How do we know quantum mechanics is really random?

Daniel and Jorge wrestle with Bell's experiment and the philosophical consequences.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, do you have a pretty good routine? You
mean like a dance routine or like ten tight minutes
of stand up comedy? I mean like a schedule, Like
do you have the same day plant every day? Or
do you wing it every day? Yeah? I'm pretty into
my schedules. It's the only way I can really stay
on top of everything. Oh man, that is the opposite
of what I do. I like to wake up every
day not knowing what's gonna happen. Well, I like to

(00:29):
plan every day, but in the end, every day turns
out totally different because my well laid plans get blown
up by something that happens. See, so what's the point
of making plans. I like to live in a superposition
of organization and chaos. So you're both or neither depends
on which day you collapse my wave function and on
which day my schedule collapses. Sounds like you're the one

(00:50):
who collapses at the end of the day, though. That's
how you know him a true quantum mechanic. Hi am
or Him and Cartoonists, and the co author of Frequently

(01:11):
Asked Questions about the Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a
particle physicist. And a professor at U C Irvine, And
I'm supposed to understand quantum mechanics. You're supposed to do that,
I guess because you're a physicist, right, that's right, it's
my official job. Particles are definitely quantum objects, and yet
it's still something that everybody in the field struggles with.

(01:32):
But didn't Richard Fine when famously said that nobody understands
quantum mechanics and if you do, then you don't really
understand it. And he was one of the top five
smartest physicists. So yeah, everybody below him on the ranking
can't understand it better than he does. With the top four, dude,
I think there are a few people out there that
might understand quantum mechanics better than Richard Fineman. Yeah. Do

(01:53):
you think it's maybe just a limitation of the human
brain or is the quantum mechanics use there not understandable.
I think we definitely can understand the mathematics of it,
but sometimes translating that mathematics into intuition is really complicated.
It's hard to understand things which are very unfamiliar to us.
Because in the end, physics is about trying to explain

(02:16):
the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. But sometimes we
don't have a good intuitive analog to reach for. Sometimes
we find something which really is very different from anything
we've experienced before. That's why I don't believe in intuition,
either schedules and intuitions. I just leave him at home
every day. But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and

(02:36):
Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio
in which we attempt to apply our intuition to understanding
everything about the universe. For these little squishy brains that
evolved on this one rock around one planet. It's an
incredible task to try to understand everything that's out there,
including phenomena that our ancestors never saw, crazy black holes,

(02:58):
incredibly dense neutron stars, any buzzing particles. Is it even
possible to grop all of that, to import it somehow
into our minds so we can play with it, manipulated
and understand it. That's right, because it is a vast
and incredible universe full of amazing things that run counter
to our intuitions sometimes and that are very difficult to understand.
And so the only thing we can schedule on this

(03:19):
podcast is the idea that we're gonna talk about it
and try to understand it and ask questions about it.
Because on the podcast we try to do something which
may be impossible, which is to translate all of these ideas,
which in the end are expressed mathematically, into concepts that
we can deliver into your brain just with chit chat

(03:39):
and conversation. It's not always easy to know how to
transform these ideas from their essential mathematical principles into an
intuitive understanding, a stream of words which land in your
ear and build in your mind a little model that
makes you go, oh, I get it. But that's what
we're going for. Yeah, it's a pretty challenging problem if
you think about it, right, because we're trying to take

(03:59):
the higher universe, which is at least four dimensions, maybe more,
and we're trying to get it down to really one dimension, right,
because audio is just one one degree of freedom, right,
I suppose though, although in principle there are an infinite
number of frequencies along which to convey information. But yeah,
that's a good point. We're trying to like serialize the
universe into a stream of information which unpacks itself into

(04:23):
your mind to give you a mental model of the
universe that somehow works. I guess it would help if
maybe we're recording stereo, like I could be on people's
left ear and you could be on people's right ear,
and then we could maybe convey more information that way,
like a little angel and devils standing on your shoulders.
Or maybe we need to cartoonists and to physicists going simultaneously.
How does that help, and we're all talking at the

(04:45):
same time exactly, it would be two dimensional podcasting simultaneously.
I feel like you would still collapse right under the
amount of information. You're still collapsing the information down to
one dimensional audio. Yeah. I think probably it's best to
stick with one dimension and do best to project these
crazy ideas down into a one dimensional audio stream. It
is a complex universe, and sometimes it's a seemingly random universe.

(05:09):
It's a huge universe, and all kinds of things are
happening in it, and it's not quite clear where the
things are happening according to a plan or if they
are just randomly occurring in the universe. Yeah. One of
the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe
is whether you can predict what's going to happen in
the future based on the past. Is the universe like

(05:29):
a big clock, where if you understood all of the
rules and had enough information, you could tell exactly what
was going to happen? Or fundamentally, is there something weird
going on at the heart of the machine that is
running the universe, something different from anything we have ever
experienced directly, something truly random? And well, I guess the
universe seems pretty random, right, Like if I flip a coin,

(05:51):
it's really hard to tell if it's going to be
heads or tails. Right, it does, And we often use
flipping a coin or rolling a dice as an approximation
for some random But those are not actually random processes.
Those are just very very complicated processes, things which are
hard to predict, but in principle possible to predict if
you had enough information and enough computer processing power. What

(06:15):
about whether we're going to explain something well or not?
Isn't that also kind of random? Hey, sometimes what we
talk about on the podcast feels a little random. You know,
I'll prepare a whole outline and we'll never get past
the first bit. Wait, are you saying I'm the random
filter here? I'm saying that Daniel Jorge interaction is a
little unpredictable. Sometimes what we end up talking about in
the best possible way. I love those episodes when you're

(06:36):
like a whole lot of second, slow down, what does
that actually mean? And then we spend forty five minutes
talking about the definition. We may we just need like
a parallel podcast or something. Maybe we need the multi
World's podcast where we take every possible branch and every
possible digression simultaneously. Well, this idea of whether the universe
is random or not with something that sort of came
up recently in the last hundred or two hundred years, right,

(06:58):
I mean, after Newton, people have figured that the universe
was pretty mechanical, pretty much like a machine where everything
followed F equals m A, and you could predict what
the path of a baseball or dropping a coin, what
was going to happen. You could predict that. But then
came quantum mechanics, who said, well, maybe things are not
that predictable. Yeah, And both of those really are revolutions

(07:19):
in our understanding of how the universe works. I mean,
before quantum mechanics, even just the idea that the universe
was deterministic, that it was like clockwork, that the whole
apparatus of reality was somehow following physical laws which you
could uncover and understand and used to predict the future.
This was a big idea, right. This flew in the

(07:39):
face of lots of people sort of spiritual sense that
there was somebody out there, unpredictable, in control of the universe.
To reduce it to a set of natural laws which
governed it, that was a big step forward. And so
then to pull the rug out from underneath that and say, actually, no,
at the heart of all of it, there might be
something unpredictable, some process which determines the outcome but isn't

(08:02):
determined by the past, is somehow fundamentally random. That was
a crazy, big new idea. Yeah, I guess it was
a double sweeping of the rug, right, because before Newton,
I guess, and before these fundamental laws of the universe,
people kind of thought the universe was random. Right. It
was random, or at least at the whim of some
gods or some deity that sort of randomly decided things.

