in... You got out before they came in? I was out well before that. Well done me. Did you get to benefit from, did they come in, you got out before they came in? I was out well before that. Ah, Jesus! This is going nowhere, it's boring. Do you regret that deeply? Not really, no. I didn't like the room. It's claustrophobic.

It's fine, you know, I've done other things with my life. Are quantum computers commercially available, or at the moment is it...? No, at the moment you can access them. So you can go online, if you've got the right credentials, and access, like, Google's quantum computers. They're rudimentary stuff, and IBM's as well.

And you can do little calculations on them and play with them and see what you can do but it's really hard, it's like you have to start again, you know how like in the 1950s and 60s we had to learn machine code, like to talk to a computer was really really hard to do and we're sort of at that stage now where people

are having to learn how to address these things in a way that makes sense and can do something useful so we're the big sort of growth industry is going to be in programmers for quantum computers effectively. One question I got asked was what technology, right, do you, what technology that's emerging excites you most that you think is really going to change things for the better? God. 32-county republic.

32-county republic, someone said. I honestly don't know how to... So I wouldn't invest in quantum computing yet. I think it's a bit early. I think there are... I mean, the money's going to come from finding the next Alexa or something like that. That kind of signal... Ways to interfere in people's lives, basically, that makes them think it's worth it, but it actually isn't.

But they'll pay for it anyway. What was... them think it's worth it, but it actually isn't, but they'll pay for it anyway. So if we were to... When quantum computing improves, how can a quantum computer improve the world? So one of the boring answers to that is that it enables you to search really fast through like lists of chemicals, say. So you can do new chemistry, you can sort really fast through lists of chemicals, say. So you can do new chemistry. You can find the properties of chemicals. So the pharmaceutical industry is really interested in this

for drug development. So this will be a real fast track for doing the kind of chemistry that leads to breakthrough drugs. So that's one thing. Because it can process just way more data than we can process at the moment. Yeah, and it can search. How do you feel we can process at the moment. Yeah, yeah, and it can search.

How do you feel about, like, because currently the big thing with pharmaceuticals is getting DNA data and running through DNA data. So what would, if we have everyone's DNA on the planet, which is what they want, and mix that with a quantum computer? So it will search through unstructured information really quickly, or much more quickly than you can do with any other method. The thing about DNA data is that you can't really pin down what's useful about this DNA data and this genetic data and that.

So the idea that you can just take people's genome and say, oh, you need this, this, and this, it's just not like that. It doesn't work like that. And that's the big lie that we've been sold effectively. How do you feel about, we'll say, companies like 23andMe and History.com who are basically selling our DNA to pharmaceutical companies, our DNA data? Like, ethically, is that something that scares you? Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't do it at all.

I mean, I wouldn't do it because this stuff is going to reach insurance companies, for instance. Yeah, what's the fear there? And all of a sudden, you're going to get a phone call saying, we've had to adjust your premium because we've been sent this information. And the information might itself be actually, you know, not useful at all, but they've interpreted it in a way where they say, well, you know, he seems more of a risk than he used to, so we're going to up his premiums. Or, you know, if you live in the US,

that might mean the difference between life and death. So I'm not a fan of it. I wouldn't do it. I don't think it's useful. I think we're going to find ourselves in a situation where people are going to know about our DNA. And we're already seeing people are discovering, like, relatives they didn't know they had.

And, you know, which could be good, it could be bad. Yeah, because I don't think people... What we're talking about, I did a podcast on it before. The companies, all these DNA companies where you spit into an envelope and then it comes back and it tells you what your ethnicity is or whatever. They're selling your DNA to like Glacos, Mitko, Klein. They did a deal for 300 million.

And I don't think people... People don't care. They don't understand why that... It's like, why should I give a fuck about my DNA or who has it? But they don't... I mean, in the same way, they don't understand that, like, you know, Alexa is a tool for gathering information about you. Yeah.

You know, it's just... It's like, it's fun to have in the kitchen, or so you think. And then you realise that you can put music on for yourself, to be honest, and the speakers, shit. So, you know, it's like, mine's back in its box. They're giving Alexa away for free now, practically, too. Yeah, of course they are. Because I was approached by a company, a Canadian company,

and they wanted to pay me a pretty decent amount of money per podcast in order to have access to the data of my voice. So they wanted to get my voice, put it into a machine, and then have all that data, and they were willing to pay me per podcast. What were they going to do with that? I said to them, I said, look, you're paying me money for the data of my voice what what do you want with it and they're like well we just want to sell it to whoever wants to buy it and then i'm thinking so you mean you can fucking release my audio book that a robot said and you can yeah or they could sell it to police agencies who are

trying to catch criminals who have my accent you know know? It didn't feel good. It's just like, why do you want to give me a lot of money for my voice? There's something they're not telling you, isn't there? Yeah. And they seemed really nice, but again, it's... Could they not just have recorded it anyway?

They can't, because then it's... I'm guessing what it was was GDPR. Right, okay. So my voice data, I must have, I was signing away consent to can we put your voice

through a computer? Yeah. But I have an app on my phone already. I stopped using it because it scared me. It's called Liar Bird and what it does

is you train it, you speak into it every single day and then after about a week of Liar Bird listening to you, you can type out sentences and it's like having siri but it's your own accent yeah yeah yeah and i just didn't like it because it's like what's on the other end of that yeah because none of us really i mean it's

interesting because one of the few things that stephen hawking was never willing to sell was his voice so he was that his so the the the software software that made his voice. I mean the software, was it his unique? It was unique to him for a long time and people like SatNav companies wanted to have it so you could have Stephen Hawking directing you around the streets of Bristol or whatever. And how did that happen? When Stephen Hawking went, was he one of the first people to access the technology? Yeah. Wow. So that was his voice. So it wasn't his voice that

you hear, but it was his voice. I know, but it's uniquely his. It was his. It's uniquely his, yeah. Yeah. Wow. And he wouldn't say, he was precious over his data. Yeah, I think there's a similar sort of sense of this is me and this is my person and there's a

line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. there's a line yeah there's a line that you and you shouldn't sell your person yeah yeah yeah fucking hell um someone i don't know why someone asked this do you know what i so i put the question up saying that you're a quantum physicist and you're also interested in democratizing science and i think someone looked past the whole quantum physics part and just said why do we hiccup? And do you know what? And I said back to him

I'm going to ask the quantum physicist why we hiccup. It's a muscle spasm isn't it? Great. Moving on. That man is happy now.

I don't know. I'm a physicist. what do you think of um it's kind of a crack theory but biocentrism which is the idea that um to look at the universe you don't look at it through physics you look at it through biology and that it's kind of, it's a fellow called Dr. Robert Lanza. He says that reality isn't something that is there, but rather it's created by consciousness. Right. I mean, is that mad? He says if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, the tree, it doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen or it doesn't make a noise? Well's not it's it's it needs someone it needs someone to be listening to it so if you don't hear the tree then that didn't happen that like i don't know if you're in your living room and next door is the kitchen then if you're not in the kitchen looking at the fridge all it is is like quantum possibilities of fridgeness and you need to walk into the so because consciousness and he means literally physically if you're not in that kitchen nothing there buddy so it's been a long this has been actually a long debate in in quantum physics was like you know when you look in the box at the rock city you're the best fans in the box at the Rock City you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on Saturday April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at

First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7 30 p.m. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com cat yeah is is it that you have to look at the what happens if you close your eyes and you but you just open the box is that still changing the state of the cat or not? What if you smell the cat? What if the cat got so frightened and was a tomcat and it pissed and your eyes are closed?

So all you know then is it pissed itself possibly before it died. I mean, if you've left it a few months and you can smell decay, then... Okay. Yeah. But I mean, this is all about, you know, is there a need for consciousness in the observer observer and lots of physicists for a long time thought

there must be a need for consciousness to have an observation what is is consciousness when a sentient being is aware of i'm alive well yeah so that's the sort of root definition of consciousness we i mean nobody will ever properly define consciousness and there are lots of people now who are saying well there are lots of people now who are saying, well, there are degrees of consciousness, and we're highly conscious, and other animals are maybe less conscious, and a rock is probably not very conscious. And you can sort of take it through to, you know,

this electrical circuit has a kind of network of things that feed back, and you can kind of say it will have a degree of consciousness. So you can define it in lots of different ways. My problem with like nothing happens in the universe until there's a sentient being is that like, you know, we know that the universe has a history. It existed before we existed, right? And so I don't know what was doing the observing

