Tomorrow, Today - QBism & the Truth of Probability with Dr. Chris Fuchs

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

In this episode, the Tomorrow, Today team sits down with Dr. Chris Fuchs, founder of QBism, to discuss the intersections of philosophy and science. What are the limits of our ability to understand physics, and is objectivity even real? If it's not real, what are the implications and how does it impact our interactions with the world around us? To read more work from Dr. Chris Fuchs and other physicists, visit: https://arxiv.org/ To support this project and to get early access to each episode, visit https://www.patreon.com/poorprolesalmanac

Welcome back to tomorrow today, the podcast where we talk about tomorrow today. My name is Ash Flynn. I'm joined, as always, by my illustrious co-host, Andy. Illustrious? What am I, a butterfly? Are butterflies illustrious? I think. I feel like maybe no.

How about yes? I feel like only co-hosts are illustrious. Like, that's when we use that word. It's literally the only use of the word. Yes. And butterflies. Well, I've never heard it with butterflies. So maybe that's just a thing for you.

It's a thing. You're a butterfly, Andy. That's what we're saying. I am a beautiful butterfly. A beautiful butterfly. I get that a lot. I know. I believe that.

Do we want to talk about the subject of today's episode? The butterfly effect? Nope. It kind of is. Gotta move off from butterflies, my man. Kind of. Take a break from butterflies. Just for the record, technically speaking, if we're talking about Bayesian theory, the

Bayesian model, Bayes theorem, that's it. I went to grad school for accounting. I know the base theorem. If we're talking about that, then yeah, technically the butterfly effect does affect probability. So, therefore. Therefore, you were right this whole time. Therefore, we are talking about the illustrious butterfly, is what I'm saying. Okay.

I feel like every intro we do to this podcast, I'm like, why did we start this podcast together? Because of the butterflies. Because of the butterflies. They're not just in your stomach. Aw. Why are you saying, aw? Did I eat butterflies recently? No.

When you're nervous. When you're nervous. Right. Oh, well, I guess that too. Nerves. Yeah. I guess that too. Yeah, I was thinking, I went right to.

You're dead inside. Why would you feel that way? Well, I went right to my Disney, you know, princess indoctrination of a childhood, you know, or I mean, like, women are conditioned. We don't have to talk about it. We don't have to talk about it. That's a different type of, yeah. It's a different episode.

It's a different episode. Yeah, so we sat down with the very, very fantastic, almost illustrious. Almost. Dr. Christopher Fux's. this week. Dr. Christopher Butterflyless, Fuchs. Yes, we gave him a middle name. I'm sorry if you're finding out this way, Dr. Fuchs.

I can't apologize for what happens in the intro to these things. You knew what you signed up for. Yeah, we did tell you we get kind of silly in these. But we were talking about quantum mechanics, quantum physics, which as all the listeners on this podcast know, I'm very, very well versed in. I'm a physicist by train. I'm a physician my trade.

And let me tell you. So I know you know this, Andy, so I'm explaining this for our listeners, but I actually know Dr. Fuchs in real life. And when I said, do you want to be on my podcast? He was like, well, yes, but you have to do your homework, right? And I was like, oh, sure, of course. I always do research before I interview anybody because that's how interviews go. and then he proceeded to send me a like 15 or 16 article and YouTube clip packet that make up his media packet as homework.

And then he said, including just before you go any further, part of this media packet is interviews with him that didn't go well because they didn't do enough research. So he cautioned me that he would know if I didn't do my homework and that there were dire consequences if I didn't do my homework. so I can tell you that I spent the three to four days prior to this interview in a full-blown meat sweat. She had the butterflies is what she's saying. I was just like, this is not going to go good. And my life is going to end after that immediately, right? So we started focusing on the research.

And at that point I said to Andy, we normally do these interviews solo and then do this lovely intro together as a way to synthesize the information. but I was like, there's no way I can tackle this interview alone, right? I was six articles deep and I was like, please, sir, I need help. Like a night and shining armor I showed up. Yes, and he was like, guess what? I went to accounting school. Did you call for an accountant?

I can account everything, including all of the butterflies. All of the butterflies. So we started going into the research together and I was like, wow, I am more stupid than I thought. You know what I mean? Like this concept. It's fun times. Yeah. You know, it seems.

far out of my ability to understand information. And then we sat down with Dr. Fuchs, and I got to prove that I did my homework because I did. I was nervous all morning. We ran into so many technical problems that morning. But it ended up being a really, really, really fascinating conversation and fascinating in a way that I didn't really think that physics could be. I am the least scientifically literate person.

I know that also does ecology. Okay. So I was interested, but also cautious. And then one of the things that comes up is that quantum mechanics has obviously a scientific underpinning, but it also dips really heavily into philosophy. And I think that overlap is something that people just aren't aware of. So like I think about like when we, before we got into this interview, if you would ask me like, what is quantum mechanics?

My answer would have been something I probably heard when I was like 13. which is like things happen before the thing that caused them does. So like time is reversed and that's quantum physics. And that's what I thought it was because I didn't go to physics class in high school or biology or chemistry because I really shouldn't have graduated high school. You didn't go to any classes in high school. Didn't even, not necessarily didn't go. I didn't even like wasn't even signed up for. I legitimately do not understand how I graduated high school in retrospect.