(08:23):
And then we thought it was all ordered, and then
we realized, wait, it is sort of random. Yeah, exactly
though random in a very very different way. Right, quantum
mechanical randomness, as we'll dig into, it's not arbitrary or
at the whims of some god. Right, how do you know, Daniel?
You know, we might be at the whims of the
writers of the simulation. But whatever code they wrote is
what determines how the universe seems to work. What if

(08:45):
that code is at the whim of some other writers. Well,
maybe it is, but they don't seem to have been
changing the code recently. It seems like the code is
pretty stable over the fourteen billion years at the universe's history,
So there haven't been any updates. Well, it seems like
we've done a double take here on the random of
the universe. And the latest is that according to quantum mechanics,
things are random. But is that really true? And so

(09:07):
to be on the podcast we'll be tackling the question
how do we know quantum mechanics is really random as
opposed to just plane wacky or flaky or at the
whim of some quantum mechanical gods. Well, you know, quantum
mechanics has probabilities in it, and you can talk about

(09:29):
what probabilities means. Sometimes probability just means our lack of information.
Things we don't know, but in principle could predict. And
sometimes probability means fundamentally random, governed by our process outside
of our control. You're gonna bet on the outcome of
a Roulette wheel spin, for example, you might think that's random,
and in principle, if you knew how the ball bounced

(09:50):
and you spun it the same way twice, you should
get exactly the same answer, So it's not really random.
The probabilities, they're just come from your lack of understanding.
The question really is quantum mechanics the same way. Are
there details which actually do determine the outcome of these experiments,
which is not aware of them? Or is the universe
really actually at its core a random number generator? You're

(10:12):
asking is it really random or does it just seem random?
Because something can seem random, right like I can have
a computer code that spits out random numbers, which will
look pretty random to anyone, but actually there's sort of
card coded on the computer right exactly. Random number generators
follow a sequence where computers follow rules. They can't actually
generate random numbers. They can only have pseudo random number

(10:35):
sequences that sort of look random ish, right, And so
we're asking the same question about the entire universe. Is
the universe actually random at its core? Or does it
just seem random? And I guess we need to go
to quantum mechanics to find the answer. And we've been
talking around this topic and a few recent episodes and
listeners have responded and asked us to dig into the

(10:55):
heart of the matter. Yeah, and as usually, we were
wondering how many people out there I thought about whether
quantum mechanics really is random or not. So thanks to
everybody who answers these questions for us. It gives us
a great sense for what people know and what they're
wondering about, and what you might be thinking out there.
And if you would like to lend your voice for
a future episode, please don't be shy, all right to
us two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So

(11:17):
think about it for a second. Do you think quantum
mechanics really is random? Here's what people had to say. Actually,
I then that's what Einstein thought. He thought there was
some hidden variables are controlled all the processes, and we
didn't know about that, and that's why we thought it
rest them, but I think there have been many experiments
where they redeed the same thing over in our work,

(11:38):
but in the same conditions, but there's a different result
each time, and that's what that's how we know that
it is truly random is such a question. We do
experiments thousands and thousands of times so that we can
get probability curves that show randomness. But he would only
know to a certain amount of certainty based on how

(12:00):
many experiments you do, and you can't do an infinite
number of experiments. So maybe we don't know that it's random,
but it's just random enough for purposes. Well, if it's
not random, I guess scientists would have figured out how
it's really working, and we would have really cool quantum
computers by now. We may not know it as an
absolute fact, but our models really suggest it is random

(12:25):
through many experiments and theories. That model of randomness holds
out really, really well. And that's about as good as
we can get if the model fits we accepted. I'm
a big fan of the idea that there's a hidden
variable that we don't understand, But at the same time
I realized that all the evidence says that it's really
really random. There's that whole thing where you send electrons

(12:49):
through a slit experiment, one electron at a time, and
they still interfere because, as I've heard you guys say,
it's a field, not a point. But I don't really
understand damn that um. As a computer programmer, I know
that quantum is the gold standard for truly random numbers,
but I guess I really don't understand that at all.

(13:10):
If you set up an experiment, well so they call
it an ensemble, if you set up multiple instances of
that experiment and everything is the same, and you produce
the electron, say you, I don't know if I were
it in a given direction, And then well, since you
know its position or the trajectory it's taking, if you

(13:30):
then try to measure its momentum while it's moving, even
though the experiments are set up in exactly the same way,
you get different answers for the momentum, and it doesn't
depend on how you've set up the experiment, because the
ensembles are exactly the same and there is no like
sort of external factor that you can change that somehow

(13:50):
correlates with the measured momentum and that's why we say
quantum mechanics is random. Well, I guess you could set
up the same experiment many many times and if you
get different outcomes um with the sort of random distribution,
you would know that it's very random. Otherwise I have
no idea. Interesting, I feel like some people don't want

(14:14):
to know, kind of. It is really hard to accept
this idea that the universe is so different from the
one you experience. So I think a lot of people resisted. Yeah,
and do you think quantum mechanics is random or maybe
it was just discovered randomly? It does seem like the
history of science is a little bit random, you know,
especially in the case of quantum mechanics, because we had

(14:36):
a few experiments that people had done and nobody really understood,
and then Einstein and Plank came along and sort of
put the pieces together years later. Makes you wonder if
it could have happened sooner, or maybe if it could
have happened decades later. It's fun to think about alternative
histories and what we might have discovered or not at all. Right,
Like what if Einstein had decided that he wanted to
play soccer for a living. Maybe we wouldn't be having

(14:58):
this conversation at all. Usually can't say that about historical figures,
but Eisen is one of those figures where if he
hadn't come along at the moment he did, things would
be super different. Things might be different. There are people
who say that a lot of the precursors to his
ideas came from other people, and so it was sort
of inevitable for them to click together. You know, a
lot of the math that underpins relativity was developed by
other folks. Rimon, for example, developed the rimanny and manifold,

