Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Quasars and Quanta: Exploring Einstein’s Quantum Riddle

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

Even though his own work led to it, Albert Einstein never cared for quantum mechanics concepts like entanglement, which he called “spooky action at a distance.” While there’s no doubt it is real, could something even more mysterious be hiding under it? We’ll talk with three eminent physicists and physicist/science fiction author David Brin about the Nova documentary on this subject.  Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreier analyzes President Donald Trump’s recent tweet about the Moon and Mars, and Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla introduces a new edition of The Planetary Report, now available to all. You can learn more about all of this week’s topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0612-2019-quantum-riddle.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To the edge of the universe for spooky action, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Way, way beyond. I've got something very special I've wanted to share with you for many weeks. We'll sit down with four outstanding physicists for a conversation about the riddle of quantum mechanics and what Einstein called spooky action at a distance. It will take us from the smallest distances possible to some of the most distant objects in the cosmos, even as we touch on how hippies, the counterculture, and science fiction may have further opened this window on all we know and our future. Don't worry, we'll also keep

things down to earth with an announcement and an opportunity from Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla and this short visit with our Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer that was generated by an apparently offhand tweet from the president of the United States. Casey, I don't know about you, but since we published, in fact, even a little bit before we published the June Space Policy Edition, your excellent conversation with Asif Siddiqui, which we'll let you describe a little bit in a moment. I have gotten a lot of inquiries. Oh my goodness, Casey has got to talk about this quote from the president. So let's talk about it. We didn't have time to put it into Space Policy Edition,

but we do now. Yeah, the tweet that ruined my Friday afternoon. You mean that one? Yeah, the tweet that ruined my Friday afternoon. You mean that one? That one. Yeah, threw off my plans. Yeah, I don't have the exact words in front of me from the tweet, but the president tweeted on Friday, just a couple days ago from when the show will come out, basically implying that maybe the moon is not where NASA should be going. Something like NASA should stop talking about the moon. We went there 50 years ago. We should go to Mars instead. And the moon is part of that. It basically completely undermined, in a sense, this narrative that the president himself had been pushing for this accelerated 2024 lunar landing. I mean, NASA had literally just released a supplemental budget

request to accelerate a lunar landing for humans. And Mars is technically part of those plans, but it just came out of left field and left the space policy world and a lot of other observers quite confused, let's say, is the most generous term for that. Here is the tweet verbatim. For all of the money we are spending, NASA should not, capitalized, be talking about going to the moon. We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars, parentheses, of which the moon is a part, close parentheses, defense and science. I hate to read that with sort of a, what should I say, sarcastic attitude. I hope it's not coming across too much that way, but it is just so out of left field. It is. And a lot of people in the larger

media keyed on the second part of Mars of which the moon is part. And I think it's obvious that he's talking about moon to Mars as a concept there. The far more troubling thing was the first part of that tweet, which is that for all the money we're spending, NASA should not be talking about going to the moon. Like that's pretty cut and dry, you know, in terms of a statement. That's not confusing. You know, if you actually pay attention to the president's, not just his speeches, but when he talks to astronauts, when he has said things off the cuff, and even the reports from back in the transition era of 2017, he clearly likes Mars. He is really focused on Mars as NASA going to Mars.

I think he offered Robert Lightfoot, could NASA go to Mars by the end of my first term if money was no object, right? I think what this shows is that the president is keyed on Mars. It probably implies that the moon program focus has been really a focus of the vice president, Vice President Pence, who is the chair of the National Space Council. And it demonstrates that there is at least some, if not a large amount of policy difference between the vice president and the president on this, which is, I think, the most important takeaway from this tweet. And, you know, we should say NASA and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, came out a few hours later, tried to clarify this saying, yes, the president is right. We are going to Mars after the moon and so forth. And, you know, they're doing the best they can. And it's a tough position to be in.

The actual policy, right, the actual policy as directed and signed by the president is for NASA to return to the moon first. That's what NASA has to do, right? NASA is part of the executive branch. So policy isn't dictated by tweet. We should just remember that. So nothing is changing right now. And my prediction is very unlikely that anything will change immediately, right? I think though, it's going to be a little harder for NASA to generate international partnerships on this effort, commercial partnerships, because people are going to wonder how serious, what is the priority that the president actually has for this lunar effort compared to something else? Great analysis. Thank you, Casey. Let's take it back to the last

time we were headed toward the moon. Give us that little tease about the Space Policy Edition for June. I'm really excited about this. It's the start of what's going to be a series of special interviews as we approach the Apollo 11 50th anniversary. I'm really hoping to bring a different perspective than a lot of the other anniversary discussions, which really focus rightly on, you know, the astronauts and the actual event itself. But I want to focus on why Apollo happened and why Apollo stopped happening. So to look at the political and historical context behind it, the politics here in the United States, the Soviet aspect of the moon race, and then of course, why we voluntarily stopped going to the moon after spending a huge amount of money to develop the capability to do so. So our first interview that we're releasing