The point being, when I went in, I had very specific understanding of what it was, is like this thing that was like so beyond like the element of normal human understanding. And then it was like, oh, okay, some of these formulas are replicable in finance and accounting. And I was like, I get those and they make sense there. And then trying to translate that into a dialogue, which is basically what he focuses on. It was really interesting to get that different perspective from somebody who's, like, by magnitudes, more knowledgeable and intelligent on the subject matter and probably generally speaking. So I think if you would ask me prior to our conversation with Dr. Fuchs, about even honestly physics at all, I would have dropped to the floor and just started crying until you left.

Like, I think that would be my like survival mechanism. So you're a sloth. Yes, I'm a sloth. My biggest defense is absolutely none. I will just drop to the floor. But I think, you know, what really became clear to me as we were talking about this conversation. And I think you're going to hear it as I'm talking and being like, wow, that's so surprising, is that I really found that there's a beauty in this.

You know, there's a real worldview in cubism and quantum basianism that I didn't expect to find in science. It reminds me a lot of when we think about like historically, like romantically sciences like Leonardo da Vinci. And like the concept of more science being this polymath, this coalescing of different knowledge bases and bringing them together, making them more than the sum of their parts, which I think is really not missing necessarily, but maybe not publicly known. And I think that idea that these different types of knowages can come together and make each other better is really not just important, but like human. like that the world is complex and these things do overlap. Physics does overlap with philosophy and the way we engage with the world around us. And providing a place and a space to have those conversations and then again, underpin it with actual science is really hopeful, I guess you could say. Yeah.

Inspiring. I don't know. I mean, I would say that. I think this whole conversation changed my worldview a lot. And I'll talk a little bit about it in the interview, but I was a firm believer prior to this in the multiverse, and I am not now. And I think, you know, having... She's just the verse now.

Yeah, it's just the verse. Having a 20-minute conversation that changes something you understand or you think you understand about how you relate to the world or even how the universe works, I think is crazy, but also, like, very cool. Like, I'm very, very glad that watching me change my mind on something is recorded for a podcast. It's not like a helpful fundamental change.

Like, right? It's like a pre-movie, fun fact. Like, I'm in the theater. And it's like, hey, what of these things as Nash Flynn? Used to believe in the multiverse. Had a life-altering experience that was recorded. Film, podcast, home video. Yeah.

And then people are in the audience. Like, what an idiot. She believed in the multiverse. You know what I mean? Come on, what a pleb. You know? It's true, though. It's true.

She is a club. I am. I was firmly entrenched in believing that the multiverse was real and had been proven. But science tells us no. Maybe it's been disproven. I mean, for cubism, it's definitely been disproven. No. Science says no.

That's all I got. I think that's a good place to end things, honestly. Science says no. Firmly. Except when it says yes. Except when it says that's the wrong question. Ooh. Thinking about things wrong.

We have to rethink. All things. perspective. Totally different. Actually, I think we should just remove, no. Remove us from the equation. I was going to say we remove us from the equation, but that's very anti-cubism. Well, wait until you hear about this dude named Albert Einstein. Just wait. And his beef with basically everyone, but especially in Nears, Niels Bohr. Yeah. It gets for a while. And his love of cigars. So many good stories. I wish we could have Dr. Fuchs back literally every week, just reacting to things. Maybe we'll bring him back because I do think it would be fun.

Watching him. Sitting next to a fireplace. Oh. Where is NBC when you need them? Call Morgan Freeman. Excuse me, Peacock? I have a show to pitch to you. Is Peacock still a thing?

I don't know. Anyway, the chat is immediately following this because that's when they always are. That's how it works. That's how we run this show. Time is linear in this case. In this case, philosophically speaking. Time is a line and you're about to run it from one part of it. You're about to snort it.

You're about to snort it. Time is a line. You're about to snort it. This is the end of the intro. Please enjoy the interview with Dr. Christopher Fuchs. Today we had the pleasure to sit down and chat with Dr. Christopher Fuchs, a physicist, philosopher, and Morgan Freeman's best friend. He's often credited as the father of cubism or quantum basian physics. Today also is, coincidentally, the day our listeners realize I do not understand any branch of science whatsoever.

Chris, thanks for coming on. You're welcome. I had to do quite a bit. It was my absolute pleasure and also fear. So just so our listeners, though, I had to do quite a bit of reading before Dr. Fuchs would agree to chat, which he correctly called homework. In that reading, I stumbled on Dennis Lidley's quote about the coherent, coherentist paradigm. So this is the quote, is the tale of a person contemplating the world and not wanting to be stupid. So I could tell you that that quote has haunted me since you agreed to come on and since I ran into it because that is exactly what is happening right now.

And it is with so much fear that I approach this interview that actually, this is the first interview that Andy and I are doing together. I'm here. This is the first collaborative tomorrow today interview that we will probably ever have solely because of my fear. So, Chris, I think what struck me the most about cubism in general is just how unscience, it seems to me. Like, I've always thought of science as this big, scary kind of field.

