Sean Carroll

I do think that if you understand or want to try to understand difficult issues, you should understand arguments on both sides.

That's fine.

But I'm not interested in sort of setting up a competition, like a prize fight between the best arguments for a theory and the best arguments against the theory, and then putting them in the arena and see who wins.

I don't think that's the way things work.

I think that rather than coming up with the steel man version of this argument or that argument, I want to come up with the correct version, the best version of every argument.

I'm not going to try to make an argument sound stronger than it is or weaker than it is.

So I'm more about just getting things right than about steel manning or straw manning or whatever.

Of course, your mileage may vary whether I actually succeed in that as well.

OK, with that throat clearing out of the way, let's remember what quantum mechanics says.

I know that some of you have heard about quantum mechanics a lot.

Some of you might be new.

This might be the first ever Mindscape podcast that you've listened to, which is great.

and if that's true let me tell you about this thing called quantum mechanics very very briefly because it could be ours all by itself the idea is back in the early part of the 20th century we knew about things like electrons you know electrons are always the example that physicists use because they're the elementary particle that is heavy enough and electrically charged enough to be manipulated

but also light enough to be pushed around very easily.

Like all of chemistry and much of material science is based on what electrons do.

There's also protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms, but they mostly sit there until you start considering nuclear fission or fusion or radioactivity or whatever.

But in your body and in the table in front of you, most of your nuclei are just sitting there going along for the ride,

while the electrons do the interesting work.

So anyway, electrons were understood in the early 20th century, but they had this funny property that we have a picture that you've all seen of an atom that looks like a little solar system, right?

With the nucleus in the center and the electrons orbiting.