The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

As we move into the end of the year, I’m excited to return to our recurring series “What’s New in Science” with my co-host Sabine Hossenfelder. In this month’s episode, we started by tackling a favorite subject: scientific hype. Sabine kicked things off by dissecting a recent, highly suspect press release claiming a million-qubit quantum computer is on the horizon. I then brought up a National Geographic article claiming that “warp drive is speeding closer to reality” , and we discussed the reasons why it actually isn’t, including the need for “negative energy,” that keep it firmly in the realm of science fiction.From there, Sabine steered us into the world of academic accolades, discussing the controversy around last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neural networks and the collaborative nature of science. I then introduced this year’s prize, which was awarded for the beautiful and precise experimental work on seemingly macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics—specifically, showing a superconducting quantum state can “tunnel” through a barrier.Finally, we turned to cosmic mysteries. Sabine presented a report on search for “Dark Stars,” a theory that the first stars might have been powered by dark matter annihilation , which require some wishful thinking and what I think are not particularly well motivated physics. For full disclosure this is an issue I thought about in a slightly different context almost 40 years ago and have some a priori skepticism about. I closed with a much more plausible bit of exotic physics that may have been observed: new observations of long-lived gamma-ray bursts. A new model suggests these are caused by a black hole that has merged with a star and is consuming it from the inside out. From wild hype to implausible and plausible models to Nobel-winning physics, I hope you enjoy the conversation.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast, and this is one of my favorite segments on the Origins Podcast, What's New in Science with my friend and colleague Sabina Ostmfelder, where we discuss interesting science, or sometimes not so interesting science, in the last month. And welcome, Sabina. It's nice to see you again. I could see you. Okay, well, let's get right to it, because we're going to talk about a number of topics. And I think the first topic we're going to talk about merges two of your favorite things, as far as I can tell. Hype in science and quantum computing.

So take it away. Yeah, so quantum computing. Quantum computing is great and I love talking about it because I think it has the real potential. But man, like pretty much everything I read about it is just crazy nonsense. And so like just the other week, I came across this press release from a company called Quantum Motion, which sits in the UK, and they announced they have the first full-stack quantum computer that can be mass-produced and can be scaled to a million cubits. And I'm like, wait, what?

Like, what did I miss? Like, quantum computing suddenly works. And so I looked at this a little bit closer, and it turns out like their purpose, and it turns out, like, their point is basically they have a way to mass produce cubits. All right. And then they say, oh, now we can do a million of those things and then we can lump them together. But like without paying any attention to whether the thing actually works. So it's like saying, I can build a spacecraft, but it doesn't fly.

That's what I have. I have a little engine here. And if I could only put a million of them together and have it work, could be, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I don't want to blame this company too much because I see this kind of thing going on all the time. Like, their companies, like this Japanese company, Pujitsu, they just put out

the press release saying, they're going to build a quantum computer with 250 logical qubits. I'm like, okay. And how? Like everyone can write a press release. And then on the theoretical side, I see headlines like IBM put up one. Like they've optimized some financial things with a quantum computer. And you can use quantum computers to build greener homes.

You can use quantum computers to optimize train schedules. You can use quantum computers to fix climate change, basically, like every other week there's a thing like this. And I'm like, okay, but what did they actually do? Like, did they actually need the quantum computer to do the calculation? Like, so there's nothing there. And then I look at the stocks of quantum companies. Did you look at the stocks of quantum companies lately? Like, it's crazy. They've, like, they've made gains, like more than a factor 10 in the past six months. And I feel pretty dumb now that I didn't buy any D-Wave stocks. Maybe I should have bought deep wave stocks.

But like, there's nothing there. Like, I don't get it. Like, I've... I'm glad because I looked at the press release and I thought, I don't understand this at all. So I need Sabina to explain to me because there's nothing. There's nothing explained there. And it actually, they don't even

explain the cubits. They just say, we're going to use standard silicon chip fabrication process. They don't even describe as far as I can tell how robust the cubits are. And of course, the huge problems, I mean, as you say, quantum computing is real physics, but knowing you can make a quantum computer and doing it are two different things. And in fact, doing it practically versus doing it in principle are vastly different things

because, of course, the big problems with quantum computing are first keeping your cubit isolated and quantum mechanical, then putting a bunch of cubits together and not having them destroy the quantum coherence. And then having, being able to handle noise, which destroys not just the quantum coherence, but can lead to a wrong result, and tying the whole thing together with some very careful control system. Every bit of that is at the limit in some ways in modern technology. And people are looking for new qubits because the first kind of cubits that were discussed,

which are basically in some ways an electron, more or less in many different states, have problems. So people looking at topological cubits and this company just says we're going to build a standard silicon chip. And then we're going to put a million of them together and we're going to connect them and it's going to work. It's like it's just, as you say, I mean, I can't even think of a good classical analogy to this. except to say maybe I've got some tires and I see some piece of metal on the road. I think I can imagine building a fleet of cars. And, you know, because cars are made a metal, so why not? And in any case, it's a press release.

