Adam Becker

It seems hard to imagine that Charles Darwin or Chucky Dee to his friends and company would have had the audacity to suggest that humans are not at the center of biological creation, right?

And instead that we're just another ape, just another organism.

in a giant tree of organisms.

And without both of those changes in the way that we think about the world, I mean, first of all, you can probably come up with your own examples here, but without both of those changes, Stanley Kubrick wouldn't have been able to film 2001.

Right.

All those all those apes at the beginning.

And, you know, like, come on, that wouldn't have happened.

And there's lots of other art and culture and and just important things that have happened because of our scientific theories and vice versa.

Yeah.

What is tunneling?

So tunneling.

So the short answer is in classical physics, if I put my hand on this table and leave it here, then it will just sort of stay on top of this table.

But in quantum physics, there's a small chance that my hand will suddenly pass through the table.

But it's phenomenally unlikely because my hand is quite large and the probability of that kind of tunneling has to do with, among other things, the size of the object involved.

For tiny objects, tunneling happens all the time.

In fact, if tunneling didn't happen, the sun would not shine.

So we know that tunneling happens.

Tunneling is not more strange than the rest or unexplained than the rest of quantum physics.

So if you can get a good picture of the world that comes with quantum physics, you get tunneling for free.

It does kind of sound like that.