Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Harry Chuck, something cool always happens when we have our geek in chief. Chuck Lu. He's the best. With his new book on quantum, people started asking about quantum physics. My favorite was quantum consciousness.
Chapter 2: What is quantum consciousness and why is it significant?
Quantum consciousness. And boy, did we bask in that. Oh, yes. Straight in the deep end. Right to the deep end. Some of us drowned. Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.
And if it's Special Edition, you know that means Gary O'Reilly's in the house. Gary, how you doing, man?
I'm good, Neil. I'm good. It's cold, but I'm feeling okay.
Oh, that's all right. It's colder than your UK roots would ever have been for you in this moment, for sure. But we are getting the World Cup. Yes. And you used to play professional soccer. Yes.
I'm interested.
Okay. And we've got Chuck Nice, baby. How you doing, man? That's right, Chuck Nice, who played no soccer, no football, no nothing.
So, this is a special edition grab bag. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we have, for certain grab bags, only ones that, like, achieve great heights. We put up the bat signal to call in the geek in chief, Charles Liu. Charles, how you doing, man? Hey!
Our returning champion, Chuck Liu!
It is so good to be back with you all. I played soccer when I was a kid, too. I was usually the goal. Oh. Not the goalie.
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Chapter 3: How does quantum theory relate to consciousness?
But what we really need to do is to know what questions to ask next. If we're moving forward in the science, this is a guidebook, right? It's not a textbook or anything, but it's like, here, you want some answers? Here they are.
And a lot of people, they've heard, you know, quantum is all the buzzwords lately. It really is. They just want to become fluent in it, which is a great way to make that happen. Now, we solicited questions from our fan base, but we told them that they were going to you. So those who are already plugged into your geekin' chiefitude probably are going to take us there.
But I haven't seen the questions. So who's got the questions? Gary? Chuck?
We do. Chuck and I. I'll start us off. This first question.
By the way, before we go any further, Chuck, I don't know if you can see this, but that's That's you next to Michelle Obama on my Kindle, baby. Dude. That's right. Yeah, man. I am truly honored. There you go, buddy. That's you right there.
You see that?
That's you on my Kindle. You are so kind.
So a picture of his book is next to a picture of her book. No, it's his book. It's just in digital form. You just said, I have a picture of you next to Michelle Obama. I said, I didn't know my boy was hanging out with Michelle.
Oh, well, yeah, it's his book and her book. I don't know her.
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Chapter 4: What questions did fans ask about quantum physics?
But we don't see them. We haven't seen a single wormhole. We haven't seen a single white hole. So the existence of those things has not yet been confirmed and appears to be contradicted or refuted by the fact that we don't see these things. That phantom energy is not what dark energy actually is. But that's just the opposite of in math.
Well, then since we don't know, so then what is dark energy, Chuck? I don't know.
I have no idea. I have zero idea.
Don't have an attitude while you address my guest here. It's okay. It's okay. Listen, here's something.
Yeah, I have no idea, but I'll tell you something else that's been really interesting. Maybe we can save this for later in the show if there are other questions regarding this. But I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting not too long ago in Phoenix. And I was just so happy. There was just a lovely time. I'm still basking in it, even though it's been a little while.
But one of the last speeches, one of the last talks in that conference was about the nature of dark energy. The dark energy survey, which has now gathered information about 15 million galaxies and where they're placed in the universe, seems to show that what we have counted as dark energy, the cosmological constant, is probably not constant.
It looks like it's actually changing, which is really amazing, which adds still more speculation as to what this dark energy actually is, because you have to account for the fact that it looks like the universe doesn't have a constant cosmological constant.
And just to be clear, our assumption that it was constant comes directly from Einstein's equations. Correct. His equations require it to be constant. So if it's not constant, it means Einstein's general relativity is missing something about it as a model of the universe.
Not so smart are you now, Einstein, are you?
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Chapter 5: How does the concept of retrocausality fit into quantum mechanics?
Once you can combine them, right, then we're in good shape. Now, people are working on this. Light does seem to be a place where you both... somehow, for example, have a maximum speed of light, right? Speed of light is the maximum speed at which any object can move through space and time. Meanwhile, matter and energy, right?
Light is both a particle in a wave and its energy, which can be converted into matter, things like that. So light does seem to be some sort of linchpin in this sort of shotgun wedding that you was talking about. But it might not be shotgun. I'll venture this. Neil, you and I both know a very, very, very good guy named Jacob Berendis. Jacob is a preceptor at Harvard University.
And he has recently.
When I was in graduate school, he was in high school and he programmed my website at the time. That's the same Jacob Baroness.
