Good to see all of you.You see a quote up
there by Niels Bohr, one of the founding figures
of quantum mechanics: “Anyone who thinks
they can talk about quantum mechanics without
getting dizzy hasn’t yet understood the
first word of it.”
Now, why would that be?
What did Niels Bohr mean by that?
Well, basically he meant that we all have
a good intuition for classical physics.
Right?
And by that, I mean, you know, if I was to
take any little object, right, and give it
a catch.
Nice!
Did a one-handed catch right there.
Throw this a little bit further back.
Here we go, two for two.
Nope, we’re still one-for-two.
They’re still back in the dark ages--here
we go.
You have that one over there?
Good.
Right now, each one of the people who caught,
so that would be the two of you over here,
is really an evolved human being.
Now, you see, when we were out there in the
savannah trying to survive, we needed certain
skills, we needed to be able to know where
to throw a spear or how to throw a rock to
get the next meal.
We needed to dodge some animal that was running
toward us.
And therefore we learned the basic physics
of the everyday macroscopic so-called classical world.
We learned that intuitively.
And that’s why when I throw an object, you
don’t have to through some elaborate calculation
to figure out the trajectory of that stuffed
animal.
You just put out your hand and catch it.
It’s built into our being.
But that’s not the case when we go beyond
the world of the everyday.
If we explore the world, say of the very small, which is what we are going to focus on here tonight,
we don’t have experience in that
domain.
We don’t have intuition in that domain.
And in fact, were it the case that any of
our distant brethren way in the past, if they
did have some quantum mechanical knowledge
and they sat down to think about electrons
and probability waves and wave functions and
things of that sort, they got eaten!
Their genes didn’t propagate, right?
And therefore we have to use the power of
mathematics and experiment and observation
to peer deeper into the true nature of reality
when things are beyond our direct sensory experience.
And that’s what quantum mechanics is all
about.
It’s trying to describe what happens in
the micro-world in a way that is both accurate
and revealing.
And the thing to bear in mind is that even
though our focus here tonight will really
in some sense be in the microworld, the world
of particles, we are all a collection of particles.
So any weirdness that we find down there in
the microworld, in some sense it has an impact
even in the macroworld and maybe suppresses--we’ll
discuss.
But it’s not like there’s a sharp divide
between the small and the big.
We are big beings made of a lot of small things.
So any weirdness about the small stuff really
does apply to us as well.
And in this journey into the micro-world,
the world of quantum mechanics, we have some
of the world leading experts to help us along,
to figure things out.
And let me now bring them on stage.
Joining us tonight is a professor of philosophy
at the University of Southern California who
spent 22 years at the University of Oxford
as a student, researcher, and faculty member.
He is the author of a book on the Everett
interpretation of quantum mechanics titled
"The Emergent Multiverse."
Please welcome David Wallace.
Also joining us tonight is a professor of
chemistry at the University of California,
Berkeley, co-director of the Berkeley Quantum
Information and Computation Center and faculty
scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory.
She’s a fellow of the American Physical
Society and recipient of awards from the Bergmann, Sloan,
Alexander von Humboldt Foundations.
Please welcome K. Birgitta Whaley.
Our third participant is a professor of physics
at the Univeristy of British Columbia, a Simons
Investigator and member of the Simons Foundation
“It from Qubit” collaboration.
He was a Canada research chair and Sloan Foundation
fellow and was awarded the Canadian CAP medal
for mathematical physics for 2014.
Please welcome Mark Van Raamsdonk.
Our final participant is a professor of theoretical
physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands
and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics
for work in quantum field theory that laid
the foundations for the standard model of
particle physics, one of the greatest minds
of our era, please welcome Gerard ‘t Hooft.
Alright, so the subject is quantum mechanics,
and part of the evening will involve
some challenge to the conventional thinking about quantum mechanics.
And so before we get into the details, I thought
I would just sort of take your temperature.
Get a sense of where you stand on quantum
mechanics.
Is it, in your mind, a done deal?
It’s finished, we completely understand
it?
Is it a provisional theory?
Is it something which 100 years from now we’re
gonna look back on with a quaint smile?
“How did they think that that’s how things
worked?”
So, David, your view.
Well I don’t think we fully understand it
yet.
I think it has a lot of depth left to plumb,
and who knows it might turn out to be replaced.
But right at the minute, I think we don’t
have either empirical or theoretical reason
to think that anything will take its place.
Good
I think it’s here to stay.
There maybe extensions, modifications, there
may be something more complete, but this will
still be part of it, in my view.
OK, Mark
Yeah, so there’s a frontier in quantum mechanics
that I work in, and this is the frontier.
It’s like the wild west of theoretical physics,
where we’re trying to combine quantum mechanics
and gravity, and we need to do that to understand
black holes and hopefully eventually understand
the big bang.
And there’s a lot to do, and we don’t
know if we’re going to have to modify quantum
mechanics, or it will all be the same quantum
mechanics all the way down.
Now, Gerard, you have unusual views.
Well yes, I could spend the rest of the evening
explaining them.
But, to my mind, quantum mechanics is a tool,
a very important mathematical tool, to calculate
what happens if you have some underlying equations.
And telling us how particles and other small
things behave.
We know the answer to that question--the answer
is quantum mechanics.
But we don’t know the question, that’s
still something we’re trying to figure out.
Good.
So, sort of a jeopardy issue, if you know
the American reference.
(Exactly.)
Alright, so just a quick overview.
We’re going to start with some of the basics
of quantum mechanics just to sort of make
sure that all of us are more or less on the
same page.
We’ll then turn to a section on something
called the “quantum measurement problem,”
something weird, “quantum entanglement”
as in the title of the program.
We’ll then turn to issues of black holes,
spacetime, and quantum computation, which
will take us right through to the end.
Alright, so just to get to the basics of quantum
mechanics.
The story, of course, began more or less in
the way that I started.
We understood the world using classical physics
in the early days, way back to the 1600s.
And then something happened in the early part
of the 20th century, where people like--we
started with Newton, of course, then we moved
on to people like Max Planck, Albert Einstein.
What drove the initial move into quantum physics?
David?
I think it was really just pushing really
hard at classical mechanics as it went down
into the scale of atoms and the structure
of atoms, and just finding that that structure
snapped and broke.
That trying to use classical mechanics to
understand how hot things got or how electrons
went around atoms without collapsing into
the nucleus.
In all those places, we had a series of hints
that something was amiss in our classical physics.
And it took, I guess, most of 30 years for
those hints to coalesce into a coherent theory.
But that coherent theory then became not really
just a single physical theory, but the language
for writing physical theory, be it theories
of particles or fields, maybe someday even gravity.
And that language was more or less sort of
solid by, I guess about 1930.
Yup.
Yeah and it’s actually quite remarkable
that it only took that number of years to
develop a radically new way of thinking about
things.
And Richard Feynman, who is of course a hero
of all of us, also known to the public, famously
said that there was one experiment--we can
go through the whole history of everything
you described, with the ultraviolet catastrophe
and photoelectric effect and all these beautiful
experiments--but the Double Slit Experiment,
luckily for us, in having a relatively brief
conversation, allows us to get to the heart
of this new idea, where it came from.
This actually is the paper on, in some sense,
the Double Slit Experiment.
The first version, Davisson and Germer.
And I’ll draw your attention to one thing.
You see the word “accident”?
And this is just a footnote.
But, in the old days, people would actually
describe the blind alleys that they went down
in a scientific paper.
But as science progressed, we were kind of
taught, “no no don’t ever say what went wrong.
Only talk about what went right!”
But here is an old paper, and indeed this
experiment emerged from an accident in the
laboratory at Bell Labs.
They were doing a version of this experiment,
they turned the intensity up too high, some
glass tube shattered, and when they re-did
the experiment, unwittingly, they had changed
the experiment to something that was actually
far more interesting than the experiment they
were initially carrying out.
So, just to talk about what this experiment
is in modern language, so David again, just,
what’s the basic idea of the Double Slit
Experiment?
So you take a source of, well of particles
of any kind, but let it be light, for instance.
You shine that light as a narrow beam on a
screen--it has two gaps in it, and you look
at the pattern of light behind the two gaps
in the screen (“two slits”) two slits,
exactly, yes.
So the slits are just literally gaps in a
black sheet of paper, in principle.
The light’s going through.
If light is a particle, you’d expect one
sort of result on the far side of the screen.
If light is a wave, you might expect something
different as the light coming through one
part of the slit interferes with the light
going through the other part of the slit.
And the weird thing about the quantum two-slit
experiment is that it seems, in various ways,
to be doing both of those things at the same
time.
Good.
So, Birgitta, if you can just take us through
a particle experiment to build up our intuition.
So let’s say we carry out the experiment
the way we described, but we don’t start
with photons or electrons, we start with pellets--bullets
or something.
So I think we have a little animation that
you could take us through.
So what would we expect to happen in this
experiment?
