Classic Episode - Is the Universe Random?

If you repeat the same experiment, do you get the same outcome?

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (01:52):
Let's go places. There's a core idea in science that
experiments should be repeatable.

Speaker 4 (02:05):
If you do an experiment the same way different times,
you should get the same result.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
However, there is a loophole.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
There's a loophole in science.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, and that loophole opens a window into everything we
think is true about reality in the universe and everything.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
In which we try to take the entire universe and
break it into bite sized pieces so you can enjoy
them with your afternoon coffee.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
I'm more I'm a cartoonist. I draw comics online.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I spend my
days smashing protons together at the large Hadron colliders to
try to reveal the secrets of the universe, mostly so
that I can tell them to you in this podcast.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
Basically, only one of us is qualified to be explaining
things to you on this podcast.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
That would be the cartoonist. Yeah, physicists are not qualified
usually to be explainers. Mostly we just try to solve
the mysteries of the universe. We don't try to tell
anybody about them, right.

Speaker 4 (03:21):
Mostly physicists just need explaining, that's right.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
That's where the cartoons come in, right.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
Yeah, and spouses also, spouses of physicists probably have to
do a lot of explaining.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
You've got some explaining to do, exactly. Yeah. So we're
here to talk to you about big questions about the universe.
And today's question is a really deep and basic question,
and it's about the very nature of reality. What is it?
What are we going to talk about today?

Speaker 4 (03:48):
Is the universe random or is it just chaotic? And
what's the difference?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Or is it run by some super being and we're
actually just in their simulation. But that's other episode.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
That's a whole other podcast.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Right today, just the two sinister options, random or chaotic,
you might feel like, ooh, neither of those sound very cozy.
I don't want to live in either of those universes.

Speaker 4 (04:10):
Well, the question basically breaks down to is the universe predictable?
Like can you predict what the universe is going to do?
Or is it that nobody can predict what the universe
is going to do?

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Right? And I think that's why it's an awesome question
for science because for so many thousands and thousands of years,
I think humans probably felt like the universe around them
was totally unpredictable. I mean, they invented gods for this
and for that to try to describe how the universe
was out of their control and doing things that didn't
make sense, as if it had some you know, will
and agency, right, Yeah, and then science comes along it

(04:44):
says actually there are rules and you can discover them,
and slowly science starts to creep in this description of
the universe that locks out this agency, this idea, this personality,
and gives you the sense that maybe the universe follows
these rules.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
Right. So we went out and as usual, you'll ask
people on the street do you think the universe is
random or chaotic?

Speaker 1 (05:06):
And here's what they had to say.

Speaker 5 (05:09):
That's gonna okay, that's a that's a thinker right there.
I would say, surely random. With randomness comes chaos. You
never know what will happen, but there's there's always a
probability and a chance of things, of certain things happening.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
I'd like to say random.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
I'm religious, so I feel like everything happens for a reason,
And yes it is random, but there's a purpose behind everything.

Speaker 4 (05:34):
I think it's a mixture of both. Like it's random,
but it can appear chaotic because of how.

Speaker 6 (05:40):
Everything is truly chaotic, because like on a smaller level,
everything is like moving really fast, but at like a
bigger level, we don't see any of that.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Wow, So would you think of those answers or him?

Speaker 4 (05:56):
I think they were all over the place. They were
actually kind of random.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, they're random and chaotic. I feel like I feel
like people had no idea what I was asking them,
you know, I.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
Feel like people just I feel like they had no
idea what they were answering.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Some of those people. I remember recording these interviews, and
some of those people, as the words were coming out
of their mouth, I felt like they surprised them as
much as they did me. Like it was all over
the place.

Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah, well, I feel like some people it's interesting. Some
people related to that question to the other question, which
is like does the universe have a purpose? Like do
things happen for a reason? Or do they Is it
just like a random role to die and nobody's really
in charge? Like that's the question, right, Like is somebody
in charge of the universe or is it impossible for

(06:41):
anyone to kind of predict what it's going to do?

