07 July, 2014
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The Gabcast (Eddie, B-Dubb, Onan & Jazmunda) attempt to graduate from 7th grade (metaphorically speaking) by engaging astrophysicist Agent : Orange(of BellGab) in a discussion about all things Quantum Physics. Things seem to go exceedingly well until Skype mayhem strikes. Was the Internet turned inside out by Quantum bozos? Who will be the first to trademark the trendy & magical word "Quantum" to reap tens of dollars in profit? Listen to this very special episode of the GabCast to find out.
My soundboard just died as I was clicking the open.
So we're off to a grand start tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the GabCast.
I'm Eddie Dean.
We've got Owen and Jasmoon to beat up with us tonight.
If you'd like to be part of the show, the number is 623-242-2278.
Again, that's 623-242-CAST.
I'm waiting for...
Let me pot down this music here so I can stop this runtime error.
And there goes my soundboard.
So I need to start that up again.
Hey, everybody.
Hi.
Hey, what's up?
I can do sound effects if you need.
Would you like to be?
Yeah, you can do that.
Go ahead.
Good point.
Good point.
Yeah, and my noise soundboard dropped off too.
So while I'm starting that back up.
Okay, so there we go.
So we forgot the very, very important disclaimer.
The Gabcast is not legally responsible for your feelings.
So I had to get that in there.
We had to get that in there so we don't have any legal troubles down the road.
Welcome to the Gabcast, everybody.
Thank you.
Well, thank you for having me.
Tonight, what we're going to do is something new.
We're going to bring in a guest, and that guest is Agent Orange, Belgab's very own Agent Orange.
And he's a science type guy.
Hey, Agent Orange, what's up, man?
Hey, how's it going?
Pretty good.
It's good to hear you, man.
Thank you for joining us tonight, man.
Sure.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Would you like to tell everybody maybe what you do?
You're an astrophysicist, is that right?
Or astrophysicist?
That's easy for me to say.
Yeah, I'm an astrophysicist.
I'm a research associate, a research assistant, RA, a postdoc at Canadian University.
And my specialty is in gravity and general relativity.
Wow.
So you're like a...
How long does that pay?
Ha ha.
Pays the bills.
It's good work if you can get it.
It pays the bills.
How long have you been doing that?
Well, I graduated.
I defended my thesis when I took one of my extended breaks from posting in 2012.
And so I graduated from Mr. Orange into Dr. Orange.
We have to change your member name at Belgab then.
I have to get Envy to do that.
Congratulations, man.
Cheers.
So, yeah, that was 2012.
And last year, my thesis received a distinction as well.
Was that some sort of an honor?
Like an honors type thing?
Yeah.
It reads in recognition of doctoral graduands who have made groundbreaking novel contributions to their academic discipline.
So I bring that up not to boast about it or sound too arrogant or anything like that, but that's all I have to prove that I'm not some crazy person is my credentials, right?
So I'm sure we'll wind up talking about stuff tonight.
You do post on Belgab, so that theory is.
I do.
Well, but he is anonymous.
He is anonymous, though.
So that helps a little bit.
So there you go.
Maybe take it with a grain of salt if you want.
I got to tell you, I wish every science type person that goes on Coast to Coast or other paranormal shows would have the credentials that you do because you actually know what you're talking about as far as science, space science, and quantum theory and black holes and all that.
I put a little bit of time in with that stuff, yeah.
Some of the well, yeah, I mean, there's some guests that are on that talk about this kind of thing that, you know, I don't know.
Coast to coast has a lot of really questionable things that are on that show.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting for me.
I have to say, first of all, thanks to Willie D for posting that huge torrent of shows.
That's so awesome.
Because there's one show in there specifically that really got me started on doing all of this, all of the stuff that I do, or put me on the road that I'm on right now.
When I was, you know, I didn't really care about going through high school at the time.
My marks were terrible.
But I had found out, I had figured out that I had a little bit of artistic ability I went into.
I went into fine arts for one year because I thought I can become an illustrator or get into drawing comic books or something like that, which I loved.
So I didn't really give a damn about school at all.
I went through my first year of fine arts and that sort of fell apart on me.
And I realized, I'm not going to be able to, not going to be able to do this for the rest of my life.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
So, sorry.
1997, August 22, I was riding with my friend in a car, and we happened to switch on the radio.
I heard Coast to Coast.
Art Bell had on a dude named Michio Kaku, who I'd never heard of before.
Yeah.
Listened to the whole show, just enchanted with it.
Went out and bought the dude's book the next day.
And I just couldn't believe that you could make a living thinking about that kind of thing.
It just blew my mind.
So, like, I sent a few emails to Kaku and asked him some questions myself.
And then started thinking that this is just too interesting to pass up on.
So, Kaku was actually approachable?
Did he answer your emails?
I got two very detailed emails, or two or three very detailed emails from him.
It went back and forth for a little bit.
So, I mean, three emails worth.
I don't know how much of it was cut and paste, but there were some things in there that were very specific, you know?
