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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Quantum paradoxes. Information and entropy. Spice dust. All of that and more on StarTalk Special Edition Cosmic Queries with our one and only geek-in-chief at the helm, Charles Liu. Coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. We're doing a Cosmic Queries Grab Bag.
Normally, you see these over on our flagship StarTalk show, but we've got with us not only, of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary. Hey, Neil. And, of course, Chuck Nice. Hey, hey. But the only way this becomes a party is when we bring in our geek in chief, Charles Liu. Charles, how you doing, man? Hey, hey, it is a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much as always.
All right, all right. Charles is a professor of astronomy. Is that the department? What's the name of the department, Charles? Department is physics and astronomy.
Physics and astronomy.
College of Staten Island. College of Staten Island of the City University System of New York. Longtime friend. Many people don't know that Charles co-wrote the exhibit copy that lives in Negro Center for Earth and Space. He was with us at the birth of the whole facility. That was so much fun. We had a great time, didn't we, Neil? It was. All good. All good. And Gary, former soccer pro. Yes.
And I don't think Charles knows this yet. You're a new American citizen as of a few days ago.
All right. Freshly minted. Welcome to the club, Gary. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. And the three gentlemen here are part of the reason why being a US citizen for me is fantastic. So thank you.
Oh, wow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Now we have to live up to that.
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Chapter 2: How do observers influence the universe's existence?
you have two oranges. But if I give you two newspapers, you don't have twice the information than you would have had on one newspaper. So information is clearly a different thing from what we think of as material reality. So could you give us a quick primer on what a physicist means when information is the topic?
Oh, it's kind of hard, but I'll do my best. If you think about information as you're looking at a system with lots and lots of stuff, what is it about the stuff that distinguishes this stuff from other stuff? In other words, you have a blob of matter in the universe. Then you have another blob of matter. What makes this blob different from that blob? It's the information you get from it.
It's not the form. It's not, for example, whether it's an atom or whether it's a proton or whether it's a neutron, but rather whether it's spin up or spin down or whether it is this temperature or whether it is that.
So it's information in the way that we think about it, yes, but it also requires you to sort of think about it in systems of stuff and not just the things themselves, but almost an abstract way of considering material.
So material can have information completely coursing through it.
Yes.
Unlike quantum physics, if no one's there to measure that information, the information is still there, correct?
Yes. It's kind of like an objective thing that's there no matter what. But if you don't measure it, then you don't know what it is. An example might be a bit. You've heard of the term a bit in a computer, right? A 16-bit chip or something like that. The bit is the information, one or zero, or on or off.
But it doesn't matter whether the bit is an electronic chip or whether it's a quantum bit or whether it's a pair of electron positron or something like that. That information is still the important piece of the input or output that you're getting from that system. Does that make sense?
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between information and entropy?
We're not going to try to figure out how it actually works. Let's just go home and have a drink and forget about it. So we refuse to sort of give up and just say, oh, it was something that we'll never be able to understand. It was some divinity or it was some supernatural thing.
So if we try to think about nature, then the way you can actually inject energy has to do with something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Neil, have you told our distinguished Patreons about the fundamental forces in the universe? Assume no. Assume no. Yeah. Okay. Assuming no. Currently, we think that the universe has four forces in it.
that sort of determine all of the transfer of energy and material and so forth around the universe. There's something called the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity.
Now, gravity is its own strange beast because there is a hypothesis that gravity as a force actually has more to do with the structure of space-time than the transfer of little particles back and forth. But electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force are now separate forces.
They have different mathematical explanations and they behave differently depending on where they are and what size and scales and so forth are around. It makes sense to hypothesize that right around the time of the Big Bang, there were not four forces, but there was only one. And something happened at the quantum level to break forces off from one another.
And that break is called a spontaneous symmetry break. So when I was saying spontaneous symmetry breaking, you can imagine something breaking and from the inside of that break that used to be symmetric, this one beautiful force that followed all of its math, now is two or now is three. Or now it's four.
And the resulting chaos, it's almost like unleashing to some extent that entropy we were talking about when we're trying to boil water. But now we're unleashing just straight up energy in such huge densities and such huge amounts that it will propel the universe to grow at such a rate and such a speed that we pass the black hole thresholds.
And then you have to start all over again and turn that energy into matter and then make black holes again. thousands or even millions of years later.
Wow, that's pretty wild. Okay, so how do you feel about, we didn't have her on the show, but we were supposed to. I believe her name is Sabine Hoffensomething. She's- Hoffensomething. It is, I mean, I don't know. But you guys know who I'm talking about. Hassenfelder, okay. Yes, yeah, mm-hmm.
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