And when I was researching this, I think there's a beautiful sort of blurred line between the philosophy and science. But in one interview you said that physics is the interplay between storytelling and equation writing. And I think it's beautiful and I really want to start there. So can you tell a little bit about the story of how quantum basian came to be born? Oh, how did it come to be born? Well, it was born before it was born. So in the 1920s, physics was really confused. And in fact, let's say in the late 1810s, physics was really confused. In fact, let's say in the late 1800s, things really started in the late 1800s. The light bulb had just been invented, and people were trying to get a handle on what kinds of materials to use for the little filaments in a light bulb.

And the question arose, what is the most efficient converter from temperature? to light. And so people started studying, you know, what kind of light comes from this and what kind of light comes from that. They noticed some unusual patterns in the amount of light that would come off of something called a black body. So you take something that's really black and you heat it up to a certain temperature and it starts glowing a little bit. It starts glowing a little bit blue, a little bit red, etc. what was noticed was that the proportions of red and blue and the other colors weren't what the theory was predicting. So consistently so. We had this little thing you can do in the laboratory, you can make a black body glow, and the colors of light that were coming off of it were wrong.

So, okay, that's where quantum mechanics started. Quantum mechanics started as an effort to explain the colors of light that come from a black body. But then as people dug and dug into the problem, it became more and more confusing. And weirder things were noticed and so forth. Finally, everything came to a head in 1925 when quantum mechanics was discovered. People finally had a theory that explained everything. So this was exciting. They had a theory that would explain everything.

It would explain the colors of light. They come from a black body. It would explain the colors of light coming from. from a hydrogen atom. Oh, did you look at, did you see the big NASA announcement yesterday? No. No. So there's a new telescope called James Webb Space Telescope that, among other things.

So they showed all five things that it's found in its first week of operation. And one of them was they looked at an exoplanet. You know, when an exoplanet is a planet around another star. they looked at it very carefully and they looked at the colors of light that were coming from the planet. And by the colors of light on the planet, they could tell exactly how much hydrogen, how much water. They could tell what is on the planet. And that's because all the different elements have signature colors. Well, in 1925, quantum mechanics explained that.

Okay, this is a long introduction. But here's what came with it. The theory that explained it didn't look like any theory anyone had ever had before. It had a different shape to it and a different feel. And this confused all the great founders immensely. So, I mean, there were almost fistfights between like Einstein who hated it. And another founder, Niels Bohr, who loved it. You know, Boer is known to like just take pull. them cigar out of Einstein's mouth and say, look here, Einstein. This theory is right and it's working. So you should be happy about it. And Einstein hated it. So the roots of Cubism are in the debate between Einstein and his fellow scientists about what this theory means. It works, but what does it mean? What does it actually tell us about the world other than just working? I actually love that it starts with a light bulb, to be honest with you. I think that's like what symbolism.

Yeah. Ding. You know, I was just blown away by the, so one of the photos they showed yesterday from the new telescope shows a galaxy that is the farthest thing ever seen in the universe. It's 13.1 billion light years away. So it took the light from that galaxy, 13.1 billion years to get to us. and the way they could tell how far away it was was by the colors of light that were coming from it. And quantum mechanics,

it was one of those pieces like I was just telling you to explain where the colors of light are coming from for different substances. That's gorgeous. Actually, it reminds me, I once knew a physicist who, he saw the background of my computer at work. I used to work for scientists.

And it was just like a space scape, right? All the beautiful colors. And he came up to me and he said, you know, space doesn't actually look like that. Those are heat signatures. And so I can't even tell you how much that ruined my day. Like, I really thought if we could go to space, it would look that colorful and beautiful. And yeah, that really stuck with me for a long time.

Space isn't that colorful. Those are just, that's just one. I had to explain this to my wife yesterday. So the new telescope is an infrared telescope. It sees infrared light. It doesn't see visible light like our eyes do. and our eyes don't see infrared. So how is it that we're looking at these beautiful images?

And the way we are is because basically a scientist with some good artistic talent said, oh, I'm going to use this color to represent this temperature, this infrared light. And I'm going to use this color to represent that one. And then they put it together and you get this beautiful picture, which is representative of what's really there. But it's not something you can see with the human eye. A mosquito can see it. Mosquitoes can see infrared.

And frogs can see infrared, but we can't. So what you're saying is we should send mosquitoes to space. They might be the best receptors, yeah. Okay, let's send all the mosquitoes in space. But we have to learn to talk to mosquitoes first. I think it's okay. That's the harder thing to do. Can Cubism help us talk to mosquitoes?

I don't think so. We'll have to find a different branch of science. It's not snake oil. It doesn't fix everything. Well, so to get back into cubism and away from talking to mosquitoes, which is sort of distracting me from our major points. So the study of physics you've described in an interview is sort of the impersonal laws of nature. But with the advent of this quantum theory, there's sort of this big bang of this human understanding piece. And the physics that goes on to be concerned with what Edwin Jane's called, the unscrambling of those pieces.

This is where you bring in cubism and this sort of participatory realism. Can you talk a little bit about that? Did I totally screw things up? No, you did your homework. I am impressed. I told you. I did. I really did.

Wow, wow, wow. Edwin James. I sent him an email once, but it was a little too late. They had just turned off his dialysis. And his assistant wrote me, well, he'll never see your email. We expect him to pass away in the next seven. 22 hours. So that was very sad. That is really sad.