It's that same Jacob Baroness, yes. Wow. But yes, that Jacob, who is now a preceptor at Harvard, he has written and published some articles just recently. He's an example of one of the many scientists that's trying to tie these systems together. And what he is basically saying is that there is actually a mathematical way to bridge the
general relativity, the macroscopic world, with quantum mechanics in the microscopic world. And it has to do with the math of statistical physics and chaos theory and the ability to take things which are uncertain and make them more certain. Not always certain, but more certain. And that pulled out from the microscopic to the macroscopic unites the two areas of physics
but we're not quite there yet. That's just one hypothesis that appears to work sort of, and then there's gonna be a lot more work and a lot more people have to keep working on it. So in that case, if Jacob and his colleagues are right, then the wave particle duality is only temporary.
This incompatibility is only there because we're not advanced enough yet in our mathematical construction of physics to unite them.
Interesting.
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Chapter 6: What recent discoveries challenge the cosmological constant?
Or it could be considered something that is in the existing spatial dimensions that just happens to be temporarily not accessible. And yet you have subspace communications in Star Trek, so it is accessible, and it's just all kinds of weirdness.
But also people have thought about it and tried to come up with a solution to it. Yes. Unlike Star Wars that doesn't try to find solutions to anything.
Correct. Well, that's one of the interesting things between Star Trek and Star Wars, right? I love them both, but even though Star Trek has tried to be much more scientific... Star Wars just gave up on being scientific. Star Wars is just a space opera. And so in that sense, it's actually still kind of fun.
Although things like the Mandalorian and so forth, they still have a little bit of science thrown in there. The ideas in general of things like the Force and whatnot in Star Wars, eh, not so much.
Are we ready for another question? Yeah, bring it on. All right, this time we are Cindy Brill. Hi, it's Dr. Tyson Liu and Lord Nice, Cindy, from Tua, Latin, Oregon. My question, oh, I like this. My question is consciousness, is consciousness the result of quantum physics? What a great question.
Because we don't really understand consciousness and no one understands quantum physics. You just get one of those to explain the other and we're all fine.
This is another great question. Thank you, Cindy. And in fact, this is a question that I was asked like exactly word for word. when I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting back in January. Yeah, I know, like I said earlier, I'm still feeling really good about that meeting. I really was. I mean, you know, the world is on fire. I mean, things, it's also in ice. Things are just messed up.
But when I went there, it was so... Yes.
It's also a nice, yeah.
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Chapter 7: How do different dimensions affect our understanding of the universe?
IAU, right.
So the AAS is a great organization. And how many is it up to? 8,000 members.
8,000 members. And there are 8 billion people in the world.
That's right.
So that makes us... One in a million.
If you do the math, one in a million. That's right. So it's very cool. And so many people there, there were about 3000 people there overall, and so many of them were students, younger people. And one of those folks had come up to me and said, Hey, you know, I remember hearing you guys talking about free will. And that made me wonder, is consciousness free? Is it quantum consciousness?
And is that why there's free will? Because there's uncertainty in the quantum realm that we can't pin down. And so we can't determine what we're going to do at any given moment.
So we interpret that uncertainty as free will.
Possibly, right? Yeah. When we talked way back in the day, right? It wasn't that long ago, but it feels like a long time ago about free will. We were actually asking ourselves, right? At what point do we say we don't know what's coming next, right?
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Chapter 8: What role does consciousness play in our perception of reality?
Okay. Okay. So what I said is not even possible. That's the point. Yes. You cannot know the state of every particle differently. down to the last particle that's running your brain because quantum physics prevents that knowledge. So to say I have an exact copy of it cannot be a real statement. Excellent way to put it. Excellent.
And that front ends what you just said about trying to recover what your thoughts were.
Right.
Right. Okay. Interesting. Wow. God. They put a kibosh on all uploading consciousness. Absolutely.
Well, yes. And if you're talking about like fictional characters, which are digital, like the holographic doctor in the Star Trek Enterprise.
Right.
What you're doing is that you're assuming that consciousness can be digitized, at least to a facsimile to where a starting point can be produced that is reproducible. In other words, every time you turn on the doctor, it's please state the nature of the medical emergency.
And if you can get to that point, and then the future time evolution is also digital and not quantum, then maybe you can get some semblance of consciousness. But if it's quantum, no chance.
No chance. Now, how about this? Suppose I'm able, suppose I'm able to run subroutines in a program that is everything about me, every single thing. So I have the main program, which is Chuck. And then I have like, just almost, it can't be infinite, but like.
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