Unraveling misleading popular science

Daniel and Kelly uncover the real science behind some flashing recent popular science and talk about how to be an informed information consumer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
So you're listening to this podcast, which means you're a
curious person. You want to stay on top of the
science news. You want to be along for the ride
when big discoveries are made, and you want to be
in the know when scientists reveal new insights into the
nature of the universe, about matter, about energy, space, time, fusion, parasites,
maybe even the occasion will step forward in chemistry. But

(00:34):
it's hard sometimes to soar through all of the science
headlines competing for your attention. What should you believe is
this latest breakthrough infusion technology gonna finally move the needle
to the James Webspace telescope, really discover a universe where
time goes backwards? How to know? Well? Today in the podcast,
we're going to help you with all that. We'll sort
through some recent misleading popular physics articles and and by

(00:57):
giving you some advice about how to critically read this
stuff on your own. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's responsibly
reported Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Hello, this is Kelly Waiter Smith.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
I study parasites and space, and boy do I get
frustrated with misleading titles.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hi, I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC Irvine. And the most frustrating thing for me
about space news is that it's usually accompanied by an
artist's impression rather than actual data from the paper.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Okay, all right, time out, time out, Daniel. I think
most of us want to see an artist impression and
not like.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
A pile of data.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Like you're a science communicator, clearly this is and we
like collaborating with artists. I married one. You do this
all the time. Why are artist conceptions bad?

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Artist inceptions aren't bad in and of themselves if you
know what you're seeing and you understand which part the
artist has filled in and which part we actually know.
But the crucial thing about science and these science articles
is understanding what we've learned and what remains unknown. And
usually these artist conceptions go way too far. Like there's
a discovery of some new planet, and then you see

(02:20):
a drawing of the planet with like you know, edges
of the continents and ice caps and whatever, adding all
this information that's just a guess and the reader has
no idea which part has the artist invented and which
part is the scientists actually learned about the universe. That's
where the data tells you, but the artists often go
too far. So I love artists. I'm pro artist artists
should definitely be collaborating with scientists, but you have to

(02:42):
be very careful about showing the edge of knowledge.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
So I feel like I don't want to see artist
renderings go away. But I see your point, and I
think this idea is probably never going to fly. But
could we just have a box associated with every artistic
rendering of a finding that says, like, here's where the imagination,
the creativity was allowed to creep in, to like clarify
these things somehow.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
It's not even always obvious that it is an artist's impression,
especially when you just see the headline and the picture
and you're like, ooh, look at that planet, and then
you scroll by, and then later you're telling your friend Al,
we've totally seen pictures of continents and ice caps on
other planets. And it's not your fault and it's not
the artist's fault, but something about the way it's put
together blurs the line between what we've learned and what

(03:25):
we haven't learned.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
What is that famous photo that I think was from
James Web the Pillars of Creation or something like that
and they're like pink. I didn't realize that they weren't
actually those colors. And I realize that now because I like,
I have them on my shoes, and I try to
make sure that any fashion thing that I have on
my body I can explain in case I get cornered.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
But you know what, like, how do you feel like
that should have been portrayed?

Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's a great question and a slightly different one because
that is real data, right, Like we're looking at actual
image from space from a telescope. The only thing that's
been changed is the frequency of light shifted into the
frequency we could see it, because otherwise, if you're looking
at the life from James Web, it's just going to
be black on your screen, right, because James Web only
sees in wavelengths that we can't see. So it's like

(04:13):
night vision goggles, right. Its job is to shift it
into the visible spectrum so that we can see it
and analyze it. I mean otherwise you could just analyze
it on the computer. But yeah, this should be clarified
somewhere that this is shifted into our visible spectrum. I
don't think that needs to be printed on your shoes.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
That's good That's good because I really like my shoes,
and I think I'd like them less if there was
an explanation on them.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
But at least it's actual pictures of real data, right, Okay.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
So somebody just like slid the color knob over and
so like the difference in the colors between everything is
like the same. Like, I guess I'm wondering were there
artistic choices made or it's just shifting it all over.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
One hundred percent. There are choices made, and there are
different choices that could be made, and you'll sometimes see
people reanalyze old data make new images and and they
may just pop better or they look more interesting, and
that's because they're making different choices. Are they artistic choices
scientific choices? I don't know where the line is there,
but there's definitely an arbitrary mapping from one set of
wavelengths to another, and there are different choices that you

(05:13):
could make and reasonable ways to defend all of them.
So the bottom line is like, know what you're looking
at all?

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Right?

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Well, So I think a point that we are sort
of skirting around here is that communicating science is hard.
It is, and trying to visualize science in a way
that makes sense to people who don't spend eight hours
of every day for the last decade of their lives
thinking about these sorts of things like how do you
get that message across?

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Is difficult?

Speaker 3 (05:38):
And today we're going to talk about ways that it
has been done spectacularly and correctly.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
That's right. Today, we're going to go through a few
examples of science communication sent to us by listeners where
the headline and the picture are quite misleading, and they're
going to dig into the science, what it actually means,
what the scientists actually learned, what we know about the universe,
and what we don't know after this study, And at
the end we're going to try to give you some
tips for scientific literacy. How should you digest scientific information

(06:07):
on the internet when you don't have Daniel and Kelly
in your ear?

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Oh, I mean, that's a sad world to live in,
I think.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
And I'd just like to give a shout out to
the DKEU Discord community who helped us come up with
these topics to talk about today, and who always have
amazing insights and great questions and are just they're just
all lovely people.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, and wish you
could chat with other people who have listened and are
curious about the universe. Come join the discord. Check out
the link on our website Daniel and Kelly dot org.
You'll find the invitation there. Everybody's friendly, everybody's interested in science,
and we have a lot of nerdy jokes.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Oh my gosh, so many nerdy jokes. Love those people.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
All right, so let's go ahead, and our first headline
today is is the Universe inside a black Hole?