So, okay. Could have just lied. Okay. Before quantum theory, all the theories of physics seem to tell you what's out there. It would say, oh, the world is made of this stuff. And the stuff it's made of acts this way. And it doesn't matter whether you're looking at the stuff or not, it's still acting that way. The way the theory says it should be acting.

The thing that was so consternating about quantum theory back in the 1920s already was that the theory itself said, oh, here's what I'm about. I'm about predicting probabilities for what you will see. And I'm not, it's stubbornly, strangely enough, the equations kind of stubbornly tell you that's what they're about. they're not about what the stuff of the world is out there it's not about the probabilities of what is out there when no one is looking the theory is only about the probabilities for what you will see when you look what someone will see when they look and that's what the probabilities are about so you might think oh well what that means is there's something deeper going on there's really The probability, so maybe a better theory would be the probability of this being out there is this or that or the other thing.

And then you may or not see it. But if you try to make that assumption, if you try to back off from quantum theory and say, oh, there's a better theory that's about what's the probability that the cat is alive or dead? The theory says, no, I'm not about that. I'm about the probability that you will see the cat alive or dead. And those are two different things. It's not the probability about whether the cat is alive or dead, but the probability about whether you will see it alive or see it dead.

That makes a reference to you, to the person, the one who's seeing the things. And this was spooky, spooky to lots of scientists, because the great signature of scientific progress up until quantum theory was that we want to get rid of the egocentrism or anthropocentrism in our theories. So, you know, you used to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. Well, why was it the center of the universe? Because we're here, you know, and God chose us to be the center of all things. and then, well, great progress was made when people started to discover, no, the Earth isn't the center of the universe.

The sun's the center of the universe. Now we can explain planetary orbits. Well, then later we understood, no, the sun's not the center of the universe. The sun is going around the center of the galaxy. That's the center of the universe. No, it's not the center of the universe. There's thousands, millions, trillions of galaxies, like we saw in some of those photos yesterday.

So scientific progress was really predicated or based on the idea that it's best to get rid of the human-centeredness of anything. And then quantum theory came along and said, no, I'm precisely about human-centeredness. And that's why there was a debate, and that's, you know, why you can see Niels Bohr pulling the the cigar out of Einstein's mouth and smashing it.

I wish your listeners could see my impression of bored pouring a cigar of them. It's perfect. It's just a, it's a yank. I'll as you guys picture it. Google a photo of Chris Hooks and then just imagine that he's yanking a cigar. There's a cute story about a time when Niels Bohr was visiting Einstein at Princeton. And Einstein gave Boer his office and said, oh, I don't need all of this space. I'll sit in the secretary's office.

So while Boer was visiting, Boer had Einstein's office. And Einstein sat out in the secretary's office. But at this stage in his life, Einstein's doctors told him he shouldn't be smoking his cigars. But he kept a stash of them in his desk in his office. and so there's a wonderful story of someone who happened to see this from outside. Einstein tried to, Niels Bohr was at the chalkboard, just writing some equations and having an internal debate in his mind. And Einstein was sneaking into the office, Boer couldn't see him, to get to the drawer to get some cigars. and as Einstein was sneaking in,

Boer was at the chalkboard going, Einstein. Einstein. You know, so he was having this debate with him in his mind. Einstein just about gets to the cigars. And it's like, like, Boer had a denouement and goes, Einstein, and turns around and he sees Einstein.

And he almost has a heart attack. Anyway. No, I, I, I, I, I distract. I move away from the story. I love it. So cubism and participatory realism is a stark recognition that quantum mechanics is actually about us. It's not about what's out there,

but rather about the interface between each of us and the world out there. And so just as the world can surprise me, with what I end up seeing, I can surprise the world with what I do. And so it's a recognition that actually we're not just insignificant little things. Our actions matter and they actually make a difference to the world. I love that. I was actually telling Andy about this earlier because I tend to be such a nihilist, such a fatalist. And then I listened to that interview you did with Morgan Freeman.

I mean, I guess I wasn't really with him, but in my heart it was with him. And you say that at the very end that, you know, our choices matter. We matter because we're constantly influencing what's happening around us. I think that's really gorgeous in a way that I had not ever considered science to be. I don't know. Are you with me on this one? Yeah. When I was reading it, I was thinking or reading some of the arguments on cubism.

I was thinking mostly about this concept and thinking back to like grad school and like using like the base theorem to to calculate probability. in finance and how it didn't feel right. It didn't feel conclusive in a lot of ways. And the argument tended to be like, well, we want to, we don't want to overcomplicate things because then we're less likely to be able to come up with an answer that we can use. And that seems to permeate across like economics and finance. And I think cubism kind of challenges that.

And in focusing specifically on like the inverse of that. that space that is the probability or how we try to construct probability. I was trying to come up with questions and instead of just like ramblings because it's it's so philosophical, you know, I know you call yourself like a theoretical physicist, but in reality, it's more philosophical than theoretical, at least from the way I understand it. It's got aspects of both, you know, so I have one big grant coming to work on the philosophical side of things. And I have another federal grant, as Nash pointed out a little earlier, a federal grant to work on the technical side of things. But really, so, you know, coming back to this

quote of Dennis Lindley that Nash mentioned earlier, we use probabilities because we don't want to be stupid. So we want to make good decisions. And that's where probability theory comes into this kind of understanding of things. So just in economics, you use probabilities because you're doing your best not to be stupid. You're doing your best not to make, you're doing your best not to make bad decisions. And Cubism really is a recognition that quantum physics is about doing our best. not to be stupid so that we might live longer. Yeah. Oh, you know, may I, if I might go back to the business about life and death.

