December 9, 2010 • 26 mins
If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Originally this question was made for meditative purposes, but answering the question incorporates several fascinating ideas about human perception and psychology. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
I'm Robert glam and I'm Julie Douglas. Tell me, Julie,
what does your cat do all day when you're not
at it hide out? Well, I think I've told you
before that he is working allah inception to plant thoughts
(00:26):
into my mind. Okay, yeah, so he's just working on
mathematical models basically. Okay, Yeah, that's your that's your theory, right. Uh, no,
that's that's that's what my webcam is telling. Oh, that's
what your webcams. Yeah, we got a little blackboard office
and see I knew I should see. We don't have
a webcam set up. So it's all a mystery to
me what the cat may or may not be doing
in the house or outside the house while I'm away.
(00:49):
She could be sleeping on the pillows all day where
she's not allowed. She could be, uh, you know, turning
on the Xbox. I have no idea. Huh. This is
sort of like that proverb. Yeah, if tree falls in
the forest and no one is around here, it doesn't
make a sound. Yeah, it's a it's a this is
an old philosophical question. The idea. The idea is not
necessary to answer the question. Um. You know, of course
(01:12):
some people listening this probably have that kind of mind
where they're like, this is something we can test, we
can do this, but but it's more about training the
mind and and uh and you know, throwing a good
paradox at it to beef it up, you know. Okay,
So it's like a thought sandwich that we can chew on. Yeah,
a big chewy thought sandwich. It's a double decker. Yeah,
have a sandwich. You can soften it up if you
put in the microwave a little bit, but straight up,
(01:33):
it's gonna be it's gonna be pretty tough, should we
talk about I mean, just like the bones of it
like that. The fact that the sound is sound is
vibration that's carried through a medium at a frequency range
capable of being heard by the humanity here. So there's
there's that, But there's the sound that's out there. So
regardless of whether or not you're here to listen to it,
(01:53):
I'm here to listen to it. Sound is going to exist, right, yes,
But if the sound is that seeve though, that's that
kind of gets into the question like if the sound
is not received by by a listener by an observer,
then did it take place? What's it really sound? See?
And I think there are multiple multiple answers to this,
(02:14):
right right, because you could say, well that you know,
other organisms are listening first of all, but I guess
this is just concerning us Homeo sapiens. Yeah, and it
really comes down to what it says about our perception
and how it affects our understanding of the universe. Okay,
so um, I'm thinking right now, like patterns that we
(02:37):
tend to pick up on, right right. So, um, sometimes
I'll notice something that's happening in the world and I'll
start think, oh, my goodness, armageddon is is It's just
around the corner. Yeah, there's always something like, you know,
especially if teenagers do something like suddenly everybody's paying attention
to what these teenagers are doing and it's oh, my goodness,
the end of the world isn't here, right, Yeah, they're
(02:58):
they're all listening to this horrible music or they're wearing
these gene shorts that are that are going to bring
about the end times and and and people have been
saying this for you know, for ages. I didn't know
that Jeane Shorts was the queue for the four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse. Well, no, it's the Antichrist. The Antichrist
will will come in the form of Yeah Shorts, Gane Shorts.
(03:20):
I've been rereading the Name of the Rose recently, so
I have a lot of this like apocalyptic stuff in
my mind. So I can imagine like an old monk
talking about, like explaining very detailed why teenagers and Geane
Shorts are the sign of the Antichrist is walking among us.
So but anyway, but but at any rate, we've been
reading too much into data for a long time, and
we continue to do it um even though it might
(03:43):
relate more to say, geothermal events than it does to
the you know, the you know, the arrival of the
Antichrist on Earth. Okay, So if I'm looking at the weather,
for instance, and I noticed that there have been a
ton of floods or hurricanes or tornadoes, and I start
to think to myself, you know, oh my goodness, look
what's going on. There seems to be more activity and
(04:06):
whether than ever before. Couldn't be true, And you can
you can totally freak out like that on like an
individual level, but you also see it in like broadly
and scientific studies, where it's called a reporting effect. Now,
a great example of this, uh is something that I
came across when I was writing an article titled all
our Volcanic Eruptions Increasing for Discovering News, and it's I've
(04:29):
done a number of these at all tackle seemingly simplistic questions,
and uh and I was really delighted with how how
interesting this one was. The short answer is is no.
And and I didn't just look this up. I talked
to some experts. I talked to uh Lee Siebert, the
director of the Smithsonian Global Vote of Volcanism Program, or
the g v P as the kids call it in
(04:50):
their gene shorts, and uh and and he broke it
down for me, the great guy. He said that basically,
we've been he they've been looking at the g VP
has been looking at volcanic eruption for forty years. And
if you you really start digging, you have about two
hundred years worth of data to look at. So if
you plot those last two hundred years, there's a clear
(05:11):
increase in the number of eruptions over time. Look at
the data and you're like oh, well there, you know,
and this is totally the numbers are totally off, and
they're like, oh, there's five this year, and then next
year there's two, and then there's fifteen. Volcanic activity is
clearly going up. But that's but it's not the case.
This is this is the reporting effect in an action,
because what does that mean? Like why why would we
(05:31):
see that pattern and why wouldn't it be true. Well,
you take this apparent increase in volcanic eruptions and you
can compare it to other data, and things start making
a whole lot more sense. For instance, the apparent increase
in volcanic eruptions parallels the rise in global population. It
parallels human encroachment into areas of volcanic activity. There's suddenly
(05:52):
more people around to observe volcanoes erupting. There are more
people of living in the vicinity of volcanoes to report
on it. You see the number increase with the evolution
of our telecommunication systems Suddenly, not only can more people,
more people in a position to observe volcanic activity, but
they're in a better position to report it. So, yeah,
(06:13):
tweeting what's going on? Tweeting about it? You know, you know,
emailing call. I mean just as simple as like being
able to call somebody or instead of just writing a
letter or just marking in your journal. So that means
that all of a sudden we have an avalanche of data. Right.