Speaker 1 (06:54):
No? No, no, that's not even the headline. That was my summary.
Actual headline on the article is quote the scientist says
he found evidence our entire universe is trapped inside a
black hole. That's the literal title the headline on this article.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
All right, So I think that we should start by
saying that often the titles are not created by the
science communicator themselves, and editors often have final say on
the titles.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
I've had a couple titles where I've been like, all right,
I guess we're going with that.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
I hope they read the whole thing, but anyway, still,
they can be quite misleading.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yes, exactly, And a lot of people don't read past
the headline, right or the headlines is the thing that
gets them to read it, and so we understand this
is a marketplace for retention, and people got to ramp
up the excitement level of the headline to get people
to read it. But still this is quite misleading.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
So where do we start with the debunking Daniel.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
First, let's talk about the science that was actually done
by the person who did the actual science that underline
this article. Then we'll talk about the claims made in
the article, and then clarify what we actually knew and
don't know because there is a lot of interesting science
going on here. Okay, so what actually happened here, Well,
there was a scientist who looked at a bunch of
galaxies and tried to measure their spin. And this is

(08:12):
a cool thing to do because we expect the galaxies
to be evenly split. Some should spin clockwise and some
should spin counterclockwise, and there's no reason why we should
have more of one or the other. So if you
look at a bunch of them, you can measure the
clockwise versus counterclockwise and it should be close to fifty
to fifty. And it's the standard thing to do in
science to be like, well, this is what we expect.

(08:34):
Let's go out and measure and maybe there's a discrepancy. Right.
This happens all the time and usually comes up yet
it's split evenly, yawn, move on, but sometimes it isn't.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
And am I remembering correctly that in so, we previously
did an episode something to the effect of does the
universe show handedness? And I think you referenced a study
that suggested that galaxies do show some evidence of handedness,
So like a preference for in a certain direction.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Is this related? And building on that finding.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
It's similar. That was a different study where they looked
at quadruplets of galaxies. So you make like a little
pyramid of galaxies and you order them by the biggest
to smallest, and you ask, are there more left handed
versus right handed? Where you define left and right handed
in a certain way? Dig into that episode do you
want more details? But the basic question was the same, like,

(09:25):
if we define left handed and right handed in this way,
we should still expect to see fifty to fifty. And
they also didn't see fifty to fifty. They saw more
left handed arrangements of galaxies than right handed, which was
fascinating and connected to the question of that episode, which
is is the universe left handed or right handed? In
this fascinating connections in biology and in particle physics that
suggest a preference for left handedness. But here it's not

(09:48):
about being left or right handed, because whether galaxy spins
clockwise or counterclockwise also depends on our view relative to
the galaxy. Like if you're looking at a galaxy and
you see it spinning clockwise, then if you're looking from
the other side, it would be counterclockwise. So in some
sense this also depends on your relationship to the galaxy.
So it's not a fundamental thing in that sense, but
still it should be evenly split. People out there might

(10:10):
be asking, well, why should it be evenly split? You
know what's the argument there, So let's make it explicit.
You know, why do galaxies spin at all? Galaxies spin
at all because the original blob of stuff that formed
the galaxy was spinning. So go way way back to
the very early universe. Imagine the universe filled with gas
and it's mostly smooth, but there's little lumpy bits. Right.

(10:32):
This bit is a little denser, and that bit is
a little denser. The bits that are denser have more gravity.
They pull in more stuff, so they get denser, so
they have more gravity, so they pull in more stuff.
Runaway effect, you get clumps. Right, So you go from
smooth with very small clumps to a much more clumpy universe.
And that's the formation of galaxies. And actually dark matter
plays a big role in that because it provides a
lot of the gravity. So that explains the clumps. But

(10:55):
where does the spin come from? Right, you have these
big clumps, why do they spin? Well, any of the
those individual clumps, if you measure their overall spin, it's
going to be closed to zero, but it's never exactly zero.
Like take a random scoop of gas. If a bunch
of particles flying around, this one's going this way, this
one's going that way. They got up the effective spin

(11:15):
contribution from all of those particles, it's going to be
close to zero, but not exactly zero. The big clump
of gas is going to have an overall slightly positive
or negative spin, and the one next to it is
going to have another spin overall positive and negative. On balance,
it's all going to add up to nothing. But there
are little fluctuations, just like there were fluctuations that led
to the formation of galaxies, there are little fluctuations that

(11:38):
make it very unlikely that it all adds up to zero.
And so each clump of gas is a spin, and
then as it collapses into a galaxy, it has to
keep spinning because of conservation of angular momentum, and as
it collapses it spins faster and faster. So that's where
the spin of the galaxy comes from. And the same
story is true for spin of solar systems, which are
like little mini galaxies inside a galaxy.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
That's fascinating. I don't think i'd ever of that before.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
I guess I just kind of assumed that all of
the stuff that was in the universe was already kind
of spinning in the same direction, and maybe you would
expect it to all be spinning in the same direction,
at least within a small area.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, now I understand that was wrong. Okay. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Another way to think about it is like, say you
flip a million coins, right, you expect roughly fifty to fifty, right,
fifty percent heads, fifty percent tails. But do you expect
exactly fifty to fifty That would be pretty unusual. Most
likely you're not going to get exactly fifty to fifty
and so you're going to get little imbalances. And each
clump of gas that forms a galaxy has all those
particles in it, some which contribute to its spinning clockwise,