Of course, one has to be wary of signs done by press release. And what worried me a little bit is they said it's located, it's deployed at the UK National Quantum Computing Center and I thought, oh, okay, so it's, and I don't know anything about that. You spend more time in the UK, but I thought

my suspicion is that the National Computing Center basically leases out space. My bet is that it leases out space for people who are trying to build quantum computers. So the fact that it's deployed there means they have a little cubicle. I don't know. Do you know anything about that?

Well, no, but I watched the video because I actually only looked at this because they had a very impressive image that went with the press release. And I was like, is this real? Or is it like one of those computer generated things?

And so they do have a video that comes with a press release. And it totally looks like this is an actual room where people walk around in. And so I mean, it looks real to me, but what do I know? Like in the age of AI.

Yeah, I mean, it's not If it was a press release coming from UK's National Computing Center, quantum computing center, then I'd stand up and take a little more notice because you'd think if the UK's National Quantum Computing Center actually built the, was in the verge of building the first real quantum computer, they might actually announce it. So I'm suspicious that this facility is a real facility, but my suspicion is that it's a UK government facility that provides environments, you know, laboratory space for people working on quantum computers.

And that's about it. Yeah, well, the other thing that was funny about the video, you usually really have a look at it, is that they have a couple of people who work at this company, whatever it is. And they were clearly reading a script of a teleprompter that they'd never seen before. It was really funny.

Oh, well, that I don't hold against them. It could be just normal scientists, afraid to speak in front of a camera. But, you know, you hit, look, we've talked about quantum computing almost every month when we've done our dialogues. And there's a lot of interesting work and a lot of hard work being done.

And every time there's a new development, of course, it's heralded as the era of quantum computing is among us. And, you know, quantum computing is one of those areas that is exciting, although what it will be used for and how much it will actually change the world remains to be seen. It'll certainly be useful in physics. But the problem is right now that it lends itself to hype because it's one of those things that is just around the corner and it seems like it's where, and so every new development is revolutionary. And one has to, therefore,

my attitude when I read about new quantum computing systems is to say, you know, show, me the data. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, I mean, good luck to them. And I hope you and I are wrong. But I wouldn't invest in it right now if I were you, Sabina. And I wouldn't invest your money, even if he gave it to me.

Okay. Okay. Speaking of hype, we'll talk about one of my favorite bits of hype, although this is much more science fiction than, than your bit of hype. Because as you pointed out, quantum computing, is, there are quantum computers. They're just not very sophisticated quantum computers, but they do exist and the technology is not imaginary.

But I couldn't believe it when I saw a piece in National Geographic, which isn't exactly a science journal, but still saying science fiction's warp drive is speeding closer to reality. And I said, what? And then I saw them quote. Sabita Hossensfelder and I said, oh my goodness, gracious. But your quote is quite innocuous, of course. You said, unlike wormholes and extramential hyperdrive's warp drive is the easiest

to make compatible with known physics. That's like saying, unlike ghosts and telepenesis, warp drive is easier to make compatible with standard physics. Having written about warp drive of the physics and Star Trek had followed it, and in fact, having once attended a session on workdress, at NASA, where each of the engineers had little models of Star Trek, of the Star Trek enterprise all around the room. And these were engineers, not physicists, who, and this is a physics problem, not an engineering problem. I decided to look at this. And of course, once again, it's a private

company, applied physics. And it works with the government of the private sector, saying, how beautiful it is. And the original idea behind a non-work drive that's compatible with the laws of physics, as we know them, was of course proposed by Miguel Al-Subier a long time ago. We argued basically, if you had the right kind of energy, you could expand space behind a bubble and compress it in front of a bubble. So the bubble would be at rest, but the space behind it would be expanding and the space in front of it would be contracting. And because space can contract and expand faster than light, the object could appear to go from, could appear to go from one place to another faster than light. And even then, while it was consistent with general relativity, it was pointed

out, first of all, you need negative energy in order to do this, because you need negative energy to expand space faster than light. And moreover, it would take more energy than probably in the galaxy, or in this article, they said a star, but as I remember, it was in the galaxy, than the mass of the entire galaxy to make it happen in principle. Now, one of the things that wasn't pointed out in the article, but nevertheless important in the original Al-Sabir article, is that, yes, that allows in principle this to happen. If you could have negative energy, and we don't know if you can create,

negative energy configurations. In fact, there's a bunch of interesting papers by Alan Gooth and colleagues that have said that basically any way you could try and think of creating negative energy configurations in the laboratory don't work. So you need some new kind of something new to make that happen, maybe some kind of quantum gravity. So A, you can't make negative energy in the lab as far as we know, and certainly no one's done it. But B, if you wanted to go from here to the nearest star, as I point out, there's another problem, which is you'd have to set up space behind the craft and in front of it just right all the way from here to the nearest star to do the gravitational collapse and expansion and say one second. But that means you'd have to go between here and