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, I think you're right. That does get at the
heart of the question. You know what's going to happen
in the universe and can we tell and can we
influence it? Right? Is the universe sort of churning on
without our ability to change this direction at all in
some sort of way that's been determined since the dawn
of time? Or can we nudget and in one way
or the other, you know, make the calves win? Or
can you if you jump up and down in front

(07:04):
of your television enough whill the Warriors win another NBA championship?
You know? Can you influence the world? I think that's
a that's an interesting and deep question. Yeah, that's probably
the one people were actually having in their mind.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
Yeah, so may let's go back in history. And I
like how you think about this question a lot, Daniel,
which is that you sort of start with early man,
like the cave men and woman and women, early humans,
we're really just kind of at the mercy of all
the elements and all the animals out there and the weather,
and so they to them, the universe was this crazy,

(07:35):
random and chaotic place, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
And it actually it touches on sort of my personal
theory of consciousness, which is that we developed this awareness
because we are looking out into the world for other
people or other ideas. Are there intelligences and we have
this hyperactive ability to see agency, to see intention in
something that we don't understand, and we imagine that there
must be a mind behind it. And so I think

(07:58):
for a long time, people's view the world was that
it was controlled by other greater minds. You know, what
controls the lightning? Why do some people die of disease?
All this stuff?

Speaker 4 (08:07):
And then as there must be like a consciousness that
is shooting out these lightning bolts or making it rain,
or you know, making the sun come out.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Or killing my baby of some horrible disease. Right, like,
there must be. It's hard to live in this world
if you don't have the sense that there's somebody else
in charge. Right there's a lot of suffering and a
lot of pain, and a lot of unexplained events, and
it's nice to think somebody else out there is taking
care of it, or somebody's in charge of it.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
But there's a reason, right.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, that there's a reason, that there's some design. It's
not just random. But then as history progresses, as we
were saying earlier, you know, science comes along, it says, well,
there are seemed to be some rules, not just like
that anything can happen. You can't have an Ostrich here
and then all of a sudden the ostrich is gone.
There are some rules that limit what can happen. If
you know what's happening. Now there's a certain set of

(08:57):
possibilities for what can happen in one second and two seconds?
Then you know that's physics, right.

Speaker 4 (09:01):
Well, it started with like noticing patterns, right, Like lightning
doesn't just come out of nowhere, It comes out when
there's these dark clouds in the sky.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Right, Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And people started noticing patterns and
started putting those together and then asking themselves, can I
use what I've learned in the past to predict the future?

Speaker 6 (09:21):
Right?

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Like if I have the same set of events that
happened yesterday, I am I going to be able to
tell what's going to happen next week if the same
thing happens.

Speaker 6 (09:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
If I roll a ball down the hill yesterday and
it goes up to a certain speed, will the same
thing happen tomorrow?

Speaker 4 (09:34):
Right? Right? Or if I throw a ball in the
air and I know which direction it's going and how
fast it is going, can I predict where it's going
to land exactly? If I build a catapult, can I
basically aim it right?

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Exactly? And that's how military technology drove science even hundreds
of years ago. Right, where do I shoot my cannon exactly?
To get over that wall.

Speaker 4 (09:53):
Yeah, well, that's kind of where Newton came in, right,
Isaac Newton, And that's why they say he kind of
gave birth to science, right, or at least the scientific revolution.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
No, I think it was earlier than that. Newton came
along well after folks like Galileo and Francis Bacon and
those guys. They really were the first ones to do
experiments and to say, let's see what the rules of
the universe is following, and let's see if we can
try to deduce them and use those to predict the
outcome of future experiments. They really were the first ones
to connect the idea of a scientific universe to the

(10:25):
actual experiments they do to influence those ideas and to
predict future results. And I think that's the key is
that here we've developed a system science which can not
only explain what we've seen before, but can predict the future.
Now you are about to fire a cannon ball at
your enemy. You want to know where is that ball
going to fly? And it's incredible that physics can do that.

(10:45):
It can literally predict the future if you know enough
about the situation, right.