(12:37):
some contribute to its spinning counterclockwise, but never actually bouncing
out all right, anyway, So what did this scientist do.
He looked at a bunch of galaxies and tried to measure
their spin. Turns out, this is hard because most of
the galaxies we know about, and there are lots of them,
are too far away for us to measure their spin.
To measure the spin of a galaxy, you have to
see different stars in the galaxy and measure, like blue

(12:58):
ship to this one and read shift to that one.
You need to measure the relative velocity of stars inside
the galaxy. It's not something we can do for super
distant galaxies where we're barely observing them, or even with
ones that are not that distant, but we can't resolve
the individual stars inside them. So he was only able
to do this for two hundred and sixty three galaxies
that were like close enough and were arranged in the

(13:21):
right way, and so not a huge sample, not tiny,
but like relatively small compared to the number of galaxies
in the universe, and what he saw is two thirds
of them are going clockwise, one third of them are
going counterclockwise. That's weird. That's a science that was actually done.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Okay, but it also seems easy to imagine there could
be a bias based on like stuff that's close by
doing something different than if you look at another part
of the Solar system or exactly.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
And the scientist in you is like looking for prosaic explanations. Right,
You're not immediately jumping to maybe we live in a
black hole. Right, every time you see weird data, You're
not like, maybe I live in a black hole.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
You know, that's my explanation for like everything, like oh
where did the apple go?

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Maybe we live in a black hole? Why is the
house not clean?

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Exactly exactly, I put this piece of cake in the
fridge yesterday and now it's gone. You know, this frosting
on my husband's mustache. But maybe we live in a
black hole.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
I think you're usually a zach who's like, no, no, no,
it's because we live in a black hole.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
No, wow, And you know this is a fine piece
of science, but you're right, there are questions about it,
Like number one, we don't know how accurate this measurement
is because there could be a bias. Like you start
with a huge nomber of galaxies, you filter for the
ones where you can make a measurement. That filter removes
most of the galaxies. You have to be very concerned

(14:41):
about whether that filter has introduced a bias. Maybe you're
somehow better at seeing galaxies that rotate clockwise relative to
you than counterclockwise. Right, there's lots of ways to introduce
a bias that you can't expect, and it could be
like third order effects. But if you're reducing from zillions
of galaxies to two hundred and fifty third fourth order effects,
these can dominate. And it's not even that hard to

(15:02):
imagine mechanisms that could introduce that. Because you know our
galaxy is spinning, we're in a certain arm on that galaxy,
and so it certainly could be easier to make measurements
of stars in a certain red shift or blue shift range,
because otherwise they move out of our range to be
able to measure them. So anyway, it's not that hard
to imagine. But the claims in the articles are amazing.

(15:23):
They suggest that this imbalanced the rotation means we live
inside a black hole? How do they get there?

Speaker 3 (15:29):
And by claims in the article, do you mean in
the original scientific paper or in the futurism article.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
So both the actual scientific paper made these connections. So
it wasn't just like somebody to to study said what
this is interesting, and then futurism was like dot dot
dot black hole. The paper itself did the dot dot
dot black hole part, and you know it has more
qualified claims than the article itself. And this is a
paper done by a computer scientist and not a physicist.

(15:56):
So you know, take this for a grain of salt.
Not that people who don't have a physics speachd you
can't do physics, but you should be cautious when you
read a paper from somebody who's writing far outside their expertise.
Doesn't mean they're wrong, right, but be cautious about it.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Well, if I can just go on a very short tangent,
you know, I feel like in papers it's good to
like start by saying like, here are all of the
boring things that could explain these data, and boring could
be like a bias by looking at things that are nearby,
and I feel like you need to frontload the boring
things because quite often the boring things are what explains it.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
And there's nothing.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
Wrong with saying like, also, it's consistent with living inside
of a black hole, but like, clearly we need more
data to be honest. The reason that I most frequently
reject papers that I review is because they pick the
most interesting interpretation and front load, like the introduction is
about how maybe we live inside a black hole or something,
and science has this problem where I think we try
to incentivize, like the most interesting interpretation is going to

(16:49):
get you in the best journal. Yeah, but it's so
important to be like, the most interesting interpretation is also
often the one that's least likely, and so you need
to like couch it appropriately. But anyway, so you're saying
that this article maybe couched things appropriately, but did mention
this black hole possibility and that's what got clung too
in the popular media.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Is that right?

Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah? I think the scientific article put it reasonably, but
the popular article stretched it out. So what are the
connections here? You know, this is a common concept, the
idea that we might live inside a black hole, and
it comes from two sort of ideas. One is there
are some superficial parallels between a black hole where you
think about a singularity and an event horizon, and the

(17:30):
Big Bang. The Big Bang, people talk about a singularity
in the early universe, and we also talk about a
cosmic horizon, a region past which we cannot see, so
to hear singularity to hear horizon. They're like, that seems
black hole, right, and there is a superficial relationship there,
Like people imagine maybe we're living inside a black hole
and the Big Bang. Singularity was sort of like the

(17:51):
singularity the start of a black hole. But it doesn't
really stand up to much scrutiny because the singularity at
the start of the universe, if there even was one.
The Big Bang doesn't explicitly predict a singularity. It just
takes you back in time to when the universe was
super duper dense, not all the way to a singularity,
because we can't extrapolate past a certain density. We need
quantum gravity for that.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Can we define singularity? What is a singularity?