the nearest star and set up your laboratory configuration to do it, which of course you could only do slower than light. So even if you could build a warp drive and the star was, let's say, five light years away, it would take you 100,000 years to. set up the experiment and then in principle, we'll make it happen. Even if you had the energy, negative energy material and enough energy to recreate an entire galaxy, you still couldn't go faster than light because you'd have to set up the experiment and it would take, you know, longer than it would take you to go at a light ray from here to the nearest star to set up the experiment. So there's lots of problem. And it's just, it's fun and it's amusing, but not

realistic. The engineers at NASA that I talked about didn't care about that. They just thought if they use their screwdrivers, it's like the quantum computer, you know, and you just keep tweaking things, maybe it would work. It's a fundamental question of physics, not engineering, as I point out, a fundamental question of

physics. Now these people say, well, we've done a tweak of it. We have a different kind of warp drive. The problem is it doesn't go faster than light, but we're working on it. I mean, this is not, again, Again, theoretical, not practical.

And you may not need the energy of the galaxy, maybe just a star or maybe just the mass of the earth. But it won't go faster than light, but it's really exciting. Anyway, and so once again, this is just not just hype, but wishful thinking in the extreme. At least the people with the quantum computer had a picture of a device and a chip that they might do. This is all daydreams of wishful thinking by engineers who, as far as I can tell, don't realize the fundamental physical constraints.

You cannot go faster than light. Space will not expand ultimately faster than light without something called negative energy. Anyway, do you have any comments? And I don't know how they got that quote from you when they wrote the article, the National Geographic. Well, the person who wrote the article, I forgot her name. She, you know, she sent some questions by email and I replied. So I wrote a terrible lot, but this was the only thing that made it into the article. But look, I have to say something in defense of those people from this applied physics website.

They're not engineers. So I talked to some of them, and they basically come from the same corner of physics as I, which is classical quantum gravity. And this is why I know something about warp drives, because I'm interested in the solutions to general relativity, like from a totally mathematical perspective. And I think this is where the problem is, because I think what a lot of people don't realize

is that if you say it's a solution of general relativity, that sounds very impressive, but it means totally nothing because the only thing that Einstein's equations tell you is that the curvature of space time needs to be related to the distribution of masses and energies. But you can take any curvature of space time, a wormhole, a warp drive, whatever you want it to be. And the equation will give you a distribution of energy and masses that you need to make it happen. And so for the warp drive, okay, so you want a warp drive metric, well, then it says where you need negative energy. And too bad we don't have this negative energy, right? So, and then these, as you pointed out, like these guys point out, actually, you only need the negative energies if you want the thing to go faster than light.

And so I have some sympathy for that because you could say, well, if it goes pretty much at the speed of light, that would be progress. Okay. Well, yeah. Right. But then you have the problem like, how do you even get close to the speed of light? And every time I look at these equations, it comes down to, well, you need a propulsion system, which is kind of the entire problem with any spacecraft. Exactly. I think in general, what you find is you need more energy than if you just had a, you know, a rocket, a standard rocket trying to, you know,

accelerate at a constant rate getting to the speed of light in a year or two or whatever. and that itself requires a huge amount of fuel. But I'm glad you said what you said, because that's the important point that I often try and say, I didn't say very clearly here. Einstein's equations a mathematical, mathematical equation, but at least the geometry of space

to the distribution of manner and energy. And therefore, mathematically, you can write any geometry you want. You can write anything you want on the right-hand side, and you'll find that there's a solution on the left-hand side that equals the right-hand side. But whether that solution is physical or not is the key problem. And in this case, as far as we know, it isn't physical.

And moreover, even if it were, you know, at this point, as far as anyone can say, that you would need more energy than you could ever possibly imagine to even make it work. And I still say, my fundamental complaint is still the case. the bubble, the warp bubble is a finite region and you can do the geometry of it. But if you really want to go from A to B, you have to do this macroscopically. And that means you have to set up the energy just right all the way along the route that you want. And that's going to require you to travel less than speed of light. So warp drive is wonderful in Star Trek.

And you're right. I shouldn't say these guys are engineers. They talked in this article about NASA. And the NASA people that I have dealt with were engineers. And I felt they were so hopeful. They were excited and they wanted to make a – and I love the fact that their models look just like the SDSS Enterprise. But don't hold your breath. I'd have to say, if I were investing my money, I'd invest in the quantum computer before the warp drive.