Speaker 4 (10:50):
Right, It's kind of like Google Maps. Now it can
totally tell if you're going to be late to meeting
or not, or to a podcast recording, like how long
will take you to get home? They're like, oh, they're
going to be late.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
It's not always a hard problem though. Jege for example,
it says if person equals whohe, then late equals true
every time.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Every time.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Data predictable data, and some of these things are simple,
but some of these things are complicated, And it's incredible
to witness as physics sort of builds confidence and science
develops our ability to predict you know, chemical reactions and
biological function, all sorts of things, and then it gives

(11:31):
this creeping sense of is there anything that can escape science? Right?
Can science predict everything? Like if you knew enough about
the world, could you break it all down to cannonballs
to predict where all those cannonballs are going to fly
and then tell exactly what's going to happen?

Speaker 4 (11:45):
Yeah, And it's like kind of like if you know
that force equals mass times acceleration, like Newton figured out,
then you can predict things like cannon balls and catapults
and and and you could possibly predict like how a
room of particles move, right, Yeah, possibly you can extend
that to can you predict how the whole world works? Yeah,

(12:09):
what it's going to do and what people are going to.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Do, extrapolate to the whole universe, right, Yeah, I mean,
and that's the principle of determinism. It says, look, if
things follow rules, and the future is dependent only two things,
one the rules and two the things that are happening
now the current state, right, given if you know exactly
where things are, imagine the whole universe is just a
bunch of tiny cannonballs, right, and you know the rules

(12:31):
of those cannonballs, and you know the position and direction
of motion of all those cannonballs. Then in principle, given
a super powerful universe sized computer, you should be able
to predict the future one to five ten seconds into
the future, a thousand seconds into the future.

Speaker 4 (12:45):
Like every single molecule, atom, subatomic particle. You should be able.
If it follows rules, you should be able to kind
of track where it's going to go. Is should tell you,
based on where things are now, what's going to happen exactly.
It's kind of like this idea of a clock, right right,
is the universe giant clock just kind of clicking along
or is there some kind of magic inside of it

(13:06):
that makes it unpredictable?

Speaker 1 (13:08):
Right exactly. And the idea of the universe just being
a huge clock is both exciting and terrifying. Right. It's
exciting because like, wow, can you imagine we could understand
the universe that well, that we could predict the future,
think about what we could do, right, But it's terrifying
because it's sort of like you're trapped in this science
cage where you have no influence over the world and
everything you do and know and say, and that joke

(13:30):
you're gonna make in that fart you're gonna let slip
are all predictable, right, All those things are predictable. That's scary.
It makes you feel like you are part of that
watch and you're just clicking along because you're reacting to
things around you in your initial conditions. And so that's terrifying.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
And I think we have kind of an innate sense
of like rejecting this idea that we're trapped. Right. Everyone
wants to feel like they have free will, Like everyone
wants to know that they have a choice.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Right, Well, I guess so my kids don't feel that way,
you know, like, why did you hit your sister? Well,
she hit me, you know, Like, well, so what you
have no free will? Like you're completely determined by her behavior.
I have that argument with my kids so many times.
I'm always thinking about the philosophical echoes of that.

Speaker 4 (14:14):
My kids are always rebelling. They're like, we want free will.
Don't tell us what to do?

Speaker 1 (14:19):
I see, but they want you to follow rules. They're like,
you promised, daddy we could have ice cream, right, and
so therefore you have to There's no more decision to
be made.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
Kids are so unfair.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
They're philosophically inconsistent. I think it's really the problem with Yeah,
the cute, But if they just read some more Nietzsche,
you know, and some some carl and some Popper or whatever,
they would be easier to be around.

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(19:14):
something fascinating about the deterministic view of the universe, but
probably people out there thinking, Okay, maybe in theory you
could predict the whole universe, but in practice that's impossible.
I mean, you don't have a universe sized computer to
break the whole universe, and even to predict like you know,
a person is a huge number of articles, and so
to do that calculation just seems impractical.

Speaker 4 (19:35):
Right, Right, it's practically possible, but I think people revel
just to the idea of it, right, Like, are my
thoughts my thoughts or just something that I'm programmed and
that I will inevitably have and do.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, And that's a really deep question. And so we
started out with prehistoric man feeling like the universe is
full of random not random, but unexplained agency and intelligence
all the way to life. Now, scientific physical determinism says, actually,
the universe just clicks along like a watch, right, and
there's no free will. So let's take one step back

(20:08):
from that, and that's chaos. That says, well, maybe the
universe is deterministic, sure, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily
practical for you to predict it because the way things
play out is really sensitive to exactly how things started.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Well, I think some people who responded to their question.
Maybe weren't sure about the difference, right, Like, what's the
difference between something being chaotic and something being random?