Yeah.
So, yeah, I was just blown away by that.
And that was just so inspiring.
I mean, I went back to high school for two years.
I got my physics, chemistry, and mathematics that I needed to get into university.
And I graduated a few years later with honors from the Physics Honors Program.
So I guess that's like in the States they would say like cum laude.
Wow, so you're like an Art Bell.
I mean, Art Bell really sent you on the path, didn't he?
Yeah, that started everything was hearing that one show.
And it's really cool because I can go back and listen to it, and there's a specific date stamped on it that I can say about that.
Do you remember that's the show I heard live, yeah?
Do you remember what topic they were talking about?
It was the first time Kaku was on.
August 22nd, 1997.
It's in that torrent.
And he was going on about string theory and hyperdimensional, you know, Just different theories of generalizing general relativity to higher dimensions and gravity, time and space, and all of this kind of stuff that I'm just, I love that stuff.
Was he talking about science is a river, making the river analogy, like MV likes to say?
Time is a river.
Time is a river.
I think that came up from the Opie and Anthony show, right?
Did it?
It could have been so.
And I just so depressed that they got rid of Opie or Anthony.
Anthony, I guess.
Yeah.
I never listened to the show, so I don't know me either.
They had their moments.
I mean, it was kind of like a Stern show, right?
But their own.
It was very much like Stern.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was doing some research for the show tonight.
And, you know, I'm not an expert in quantum theory or, you know, anything.
Really not an expert at anything.
But as far as like quantum theory, it really, parts of it really make no sense whatsoever.
And we talked a little bit last night about this, that there's a lot of people that are taking certain portions of quantum theory like entanglement, like particle entanglement, and trying to upscale that to the real world and using that as a example of the theory that they have, some sort of a new age theory.
Could you talk a little bit about quantum entanglement and how that works?
And if there's any, if you think there's, we'll figure out exactly how that works, how two particles were able to communicate with one another over huge distances in a speed that's that's faster than light.
Yeah, there's a connection between two things in some sense.
I mean, well, let me address the first point first and just say that quantum mechanics especially, but it's also true for astrophysics, cosmology, it's a bit daunting to get into some of these things because the amount of jargon that's thrown around by people is very high.
And so unless you know exactly what these things mean, then you can take any idea that you want and throw some of these $10 words behind them and make them sound legitimate.
So whenever you have people talking about quantum effects at the scale of our everyday lives, that should be a big red flag that goes up for everyone.
So I mean, if people are selling entanglement colonics or whatever or quantum, the quantum diet, all of that stuff should make you question it.
The way that I've always kind of looked at entanglement is that you've got two particles.
It's like looking at your shoes.
You've got a right foot and a left foot.
And if you close your eyes and grab one, you don't know which one you've got.
But if you throw it away and then you look at the one you've got left, you know which one you threw away.
No, that's exactly a perfect way of saying it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the basic idea behind entanglement right there.
So it's really important communication.
It's just the way they're built.
Right.
And they're born linked with one another.
And beforehand, you know, the thing is, the thing that makes a quantum system different than your shoes is that your shoes have definite states beforehand, right?
Like, let's say I have one white sock on and one black sock on.
I can say for sure one of my feet has a white sock and one has a black sock.
That's just objective reality, says that I can say that.
Entangled system is in a state where both of those socks are gray beforehand.
They're in a mixed state of being black and of being white.
When you pick one of them, you now know, ah, I'm holding a white sock, and that means the other one has to be in a state that's black.
But beforehand, you can't say that they're in any state at all.
I understand.
A little bit, maybe.
I think.
So you say they're born that way, or they're created entangled.
I thought I was reading that when they detect particle A that's spinning counterclockwise, particle B is spinning clockwise, right?
Is it the opposite or is it the same?
Like if particle A is spinning clockwise, particle B is also spinning clockwise?
Well, it's usually the opposite, or that one particle will be spin up and one will be spin down.
And the reason for that is when you do an experiment, there are certain laws that have to be conserved, right?
So in the universe, angular momentum is one of these things that are conserved.
So if there's a particle that decays into two separate things that are entangled afterwards, two separate entangled particles, and the original one had zero angular momentum, that means the spins of either of the decay products, what comes out of this decay, has to also have zero angular momentum.
So one will be spinning up and one will be spinning down.
Or with any other property as well, charge that happens a lot, that there's a positive and a negative piece that comes from some reaction.
And that usually these things have to be conserved.
And so that's why you get these properties that are opposite to one another.
So the experiment that I maybe I just misunderstood, which is probably pretty likely, misunderstood what I was reading.
So you're saying that if they take a reading on particle A, they can predict what particle B is doing.
From what I was led to believe is if you change particle A, if you change the angular, what did you say, angular?
Momentum.
Momentum.
If you change the angular momentum of particle A, particle B will also react in the beat of an eye, as George says.
Or faster than the speed of light.
So is that incorrect?
Or is that just that they haven't been able to actually do that experiment?