Yeah. It seems like you mentioned a little bit earlier. Another key influence on Cubism is the philosophy of a man named William James, who was a Harvard professor. late 1900s to very early 1900s. He was the first professor of psychology in the United States. And then he later became professor of philosophy. He had a certain philosophy that he called pragmatism. And pragmatism was really founded on an experience that he had in the 18,

70s. He was feeling suicidal and wanted to end it all. But at the same time, he was studying the philosophy of a French philosopher, Charles Renouvié, that's my best French. And Renouvié is known as the philosopher of free will. James writes in his notebook that two days ago, I nearly ended it. all. But then I completed reading the essays of Renovie. And I see nothing wrong with his argument that one can adopt to have free will and that one can make a difference to the world. So for a

year, hence, I am going to freely choose to have free will and see if this changes my life. So he sort of bought free will on a trial offer. And it ended up saving his life. So then he really became the philosopher of free will and the philosopher who preached that your actions matter. You know, since you have such an interest in life and death, he has a nice little essay called Is Life Worth Living? Oh. And it starts with a joke about how that depends. depends upon the liver, which you can read two different ways.

So it depends upon the person or it depends upon, you know, what's their internal organ. That's great. Anyway, the point of the essay is that knowing that your actions matter makes life worth living. That's gorgeous. I love that. I mean, it's sort of the thread in all of cubism, right? That we influence the world in ways that we don't even really understand by making choices that impact what's happening around us.

And I think that's, I think honestly, cubism is what people need right now, right? Like, I feel like the last three years has been so hard psychologically on all of us that it's like, even if all you're doing is still going to your job and doing your job from home and you do nothing else all day,

your actions are still mattering to the world. What a powerful message from science today. Before we let you go, I really want to talk to you about the multiverse. I want to ask a question. Oh, sorry, sorry. Ask your question. We'll talk about the multiverse.

Yeah, so you've talked a bit about this idea of, you know, re-centering humanness in the way we understand and relate with the science that we do, basically. And I think this is something that is kind of outside of cubism starting to get more traction. One of the things that I see personally in the work that I do around ecology is that people are starting to, instead of think about, like, nature is this thing outside of us, but rather as this construct that we, by definition, need to be integrated within. So I'm really interested, you know, as you do this type of work, you know, trying to validate the concepts of cubism is how does this matter in terms of, you know, if you could prove today cubism, you know, is objectively, you know, using that word kind of flippantly based on the subject matter,

provable, then, like, what are those repercussions and how we can translate cubism into the way we interact and relate to everything in our world? Oh, that's a beautiful question, and I wish I had an answer to be. But some people are thinking about this. There is a philosopher from one of the Scandinavian countries. I met her at some... met her at some international relations meeting. So there's, there's, there's been a few meetings in Australia on international relations as influenced by quantum mechanical ideas. And it's a really crazy thing to go to. And I didn't find it as productive as, as I would have liked, because

mostly I found international relations scholars using lots of buzzwords from quantum theory, but not knowing what they meant. And among other things, they would sort of slip together all of the different interpretations of quantum theory. So for instance, Nash just mentioned the multiverse theory. At the same time that they would be using metaphors from the multiverse theory, they would be using metaphors from cubism as if they didn't contradict each other.

And so I didn't find the meeting all that useful. However, I did meet the, the Scandinavian professor, and I don't remember her name at the moment, who was a climate scientist. And she thought that part of reorienting people's thinking about saving the climate was that people should realize that their actions matter. And, oh, she won a Nobel Prize at the same time as Al Gore. But so the Nobel Prize, when Al Gore won it, was Al Gore got half of it. And then a group of 3,000 other people got the other half. And she was one of those 3,000 other people.

A Nobel Peace Prize went one year. So you can look up whenever Al Gore won't. That won't help you find her name. because she was one of the 3,000. But so she thought that a lot of the sort of psychology that goes into people being resistant to make good climate choices was that they thought, well, it's just inevitable. There's this mindset. There's nothing that can be done about it. And her schick was that understanding physics better can make you.

you more aware that your choices matter and that we can choose to have a planet that's habitable or we can choose to not have a planet that's habitable. It's within our power. We just have to understand that we have the power. So I wish I could tell you something deeper. I loved your question. I've often thought that the change in worldview brought about by cubism. The change in worldview specifically because it's about physics and we like to think of physics as the fundamental thing. So if you change your view on physics, the fundamental thing,

that should have repercussions in all of humanity, in all the whole human sphere. But, you know, I'm a specialist, and you're asking a very generalist question. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know if you'd have an answer. I'm just, you know,

I think about things like, you know, the logical conclusion of trying to prove something would lead to, you know, repercussions across different specializations. And I'm always curious to kind of think about big picture long term, you know, how do these things kind of weave together into, you know, what the future might look like? Even as a thought exercise, I think is really important just to, you know, I don't know, I'm a big proponent of the concept of utopia because I think it's really important for us to try to imagine, even if, you know, we can't ever see it in practice. I think it's really important to start thinking about how things can be different and why we do the things we do on grander scale. And I think that's kind of what this underscores is that we can think about the way the future looks fundamentally differently based on how we interact with the knowledge and the frameworks that we have today.