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Right? And so let's drill into that. So let's take,
for an example, the roll of a dice. Right, people
think of rolling dice as random, but actually it's chaotic,
meaning that it's hard to predict, but it is deterministic.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
Oh what do you mean?

Speaker 1 (20:47):
If you knew exactly how I threw the dice, like
exactly the direction and the spin and all the molecules
of the air, then you could treat the moll like
the little cannon balls, little particles, and you could model
how it rolls, and you could, in theory, predict exactlyactly
how the dice rolled every time.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Meaning like if if I'm seeing footage of you throwing
to die, and like I pause the video just as
to die leave your hands, then I could you know
where they are. I know which direction they're going, how
fast are going. I could run some kind of computer
simulation to like follow the die and predict what they're
going to do when they bounce off the table and

(21:24):
roll around. I could potentially predict what the dye are
going to show.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
That's right, because we're saying that the universe in that
case is deterministic, and so you should be able to
predict the future given enough information about the setup. Right now,
that's a hard problem, and that's why we use dice, right,
because it's really difficult, and nobody can practically, like bring
a mini computer into Las Vegas and use that to
predict who's going to win it Craps, right though in theory,

(21:49):
In theory, you could if the universe was deterministic but
very sensitive to exactly how somebody's rolling the dice. Right,
when you throw the dice at Craps, if you flip
it this way or that way, then it's going to
bounce slightly differently, and how it's going to hit that
the felt on the table. It's all very very sensitive,
and a very small change in how you throw it
can result in a totally different number. That's what we

(22:10):
mean by chaos.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
It means that it's like the butterfly effect, right, like
the idea that if you butterfly flaps is wing here,
it's going to have a huge effect, maybe potentially on
the weather and on the other side of the world. Right,
It's like a very sensitive system.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
That's right. The weather is a great example because we
understand all the processes of weather. I mean, it's hot air,
it's cold air, it's water. We know that stuff. It's
pretty simple chemistry. But all together, an entire planet is
really difficult to describe because it's huge and it's really sensitive. Like,
as you say, a butterfly flapping its wings in China
could change the way this air flows, which could change

(22:46):
the way that air flows, which bounces off this building,
which turns into a rainstorm, which collides with this cloud
and causes a hurricane. Right, it's not true that every
time a butterfly flaps its wings you get a hurricane.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
But sometimes so weather is it's chaotic, but it's not random,
is that what you're saying? That rand Like, if we
could keep track of every single butterfly in the world
flapping its wing, we would be able to predict the
weather if we had a giant supercomputer the size of
the Solar System. But since we don't, then weather it

(23:17):
seems random, But actually it's chaotic.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Exactly, And that's exactly what scientists are trying to do.
They're building bigger and bigger and faster computers to try
to simulate more and more of the Earth's atmosphere to
get better and better predictions of weather. In fact, I
think like all the top ten supercomputers in the world
are devoted to that problem, like modeling the weather, because
it's important. But you're exactly right, it's actually chaotic, meaning
it's deterministic but really sensitive to exactly how it started.

(23:43):
But it seems random because it's too difficult for us
to calculate, and principle we should be able to, but
we can't. Another example is flipping a coin. Right, based
on how you flip the coin, you should be able
to model how it spins through the air and how
it bounces off air molecule and how it hits the
ground and where it lands right, But it's a difficult problem.
So we can use it to model randomness to say
it's kind of like randomness. Really it's just chaotic though, But.

Speaker 4 (24:07):
Then if I flip the coin one hundred times, most
likely half of those times will behead and half of
those times will be tails. Right, So where does that
fit into chaos theory? Like why is it predictable on
a statistical basis?