is with Asif Siddiqui, who literally wrote the book on the Soviet space program, and looking at the lunar efforts of the Soviet space program in comparison to Apollo. And I think it's an aspect that we really forget about. The triumph of Apollo overshadows the fact that we were really concerned about, we, the United States, was concerned about the Soviets beating us to the moon, right? So, did the Soviets actually ever race us? Was there actually a serious possibility that they could have made it? The answer is, I think, is really fascinating and subtle and really shows a lot about the context and the world in which we were living in in the 1960s. I just really enjoyed the conversation. So it's going to be the first of these. We're going to look into the history of why Apollo happened after that, the domestic

opposition to Apollo even after that, and then of course, why we got the shuttle instead of the moon. So much to come, but you can get started with this month's Space Policy Edition. And if you subscribe to Planetary Radio, you probably already have it waiting for you on your device. I had a great time listening to it. And as I told you at the close of the conversation, Casey, that you had with Asif, there were a lot of revelations for me. So I certainly recommend it. And I do look forward to hearing the rest of this special Apollo series as we mark the 50th anniversary. Thanks for joining me today. Oh, as always, Matt, we'll see you next month.

Casey Dreyer, he's the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Emily. Beautiful, beautiful new issue of the Planetary Report. Thanks for pulling this together. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure to be able to bring beautiful images from all over the solar system into a magazine, and you really can't help but make it a beautiful issue when you do that. And I was showing it off a little bit because it is a gorgeous issue, but it also represents some of the changes that you have made to the magazine, which I think have resulted in

some notable improvements. What is your goal here? What are you accomplishing? Well, I brought together some of the Planetary Society's internal contributions, telling members what we've done and what they can do to make changes in the future of defending our planet against asteroid impacts, all in one kind of coherent section at the front of the magazine, sort of a news and notes. And then another one of the changes that I'm making is to try to bring more people forward in images, because even though it's robots exploring across our solar system, the work that they do is being run by humans back on Earth. The data they send back is being analyzed by humans back on Earth. And there's all different kinds of people involved in making sure that our spacecraft are able to operate across the solar system. So I've got a couple of new features designed to do that. My favorite one is one I

call Space on Earth, where I'm going to be highlighting facilities all over the world that participate in space exploration. And that's the inside front cover. It's got this great shot of these people, one of them down in sort of a trench in a hard hat, giant gear. Looks like they're going to be improving our ability to communicate across the solar system. Yeah, they're working on the bearings for one of Australia's gigantic radio dishes that we use to communicate with Voyager and other distant spacecraft. And it's hard, gritty work, but it's work that's needed to be done in order to keep those spacecraft going. What are some of the other highlights in this edition? Well, feature articles include one on the science from the Rosetta mission.

Of course, just a little taste of the science from that highly successful long-term mission to Comet 67P, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. And then another article about the ongoing Hayabusa-2 sample return mission to asteroid Yugu. And with your help, we're going to, in the coming weeks and months, be talking to the authors of those two features in this month's edition of the Planetary Report, which people can find how? You can go to planetary.org slash TPR. Easy enough. Thanks very much, Emily, and great work on this. Thank you, Matt.

She is our senior editor and the editor-in-chief of the Planetary Report, the quarterly publication of the Planetary Society that, as you have just heard, you can find online. And the printed copy has gone to all of our members. And she's our planetary evangelist at the Planetary Society, award-winning series of science documentaries on PBS, the public broadcasting service in the U.S. Back on January 9th, it helped get the new year rolling with the dramatic tale of Einstein's quantum riddle. Two months later, two of the film's stars were at the

University of California, San Diego, as guests of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Imagination. Andrew Friedman is an associate research scientist in the UCSD Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, while Jason Gallichio is a professor of physics at Harvey Mudd College. Andrew and Jason were major players in the experiment at the heart of the film. In spite of hardships and setbacks, including a nearly disastrous windstorm, they and their team managed to use two quasars to refine our knowledge of that strange but wonderful property called entanglement. Thanks to the Clark Center, I was allowed to sit down with Andrew and Jason not long before a public screening of the documentary.

Joining us were two more physicists. Experimental astrophysicist Brian Keating is a colleague of Andrew's at UCSD and Associate Director of the Clark Center. Also at the table was an old friend of Planetary Radio, physicist and award-winning science fiction author, David Brin, who is on the board of the Clark Center. We met in a lab at the university that had surprisingly good acoustics. Gentlemen, it is a pleasure to sit down with each of you here in this wonderful room. Thank you for building this for us at UC San Diego to talk about this terrific documentary, which you will be showing tonight, screening here for a public audience at UCSD.

But I was able to watch just a couple of hours ago since I'm a good supporter of my local PBS station here in San Diego. It is a fascinating story and one that has fascinated me for many, many, many years and perplexed me as it does many people. Let's talk about this documentary and what it has to say about quantum mechanics. I noted because I looked up the paper that the two of you are authors on, and that paper, I will even read the title, is Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High Redshift Quasars. And it was published in the Physical Review Letters on August 20th, just last year. And you included in the opening of that, you and your colleagues, this great quote from Schrodinger, he of the famous cat,

who said that entanglement was the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in other words, a revolutionary way to understand all that is, this table we're sitting at and the rest of the universe. So he was responding to a paper by Einstein and his colleagues about some strange things that they noticed in quantum mechanics. And Schrodinger said, yeah, that's right. Quantum mechanics really does predict these correlations that appear to be non-local, that appear to not be a simple result of some common cause. Are that great quote from Einstein, spooky action at a distance, which comes up in the documentary, of course. All right. I guess we have to take, what's it going to take, 90 seconds to explain

entanglement? But I want to, you guys decide amongst yourself, who is best to give those people in our audience who don't already have some awareness of this what we're talking about? I guess I would say that in the classical physics world, when two systems are separate from each other, you can think of them as independent. But in quantum mechanics, when you have an entangled system, you can have a situation where it's not possible for those parts of the system to really be described independently of one another. So you can have an entangled pair of particles where one of them is very, very far away from the other. You make a measurement on one of them, and you instantly know something about a future measurement outcome of its partner, no matter how far away they are, no matter how long ago they became entangled. And there just is no classical physics explanation

for this that makes any sense. And we're still struggling today with what it all means. I was just going to say, I mean, the thing that makes it so interesting is when you learn about the history of this, you talk about entanglement. And I always get asked, well, why is it such a paradox? And it wasn't until I had deep conversations with Andy over here that I understood it because I thought, well, if you have two pairs of socks in your drawer, one's red and one's blue, and you reach into your suitcase after packing and getting into your destination, you pull out your socks and you got one in red and one blue, then you know at home you left one, one red and one blue. And it wasn't until we had many conversations over this that I really began to appreciate at more, you know, more than a lay person's level of understanding why this is such

a baffling and perplexing mystery. Yeah, in quantum mechanics, it's, there are an infinite number of questions you could ask of each of the particles, not just the question of whether they're red or blue. And when you try to come up with an explanation for how it is that the measurement outcomes on either side of this entanglement experiment could line up as often as they do. David? Let's put this in a very simple way for the listeners, and that is that most of us hear about entanglement when it comes to, say, cryptography or something like that. The Chinese have been making real progress.

And so what you're talking about is a simple atomic reaction or electromagnetic effect creates two photons. They go heading off in opposite directions so that the atom that made the two photons is standing still. Since they were generated, they had their beginning of their life from the same atom and the same event. When they're heading off in opposite directions, usually it turns out that they are entangled with each other. Their origins, it's like each one is leaving a little thread behind it that's connected to the other one. Now there are other forms of entanglement that are more complicated, but the simplest type,

and the type that these two fine gentlemen and their colleagues measured out on the Canary Islands, is just taking this simple reaction that creates two photons going in opposite directions. And if you can stretch this distance, say to outer space or from one Canary Island to another Canary Island, then you have time to be able to let them settle down, settle in, and then you measure them at both ends with a simple polarimeter like the like your Polaroid sunglasses turning them at various angles or you can measure the circular polarization what they're talking about is the fact

that if you turn the polarizer to any given angle, 37 degrees, and you measure whether or not that photon is going to get through or not get through. When you measure the other photon at the other Canary Island, at the other detector, it's going to have the complementary polarization. Right, Andy? Yeah, so there'll be a correlation between those measurement outcomes that doesn't seem to be explainable by a local view of physics, the kind of thing that Einstein wanted to be true about the world. Einstein liked the traditional view of space-time, right? And causality. You can't have an action here and have it affect something that is so far away that there can't possibly be any physical connection between those two objects, or so we thought. Einstein thought that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete because entanglement itself presented such a conundrum to him.

He called it spooky action at a distance. There's that quote. Because it seemed to him that something done to one half of the system would instantaneously affect the state of something very far away. And he had very, very deep misgivings about quantum mechanics. And entanglement was really one of the things that he didn't like about it. There is so much history to this. I'm going to get to the documentary and to the experiment that two of you were such a big part of. The history in this and the characters that were involved in it. I'm thinking of like the meeting that took place that is documented in the documentary in 1927, where you had maybe the greatest geniuses in the history of physics all gathered in one place debating this, and Einstein among them coming up every night with some new argument for why quantum mechanics couldn't be real. Jason?

And apparently by the end of the day, Bohr would come back with a counter-argument about why quantum mechanics was consistent, and often Einstein would have to go back to his room and think about a new argument. And I think it culminated in Bohr being really stumped all day and at the end, finally making the counter-argument using Einstein's own general theory of relativity. And this is one reason why physics has been one of the leading human endeavors that helped to reinforce the Enlightenment's belief that argument, fair, open argument, is what gets you to truth a lot quicker

than anybody making grand declarations. Science. Science, as opposed to the way you had hierarchies in which kings or nobles or priests made grand declarations. It's the back and forth that this Nova show illustrates, almost all Nova shows illustrate, but this one especially. I hope you're thoroughly entangled in our conversation about entanglement. The best is ahead after this break on Planetary Radio. Forty years ago, my professor, Carl Sagan, shared his dream of exploring the cosmos with solar sails.

The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 will soon become the first small spacecraft to be propelled only by the light of the sun. I'm Bill Nye, and I'll be there as a rocket carries our craft into orbit. Tens of thousands of members have made this day possible. Already part of our LightSail team? Thank you. It's never too late to join us. Learn how at planetary.org slash join. We're back with David Brin, Andrew Friedman, Jason Gallicchio, and Brian Keating to continue our fascinating conversation about quantum mechanics and entanglement, that old spooky action at a distance. Here's Jason on why this entanglement experiment was conducted in the Canary Islands.

So the group we worked with has used various telescopes on the Canary Islands for various things. In a previous experiment, they actually sent entangled particles between the Canary Islands. It was 144 kilometers. In our experiment, they did not send entangled particles between the islands. We stuck to one island, but we still sent them about a kilometer in each direction, pointed at some of the biggest telescopes in the world. And the reason why we had to go to the Canary Islands was that,

sort of like Europe's Hawaii, in that it's a giant volcanic island in the middle of the ocean, and you could put telescopes up on the top, and the clouds stay pretty low. Some of the biggest telescopes in the world are there, and we were able to use two of them simultaneously, and they were far enough apart that we could establish certain causal conditions.

We had enough time to do that, but they were close enough together that we could run the experiment often enough to get the data that we needed. over this matter of microseconds, we would try to collect light from quasars on both sides and have a fresh measurement choice that was ready to go before the entangled particles arrived. So we've got to back up because, I mean, this is why you needed two big telescopes. I suppose you could have gone to Mauna Kea, you could have gone to the Atacama in Chile, but you had time on these telescopes. And you needed them because here you were going to use them to look at these objects which are among the most distant in the galaxy, in the universe. They are, in fact, very distant galaxies. Why was it key to this experiment?

And what was the point of using the light of these quasars to demonstrate that entanglement is a real thing? Because wasn't that really what you were doing? It was to eliminate the possibility that some other X factor was maybe making it look like things were entangled, but maybe they aren't really? It's a little subtle. The thing that separates entanglement from kind of the classic story of pairs of socks, really it's somewhere in between you pull out one sock and you know what the other sock must look like because you only have pairs of similar colors, and actual influences going back and forth between the two particles. There are correlations that happen between these particles. And we wanted to make

absolutely sure that those correlations were not caused by anything local on Earth. We wanted to push as far back as we could the place and the time at which any of those common causes could have been in place. And so one of the quasars we looked at emitted its light when the universe was only about 10% as old as it is today. Long before the Earth formed. Long before the Earth formed, billions of years ago. And the reason why they used two quasars at opposite directions, and that's why they needed the telescopes.

They didn't need the telescopes to check whether or not the particles were entangled with each other. But they looked in opposite directions to get light from two quasars that never met, that never knew each other. Because if they had been in the same part of space at any point in the last 13.8 billion years, they might have, in some underhanded way, conspired with each other how they would communicate with Jason and Andy 13.8 billion years in the future. But because they were selected from opposite sides of the universe, and the way they had traveled apart from each other, they could not have conspired, so to speak. I'm a science fiction author, so I'm putting it in dramatic terms.

Conspiring galaxies. Conspiring quasars, yes. Well, now, the fourth fellow sitting across from Matt here is an expert about the phase of the universe that I was just talking about. And that is the very beginning when the curtain came up and the hydrogen atoms deionized and let all the photons run free. And before that, all the way back to inflation. And so Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, he can tell us about that epoch and why Andy and Jason chose quasars. And before you do that, Brian, for you guys, basically what you needed was the greatest random number generator in the universe. And I should mention, every week on this show, we do a contest, a space trivia contest, and we let the winner be decided among those who've answered the question correctly by random.org, which I believe actually uses the cosmic microwave background to get its random numbers. Not quite as exact or as precise, maybe. I'm not sure of the word I want as what you guys did with quasars.

But the CMB and its place in all this. you can describe the entire universe with, in quantum mechanical terms, both at its very origin, when it was perhaps quantum mechanical in size, you know, in terms of its physical size extent, but also whether or not you can describe the universe itself with a wave function, with one of these mysterious mathematical operators. And what's so fascinating about what these two guys, Jason and Andy, do is that they're really bringing down to earth, no pun intended, how these quantum effects could be made manifest almost in our daily lives. And I think that's what's so fascinating. If you can think about how the universe behaves on a quantum scale, you might not care so much about that. But

if it comes down to siphoning off your bank account because someone's been able to de-encrypt your password or some other effect like that then I think it's much more relatable to the average person. In the work that we do where we study the most ancient photons in the universe, these two guys have not yet pushed back to that horizon

yet but they are planning to. Jason Gallicchio is also an expert in the observation of the CMB, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, having spent an entire year almost of his life at the bottom of the world, South Pole, Antarctica. I didn't know the project that you document in your book. It's an allied project, yes. We both, yes, we both, we were neighbors at the South Pole.

Jason ran an entire telescope called the South Pole Telescope, the biggest. Occasionally slept under the Bicep Telescope. Which is on my telescope. And just to think about this connection between quarks and the cosmos, the quantum to the macroscopic universe. And I think that, I don't want to spill the beans, but I would be surprised if that wasn't in their near future horizon, that they want to push back even further to the quantum epoch to perhaps to see if the universe featured quantum correlations that some maniacal demonic presence that David over here likes to speculate about could have played tricks with the very laws of physics itself so that 13.8 billion years later, these two gentlemen

and their colleagues would find just the results that they had. And you look like you want to get in on this. Yeah, there's a certain idea that's called superdeterminism, which is the idea that everything was set in stone at the very beginning of time. There's a sense in which that kind of an idea is not something that our experiment could ever falsify. The best we can do is if we outsource the choices of how to measure the entangled particles to things like very distant quasars or even patches of light from the microwave background, we could push back further and further in time progressively

the place where any of these alternative non-quantum models could have been responsible for the entanglement correlations. But if the epoch that Brian studies inflation in the early universe happened, it's possible that the correlations that we see could have been generated there. And we can push things back that far, but we don't know of any way to go further beyond that. Let's take it back to somewhat more recent history and your reliance on these quasars. Rather than keeping everybody in suspense, did you determine that at least as far as you could determine with this experiment, is it real? Does entanglement exist? Entanglement held up, yes. We got the results that quantum

mechanics would have predicted, even when we subjected quantum mechanics to this very harsh test of picking how we were going to measure each of the two entangled particles using information that was created when the universe was 10% as old as it is today and not available to us until those photons from the quasars arrived and we did our experiment. We knew that quantum theory, quantum mechanics holds up, right? Because we have it all around us. It's working in the machine I'm recording you on right now. Why was it necessary to prove that entanglement is a real thing? Why does it continue to be necessary?

I think a good way of putting it is that we're not really interested in disproving quantum mechanics, but we are interested in this question of whether or not there is a deeper theory under the hood of quantum mechanics. We know that entanglement is an experimental reality, but the question is, is quantum mechanics as a theory the correct description of entanglement, or is there a more fundamental explanation in some new theory of physics that we don't yet understand? And one of our thoughts is that, well, if we did this experiment and then we saw the results that we saw, which were consistent with quantum mechanics, we are pushing back this loophole that could allow an alternative explanation to explain entanglement. But, you know, you never know what we're going to see. explanation to explain entanglement. But, you know, you never know what we're going to see. And if we had seen something unexpected, that could have potentially been evidence for some new physics beyond quantum mechanics. We didn't see that.

But I think that this experiment was worth doing. We thought of it as a win-win because we learned something interesting about nature either way. Until we did our series of experiments with stars and then quasars. It could have been that something local on Earth within microseconds before or milliseconds before the experiment was run could have influenced the settings that we chose and the results we got. By using astronomical objects as a tool, we were pushing the reach of quantum mechanics further and further from milliseconds to

billions of years? Well, one way of looking at it is a lot of folks are familiar that Einstein's theories of relativity and gravitation did not disprove Isaac Newton, but they proved that Isaac Newton's theories were approximations, good in the macroscopic sense, approximations of the more general physics that Einstein came up with. The same is true for quantum mechanics. We know that quantum mechanics is true. We know that it describes the universe and it's incredibly useful at calculating what's going to happen or the probabilities of what's going to happen. But there are people who say quantum mechanics is a surface manifestation of hidden variables, things that are going on

underneath gears and that are turning that we haven't seen yet. What these fellows have done is they've shown that the gears aren't necessary down to a much, much finer degree than we had ever thought of before. Brian, you wanted to add something. Well, I just want to say that it's reflective of a deep curiosity, I think, in human beings, both the fact that, as Richard Feynman said, nobody understands quantum mechanics, apparently, or if they say that they do, they don't. And that every year there's a bumper crop As Richard Feynman said, nobody understands quantum mechanics, apparently. Or if they say that they do, they don't. And every year there's a bumper crop of new books that come out that seem to tackle the same question over and over again.

And just recently I was on an international flight and I was forced to watch a movie called Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is enjoyable but uh but i was thinking in anticipation of being with these uh with these two guys tonight three guys tonight you know just how fascinating is that this story relies on behavior at the quantum realm and that things can happen and the way that they describe it is so hand-waving that i thought it could only be true that that not only do no physicists understand it but no hollywood producers either and i think that that's deeply reflective, as David said before, of a thirst and the way that this original controversy is one of the founding flaws or founding features of quantum mechanics, that it is so radically non-intuitive. I'm so glad you went there, Brian, because one of the things that is talked about briefly in this documentary is the effect that public knowledge of quantum mechanics had on certain people who might be identified as counterculture and the appearance of books like