And then another interesting aspect that they encountered is that
if you you look at the apparent of volcanic activity,
(06:35):
just based on reports, you see two really curious depths
in volcanic activity in the twentieth century, once during the
First World War and then again during the Second World War. Now,
you could make the argument that that the that these
world wars caused volcanic activity around the world to decrease,
(06:58):
but of course you would be and that would be insane, right.
I'm raising my eyebrows right now at you. That's kind
of like, um, I mean, it comes down to the
fact that we were pretty distracted during those times. We
had world wars going on, and we just didn't have
time to really focus on what the volcanoes were doing
for the most part. Again, it's kind of like the cat.
If you've ever been been really busy and you don't
(07:18):
notice the cat doing anything. Don't mean the cat is
not doing anything in fact, it may result in the
cat doing all sorts of horrible things to get your attention,
depending on the cat. Uh, it's it's just where your
attention is at. Likewise, they found that the following, uh,
the really dramatic eruptions of Krakatoa in eighteen eighty three
and Mount Pele in nineteen o two, you saw an
(07:40):
apparent increase in volcanic volcanic activity following those events. Now,
it would be a lot easier in this case to say, oh, well,
there's just a huge volcanic events, so there you know,
these other volcanoes were acting up to. No, it's just
that you have this huge event and people were suddenly
paying a lot more attention to what all the other
volcanoes are up to. It's kind of like, uh, you know,
some some it hits the news for you know, for
(08:02):
for something. Uh, like you know, if somebody robs a
bank while wearing tight jean shorts, right, and then suddenly
everybody's focused on geene shorts or more people wearing jeene shorts,
or more crimes being committed with jeane shorts. No, it's
just suddenly our our mind is focused on It was
that one monk right, Ye, should we go back and
look at this seriously? Yeah? Really? Yeah? Alright, Okay, so
I'm seeing so the pattern isn't necessarily telling the whole truth.
(08:24):
When you really peel back the layers, you see that
we just have more access to more data. So even
like with hurricanes, right, this is the same right hurricane
you see reporting effects in hurt with with hurricanes, other
kind of atmospheric anomalis, you see it in like economic studies,
you see it in health reports, And it just underlines
that no matter what we're looking at and trying to understand,
(08:47):
we can we can look at to the point where
we we don't really have a good understanding of it.
We've we've analyzed it too much, we've over analyzed it,
and we we were not were We have to take
that information that we've gathered and gathered and put it
in perspective with pretty everything else in the universe to
to make complete sense of it. Yeah, And I'm even
thinking about Slate. Don't they have a feature that's sort
of the bogus trend of the week. Oh yeah, I
(09:09):
think they do that. They sort of debunked the myth
I think they have. One was like rompers, like everybody's
wearing rompers now refreshment my memory. What is a romper?
Romper is how to explain this. It's a it's a
sort of onesie for grown ups. Um and and it's
like first person outfit or like big feetie pajamas. No, no,
(09:29):
I should say that it's like shorts, like shorts onesie.
And uh so there are a lot of magazines that
we're saying that, you know, it's come back and it's
the sexiest thing ever and men love it like cut
off overalls. Yeah, but with sleeves sometimes. Yeah, you see,
you're getting the idea. It's kind of sounds like a snead,
(09:49):
you know. Oh right, this is the blanket the that's
the snug snuggy. But then the sneed was the thing
that everyone needs that the the one sler in the
Lorax made. There was some sort of horrible garment that
appeared to have no function but became really popular because
the one Sler was telling everybody that they needed it.
(10:10):
If I remember correctly, Yes, that's right. So there you get.
I mean, you're you're there's pattern recognition everywhere, even when
patterns don't exist. I think is what we're saying, So
whether or not it's an increase in volcanic activity or
um the onslaught of the romper onto American women's bodies,
or more trees falling all over the world, Yes, because
(10:32):
we're paying attention to them, that's right. Going back to
the lorax. Actually, yes, a lot of trees fall on that.
It all comes together, that's right. So I'm thinking about
quantum inter indeterminacy and how this relates back to that,
because you know, we always have to take on a
little quantum in each podcast. Quantum indetermacy, and this is
(10:54):
the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system.
It has become one of the characteristics standard description of
quantum physics, right, and that the stuffy description, right stuff
in The important part of that is the apparent necessary
and completeness. So before this, prior to quantum physics, it
(11:14):
was thought that a physical system had a determinate state
which uniquely determined all the values of its measurable properties,
and conversely, be the values of its measurable properties uniquely
determine the state. But the quantum into the mix, and
essentially quantum in determinacy is saying actually there's all sorts
of outcomes, and in fact, we could be wrong. We
(11:35):
could you know, this is this is a sort of
placeholder and um, what we're trying to determine, and it
is We'll just go ahead and say right off the
bat that it is incomplete. It is not the end
all of the be all. We don't know if a
tree is falling in the forest with quantum indeterminacy, but
(11:56):
we know the possibility is there, right, all right, So
it's the game of possibilities. Well, of course it instantly
brings to mind, especially since we mentioned cats earlier, the
idea of Schrodinger's cat, which of course the ideas of
the cats in a box. And you have this sort
of elaborate system set up with with the decaying radioactive
substance and tomic particle writer. It has like an hour
(12:18):
and it there's a chance of decaying, right yeah, yeah,
and chance of nutcaing, and there's a Geiger counter, and
if it decays and a hammer hits a flask and
poison or it fires a gun, they're very I think
they're very various ways to kill the cat. Yeah, But
but it basically comes down to the fact that there's
a box kind of like your home, and there's a
cat in it, and you cannot be sure exactly what
(12:39):
state the cat is in. And since you can't be sure,
in the case of Shroudinger, if the cat is alive
or dead, the cat is there in a what it's
called a superposition, meaning that it is both alive and dead.