(15:22):
which Einstein realized was a great way to describe the
curvature of space. Other folks were working on similar ideas
and may have brought it together even without Einstein, though
it could have taken a few years or decades longer. Well,
Eisen did what he did. And here we are talking
about quantum mechanics and randomness and whether or not it
is actually random at its core. And so I guess, Daniel,

(15:43):
let's start with the basics here. Uh, Well, first of all,
what do we mean by the word random? So by
random we really mean something which is not determined by
the experimental setup you'd build an experiment to shoot a ball,
or to flip a coin, or to roll a dice
or whatever. If it really is random, then you can
do the same experiment twice and get different outcomes, right

(16:04):
Like For example, a computer random number generator is not
really random because it uses a computer formula, right like that.
One works by taking a look at the current time,
grabbing a bunch of different variables that are changing all
the time, and then it processes those and then it
spits out what seems like a random number, but it's
not really random because venia what all the numbers that
went into the random number generator, you could generate the

(16:26):
exact same sequence, right yeah, and we do that all
the time. You have a random number seeds for example.
These are the parameters that control the random number generation.
And if you give a computer the same seeds, it
will generate the same sequence of random numbers every time.
So computer random number generators are deterministic. They can be
predicted from their inputs and reproduced. You run the same

(16:47):
random number generator with the same inputs get exactly the
same outputs, So that's deterministic. That's not random, But they
are chaotic. They are hard to predict. Their designed to
be complicated the way. For example, a die is designed
to be unpredictable, as all these sharp edges which bounce
unpredictably against surfaces and makes it really tricky to know

(17:07):
if a two or four is going to land upright,
It's very sensitive to exactly how you throw it, which
makes it hard to predict and appear random but not
actually be random, right, because a die with sharp edges
sort of like if you stand it on one corner,
I guess it might fall to the rider, It might
fault to the left, or it might bounce to the
right or left, just like a coin if you stand

(17:28):
it up on its side, it could maybe um flip
or land and either way. Yeah, imagine trying to learn,
for example, how to flip a coin so that it
always comes up heads. In principle, you could you could
learn how to spin it at just the right frequency
and toss it in the air just the right velocity,
so it has a certain number of flips before it
lands on your hand and it's always going to come

(17:48):
up heads. That would be a great skill, right, But
it's so hard to do because it's so sensitive to
all of those details. You'd have to be a master
coin flipper to be able to do that same with
a dive. Some many knew how to roll sevens every
single time. They would make zillions of dollars at casinos
every day. Right, The whole game of craps is built
on the assumption that nobody can really control what happens

(18:10):
to the diet even though they give them to you,
they let you roll them, right, And so the whole
assumption there is that you can't reproduce the same toss
over and over again. So I don't let you into
casinos anymore. It may they stop you at the door first,
they're like, are you Antonian physicists or a quantum mechanicis
may say quantum physicists. They'll let you in. They'll let
you in exactly because you've given up. You've allowed the

(18:32):
randomness to enter your life, all right. So that's the
kind of the difference between random and not random. Random
you can't predict given the initial conditions, and not random
you can't predict it even if it is really hard.
If you can't predict it, then it's possible that you
can't predict it, and so it's not random, and everything
in your everyday experience is not random. Whether you hit

(18:52):
a green light, or whether you trip on the steps,
or whether that bird poops on your shoulder or whatever.
These things can seem random, whether really just complex. They're
actually just chaotic. Even the weather, right, the weather is
not fundamentally quantum mechanically random. It's just difficult to predict
because it's so complicated. So in our experience, everything that
seems random is actually just deterministic and complicated, or at

(19:15):
least I think you mean, it's mostly deterministic and chaotic, right,
And it's it's just saying that Newtonian dynamics dominate our
everyday lives. But there is still a little bit of
a quantum at it's hard right at the microscopic level,
right like as the coin hits the table, there is
some sort of maybe quantum interaction there. They could determine
whether it flips to the right or to the left. Well,

(19:36):
we do know that microscopically everything we experience is made
of quantum objects, and so if quantum mechanics is random,
then you know, you might ask why aren't things made
of quantum objects also random. The answer is that that
randomness mostly averages out, and so even electron is going
to like quantum mechanically fluctuate to the left somewhere than
an electron quantum mechanically fluctuating to the right. So when

(19:57):
you have in big enough groups of quantum objects, these
things tend to wash out. It's very difficult to actually
pinpoint quantum mechanical impacts on everyday macroscopic classical objects. Otherwise
we would have discovered quantum mechanics sooner. You know, it
would have been more obvious if there were quantum mechanical
impacts on our everyday life. Right, But you just found

(20:17):
it a little bit absolute in But then you said
you mostly wash this out, right, not completely right. There
is still a little bit of tiny, little bit of
maybe quantum randomness in our everyday lives too. Yeah, there's
a little bit there. Right In the end, these things
are averages, so there are probabilities you could in principle
disappear and quantum tunnel to the other side of your house. Right,
It's not impossible. That's why you should never say things absolutely. Also,

(20:41):
this is not something that we a hundred understand, right,
How do quantum mechanical objects when they're all tiny, the
huge frothing mass of them, how did they come together
to make the classical picture that we understand that boundary
is kind of fuzzy and not super well understood. So
there might be places where quantum effects really do have
so of like cascading consequences which lead to macroscopic effects,

(21:04):
like the heart of the human brain. Are there quantum
effects inside your neurons which change the decisions that you make?
We don't really understand that in enough detail to be
absolutist about it, right, But I think what you're saying
that then, is that our everyday lives that things are
mostly deterministic because all the quantum mechanics sort of mostly

(21:24):
washes off. But although there's still a little bit of
room there for things to be random, but they're not
as random as they are at the microscopic level. If
you're looking at like one electron that has a as
a huge random as factor whether it goes right or
left exactly, we think that at the microscopic level, quantum
mechanics might be really truly random. Although there are a
lot of different interpretations for these weird experiments that we're

(21:47):
going to dig into, these bells experiment with entangled particles, right, So,
even at the macroscopic level, you can ask the question
if an electron is actually actually random or whether it
just seems random. Right, that's the question we're asking today.
That's the one at the heart of the matter. If
the tiniest little bits in the universe can be predicted
if you have not all the information, or if the

(22:09):
universe is like rolling a truly random die every time
an electron has to decide where it's going to go.
All right, well, let's dig into whether or not the
universe is random at the microscopic level or not, and
how we could maybe tell the difference using a famous experiment. First,
let's take a quick break. All right, we're asking the