the Tao of physics that tried to say, oh, look, this is proof that Eastern approaches, the Eastern philosophies are right on. To their credit, in the documentary, they say, well, one of the spokespeople, one of the people interviewed says, now, I had a good time hanging out with those guys, but there was nothing to it. Any comments about that? I mean, is there more immediate philosophical meaning for us in what we're talking about here? Sure. David Kaiser, in his book, How the Hippies Saved Physics, he goes into this story quite a lot in terms of how in the 1970s, there was a group of counterculture physicists outside of the mainstream who were really interested in entanglement and what it could possibly mean. Many of them were thinking about, well, you could use entanglement to transmit information faster than the speed of light, or you could use entanglement to explain some weird things about consciousness. And it turns out that many of those ideas were very misguided, but that the physics

community's response to them trying to poke holes in some of these ideas actually ended up kind of serving as the springboard for a whole new field of physics, which is the field of quantum information, which is a huge field today, which is enabled by what's made possible with entanglement and the various technologies that are on the horizon. But it's certainly true that the philosophical questions that are at stake here are still very much alive and interesting. We're really interested in understanding what the fundamental nature of reality is at the smallest of scales, we want to know, do objects exist when you're not looking at them? We want to know what's actually happening with spooky action at a distance if you can't actually transmit information faster than light. And we want to know if our choices are really free or not. So these are really, really

huge philosophical questions at stake. Your colleague, Anton, I'll probably get his name wrong, Zeilinger, who was the last person heard in the documentary. He summed up this quest with great words. He said, we just want to understand how nature works, what is happening, what were God's thoughts when he created the world, or more than the world. Very Einsteinian statement there. Of course, you know, although I am a member of the fraternity with these other fellows, I have a physics PhD. I'm more of a Franciscan. These guys are Jesuits at the high, airy, fairy, you know, theoretical end. And I'm more of a Bush League physicist. end, and I'm more of a Bush League physicist, but the end that I contribute is from science fiction, because there are some novels and even some decent movies that poke away at some of these concepts.

And we are being hosted this evening down here by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Brian is one of the directors. And people can find out more about it at imagination.ucsd.edu. I would have done that if you hadn't. That's fine. And the notion is that people can play with the implications of some of these ideas and how they would play out if humanity ever got to actually get access to the gears and levers there. Probably the science fiction author who has explored these notions most thoroughly is a fellow by the name of Greg Egan, E-G-A-N. thoroughly is a fellow by the name of Greg Egan, E-G-A-N. And in a very quantum way, nobody seems to have ever met him.

How interesting. I think there's no pictures of him on the internet. I just want to point out that for decades, almost 100 years, the philosophy, the fiction was outpacing the fact. And these two guys and their many colleagues worked on it have now brought us basically a complete opposite direction. Now we can actually test quantitatively multiple decimal places, multiple levels of precision. These things that were once the realm of pure science fiction and or pure philosophy. Let me go back to your namesake,

the namesake for the center here. Arthur C. Clarke once told me, and I think this is something he told many people, I had asked him, where do you think if something completely unexpected, one of those unknown unknowns, pardon the quote, is going to change everything? think it'll come from? And he said, well, my money is on vacuum energy, the Casimir effect, which I don't know, Jason, maybe if you can, can you maybe say a word or two or anybody who wants to jump in on that, just about what those are. And do you agree with that? And is it relevant to what we've been talking about? Vacuum energy, the Casimir effect, involves quantizing not just particles like electrons and protons, but when you actually quantize the electromagnetic field, quantize radio waves and light and X-rays,

and you ask what is the lowest energy state consistent with Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the rules of quantum mechanics, it seems like the lowest energy state is not energy zero, but has some energy. And you can actually change the properties of that if you're not asking questions about electromagnetism in empty space, but in a confined metal box, say. And you can actually measure this. You can measure this effect of the vacuum energy, the energy where there are no particles present, by bringing metal plates really close together, bringing a metal sphere really close to a plate. This is not science fiction.

This has been confirmed experimentally. Now, I don't know of any experimental, well, any engineering advances that this has brought on, other than sometimes you have to take it into account when you're designing really tiny machines. But it's interesting to think about. There's also the macroscopic domain in which vacuum energy plays out. I don't think, although knowing Sir Arthur C. Clarke, he might have presaged the notion of dark energy, which is a vacuum energy of a very different character than the one Jason was just describing, which seems to operate at the grandest of cosmic scales, causing very distant objects in the universe, objects Andy is an expert in, to accelerate faster over time and conversely decelerate if you look back in the past. And this seems to be indicating that the universe will have a very, very, let me say, dramatic end, if indeed it does come to an end. But that won't happen for about a trillion years. So keep paying your taxes out there. But nevertheless, these two notions of

microscopic, again, resonating this theme, microscopic to the cosmos, vacuum energy, Casimir effect on the small scales, and dark energy on the largest scales. It's just a wonderfully delicious combination of effects. One of the things that was just so fun about being able to work on this cosmic bell experiment is that we got to use cosmology and the universe on the largest of scales, including this fact that Brian just described about we think that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. That affected our understanding of the light that's coming from these distant quasars and how long ago the light was emitted. And it affected our questions about how long ago in the past could a joint common cause have sent a signal at the speed of light or slower that would have influenced both