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Okay, so that's fascinating that's an emergent phenomenon. Right. That says,
if you understand the tiny little local laws of physics,
like the laws of how the particles inside the coin move,
you should be able to predict some larger effect. And
it's true, there is a simple or description of that
larger effect, right, if you understand how these things work.
So physics works on these layers. Right, you can either

(24:44):
understand it a very low layer and try to model
it all the way up to a higher layer, or
you can just try to get an understanding at a
higher layer, just the same way. You could say, well,
I can understand the way canniball flies by modeling all
the particles inside of it, or you could just use
F equals M, which treats the whole cannonball like one particle.
That's just a question of at what layer you're modeling something. Right.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
Okay, so a coin is chaotic but not actually random.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
But not actually random yet if the universe is deterministic,
then a coin is chaotic but not actually random.

Speaker 4 (25:17):
Yeah, okay, got it, got it.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
But then there's the question of that's the really the
nugget of the question is is the universe deterministic? You know,
if you have a particle or a billiard ball or
a cannonball or whatever, and you understand direction it's going,
can you predict its future out into infinity? Right?

Speaker 5 (25:34):
Right?

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Can you tell exactly what's going to happen?

Speaker 4 (25:37):
But there's so many factors leading up to me tossing
the coin that it's so unpredictable that it's it's it
feels random.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
That's right. And so we have to separate between what's
practical and what's in theory possible. Okay, anything that's chaotic.
We're saying, in theory, if you knew enough, you could
predict it, right, whereas but in practice that we can't.
So it's it's it's.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
So it seems. It seems the random number generators and
computers when they try to come up with a random number,
it's not really random, you're saying, it's just an algorithm.
That's chaotic.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
That's right. Computers, by construction are deterministic, right, We've built
them to be deterministic. Every time you run a program,
it should give you the same answer if you give
it the same input, right, right. There's no way for
computer to do anything but that. It's like a series
of logic gates, and you know, how it's implemented is
not important, but you know, it's a system for doing
deterministic calculations. That's what a computer is. So it's impossible

(26:31):
for computer to be truly random. All the random number
generators in your favorite Python code are actually pseudo random
number generators. They're just chaotic. They take a seed a
number to start from, and then they spin off of
that and generate a sequence of numbers. But if you
give them the same seed twice, they'll generate the same
sequence of numbers twice.

Speaker 4 (26:50):
Wow. So like if you're playing a video game and
you're inside of a virtual world, that world is totally
determinat absolutely it's been crunched on by a logical computers.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Exactly. You do the same move every time. You'll kill
that boss character every single time. And not even in
silly games like you know, like punch Out, where the
guy is totally predictable, but even in more complicated ones.
You know, if you're in the same world and you
do the same thing, the same things should happen. Because
computers are not capable of true randomness.

Speaker 4 (27:18):
Before we keep going, let's take a short break.

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Speaker 4 (30:48):
So the question is is our universe like a computer simulation? Right? Like,
the question is is is our universe also being crunched
by a logical computer that can't be random?

Speaker 1 (31:01):
That's right? And for a long time people thought the
universe was deterministic. I mean, we were able to predict
the outcome of every experiment. Things were going along really well.
And then of.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
Course we can throw a spaceship and land it on
the moon.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
That's pretty crazy, right, Yeah, that well, that's pretty risky,
but yeah, that's pretty amazing. You have to certainly have
confidence in our ability to predict the future if you're
going to get into that cannon ball and get shot
out into space. Right.

Speaker 4 (31:25):
Well, I remember in Gratz Cloths, in this classic it's
called linear dynamical systems. But I remember in class, this
guy was so the professor was so cocky. He's like,
of all the technologies that contributed to putting a man
on the moon, this is the one that made it happen.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Linear algebra.

Speaker 4 (31:41):
I kind of had this linear algebra equation we would
not be able to put a man in the mood.
And so that's how powerful this idea is, right, Like,
if you can predict f equals in a you can
put a man on the mood.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And it's given us great
power over our environment. I mean, everything that we have
is because we have mastered a lot of the laws
of our environment and then use them and bent them
to our will to improve our lives. Right, So it
certainly works, and we rely in every day, every time
you get into a car or an airplane, you rely
on it working the same way it did yesterday, right, right, right,
So that's that's a relief. But it was about one

(32:13):
hundred years ago when people started seeing things that they
couldn't explain, and it was quantum mechanics that told us
that maybe the universe is not deterministic. Maybe these little
particles don't follow the same rules that like billiard balls
and basketballs and larger objects follow, and maybe they're not
even deterministic, meaning you do the same experiment twice with

(32:35):
tiny particles, you could get different outcomes even if you
do it exactly the same way.