Let me just put it that way. Yeah, right. I mean, on the other hand, you know, if you have like, you know, 12 people in the world who, look at a particular class of solutions of general relativity, why not? Like, I mean, it's like not, we're not talking about billions, right? Yeah, yeah. And, and, and your, your point is also the case. You mentioned wormholes. Wormholes are solutions of Einstein's equations. But in fact, as far as we know, again, without any kind of exotic kind of negative energy, as Kip Thorne showed, the mouth of the wormholes will collapse to form a black hole before

you can go through them, so they're not traversable. So there are beautiful mathematical solutions, but not physically realizable in that case, and certainly in the case of Warp Drive. Unless you do it on a quantum computer. In an extra dimension, just for fun. Okay. Exactly. Well, speaking now of going from hype to potential hype,

you are going to tell me now, as far as I know, that last year's Nobel Prize was plagiarized. Oh, no, I'm going to tell you that someone else's claim, it was plagiarized. And so, of course, you know, people make plagiarism claims all the time. Every time they have the Nobel Prize, they're like 50 people who have done it earlier. But so in this case, it's not that easy to dismiss because the guy who's made the claim, his name is Jürgen Schmidt-uber. He's a professor for computer science, and he works himself on artificial intelligence.

which was the topic of last year's Nobel Prize in physics. And his claim is basically that the two guys who won the Nobel Prize, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, they just reproduced the work of earlier people, people who worked on this earlier, and they didn't properly cite them. So it's a very academic complaint, basically. And he has a long list, like he has a website where he lists all the references and all the papers and who they cited and who they didn't cite and so on as a book.

So I had a look at this. And, you know, I have to admit that he has a point there. Okay. So they were not very careful with citing everyone who came before them. So it's not entirely vacuous. Then again, I think it's a little bit extreme to call it plagiarism. you know, they were maybe careless. Maybe they didn't think very deeply about whom to cite, you know,

what would have been politically correct. And there's an entirely different layer to this problem, which Schmidt-Huber doesn't mention at all. And maybe he just isn't aware of it. But those people who came before Hopfield and Hinton, some of whom are still alive, so you could reasonably argue maybe they should have gotten the Nobel Prize.

But the issue is this was a Nobel Prize for physics. And the Nobel Prize committee can't just say, well, give this award to computer science. Well, they did. Like they can't. Like, because they're bound to fulfill Nobel's will.

So what they had to do, basically, they had to find a way to make it fit to physics. And so, this is my interpretation of what's happened, is that they picked the people who made a connection to physics with the Boltzmann machines. Like it's basically in the name, like the Boltzmann machine and the icing model. And so the people who worked on this were the people who got the prize because they could

reasonably argue it's physics. Yeah, well, I mean, I know many physicists raised their eyebrows that last year was the AI year of Nobel Prizes all over the place. And he even mentions the chemistry prize, too, of course, which is AI and argues that they kind of plagiarize as well. But I think, look, your point is, physics is, you know, not done in isolation. It's collaborative and there's lots of baby steps. And for every Nobel Prize, there's lots of work that's related or closely related. I will say that, you know, it was very, that Jeffrey Hinton is a computer scientist as far as I can tell.

John Hopfield is a physicist and initially, as you say, began this with real solid state physics and bio physics and I've been hearing talk about it and early days for at least 30 or 40 years. In every case, it was physics explanations of how you could build a network and et cetera. But I think the other thing is, so, you know, it's often, I don't want to say it's arbitrary. but prizes are always arbitrary, especially when there's three people maximum to be given the two. And the Nobel Committee works very, very hard. And I've been involved before. I've been at the Nobel Prize ceremonies.

And they work full time from the day that prize announced to the next year, trying to not make mistakes and trying to get it right. And they do a very, very good job. But I will also say that there's something else about the Nobel Prize. Again, it's a prize. It's arbitrary. You know, the discovery of the Higgs particle wasn't done by. by three people. It was done by

5,000 or 10,000 people. In fact, longer if you consider all the efforts made to build the machine, etc. But Nobel Prize isn't just given for an idea either. It's given for basically the people who convince the world who changed the direction of research because of their work. They may not have even known what they were doing, like the guys who discovered the Cosmicuay background radiation. But their work, changed the way people thought about the world or the way people did things.

And so what's clear is that there's a lot of work been done, but, now I didn't know Hinton's work as well, but the committee decided that these two people's work were the ones that was most influential in changing the way people did physics or in this case did computer science. And so it's really for those people who convince the world, not those people who speculate or those people who have had an idea, it's really those people who have had an impact. Again, the impact can sometimes be accidental, but either way, the impact.

And so, you know, knowing how hard the Nobel Committee works to try and not have this kind of mistake happen, I'm willing to trust that a certain I'd hurt, I mean, two names that I knew of were Hinton and Hopfield. And clearly, for the longest while, they seem to have the most impact in terms of formative work, changing the way people think about neural networks as they might be used in,

well, in physics or later on in AI in other areas. So it's, but it is a prize and it is arbitrary. And there are many people whose work was amazing and haven't won it. Happily, as far as I'm concerned, there are very few people, as far as I know, who have won it, whose work was wrong. And that's probably more of a concern to the Nobel Committee. Although in economics, I think it happens all the time. But that's economics. Okay.