of the quasars. So we use the entire universe as a laboratory in order to learn something about nature on the smallest of scales. And it's so much fun to be able to actually, you know, participate and make it happen. I'll say this is so much fun. I am basically at the end of the time that I was allotted by you guys, because you've got to get to dinner before your big event tonight. But if you'll indulge me for a couple more minutes, because Brian, you started to take us in the direction that I'm hoping to end with, and that is to make things even more practical. We saw in the documentary, Einstein's Quantum Riddle, some new applications for applications of entanglement of

quantum mechanics, like quantum computing, efforts underway all around the world, Google, IBM, China. I was surprised that we were able to enter into a Chinese lab and see work that's being done there on quantum entanglement for encryption, which seems to have enormous potential and somewhat disturbing potential. The technologies that are enabled by entanglement, they're of interest to every three-letter agency in the world. Quantum encryption is foremost amongst them. It's certainly possible that a new encryption technology could replace all of the standard classical encryption schemes that, let's say, protect your online bank

transactions today. But instead of relying on it being hard to solve certain math problems, you're relying on the laws of physics themselves to provide the security for the encryption. What we're interested in, we're attacking this more from the foundational physics side of things, but it turns out that if these alternative theories that are not quantum mechanics are viable, then it might be in principle possible to hack these quantum encryption schemes. So they might not be perfectly secure. So the fundamental nature of reality, although it might seem like it's very esoteric and philosophical, might actually be relevant to whether or not these these these more practical applications but in this case a completely impractical application simulating properties of quantum objects there turns out there's no better simulator of a quantum mechanical system than a quantum mechanical computer which is maybe dead obvious to the average person but to me thinking about these things and it turns out that's even some of david's colleagues and and beyond in the science

fiction world there are people that are seriously approaching the notion of quantum computing being a way that we could potentially access powers of simulating, of simulating entire universes perhaps, and simulating the behavior of entities, conscious or unconscious, within such a universe. within such a universe, and that quantum computers may be the key to the so-called simulation hypothesis that many people take seriously. And to me, it's delightful when science fiction and science fact collide in such a beautiful way. And so now we come back to the Dilbert cartoon that I shared with all of you before we started recording from Sunday of March 3rd, where Dilbert has created a universe that includes quantum mechanics. He's asked, don't you think the smart people will be able to figure out that it's all rigged? And he said, no,

I coded the people in this universe to not believe smart people. I believe all of you. And it has absolutely been a delight to be invited into your little toy store for a little bit. Jason, where does this research go next? There's a couple directions we could take. Using the cosmic microwave background is a big one. If somebody wants to give us millions of dollars to fly a balloon over Antarctica, I would love to be involved in that. On Earth, we are extending other types of quantum tests, something called quantum eraser, where maybe you've heard that objects can act like either a particle or a wave, and through

entanglement you can sort of force a distant particle to either act like a particle or a wave by doing something to the other entangled particle. And these these tests have been done using local sources of randomness, and we can improve them, again, by using light from distant stars and quasars and maybe eventually a cosmic wave background. So there's a couple different paths we're taking. Yeah, the common theme is to outsource experimental choices to the universe by using different kinds of astronomical sources that are at progressively larger distances from us. There are a lot of foundational quantum experiments that one could think of

beyond just the entangled particle experiment that this could be of use for. Brian, David, any last words from you two? Well, I just want to mention that when you, Matt, talked about asking Arthur C. Clarke what would surprise him, what he would like to think further about, maybe in science fiction or in physics. This is something some of us here, you know, consult with those three letter agencies. And one of the most common themes in science fiction is something surprising has happened. And then the government or whoever happens to be on the scene, they gather and they discuss what is it that we see happening,

and they always make a mistake. Because otherwise, how are you going to have, oh no, the dinosaurs got loose. How are you going to have a great drama? What we've created is called TASAT, T-A-S-A-T. There's a story about that. Because for 80, 90 years, science fiction authors have been writing these thought experiments about some unusual thing that might happen and the mistake that people would make initially

when they encountered it. So TASAT, and folks are welcome to come and join the community, TASAT is where you take almost anything that might surprise us someday, looking ahead in the future, and say, is there a story about that? So government agencies or anybody in the future would be able to consult this vast library of past thought experiments. Is this something out of the center? Yes, it's sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and people can find it by going tasat.imagination.ucsd.edu, and I'm sure it'll be on the cover page for this.

You bet. We'll put it on the episode page, along with links to the work that you guys have had underway. Brian, you may want to add something, but I also want to give you special thanks for hosting us for this today at the Center. It's our pleasure. And I want to thank the two scientists, Jason and Andy here, because they've not only provided an unveiled part of cosmic mysteries to us, but they also have done so in very practical terms, providing educational opportunities for students here and elsewhere to get their PhDs, to understand more about the cosmos. And many of these students come from extremely diverse backgrounds

and will contribute to society in untold ways. And I think that's, I once learned that the meaning of the word scientist in Russian, and the only one who can correct me is Sergei's cousin David over here, Brin, which is that the meaning of the word scientist in Russian, and the only one who can correct me is Sergey's cousin David over here, Bryn, which is that the meaning of the word scientist in Russian means one who was taught. It basically translates in that form. And to me, these two guys and their colleagues have really contributed to that obligation that scientists have, and also the benefit that scientists receive from one another. So I want to thank you guys. Thank you all once again. Go Tritons. And I hope we can talk again sometime. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thank you so much. Great.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He is back once again to tell us about the night sky. Hopefully this will be a glitch-free what's up. Keep that word in mind. Glitch, glitch. How are things up there? There's still stuff in the sky, if that's what you mean. Jupiter looking lovely. It's right around opposition just past being on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, so closest for the year. Looking brighter than any bright star up there in the east in the early evening, in the south by mid-evening. And it's hanging out near Scorpius, which means it's near the red star Antares.