(22:40):
question whether the universe really is random, and whether or
not Daniel can plan his day with any certainty at all,
or is it all a futile exercise. Just give up
like I do. Just embrace the chaos. Yeah, embrace the randomness.
It's different than kids. Well you should e'mbrace both. I
guess just let whatever have happened. Yeah, So that there's

(23:02):
a famous way to tell whether or not electrons and
things at the microscopic level are truly random, or whether
or not they just seem random. Right, And this is
the idea of Bell's experiment, And it goes actually back
to Einstein again. Einstein, though he had some of the
foundational ideas that led us to develop quantum mechanics, he

(23:22):
was fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea that the universe was
truly random. He thought that perhaps there were just details
there that we were not understanding, that when things seemed random,
it was just because there was missing information that we
didn't have that was actually controlling the outcome of the experiments.
So he and a couple of buddies of his came
up with a thought experiment because he was like a

(23:43):
champion of thought experiments, to demonstrate how weird it would
be if quantum mechanics was really random. Yeah, And I
think it all sort of goes back to this picture
of one electron, right, Like, if you shoot an electron
towards a magnet, it has kind of a random equal
probability of serving to the right, as does swerving to
the left. Right. That's kind of the fundamental random experiment

(24:04):
that people picture when they picture quantum mechanics. Right, It's
like it has a half a probablegy to go right.
Have a probability to go left, and it's totally randomly.
There's no way you could maybe predict whether it's going
to go right or left. Yeah, And just to clarify,
electrons always go the same direction when they hit like
a big macroscopic magnet, because magnetic fields turn electrons in
a way that we understand it. But electrons also have

(24:26):
another quantum mechanical component, the spin, which affects their little
magnetic field, and so that can affect whether they go
like left or right when they hit like a weird
magnetic field. And so you're right. Quantum mechanics says there's
an equal probability for it to be spin up or
spin down, which means that it goes left or it
goes right, and it says that that's not actually determined
until somebody measures it, that both possibilities are live simultaneously

(24:50):
until you actually measure it, whereas the other view says, no,
no, no no, there's some detail that determines whether it's spin
up or spin down, whether it's going to go left
or right, and it those left or it goes right
the whole time until you look at it. Right. That's
the idea of the hidden variable right, Like, maybe the
electron at its core knows whether it's spinning up or
spinning down. It's just that we don't know. And so

(25:11):
that's why you call it a hidden variable. And so
the question is, does the electron actually know if it's
spinning up or down? Or does even the electron not
know what's going to happen until somebody comes in and
ask it or puts it. Yeah, and you might imagine
it's impossible to tell the difference, like how can you
know if it's actually determined but you're just not aware
of it, or if it's chosen at the time you
poke it, because before that nobody's poking it, So how

(25:32):
can you tell? So Einstein's big idea was to add
another electron, which said, well, what if you have two
of these things and you know something about the pair
of them. You know that they have to have opposite spins,
maybe they come from the same source, so they're constrained somehow.
There's a connection between them, so that if one of
them is spin up, the other one has to be
spinned down. This is the idea of quantum entanglement. And

(25:54):
it's not so hard to I understand the general idea
For example, you have two bags, one with the red ball,
one with a blue ball in it, and you and
your friend each take one bag, but you don't know
which is which, and you travel like ten miles apart.
Now you look at the bag and you say, oh,
I have the blue ball. That means my friend has
the red ball. Or if your friend has the blue ball,
that means you have the red ball. Because you know

(26:15):
there's only one blue ball, then you know something about
what's happening with the other particle. That's the idea of
entanglement connecting these two electrons together, right, Because when you
separate the balls in the bags, you take one this
way and take the other one that way. They have
something that ties their history together, right, some sort of
constraint that says if one is blue, the olne spread
and if this one is red deal and has to

(26:36):
be blue. Right, it's something that ties their histories together exactly.
In Einstein's point was if things really aren't determined until
you look, that means something really weird. That means that
the electrons, which are now five miles apart from each other,
if you measure one of them and it determines to
be spin up if you're saying that they really weren't
determined until you're measured, that means that the other electron,

(26:57):
now ten miles apart, instantaneously is from undetermined to spin
down without anybody even looking at it. So this was
Einstein's complaint that if quantum mechanics really was random, then
it was somehow nonlocal. It is somehow instantaneous collapse of
the distant electron the other one the way you weren't
even looking at. Right. Yeah, you mentioned the idea of local,

(27:19):
because that's kind of a big part of it, right,
Like if I take one of the balls and I
go to New Mexico and you stay in Los Angeles,
and I opened my ball and I know and I
see that it's red, then I know that your ball
is blue. But you don't know that I opened my
bag and found a red ball right to you. It's
still uh, totally unpredictable what's in your bag. Unless I
go and I call you or I send you an

(27:41):
email saying, hey, my ball was a certain color, then
you would know what color your ball is exactly. But
according to quantum mechanics, it is at that point determined
once you've measured yours to be red, then mine is blue.
So Einstein's big point here was to say, this is ridiculous,
This idea that quantum mechanics is random, that there aren't
details determining which one is spin up and which one

(28:02):
has spin down, requires them to somehow conspire across great
distances faster than the speed of light. So we said,
obviously this can't be true, but it turned up that
it is true. I feel like you were leading me
into that, but I don't really know. That's what Einstein
I wanted everybody to think. But again you can ask
the question, how can you know? Maybe quantum mechanics really

(28:22):
is just weird that way and it doesn't sit well
in Einstein's brain, doesn't mean it isn't reality. Is there
some way we can enhance this experiment so we can
tell the difference. We can tell if it really is
random and decided at the last minute before you measure it,
or if it's all somehow decided in advance using information.
We just don't have access to some sort of weird

(28:42):
hidden details about these particles that determine which one is
spin up or spin down. So that was the great challenge.
Is there a way to come up with an experiment
to tell the difference. Right, you're saying that as soon
as I opened my bag in New Mexico and I
see that my ball is read, suddenly your ball goes
from being a quant mechanical object that could be anything
to a non quantum mechanical object which can only be blue.