It's not even wrong. Yeah, it's not even wrong. Exactly. Exactly, as Pauli would say. Okay. Well, let's go from the suspicious Nobel Prize, which isn't that suspicious, but it certainly did cause physicists to raise their eyebrows, at least I don't know where the group you were in saying, what? This is a physics prize. Although, as I say, I've known John Hopfield

for a long time, and he's definitely a really good physicist. To this year's Nobel Prize, which also to some extent, I mean, I don't think there's any raised eyebrows. This is physics. And I know John Clark, in the early days when we were developing detectors, And just around the time when he was doing this experiment, I ran a workshop on dark matter detectors using superconducting devices and other things. And John Clark was there and was an expert in that area. And around the same time,

he just happened to be doing this other work, which now is one of the Nobel Prize with his postdoc and student. And it is beautiful work. And what, but I raised my eyebrows a little bit only because it's once again work showing that quantum mechanics works. And quantum mechanics is weird.

And quantum mechanics can even work on macroscopic scales if you're very careful. Now, presumably, what makes this Nobel Prize worthy of more than just being interesting is the fact that the kind of devices that they're using

can be developed in principle for other very sensitive detection and technological applications. But the idea is, sort of simple. And it goes back to superconductivity. The amazing thing about superconductivity is it is macroscopic quantum mechanics. Particles, individual particles, you know, going through a material bounce off things and that produces resistance. But in a certain configuration, and as was first shown by Bardeen Cooper and Schrefer, the electrons can combine into what

Cooper pairs into a macroscopic single quantum configuration so that the individual electrons are not thought of individual particles. They're part of a single quantum mechanical state that occupies the entire superconductor. And that entire state can basically conduct a current. That whole state is in one single quantum mechanical configuration, even though it's macroscopic. But because of the very particular situation, where there's an energy barrier and this quantum mechanical state is preserved and you need more energy than it takes to get over the barrier to destroy that quantum mechanical state. That whole thing acts as a quantum mechanical system and therefore acts weirdly and you can have a

system that has literally zero resistance. A brilliant Nobel Prize and of course superconduct has become more and more important in practical applications. So what already is a macroscopic quantum chemical system. In this case, what they showed was, well, it's well known in the history of physics, and one of the other weird aspects of quantum mechanics is that a phenomena called tunneling happens. Classically, if you have a barrier and a particle on one side of a wall, no, it can't get to the other side of the wall without bouncing off or cracking the wall and getting through. But quantum mechanically, the wave function of the particle, probability the particle might be found on one side of the wall, the other can be shown if the wall is thin enough to be non-zero on the other side

of the wall, which means that the particle can, with some non-zero probability, often very small, often exponentially small, as in the case of many sort of nuclear decays, can end up on the other side of the wall. And that's amazing and true. And another fascinating and very non-intuitive aspect of quantum mechanics. What they did was combine the two and said, well, If it's true for a particle, maybe it's true for this macroscopic quantum state that they designed a configuration with two superconductors with a very narrow gap, a often called a tunnel junction, basically, and discovered that under the right conditions,

basically that quantum mechanical state, entire quantum mechanical state could tunnel from one superconductor to the other. And so you don't just have this weird quantum mechanical behavior for a single particle. You have it for the whole state. And as I say, that configuration, if carefully controlled, could be useful for, who knows, maybe even quantum computers, but certainly very careful devices, special devices, detectors, perhaps, or other things. And so in any case, it's a beautiful experiment. and it demonstrates that quantum mechanics works, even on macroscopic scales,

for very special quantum mechanical systems, in this case, superconductors. So it's a nice piece of physics, and hopefully the devices that it develops are groundbreaking enough to justify this. But it is certainly a beautiful piece of well-known physics shown to work. So that's my impression. What's your take on it? Well, first of all, I think for the benefit of those watching, if you wave your hands and you speak of macroscopic things, they're not actually that large.

Okay, so I find the word macroscopic when it comes to this macroscopic quantum tunneling, somewhat misleading because I think when people hear the word, macroscopics, they think of, I don't know, basketballs or something. Yeah. But we're talking about micrometers or something. So basically... A lot of particles. Yeah, yeah, like they're much, much larger than elementary particles.

So this is why physicists call this, like, it's a macroscopic state, but I think it's not what the average person means, where they either are macroscopic. And so these devices that they build, like they're basically microchips, like their microchips size. And this is also, I mean, this is why this company, this quantum motion company with their quantum computer, like this is why they're saying they can now mass produce this because they actually use the technology that was developed for the microchips. So this is why this is so super useful because it allows people to, manipulate quantum effects on this level of microchips, which is much more feasible than if you're trying to actually work with individual atoms or electrons or something like that.

I think this was basically the big deal. So it opened this quantum technology to a much larger range of applications. You know, other laboratories could work with these kind of things. And I'm not particularly good with the entire history of quantum computing, but I think that this macroscopic quantum tunneling was kind of one of the inspirations for the superconducting circus that they use now. I think they kind of, strictly speaking, they use a different kind of state. So details elude me.