You don't know for sure. It's just a complete uncertainty. Likewise,
right now, what's my cat Biscuit doing? She laying on
a pillow? Is she playing the xbox? I don't know.
(13:01):
My mind don't know. Mine has just broken through the
theory of everything. Well, that's because you get the webcam.
I know, I know, I just saw it. I saw Wow.
Let's see, the box is open for you because of
the webcamp webcam. For me, the box is closed. So
anything is possible. Right. So what I think is cool
about this concept is that it really is a driving
force in science. When we think about science, we think
(13:23):
about um than what we know, and we think about
this sort of infaillible like you know A is A
and B, S B and c SC and that's that's
the story, folks, When in fact, science is just a
murky murky field UM with all sorts of spooky things happening.
And there's a neuroscientist named David Eagleman who gave a
(13:47):
talk at the School of Life about this uncertainty, this
this quality in our universe that we've come to understand
is the limits of our knowledge essentially. Right. He's a
he's he has a kind of a rock star personas
I remember, he's pretty a pretty hip dude. Oh yeah, yeah.
He He starts out this conversation by saying, hey, do
you guys know about deep field observation? The host, the audience,
(14:10):
and uh, you know this is in the UK s
of course, like you half of them now And he says,
all right, well cool, let me let me just blow
your mind, you know, right off the bat. And he says, okay,
there's the Hubble telescope went up, but you know, two
thousand and three and it's been orbiting UM and a
geosynchronus synchronous orbit and they just decided to point their
(14:30):
lens a little tiny spot in space. And what did
they find? After millions of seconds of data, They thought
maybe I'd find a star or something. They ended up
finding ten thousand galaxies, which is thousands of billions of
sons observed in a tiny, tiny patch. Um. And to
me that was the ultimate example of the vastness of
(14:51):
what we don't know, right, especially he in this he
mentions that, you know, people are like, well, why don't
you we just do analyze everything to that extent, And
we could, but it would take like millions and millions
a yeah, yeah, if you pointed that lens, if you
tried to map out the entire space, there's no way
we could do it. But we can that tiny little spot.
We can gather data. Yeah, just a tremendous amount of
focus on one portion of the sky. Yeah. And so
(15:16):
he uses this as a jumping off point to say,
you know, everything that we thought was true, we we
kind of have to back up and and look at
and and then he goes into this concept of possibilionism,
which he he used actually as a joke term um
a while back, and it's actually gained some legs. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:38):
he sounds like something Jack donaghe would make up on
thirty rocks. That's right, possibillionism, lemon, it's the new when
you're writing your Reaganism like that. Um. But basically what
he's saying, is it's the act of exploration of new ideas,
which is trying to understand the structure of that possibility space.
So he's saying, basically, everybody is welcome at the table,
(16:01):
but we're going to use science to try to cut
away the parts that don't make sense to us, and
we're going to acknowledge real the real limits of knowledge
that we have um and and then he kind of
talks about all the different puzzle parts that we have
that we know about right now, but what we don't
(16:22):
know about, and quantum theory is basically when those things
that he talks about, he says like it's given us
a tremendous amount of information, but at the same time,
we still are kind of stuck even in that mode
of well, what's what's right the Copenhagen interpretation or the
many worlds theory? Right, so so you know, time collapse theory,
which one of them is right? Are there are many
(16:44):
many worlds that we can observe or is there just
this one world that we can observe because nothing beyond
that exists, which goes back to that tree in the
forest you know, now you mentioned when we were prepping
for this we want to relativity a little bit. Yeah,
and about how the original theory relativity is the idea
of it. It's it's you can sort of compare that
(17:04):
to a tree following in the forest right right with
Einstein and basically saying, Okay, this is this is my
projection based on mathematics, but this is still just a thought, right,
this is still a thought experiment in a sense, and
and and and it was something that subsequently we had
to prove. We had to prove the things like you know,
observable time dilation uh uh and and also like gravitational
(17:28):
lensing with stars of observing how you know this this
interesting relationship between time and space and it's reality at
space time. This presentation is brought to you by Intel
sponsors of Tomorrow. So yeah, basically when Einstein was looking
(17:52):
at that, this was just the seeds for for what
we now can apply to different disciplines. Um to breakthroughs
that we've had in science. But still we have this
unknown quantity. And I think about dark matter as an example. Um,
you know, we we definitely underestimated the gravitational pool and
now we found out that or we think of the
(18:13):
matter of uh of the universe that we don't know
what it is or where it's coming from. Yeah, it's
kind of like there was a one particular Sherlock Holmes
story and I forget the title of it, but they're
investigating a house and Sherlock was able to determine that
there's not enough based on the visible space. There's a
secret room here somewhere and uh, and dark matter is
(18:34):
kind of a similar situation based on how much matter
there should be the universe or something missing for dark matter, right,
then that's a great example or a great technology because
we can't see it, but we know that based on
our models that there has to be something there. There's
a there's a hidden room and it's filled with dark matter,
and we just have to figure out exactly what that means. Yeah,
(18:57):
and then if you take it down to even just uh,
the level of what's available to us now, like, for instance,
you've got photography, which high speed photography now which we
can slow down mundane events. Um, even like a dog
lapping up water, Oh yes, or a cat. They're recently
studying on exactly how a cat's drinking. It's completely different
(19:20):
than we ever thought. I mean, especially with a dog
if you look at it. I used to think that
the dog was using its tongue is a sort of
cup and bringing all that water up into him. But
now we understand that it's actually curling its tongue under
and getting the water in that way. So you begin
to think to yourself, how many things am I actually
missing on a day to day basis because I'm not
(19:41):
quite equipped to perceive things like We slow it down
even more and we see that when the tongue curls
like a tiny doghead comes out of a hole in
the tongue and then drinks the water. That's not true.