I like that. I should be giving you. Maybe I should be doing a podcast. with you asking you more about this. I will just leave. It's fine. Okay, so I really wanted to talk to you about the multiverse, partially because I think I want to give you an opportunity to talk shit about the multiverse, but also because I felt like as a very naive person on the outskirts of science, I thought we had sort of proved that

the multiverse existed, but Cubism says no, absolutely not. Yeah. So you want me to talk shit about the multiverse? Well, the first mean thing I'll say is they stole the word, the bastards. I think it was probably David Deutsch who first called something. It can either be called the Everettian view of quantum theory, or it was called the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory in previous years. And then I think it was Deutsch who co-opted the term multivorpe. Now, the word multiverse, actually, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that it comes from my favorite philosopher, William James, who thought that the world couldn't be unified in any sense, that there really were truly private pieces of the world, and that there's no way to sort of go above all of reality and look back down and see everything that is.

so there's just no way to unify it. And he called that the multiverse. Or he sometimes called it the pluriverse, like plurality. So anyway, the idea of the many worlds interpretation that somehow everything that can happen does happen. Everything that can possibly happen does happen in a separate world. In a separate world in some sense, to me, just. just psychologically takes away this whole idea of life being worth living. Your actions don't matter anymore because everything that's going to happen does.

So, you know, there's a world in which Nash is picking her nose right now. There's a world in which, you know, drool is coming from the side of her mouth. There's a world in which she's staring at me angrily instead of laughing. There's a world, you know, everything that can happen. does happen, that strips away the meaning and the meaning of life to me. Now, I think a lot of people find religious comfort in the idea because a lot of us want to shirk responsibility if we can. Oh, you know, there's a, sorry to keep telling you stories about Einstein, but there's a great story about if you look through Einstein's correspondence.

one historian has noticed that at those times when he was cheating on one of his wives, he would write very fatalistically about how our choices in the world don't really matter. And at those times when he was being faithful to his wife, he didn't emphasize this point so much. So I think some people are religiously drawn to the multiverse idea. And in fact, I think most of the people who really, espouse it, for instance, the physicist Sean Carroll, I think he has a religious feeling for this idea.

Now, one of the things that bothers me from the scientific end, so that's just psychological. I'm not psychologically attracted to the idea of a world in which everything that can happen does happen. So that's psychology.

From the physics end, I like to think that the point of view of cubism came precisely from the structure of quantum theory. It came from the details of the equations. It came from the details of the mathematics. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the multiverse, despite everyone saying,

it's the ultimate conclusion of quantum theory, actually doesn't depend upon quantum theory at all. You could have that point of view without knowing any of the details of quantum theory. So, you know, what if the equation were this one rather than that one? Oh, you can still have a multiverse view. What if the way that we can perform these experiments were different? Oh, you can still have a multiverse point of view.

And, you know, I could do that with every little detail of quantum theory. So to my mind, it's actually contentless, despite the attraction of science writers to it. and despite the attraction of a number of physicists to it, I think it's just empty of all content. We could have played this game without knowing anything about quantum mechanics. And in fact, there's a nice science fiction tale that I put in one of my papers. I'll have to dig it up, maybe send it to you. From the 1930s, long before Everett had the idea of the multiverse,

you can find it in a science fiction novel. It had nothing to do with quantum mechanics. So is that enough shit or do you want more? I mean, if you can keep going, let's keep talking shit about the multiverse. Because for me, I was like, man, I love the multiverse theory. Like when I first ran into you not liking it, I was like, oh, no, we're going to have beef about multiverse. Because for me, sitting in my basement, working a 9 to 5 job, I was like, well, somewhere in a different multiverse, Nashville has already had a Netflix special. But if the multiverse doesn't exist, then I don't anywhere at all, which I guess makes me fight harder for this timeline, you know, that I have to get it now.

Yeah, it makes things harder for this timeline. I mean, you actually have to be responsible. Yeah, it sucks. You have to take hold of the world and make it do what you wanted to do. You know, so if you want to have a Netflix special, you've got to make it happen. It's not just going to happen because, well, it was going to happen anyway. And by the way, you know, so sitting in your basement knowing that there is that other more fortunate Nash Flynn. Yeah.

What good did that really do you? None. Didn't it just make you that much more jealous? Yeah. Yeah. It should. It does. Like, what a bitch.

Why couldn't she do it here? So I think I'm a full convert. You know, I used to find a lot of comfort in it. Now I'm out of like, you know what? Why not me? Why didn't it pick me? So now I got to pick me, which. In doing your homework, did you read a piece of mind called interview with a quantum basian?

I did read the one where the gentleman did. did not do his homework very well, and that didn't go great for him. Well, maybe I didn't send you this one. It's called The Interview with a Quantum Basian. And you can find it, and it's a number of questions, and I answer them to the best of my ability. And in one of them, I invoke the story of this Christmas time movie. It's a wonderful life. Where, oh, God, I wish I had it in front of me, because I'm not going to remember the details.

exactly of what I wrote there. But in it's a wonderful life, this guy has lost all hope, the protagonist of the story. He jumps off of a bridge and he's saved by his guardian angel Clarence. And so after he's saved in like a moment of exasperation, the protagonist says, I wish I had never been born. And Clarence, the guardian angel, like, looks up to God and says, that's it. Maybe we should grant him his wish. Let's let him see what the world would have been like if he hadn't been born.

And so then it unfold, you know, if he hadn't been born, then the world would have been so different. And it actually was a better world because of his presence. He comes to realize at the end of the movie. And so then, you know, he says, I want to live again. I want to live again. I think that's the lesson here, you know, that it gives you a good reason to live because maybe the world wouldn't be in such good shape if you weren't here. So It's a Wonderful Life is actually a science documentary. I think so.

Yeah. It's Canada. I think so. So, you know, look up that paper. I'll send it to you. The writing side of my brain is more eloquent than the speaking side of my brain. And I trust that side better. Before we wrap up, I do, I'm going to pick back on my question about the future a little bit more,

because I do have a quote from you talking about the future that I think is really interesting, and I want to hear more of your thoughts about it. In an interview, you said, one can imagine that eventually will have evolved to a stage where we can take advantage of things we can't now. We may call those things changes in the laws of physics. Usually we think of the universe as this rigid thing that can't be changed. Instead, methodologically, we should assume just the opposite, that the universe is before us so that we can shape it,

that it can be changed and that it will push back on us. We'll understand our elements by noticing how much it pushes back on us. So you have thought a little bit about the future and the future of cubism. I'd love to hear a little bit more of your thoughts on that argument. You see, that's an example where the writing side of my brain is far superior to the speaking side of my brain, because, hell, I don't know that I can add anything to that. In fact, as I was listening to it, I was like, who wrote that? That sounds pretty good. Those are the best.

You know, there's a crazy old physicist, Danny Greenberger, who's wonderfully still with us. He might be nearing 90 now. He's famous in quantum mechanics for something called the Greenberger Horn Zylinger experiment. And he gives a total. talk, or he has on occasion expressed the idea that physics says you can't violate the speed of light, you can't go faster than light. Well, you know, your grandchildren are going to understand that that was wrong. And I find that just such a hopeful message. And he's dead serious about it. I love the way he says, you know, there's experiments. In fact, at UMass Boston, where I'm on the faculty, there was a professor who retired recently who had slowed light down.

So, you know, you usually think of light has a certain speed, 186,282, 282 miles per second. But that's what light does in a vacuum. If you, like, send it through water, it's got a different speed. And for a while, people were playing the game of seeing how much they could slow light down. And this professor who just recently retired had the world's record for the slowest light. And he did it with rather simple experiments. So anyway, just going back to the guy Danny Greenberg, he's like, well, if we can slow light down, why can't we speed it up? I think that's the hopeful message here.

If you start to understand that physics isn't a perfectly rigid structure and that what we call the laws, of physics are really more codifications of what our limitations are. Oh, this is a law of physics. That's the way the world is. No, no, no. It's a statement of my present day limits. This is the best I can do. And we write it down as if, you know, here's a list of things that we can and can't do. That's what the laws of physics are. If you take the opposite point of view that, I mean, if you take the point of view that it's your limits, well, your limits can be broken. We evolve. We can do things that. that we couldn't do. Just yesterday, we saw something 13.1 billion light years away. We used to not be able to do that. Here's a cool example of something that I'm going to take a sabbatical this year

and go to a laboratory called Gillum, part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. There they have the world's most accurate clock. Well, you know, so you curse on this podcast. Yes. Oh, yeah, we do. I heard you say the word shit. Yep. Okay. They've got the world's most accurate plot.

Well, big fucking whoop. Why would you want the world's most accurate plot? Who cares? Well, this is why you might care. So your listeners can't see this, but I have my two hands out. And I have them parallel to each other at the same height. And now I'm going to raise one of them a little higher than, the other. If I had these two clocks on my hands, one here and one on the other hand,

and I've got my hands at exactly the same height, they will run at the same speed. They will, you know, they tick. When one goes tick, the other one goes tick, exactly at the same time. But Einstein taught us in 1915 that if one of them is a little higher than the other, it will go faster. than the lower one. And this is one of the predictions. Weinstein has been tested. And in fact, with this most accurate clock in the world at NIST in Boulder, if you raise one of them one millimeter higher than the other,

you can detect the differences in their, in the rate. Okay. Again, big fucking whoa. But imagine this. imagine you build a number of these clocks and put them around the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park. They're all going to be at different heights, so they're all going to be going at different rates, etc. Oh, by the way, what's important about the height? What's important about the height is how much gravity is acting on the clock.

The higher one has less gravity acting on it than the lower one. All right. Now, you put these around Yellowstone National Park, and they're all taking. taking away as they're ticking and you tabulate the differences in them. And then maybe, you know, five years later, you notice that the unsynchronization of two of them is changing. Why? Why would it be changing? Oh, it must be that one of them is getting more gravity acting on it than it used to. What this indicates is that lava is flowing underneath. and lava is denser and creates a local gravitational field that wasn't there before.

So you can turn super accurate clocks into volcanic eruption detectors. This is something that we couldn't do before. Okay. So as you push the laws of physics to their real conclusion, you end up with instruments that can see things that couldn't be seen before. And once you have instruments that can see things that couldn't see before, then it's usually time to change your theory of physics because you start to see things that don't make sense anymore.

And now you've got to change physics. So physics changes. So physics is like the Pirates Code, right? It's more guidelines than actual rules. I think so. Yeah, yeah, I like that. What is it? Captain Jack Sparrow.

You're welcome. I should watch those movies again. He's a Cubist. He's a cubist. Well, maybe the character, Jack Sparrow, the Johnny Depp underneath it, I'm not sure, is such a savory character. Well, I mean, Captain Jack Sparrow also at his moments, you know.

So I'm going to end with one last thought. In my reading for this, I came across the Wikipedia page. One of my favorite quotes of the day comes from the Wikipedia page, and it is this, quote, reactions to Cubist interpretation have ranged from enthusiastic to strongly negative end quote

what an indictment of being correct I want to give you a platform like what do you say to your haters oh god well it usually devolves to using the word shit and fuck it yeah the way science should

you know this fights a tale is all this time Who was this comedian? Oh, God. There was a comedian in the 70s who had a little piece where he goes, you know, shit and fuck are two great words. You know, you can use them in all kinds of ways.

If you ain't ever fucked, shit. You ain't never shit. Fuck. Oh, yeah. So the quantum debates usually devolved into a big, big fight. what do I say to my detractors? I think that they're overly wedded to the idea that the agent, the person who's trying not to be stupid, should be stripped out of science.

And it's only that that is clouding their vision and causing them to dislike cubism. In other words, their dislike is based on a prejudice that was built into them early on in their education. And if they could get past that, then they would start to see that that Cubism isn't something to be feared, it's something to be embraced. By the way, I go to a lot of philosophy of science meetings, and the philosophers generally hate cubism. The philosophers who are professional philosophers of science literally hate cubism, and they throw tomatoes at me, and they've been doing it for 20 years. But recently, a distinct strain of philosophy called,

the philosophers called themselves phenomenologists. And they're followers of a German philosopher from Searle and French philosopher, a man named Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Anyway, these philosophers have gotten all excited about cubism. And they had a meeting recently called Cubism and phenomenology.

compared and contrasted in Sweden. And I went to that last month. And nobody threw a tomato at me. It was the most satisfying thing to go to a philosophy meeting and not have tomatoes thrown at me. So it shows that different strains of philosophy are built on prejudices. And probably the phenomenologists have their own prejudices, but their prejudices this happened to be more aligned with cubism. So they reserved their tomatoes.

I think what I love about these stories is that even when science gets contentious, right, you guys still sit in the same room. You still play together. There's sort of this desire to come together or to understand it in a way, even though you're disagreeing. But with philosophers, it doesn't really sound like they're willing to do that at all. No, most philosophers are born with a philosophy. and die with it. And they, you know, they don't, they don't change at all. In fact, there's a man on

this shelf kind of over there named Hillary Putnam, very famous philosopher, professor at Harvard. I talked to him once. He said, excuse me, can you hold his cell phone for a second? Anyway, the philosophers of science usually make fun of Hillary Putnam because he changed his position a few times. Wow. And they viewed that with disdain. He changed his position. How unscientific of them.

I think everyone just takes themselves too seriously in the sciences. That's what it comes down to. Well, in philosophy, in particular. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. I've enjoyed every single second of this, and I was, I'm ashamed that I was afraid, actually. This was very pleasant and very, we didn't talk about equations once.

There was not one piece of math. You didn't even get yelled at. I didn't get yelled at. It was perfection. Because you did your homework. She got praised. Chris, do you want to plug any, for folks that enjoyed this, do books, website, anything like that?

Well, you know, you mentioned the Wikipedia page. It's actually not bad. It's pretty good, frankly. So the Wikipedia page on, it's called quantum basinism rather than cubism. But I think Cubism redirects. Now, I prefer the name cubism over quantum basinism. and there's reasons for that. But quantum basianism was the early name.

And so Wikipedia has been inflexible in wanting to change the name. Anyway, so that's pretty good. If you want to see the story of how Cubism connects to the movie, it's a wonderful life. Go to archive.org, a r-xiv.org. That's where all quantum physicists put their papers. and do a search on my name and interview with a quantum basian. So that's when I was still using quantum basian myself. Hans von Beyer, that's Hans Christian Funbier, B-A-E-Y-E-R,

has a little popular press book on Cubism. I think it's called Cubism, the future of physics. So that might be a decent place to look at things. You have a paper on participatory realism. You can just Google that. You can look at my paper on participatory realism. In fact, the title is on participatory realism. There's a paper titled Not Withstanding Bore, this guy that I've mentioned so many times,

notwithstanding Bore, the reasons for Cubism. The intro might be of interest to allay audience. I wouldn't want to read all the way through it, But it kind of tells the story of where Cubism came from and how Cubism views itself as a statement of the structure of reality. A lot of people have the impression that Cubism is agnostic on how reality is, but that's a misimpression. It's got a strong opinion about how reality is, that reality is malleable. and that paper notwithstanding bore goes into some of that.

So the intro. That's probably...