So you can check out Antares to the right of Jupiter. And then coming up a little later in the evening, and you can see over farther to the east, is yellowish Saturn. And if you look on June 15th or 16th, you'll also see the moon hanging out near Jupiter. The sky has cheated me so far. I keep going out. It's clear during the day, and then it clouds over where I am. And so no chance to look at that big, pretty Jupiter, but maybe tonight. That's the price you pay for nice weather by the ocean.

It's true. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1963 that Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. And 20 years later, 1983, that Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Couple of heroes. We move on to random space fact. Be there. One night only.

No, actually every night, every night. So I wanted to address this whole bit of a pet peeve of mine. People ask, what is, what's the name of the moon? Well, in English, it's the moon. That's its name. Now, it is called other things, of course, in every other language, because not surprisingly, I think everyone noticed the moon in the sky. So, for example, the moon is known as Luna in Italian, Latin, and Spanish. La Luna, La Luna. From one of our favorite movies here. I like that.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I ask you, what is the brightest pulsar as seen from Earth at radio wavelengths? How'd we do, Matt? You were so clever to specify the wavelengths, because we got a lot of answers from people who came up with the brightest source in the sky, but that was in X-ray wavelengths. And so the answer I think you're looking for, which came from more than half the folks who submitted, the one that chosen by random.org anyway, was the Vela Pulsar. That is correct. mytelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes, and James Donovan's book, the new book, one of many, of course, out right now, but one that's getting great reviews, Shoot for the Moon, the Space Race, and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo

11. I say a lot of books out right now. Yes, books specifically about Apollo. Did you learn anything else from our listeners? I sure did. I mean, we do pretty much every week. A lot of them, including Peter Carboni, mentioned that some pulsars, including Vela, have this quality which astronomers have very scientifically called a glitch or glitches. I have those too. Do you suddenly spin up in your rotation? Sometimes. Vela is the best known of all glitching pulsars, Peter shared,

with glitches occurring on average every three years, but they are not predictable. And maybe needless to say, nobody knows why they happen. I was hoping for an answer to my glitches, but oh well. I'm sorry. Well, yours maybe may have a solution or an answer. Martin Hajoski, our friend in Texas. We're into the funny stuff now. Just make it obvious up front. Hela, while playing Lela at the gala at Vela, Eric Clapton's performance was Tela made to shine bright on the radio.

Now that's delivering the mayola. Okay, if your stomach doesn't hurt too much, here's the submission from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. Laudably whirling around on its axis, 11 per second we find, and when you add in the glitches it harbors, it boggles astronomy's mind. Finally, this from Torsten Zimmer in Germany. Vela sounds like a pretty cool dude, but I still wouldn't want him to reside too close by in the neighborhood. And as far as radio signals go, I prefer planetary radio.

Oh, we're preferred over a pulsar. That's nice. Thank you, Torsten. We're ready for another one of these, I believe. All right. It's time once again to play Where in the Solar System? Where in the solar system is there a feature named Dogana? D-O-G-A-N-A.

Dogana. Go to planetary-G-A-N-A. Dogana. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Well, Dogana. I'm trying too hard. You have until the 19th. That would be Wednesday, June 19th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. Someone is going to win a Planetary Society rubber asteroid,

a 200-point, it's worth a couple hundred bucks, a 200 point itelescope.net account. And I still have a lot of books to give away. I have a book, and this is mostly for young people, called The Space Race. It's very nicely illustrated by Sarah Krudas. And some people may have seen her appearing with me. I wasn't with her. She was with me on the recent special on the Discovery Channel about Bereshit, the Israeli lunar landing attempt.

Sarah, delightful person. And she told me about this book. She sent a copy for us to give away. Maybe you will win it. It's really a very nicely illustrated book, a delight to read. So that will also go to our winner this week. And I think that's it. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky,

and think about tongues. They're pretty cool. Thank you, and good night. Yeah, I like using one. I don't want to eat one. It's one of my mother's favorite foods. Oh, geez. I know. That's how I feel. I have to go to eat one. It's one of my mother's favorite foods. Oh, jeez. I know, that's how I feel. I have to go away

when she does that. You're listening to Bruce Betts. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. By the way, also the author of Astronomy for Kids, another beautifully illustrated book for young people that has appeal well beyond that,

if I do say so myself. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our entangled members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, at Astro.