That's it might be true. We just don't know yet.
We don't know yet. We just can't be certain. I
really wish that word here, but it does make me
think about like Another example, which David Eagleman gives, is
(20:05):
that we've got photo receptors at the back of our
eyes picking up signals and picking up a tiny slice
of electromagnetic radiation spectrum, which is what we call visible light.
The same stuff is passing through us via cell phones, right,
But the difference is that cell phone signals we can't
decode them because we don't have the specialized receptors for it.
(20:28):
So again it brings us back to that question of
maybe we're just ill equipped to be able to do
more at this point in time. Evolution kind of end
up thinking of the visible world. The world is visible
to humans as being reality, but in but it actually
may work out to where the version of reality we're
(20:49):
just seeing like a slim slice of reality. The rest
is like we've got blinders like a horse. Yeah. Yeah.
David Eagleman had this really great point. He was sort
of talking about all the where we are history really
in terms of breakthroughs and saying, you know, can you
imagine being able to even understand a computer lit alone
quantum computing if you didn't even have electricity to plug
(21:10):
in that computer? Yeah, I can't even imagine understanding one
with electrics, right, It still breaks my brain. But but
so we think about where we're going to be on
that timeline a hundred years from now, our thousand years
from now, and we essentially might look like Caveman. And
then all the things that we think right now may
just be some sort of guessing game um that you know,
probability half of it turns out to be correct, the
(21:32):
other half not correct and this is I think when
the most important points that David Eagleman makes, which is
that science really is a guessing game. Um, it doesn't
look Science does not move in a linear fashion. Uh.
It takes great creative leaps and then it tries to
backfill to substantiate those leaps. Yeah. So that's another reason
why science scientists are rock stars. And well it's it
(21:57):
goes back to take it into cosmology. The idea of
um geocentricism and heliocentricism, like the idea that, okay, the
Earth's center of the universe, let's throw some math at that. Okay,
that didn't work out. Sons the center of the universe.
That didn't work out either. You know. It's like they
you know, they take this leap, and sometimes the leap
is based on things that aren't science. But then by
(22:17):
through scientific evaluation, they are able to determine whether that
was a leap that's going to land us on a
solid ground or not. All right, Yeah, I'm liking this
because you know this, this concept of scientists has stayed
pipe smoking, plaid vest wherein men and women because you know,
but with mustaches. I'll just go that far um is
(22:38):
completely wrong. I mean they're they're sort of like the
graffiti artists, you know, trying to put things together on
a graffiti artist sounded kind of cool, but as you said,
they're just throwing things, the throwing darts at the at
the dart boards of ideas and just trying to get there.
And one day they'll look back and they'll say, I
can't believe that they thought that dark matter was a thing.
And they didn't know that dog tongues had a little
bit of doghead that came out right exactly, totally didn't
(23:01):
understand even their own pets and Jeane Shorts what was
that all about. But examples I think of this of
this creative leap is with relativity, as you had brought
up before with Einstein. That was just a little seedon
idea before, but then it actually had some real time applications. Yeah,
and we were later able to observe gravitational lensing too,
(23:24):
to see how light traveling near a huge, a very
large star actually warps around it, being able to observe
how the the the the clocks in an orbiting satellite,
how time passes a little differently in orbit than it
doesn't earth, right, and so that's that's the geosynchronous satellites, right,
(23:47):
and so that's what that's how we keep time aboard
spacecraft by being aware of the change, right, Okay, and
then we've got atomic energy and atomic warfare. I mean,
these are huge things that we're just predicated on a thought.
Of course a lot of math too, but but turned
out to be on the right part of the board there. Yeah.
(24:10):
It's kind of like we're pawing our way blindly through
a fog, and the fog is the universe, you know,
when we can never really see the whole picture, but
we can sort of you know, reach ahead and sort
of feel our way through it and h and figure
out what's going to be solid ground and what's going
to be you know, a plummet into an abyss. We
can't see the trees for the forest there you go,
(24:32):
all right, Well that helps explain a little bit. But
I think that the coolest thing is that it helps
us to understand the uncertainty is okay, right, and uncertainty
is a huge part of it, right, is the building
block of our knowledge. Right. Yeah. The second you have
everything figured out, that's that's where the problem you're in
big trouble. In fact, Voltaire said, doubt is an uncomfortable position,
(24:53):
but certainty is an absurd position. I always come back
to the Book of Job, where Job's in a miserable time.
I've probably mentioned this before, but but then you know,
God is basically when he decides to know, mouth off
to God. God's like, you know, who are you to
ask questions? You're never gonna understand anything? And it's a
very it's it's it's probably my favorite chapter in the
(25:14):
Bible because it's got the Book of the Bible, because
it comes down to uncertainty, cosmic uncertainty, theological uncertainty, everything philosophical.
I like that chapter two and the one on gene shorts.