But it kind of goes back to this idea that you can use macroscopic states in some sense. sense to produce qubits. Yes. And certainly in the 1980s, they were one of the first groups to be able to show you could control this and actually do the experiment to prove that it worked. So it's as I say, a precision, exquisite experiment with clear results demonstrating the fundamental physics works. And as you say, anytime you can control a quantum mechanical system, in this case

superconductors, finally and developed small. The other thing that showed is that the system is quantized, which is interesting, that the Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a superconductor, can exist in some excited states. And those states are quantized. And they showed that the tunneling is quantized, exactly. as you would imagine. And so careful manipulation of quantum systems is the word of the day or the phrase of the day because that's the kind of thing. Quantum engineering, as we used to call it,

is what's going to be sort of the forefront field of science today. Building materials that allow you to exploit quantum mechanics to do what you want is the holy grail of a lot of this field. This is one example of that, although the sort of the physics is clear. The physics is certainly clear, and it's quantum mechanics. And the interesting thing is we've seen a number of Nobel Prizes for just this kind of thing, basically proving quantum mechanics, manipulating systems in an exquisite scale to show the quantum mechanics works. and once again, the prize is also in principle,

not just to show the quantum mechanics works, but that this can then be useful later on. And sometimes, sometimes a Nobel committee is more wishful thinking, but in the end, they bet well. We've seen it. We've seen a number of prizes where people, where they say this is going to change the world,

even superconductivity for a long time, It didn't change much. It was unbelievable and an amazing phenomenon, but it wasn't, it didn't change the world. And I was just reading lasers when they were first of all. No one had an idea what they do with them. And so sometimes they're ahead of the curve and say that this will make dramatic changes and they're down a generation. Sometimes they wait for the generation for the impact to happen.

In this case, they certainly waited 30, 40 years before, from 1984. So it's 40 years, if I did my wrath correctly, from the time this experiment was done to the time the Nobel Prize came. So this is now, this technology is now probably an essential part of what people are trying to do for one type of quantum computer. Anyway, it's an exquisite experiment. And as I say, congratulations. I don't know the other two gentlemen.

I owe John Clark. Congratulations to John Clark. and his collaborators. Okay. I have to say that this example also illustrates that there's always a lot of arbitrariness. Like if you wanted to give a Nobel Prize for quantum computing,

there would have been a lot of other people. You could have thought of. And as a theoretical physicist, I'm a little bit dismay that it was three experimentals and no one thought of the theorists. Yeah. Well, and Feynman is dead. But anyway, yeah, it's, but physics is an empirical science. And so I think to be fair, as a theorist, it's, most prizes should go for experiments because they're the things that change the world. And every now and then, theorists do something significant, but I don't mind. It's an empirical science. And we've got to remember that. You know, I really want to emphasize that because the ones who get most of glory are the theorists. I mean, Einstein and Heisenberg and, you know, the names that people

know, Dirac, and then later on Feynman, and for some reason, the theory is, is, it captures people's imagination. And I think one of the reasons the experiments are hard and difficult and, and require a lot of sort of technology and they're hard to get your head around. So while theorists get most of the glory, I think experiments, experimentless do most of the work. So I'm not going to mind. Well, I think it takes both, and I think maybe experimentalists have a little bit of a communication problem. So why are theorists to blame if they just, you know, talk more about what they're doing? But in any case, so let's move on to something which. Yeah, fine. One could say that theorists have nothing to do but talk about the work.

That's one way to put it. Anyway, okay. Yeah. So the next topic I have is, I think you could say, like, it lives at the intersection of theory and experiment, what I would call phenomenology. So that's about dark stars. So it's like there's a trend in physics that you put the word dark in front of everything, dark matter, dark energy, the dark flow, the dark, what else did we have? The dark spot. and all kinds of dark states, dark photons. And yeah. And the dark photons. Yeah, absolutely. The dark sector. So, yeah, dark stars, which is a good name because dark stars aren't even dark.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're actually quite light. Yeah, yeah. So, but they're powered by dark matter. At least that's the idea. So a particular type of dark matter could have given rise to peculiar type of stars in the early universe. They don't live for very long.

And this type of dark matter is actually one that has been talked about a lot. It's a type of dark matter that can make a self-annihilation. So basically, if two dark matter particles happen to meet, they will make a flash of light. And that can heat up normal matter and make it shine. So then you have a star. And that's the dark star. these dark stars aren't anything like the stars that we have now. So they don't actually make their energy or their light by nuclear fusion,

but it all comes from this dark matter fraction, which actually can be fairly small. I think it's below a percent or something. In any case, so as I said, they run out a few very quickly, and then this thing collapses and makes a normal star basically at some point. So you have to look for them in the early universe, and how would you do this? Where you would do it with data from the James Web space telescope.

So this is a great thing that we can now look back into the very early days of the universe, like a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. And so there's this group around Katie Fries, who's been looking for dark stars for a long time. And they say they found four candidates in the James. Wraim's web data, one of which they say is particularly promising because it has a faint, but, you know, barely visible absorption line in the right range so that it fit to some helium isotope and I forgot exactly why that's good, but they say it fits to the dark matter hypothesis.

And so, I mean, look, the signal to noise ratio of this so-called helium detection is something like 2.4. So it's not particularly impressive. But I kind of like the idea because if there was something to it, like in the best case scenario, let's imagine, they would actually confirm this and it turns out, yeah,

the dark stars the only thing that fits. It would be a way to pin down the properties of dark matter, which is kind of the thing that's been missing. for a long time. Like we just have too, too many candidates and they're all over the place and it could be everything or anything,

which is why I make so many jokes about dark matter with their gazillions of dark sector particles and so on. So, well, you're being, I think you're being generous. Let me put it that way.