You have to be a little bit careful about what faster than the speed of light really means.
Okay.
Because there's not actually any information that's being communicated.
Well, there's not really any information that's being communicated between them.
In other words, I can't use these two particles as a faster-than-light messaging system between me and the Andromeda galaxy.
But what I can do is make measurements on one particle, and someone making measurements on a second particle will see correlations.
And when we get together and compare our results, we'll say, ah, they're perfectly correlated.
So you have a way of detecting eavesdropping here in that if you send a particle prepared in one state, it's not measured to be in a corresponding state, then you can tell that somebody was doing some experiment on your signal before you were able to.
So, I mean, this is the basis of this quantum cryptography or quantum message hiding.
Here's what makes me scratch my head: is why would two particles be so far apart to begin with?
I mean, I don't understand that separation.
What it's really saying is that our knowledge of the system at some point is incomplete.
They're in this mixed state.
And so when they're born this way, there's a connection between them.
The particles can be separated to great distance.
So let's say that I have so just like I said, you know, angular momentum or spin is conserved, then linear momentum also has to be conserved.
So if there's a decay, you know, you can have one big particle break up into two smaller ones.
One of the smaller ones goes to the left and one of them goes to the right.
You can wait until they're at huge distances from one another.
Make a measurement on one, and the system snaps into the corresponding state.
All of a sudden, you know what the other state has to be.
So that's really where the paradox comes from, right?
And so right now, in string theory, just, I guess, last year, there was a paper that's conjecturing that entangled particles and wormholes are similar to one another, and that there's some connection between the two.
So you can almost think of it as the particles are behaving like a tiny, each particle is like the mouth of a tiny wormhole, and they're connected by a bridge between them.
And they can send messages to Art Bell through the wormhole.
You drop it down the wormhole, and there it goes.
BW, did you have this?
So this is Agent Orange.
Has that actually been observed, or is that just something that's been theorized, the whole quantum entanglement?
Yes, it's been observed.
It's been used to send particles back and forth.
The correlations between them have been measured.
And what's more is that there are tests which you can do to show that beforehand the particles are in a mixture of states.
It's not as if they're one or the other.
It's not like Owen's socks that one is black and one is white beforehand.
There are statistical properties they have.
There are measurements that you can make, very complicated, that you can actually wind up showing that the system has to be in a mixture of states before any measurement is made.
This is called the Bell inequalities.
It tells you that reality at the level of electrons and atoms and molecules is quantum.
It's not run by some hidden variables or something that control the system that we just don't know about.
It's that the system really is in these mixtures of states.
So, I mean, this is so I mean, that's telling us that in some sense, the universe at these small scales is non-local in that information, that distance and time don't really mean the same thing for electrons as they mean for us.
And this gets to the heart of this gets to the heart of what quantum gravity is and sort of how to proceed.
I mean, people are interested in combining general relativity, which tells you about gravitational effects, with quantum mechanics, which tells you about entanglement and what particles really are and things like this.
So string theory is one candidate to do that, to combine these two ideas.
And so we have some ideas of what the synthesis of these two pillars of physics should look like when they're combined now, because we've done experiments like the Bell inequalities.
So that experiment was first done by a guy called Elaine Aspect in the early 80s called the Aspect Experiment.
Yeah.
Which is interesting, but very, very complicated to really get to the heart of.
It's difficult to understand this stuff and try to boil it down to the easily understood type of thing, especially for the GABCAS.
Jazz, are you guys still there?
It seems like I lost it.
Can I ask a follow-up question?
Yeah, go ahead, B-W.
How is something like that observed?
What experiment can you run to prove or support that thesis or that idea?
Well, again, it sort of comes down to – I don't think I can give a straightaway answer that's going to be very clear.
It's a statistical – you can show statistical correlation between two particles, right?
So I mean, this is part of the difficulty in doing such an experiment is that the state in which these particles are in this entangled state where these particles are mixed up in one another is super sensitive.
So at the scale of individual particles or atoms or small at the quantum scale, these types of states can exist.
But as you get larger and larger, more and more particles involved, you have to take into account thermal noise, just the noise of heat, the heat of air molecules bouncing off of these states.
Any interaction with light will spoil the system and break the entanglement.
It's very hard to scale these things upward, right?
So I think that these types of experiments have been done with buckyballs, which are carbon, they're like spheres of carbon atoms.
There's 60 of them in one of these molecules.
That's the largest that you can go, is to see entanglement effects on these things.
And even then, it's extremely difficult to prepare the system in such a way that the state is preserved.
So the experiments are very, very touchy.
And that's why I say at the scale of humans, you don't really see these types of effects.
And anybody that's sort of telling you that their product or whatever has certain properties that are based on quantum mechanics just don't know what they're talking about.
Most of these things can't be observed at room temperature at all.
It has to be cooled down very close to absolute zero to see these things.
So in observing a phenomenon like this, you could, you know, I think we talked about this yesterday.
There's a saying that in the process of observing an experiment like this, you would actually be possibly affecting the outcome.