The other one on gene shorts is pretty good, but
it's a cautionary tale. Of course. You don't see any
on me. So if you want to learn more about
(25:34):
these topics, just to visit the homepage and you can
drop in quantum physics, relativity, gene shorts, whatever into the
search bar and we have a plethora of articles for
you to look over. And don't forget to check out
David Eagleman's Talking Uncertainty, which is on school Life Dot com,
and in the meantime, you can check us out on
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(25:56):
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(26:17):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
I'm Robert glam and I'm Julie Douglas. Tell me, Julie,
what does your cat do all day when you're not
at it hide out? Well, I think I've told you
before that he is working allah inception to plant thoughts
(00:26):
into my mind. Okay, yeah, so he's just working on
mathematical models basically. Okay, Yeah, that's your that's your theory, right. Uh, no,
that's that's that's what my webcam is telling. Oh, that's
what your webcams. Yeah, we got a little blackboard office
and see I knew I should see. We don't have
a webcam set up. So it's all a mystery to
me what the cat may or may not be doing
in the house or outside the house while I'm away.
(00:49):
She could be sleeping on the pillows all day where
she's not allowed. She could be, uh, you know, turning
on the Xbox. I have no idea. Huh. This is
sort of like that proverb. Yeah, if tree falls in
the forest and no one is around here, it doesn't
make a sound. Yeah, it's a it's a this is
an old philosophical question. The idea. The idea is not
necessary to answer the question. Um. You know, of course
(01:12):
some people listening this probably have that kind of mind
where they're like, this is something we can test, we
can do this, but but it's more about training the
mind and and uh and you know, throwing a good
paradox at it to beef it up, you know. Okay,
So it's like a thought sandwich that we can chew on. Yeah,
a big chewy thought sandwich. It's a double decker. Yeah,
have a sandwich. You can soften it up if you
put in the microwave a little bit, but straight up,
(01:33):
it's gonna be it's gonna be pretty tough, should we
talk about I mean, just like the bones of it
like that. The fact that the sound is sound is
vibration that's carried through a medium at a frequency range
capable of being heard by the humanity here. So there's
there's that, But there's the sound that's out there. So
regardless of whether or not you're here to listen to it,
(01:53):
I'm here to listen to it. Sound is going to exist, right, yes,
But if the sound is that seeve though, that's that
kind of gets into the question like if the sound
is not received by by a listener by an observer,
then did it take place? What's it really sound? See?
And I think there are multiple multiple answers to this,
(02:14):
right right, because you could say, well that you know,
other organisms are listening first of all, but I guess
this is just concerning us Homeo sapiens. Yeah, and it
really comes down to what it says about our perception
and how it affects our understanding of the universe. Okay,
so um, I'm thinking right now, like patterns that we
(02:37):
tend to pick up on, right right. So, um, sometimes
I'll notice something that's happening in the world and I'll
start think, oh, my goodness, armageddon is is It's just
around the corner. Yeah, there's always something like, you know,
especially if teenagers do something like suddenly everybody's paying attention
to what these teenagers are doing and it's oh, my goodness,
the end of the world isn't here, right, Yeah, they're
(02:58):
they're all listening to this horrible music or they're wearing
these gene shorts that are that are going to bring
about the end times and and and people have been
saying this for you know, for ages. I didn't know
that Jeane Shorts was the queue for the four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse. Well, no, it's the Antichrist. The Antichrist
will will come in the form of Yeah Shorts, Gane Shorts.
(03:20):
I've been rereading the Name of the Rose recently, so
I have a lot of this like apocalyptic stuff in
my mind. So I can imagine like an old monk
talking about, like explaining very detailed why teenagers and Geane
Shorts are the sign of the Antichrist is walking among us.
So but anyway, but but at any rate, we've been
reading too much into data for a long time, and
we continue to do it um even though it might
(03:43):
relate more to say, geothermal events than it does to
the you know, the you know, the arrival of the
Antichrist on Earth. Okay, So if I'm looking at the weather,
for instance, and I noticed that there have been a
ton of floods or hurricanes or tornadoes, and I start
to think to myself, you know, oh my goodness, look
what's going on. There seems to be more activity and
(04:06):
whether than ever before. Couldn't be true, And you can
you can totally freak out like that on like an
individual level, but you also see it in like broadly
and scientific studies, where it's called a reporting effect. Now,
a great example of this, uh is something that I
came across when I was writing an article titled all
our Volcanic Eruptions Increasing for Discovering News, and it's I've
(04:29):
done a number of these at all tackle seemingly simplistic questions,
and uh and I was really delighted with how how
interesting this one was. The short answer is is no.
And and I didn't just look this up. I talked
to some experts. I talked to uh Lee Siebert, the
director of the Smithsonian Global Vote of Volcanism Program, or
the g v P as the kids call it in
(04:50):
their gene shorts, and uh and and he broke it
down for me, the great guy. He said that basically,
we've been he they've been looking at the g VP
has been looking at volcanic eruption for forty years. And
if you you really start digging, you have about two
hundred years worth of data to look at. So if
you plot those last two hundred years, there's a clear
(05:11):
increase in the number of eruptions over time. Look at
the data and you're like oh, well there, you know,
and this is totally the numbers are totally off, and
they're like, oh, there's five this year, and then next
year there's two, and then there's fifteen. Volcanic activity is
clearly going up. But that's but it's not the case.
This is this is the reporting effect in an action,
because what does that mean? Like why why would we
(05:31):
see that pattern and why wouldn't it be true. Well,
you take this apparent increase in volcanic eruptions and you
can compare it to other data, and things start making
a whole lot more sense. For instance, the apparent increase
in volcanic eruptions parallels the rise in global population. It
parallels human encroachment into areas of volcanic activity. There's suddenly
(05:52):
more people around to observe volcanoes erupting. There are more
people of living in the vicinity of volcanoes to report
on it. You see the number increase with the evolution
of our telecommunication systems Suddenly, not only can more people,
more people in a position to observe volcanic activity, but
they're in a better position to report it. So, yeah,
(06:13):
tweeting what's going on? Tweeting about it? You know, you know,
emailing call. I mean just as simple as like being
able to call somebody or instead of just writing a
letter or just marking in your journal. So that means
that all of a sudden we have an avalanche of data. Right.