sort of way back when. Oh, good point. So, you know, it seems to me that you could say, you know, the universe was conscious of itself or something but that becomes meaningless okay that's yeah because dinosaurs were conscious yeah to a degree yeah definitely but then those little lads billions and billions of years ago in the fucking ocean yeah but they would have like a degree of consciousness but not be very conscious is uh like even the most basic insect does that have consciousness simply because

it can feel pain and run away and stuff or what about bacteria i would say bacteria no okay um and viruses no i would say would say that you could attribute consciousness to anything that can feel pain because to feel pain is to feel something. And we sort of think of consciousness as being feeling. But you can actually build robots that look exactly and react exactly as if they feel pain. So there's a guy called Pentti Heikkonen

who works at university in Finland. And he builds these robots and he pokes them. You can look on YouTube. He's got loads of videos on YouTube. He builds these robots and he trains them to basically react to stimulus. And then he teaches them to be afraid of the color yellow or something.

And then he shows them something yellow and they back off. And it's weird when you watch it, you think that looks like it's conscious. So the big question is, just because something looks like it's conscious, is it conscious? Oh, fuck yeah.

Because you don't know, and I don't know you're conscious, or any of them are conscious, all I know is that I'm conscious, and you could all be like zombies, and just really cleverly put together. In the simulation. Yeah, yeah.

I'm not. That's what you would say that, wouldn't you? So, you know, so consciousness is a really, really difficult thing. And we don't know what's conscious and what's not. You know, and it comes into questions of ethics about, you know, what animals you're willing to eat and what you're not willing to eat. And there's a lot of, you know, things about, you know,

well, if something feels pain and feels fear, then should you really be inflicting that on it? Yeah, because do you ever look into plants now and the way they have an internet made out of mushrooms? Oh, yeah, I know, I know. I mean, it's bad news for vegans. It is, isn't it? Because plants, they scream in pain when they're cut.

Yeah. And so you have to decide that that's not a thing, right? So you can record, I think it's the ultrasonic signals of a plant, you know, you cut it with a knife and you can hear this, you can record the ultrasound

and it's effectively a scream which is a response to a predator or something like that. But is that scream, does it not go through the mushroom internet to warn the plants? So if it's still in the ground, yeah, so if it's still in the ground. This is real. This is real. And there are plants that if they start getting eaten by an antelope, they send out a signal to all the other plants of the same species in the region

to say up your levels of bitterness, so caffeine-like molecules in their leaves, so that you don't get eaten as well, so that they take one bite and back off, because it's horrible. So they are actually communicating with each other, warning each other about what's around in the environment that's a predator.

But they are using an internet of mushrooms. Yeah, yeah. So the mycelium sort of network underground in forests and they prefer their own species so they warn their own species but, you know,

screw the rest. But they won't warn a different plant. Here's something that, okay, so let's just say the deer comes along and eats the plant. Yeah.

So then that plant warns the other plants to up their bitterness, right? Yeah, yeah. Something like coffee is bitter. We enjoy the bitter taste of right? Yeah, yeah. Something like coffee is bitter. We enjoy the bitter taste of coffee. Yeah.

Can we, like, bully certain coffee plants and then change the flavour of the rest of the field? Like, is someone looking... If nature does it... I honestly don't know if anyone's looking into bullying coffee plants. I think there's probably easier ways to do it. I mean, maybe you just breed them differently and breed them to be more bitter.

But, yeah, I mean, it's an option, I suppose. I think it's a great thing to say to a guard the next time you're caught fucking vandalising coffee plants. Well, that doesn't happen very often, in fairness, does it? I don't know, robbing apples from a tree. That's what I'm going to fucking say. The next time I jump over a wall and decide I want to steal some fucking apples,

I'm going to say, well, what I'm actually doing is I'm trying to increase the vigour of the orchard because by abusing this one tree, it's going to warn the rest. So fuck you. This isn't a crime. this one tree it's going to warn the rest so fuck you this isn't a crime

oh that was the podcast interview right there there was some audience questions after that but I it would have been too long alright I'll talk to you next week

you gentle bastards.