Because you're to observe something at a particle level, you're probably bombarding that area of radiation or something and detecting how that radiation is affected by whatever's going on in that area.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So there are two effects now.
Now, so you bring up the question of uncertainty, right?
How do you observe a system?
What it really means is if I have a particle, a small mode of dust or whatever, in order to observe that object, I have to bounce light off of it, right?
And then I get the scattered light.
I can say, okay, well, I know I hit the thing because my light ray bounced off, so it has to be in this position.
But then once you do that, when you bounce a light ray off of something, you give it a little kick, which means, oh, now I don't know what the momentum of this thing is anymore.
It can be traveling somewhere else now.
So I knew its position at one point, but I don't know anything about its momentum.
I've destroyed all knowledge I could have about its momentum by bouncing this light ray off of it.
So I mean, you can think of it like this.
Here's why quantum effects don't scale up properly.
I'm sorry to come back to this again, but The question of measurement is perfect to lead into this.
If you imagine a very small object, so a light ray has some frequency and some wavelength between the crests, right?
It's a wave like a wave on the surface of the ocean.
So let's think about that.
If you put a cork on the ocean and a big swell comes by, then the cork will bounce and get tossed all over the place.
But if that same swell continues on and hits a battleship, the battleship doesn't move very much at all, right?
So that's why quantum systems are subject to that type of uncertainty, or at least that's why observing small systems brings up this question of uncertainty.
I'm holding a coffee mug in my hand right now.
If I put that on the table, I can see light bouncing off of it because I can see the thing, and it doesn't move.
Well, it's because this is like the light that's falling on it is like a swell hitting a battleship, right?
The coffee mug is like a battleship because it's made of so many billions of atoms.
So individually, having a little bit of light bounce off of it doesn't do very much at all.
Whereas if I replaced my coffee mug with a moat of dust, you would see the moat of dust dance around in light rays.
You can see that on a sunny day if you just open up your blinds, right?
Right.
You can see dust floating around in the room.
So that's a good analogy for why these things don't scale the way you might expect them to, and that there's these strange effects when you go from very small scale things up into very large scale.
It's a complex thing.
Jazz, did you have a question?
Yeah, well, my head's totally spinning now, but that could be the methane that I've been huffing while we're doing this experiment.
The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, is that related to quantum mechanics?
And because I think that's sort of the simplest way that all this has ever been explained to me, and I still don't get it 100%.
Yeah, Schrodinger's cat is an example of a system being in a mixture of states, right?
Just like we had said before, Onin's socks can neither be said to be black nor white.
They're somehow gray.
There's some mixture of them.
So Schrodinger's cat is just like that, right?
You have a cat in a box with a device that's triggered by a quantum effect.
In other words, the decay of a radioactive nucleus, something like this.
If this particle decays within, if this nucleus decays within some period of time, then the cat is killed.
That's a signal to trigger the death machine that kills the cat inside the box.
If it doesn't decay, then the cat lives.
So beforehand, how do you know that?
So this is interesting for a few reasons.
Beforehand, before you open the box and look inside, how do you know the cat is alive or dead?
And in the quantum mechanics picture, this is why quantum mechanics doesn't scale up to the real world very well.
And this is what Schrodinger was actually trying to show with this.
Is to say the quantum mechanical picture would say that the cat can't be said to be alive nor dead, just like the socks are neither black nor white.
It has to be in some admixture of states, and that means that the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously, which classically it doesn't make sense, which is why this shows why quantum mechanics can't scale up to the real world, because it makes no sense objectively for a cat to be in both of those states at the same time.
But for a quantum system, quantum system is described by a wave, a probability wave.
Schrodinger's equation tells us how this wave evolves in time and the properties that this wave has.
So very small systems are described by wave mechanics instead of just particle mechanics.
It's almost to say that at our level of reality, at the scale that we're at, you never see those wave effects at all.
So you think of the desk being solid, the coffee mug is a solid thing.
But really, the particles that make it up, our bodies too, right?
All of the particles inside our bodies are not only particle-like, when you get down very small, they're really wave-like.
And this is where all of the strange quantum weirdness effects come from, is this wave nature of reality on very small scales.
So, I mean, that's the key to understanding the entanglement and, for example, the double-slit experiment as well.
Oh, yeah, I wanted to talk about that.
But I think, Jazz, did you have a follow-up?
Does that have anything to do with, like, parallel universes, like the cat being alive and dead at the same time, or is that?
Well, that's one of the, that's one, like, people went through phases in interpreting this, right?
Because you can derive the math.
Schrodinger derived his equation and then had to figure out afterwards, what is this really telling me?
What does this really mean about the world?
So there are phases that physics has gone through where they've interpreted, scientists have interpreted the meanings of these things a little bit differently.
And one interpretation in the 50s was from a guy called Hugh Everett.
He says, okay, if you make an experiment on a system that can be spin up or spin down, for example, a two-state system, there's some probability I'll find it spinning with its spin axis pointed up.