And then another interesting aspect that they encountered is that
if you you look at the apparent of volcanic activity,
(06:35):
just based on reports, you see two really curious depths
in volcanic activity in the twentieth century, once during the
First World War and then again during the Second World War. Now,
you could make the argument that that the that these
world wars caused volcanic activity around the world to decrease,
(06:58):
but of course you would be and that would be insane, right.
I'm raising my eyebrows right now at you. That's kind
of like, um, I mean, it comes down to the
fact that we were pretty distracted during those times. We
had world wars going on, and we just didn't have
time to really focus on what the volcanoes were doing
for the most part. Again, it's kind of like the cat.
If you've ever been been really busy and you don't
(07:18):
notice the cat doing anything. Don't mean the cat is
not doing anything in fact, it may result in the
cat doing all sorts of horrible things to get your attention,
depending on the cat. Uh, it's it's just where your
attention is at. Likewise, they found that the following, uh,
the really dramatic eruptions of Krakatoa in eighteen eighty three
and Mount Pele in nineteen o two, you saw an
(07:40):
apparent increase in volcanic volcanic activity following those events. Now,
it would be a lot easier in this case to say, oh, well,
there's just a huge volcanic events, so there you know,
these other volcanoes were acting up to. No, it's just
that you have this huge event and people were suddenly
paying a lot more attention to what all the other
volcanoes are up to. It's kind of like, uh, you know,
some some it hits the news for you know, for
(08:02):
for something. Uh, like you know, if somebody robs a
bank while wearing tight jean shorts, right, and then suddenly
everybody's focused on geene shorts or more people wearing jeene shorts,
or more crimes being committed with jeane shorts. No, it's
just suddenly our our mind is focused on It was
that one monk right, Ye, should we go back and
look at this seriously? Yeah? Really? Yeah? Alright, Okay, so
I'm seeing so the pattern isn't necessarily telling the whole truth.
(08:24):
When you really peel back the layers, you see that
we just have more access to more data. So even
like with hurricanes, right, this is the same right hurricane
you see reporting effects in hurt with with hurricanes, other
kind of atmospheric anomalis, you see it in like economic studies,
you see it in health reports, And it just underlines
that no matter what we're looking at and trying to understand,
(08:47):
we can we can look at to the point where
we we don't really have a good understanding of it.
We've we've analyzed it too much, we've over analyzed it,
and we we were not were We have to take
that information that we've gathered and gathered and put it
in perspective with pretty everything else in the universe to
to make complete sense of it. Yeah, And I'm even
thinking about Slate. Don't they have a feature that's sort
of the bogus trend of the week. Oh yeah, I
(09:09):
think they do that. They sort of debunked the myth
I think they have. One was like rompers, like everybody's
wearing rompers now refreshment my memory. What is a romper?
Romper is how to explain this. It's a it's a
sort of onesie for grown ups. Um and and it's
like first person outfit or like big feetie pajamas. No, no,
(09:29):
I should say that it's like shorts, like shorts onesie.
And uh so there are a lot of magazines that
we're saying that, you know, it's come back and it's
the sexiest thing ever and men love it like cut
off overalls. Yeah, but with sleeves sometimes. Yeah, you see,
you're getting the idea. It's kind of sounds like a snead,
(09:49):
you know. Oh right, this is the blanket the that's
the snug snuggy. But then the sneed was the thing
that everyone needs that the the one sler in the
Lorax made. There was some sort of horrible garment that
appeared to have no function but became really popular because
the one Sler was telling everybody that they needed it.
(10:10):
If I remember correctly, Yes, that's right. So there you get.
I mean, you're you're there's pattern recognition everywhere, even when
patterns don't exist. I think is what we're saying, So
whether or not it's an increase in volcanic activity or
um the onslaught of the romper onto American women's bodies,
or more trees falling all over the world, Yes, because
(10:32):
we're paying attention to them, that's right. Going back to
the lorax. Actually, yes, a lot of trees fall on that.
It all comes together, that's right. So I'm thinking about
quantum inter indeterminacy and how this relates back to that,
because you know, we always have to take on a
little quantum in each podcast. Quantum indetermacy, and this is
(10:54):
the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system.
It has become one of the characteristics standard description of
quantum physics, right, and that the stuffy description, right stuff
in The important part of that is the apparent necessary
and completeness. So before this, prior to quantum physics, it
(11:14):
was thought that a physical system had a determinate state
which uniquely determined all the values of its measurable properties,
and conversely, be the values of its measurable properties uniquely
determine the state. But the quantum into the mix, and
essentially quantum in determinacy is saying actually there's all sorts
of outcomes, and in fact, we could be wrong. We
(11:35):
could you know, this is this is a sort of
placeholder and um, what we're trying to determine, and it
is We'll just go ahead and say right off the
bat that it is incomplete. It is not the end
all of the be all. We don't know if a
tree is falling in the forest with quantum indeterminacy, but
(11:56):
we know the possibility is there, right, all right, So
it's the game of possibilities. Well, of course it instantly
brings to mind, especially since we mentioned cats earlier, the
idea of Schrodinger's cat, which of course the ideas of
the cats in a box. And you have this sort
of elaborate system set up with with the decaying radioactive
substance and tomic particle writer. It has like an hour
(12:18):
and it there's a chance of decaying, right yeah, yeah,
and chance of nutcaing, and there's a Geiger counter, and
if it decays and a hammer hits a flask and
poison or it fires a gun, they're very I think
they're very various ways to kill the cat. Yeah, But
but it basically comes down to the fact that there's
a box kind of like your home, and there's a
cat in it, and you cannot be sure exactly what
(12:39):
state the cat is in. And since you can't be sure,
in the case of Shroudinger, if the cat is alive
or dead, the cat is there in a what it's
called a superposition, meaning that it is both alive and dead.