Or maybe wishful thinking, hopeful. This, one should point out, by the way, that the article that you direct me to is, again, a press release, a press release in this case by the university involved in it and I'm always worried of course of physics by press release but

this is an area that I've been involved in since the very beginning not dark stars but dark matter captured by stars we wrote some of the first papers on that and even then it was clear that to do something useful you need a very particular type of dark matter So this is, in my mind, this is an example of sort of particle physicists inventing something to solve an astrophysical problem that probably has another solution, rather than particle physicists inventing something that is compelling from a fundamental perspective, and then you find out it solves another problem.

You know, you need this thing to self-inilay. I haven't gone through the detail, but I know from the early work, you need it to, the cross sections have to, it's not the kind of generic kind of, if you've locked a theorist in a room, the kind of dark matter you'd need, you'd produce. Plus, these are supermassive. We all know in the early universe, the first stars to form were probably supermassive stars because there wasn't heavy metals. There wasn't heavy metals. And that causes, that means you have larger stars.

And then the question is, how do you get supermassive black holes? So this is a star. And of course, this is a massive, and not a star initially, it's just a bunch of helium and hydrogen gas that would collapse and it would collapse completely, something has to stop it from collapsing. Normally for a star, what stops a star from collapsing are nuclear reactions. If you put some dark matter, which collapses into the core of the system, and it annihilates, it produces heat, and that heat, effectively, if you produce enough of it, holds a star up just like nuclear reactions. But of course, that begs the question then. If you're producing

that much energy, could it be nuclear reactions? after all in the first place. And reading this piece, it's clear that this is a, even the star of interest, or of interest it says, is in a very metal-rich environment. It must be a dark star embedded in a metal-rich environment.

This is complicated astrophysics. And it seems to me, not only is the system week, the signal week, but the theory is pushing the edge of what I would, what I would I call reasonable theory. So it's wishful thinking theoretically, looking at wishful observations in astrophysics

at a marginal signal to noise level. And it's certainly not on the scale of the quantum computer we talked about or warp drive. But I think it's, it smells like wishful thinking to me. And more likely, a supermassive star in the early universe.

and once again, if you, I'm, there's a lot of, we all know that if you look, do an experiment, and you have a lot of data and you look for the anomalies, you're going to find anomalies. And I'm always worried when a bunch of theorists say, I have this theory, this pet theory of mine, and I'm going to look at tons and tons of data, and I'm going to find something that might just be it. Well, every now and that it is. but again, I bet against it. So I think it smells wrong, in my opinion. Or at least it smells suspicious, not wrong.

And I think it's, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a supermassive star in a weird environment, powered by something less exotic than a very strange kind of dark matter that a particle physicist wouldn't have proposed on the basis of pure particle theory. So having been involved in this and tried, you know, early on when we were looking at capture by with frank wilchick and colleagues with capture of dark matter in the sun and the earth and jupiter one of the things we notice is jupiter has got an anomaly it produces a little more heat than you should you would expect and we said maybe it's maybe it's dark matter the problem is the kind of dark matter you have to engineer to make it work is always pretty suspicious and i suspect it's the same here so um i don't i don't disagree. You know, I've seen a lot of theorists try to explain supposed anomalies that later turned out to be pretty normal astrophysical phenomena. Though, you know, I'm trying to be open-minded on these kind of things. Like, if I go and say

everything is bullshit, people get just... Yeah, you're right. Yeah, because you're saying that. Yeah, well, you know, I do try to remind myself, like, maybe one day it isn't bullshit. So I try to actually look at this. I want to clarify one thing, though, because you said this is like signs by press release. They actually did write a paper and was actually published. And there's actually real data. So it's not like, you know, like Microsoft puts out press release and there's no paper

and you have an idea what they actually did. It's not quite as bad. Yeah, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And there's a lot of papers published. I guess when the point is when the people that know to suggest the significance of the work are the university that the work is in, I always worry a little bit. And I mean, unfortunately, that's how the world works nowadays. Universities have to do press release because they're worried about getting funding. And you're right.

This is a paper. And it's not bullshit. It's just wishful thinking in my opinion. I mean, it's sort of pushing the edge of the envelope. And it's unlikely. but it's interesting enough to follow up. And I bet against it, but who knows? Every now and then the bet the court works out wrong.

So we'll see. You have another topic that is more on the solid side of evidence. Yes. The next topic I want to go to is one that I think is very similar, but maybe not as hype because it's, It's not as exotic physics, although black holes are pretty exotic. But it's a different kind of, they don't call it a dark star. They don't call it a dark gamma ray burst because it's not dark matter in it.