(29:06):
That's the weird thing that kind of freak instain out.
As soon as I opened my bag in New Mexico,
So your bag in Los Angeles starts being quantum mechanical instantaneously. Yeah.
So people were chewing on this problem, and one other
very smart guy who might understand quantum mechanics better than
Richard Feynman, he came up with a really ingenious idea
for how to tell the difference, for how to know

(29:28):
if quantum mechanics was doing this at the last minute,
if it was really was left undecided and truly randomly
collapsed at the last moment, or if he was determined
by some information we just didn't have access to. He
actually came up with a way to test that, to
build an experiment which would tell you what the universe
was doing. Well, what's the alternative? Then, in the case
of the two balls, the one in New Mexico and

(29:50):
the one in Los Angeles. Like, if Einstein is right,
then what actually happened to the balls? You actually knew
which one was red and blue the whole time. Yeah,
if eine Stein is right, then one was red and
one was blue with whole time. We don't have access
to the information. We didn't know that until we opened
it up. But it actually was read the whole time.
And if quantum mechanics is right, then it wasn't read.

(30:10):
It was a possibility of being read and a possibility
being blue. Right in the quantum mechanical view, both were
possibilities until I open minding in Mexico, and in which
case both became non possibilities exactly. And if Einstein was right,
you get what he calls realism. He says, the universe
is a certain way, even if you aren't looking at it.
There is a fact of the matter, and the ball

(30:31):
is blue or is read regardless of whether we know
it or not. That's what Einstein believed. But the typical
description of quantum mechanics says that it really is undetermined
and there's a random process that chooses it at the
last moment, just before you measure it, or as you
measure it, or the act of you measuring it collapses
it and forces the universe to access its true random

(30:52):
number generator. And I think one the Einstein's point is
that it's hard to tell the difference between those two
scenarios whether they were red and blue the whole time
time or whether they decided only when I opened mining
New Mexico, because there's no way to tell a difference,
which is that simple experiment, So you need to sort
of do an experiment two point oh that maybe messages
with that to see if actually things were random or not. Yeah, exactly,

(31:14):
And that was Bell's big idea. Bell came up with
a way to test this, and at first, blush, it
feels impossible, right, like how could you tell whether it's
undetermined when you don't look without looking, and by looking
you collapse it. So it seems sort of like a paradox,
like impossible to probe. Bell's big idea was taking advantage
of another aspect of quantum mechanics that didn't exist in

(31:35):
the hidden variables picture, and that's the fact that it
matters along which direction you're measuring the spin. So we're
talking about a quantum mechanical property of these electrons. It's
called spin, and they can be spin up or spin down.
But it can be spin up or spin down along
with some direction. Right, if you have like an axis
you're defining as X, you can say, is my electron
spin up or spin down along this axis? You can

(31:56):
also measured along Y or measured along z. Asid anything
quantum mechanically is that these things are connected. Like in
quantum mechanics, you can't know the spin in X and
in Y and in Z simultaneously. They're all weirdly entangled
by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the same way that like
you can't know the position and momentum of an object

(32:17):
at the same time those two pieces of information are
really connected together. So Bell came up with this experiment
where people in different locations might use different axes, they
might be measuring the spin in different directions, and quantum
mechanics would make a different prediction for the correlations between
those measurements than the hidden variable theory would. Yeah, let
me just let me go back the little bit on

(32:38):
this idea of spin, because this is when I think
it's going to be hard to explain over audio. I
think maybe a way to picture it is that you know,
instead of a red and a blue ball that we
put in our and those hidden bags, instead of drawing
arrow on our balls, like an arrow pointing up or
an arrow pointing down right, or I guess the arrow
could be pointing in any direction. Really in the in
the ball right, it could be pointing up, down, left, right, diagonal,

(33:01):
diagonal down, diagonal up, So it can be pointing in
any of those directions. But one thing about quantum mechanics
is that you can't ask whether it's pointing up and
down and left and right at the same time. That's
a weird thing about quantum mechanics, right. The weird thing
about quantum mechanics there is that it matters the order
in which you do it. Just like if you measure position,
you get a number, and then you measure momentum, then

(33:22):
your position measurement is no longer valid. Once you measure momentum,
you scramble the position. In the same way here, if
you measure the spin along one axis, you look to
see if the arrow is pointing up or down according
to your imaginary Z axis, and then you do it
along y or X. It scrambles the first measurement, so
you can't know the spin in all three directions simultaneously

(33:43):
for a quantum object the way you can for a ball.
Right ball, you can just look at and say, oh,
it's kind of up in Z and kind of down
and X and kind of whatever. You can just know
it's determined as possible. These are sort of like orthogonal
directions in the hidden variable theory quantum mechanics. They're weirdly
connected to each other. Is like let information available. There's
like shared information between x, Y and Z and the

(34:04):
spin measurements. Right, Like, let's maybe explain it. Like let's
say I point an arrow on the face of my ball,
and it can be up, down, left, right, the daggon
or whatever. Maybe you can picture it as like the
hour hand in a clock, So it can be pointing
up at twelve o'clock or down at six o'clock, or
right at three o'clock or left at nine o'clock, or
it could put pointing at one o'clock, four o'clock, eight o'clock,

(34:25):
ten o'clock. And you can only sort of ask one
thing at a time, whether it's generally pointing up or
down or left or right, not both at the same time.
So like, if it's actually pointing at two o'clock, I
can as well as it pointing up or down, and
you would say, well, it's at two o'clock, so it's
pointing up. Where I can ask is the pointing left
or right? And you say, well, it's pointing right because

(34:45):
it's pointing at two o'clock. But I can't ask both
of them at the same time to really figure out
what the hour was like. Once you ask whether it's
up or down, the whole thing collapses and that's it.
I can't know anything else about it. Yeah, once you
make a measurement, all your previous measurements are now relevant,
so you can't like zero in on the exact details. Right,
Like you would maybe said your hour clock at a

(35:06):
point in your clock right, and then I would ask
you is it up or down? And you would see up.
And now I can't ask you whether it was right
or left because I would tell me exactly where the
hand was right, remember that there might not be any
where it really was. In the theory of local realism,
there is a true position, a total reality, and the

(35:26):
clock really is pointed in just one direction, but in
the quantum theory without hidden variables, measuring it along one
direction scrambles it any other directions, so they're not just
not known, they are not determined. And that's really the
issue we want to address. The question we want to answer,
can we tell if those measurements are undetermined or unknown?