You don't know for sure. It's just a complete uncertainty. Likewise,
right now, what's my cat Biscuit doing? She laying on
a pillow? Is she playing the xbox? I don't know.
(13:01):
My mind don't know. Mine has just broken through the
theory of everything. Well, that's because you get the webcam.
I know, I know, I just saw it. I saw Wow.
Let's see, the box is open for you because of
the webcamp webcam. For me, the box is closed. So
anything is possible. Right. So what I think is cool
about this concept is that it really is a driving
force in science. When we think about science, we think
(13:23):
about um than what we know, and we think about
this sort of infaillible like you know A is A
and B, S B and c SC and that's that's
the story, folks, When in fact, science is just a
murky murky field UM with all sorts of spooky things happening.
And there's a neuroscientist named David Eagleman who gave a
(13:47):
talk at the School of Life about this uncertainty, this
this quality in our universe that we've come to understand
is the limits of our knowledge essentially. Right. He's a
he's he has a kind of a rock star personas
I remember, he's pretty a pretty hip dude. Oh yeah, yeah.
He He starts out this conversation by saying, hey, do
you guys know about deep field observation? The host, the audience,
(14:10):
and uh, you know this is in the UK s
of course, like you half of them now And he says,
all right, well cool, let me let me just blow
your mind, you know, right off the bat. And he says, okay,
there's the Hubble telescope went up, but you know, two
thousand and three and it's been orbiting UM and a
geosynchronus synchronous orbit and they just decided to point their
(14:30):
lens a little tiny spot in space. And what did
they find? After millions of seconds of data, They thought
maybe I'd find a star or something. They ended up
finding ten thousand galaxies, which is thousands of billions of
sons observed in a tiny, tiny patch. Um. And to
me that was the ultimate example of the vastness of
(14:51):
what we don't know, right, especially he in this he
mentions that, you know, people are like, well, why don't
you we just do analyze everything to that extent, And
we could, but it would take like millions and millions
a yeah, yeah, if you pointed that lens, if you
tried to map out the entire space, there's no way
we could do it. But we can that tiny little spot.
We can gather data. Yeah, just a tremendous amount of
focus on one portion of the sky. Yeah. And so
(15:16):
he uses this as a jumping off point to say,
you know, everything that we thought was true, we we
kind of have to back up and and look at
and and then he goes into this concept of possibilionism,
which he he used actually as a joke term um
a while back, and it's actually gained some legs. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:38):
he sounds like something Jack donaghe would make up on
thirty rocks. That's right, possibillionism, lemon, it's the new when
you're writing your Reaganism like that. Um. But basically what
he's saying, is it's the act of exploration of new ideas,
which is trying to understand the structure of that possibility space.
So he's saying, basically, everybody is welcome at the table,
(16:01):
but we're going to use science to try to cut
away the parts that don't make sense to us, and
we're going to acknowledge real the real limits of knowledge
that we have um and and then he kind of
talks about all the different puzzle parts that we have
that we know about right now, but what we don't
(16:22):
know about, and quantum theory is basically when those things
that he talks about, he says like it's given us
a tremendous amount of information, but at the same time,
we still are kind of stuck even in that mode
of well, what's what's right the Copenhagen interpretation or the
many worlds theory? Right, so so you know, time collapse theory,
which one of them is right? Are there are many
(16:44):
many worlds that we can observe or is there just
this one world that we can observe because nothing beyond
that exists, which goes back to that tree in the
forest you know, now you mentioned when we were prepping
for this we want to relativity a little bit. Yeah,
and about how the original theory relativity is the idea
of it. It's it's you can sort of compare that
(17:04):
to a tree following in the forest right right with
Einstein and basically saying, Okay, this is this is my
projection based on mathematics, but this is still just a thought, right,
this is still a thought experiment in a sense, and
and and and it was something that subsequently we had
to prove. We had to prove the things like you know,
observable time dilation uh uh and and also like gravitational
(17:28):
lensing with stars of observing how you know this this
interesting relationship between time and space and it's reality at
space time. This presentation is brought to you by Intel
sponsors of Tomorrow. So yeah, basically when Einstein was looking
(17:52):
at that, this was just the seeds for for what
we now can apply to different disciplines. Um to breakthroughs
that we've had in science. But still we have this
unknown quantity. And I think about dark matter as an example. Um,
you know, we we definitely underestimated the gravitational pool and
now we found out that or we think of the
(18:13):
matter of uh of the universe that we don't know
what it is or where it's coming from. Yeah, it's
kind of like there was a one particular Sherlock Holmes
story and I forget the title of it, but they're
investigating a house and Sherlock was able to determine that
there's not enough based on the visible space. There's a
secret room here somewhere and uh, and dark matter is
(18:34):
kind of a similar situation based on how much matter
there should be the universe or something missing for dark matter, right,
then that's a great example or a great technology because
we can't see it, but we know that based on
our models that there has to be something there. There's
a there's a hidden room and it's filled with dark matter,
and we just have to figure out exactly what that means. Yeah,
(18:57):
and then if you take it down to even just uh,
the level of what's available to us now, like, for instance,
you've got photography, which high speed photography now which we
can slow down mundane events. Um, even like a dog
lapping up water, Oh yes, or a cat. They're recently
studying on exactly how a cat's drinking. It's completely different
(19:20):
than we ever thought. I mean, especially with a dog
if you look at it. I used to think that
the dog was using its tongue is a sort of
cup and bringing all that water up into him. But
now we understand that it's actually curling its tongue under
and getting the water in that way. So you begin
to think to yourself, how many things am I actually
missing on a day to day basis because I'm not
(19:41):
quite equipped to perceive things like We slow it down
even more and we see that when the tongue curls
like a tiny doghead comes out of a hole in
the tongue and then drinks the water. That's not true.
That's it might be true. We just don't know yet.
We don't know yet. We just can't be certain. I
really wish that word here, but it does make me
think about like Another example, which David Eagleman gives, is
(20:05):
that we've got photo receptors at the back of our
eyes picking up signals and picking up a tiny slice
of electromagnetic radiation spectrum, which is what we call visible light.
The same stuff is passing through us via cell phones, right,
But the difference is that cell phone signals we can't
decode them because we don't have the specialized receptors for it.
(20:28):
So again it brings us back to that question of
maybe we're just ill equipped to be able to do
more at this point in time. Evolution kind of end
up thinking of the visible world. The world is visible
to humans as being reality, but in but it actually
may work out to where the version of reality we're
(20:49):
just seeing like a slim slice of reality. The rest
is like we've got blinders like a horse. Yeah. Yeah.
David Eagleman had this really great point. He was sort
of talking about all the where we are history really
in terms of breakthroughs and saying, you know, can you
imagine being able to even understand a computer lit alone
quantum computing if you didn't even have electricity to plug
(21:10):
in that computer? Yeah, I can't even imagine understanding one
with electrics, right, It still breaks my brain. But but
so we think about where we're going to be on
that timeline a hundred years from now, our thousand years
from now, and we essentially might look like Caveman. And
then all the things that we think right now may
just be some sort of guessing game um that you know,
probability half of it turns out to be correct, the
(21:32):
other half not correct and this is I think when
the most important points that David Eagleman makes, which is
that science really is a guessing game. Um, it doesn't
look Science does not move in a linear fashion. Uh.
It takes great creative leaps and then it tries to
backfill to substantiate those leaps. Yeah. So that's another reason
why science scientists are rock stars. And well it's it
(21:57):
goes back to take it into cosmology. The idea of
um geocentricism and heliocentricism, like the idea that, okay, the
Earth's center of the universe, let's throw some math at that. Okay,
that didn't work out. Sons the center of the universe.
That didn't work out either. You know. It's like they
you know, they take this leap, and sometimes the leap
is based on things that aren't science. But then by
(22:17):
through scientific evaluation, they are able to determine whether that
was a leap that's going to land us on a
solid ground or not. All right, Yeah, I'm liking this
because you know this, this concept of scientists has stayed
pipe smoking, plaid vest wherein men and women because you know,
but with mustaches. I'll just go that far um is
(22:38):
completely wrong. I mean they're they're sort of like the
graffiti artists, you know, trying to put things together on
a graffiti artist sounded kind of cool, but as you said,
they're just throwing things, the throwing darts at the at
the dart boards of ideas and just trying to get there.
And one day they'll look back and they'll say, I
can't believe that they thought that dark matter was a thing.
And they didn't know that dog tongues had a little
bit of doghead that came out right exactly, totally didn't
(23:01):
understand even their own pets and Jeane Shorts what was
that all about. But examples I think of this of
this creative leap is with relativity, as you had brought
up before with Einstein. That was just a little seedon
idea before, but then it actually had some real time applications. Yeah,
and we were later able to observe gravitational lensing too,
(23:24):
to see how light traveling near a huge, a very
large star actually warps around it, being able to observe
how the the the the clocks in an orbiting satellite,
how time passes a little differently in orbit than it
doesn't earth, right, and so that's that's the geosynchronous satellites, right,
(23:47):
and so that's what that's how we keep time aboard
spacecraft by being aware of the change, right, Okay, and
then we've got atomic energy and atomic warfare. I mean,
these are huge things that we're just predicated on a thought.
Of course a lot of math too, but but turned
out to be on the right part of the board there. Yeah.
(24:10):
It's kind of like we're pawing our way blindly through
a fog, and the fog is the universe, you know,
when we can never really see the whole picture, but
we can sort of you know, reach ahead and sort
of feel our way through it and h and figure
out what's going to be solid ground and what's going
to be you know, a plummet into an abyss. We
can't see the trees for the forest there you go,
(24:32):
all right, Well that helps explain a little bit. But
I think that the coolest thing is that it helps
us to understand the uncertainty is okay, right, and uncertainty
is a huge part of it, right, is the building
block of our knowledge. Right. Yeah. The second you have
everything figured out, that's that's where the problem you're in
big trouble. In fact, Voltaire said, doubt is an uncomfortable position,
(24:53):
but certainty is an absurd position. I always come back
to the Book of Job, where Job's in a miserable time.
I've probably mentioned this before, but but then you know,
God is basically when he decides to know, mouth off
to God. God's like, you know, who are you to
ask questions? You're never gonna understand anything? And it's a
very it's it's it's probably my favorite chapter in the
(25:14):
Bible because it's got the Book of the Bible, because
it comes down to uncertainty, cosmic uncertainty, theological uncertainty, everything philosophical.
I like that chapter two and the one on gene shorts.
The other one on gene shorts is pretty good, but
it's a cautionary tale. Of course. You don't see any
on me. So if you want to learn more about
(25:34):
these topics, just to visit the homepage and you can
drop in quantum physics, relativity, gene shorts, whatever into the
search bar and we have a plethora of articles for
you to look over. And don't forget to check out
David Eagleman's Talking Uncertainty, which is on school Life Dot com,
and in the meantime, you can check us out on
Twitter and Facebook. You can find us just do a
(25:56):
search on Facebook for stuff to Blow your Mind or
just put him Low the Mind. That's our Facebook and
Twitter handle, and please drop us a line at blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For moral
this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
(26:17):
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