Speaker 4 (32:41):
And this all came about when people started noticing that
like light and things had a minimum size, right, Like
light doesn't come in infinitely small bits of light, Like
there's chunks of light.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
That's right. Yeah, Einstein was looking at some experiments it
didn't quite make sense, and the only way he could
explain them was if light came in little packets. And
that's what quantum means. Quantum means a unit or a packet,
and so he suggested that maybe light comes in these
little packets. But then it had all these far reaching consequences,
you know, about light going through mirrors and through prisms,

(33:15):
and the way people could understand that was only if
there were various probabilities for things to happen, and they
began this whole revolution of quantum mechanics, which then Einstein
tried to put the brakes on, right, He was like, wait,
hold on a second, guys, this is crazy talk. There's
no way the universe works this.

Speaker 4 (33:29):
Way, meaning like, this idea of quantum stuff only made
sense if the universe work based on probabilities, not like deterministically,
you know, you have to describe things with wave functions,
and things aren't really like point particles or kind of
fuzzy things.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
That's exactly the point is that there's this fuzziness in
the universe and quantum mechanics because there's these minimum sized
objects and the way they interfere with each other and
the way the calculations happen. Quantum mechanics predicts that the
universe is fundamentally random, and it means that, for example,
you have an electron, you don't know exactly where it is.
There's a probability distribution that says, most likely it's here,

(34:06):
maybe it's there, maybe it's somewhere else.

Speaker 4 (34:09):
Is it that we can't is it like a randomness,
like we can't know where it is, or that there's
this trade off between like momentum and position.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Right, that's exactly the right question, and that's exactly what
people were asking. They looked at these equations and they said, well,
is it that we can't predict where the electron is,
like it's totally impossible to predict. Or is it that
we just don't know where it is that we haven't
figured it out how to get that information? Right? Does
the information not exist or do we just not have it?
And so Einstein is the one who said there must

(34:41):
be some hidden variable, there must be something that these
particles are carrying, some piece of information that determines exactly
what's going to happen to them. But we just don't
know what it is. Oh I see to him. It
was crazy to think that you could shoot an electron
into an experiment twice and get two different answers, but
that's what appeared to happen. People set up these careful
experiments where you would shoot a photon one at a time.

(35:04):
You would shoot photons into an experiment, and every photon
would do something different, and then as you would accumulate
a bunch of photons, it would add up to give
you a distribution that made sense to you, just the
same way when you flip a coin, you get heads,
you get tails, you get heads, you get tails. It
seems random, but eventually it builds up to fifty to fifty. Right.
Quantum mechanics tells us all we can do is predict

(35:27):
the eventual distribution. We can say, if you measure a
thousand electrons, some of them will go here and some
of them will go there. It says you can't predict
any individual one. All you can predict is the distribution
of outcomes.

Speaker 4 (35:39):
So eistin was like, maybe a photon is kind of
like the coin we were talking about before, Like maybe
it seems random to us, but really it's just kind
of this chain of little local events that actually make
it predictable. That's right, if we knew all that information inside,
Like maybe it just looks fuzzy to us and we
can't tell where it is, but inside that part of

(36:00):
really actually knows where it is.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
It's exactly right.

Speaker 4 (36:02):
That's what he wanted to believe, right.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
That's what he wanted to believe, And you got to
sympathize with the guy. Right, it's hard to imagine that
the universe would not be deterministic. I mean, we spent
hundreds of years building up our confidence in science and
in physics, especially as being able to predict the future,
and just of saying, basically, the universe follows rules. Right,
So now all of a sudden, you're telling us, what
there's like dice in there?

Speaker 5 (36:23):
Right?

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Is there some randomness? Like every time you shoot an
electronic experiment, somebody or something or the universe is making
like a random decision about where it's going to go.
It seems crazy. So you're absolutely right. And he suggested
that a simpler explanation is that they're carrying along another
piece of information that we just don't have access to,
or can't measure or didn't measure, and that that's actually

(36:44):
determining in a totally predictable way what's going to happen
to each particle. That was his solution to the problem.