(35:47):
And the fact that in quantum mechanics you can't know
more than one direction of spin at once is the
crucial concept in Bell's theory because it changes how measurements
in different directions are core lated measurements along different axes,
And this is the exact idea at the heart of
Bell's experiment. Bell says, let's take our balls and let's

(36:08):
pick three directions in advance. And the people who are
doing these measurements, they're gonna pick one of these three
directions to make their measurement. As you say, it's like
picking two o'clock or nine o'clock or six o'clock on
the clock right to make your measurement, to ask whether
the arrow is up or down. They're going to pick
one of those. And if things really are determined, then
the direction they pick doesn't matter, doesn't change the state

(36:28):
of the ball at all, it's a very simple relationship
between whether or not they're they're likely to see the
same answer. You know, if they both pick twelve o'clock,
they're going to see the same answer. One of them
picks twelve and the other one picks two o'clock, they're
almost always going to see the same answer. This kind
of stuff. So you can say, if things aren't messed
up in that way, measuring in one direction doesn't measure
and the other directions, then we understand exactly how often

(36:51):
people should get the same answer. But in the quantum
mechanics version, if these things are scrambled, if measuring one
direction messes up, the measurements in the other directions, get
a different relationship with people with the two balls or
the two electrons get the same answer sort of more
often than you would expect. If things really are determined
by hidden variables, these correlations between the different directions quantum

(37:12):
mechanically come into play and sort of mess up the
otherwise perfect picture, right. I think you're saying that, Like
in our original experiment where we have the tool balls
in Los Angeles, and I took one of the balls
to New Mexico. Now we're going to introduce something new
to eights experiment in order to test this quantum randomness,
and that is to put people in between Los Angeles

(37:32):
and New Mexico and have them asked questions about the
ball on the way as it's traveling from Los Angeles
to New Mexico, right, and somehow that's going to tell
you whether or not things are actually random or not.
You measure each ball one time, because once you've measured it,
there's no more entanglement with the other ball going in
the other direction, and you don't necessarily measure each ball

(37:54):
along the same spin axis. Each ball gets measured along
one of three directions. You can make the three directions
like a Mercedes symbol if you want. Both balls might
get measured along the same direction, which case one is
up and one and down. That happens a third at
the time, but two thirds of the time you don't
choose the same axes and bells and equalities all about
how often both balls that measured spin up or spin

(38:16):
down along the random access that's chosen for a hidden
variable model, you get the same answer from both balls
less than two thirds of the time, And so when
you compare the answers for one ball and the other ball.
It just depends on like what angle the ball actually
was at. Right, Maybe let's step people through that example
in our scenario here of l a Vers is New Mexico.
So like, let's say that things are not quantum mechanical,

(38:39):
and you actually drew on your ball, you know, an
arrow pointing at one o'clock right now. The first person's
going to ask is it generally pointing in the twelve
o'clock direction, and you would say yes, And when it
arrives in New Mexico, it's still going to be pointing
at one o'clock like you drew it right exactly. You
also have to have people asking the same questions of
the other ball and then comparing the answers. That's the

(39:00):
key to the experiment. Okay, now that's what it's going
to happen. If the universe is not random, if he
has hidden variables, if you actually drew the arrow on
the ball before putting it into the bag. But now
let's paint the quantum mechanical version where it's something. It's
not really drawn on the ball, it's just something. It
just has the probability of being something. Right, Yeah, So

(39:21):
as a probability in any random direction, And the only
thing we know is that whatever direction is in the
other ball going to the other city is pointing the
other way. And so in the quantum mechanical version, you
can really only ask one question. You can measure it
along one direction. You can say, is it pointing towards
two o'clock or is it pointing towards eleven o'clock. Once
you've done that, you sort of messed it up. You

(39:42):
can't really get any more information about the ball. So
you can make one measurement about your ball, and your
friend going the other direction you can make one measurement
about their ball. If you pick these three directions in advance,
then you can predict how often they will get the
same answer. Like both people say two o'clock, then you
know they're going to get opposite answers. Right, one ball
is going to be up with respect to two o'clock,
the other one is going to be down. But if

(40:03):
one person uses two o'clock and the other person uses
eleven am, then they might get different answers. And quantum
mechanics tells you how likely they are to get different answers. Well,
let's step people through it. What happens if it is
a quantum mechanical ball that goes through and gets the question.
So the first person says, is it generally pointing towards
twelve o'clock? And then that will sort of collapse the

(40:23):
ball a little bit, right. I think that's what you're saying,
is that now the ball cannot be pointing downwards if
I say yes, if you say yes, then the ball
cannot be pointing downwards. So that if the next person says, hey,
is it pointing three o'clock, they can't tell you. Right. Well,
what happens is you've destroyed the entanglement, so you can
make the measurement, but it's no longer constrained to be
the opposite of what the other ball is. And the

(40:45):
whole idea is that these things need to be entangled.
Once you've made a measurement, then the entanglement is broken.
You can only use up the entanglement sort of one time.
That's why you can only really make one interesting measurement.
You can make as many measurements as you like, but
they're not really as interesting because you no longer measure
ring an entangled system. Right. Once you interact with something,
you break the entanglement. But wait, is that really a

(41:05):
good analogy of Bell's theorem that somebody along the way
asks if it's pointing towards twelve o'clock. Sort of if
you take one more step. Bell's experiment says, pick three
directions in advance. Everybody decides in those three directions, and
then when you actually make your measurement, you pick one
of those three directions randomly. So you know, Jorge in
New Mexico is going to pick the two o'clock direction,

(41:27):
and Daniel in l A. Is maybe he's gonna pick
the two o'clock direction, maybe he's gonna pick the eleven o'clock.
There's a random element there. If we pick the same directions,
we're gonna get answers exactly opposite each other. Of course,
if we don't pick the same directions, then we might
get the same answers. We might not. And that's the
part that's predicted by quantum mechanics. Oh, I see, you
don't ask it the three times when it's going from
l A to New Mexico. You ask it one time,

(41:49):
like one of the three people ask their question. That's
what you're saying, and the person who gets to ask.
The question is decided at random exactly, and in the
hidden variables version, you can very easy calculate what are
the chances that the one ball is going to give
you the same answer as the other ball, And it's
all determined, and so you can just do the calculations.
You get a very crisp number of prediction. But quantum

(42:10):
mechanics adds more connections between these balls because it says
measurements in one direction are connected to measurements in another direction,
which doesn't exist for the hidden variables versions. So it
means you're more likely in the quantum mechanics to get
the same answer as the other person. Bell's experiment is
not a one off thing. You can't say from one experiment, Oh, definitely,
it was random. It's a statistical calculation. Across many iterations

(42:31):
of this experiment, you get a correlation between these things
which should be impossible. In the hidden variables version, your
measurements agree more often than if all the details were
specified in advance, and it's because of that quantum mechanical
connection between measuring in different directions. All right, Well, dig
into this a little bit more, because I feel like
maybe you're sort of waving your hand and saying, there's

(42:52):
a lot of complex math here that we can't understand
on the podcast. But I wonder if there are sort
of intuitive ways for us to figure out why they
would give you different results if there was there was
a hidden variable or not. Let's try to dig into that.
But first let's take another quick break. Alright, we're talking

(43:19):
about Bell's experiments, which, if it's true, confirms whether or
not quantum mechanics really is random or we just think
it's random, which would also confirm whether the universe is random.
And that's a pretty big deal, right. If the universe
is random, then it's totally unpredictable. If the universe is
not random, then everything that happens is kind of predetermined.