But there are these long, there's a new, there are gamray bursts are the most energetic objects in the universe. And they're conventionally thought of as basically a large supermassive black hole eating a star or some gas. Because when the gas falls into black hole, it emits a tremendous amount of energy. and it's observed and gamma rays and other things. There are some, there's a kind of gamma ray burst that is long lived, much longer lived, given the size of the system, much longer lived than you would imagine. And interestingly enough, the burst lasted, I think, seven hours or maybe four bursts over two days. and what's interesting is it suggested in this case, well, that it's not a black hole eating a distant star,

but rather a complicated environment where the black hole is actually more or less fallen into the star and merged with a star and is eating it from the inside out. And that's, there's nothing, there's no exotic, unexpected physics there. it's a complex environment and due to the fact that it's inside the star, it turns out all of the physics works out to produce the kind of signal that's seen. Now, can you prove it? No, but it's kind of remarkable that it seems more remarkable to imagine a black hole inside of a star instead of a black hole beside a star destroying it. but it's just a matter of location, just a matter of real estate, if you want to think about it this way.

But what's interesting to me is that the people who've looked at this find a distinct signature in terms of the length of time that the burst would happen that they say would be generally characteristic if the black hole had actually merged with the star beforehand before it destroyed it. And so it's a not a dark star. You could call it a black hole star if you want.

if you wanted to get more attention, but it's not even that. But it's a, it's a fascinating observation. And in this big old universe of ours, if there are lots of black holes eating stars, it wouldn't surprise me if some of them ate them from the inside. So I think it's a, I wanted, when I knew you were going to talk about the other kind of thing, I thought, well, this is a little less exotic physics of the black holes are exotic. And as far as I can tell, the characteristics of this signal is, length of time cannot be easily understood in other ways, unlike perhaps the stars from the last

example. So I don't know what your thoughts are about this. Do they say anything about the likely frequency of that happening? Like, is this the only such event that we'll ever see? Or is there a chance we'll see more of them? The article doesn't say that, doesn't talk about the frequency. That would be interesting. I think you'd have to know more about the environments of supermassive black holes or me massive, not even stellar black holes, to know. And it's a subject we're learning about. So I suspect we'll learn more about it through gravitational waves. We'll learn about the frequency of black holes in for masses, the environments they're in. And that's what's a great about having gravitational wave detector combined with other observatories because you're beginning to learn a lot more

about what the actual physics of Blackholes is. But you're right. They say it's a bit unusual in its environment. So it's interesting. It's very unusual and it's a duration, and it's a bit unusual in its environment. So I think that's the point. It's the length of time of this

that makes us stand out for grammar. array observatories. But the environment is not that unusual. Namely, it's, you know, a black holes surrounded by a lot of, if it's surrounded by a lot of gas and it's surrounded by SARS, I guess it's not too surprising if it actually in the process of the two things merged. So they don't seem to think it's that unusual as an environment, but it's the signal that struck them. So it remains to be seen if there are other long-lived, long-lasting gamma rays. And, um, and, My understanding is that there's some long lengths in gamma rays, but they're closer Earth and therefore they're more easily understood by other processes. But to be visible enough, very far away, it has to be a black hole eating a star.

And in this case, the black hole eating a star from it then. I think what's fascinating about the universe is that it's big and old and rare events are happening all the time. And if black holes are there and stars are there and black holes. eat stars, then why not eat it from the inside out? It sounds to me like it's perfectly reasonable. I'm willing to go for that one. Well, you know, as someone who has a background in particle physics and who worked a little bit in astrophysics,

I have to say, like, one of the things that took me a while to realize is that you start out thinking, like, you know, they're like six, seven types of stars and there are like, I don't know, a dozen types of galaxies, and you think of them like they're elementary particles, But they're all different. Like every single star with its environment, every single galaxy has its own history. They have their own problems.

They have their own characteristics. And so it's vastly more complicated than particle physics. And that's why it's, and it's observations, not experiments. That's why it's hard to do because you can't tweak the knobs. But I still think it is fascinating in the last two examples show that, I mean, this universe continues to surprise us. I may not surprise this in the direction that the theorists proposed it to be. But the fact that this big universe contains such exotic things as black holes and stars, eating stars, is remarkable.

And once again, even if it's rare, even if happens once every million years per galaxy, there's, remember, over 100 billion galaxies. And if you look far enough, you're going to find it. So the bottom line is whatever can happen does happen. And it's a job of theorists like us to talk about what can happen. And the job of experiments us to say what does happen. And sometimes the two come together in beautiful ways. And that's what makes physics fun.

And so we've seen today the gamut from wild eye speculation to potential realistic results about very exotic objects. And it's a lot of fun. And what's great is that we can test these ideas and eventually discover that the universe is more interesting than we ever possibly imagined. So thank you very much, Sabina, and I'm hoping those that are watching this,

notice that she didn't say everything was bullshit because she doesn't, no matter what you say about her. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you and to find out our different perspectives. And when one of us is more skeptical than the other, it's nice to see that give and take. And I hope you, the viewers, have enjoyed it. I always enjoyed talking to you. Thanks again, Sabina. Thank you.

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