Speaker 4 (36:50):
Well, he famously said God doesn't play dice, right.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Famously quoted as saying that I'm not sure he actually did,
but it's oh, it's really but it's a pretty good
summary of what he believed fake news about hindsight, Well,
like a lot of fake news is a kernel of
truth in it. He certainly wanted to believe in the
deterministic universe and it made sense to him. And you
know what it makes sense to me. I mean the

(37:14):
idea that there's like a true random number generator somewhere
in the universe that's making a decision every time you
shoot an electron into something. It doesn't make any sense
to me intuitively. You know, not that the universe has
to make sense to me intuitively, but it doesn't.

Speaker 4 (37:31):
So you're saying, the quantum mechanics says that there is
a randomness in things, and so where is that randomness
actually in like the position of particles, in their velocity,
in their like very being, in their energy level. Is
this randomness of everything?

Speaker 1 (37:48):
Well, there's randomness at every level. I mean there's randomness
between every time you look at something. So say, for example,
you measure an electron, you see it's a certain place,
then you look away, right, because you can't monitor an
electron every moment or every nanosecond even you look away,
what does the electron do between when you last saw
it and when you'll next see it?

Speaker 4 (38:09):
Meaning like, if I know where it is and how
fast it's going, and then I look away and I
look again, is it going to be where I think
it's going to be?

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yes, exactly. And so every moment of an electron or
a particle's life is determined by quantum mechanics, which says
this is a probability distribution. It's not like the electron
is doing something behind your back. It's got one particular
path that you're just not aware of behind your back,
and you just don't know it. It doesn't have a
specific path. It's not like it goes from A to

(38:38):
B via a particular path. It has a probability of
different ways to get there. WHOA And if you don't look,
then it's sort of doing all of them at once.
They all have different probabilities, and those probabilities are the
things determined by the laws of physics. So there still
are laws. Physics still does tell the universe how to run.
It's just that those laws are probabilistic. It says, look,

(39:00):
mister electron, instead of telling you exactly where you're going
to go, I'm going to say you have a seventy
percent chance of doing this and a thirty percent chance
of doing that.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
So that's where the fuzziness and the randomness comes in.
It's not that it like, it looks fuzzy, it's just
that it's just hard to predict where it's going to be.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
It's impossible.

Speaker 4 (39:15):
I mean, you know all this information, it's impossible.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
It's impossible to predict the future. Impossible exactly. You can
predict the various likelihood of this or the likelihood of
that at the particle level, but you can't say what
one particle is going to do. Wow, Now Einstein said,
that's crazy, right, There's no way that's true. There must
be a way to predict it must be there there's
some piece of information there. And then some guys came
up with an experiment. They came up with this crazy experiment.

(39:39):
It's based on an idea called Bell's inequality. To test
this theory, they said, let's see if the universe is
really random, or if there's some hidden piece of information
that's actually secretly determining things.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Like let's see if if I really can't predict where
that electron is going to go, or if it's actually
like the electron knows, it just won't tell.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Us, yeah, right, exactly. And so they set up this
cool experiment where they took a particle and they had
to shoot out two particles in opposite directions. And those
particles are therefore connected because they have to conserve momentum
and they have to conserve energy and have to conserve spin.
And so if you know something about one particle, then
you know something about the other particle. But both particles

(40:20):
have equal probability to be like spin up or spin down,
or point this way, a point the other way. But
you know something about the combination of the two. And
so they came up with this really ingenious experiment to
measure how often you saw one spin up and one
spin down, for example, and based on the outcome of that,
you could tell whether there was a secret, hidden piece

(40:40):
of information that was controlling both particles, or whether they
were both truly random. And the experiments are conclusive, and
it's been done as zillion times, and the experiment tells
us that the universe at its core really is random.
It's making a random decision every time you look at
these particles.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
So beyond the shadow of a doubt, we know that
the universe is random.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
The universe is random absolutely.

Speaker 4 (41:04):
There's no.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
There's no escape clause, there's no if hands or butts,
there's no there's no loopholes. The universe at the particle
level is really random. Now, you said something really interesting earlier.
You know, even if the universe is random at the
lowest level, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's random at
other levels, right, Like we still got to the moon. Right.

(41:26):
It's not like we're saying science doesn't work or you
shouldn't get in that airplane. Right. Science works at at
different levels. And even if it's random at the very
very small level, doesn't mean that on average it's really predictable, right, Like,
we do know how basketballs bounce, right, And that's because
the randomness only applies to these tiny little particles, and
over the ten to the thirty or whatever particles and

(41:47):
a basketball, that all averages out to something very very predictable.

Speaker 4 (41:51):
Wow, So like random events Canada add up to predictable events?
Is that kind of what you're saying?

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah, exactly, Like you can't tell how any individual voter
is going to vote, but if you've done enough polls
you can tell you know how the nation is going
to vote at a certain election.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
That worked out so well in the twenty sixteen election.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah, maybe that wasn't the best.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
Example totally predictable. At the level of particles, there is randomness,
but maybe in the macroscale things are fairly predictable. Yeah,
but how does that affect things like free will? Does
that mean that, like my brain, does quantum randomness give

(42:31):
me some sort of unpredictability or free will as you
might call it, Or is my brain also very predictable
in the long run.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
It's a great question, and into this tiny crack in determinism,
you know, saying that at the particle level things are
truly random, and there's flooded and enormous literature of consciousness
and all sorts of philosophy that try to connect free
will to quantum randomness, you know, to say that this
is the whole we needed, This is what breaks determinism
and allows for me and my soul and God and

(43:01):
all the and and all the things you want to
cram into your universe. Right, I'm not convinced that quantum
mechanics allows for free will, or for souls or you know,
for all that kind of stuff, but it certainly does
dismantle the deterministic watchlike universe that we thought we had.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
M So, just because something is random doesn't mean you
have free will.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Like it's just random, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so to
answer the question, you know, is the universe random or
is it chaotic? Turns out it's kind of both. Right,
It's random at the particle level, but it's chaotic at
the macroscopic level. Right. Things do seem to be fairly
deterministic at the macroscopic level, but then again they're too

(43:42):
chaotic to really to really model. So it's not like
you can predict the weather.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
It's kind of a progression. Like it's random at the
particle level, it's kind of deterministic at a medium range level,
but then as you get to larger and larger systems,
then it's chaotic and it's practically unpredictable.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So any answer you want there's
some place in the universe.

Speaker 4 (44:02):
Is yeah, I just pick a random, random answer and
it will be.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
So maybe that's why people answered it's such a such
streams of gibberish to our question, because because they really
deeply understood that the universe was both random and chaotic.

Speaker 4 (44:20):
Wow, wisdom of the crowd.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Wisdom of the crowd. Exactly, you average over ten random
people and there is some insight. Yeah, exactly. That's the
whole that's the whole problem.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
The answer is the answer is yes.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
So I think it's it's fun to think about that
in ste of the larger context. You know, like we
started off thinking the universe was crazy, then we started
to get some grips on it. Then we felt like, oh,
maybe the universe is sort of too tight a grip
on us because it seems deterministic, and they we've got
this crack thanks to quantum mechanics that says it's random.
But I don't really know how comfortable people are with
that crack, you know, to think that the universe doesn't

(44:54):
know what it's going to do at any moment, like
they could do this, it could do that. That's sort
of terrifying. I stand Einstein's fear. That Einstein's dislike or
disdain for that, and that leaves us in a sort
of uncomfortable position.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
And it might get even crazier, right, Like, let's say
that we build quantum computers and then there's AI based
on quantum computers. That that would be even crazier.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Right, Yeah, I'd love to read that science fiction novel
that's that's how AI develops free will, Right.

Speaker 4 (45:20):
Quantum computers maybe more than us, That's exactly right. All right, Well,
thank you for joining us. I hope that didn't seem
like a random, random or chaotic discussion.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
But those are really fun topics. I think it's super
fun to try to wrap your mind around those things.
And you know, one of the basic questions of physics
is not just what is the world made out or
what are the bits and pieces? But like what are
the rules? And are there rules? And and you know,
can we ever understand it? To me, that's one of
the deepest questions of science, and this goes right to
the heart of it.

Speaker 4 (45:54):
So if you're a butterfly out there, keep on flam exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Danielandjorge dot com. When you

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and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last
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