(43:40):
Although to this day there are very strenuous philosophical arguments
about what the results of Bell's experiment really means. Is
it actually ruling out local hidden variables? And one person
who argued very strongly that these experiments don't rule out
hidden variables was Bell. Bell was persuaded not that the
universe was random, but just that the universe was non local,

(44:04):
that it was somehow coordinating the results of these experiments
across space and time in a way that we didn't understand. Well,
we had this experiment setup where we had some balls
and we drew arrows on them, or had them quantum
mechanically drawn on the balls, and then we sent them
to New Mexico, and you had people asking questions alowing
the way. But it seems sort of like you're saying that, really,
to understand how Bill's experiment works, we sort of really

(44:25):
need to dig into the math, because that's where the
differences between a random universe and a non random universe
really are. Like, if it's really random, then the math
says that you should get one type of result from
this experiment, and if it's not random, then the math
has you should get another kind of results. Yeah, it
does come down to the math. And there are lots
of times in quantum mechanics where things don't make intuitive

(44:45):
sense to us, but the math is pretty clear and
it tells you exactly what's going to happen. And this
is one of those scenarios where you're like, well, that
would be really weird if that were true. The quantum
mechanic predicts it to happen, and then you go and
you do it in the experiment, and it does like
people have in these experiments starting in the seventies and
up till fairly recently, more and more sophisticated versions of them,
and the numbers they get agree with quantum mechanics. They

(45:08):
disagree with the local hidden variables picture of the universe.
And what you want is to, like have a deep
understanding of why that is. What is it about quantum
mechanics that makes it have a different prediction. So this
experiment predicts something different for quantum mechanics and the hidden
variables theory, and that's tricky. I mean, it's very clear
to just look at the math, like you write out
the probabilities, you do the calculation, the number comes out

(45:29):
of certain value. But we don't all think mathematically, and
so you want sometimes an intuitive understanding. And I think
the most intuitive understanding I have of it at least
is that quantum mechanics ties up these different measurements, if
you're thinking about measurements in one direction, how they're connected
to measurements in other directions than sort of in the
hidden variables version, everything is clean and crisp and they
don't mess up each other, whereas in the quantum mechanical version.

(45:50):
You make a measurement in one direction, it's more connected
to measurements in other directions. That's what gives you these
enhanced mathematical probabilities. All right, well, I think maybe the
next and then should be have people actually done this experiment?
I mean, we sort of talked about it, and we
know that if it comes out one way, it sort
of proves quantum mechanics is random or not. And have
people actually done this experiment? They have. The first test

(46:12):
was in nineteen seventy two, originally done with photons. You
can do this kind of experiment with any sort of
quantum object, where you can create entanglement, where you create
a connection between these two things so that they have
to like follow some overall constraint, want to spin up
or want to spin down. In the case of photons,
they're not spinning one half particles. They don't spin up
or down. They have three different states, including like a

(46:33):
circuit of polarization. But fundamentally the idea is the same.
And so the first test confirmed Bell's experiment in nineteen
seventy two. That was just a few years after his
original paper. It's actually a funny story about that because
Bell chose to publish his theorem in a really cheap
journal that didn't charge him to publish it, and it
meant that very few people actually read the paper when

(46:54):
it first came out. It was such a cheap journal
that if Bell wanted copies of his own paper, the
journal would even charge large him for his own copies. Usually,
if you write a paper, you get like a certain
number of free copies. So he published it in this cheap,
obscure journal, which meant that not many people saw it.
But one guy did and he was really intrigued, and
he set up the first experiment in the seventies to
test this idea. And it involves kind of pairing up

(47:17):
electrons or pairing up photons, and so maybe just to
paint us a picture. You know, you've sort of run
this bunch of times, right, not just once, and then
you can tell the universe is random or not. You
have to run it like a hundred times. And if
at the end you get you know a certain number
of times them both being spin up or spin down,
it means that the universe is random. But if at
the end you get that there was both spin up

(47:39):
or spin down, as a different percentage, then you know
that the universe is maybe not random. Right, that's kind
of what we're looking at. Yeah, you prepare these particles,
you send them off in different directions. Then you have
some process to randomly choose the axis along which you're
going to measure the spin. Remember, you have to have
like three different possibilities and you have to randomly choose
which one. Oh, how did they do it? Did they

(48:02):
flip a coin? I don't remember the details of the
first experiment, but they've become more and more elaborate as
time goes on. They use things like telescopes pointed to
distant stars, and like the flickering of that star helps
determine which when you pick. They've been really really careful
about how to determine these things. Sometimes they're linked to
cosmic rays, which people think might be fundamentally random. Is

(48:23):
there a mu on hitting my detector right now? So
they do a lot of work to try to make
sure these things are random. Remember in our episode about
super determinism, this was the heart of the matter. People
were worried about whether that choice really was random, or
whether it just appeared to be random, whether the whole
universe had been built to conspire to make these things
look random when really they weren't. Wait wait, I think

(48:44):
you're telling me that this experiment that humans have devised
to test whether the universe is random or not depends
on us doing something random. It's a little bit funny,
isn't it. Absolutely, and people have been digging into these
apparent loopholes and Bells experiment and that one of them like,
how do we know that the way we constructed the
experiment is actually random? Another one is, how do you

(49:06):
know these two things actually aren't communicating in some way?
The first experiment wasn't that big, you know, the photons,
They didn't send them very far apart. And so they've
been making these experiments more and more elaborate, trying to
make them more actually random in the way they choose
the axis, and making the particles further and further apart,
so there's no way to transmit information from one to
the other unless you do it faster than the speed

(49:28):
of light. So they've been slowly working to try to
close these loopholes. And every time somebody does want one
of these experiments, somebody goes, oh, wait, but what if
have you checked? How do you really know in one
of the core foundational loopholes that people are trying to
close is this one about the randomness. So they come
up with these more and more elaborate systems to try
to ensure that the construction of the experiment itself is

(49:49):
actually random, right, because if the experiment depends on you
doing something random, if you're if you're not really random
doing it, then the whole experiment sort of falls apart
a little bit, right. Yeah, absolutely, that's the base is
of super determinism, to say no, things really are determined.
It's just that even how you're choosing the apparently random
element of this experiment is not random, that itself is