Well so you have the source of the pellets
here in front of us, spitting out the pellets
and some of them go through the holes, and
the ones that go through the holes basically
travel rectilinear, straight ahead, as we
might expect from our classical intuition.
And we get two bands at the back, indicating
the pellets that went through the right slit,
on the right, and the left band is the pellets
that went through the left slit.
Now, if I was--that’s completely intuitive
right?
So this is the stuff that our forebears would
have known even on the savannah.
Now, if we took the size of the pellets and
we dialed them down to a very small size,
before going to your quantum intuition that
you have, what would you expect naively to
happen if you simply dialed down the size?
Would you expect there to be any different
if you were--this is a leading question, by the way.
So, just follow me here.
The answer is…would you expect anything
different?
Would you expect anything different?
(...obviously the same thing. No no not at all.)
Good.
Good.
Naively not!
Naively not. Exactly right.
So here’s what you would naively expect
would happen.
Again, you got the particles going through
the two slits.
So Mark, tell us what exactly does happen--not
that I don’t think Birgitta could, just
to give us all a little airtime.
So it’s of course, while the place where
you would least expect to see something on
that screen is exactly behind that big barrier
that’s in the middle.
And somehow, when you actually do the experiment,
you see that actually, that’s where most
of the particles end up.
So, it’s always exactly the opposite.
And you get this weird pattern with other
bands going out.
And so you initially would stare at it and
shake your head and wonder what you’d actually have.
So we’ll analyze what that means in just
a moment.
But I, you know, we often, I don’t know,
probably most everyone in this audience has
seen a still image or animation like this
in the discussion of quantum mechanics.
And I thought it would be kind of nice to
show you that it, that this actually happens.
It’s not just an animation that an artist
does.
So we’re going to actually do the Double
Slit Experiment, for real, right now.
And to do that, I’m going to invite a friend
of mine from Princeton University.
Omalon, can you wheel out, if you would, the
Double Slit Experiment?
Alright, so what we have here is a laser on
this far side.
So this is our source.
So actually we’re doing this in some sense
opposite to the orientation that we saw in
the animation.
And we’re going to fire this laser, which
is photons, in essence.
And the photons are going to go through a
barrier that has two openings in it--it’s
harder to see that of course mechanically,
but trust me there’s a barrier with two
openings.
And we’re going to take a look at the data
that falls on a detector screen, which in
the modern age is a more complicated and somewhat
finicky piece of equipment.
So we’re all sitting here, on shpilkes,
if you speak any Yiddish, you know exactly
what I’m talking about right there.
But hopefully this will work out.
So, Omalon, why don’t we just actually see
ambient noise.
Can we see a little bit of that first?
Can we switch over to the input to the screen?
Alright so this is the output from that device.
And now, if we actually turn on the laser
and allow us to collect all the photons that
land, over time.
There, they’re building up.
And there you see what actually happens.
So this is the result of this very device
here.
And you see it.
You can see on the very far left, we see some
of the photons are landing.
Then we get a dark region in between.
Then a bright, a dark, a bright, a dark, a
bright, a dark, and a bright and a dark...even
though this device over here really is a barrier
that has only 2 slits in it.
So the animation that we showed you actually
does hold true in real experiments.
And that then forces us to come to grips with
it, to try to understand what in the heck
is actually going on.
So, thank you Omalon.
So there we have it.
We have this situation in which we expected
to get two bands and we got more.
What does that tell us?
Where do we go from there?
That there’s an existing bit of mathematics
that comes up with exactly that same pattern.
But it has nothing to do with particles.
It’s the mathematics that you use to describe
waves, water waves, or other kinds of waves.
Yeah. So can we see the animation that has a single?
So this is a warm-up to the problem, where
we have water going through a single opening.
Just tell us what we see happening here.
That’s right, so you’ve got sort of a
water wave, a wave front coming along, and then
that slit acts as a bit of a source for
this rippling wave going out in a circular pattern.
And you see it’s most wavy at the place
behind the slit on the wall.
That’s indicated by the brightness there.
Yeah. And then if we go on to a more relevant version for the actual Double Slit Experiment...
Yeah, so now we’ve got that same wave front.
But now there’s two slits, and it’s like
there’s two different sources of waves,
like if you threw two different pebbles in
the pond at the same time.
And what happens is they’re both, you’re
both creating waviness.
But some places on the screen, the wave from
one is doing this, and the wave from the other
is doing this, and they kind of cancel out.
But right there in the middle, what’s happening
is that the wave from the one slit is going
up right when the wave from the other slit
is going up, and then they do this, and then
you get a big wave and that’s the bright
part.
But, if you work out the mathematics, then
the places that have the big waves are exactly
these bright ones, and that’s just like
we saw in the Double Slit for the particles.
Right. So as Gerard was saying, as Mark was saying,
we now have a strange confluence of two things:
the data that comes out of the Double Slit
Experiment when done with particles, and something
that seems to have nothing to do with it,
where we just have waves going through a barrier
with two openings.
So, the conclusion then is that there is some
weird connection between particles and waves,
that’s where that connection comes from.
And, let’s push that further, so...
Yeah. I mean let’s just drive home how weird it
should be that there is any kind of connection here.
So imagine I do the Two Slit Experiment.
I cover up one of the slits.
The effect completely goes away.
I get a bit of a spreading out of the particles, but I don’t get that interference.
I don’t get those bands.
Much as we saw with water going through a
single opening.
Exactly, much as we see with water going through
the single slit, and much as we see with your
classical intuition about particles.
If I cover up the other slit, exactly the
same result.
It’s only if I have both slits open at the
same time that the effect happens.
So it seems to be, for all the whirls, if
somehow something’s going through the first slit,
and something else is going through
the other slit, and between them they’re
interacting to create this strange effect.
And that’s why it matters so much, that
I can do this experiment with one particle at a time.
If this was just a massive light going through,
no surprise.
The sunlight’s going through the left slit,
the sunlight’s going through the right slit.
The left-hand light, the right-hand light
interferes.
But I can set this stuff up so that only one
photon goes through every hour and a half,
I still see the effect.
It doesn’t go down in its likeness.
Yeah, can we see that?
I think we have that--
And then you might be thinking, well maybe
each individual particle breaks in half,
and half of the particle goes through one slit,
and half of the particle goes through another slit.
But again, then you’d think you could--look--then
you’d think you’d be seeing half-strength
detections.
But that’s not what you see.
Whenever you look, each time you send a particle
through, if you look where it is, you see
the particle in one place and one place only.
So trying to reconcile those two accounts
of what’s going on makes your mind hurt.
Yeah, exactly.
So we’re forced into, as David was saying,
not just thinking that a large collection
of particles behaves like a wave, which maybe
would not be that surprising because water
waves are made of H2O molecules, particles,
and therefore they’re kind of wavy,
but each individual particle somehow has a wave-like quality.
And historically, people struggled to figure
out what wave, what kind of wave, what
is it made of and what does it represent if you have a wave associated with a particle.
A wave is spread out, a particle is at a point.
And it was Max Born in the 1920’s who came up with the strange idea of what these waves are.
So, Birgitta, what are these waves telling
us about?
Well the waves, what we see is the probability
which, the square of the wave or the modulus
of the wave, but—
So here’s a wave behind you.
So you said, “probability,” in essence—
Yes.
This is an amplitude, this is an amplitude
which will give us a probability.
If we take this amplitude and look anywhere
here with some measuring device,
we will find with some distinct probability, after measuring many times, we’ll find that there’s a
definite probability of the particle being
there, just as in the double slit.
After sending many particles through, we found
with a certain probability that they would
all appear on the left, or all on the right.
So, in some sense, vaguely, where the wave
is big,
there’s a high likelihood you’re going to find the particle.
Where the wave is near zero, there’s a very
small probability that you’re going to find
the particle.
But you can’t guarantee it.
So any one particle could be in a place where
the wave is very very small.
Now these are all just pictures.
In the 1920s, physicists were able to make
this precise.
So Schrodinger wrote down an equation, and
I think we can show you what the equation
looks like.
Obviously, you don’t need to know the math
to follow anything that we’re talking about here.
But Gerard, you wanted to emphasize that there
is math behind this, because your experience
has been that many people miss that point,
so feel free to emphasize.
Absolutely.
Quantum mechanics, when we talk about it,
there is a temptation to keep the discussion very fuzzy.
And so I get very many letters by people who have their own ideas about what quantum mechanics is, and
they are very good at reproducing
fuzzy arguments, but they come without the
equations, or the equations are equally fuzzy
and meaningless.
Whereas, the beauty of quantum mechanics is the fundamental mathematical coherence of these equations.
You can prove that, if this equation describes
probabilities exactly as you said before,
then actually the equations handle probabilities
exactly the way probabilities are supposed
to be handled.
Except, of course, when two waves reinforce
each other, the probabilities become four
times as big rather than twice as big.
But a lot of soft spots, the waves annihilate
the probabilities, and so the probabilities
become zero where the waves are vanishing.
So all this hangs together in a fantastically
beautiful mathematical matter.
Now math is one thing.
Experiment is another.
So how would you test a theory that only gives rise to, Mark, probabilities of one outcome or another?
How would you go about determining if it’s
right or if it’s wrong?
Yeah, so it’s like if you gave me a coin,
and you said “this is a probabilistic thing.
You flip it, it’s going to be heads half
the time and tails half the time.”
And I want to check that, I don’t trust
you for--I don’t know why that would be,
but--
Don’t worry, I’m not insulted.
So I just flip the coin, you know, a hundred
thousand times, or whatever.
You have a lot of patience to test these things.
The more sure I want to be, the more I flip
it.
So maybe I do it 10 times and I get 4 and
6, and I’m like, “oh, maybe I’ll flip
it a hundred times” and then I get 48 heads
and 52 tails.
So I can basically just repeat the experiment
a whole bunch of times, and if I have a very
precise prediction from those quantum mechanics
equations to tell me exactly how often I should
expect to get one result versus another,
So, I think we have, we can give a little
schematic, what are we seeing here?
Have a look.
Right, so we’re doing, there’s our wave
that’s describing the state of the particle,
the thing without a definite location.
Then we’re setting that up a whole bunch
of times, and measuring where the particle
is each time.
And these X’s are showing the results of
our measurement.
That’s like flipping your coin and getting
a head or getting a tail.
Exactly. So there’s all these possible locations.
And what we see is that after a while, the
pattern of how often I get one place versus
another place, it’s matching up to that
expectation given by the blue curve, by this
wave, or wave function.
That’s right, so we can’t predict the
outcome of any given run of the experiment,
but over time, building up the statistics,
we believe the theory if they align with the
probability profile given by this wave, whose
equation we showed you, and that is what works
out the shape of the wave in any given situation.
And just to bring this full circle, if we
look at the Double Slit Experiment in this
wave-like language, now think of the electron
or the photon as a wave, it goes through,
it interferes like water waves going through
the two openings, and therefore you have an
interference pattern on the screen, which
is telling you where it’s bright, it is
very likely that you’ll find the particles.
Where it’s dark, it’s unlikely.
Where it’s black, there’s zero chance
of finding the particle there, and therefore
you run this experiment with a lot of particles,
and they’re going to primarily land in the
bright regions.
They’re going to land somewhat in the greyer regions, and they’re not going to land at all in the black region.
And indeed, that’s exactly what we showed
in the experiment that we ran with the double
slit just a moment ago.
And that’s why we believe these ideas.
So that’s, in some sense, really the basics
of quantum mechanics.
Classical physics, particle motion, is the
intuitive one described by trajectories.
And quantum physics, the particle motion is
somewhat fuzzier.
It’s got this probabilistic wave-like character,
and the curious thing about a wave, as sort
of a wave of probability, if the wave is spread
out, it means there’s a chance that the
particle is here, a chance that it’s here,
a chance that it’s here.
And therefore the wave embraces a whole distinct
collection of possibilities all at once.
That, in some sense, is really the weirdness
of quantum mechanics.
So that’s the basic structure.
And now we’re going to move on to our next chapter where we’re going to dig a little bit deeper.
We’ll talk about measurement, and also entanglement.
And it’s a dead heat.
They’re checking the electron microscope.
And the winner is...number 3, in a quantum
finish!
No fair!
You change the outcome by measuring it!
Now either we have a very sophisticated audience, or you just love Futurama, I’m not sure which.
But this is part of the issue that we now
want to turn to.
Which is, if we have a quantum setup, how
do you move from this probabilistic mathematics,
saying that the electron say could be here
or here or here with different probabilities,
to the definite reality that Mark was describing:
when you actually do an experiment, you find
the electron here or here or here.
You never find anything a mixture of results.
We want to talk about how we navigate going
from the fuzzy probabilistic mathematical
description to the single definite reality
of everyday experience.
And this is something that many physicists
have contributed to over the years.
Again, Niels Bohr, we had a quote from him
early on, and he’s certainly viewed as really
one of the founding pioneers of the subject.
But let’s now try to go a little bit further
with our understanding of going from
the math to reality.
And we’re going to follow in, for this part
of the program, really in Niels Bohr’s footsteps,
in something called the Copenhagen approach
to quantum physics.
So David, can you just begin to take us through,
what was the ideas of collapse of the wave
function, in technical language, what are
those ideas all about?
So look at it this way.
I’ve got my probability wave, which is sort
of humped--let’s just say for one particle--it’s
humped over here and it’s humped over here.
So there’s kind of two ways I can think
about that.
You might say there’s an “and” way and
an “or” way.
So I could think of it as saying that the
particle is here and the particle is here.
Or you could think of it as saying the particle
is here or the particle is here.
And the problem is I kind of need to use both to make sense of quantum mechanics, or so it seems.
So, if I try to explain the two-slit experiment, I have to think in the “and” way to start with.
I have to think the particle is going
through this slit, “and” it’s going through this slit.
Because if it’s just going through this
slit “or” it’s going through this slit,
I can close one of the slits, and it wouldn’t
make any little difference.
But then as soon as I look where the particle
is, suddenly the “and” way of talking
stops making sense, because it doesn’t seem--we’ll
come back to this--but it doesn’t seem as
if I see the particle here “and” the particle
here.
It seems as if now, I need the “or” way
of thinking.
So what came out of the ideas of Bohr and
Heisenberg and people of the 20’s and 30’s was,
well there must be some new bit of physics,
some way in which that Schrodinger's equation
we saw earlier isn’t the whole story.
So suddenly the wave function stops being
peaked here and here, and it jumps. It collapses.
So let’s see a quick picture of that collapse.
So if we have a probability wave here, and
this is the “and” description in your
language, it could be in these variety of
different locations.
And I now undertake a measurement, and I take
that measurement, and it collapses to the
“or” way.
It’s only at one of those locations.
Yeah. Suddenly it’s here, and the rest of the
wave function is gone.
And now if I turn away, and I stop measuring,
it melts back into the probabilistic description,
and we’re back to a language that feels
quite unfamiliar with the particle, is in
some sense, at all of these locations simultaneously.
Now, the issue that it raised is that you
said, “look, we’re going to have to have
some other math to make this happen.”
So, first, if we just use the Schrodinger
equation, this beautiful equation that was
written down, would that be enough to cause
a wave to undergo that kind of transformation?
Nice and spread out.
And now, collapses to one location, where
the particle is found.
Can the Schrodinger equation do that for us?
Birgitta?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No. [to ‘T HOOFT] That means no, right?
It means yes?
OK
So, like I said, Gerard has distinct views
which are spectacularly interesting.
We are going to come to those in just a moment.
But let’s now follow the history of the
subject where we’re going to just follow
our nose and we look at the equation that
we have and it doesn’t do it.
So what, then, do we do to get out of this
impasse?
And to make this impasse even a little bit
more compelling, I’m going to take you through
one version of this story that I hope will
make the conundrum as sharp as it can be,
and then we’ll try to resolve it.
So I’m going to take you through a little
example over here, where we have, say, a particle
somewhere in Manhattan.
And let’s imagine that the probability wave
makes the particle location peak at the Belvedere
Castle in Central Park, just randomly chosen.
What that would mean is if somehow I had some
measuring device that could work out where
the particle is experimentally, observationally,
indeed it would reveal that the particle is
at that location.
The wave is sharply peaked at that spot, and therefore all the probability is focused right there.
That’s quite a straightforward situation.
Imagine we do the experiment again, and the
probability wave has a different footprint.
Let’s say it’s way down there at Union
Square.
If you follow the same experimental measurement procedure, and you go about figuring out
through your observation where the particle is, you find, indeed, there it is, Union Square.
The conundrum is the issue that David was
speaking to, where we now have a situation
where we don't have one peak, but two.
Now it’s sort of like the particle is at
the Belvedere Castle AND in Union Square.
And that’s puzzling, because if you go about looking at the observation, what do you think will happen here?
Well the naive thing is, your detector kind
of doesn’t know what to do.
It’s sort of caught between the particle
is at Belvedere Castle and it’s at Union Square.
But the thing is, nobody has ever found a
detector--well, I should say nobody who is
sober has ever found a detector that does
this.
Right?
This is not what we experience in the real
world.
So this is the issue that we have to sort
out.
Because that naive picture is not borne out
by experience.
And I think many people here and many people
in the community have thought about this.
You in particular, David, believe that you
have the solution.
It has a long historical lineage, but why
don’t you tell us a little about the approach
that you think resolves this?
OK.
Let’s start by reminding ourselves, what’s
the problem with just saying the wave function
suddenly jumps to being in Belvedere or Union
Square?
And the problem is really just that we’d
have to modify the equations of physics at
every level to handle that.
So the Schrodinger Equation just does not
let that happen.
And to put it mildly, we’ve got quite a
lot of evidence for that structure of physics,
and for a whole bunch of reasons.
Actually trying to change the physics to make that sudden collapse of the wave function physical,
and not just, as Gerard was putting 
it, not just as a sort of fuzzy talk,
is a really, really difficult problem.
But you could say that we have to do that,
because, like Brian was saying, it doesn’t
seem we ever see a particle here and here
at the same time.
And I think Brian’s joke is about right
to just what our intuition is about what it
would be like to see a particle here and here
at the same time.
It would be like being really drunk, like
seeing double.
But here’s the thing, if you want to work
out what some physical process would be like,
and my looking at a particle is just one more
physical process, it turns out intuition is
not a very good way to predict what happens.
So how do we ask, what would it really be
like to see a particle that’s here and here
at the same time?
Well, what does the physics say?
I’m just one more measuring device.
And the physics says something like this.
If I saw the particle here, I’d go into
a state you might call a “seeing the particle here” state.
If I look at the particle there, then I’d go into
what you’d call a “seeing the particle there” state.
If it’s in both states at the same time,
then I go into both states at the same time.
So, being a little loose for the minute, then
I’m now in the state “seeing the particle
here” and “seeing the particle there.”
And if I tell Brian where the particle is,
because I’m sure he’s fascinated, Brian’s
now in the “David says it’s here, David
says it’s there.”
And the whole audience would have to listen
to me say this.
You’re all now in the “it’s here”
and “it’s there” states at the same time.
And the reality is that, even if I don’t
tell you this, uncontrollable effects spread outward.
And so, before you know, the whole planet
or the whole solar system is in a “particle
was seen here and particle was seen here at
the same time” state.
And those two states don’t interact with
each other.
They’re way too complicated to do the sorts
of interference experiments we were doing
with the two slits. You can’t do a two-slit experiment on the whole planet.
And so for all intents and purposes, what
the quantum theory is now describing is two
sets of goings on, each of which looks, for
all the world, like the particle being in a definite place.
And that’s where the terminology of this
way of thinking about quantum mechanics comes
about, the Many Worlds Theory.
It was Hugh Everett who said, look, if you
just take quantum mechanics seriously, you’re
led to this crazy sounding idea of there being
many parallel goings-on at the same time every
time you make a quantum measurement.
But the thing I want to stress here, is it’s
not that we say quantum mechanics is weird,
but let’s bring in an even weirder idea
out of the realm of science fiction
to make it even stranger.
It’s, whatever it was saying, and what the
people who have pushed his idea since then
have been trying to make precise, is the idea
that the quantum theory itself--that Schrodinger
equation itself--when you take it very seriously,
tells you that, not at the fundamental level,
not at the level of microscopic physics, but
at the level that we see around us in the
everyday, then the physics is describing many
goings-on at the same time.
The quantum probability wave carries on being
an “and” wave all the way up.
So you’re talking about many universes?
So this is where this idea of parallel universes
or many worlds comes from.
So, in the example that we were looking at,
there would be, say, if you were undertaking
this measurement, there would be “you seeing
the particle at Belvedere,” “you seeing
it at Union Square,” and as you said, once
you articulate that, we’re all hearing it,
and we’re all going along with you in one
universe and another.
So that’s one approach to try to disambiguate
a situation in which the quantum mechanics
has many possibilities.
You’re saying, “no no, it’s not just
that one of them happens, they all happen.
They all just happen to happen in distinct
universes.”
And weirdly, that’s a conservative idea.
Mathematically conservative.
And that’s actually a vital point.
So, and this is an idea that is hard to communicate
to a general audience.
I’m sure many of you are technically trained,
but those who aren’t: if you stare at the
equations of quantum mechanics and just take
them at face value, this seems to be where
the math takes you.
But does that convince--so are you guys convinced?
Birgitta, you—
There are alternative perspectives.
But what about--why don’t you like this
one?
I like it.
I think it’s fascinating.
I think it’s wonderful.
But let’s bring in some information.
So how much information are we going to keep?
So this “many worlds” hypothesis would
say that we’re keeping every single piece of information.
But if we--so we have a measuring device,
and then the measuring device is interacting
with the environment.
Then the environment of outside is also playing
a role, it’s also affecting the measuring device.
And of these many many options, measurements
that can be recorded by the measuring device--if
the environment, which is interacting with
that measuring device, is interacting with
that measurement device and producing many
more outcomes, and yet then we throw--in producing
much more information, but then we throw all
of that information of the environment away.
Then we’re left with something which produces
just one of these options.
So you’re talking technical language of
what’s called “decoherence”?
Yes.
I’m introducing this technical term that
the coherence of the wave function, the preservation
of these...
So your belief is that if we don’t focus
just on the simple particle itself, but take
into account how it talks to and interacts
with the full environment, you feel like that’s
enough to solve the conundrum?
Well, I’m, there’s also mathematics to
justify this.
So this is another perspective.
I’m not saying we don’t know it, which
is one.
But this is a very strong argument for saying
why we don’t actually experience many, many
universes at once.
What’s your view on the many—
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s what you were
describing.
It’s basically just going all in on the
Schrodinger equation, saying, OK, we’ve
got this beautiful equation.
It applies to the atomic world.
Let’s take it seriously and just, if we
believe in it, then not only kind of understand
through the mathematics there that at the
local level you would effectively get something
like collapse if you look at just a part of
the description of the system.
But then the only thing is that, in the end,
it’s a little bit disturbing philosophically
that there’s maybe a part of the wave describing
the universe where, you know, I’m a football player, or
then that question of well why,
why do, what is our experience in that picture
of many worlds?
Is there some way to understand, you know,
why is it that we’re just experiencing one thing and
So Gerard, how about--now, I know that you
are going to take us somewhere else now.
When you asked me about this question about
the wave function, you were nodding--I was
supposed to nod “no,” and I nodded “yes.”
And, I caught you off trap for a moment.
And the point of this is that the quantum mechanics today is the best we have to do the calculation
But the best we have doesn’t mean that the
calculation is extremely accurately correct.
So, according to the equations, we get these
many worlds.
I agree with that statement.
But I don’t agree with the statement that
quantum mechanics is correct, so that we have
to accept all these other universes for being
real.
No, the calculation is incomplete.
There is much more going on that we didn’t
take into account.
And then again, you can mention the environment
and other things that you forgot.
So, we are so used to physics that unimportant
secondary phenomena can be forgotten, it just
leaves out everything taken for granted.
But if you do that, you don’t get for certain
what universe you’re in, you get a superposition
of different universes.
It doesn’t mean that the real outcome that
was really happening is that the universe
splits into a superposition of different universes.
It means our calculation is inaccurate, and
it could be done better.
And that doesn’t mean that our theory is
wrong, but that we made simplifications.
We made lots of simplifications.
Instead of describing the real world, we split
up the real world in what I call templates.
All the particles we talk about are not real
particles, they are just mathematical abstractions
of a real particle.
We use that because it’s the best we can
do, which is perfect.
It’s by far the best we can do.
So, in practice, that is just fine.
But you just have to be careful in interpreting
your result.
The result does not mean that the universe
splits into many other universes.
The result means, yes, this answer is the
best answer you can get.
Now, look at the amplitude of the universes
that you get out.
The one with the biggest amplitude, is most
likely the rightest answer.
But, all the other answers could be correct
or could be wrong if we add more details,
which we are unable to do.
Today, and perhaps also tomorrow.
We will also, we will be unable to do it exactly
precisely correctly.
So we will have to do with what we’ve got
today.
And what we got today is an incomplete theory.
We should know better, but unfortunately we
are not given the information that we need
to do a more precise calculation.
That precise calculation will show wave functions
that do not peak at different points at the
same time, like you had in Manhattan at this
address or that address and we are at a superposition.
No, in the real world, we are never in a superposition,
because the real world takes every single
phenomenon into account, and you cannot ignore
what happens in the environment and so on.
If you ignore that, then you get all this
case superposition phenomena.
If you were to do the calculation with infinite
precision, which nobody can do, if you calculate
everything that happens in this room and way
beyond and take everything into account,
you would find a wave function which doesn’t
do that.
You would find one which peaks only at the
right answer and gives a zero at the wrong answer.
Now, this view...
But the theory is so unstable, that the most
minute incorrectness in your calculation gives you these
phony signals that say, maybe the universe did this, maybe the universe did that, maybe it did that.
Only if you do it precisely correctly, then
you only get one answer.
Yeah.
Now that resonates obviously with an idea
that goes all the way back to Einstein, that
quantum mechanics was incomplete--
Yes, this is.
Yes, I think Einstein would agree with such—
Yeah, I think that he would too.
Maybe he would have his own ideas.
But anyway, to me it sounds like an Einsteinian
attitude.
That, no, nature’s absolute.
God doesn’t gamble.
The gamble is in our calculation, because
we can’t do any better.
So let’s take a step back and see why Einstein
came to this conclusion that quantum mechanics
is incomplete, which takes us to the next
strangeness of quantum mechanics, which is
something called quantum entanglement.
So, this is an idea that has a long history
in physics.
“I would not call”--entanglement, which
we are about to talk about--”one but rather
the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics,
the one that enforces its entire departure
from classical lines of thought.”
So here’s again one of the founding pioneers
of the theory who thought about this notion
that we’re about to describe as the key
element that distinguishes it from our intuition,
our classical way of thinking.
And as we’ll see, it quickly, in the hands
of Einstein, takes us to a viewpoint that
aligns really with what Gerard was saying.
And that comes most forcefully in a paper
from 1935, a date that’s good to keep in
mind, because we’re going to come back to
it in just a little bit, where these folks
write a paper, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen.
And we can just, this is actually a New York
Times article on it, and you see that they
call the theory “not complete,” much as
Gerard was describing.
And it’s good to get a feel for why it is
that they came to this conclusion.
And it involves this idea of entanglement,
and I’d like us to walk through that, just
some of the key steps.
And it’s good to do it in the context of
an example.
It’s not the example that Einstein and his
colleagues actually used.
But it’s an example having to do with a
quality of particles called spin.
So just to set it up and then I’ll let the
panelists take it from there.
When we talk about a particle, say, like an
electron, it turns out that has a characteristic called spin.
You could think of it almost like a top that’s
spinning around.
And roughly speaking, using classical language
to get a feel for it, if the spin, say, is
counterclockwise, you say it’s spinning
up.
If it’s clockwise, you say it’s spinning
down.
And weirdly, a particle can be in a mixture
of being both up and down, using your language
of the “and.”
And only when you measure the particle, you
find that it snaps out of that mixture, and
is at--in the case of the particle in Manhattan,
it was either at one location or another--here
it’s one spin or another.
It’s spinning down or up, but it’s definite
after you do the measurement.
You never find it in between.
Again, you can do a second measurement, and
say it snaps out of this fuzzy haze and it’s
spinning up.
And that’s a quality of a single particle
that’s well known in quantum physics.
But entanglement arises when you don’t have
one particle, but rather when you have two of them
And here’s the weirdness that happens.
If you do a measurement in this situation,
even though each particle is 50% up or 50% down,
you’d think they’re completely independent,
but you can set these up in such a way that
if you do a measurement, it’s always the
case that if the one on the left is up, the
one on the right is down.
They never are both up or both down.
And we can go back to this story again, do
another measurement, and they can be as far
apart as you want, and you measure it, and
find, say that the left one is down and the
right one is up.
So they’re kind of locked together by a
quantum connection--quantum entanglement--which
is graphically what we’re representing by
this yellow line over here.
Now, Gerard was talking about incompleteness
of quantum mechanics.
What was Einstein’s view of what was going
on here?
Well, Einstein’s view was that, really,
what’s going on here is, if you have particles
that the math says are both spinning up and
spinning down at the same time, if you could
look deeper to the deeper structure that Gerard
was referencing, you’d find that these particles
always have a definite spin.
They’re not actually going up and down;
that’s just mathematics.
They actually have a definite spin and therefore
if you measure them and find that one is up
and the other is down, they were already like
that.
It’s not as though there was some long distance
connection or communication going on.
And this is what’s known as quantum entanglement.
And when I describe this to a general audience,
people often get the phenomenon.
Yeah, you measure it here, it’s down, you
measure it there, it’s up.
But then they always come back to me and say,
“but what’s really going on?”
You know, like, but just, “tell me, explain
to me.”
I say, “I just did explain to you what’s
going on.
That’s all there is--” “No, no,” they
say, “please tell me, how could this be?”
So how should we interpret this result?
So Einstein says the way you interpret it
is, it was like this the whole time, nothing surprising.
But then we try to do experiments and see
if that’s the case and what happens?
So there’s a famous person that comes into
the story, who, John Bell.
So what is, Mark, what does Bell do for us?
I mean, basically, to put it simply, he finds
that any kind of simplistic, Einstein-like
description where the thing had the definite
configuration before we did that measurement,
it can’t explain the results.
So it just...you can’t...
When you say the results you are talking about
observational results.
That’s right.
Yeah, so he writes this famous paper.
What year, is this 1964?
I think this...I think it’s like 1964.
He writes this famous paper where he surprisingly
is able to get at an experimental consequence
of an Einsteinian view, that things are definitely
up or down before you look, it’s just the
mathematics that’s giving this weird superposition
quality.
And then people go out and ultimately starting,
say, with John Clauser in the, this must be
the ‘70s then into the ‘80s with Alain
Aspect.
They carry out the measurement, and they find,
as Mark was saying, that the Einsteinian picture
doesn’t describe the actual data.
So if Einstein were here, I think he’d have
to conclude that, not necessarily that quantum
mechanics is complete, but the chink in the
armor that he thought he found isn’t actually correct.
So, Gerard, what’s your--because you’re
coming at it from an Einsteinian view--how
do you deal with, let’s say this very experiment?
May I just add one point of interest?
You can think of a classical experiment as
very simple, but not strange at all.
Think of--I take two marbles in a black box.
One marble is red, the other one is green.
Now, I shake the marbles as much as I want.
I put--blindfolded, I put one marble in one
box and another marble in the other box.
And now I bring these boxes as lightly as
away from each other.
As soon as somebody who sits--or say one on
Earth and one on Mars.
So somebody on Earth opens this box, and at
the same time the guy on Mars opens his box.
Before they opened the box, they didn’t
know what kind of marble they had in there
in the box.
Was it the red one, was it the green one,
you don’t know.
As soon as the one on Earth opens the box
and says I have the red marble, instantly,
the guy on Mars knows he has the green marble.
That information went much faster than light.
But you also know all this is nonsense, because
they knew it in advance.
I had one red, and one green marble.
So what’s the big issue?
No problem, right?
So, the Bell experiment is fundamentally different
from this situation, in the sense that--
So what you described, you described sort
of the Einsteinian picture.
Einstein would say, don’t get worked up
about entanglement.
It’s just like having a green marble or
red marble.
Einsteinian picture would work perfectly well
for the box with the red marble and green marble.
No sweat, no difficulty.
We understand this situation.
No miracle at all.
But for the Bell Lab experiment with the spinning
particle, you’re using the fact that the
particle is a quantum spinning particle, and
a spinning particle is something very, very strange.
It can either spin up or spin down.
But then someone asked, what about spinning
sideways?
Why not rotate the particle 45 degrees or
90 degrees, and they would say “yes, but
that’s a quantum superposition.”
But, now if the one person on Earth looks
at the particle spinning up, the one on Mars
is spinning down, but then when the person
on Earth sees the particle spinning sideways,
the guy on Mars sees the particle spinning
sideways in the other direction, and sees
it either spinning up or spinning down, we
still don’t know.
But when they both look at the sideways direction,
they again see the spin opposite.
That is the miracle.
That is a thing which is very very difficult
to understand classically.
I maintain, but this is my private opinion,
that you can explain it, but it is--
How?
Because this is where Einstein failed...
Because they both have the same origin.
They both came eventually from an atom emitting
two spinning objects: two photons, or two
electrons or something like that, which were
entangled.
So the entanglement can be explained in terms
of correlations, so that the initial state
was not that the particle could be doing just
anything.
No, there are correlations all over the place.
This is very, very difficult to explain, and
I even wouldn’t dare to try to go in depth,
but the answer lies in correlations.
Do you think there is a way out of this impasse?
I think there is a way out.
But it’s extremely non-trivial, and if you
don’t do it quite right, you end up mystified
by the situation.
It is actually also extremely hard to make
a model that works, that gives this strange-looking phenomenon.
So yes, we have a problem, but now I think
the problem has an answer, but the answer
is very difficult and you have to work very
hard to make it all hang together properly.
That will be in the footnotes of tonight’s
program.
You’ll receive it in your email.
So David, your view on entanglement?
Is there a mystery here, or…?
There’s a kind of mystery, and it can link
to our earlier mysteries.
Look at it this way.
My wave--my probability wave for the two spinning
particles, you can kind of describe it as
something like half is this--down up--and
half is this--up down.
And again we can ask this--well do I want
to think about it as an “and” or an “or”?
Do I want to say, well, it’s this “or”
it’s this, or do I somehow have to say it’s
this “and” it’s this.
Now if it’s this “or” this, that’s
Gerard’s case.
That’s not mysterious at all.
And that’s exactly what Einstein, Podolsky,
and Rosen hoped was the case.
But what Bell’s results show us is that
the “this OR this” reading of entanglement,
just like in some ways the “this slit OR
this slit” reading of the two-slit experiment
would lead to experiment predictions that
don’t pan out.
We can’t, at least straightforwardly, we
can’t make sense of the experiments without
seeing the entangled system as being this
“and” this.
And now we’re right back to the mystery,
because understanding how it can be this “and”
this, which seems to imply some sort of deep
connection between the two systems, where
somehow saying everything there is about this
side, and everything there is about this side
separate doesn’t tell you anything.
That weird reading seems compulsory.
Right.
So, Birgitta, your view on this?
Should we fret about entanglement?
Is it—
I think Gerard raised a very important point.
It’s that when one talks about entanglement,
one should not forget to say how the particles
got entangled.
And they get entangled through an interaction.
And I think, to most physicists, entanglement
is not so mysterious if we think about it
in those terms, even in just atomic or molecular
terms.
So you take the two electrons in the helium
atom.
In the ground state, the helium atom is--if
we were to separate the two electrons—we
know we can’t do that, because they’re
sitting on top of each other.
But were you able to take those two electrons
and pull them apart, they would be in a perfectly
entangled pair.
But we know how they got there, because they
had an interaction that put them into a particular
electronic state.
And so if you randomly just put two particles
together, they would not be entangled necessarily.
Yeah.
To my mind, though, the very fact that--I
don’t care how you set it up, the fact that
you CAN set it up still makes me, in Niels
Bohr’s language, “dizzy.”
But yes, I agree that does mitigate it to
some extent, but still, it’s so far outside
of common experience that it’s still hard
to grasp.
But for these purposes, let’s assume entanglement
is real.
Because now we want to move on to think about
how it manifests itself in some unusual places
like in the vicinity of a black hole.
So that’s the next thing that we’re going
to turn to.
And for that extent let’s move on to the
next section-- “Quantum Mechanics and Black Holes.”
And we’ll also begin with a little clip.
Lisa, do you have a stray dog down there?
Um, it’s a lot worse than a stray dog.
Two stray dogs?
It’s a black hole!
That was going to be my next guess.
Are you sure your next guess wasn’t “three
stray dogs”?
Maybe.
Alright, so black holes.
I think most people here are quite familiar
with what they are.
But just again, to get us on the same page,
Mark, just describe what is a black hole.
Yeah, so it comes out of Einstein’s picture
of gravity and how the space we live in is
not sort of a passive background, but it’s
dynamical, it can warp and bend and it does
that kind of in response to the mass and energy
that’s in the universe.
And the black hole is the situation where
you take that to the extreme.
You have, so much matter--could be a gigantic
star at the end of it’s life when it has
burned up it’s fuel and it starts to collapse.
And as it’s getting denser and denser, warping
the space more and more, through Einstein’s picture.
And at some point, you get this space--the
space time is warped so much, that you get
the thing we call a horizon, you get the point
of no return where if you go past that, you
can’t get out, you can’t send signals
out, light can’t get out, and that’s our
basic notion of a black hole.
Now there are many puzzles about black holes,
and some of them are right at the forefront of research.
One in particular that I want to focus on
as it will bring together these ideas of entanglement
and ultimately the structure of spacetime,
which is where we’ll get to in the next
chapter, which is simply this--if something
falls into a black hole, what happens to the
information it contained?
Right?
So to just be concrete, imagine if I was to
take out my wallet and throw it into a black hole.
My wallet has all sorts of information, my
credit card information--oh, there it is.
They took it out of my pocket, they throw
it into the black hole, it crosses over the
horizon, the edge that Mark was referring
to.
And at least in the non-quantum, the classical
description, it’s just gone, right?
And then you can think that the information
is sort of, maybe still there, it’s just
on the other side.
We can’t get at it, unless we go in.
But if we do that, there are consequences--we
can’t come back out with the information.
You know, so that’s sort of the classical
story.
This becomes a really big puzzle and a bigger
puzzle when we include quantum mechanics into
the story, because of a result that was due
to a couple of very insightful physicists--one
who you may not have heard of, one who you
will have heard of.
So, back in the ‘70s, Jacob Bekenstein,
and also this fellow over here, Stephen Hawking.
They began to apply quantum ideas to black
holes, and found a surprising result, which
is that black holes are not actually completely
black.
So anyone just jump in and--what is it that
that means?
Or Mark, go ahead.
So Hawking found, when you start to apply
quantum mechanics to the physics in the vicinity
of a black hole, that there are quantum effects
that lead to the black hole seeming to emit
particles out of it, as if--
Yeah, I think we have a little picture that
can help.
Yeah, so this sort of a quantum effect where
you have something happening right at the
horizon of the black hole where what we would
call virtual particle and an antiparticle, they—
The particle that is red, and the particle
that is blue--
Virtual particle is red, and the antiparticle
is blue.
This can happen in quantum mechanics, but
because of the black hole horizon, the particles
end up going out, and so what it looks like--
And their partners fell in, they went out.
We don’t see those partners—
Which would mean, from far away, if we look
at this situation...
That’s right.
So there we go.
So the black hole looks like it’s emitting
stuff, and it’s actually losing some of its mass.
So you see it’s getting smaller.
Hawking did a detailed calculation to show
that it’s behaving like an object that’s
getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and
sort of what you’d call evaporating more
and more quickly, and ultimately disappearing.
So all of this information that might have
been in the black hole, it’s now this heat,
the thermal radiation going out into space.
And all this is happening, if I understand--so
you got the edge of the black hole, you got
this quantum process right at the edge that
we’re familiar with.
Particle and anti-particle sort of pop out
of empty space.
The difference is, now with the black hole
there, it can kind of pull on one member of
the pair, get sucked in, the other just rushes
out, and that gives rise to radiation flying outward.
And that’s what makes this puzzle sharp,
because if the wallet goes into the black
hole, and then you have this radiation coming
out, ultimately, and perhaps the black hole
even disappears through this.
Everything that went in has come out, but
if the radiation itself doesn’t have an
imprint of the wallet, doesn’t somehow embody
the information, the information would be lost.
Hawking’s calculation showed that, it should
not matter what formed the black hole.
You get the exactly the same radiation.
But whether it’s my wallet or whether it’s
a refrigerator, chicken soup, it all would
sort of come out the same.
The information is lost.
Now this disturbed Gerard deeply.
Very much so.
But the statement you just made was only about
the average Hawking particle.
The Hawking particles form what you call a
thermal spectrum, which means that they come
out in a completely fundamentally chaotic
way.
But it doesn’t mean that they don’t know
in what way they come out.
Again, it’s quantum mechanics, but again
there is a theory on the line of quantum mechanics
which is more precise, and which we should
provide the missing information.
And yes, there was missing information, and
yes your wallet does leave an imprint on the
radiation coming out...
So can we show--?
...Because your wallet, yes, if you want to
have a moment, your wallet carries a gravitational
field, even though it’s very light compared
to a planet or a star, it does have gravity.
That gravity is sufficient to leave a very
minute imprint on the outgoing particles.
And that’s enough...
So we sort of see that imprint here of my
wallet on the edge of the black hole.
The effect of this is that the information
gets stuck on the horizon of the black hole,
ready to come out again in the form of the
Hawking particles.
And this, in principle, you can compute.
And you find that the culprit is the gravitational
field of your wallet, that many people forget
to take into account.
Then you get a tremendous problem.
You don’t understand how can it be that
all those dollars in your--and those credit
cards in your wallet, that information gets
out.
Well, a normal person would never be able
to identify, to decompose Hawking radiation
to get back your wallet.
So surely, it’s a better shredder you’ll
never find anywhere, but even the shredder
still contains the information.
Right.
So people won’t actually be able to do this
reconstruction, but in principle...
No, in practice, of course you won’t.
...just like with the shredder, in principle
they would be able to do that.
So this is an idea that you developed also
with Lenny Susskind, which gives rise to what
we call the holographic principle, the holographic
description.
Again, because if information is stored on
a thin surface at the edge of the black hole,
it sort of brings to mind a hologram, which
is a thin piece of plastic which has etchings on it.
When you illuminate it correctly it yields
a three-dimensional entity.
Here, you’ve got information on this thin
two-dimensional surface, which is able to
reconstruct the object that went in.
And that’s why this word “holography”
is used.
So this is sort of a deep insight which has
been generalized.
People, Gerard and Lenny and others, think
that perhaps the right way of thinking about
the universe in any environment, even right
here on Earth, there’s a description where
data exists on a thin two-dimensional bounding
surface, which would make us the holographic
projections, using this language, of this
information that exists on a thin surface
that you wouldn’t think would even have
the capacity to store enough information to
make it adequate to describe all the comings
and goings in this three-dimensional realm.
Yes, David?
Yeah, I just want to sort of pin down for
a moment, like, why should we care in the
first place that the information was lost?
We’ve- but by assuming the information was
not being lost, we’ve made our way to remarkable
new ideas in physics.
And I think there’s a somewhat of a temptation
to think, “well yeah, maybe that’s the
wrong lesson.
Maybe what we should learn is information
disappears sometimes.
Deal with it.”
Which is what Hawking said.
Which is what Hawking himself thought, exactly.
And there’s still a minority of people in
physics who take that line.
And I think the deeper reason to think why--
But Hawking doesn’t take that line in the
end.
Hawking changed his mind.
Right.
And I think the deeper reason to see why the
information being lost is such a problem is,
it goes back to where we started, the idea
that black holes are hot, that everything
else in the universe that we know is hot has
a story to tell about why it’s hot
but basically says it can be in zillions and zillions
and zillions of states, and by statistically
averaging over all those states, we get out
the hot behavior.
That’s how thermodynamics is grounded in
microscopic physics for every other hot thing
in the universe.
If information is lost forever in black holes,
then black holes are hot for a fundamentally
different reason than why everything else
in the universe is hot.
And this whole story about holography and
about information being preserved is basically
a bet, and it seems to me a very well-motivated
bet on the idea that black holes are hot for
the same reason everything else is hot.
Right.
So, again, one way of saying that is, when
a black hole is radiating, it’s radiating
because, in some sense, stuff is burning near
the edge, even though all the matter that
fell in is compressed at the center.
And that’s unfamiliar, because, when a star
burns, it’s burning at its surface, so the
stuff responsible, the fuel, is burning right
where the radiation is emitted.
But with a black hole, all of the fuel, the
mass, is here, whereas the radiation is coming
out over here.
And that distinction might suggest that it’s
a different kind of burning, but you’re
absolutely right.
We want all the usual ideas of physics
to work, it better be the same kind of burning.
And that’s what the approach of holography
provides for us.
And what I’d like to do now is if we can
jump actually to the next chapter, just because
time is a little bit short.
I want to take this idea of entanglement,
and Mark...
Let me just introduce that a little bit.
One of the things--you know, Hawking did his
calculation in an approximation, where he
didn’t have a theory that actually combined
gravity and quantum mechanics.
He was using bits of quantum mechanics and
Einstein’s theory and coming up with this
result that you lose information.
And if that were true, it would say that gravity
and quantum mechanics are incompatible.
You have to change quantum mechanics somehow,
but in quantum mechanics, you never lose information.
And so this is why this holographic insight
of Gerard and others is so important.
It sort of has given us a way of avoiding
Hawking’s conclusions, and Hawking has accepted that.
And so, this way--there’s now--it’s been
for the past 20 years, we’ve got a way of
doing quantum gravity, of combining gravity
and quantum mechanics.
And it uses this holographic idea in a completely
essential way.
And it was like that picture of the Earth
with the data around it.
It’s kind of like saying that our reality
that we experience, this gravitational universe
that we’re in, there’s kind of an underlying
reality which you can think of as those bits,
those 1’s and 0’s on the surface surrounding
us.
And that’s what Brian was referring to as
the holograms.
So somehow if you want to understand the quantum
mechanics of a system with, say, black holes
and gravity, what you really want to do is
understand the quantum mechanics of that hologram,
and not kind of directly trying to the calculations
like Hawking did of the black hole.
So it’s a very powerful--we’ll come to
you in half a second to summarize that, but--it’s
a very powerful dictionary, in some sense.
You now have two ways of describing a given
physical system.
You can describe it sort of in the conventional
way that we’ve always thought about it as
a three-dimensional world that has comings
and goings.
Or you have an alternative language if you
want to make use of it,
which is the physics that takes place on this thin bounding surface.
And sometimes, that latter description gives
you insights that are very difficult to obtain
from the traditional description.
And we’re going to come to a version of
that in just a moment.
But yeah, Gerard.
Yeah, I think you can make the picture a little
bit more clear perhaps by realizing that whenever
you throw something into the black hole, when
you look at it from the outside, you will
never actually see it pass through the horizon.
It hangs around at the horizon.
So it shouldn’t be too surprising that that
information also hangs around at the horizon.
So can I just flesh it out for half a second?
So what Gerard is saying is, if you look at
how a black hole affects the passage of time,
you find that as a clock gets closer and closer
to the edge of a black hole, the clocks ticks
off time ever more slowly.
So if you’re watching this from very far
away, the object is starting to go in slow
motion as it goes toward the edge of the black
hole.
It doesn’t just immediately go over the
edge.
In fact, it goes so slow that it would take
an infinite amount of time from your perspective
for it to actually fall over the edge.
So it hangs out there.
The observers there would think that the clock
was standing still.
But the clock is simply slowing the time that
the observer, who goes with the clock, sees
that “oh, that’s time I’m going through
the horizon.”
But, for the outside the observer, that’s
the eternal time, it never changes anymore.
The other observation one could make is, it’s
a very elementary calculation to find out
how much, how can it put other kinds of information
in such a box?
Take a box with a certain radius--or let it
be spherical for simplicity.
And ask, how much information can I put in
the box no matter what I do?
So take a gas, or take a liquid, or take a
dictionary, throw anything in a box,
when do I get the maximum amount of information?
You can calculate that, and what you find
is, if you try to put more things in the box,
that takes so much energy that those encyclopedias
that you try to put in this box will automatically
make a black hole.
And what is the object that contains the most
information that you could ever imagine?
It’s the black hole.
It always wins.
So, the black hole is the maximum.
There is no way, no matter what you put in
the box with a given radius, to get more information
in that box than what fits on the surface.
And that’s the holographic principle.
Information is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional.
And that is very strange, so that’s why
I call it holography.
It is as if, you know, we have a three-dimensional
world, but you take a picture with the machinery
of holography.
I don’t really know.
It is a camera which makes a picture, and
if you look at the picture from different
angles it looks like reconstructing the three-dimensional
object.
But it only exists on a two-dimensional surface.
So did you doubt this idea, when you first,
or was it?
Yeah, this is, in the discussion with Lenny
Susskind, the word “holography” came up.
Right, but were you certain that this was
right when it popped out?
Or was this so strange that you were…?
Well, no, it is very strange, but this comes
out of the calculation, must be true.
But it’s very counterintuitive.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s like saying our reality is not as real
as we think it is.
Yeah, right, yeah, which for most of us is
pretty odd.
So the question is, what happened to the rest
of the information.
The three-dimensional information doesn’t
disappear, doesn’t get lost, this is the
mysterious aspect of our space time.
So let’s take this holographic idea, and
push it one step further, which, Mark, you
have been pioneering.
Yeah, I mean, so if we take it seriously then...
But let me--before we get that, because there’s
one thing that we didn’t discuss that would
be useful, and it’s right here, which is,
something else that happened in 1935, which
is the idea of wormholes.
So if you can just take us through what a
wormhole is, and then we can make the
So the wormhole, if you set to solving Einstein’s
equations to figure out, well, what kind of
geometries are possible for space time, then
there’s a weird thing that comes out where
it’s like you have a black hole in an empty
universe.
And then there’s this entirely separate
universe with another black hole in it.
So the top and the bottom of this picture.
Yeah, so that’s the space.
The flat part is the space in one universe,
and then this is like a black hole.
But you see it’s connected down to the flat
part, which is like the other universe, and
there’s this physical, geometrical connection.
So if one person jumped into one black hole,
and the other person jumped into the black
hole at the bottom, they could potentially
meet up inside that wormhole, you know, before
being annihilated by the black hole.
So it’s sort of a tunnel connecting these
two things.
That’s right.
Are you volunteering?
Uh, I’ll pass on that one.
Alright, and who--so you may recall I said
remember the year 1935, that was that Einstein
Podolsky Rosen, which was that entanglement
that we’ve been discussing.
This is also 1935, where it’s Einstein and
Rosen--so again, 2 of the 3 folks involved.
And in Einstein’s mind, I think it’s pretty
clear, and correct me if you think otherwise,
I don’t think he thought there was any connection
between these two 1935 discoveries.
Entanglement on one hand, coming from quantum
physics, wormholes coming from general relativity--completely
separate subjects at the time, and some of
the work that you and various of our other
colleagues have been pursuing is suggesting
that there’s actually a deep connection
between these ideas.
It’s truly amazing, so
So, I think we’ll sort of step through that
now, if that works for you.
So we have a little, you can sort of walk
us through what we’re having here
So we’re looking at some kind of universe.
There’s a black hole in this universe.
And then what’s on the outside is this hologram;
this is the actual mathematical description
in our modern way of understanding.
So this red around the outside has all of
the information that is telling us what kind
of geometry is in there--
So that’s Gerard’s hologram.
The information.
That’s Gerard’s hologram.
On the outside, you’ve got that hologram
in a particular kind of physical configuration.
And that’s coding for the fact that there’s
this black hole, and maybe some stars in there
in the spacetime.
Yeah.
And then if we go on and go to the second
black hole in the story.
OK, so we show--
Alright, now we’ve got two separate black
holes.
And basically that’s going to be encoded
by some other information.
So you change up the information and now you’ve
got two black holes.
Yup, and then if we add to the story a certain
kind of entanglement, say, so...
So here what we did was we turned that situation
into one where you have a wormhole connecting
behind the two black holes.
And the remarkable thing is, in order to do
that in the holographic set, in the holographic
description, in the outside description, what
we actually, you know, we have to do something
fundamentally quantum mechanical.
What we had to do is actually add in a whole
bunch of entanglement between different parts
of the hologram.
And that was what achieved getting this, this
wormhole.
So, just to summarize, because this is a deep
and utterly stunning idea, you’re saying
that entanglement in the holographic description,
the red description, is, in the interior description,
nothing but a wormhole connecting two black
holes.
That’s right, which is, sort of a classical
thing that would have been covered by Einstein’s
kind of classical understanding of gravity.
It’s just a geometrical connection saying
you could get from here to here, and that
property is entirely, according to this--or
according to our current understanding, due
to quantum entanglement between different
parts of the hologram.
And, moreover, if you find that you can actually
generalize this, that it actually even holds
without a black hole in space.
So take us from here.
Yeah, so I--this was I guess 2009, I was thinking
about that.
It seemed crazy, and then one of the things
that you realize if you start reading about
entanglement and about just our description
in these theories of just empty space,
is that even when you’re describing empty space,
you still have entanglement in the hologram.
In the holographic description, there’s
lots of entanglement.
And then you sort of ask yourself, well wait,
if that entanglement in the previous story
was creating a connection between the two
black holes, could all of this entanglement
there, in this picture--could that have something
to do with the fact that the space is sort
of connected up into one nice smooth, empty
universe?
That space has threads.
In some sense, we call it the fabric of space,
is it’s somehow threaded in some manner.
Could that be related to this entanglement?
And then you were able to mathematically study
that by mathematically cutting the entanglement
lines on the outside.
Right.
So it’s what we call a thought experiment.
You just sort of take your math--your description
of this and you say, well what happens if
I cut those threads of entanglement.
What happens if--?
So if we cut some of them—
--I take the left half of the hologram and
the right half of the hologram, and I remove
the entanglement between those two sides?
There’s an effect.
You remove entanglement in the hologram, and
then the spacetime starts splitting up, and
it, you know, you could actually imagine even
more than this.
So you’ve got a ball of clay, and you’re
pulling it apart, and it’s getting further
and further apart, and the middle is pinching
off, and so you could keep doing that.
You say, well what would happen if I took
away even more entanglement, and took away
even more entanglement, and then in this model,
you know, now you’ve got your space and
it’s split into four pieces.
And I still got a little bit of entanglement,
but I’m going to take that away, and what
happens in this description is that the big
nice empty universe that you thought you were
describing just splits up into millions of
tiny bits.
And once you’ve got no more entanglement
there in this description, you’ve got no
more spacetime at all.
And so you get to, you know, if this is all
right, you get to this incredibly dramatic
conclusion that maybe you’ve just understood
what space actually is, and it’s actually
fundamentally quantum mechanical that space
is somehow a manifestation of quantum entanglement
in the underlying hologram system.
So it’s this beautiful possibility that
we may actually get insight into what holds
space itself together, and it may be entanglement
in this holographic description that’s actually
threading it all together, which is, you know
I have to say, you know, as a graduate student,
I, you know, as a, you have dreams of things
that you might one day gain insight into.
Certainly when I was a graduate student, the
idea that we might somehow understand the
fundamental structure of space itself, it
was one of those unattainable dreams.
And the work that you guys are doing is starting
to reveal a possibility that we may actually get there.
So I’m going to personally applaud right
here, because that is just, you know, an absolutely
stunning insight which puts together all these
ideas--the ideas of entanglement, the ideas
of holography, all put together to gain these
insights.
So we’re sort of out there in the depths
of some pretty hefty ideas.
We’re just going to spill over for a couple
of minutes, I hope that’s OK with you.
Because I just want to sort of pull us back
a little bit to what quantum mechanics can
actually do in the world around us that might
actually affect the future of how we do various things.
So, Birgitta, you know, you work in the arena
of quantum computing.
So, what are the possibilities of actually
harnessing these weird wonderful ideas in
a manner that could actually have an impact
to, say, computing power?
Well, over the last 30 years there’s been
a very rapid growth of the field of quantum
information, which is really a marriage of
information science and quantum mechanics--and
this is still the quantum mechanics from the
1930s, 1940s.
You don’t even need relativistic effects
for this.
And what we’ve seen is, in the mid-1990’s,
there was a very dramatic publication of an
algorithm for doing a quantum--for doing a
calculation factoring large numbers.
And this was an algorithm due to Peter Shor,
and this algorithm showed--could be run many,
many orders of magnitudes faster if you had
a machine, a computer that was built on the
principles of quantum mechanics, using superposition
states, using these wave functions--delocalized,
highly delocalized wave functions over many
bits, and principles of entanglement.
And then having, however, to maintain the
very delicate quantum nature of the system
and not allowing interaction with the environment
to happen.
But if you do this, then at the end, after
many procedures--quantum procedures, you would
construct a very carefully designed measurement,
and ideally you’d want one measurement at
the end and it would be the right measurement
that would give you the answer to your calculation.
And are we going to read this?
Yes, this was very important, because factoring
large numbers lies at the heart of most of
our encryption schemes--the encryption of
your credit cards today, airline tickets,
anything that you would think of.
And so, from that moment on, the--in a sense
that sort of set the race to build such a
quantum computer, and there’s been lots
of advances experimentally then, over the
last 20 years.
And we’re now at the point where we have
functioning devices with 9 or 10 quantum bits,
the quantum analog of a classical bit.
And in the quantum bit, so as we saw those
examples of the spinning electrons.
So, classical bit will either be in a state
0 or 1, our digital universe, which we saw
in outer space just now.
But a quantum bit can be in a superposition--it
can be any arbitrary superposition of 0 and
1, which means it will be both 1 or 0, or,
and at the same time, 1 and 0.
So it was just carrying this mystery along
with us.
And so we now have devices that are functioning
with about 10 of these
You say 10?
Ten.
Nine actually is the economical number right
now.
But people are working furiously now to build
up to about 50, 60, and within a few years
we should have somewhere close to 100.
And then once we get close to about 100, that’s
a critical number because at that point, one
starts to have real technical challenges in
maintaining the quantum nature of the states
of these machines.
And that brings in these issues of the environment,
decoherence, and also very, very delicate control.
And as Gerard mentioned, then you really have
to know many, many many, many variables to
really control every one of those variables,
and that’s a really big both physics and
engineering problem, which is just starting
to be addressed now.
And then after that, I think it’s impossible
to predict how long it would take after that,
if at all possible to go up to about 1000
or so, and 1000 is about the number where
one would really have a machine which would
do things that couldn’t be computed in the
lifetime of a universe--on a classical machine.
So that would be the real change for information
processing.
Amazing.
So we’re just about out of time, but I wanted
to end on bringing this even further down
to Earth, because you sort of sort out with
the cosmos, black holes, wormholes, entanglement.
There’s a wonderful demonstration in which
these quantum mechanical ideas does something
that I find eye-popping no matter how many
times I’ve seen it.
Maybe some of you have seen it before--we
have our fingers crossed.
Omalon, can you come out one more time with
our--with quantum levitation, if you would,
which is a stunning demonstration of again,
some of the strange ways in which quantum
mechanics allows the world to work in ways
that, again, a classical intuition would not expect.
And Omalon does this freehand.
I’m going to stand back and--you want me
to actually touch this?
But I’m going to wear a glove.
He only wears it to look like he’s being
responsible--I see him do this
bare hand all the time.
You know, that’s just crazy, alright?
That’s like 77 degrees or something?
You know, Kelvin, which is cold.
OK, so let’s just go right to the disk if
you would, and if you just put that there.
And then I’m going to give this a little
bit of a push around.
Can you see that, up on the--?
Can you get a shot of that?
This is actually just hovering--can I give
it a little bit more of a push?
And what’s happening here, if you bring
up the final slide that we have here, it’s
called quantum locking.
It’s a wonderful application of quantum
ideas that originated with some Israeli physicists
who demonstrated this once before.
You’ve got magnetic lines that are penetrating
the superconducting disc.
It’s cold--that allows it to be a superconductor.
And the threads of these magnetic lines are
able to, in some sense, able to pin this object
along this track.
This track has uniform magnetic field, and
as long as you keep it cold and superconducting,
they will hold it in place.
Here’s another illustration of these ideas.
Look at that, can you get a close-up of that
shot right there?
Can you bring that up on the screen?
There you go.
So you see, that’s just hovering right there,
and there’s nothing in between there.
And can we actually--can we flip this over
and show how that goes?
Yeah, so we can take this guy...and do you
want...OK.
And do you want a glove?
No, you just want to do it by hand there.
Yeah, OK.
More fun that way, he says.
OK, yeah.
Wow, that’s insane.
Now, can you get a shot of that underneath
there?
It is now hovering underneath, which is a
fairly stunning and yes, right down to earth
demonstration of quantum mechanics.
Omalon, thank you.
Totally cool.
Appreciate that.
And I want to thank the entire panel for what
I hope was an interesting journey.
David Wallace, Birgitta Whaley, Mark Van Raamsdonk,
and Gerard ‘t Hooft.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