Speaker 1 (18:15):
M Yeah, great question. So a singularity at the heart
of a black hole is a location in space with
infinite density, so you have finite mass and zero volume
infinite density, So that's a singularity the heart of a
black hole. The singularity in early universe theories before the
Big Bang, right as an origin and Stephen Hawking had
these ideas, is a moment in time where the whole

(18:38):
universe had infinite density. So in the center of a
black hole you have a singularity which should last forever
and is a location in space right, a dot in
space that lasts forever. Singularity the beginning of the universe
is a moment in time. It doesn't last forever, and
it's everywhere. So black hole has a singularity in space.
Big bang has a singularity in time. Ok So they're

(18:59):
both infinite densities, but they're quite different or like fundamentally
really very very different. And the cosmic horizon is not
really like an event horizon. The cosmic horizon is how
far we can see, but that's growing, you know, as
time goes on, we can see further and further into
the universe. It's quite different from an event horizon.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
Okay, and so the similarities kind of in these ideas
led I'm confused.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
So there's this trope out there that maybe we live
inside a black hole and black holes are often spinning.
Black Holes spin in the universe for the same reason
that galaxy spin. They start from a big chunk of
mass which then gets condensed down. If that mass was
originally spinning even slightly, then that spin gets exaggerated as
it collapses into a black hole. So black holes in
the universe often spinning. So the idea is, so, maybe

(19:46):
our universe is inside a black hole and that black
hole is spinning, and that spin somehow trickles down to
causes galaxies to spin, and therefore there's an imbalance in
the spin. And that's what he saw. That's the threat
of the connection.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Shouldn't that make everything spin the same way?

Speaker 3 (20:01):
Then?

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Well, you still expect some sort of chaos inside of it, right,
You still expect the distribution of spin from the galaxy.
So what you would expect in that scenario is a
bias towards one direction rather than the other. Okay, so
it's not impossible that we live inside a black hole.
But the theory that connects the Big Bang and black
holes has some issues. I mean, there's really just superficial
simulators there, and there are lots of other ways you

(20:23):
can explain galaxy spinning clockwise versus counterclockwise. You don't have
to go all the way to a black hole. And
there's no positive, definitive evidence at all that suggests a
black hole, just these sort of suggestive things, right, There's
nothing here which requires a black hole and eliminates other possibilities.
So you know, it's a cool study, and I'm glad

(20:44):
that people didn't. I'm glad this paper was written. And
the paper itself is fine, but the science communication interpretation
of it is definitely way too heavy on the connections.
Remember the title was scientists found evidence our entire universe
is trapped in a black hole. Like that title is
definitely not true.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yes, And was the article a bit better at describing
the nuances or was the article pretty much leading off
from the title as usual?

Speaker 1 (21:09):
It's a gradation. The scientific paper behind it is fine,
the article is a little bit too excited, and the
title is just flat out lying to you.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
All right, let's take a break and get to another
flat out lion title when we get back.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
All right, welcome back today.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
We're talking about science articles that way oversell the results
they're talking about.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
And Daniel, can I read the next headline?

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Please do?

Speaker 3 (21:53):
Okay, here we go gravity maybe key evidence that our
universe is a simulation, groundbreaking.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
New Search suggests, well, fun.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, and you know this title is not nearly as
bad as the other one because they use the word
may and suggests okay, right, so gravity may be key evidence.
Research suggests like, kudos to this writer, this editor whoever
wrote this title for like keeping some of the qualifiers
in there, so you don't go running after your grandma saying, see,
I told you scientists have proven we live in the matrix.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's right. I used to fight with my grandma about
that all the time.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
So what's the science here? What do people actually do? Well,
you know, we don't understand gravity. For gravity, we have
Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is awesome and suggests
that gravity isn't a force, but instead it's the curvature
of space time. Crucially, the invisible curvature of space time.
You cannot see the curvature, You just notice its effects,
and its effects mimic the effects of a force. Things

(22:54):
follow the curvature of space time. If you can't see
that curvature, it looks like something is applying a force
to it. But we don't fully understand gravity there's lots
of questions about it. We can't marry it with quantum mechanics.
We know that Einstein's general relativity needs an upgrade. So
people are still working on gravity, and they should be,
and they're exploring all sorts of crazy and fascinating ideas
string theory, loop, quantum gravity, gravitons, all sorts of stuff.

(23:18):
And there's an idea in the last couple of decades
that's sort of out of left field, which is my
favorite kind of idea that suggests that gravity is not
the bending of space time, and it's not a force
like Newton, but it's some illusion that comes out of
entropy of information in a two dimensional universe, and our
three D universe is an illusion, a hologram from that

(23:40):
two D universe.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
All right, So it sounds like you are portraying this
idea as something that isn't totally nuts, not totally nuts,
not totally nuts. Question Mark, Maybe we should have a
whole episode on why it's not totally nuts, because it
does kind of sound totally nuts.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Well, you know what, the universe could be totally nuts, right,
We have no guaranteed to the universe isn't insane or
isn't crazy. In fact, I kind of hope that it is.
That's much more fun. And this is an idea that
cropped up in the last few decades. It's called holography,
and the idea is that we seem to live in
a three dimensional space and we have gravity. But people
noticed that if you build a two dimensional universe, right,

(24:20):
so like just X and Y no z, but then
you add quantum fuzziness to that universe, that that quantum
fuzziness can act like a third dimension. It's like enough
fuzziness there to encode what you would need to describe
a third dimension. And then you can build a map
from two D plus quantum information two three D. You
can make arrows back and forth, like this location in

(24:42):
my two D universe maps to that location in my
three D universe. Why would you want to do that?
This seems like, you know, something fun for a math
nerved on a Saturday afternoon, But why would anybody who
cares about the universe want to do this? Because remember,
we don't have a quantum theory of gravity. We don't
understand quantum mechanics and gravity. So any way you can
connect quant theories with gravity is exciting. So people showed

(25:03):
that in a two D plus quantum stuff universe, you
can just do quantum theories and then you can map
them to the three D universe and you get gravity. Whoa,
so there is some weird connection. There's some hint between
gravity and quantum mechanics. So that's holography. These guys are
doing something slightly different. They're saying, think about that two
D universe with quantum stuff, think about how energy flows

(25:26):
in that quantum universe, and think about entropy. Remember we
had a whole episode about entropy and talked about how
entropy is like the reason cold milk spreads out in
your hot coffee or the reason that ice melts on
a hot day is not just because energy flows. Energy
flows to increase entropy, to increase the number of available
microscopic states to a system. So people were thinking about

(25:48):
energy flowing in this weird two D universe and we
might actually be living in, and then map that back
to three dimensions and they discovered, oh, actually all you
need is entropy. If you map entropy in this two
D world two to three D world, you get gravity.
So that's the entropic theory of gravity, which Eric Verlinda
and other folks are exploring and it's not totally insane.

(26:10):
There's problems with it and unsolved issues, like with any
Nissan theory, but it's totally a reasonable thing to be
exploring and a fascinating idea.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Like with physics in general.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, like with physics in general. Hey, the whole thing
is the work in progress, right, or like with your kitchen,
who knows that's that ever gonna get finished?

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Never gonna get finished.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
The entropic theory of Kelly's home improvement projects.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, probably never gonna get finished.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Let's have a race. Let's see if we figure out
quantum gravity before Kelly finishes her kitchen.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
Oh gosh, well my marriage is on the line. I
think we've got to We've got to get the kitchen
figured out sooner.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
So I started my career as an animal behaviorist, and
I'm really interested in the like culture of certain fields.
Do the people who study whether or not the universe
is a simulation?

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Like do those people act.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Differently in their day to day lives? Like does it
impact their behavior? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Good question. I'm not one of those people, right, So
I don't know. I wonder if it's really changes that.
That's a great question because it measures whether they really
believe it. Does it impact the way you live your life?
I'm not sure?

Speaker 2 (27:13):
All right, anyway, let's get back to the science.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
All right, So so far we've explained entropic gravity. Now
this paper is not about vanilla entropic gravity, which isn't
weird enough. There's a guy who's built a version of
entropic gravity, not using the normal entropy ideas, but information entropy.
This is based on Shannon's theory of information and it
measures like how much information can be stored in a message, etc.

(27:38):
And then the entropy of that information. And in this
paper he showed that if you think about the information
stored in that two D universe and then you try
to minimize the computational expense of simulating that universe, that
those requirements translate into gravity in the three D universe.
So take your two D universe and say, boy, this

(27:59):
is complicated for me to simulate. What if I required
entropy to act in a certain way that minimize that computation.
And what he discovered is doing that effectively requires things
to clump together, like as if matter was moving to
reduce the computational the informational cost in this universe. So
he's playing with his two D universe. He imposes some

(28:19):
computational constraints he discovers, and imposing those constraints requires gravity
in the three D version of that universe. And he says, ooh,
that's fascinating. Maybe our gravity is a consequence of people
who are programming the simulation having a limitation on their
computing and so they decided the only kind of the
universe they can simulate is one that has to have

(28:40):
this rule because they have a limit on their computers.
And that's why we have gravity.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
I'll admit that it sounds like we are like skipping
over some big black boxes, and I'm not quite following
all of the steps, but I see the general picture.
And so he published this and it was given a
lot more credit than it deserved.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah, so he publishes this, and this is a fine
thing to research, and the work is itself solid, and
it's cool that he shows the universe works in a
way that might make it easier to represent inside a computer.
Does that suggest we live in a simulation? M that's
a really big leap. I mean, even think about this question,
I feel like there's a lot of coverage of this
in popular media that skips over a lot of important details,

(29:23):
like remember that if our universe is a simulation, then
what is the computer it's running on. It's running on
a computer that's not in our universe. Our universe is
in that computer, And what are the rules of physics
that that universe has that that computer is following. We
have no idea any more than like super Mario can

(29:44):
do experiments to measure laws of physics in our universe. Right,
he's living in an artificial universe. There's no way he
can measure anything or deduce anything about the computing platform
he is on. So, like, what is computationally expensive for
these folks encoding the universe simulation? We have no i
idea because we don't know how their computer works. Even
in our universe, we have different kinds of computers, right, analog,

(30:06):
digital quantum, on which different things are expensive and different
things are cheap. So how can we possibly speculate about
what could be cheap or expensive on a computer that
can simulate the universe following laws of physics from another
universe we have no access to. It's totally impossible. It's
really just popular science clickbait. And if you hear folks

(30:27):
on podcasts talking about how like it's more likely we
live in a simulation than not, then you know they're
saying exciting things to get you to listen to podcasts.
They're not really digging into the details.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
So lots of banana peels being smoked is what I'm coming.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Away with here, exactly, And really cool ideas, really fun
to think about. Don't want to be negative about exploring
crazy ideas, but like, let's be careful about what we've
actually learned and what's just like exciting to think about.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Yeah, so all right, so we've got this idea here
that's kind of out there but is totally reasonable to explore,
and you want to get people excited about it. Absolutely,
it feels almost inevitable to me that people are kind
of going to oversell it and get sort of hooked
on the like kind of you know, smoking banana peals
aspects of it. So do you think this result gets

(31:13):
shared with the general public in any other way than
like a kind of overblown way, Like.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Do you think there's an appetite?

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, amongst the general public, I mean clearly there is
for our listeners, because like They ask very good, deep
in depth questions, but like, how would you present this
paper if you were writing the article?

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, it's a great question, right, We can't just criticize here.
We should give some positive constructive tips. I think the
options are either explain the caveats right like sure, pull
people in with the excitement of the possibility, and again
kudos to these writers are saying maybe suggests rather than
explicitly claiming, like in the previous article, but then also

(31:52):
be like, well that's exciting, but also you should know
or here's the work that needs to be done to
actually connect the dots between these ideas, or go deep
enough like we do, or like we try to do
to give people the understanding so that they can make
those connections themselves and they can be like, Okay, yeah,
I mean I see that, but I don't buy this
step or that piece didn't really convince me or whatever,

(32:13):
and like equip people with what they need to know
because I think, and I know you think, which is
why we're doing this project. That's possible for folks outside
of academia to understand this stuff. It can be explained
in a way that's deep and insightful and accessible and
so I'd like to see much more of that because
then people can draw their own conclusions rather than just
being told you should accept X or you should accept why.

(32:35):
They'd be like, well, I think this, but I want
to wait for that study or whatever. So either you
got to do a deep dive or you got to
include the caveats. And I think this article is not
the worst, but it definitely didn't include enough caveats for
my taste.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
Yeah, I mean my personal strategy is I try to
include all the caveats, but then I try to, you know,
lean on Zach to tell jokes or something along the way,
like try to get people to stay with you, because
it's hard because when you start into the caveats, I
get that people lose interest, and there's so many of
us that have short attention spans. But I think those
caveats for the right audience is the fascinating thing. And

(33:10):
I feel like the hard job of a science communicator
is to make the caveats as interesting as they need
to be to get people to stick with the explanations,
because otherwise otherwise you get headlines like the first one
we talked about. All right, let's move on to our
last amazing headline, which we will get to after the break.

(33:48):
All right, Daniel, do we have free will? Quantum experiments
may soon reveal the answer? Or so says this physics
article that we are going to talk about, depending.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Of course, on what you mean by soon reveal answer
and quantum experiments.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Oh wow, Wow, that's a lot of caveat. So do
we need to define free will or is that straightforward?
Because that doesn't sound straightforward to me.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, And the subtitle of this headline says whether or
not we have partial free will could soon be resolved
by experimenting quantum physics, with potential consequences for everything from
religion to quantum computers. Holy caw yeah, pay attention.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
Although I'll note we've already downgraded from free will to
partial free will when you get to the subtitle.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
But okay, so what's the science here?

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, so there is some really interesting stuff here in
quantum physics, on the edge of science and philosophy. It
has to do with something we talk about in the
podcast a lot, whether quantum mechanics really is random, weather,
the universe is deterministic, and so like brief history context,
Newton and folks discover that the universe follows laws, and

(34:55):
the laws seem to be deterministic. Like you throw a
ball exactly the same way twice, it follows exactly the
same trajectory. You fire a cue ball at an eight ball,
and you know exactly the angles and the masses. You
can predict exactly what's gonna happen. And this leads to
a view of the universe is like a clockwork universe.
Like given a moment in time, a snapshot in time,
you can predict everything that happens. Where is there room

(35:17):
in that universe for people making decisions? For Zach deciding
I'm gonna eat Kelly's piece of cake or I'm gonna
leave it in the fridge.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Right, that's always a bad choice to eat my cake.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
But is he making a decision or is it just
a consequence of a clockwork husband that you married.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Right, everyone's always given him excuses. Man, he made a choice.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Leave my cake alone.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
Quantum experiments may soon unravel Kelly's marriage.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
I feel like I'm getting mad at him for a
cake he didn't even eat.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
I know, our hypothetical cake.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
So that's the pre quantum view of the universe. Quantum
mechanics comes along says, oh, hold on a second, Actually,
things are fundamentally random. You can have exactly the same
experiment shooting an electron at a target twice with the
same initial conditions and get different outcomes because at the
quantum level, the microscopic level, things are not determined. Only
the probability is determined. So it's not like the universe

(36:13):
is totally random and chaotic, but like the universe predicts, oh,
the electron has a seventy percent chance to do this
and a thirty percent chance to do that, and what
actually happens depends on a role that die when you
look right. So that's the quantum introduction of randomness, and
that gives people some relief because they imagine, Okay, the
universe is not totally deterministic. There's some fuzziness in there,
and there that's where philosophically free will tries to creep in.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
Okay, and you, just like living in a simulation, you
feel like this is a reasonable connection between physics and
free will.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
I wouldn't go that far, but there are interesting angles
about these experiments and loopholes that we should explore, and
some of them do have potential implications for a free will.
So like, the reason that we think that quantum mechanics
is fundamentally random is because of a series of really incredible,
ingenious experiments that go by the name of Bell's inequality
or Bell's experiments, and these sought to answer the question,

(37:08):
which is really really difficult, how do we know that
the universe is actually fundamentally random? Things are not determined
until we measure, rather than things being determined before we
measure and just unknown to us. You know, say, for example,
Zack has two bags and he puts a red ball
in one and a blue ball in the other one,
and he gives you one of the bags, and you
haven't looked inside, and you go off and you run
a bunch of errands. Then Zack opens the bag and

(37:29):
he sees, oh, he's got the blue one. You know
instantly that Kelly has the red one, right, But it
was determined in advance, we just didn't know. So people
wanted to know that, Well, it is the universe like that,
where it really was determined, we just didn't know about it.
These are called hidden variables, or is the ball really uncertain?
Is it really red or blue? Until Zack opens it

(37:51):
and then it decides okay, And that seems like a
really hard thing to distinguish, right, Like, how could you
possibly know, because the only thing you can do is
look at it, and you can just see red or blue.
So John Bell came up with this ingenious set of experiments,
and the experiments you can't tell from an individual run
of the experiment. It's not like you see red, you
see blue. You know the answer, right, because both ideas
hidden variables or truly random predict the same thing. There.

(38:14):
But he came up with a set of experiments that,
of course don't use marbles in Kelly's kitchen. They use
particles and particle spin and it's not red or blue,
but it's spin up or spin down. And these experiments
take advantage of the fact the particles have three directions
where you can measure the spin like three axes in space,
and the quantum version of the universe predicts a difference
in the correlations between the measurements in different directions than

(38:37):
the hidden variables version. So Zach and Kelly have their
bags and they randomly decide, Okay, I'm going to measure
the spin in this direction, and Kelly decides randomly, I'm
going to measure the spin in that direction. If we
look at the correlation between their measurements, quantum mechanics predicts
a different correlation than the hidden variables version, Like, if
they both predict the same axis, they should get the
same answer. If they predict different axes, there should be

(38:59):
correlations in when theory that are different from correlations in
the other theory. Crucial step there, they're randomly deciding which access.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
To choose, and the answer that got was not consistent
with the idea that it was a hidden variable, so
that you could have known all along but you only
found out when you opened it, but that it actually
is being determined the moment you open.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
It exactly conclusively. Over and over these experiments. Mind blowing
conclusion is the universe really is fundamentally random, and these
things are not determined until you measure it, Like the
universe can maintain an uncertainty really incredible, requires like a
total upheaval of your understanding the natural reality. Really mind blowing.

(39:37):
But there is a potential loophole here, and the loophole is,
how do we know that Zach and Kelly's choices really
are random?

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (39:44):
What if there's some like correlation there, so that they're
making choices that are not random. They're determined by something
else that happened earlier. So they're correlated in a way
that confuses us, misleads us into thinking the quantum answer
is right, but really it's sooner determined.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
The Wiener Smiths are entangled in some way.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
So this is a theory called super determinism that says,
like something that happened early early on in the universe,
some structural formation or some super intelligent alien designed this
whole thing. So we would think that the universe is random,
but really it is deterministic, and we've been confused. And
the way they're controlling us is by influencing the random choices. Right,

(40:26):
Those random choices are not really random. It's all downstream
of something wow, okay, And so people explore these ideas,
and this article discusses some papers in philosophy about how
you might be able to close these loopholes and figure
out is superdeterminism real? Can you test it? It's very
hard to test, And so it explores these concepts. It

(40:48):
doesn't suggest that we're going to learn the answer to
free will, right. It's like maybe we could try to
close this superdeterminism loophole. But dot dot dot free will
is a much bigger question, right, And if you read
the paper, philosophers don't even agree about what we mean
by free will, Like what does free will even mean?
Like let's start with defining that. You know, like some

(41:09):
people think you're gonna have free will even if the
universe is deterministic. You just like draw dotted line around
a certain set of processes and say, I'm calling this Daniel,
and these are Daniel's choices, and you know, we attribute
those to him. And other people think the free will
requires some like supernatural thing that's separate from the physical universe,
where you have like a mind realm that's influencing matter

(41:31):
somehow in the physical universe. It's a whole set of
ideas for what free will could even mean. So, yes,
this is a study in philosophy, not a set of
quantum experiments that touches on questions which are adjacent to
free will. But it certainly doesn't suggest a set of
experiments that are going to tell us conclusively do we
have free will or not?

Speaker 3 (41:51):
So did the paper mention free will in passing? Like
how how did this all become about free will? Was
that completely on the part of the science communicator.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
Well, again, the paper is reasonable and talks about free
will because you know, these questions do brush up against
these issues of free will. But this article in the
New Scientist, not my favorite source, definitely over sells it
and the title is like totally irresponsible in my view.
And you know, people have thought about this a lot already,
Like people go to great lengths to make these bells

(42:19):
experiments not susceptible to super intelligent alien manipulation. Like the
lengths they go to to make these choices random is hilarious.
There were experiments done in twenty fifteen where the decisions
were determined by taking a bunch of bits from three
independent sources. One of them is the digits of pie.

(42:40):
Another are strings chosen at random from Mindy Python and
the Holy Grail. The Back to the Future trilogy episodes
of Doctor Who Saved by the Bell and Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
How did Saved by the Bell get in there?

Speaker 1 (42:53):
I think they were worried that they were only choosing
nerdy things, and they were like, uh, oh, what if
the aliens are only manipulating? You know, the nerd culture.
So they're like, let's this is like the nerd view
of what popular culture is, like, let's do saved by
the Bell amazing.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
So if you.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
Want to affect these experiments and contrive some way to
make them non random, you have to manipulate the digits
of pie and somehow influence the people who wrote all
of those episodes of all of those shows, so that
you can end up with a set of experiments which
seemed like they were random, but they weren't really.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
Okay, So we have gone to great lengths to back
up Bell's experiments to solve the superdeterminism problem, but we
have not yet weighed in on free will.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
That's right, And let's say that we close this loophole.
We say, okay, superdeterminism, we've proven it's not true. We
know the universe is fundamentally quantum. That still does not
prove free will right. Randomness is not free will right.
Even if we show the universe has some elements of randomness,
that doesn't give you control over it, right. That just
means that there's some parts of that are probabilistic instead

(43:57):
of deterministic. It's not even clear to me that has
any relevant to free will. It's just like, seems intellectually
adjacent to it, but it's not actually a trapdoor in
which you can sneak in free will in my view.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
So this is only an audio podcast, so the video
people can't see that Daniel is gesticulating wildly and getting
super worked.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Up and almost knocked his coffee mug off the table.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
So well, you know, one of the things I love
about physics is that it has philosophical implications that are exciting,
that are fascinating. You can learn about where the universe
comes from and how it works and all that kind
of stuff, and so yeah, it's disappointing to me when
people try to make those philosophical connections when they aren't
there yet, like, you know, let's reserve that f when
we really do learn something deep about the universe.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
I also feel like every time a pop science article
over sells something and makes it sound like science is
about to answer a big question that it's really not
even close to answering, you hurt the ability to communicate
well with the public because they're like, oh, you guys
have been promising answers to all this stuff and it's
not happening. And I get that like, to get your
articles published, you need to convince an editor that you

(45:01):
have the most exciting idea. But I feel like maybe
it's the editor's job. Someone's job needs to be to
make sure that we're not over selling things and making
science feel like, you know, one, what are we even doing?

Speaker 1 (45:13):
New? Breakthrough means fusion is just around the corner? How
many times you read that article?

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Oh my gosh, that's right, yes, over and over again,
and so anyway, it's very important. But okay, so I
think the field needs to be doing a slightly better job.
But Daniel, you promised us at the beginning that you
were going to give us tips to make sure that
we could be critical readers so that our BS detectors
could go off when they needed to go off.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
So what should we be looking for?

Speaker 1 (45:36):
Yeah, so I read a lot of science that's outside
of my field of expertise. I mean, if there's an
article on particle physics, I can read it and tell
what's nonsense and what isn't. But I can't always in
other areas. So I have to learn to be a
critical reader. So Number one, I go to trusted sources.
I like the New York Times Science coverage. I like
Quantum Magazine, and there are very very few other places
that I really really trust were if I'm reading something

(45:57):
I don't understand, I'd be like, well, I think I'm
going to believe this. And so you need to build
up confidence with a source, like they need to repeatedly
cover things in a level headed way. You need to
see stuff that you understand covered wells that you can
trust it when you don't understand it. And if your
trusted source has not covered some big breakthrough in science,
there's probably a reason. So if you're only seeing this

(46:19):
in like sciencebuzz dot com, then it's probably overblown. That's
number one.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
I had the opportunity to write for The New York
Times twice, and one thing that really impressed me about
that process was they had an independent fact checker go
through and I had to provide citations for everything. They
made sure all of my citations were good, and there
were a couple places where I had a citation that
was like twenty years old and they're like, we want
you to find a more more recent reference convince us
that this is still the case. And I was like,

(46:46):
oh nice. And I was able to do that, but
I loved that. They were like making me defend every
single line of my article. So anyway, Yeah, I've been
impressed with how The New York Times does their science.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah, exactly. And you know, I'm not going to speak
to their political coverage. And I know they've taken a
lot of hits, fairly or unfairly for all sorts of coverage.
But their science section is good. You know, their science
writers know their science and do the work, and they're
not just like, hey, consumer, beware, it's up to you
to decide whether to believe this. They're doing the work
behind the scenes to try to make sure this stuff

(47:18):
is legit, just like we try to do. A second
piece of advice is ignore the headline. Usually the headline
is not written by the person who wrote the article, right.
It's written by some editor trying to get clicks. And
often the author disagrees with the headline and was overruled, right,
And so it's not the author article's fault, And it
doesn't say that anywhere on the page. It's like, you know,

(47:40):
crazy claim by you know, reputable writer, and you're like, oh,
I feel bad for that guy, So be careful about that.
Make sure you read the article, not the headline, and
also in the article, look for comments from uninvolved scientists.
Some articles are just regurgitations of press releases from universities

(48:02):
who listen to scientists few claims about their work. I
discovered we all live in a black hole. Yay, reputable scientist.
But did they go off and find somebody else in
the field who knows what they're talking about, who is
not involved and therefore has nothing at stake and can say, well, yeah,
I read Daniel's paper and I think it's pretty solid.
This is seminal work, or you know, I read Daniel's
paper and I think these are big leaps and there's

(48:23):
still a lot of work to be done. Look for
those quotes, because number one, it means the journalists did
their job and consulted with experts and listen what those
other experts have to say. So I think that's an
important part of any responsible bit of science journalism, and
you should look for it.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Ed Young does such a great job with that. Often
when my research gets covered by popular press, I don't
read it, partly because I'm going to get frustrated if
it was wrong, or if my quote was taken out
of context or something. So I don't read it to
avoid the frustration, but I read the articles that Ed
Young writes because I want to see like, oh, who
did he ask? And what is like a serious critique

(48:59):
of the work. And every once in a while I
will see like, oh, that's such and such that I
oversold this a little bit, and yeah, maybe they're right.
And anyway, I feel like I learned something from his
science reporting because he digs so deep into everything and anyway,
that's yeah, it's just I just I never get tired
of saying great things about Ed Young's work.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Well, it's so admirable when people have built up a
brand of being reputable. It's hard work, right, Yeah, he's
done all that hard work that you know, boots on
the ground reporting to understand is this right? Is this wrong?
What is the nuance? What are the experts that say?
What are ways to disagree with this? And so he
deserves that credibility and it's rare and so yeah, I
read everything Ed Young writes also for that same reason.

(49:39):
And there are science writers I know and I follow,
and I will read whatever they write because it's good.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, yep, amen, all right, any other tips?

Speaker 1 (49:47):
Keep reading? You know, the more you read, the more
you'll become literate in the topic, can you'll be able
to spot boloney on your own.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
My last tip is you should join our Discord community,
where anytime you come across an article that lands on
your BS detector a little bit, you can pop it
up on there and we'd be happy to tell you
what we think.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
And there's a whole.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Community of people willing to critically read the articles and
way in. So find us at Daniel and Kelly dot
org and there's a link to our Discord community there.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
And if you don't like Discord, you can just write
to us, send us an email to questions at Danielankelly
dot org and we will help you break it down
all right.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Until next time.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
We would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
We really would. We want to know what questions you
have about this Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 3 (50:40):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
If you contact us, we will get back to you.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at questions at Danielankelly.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on
all of those plans platforms.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
You can find us at D and K Universe.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
Don't be shy, write to us,