(50:10):
determined by things that happened before. All Right. So then
people have been doing this experiment for fifty years, and
they've been trying harder and harder to make it more
and more pure and exact and full proof. And what's
the overall result that they've been getting. They've been getting
that the universe is really random at the quantum level.
They've been getting a result that says that there are
no local hidden variables, right, That says that there's no

(50:33):
information that's being passed along with these particles that somehow
determines whether the ball is red or blue, or you know,
what direction is pointed at. There's no information with the particles. Wait,
I feel like maybe you're using um sort of lawyers
speak here. Absolutely, I am right, Like I asked whether
the universe is random or not, and you said there
are no local hidden variables, which is not a yes

(50:55):
or no answer, not a yes or no answer. So
what are what are the lawyerly nuances here? Yeah, because
it's possible that there are global hidden variables, that there's
something controlling everything that happens in the universe that determines
the outcome of this experiment. Bell's experiment only rules out
local hidden variables, not global hidden variables. What's the difference, Well,

(51:16):
local hidden variables would mean information is being passed along
with the electron. Something about the electron itself in the
environment of the electron determines whether it goes spin up
or spin down. Something global would be coordinating across space
time faster than the speed of light. And so. For example,
there is an interpretation of quantum mechanics called Bomian mechanics
where quantum mechanics is not random. But there's this pilot wave.

(51:40):
This thing which controls the whole universe and arranges for
these things, coordinates and says, oh, if this one over
here spin up, I'm going to go make this one
be spin down. And so it's like coordinating globally faster
than the speed of light. Wait, so a local hidden
viroiable is when the ball you put in the bag
has a little pocket inside of it that knows whether
it is spinning up or down. That's the local hidden variable.

(52:03):
And the Bell's experiment proves that there is no such
pocket inside of the the electron or the ball, but
there might be a global hidden variable, meaning like there's
a giant universe size pocket out there hiding information and
coordinating information between here and alpha centric kind of right exactly,
And that seems really weird. So the more common interpretation

(52:23):
is equantum mechanics is really just random. If you don't
like nonlocality, if you don't like things being coordinated across
the universe, then the more common interpretation is, well, things
are just really random. But it's important to remember that
that's one possible interpretation of Bell's experiment. There are other
ones which involve non local hidden variables, So it doesn't
actually put a nail in the coffin of hidden variables completely,

(52:45):
just local hidden variables. Wait, you're saying that like a
global hidden viroiable, like the whole universe is coordinated somehow magically.
Is this looks the same as a totally random universe. Yes,
we cannot tell the difference. Nobody's come up with a
way to disting between that view, which is Bowmian mechanics,
which actually Bell himself is a huge proponent of and

(53:06):
sort of Copenhagen view where these things are not determined
and then they collapse when you make this measurement. I guess.
Then the next question is if there is a giant
universe size hidden pocket viable, you know, thing coordinating everything,
is that random or not? In that theory, it's not random,
it's deterministic. In that theory, everything that happens is determined

(53:28):
by the initial conditions. There's no randomness in it. I
feel like this confirms something I've sort of come to
believe it for a long time, which is that there's
really no difference between a totally random universe and a
universe run by all powerful God. Well, we can't tell
the difference. Philosophically, it's a very different statement about what's

(53:48):
out there, what's real, what's happening in the universe. But
it really goes to the heart of the question and
like what that means. What does it mean for things
to be happening if we can't know the difference, If
these particles really are undetermined, or if they were determined
the whole time by some crazy pilot function which is
controlling the fate of the universe, What really is the
difference to us if we can't ever devise an experiment

(54:09):
to tell the difference, is there really a difference? I
don't know. It's a really interesting question in philosophy, which
is one reason why philosophers still have jobs, because people
are confused. It sounds like we need to start a
new religion called pilotism, maybe pilotism or how would you
call it, global hidden vinableism. It's not a religion. It's

(54:29):
a totally respectable philosophy of quantum mechanics, and it's not
very mainstream because for a long time people thought that
Belle's experiment ruled it out, and there was actually a
proof by von Neumann that suggested that no hidden variables
were allowed, but there was a mistake in it. So
it's a sort of a historical accident that Bowman mechanics
was sort of cast aside for many years, even though

(54:49):
Bell himself was a proponent of it and people thought
that his experiments ruled out all hidden variables. And now
Bowmian mechanics is sort of like an afterthought. People don't
get taught it in schools, not mentioned very often, even
though it's totally consistent with our understanding of the universe.
It's just maybe even stranger than a random universe. Well,
it's interesting to think that maybe we'll never find out right, Like,

(55:11):
it's possible that it's impossible to tell the difference between
you know, all powerful God or pilot function or pilot
wave and a totally random, unpredictable universe. It's possible, or
maybe we just need next centuries and John Bell to
come up with an even more clever idea for an
experiment that can somehow tell the difference. I mean, I
remember learning about this experiment as an undergrad in quantum

(55:33):
mechanics and thinking, how could you possibly construct an experiment
to tell the difference. It's impossible, and then reading his
experiment going oh wow, that's clever. I never would have
thought of that. So it might just mean that we
need another generation of clever scientists. Maybe somebody out there
listening has actually understood our description of Bell's experiment and thought,
what if you add in this feature to it? What
if you did that? What have you changed in this

(55:54):
way to come up with a new experiment that might
tell us the difference? Well, what's the probability of that
somewhere between zero and one? As long as it's not zero,
I guess we just gotta keep doing it and eventually
somebody will come up with the answer. Right, that's how
statistics works. That's right. If we do an infinite number
of podcast we will eventually inspire the physical theory of
the universe. Yeah, we'll eventually get to take credit for

(56:17):
understanding the universe exactly monkeys on typewriters and cartoonists and
physicists on podcasts. Well, we're making pretty good progress, right,
we'ven We've got a couple of hundred episodes on Under
our Belt. Yeah, something north of four hundred. Yea, So
now we just need what infinity minus for hundred more exactly?
Let me do the calculation to do too. That's infinity

(56:38):
but getting close all right, Well, we hope you enjoyed
that attempt to try and explain Bell's theorem, which is
pretty complicated. It's pretty complicated even if you have the
math and the diagrams in front of you. So thanks
for bearing with us and this attempt to translate into
a one dimensional form for your audio stream. Hope you
enjoyed it. Yeah, and please join my new church of

(56:59):
pilot Is where Jorge is the God. Are you accepting donations?
There you go, that's right, I am the pilot Wave.
Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is

(57:20):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye