Edward Frenkel
speaker
2,304 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard Apr 2023
Edward Frenkel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
We understand that it's neither.
But both projections reveal something.
They reveal different sides of it.
A paradox is like that.
It's only paradoxical if we are confined in a particular vision, if we are wedded to a particular point of view.
It's a harbinger, if you will, of a possibility of seeing things in a more, as they are, more sophisticated than we thought before, you see.
But we know that.
Our best physical theories tell us that unambiguously.
In quantum mechanics, actually, Heisenberg, I think, captured it the best when he said, what we observe is not reality itself, but reality subjected to our method of questioning.
When I talk about electrons, for instance, there is a very specific way in which this is realized.
There is a so-called double-slit experiment.
For those who don't know, you have a screen and you have an emitter from which you shoot electrons, and in between you put another screen which has two vertical slits parallel to each other.
If we were shooting, you know, tennis balls, each ball would go through one slit or another and then hit the screen behind this or that slit.
So you would have, let's say they're colored, they're painted.
So there'll be sort of bumps or spots of paint behind this or that.
But that's not what happens when we shoot electrons.
We see an interference pattern, as if we were actually sending a wave, so that each electron, it seems like each electron goes through both slits at once, and then has the audacity to interfere with itself, where at some points, two crests would amplify, and at some points, the crest and the trough would cancel each other.
Yet.
So that suggests, okay, so an electron is a wave?
Not so fast.
Showing 421–440 of 2,304 · page 22 of 116
← Previous
Next →