There's some probability I'll find it spinning with its spin axis pointed down.
Part of the problem in observing things in quantum mechanics or what makes an observation in quantum mechanics is to say how the system snaps from one state into the other.
So at first it's in a state where you don't know.
It's a mixture of states.
Then you make a measurement and you can see it's in one state or the other state.
So that's basically what every particle is some probability until a measurement is made.
We just don't know what it is.
It's still happening.
But we just don't know what that is until we make a measurement.
That's right.
The socks are black and they're white at the same time.
And that can be looked down and see them.
And that can be expressed in a mathematical equation that says both the socks are black and white at the same time.
Also, is that correct?
Yes.
That's the precise way to do it is to state all of that through mathematics.
So, I mean, I was saying that there's some mixture.
So when you make a measurement, you select one of the probabilities of the system being in a certain state.
spin up or spin down black sock white sock um uh i think um i think hang on to these i had a good thought here I hate that happens.
That happens to me all the time, man.
It's going to happen more.
I think Nori Soundboard actually has a question for you.
Let's see.
Is something afoot here?
What's that, George?
Is something afoot here?
Great.
Thanks for chiming in, George.
Really appreciate that.
Eight hours of show prep is really paying off.
Okay, so the question was, the question previously was about the parallel worlds idea.
Okay, Everett's many worlds theory says that when you make a measurement, you find either the particle spinning up or spinning down.
SOC is black or sock is white.
We only observe one of those outcomes.
The parallel worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that both of those outcomes happen.
In our universe, we see a spin-up particle or a black sock.
In some other universe, they would measure a spin-down particle or a white sock.
Both outcomes happen in some way, and the interference that you see from wave effects are actually the two universes, parallel universes, interfering with one another.
Okay, now you're blowing my mind.
So, I mean, this says that this is what Kaku talks about all the time, about the universe splitting and branching.
It's a river.
It's a river, right?
The reason why this is not liked very much by physicists is because it introduces the baggage of having it describes quantum mechanics as being objectively, or, you know, the mathematical description of quantum mechanics is physically true, but you have to accept that, you also have to accept in this picture that there are an infinite number of parallel universes.
And we can imagine that not all of them are that different, right?
That in other words, in one universe, this mode of dust in front of me is one centimeter to the left, or a couple inches to the left, if you like, instead.
So, I mean, these are trivial differences between worlds, but can I ask a question?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Is that multi-universe that you're talking about?
Is that only in the quantum world?
We're not talking about multi-universes with you and I walking around making different decisions, are we?
We're talking, well, see, it depends on, again, how you choose to interpret this.
We're talking about, yeah, an experiment is made here, and our universe branches at that point.
That we occupy a branch in which we measure a black sock, and our copy of our universe, the sister universe, or whatever you want to call it, the branching universe, would measure an experiment that sees a white sock.
But that's theoretical, though.
That's completely theoretical.
And like I say, most people don't accept this anymore, but it's thrown around quite a bit.
And so when you read a lot of articles on quantum mechanics, they'll say, well, quantum mechanics says that these parallel universes exist and blah, blah, blah.
That's one interpretation of the mathematics.
When you start, it's a philosophical point that's introduced after the fact into quantum mechanics.
There's no mathematics that says there's an infinite number of universes in quantum mechanics.
What do you think people have introduced it afterward?
What do you think the next big discovery or research into our understanding of the quantum world will happen?
I mean, is there something that's on the horizon that people are researching or they have theories about something mind-blowing like another dimension, another universe, sister universes, or whatever you want to call it?
Is there research into that or is it pretty much has quantum theory pretty much hit a wall because we can't advance past what we already know?
I mean, there's some areas that we don't really understand in the quantum world right now.
Absolutely.
And it's been like that since the 1920s, 1930s.
Absolutely.
The next, well, I mean, we're doing quite well with quantum mechanics.
I mean, for the first time in history, we've been able to predict the existence and properties of a particle that we haven't discovered yet.
And that was done when we found the Higgs boson.
That's the God particle, right?
That's the God particle.
That was found, I guess, now in 2012.
Oh, they actually did find it.
Yeah.
They did.
Yeah.
It was found.
So what is that?
Actually, when it's measured, all of the properties of that particle fall in line with what you expect from quantum mechanics.
That tells us that we understand the subatomic realm very thoroughly.
We actually have quite a good understanding of quantum mechanics.
What we don't understand is how it links up with the big picture.
Now we see, we look to the sky and we have cosmological problems or questions.
What is dark matter?
What is dark energy?
What does this stuff mean?
So what happens at the center of a black hole?
What happened at the beginning of the universe?
So now what people have to do in order to make progress on that is to find an idea, a principle that combines gravity with quantum mechanics and puts these two things together smoothly.
Because right now we can talk about the very large scale in terms of gravitational interaction and the universe at its grandest scales.
And we can talk about the universe at very small scales on the scales of fundamental particles and quantum behavior.
But when you try to put these two things together and you say, what happens, for example, when you look at the center of a black hole, there, you can look at very small scales, and the force of gravity should still be important, even at those small scales.
Well, how do gravity and quantum effects play with one another?
And we just can't test yet the energy levels that you need.
We live in a very low gravity world.
We don't know how to play with space-time to make our own gravitational fields in the lab.
We don't know how to make little black holes that we can study.
Right.
But wasn't that a big concern when they started the CERN, the Hadron Collider?
Wasn't that like a kind of an alarmist concern?
I remember George talking about they're going to create mini black holes and it's going to swallow the earth and all that.
Yeah, well, that was a story that George would have picked up and run with.
It's complete just sensationalism.
I mean, nobody really took that seriously at all.
Well, in the science world.
Other than us.
In the science world, yeah, in the science world.
I mean, you know, in that community of people that really watch out for these things or that, you know, could potentially, if there were any chance of creating a black hole from those experiments, people would have been on top of it.
There's talk about it that, you know, maybe there's a potential you can create a microscopic black hole, a quantum black hole, which is what people were worried about.
But really, these things, if you did create one, it's thought that these things would decay so quickly.
They'd evaporate.
They'd evaporate very quickly.
They just boil very quickly.
That's interesting because if you remember the John Teeter story, I think his description of how his time machine worked was he captured, had two mini black holes captured in some sort of a gravitational field container.
And I don't remember exactly how he said he used it or how it worked.
Of course, I think the John Teeter story has been kind of proven to be bullshit just a couple years ago.
But I mean, it's when he first talked about it, or when I went back and read his post about how he described his time machine working, I'm like, wow, that sounds pretty cool.
It was, you know, a non-expert trying to understand, you know, complicated theories, and he was using the buzzwords, you know, like some of the new agers use the entanglement and the quantum thing and the tiny miniature black holes and all that stuff.
Oh, yeah, he's using the buzzwords, that's for sure.
Maybe we should use some of those buzzwords on the GabCast.
You guys need to think of GabCast jargon that you can throw around.
And just take a, you know, just take some term that you can shorten.
Yeah.
I think I have a quantum boson is plugged in my toilet.
The quantum boson.
Maybe.
That actually is good.
If anybody has a question for Agent Orange, I guess tonight you can call 623-242-2278.
Again, that's 623-242-2278.
Do you guys have another.
I've got a question.
Okay.
If Einstein had a computer.
What was that last part, Onan?
If Einstein had a computer, what would have happened?
Wow.
He must have done like eight hours of show prop to come on.
I did.
Gentlemen, you can throw away your three by five cards.
And Jazz, what did you say, Jazz?
I do have a serious question, though.
Okay, go ahead.
Pull yourself up from the highly theoretical.
What's your day like?
I mean, most of us, when we go to work, we have defined tasks that we do.
What do you do after you drink your first cup of coffee?
What happens?
I got some.
Well, what I do is I go on to a site called Archive, which is a daily.
It's updated every day.
It's a site that has a repo.
It's just.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Go ahead.
A whole archive.
That's an archive of cocktails, everybody.
Archive is a repository of papers.
It's just like a big vault of papers that come out every day.
So before people submit things for peer review, they can put it up on the archive and let other people all around the world read it.
So in the astrophysics section of the archive, there's usually about 70 papers every day.
I read a very tiny percentage of those, but I glance over the abstracts of all of them, which is just a little blurb about each of them, the work that's done in each paper, what it's about.
And I read the ones that are interesting to me.
And that's usually about an hour or so, hour and a half.
And then after that, I have goals that I've made.
So in other words, in the next six months, I want to have two papers out.
So I'll do research on those topics, or I'll bang away on a computer to write some code to try to simulate what it is that I'm interested in.
And that's pretty much my day.
It's nice.
There's no real rigid structure to it.
I'm sort of able to freeform things.
And if I bump into somebody that has their own lab, I can go and take a tour of that lab.
And, you know, I can have coffee.
Sounds like a government job.
I can play a little bit of ping pong if I want to.
Post on Bell Gab.
So are you at a university that does a lot of publisher parish, or is that just the way you happen to work?
There's a real emphasis on publishing.
I'm more of a theoretical person, so The output is less extreme for me than it is for somebody who's doing observations.
You can get observational papers turned out very quickly.
So it's not unusual to know of, you know, I mean, leaders in this field have four or five hundred publications by the end of their career, right?
Like, you can turn out very quick, observationally, you can turn out very quick papers.
Are you guys still there?
Yeah, we're still there.
I just had a caller come in.
Are you on the air, caller?
Oh, it says, Skype says not enough Skype credits.
Really?
Oh, man.
That means that I'm still connected to AO.
Are you still there, Agent Orange?
I am.
Okay, maybe they called that number and they just ran out of Skype credits for some reason.
So whoever called, you have to buy more Skype credits.
Sorry about that.
I'm going to loan them my $492, but might be a bit late, I guess.
I don't know why they need Skype credit.
Oh, they're probably calling from a, well, I don't know exactly how that works.
Because I can call that number from my home phone.
Maybe they're calling from Skype.
If you're on.
I'm going to start this question, AO, was, you know, from my perspective, it seems like there's got to be some direction for your work.
I mean, there's there.
I mean, is anybody, is there any global point of view or agenda that has to be met?
Or is this just you get to think all day about whatever you want?
And I'm not disparaging that.
Matter of fact, I think it would be great, but a couple of friends that are in engineering, they go in and they work on particular projects, and sometimes they don't know the whole component.
They only know their piece.
So am I confusing you, or does this make any sense?
It does make sense.
A lot of this work, like if you look at a paper from a large laboratory like the LHC or like, you know, any large accelerator or giant scale science experiment, basically.
I mean, the Hubble telescope team is huge, right?
So, I mean, these people publish papers with publish papers with.
Uh-oh.
Okay, so a caller called in and I hit click to add to conference, and it sounds like it put AO on hold and brought the caller in.
I fucking hate Skype.
We're going to move to.
No, it's all right, man.
Did you have a question for Agent Orange?
Yeah, I wanted to see if he believed in GWAD.
If he believed in religious views, is there any kind of, you know, does he believe in GWAD?
Okay.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
All right.
Who's calling?
Oh, he hung up.
Yeah, so it put Agent Orange on hold.
Fucking Skype.
Let me see if I can get it.
We got to go to Mumble.
We really do.
I think the spec sheet, if you guys want to listen to the spec sheet, they're going to be using Mumble, I think, tomorrow night.
Did Envy say anything about the spec sheet being on tomorrow night?
Not yet, but he's probably usually up and on the day before.
You guys should be listening to the spec sheet on Tuesdays.
Yes, indeed.
I can't get Agent Orange back for some reason.
Let me just hang up on him and call him back.
Okay.
Sorry, everybody.
Skype really sucks.
There he is.
Hey, man.
I picked up a caller called Ann and it puts you on hold for some reason, even though I had clicked to conference or add to conference.
So the caller asked a question, do you believe in God or good, as he said it?
Are you guys still there?
Yeah, we're still there.
We're here.
Okay, great, great.
Who called in?
I don't know.
I didn't ask his name.
Sorry.
Before we got a name.
I believe it was Zizzle.
Was it Ziznak?
Yeah, well, that's what he signed in as on the chat room.
Maybe it was Ziznak.
Okay.
Would have liked to talk to him a little bit more.
Yeah, me too.
Sorry about that, Ziznik.
What are my religious beliefs?
You don't have to answer if you don't want to.
Maybe he was just saying, do you believe in an all-powerful consciousness or God or whatever religious skew you want to put on it?
I lean towards more.
I lean closer to the atheist side, but I'm open to it.
How dare you saw?
I just haven't really seen anything real, you know, I don't know.
It seems like every time it seems like every time there's a domain that's set aside for God, this is the playground of the Almighty, and you don't look past this point.
The volcano erupts because the volcano God points at it, whatever.
Every time we expand our horizons a little bit and increase our understanding, these walls seem to come down.
And so, I mean, this is a really great question.
One of my main focuses or sort of big interests on is in cosmology.
It's the study of the universe at its very largest scales.
And in that case, the standard model of cosmology, the standard picture of cosmology, is called by four men's names, Friedman, LeMay.
Oh, I think.
Hello?
Yeah, something's going on.
It seems like Skype kind of fails towards the end of the show for some reason or towards the 55-minute mark for some reason.
So we lost Agent.
Let me get him back.
One of you guys have another question for him.
Is he on the air now?
Are you back?
He's back.
Okay.
Sorry about that, man.
Well, if he's, I have a question.
Yeah.
Okay, so B-Dub, you have a question for him?
Oh, now, did I lose fucking the...
Did I lease the hosts now?
No, I'm here.
Oh.
B-W?
All right.
Well, so I'd read about a quantum physicist that supposedly demonstrated that there is an afterlife and that consciousness survives death.
Have you heard about that?
Do you think that's nonsense?
I haven't heard about that.
I do.
I'm interested to read more about it.
The guy's name is Robert Lanza.
Oh, and the agent is gone again.
Oh, shit.
Well, maybe we should let me bring him back here.
Maybe this is God's way of telling us that we need to end the interview.
I'm not sure.
As soon as he heard you say atheists, that was it, man.
The Skype gods.
Let us go.
Jazz, did you have a question?
Yeah, I just not sure if it has anything to do with quantum mechanics, but I was recently in the U.S.
And when I went to use the bathroom, I got a really big shock, and the water seemed to flow the other way.
Why did that happen?
There is a God.
That's what I was screaming at on the toilet.
Oh, God.
Get me through this one, God.
You know, before I got cut off, I'm sorry, I just wanted to just wanted to get to this.
Before I got cut off, I started.
I don't know if you guys heard that I started mentioning something about cosmology.
I don't know if I got cut off or not.
Yeah, we heard that part.
You said his name, Feynman.
Okay, yeah, so there's four, there's four names: Friedman, Lemaitre, Robertson, and Walker.
The L, Lemaitre, George Herman Lemaitre, is the guy who proposed that the universe began with a Big Bang, did the mathematics, showed from Einstein's equations that the universe can't be static.
It starts at a finite point in the past.
That guy is a huge inspiration.
To me, I find him a fascinating character.
He's a Jesuit priest who put the Big Bang forward.
Wow.
Went to the Pope at the time, and the Pope was ready to say, you know, I can make the belief in the Big Bang really.
We lose him again.
Yeah, we lost him again.
He just can't get this out.
He's talking about the Pope, and then it gets cut off.
It's a conspiracy.
It's got to be NASA.
I think NASA is monitoring the GabCast, and they're cutting off Agent Orange's Skype audio.
Are you back?
We are in a superposition of states of being connected and disconnected on stage at the same time.
Exactly.
So until I speak, you don't know if I'm back or not.
There's some other universe that I am connected, and this has all gone smoothly.
So does that mean that Canadians are simultaneously tasty and not tasty at the same time?
Tasty and revolting at the same time.
All right, did you want to finish up that thought?
Agent Orange?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I'll get to it quickly or as quickly as I can.
This Jesuit priest talking about the Big Bang or postulating the Big Bang went to the Pope.
And at the time, the Pope was actually ready to make this belief in the Big Bang dogma for Catholics.
And Lemaitre was wise enough to say, step back, don't do this.
Religion and science have no reason to combine with one another.
That is sort of, yes.
And this is such a progressive viewpoint that we've lost in today's world, right?
That nowadays we think, well, the whole point of doing science is to get to some answer about religion when really they're two questions that are completely separate from one another.
And they should be separate, really.
They should be separate.
Just like in the world.
Can I come back?
Am I still connected?
Yes, you're still here.
You are still here.
Can you hear us?
Fuck, he's gone.
Technology.
I love it.
Jesus.
All right, so let me bring him one more time.
Yep.
Agent, it seems like we probably should just wind this down because you keep getting cut off for whatever reason.
The Skype guys just don't want to let us continue this interview.
So would you like to come back sometime?
Yeah, maybe we can continue another time.
Yeah, I would love that.
I know there's a lot of stuff that was on my question sheet here that I never got to.
But yeah, we'd love to have you back on.
Oh, that would be so awesome.
Yeah, if I could come back and do another show, maybe we can get into some of these other things when the quantum gods are kinder to us.
And let me just say, as long as I'm connected, one last thing.
Let me just end the show using the Jasmunda precedent.
Uh-oh.
Yes!
Nice.
Which way is it?
Excellent.
All right, man.
Thanks, Agent.
Take care.
We'll talk to you soon.
Later.
Bye-bye.
Take care, AO.
Thank you.
I think all of our guests have to sign off that way.
It really should be.
They need to start the call that way and end the call that way.
I think that's no matter what their qualifications are.
Equal opportunity at Capcast.
Well, that went great until the very end.
Yeah.
I think that some of that stuff when you're talking about quantum theory, man, it's really hard to understand because people try to, like you said, try to scale it up to the real world.
And it's not how particles behave, apparently.
And I guess you need a PhD to understand all that stuff.
But yeah, that was really interesting.
I think they scale it up to the real world.
They're trying to apply theories that apply at a particle level.
Yeah, they are.
And it looks like we're losing this.
It doesn't translate.
It does not translate.
It seems like you broke up there a little bit, too.
And I'm losing the host as well.
Maybe I should just completely disengage Skype on this other machine.
I don't know if it's my bandwidth or what the hell is going on.
But what did you guys think about the great unbanning a couple weeks ago?
I guess we haven't really been on.
We haven't done a gabcast since then.
And I wanted to get your guys' opinion about that.
I was a little shocked.
Shocking.
Yeah.
Yeah, so was I.
It really hasn't translated into a horrible forum for the most part.
I mean, I think that I thought it was going to be just Katie bar the door, but it really hasn't.
I think it's been fine with a couple exceptions.
Yes.
We've had a couple people who were re-banned.
Yeah.
I don't think anyone was surprised by that.
No.
I think that was Jackstar that was the first to be re-banned, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that wasn't a surprise, though.
No, it really wasn't.
What else?
You guys have anything else, or should I just stop the show?
It's up to you.
Seems like the energy.
It might be a good place to end.
Seems like the energy is kind of low right now.
Well, I think we're all overwhelmed by it.
There was a lot of information there.
Yeah, there was.
We're just waiting for Skype to fail again.
And there's that.
And that will be the cue to end the show.
All right.
Well, that's it.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Everybody in the chat room at UFOShift.com, there's also the spec sheet on tomorrow night on UFOShift.com, and as well as a monthly podcast from Eric Dahl called The Fret Files about guitar repair and everything guitars.
Thanks, Agent Orange, for being on the show tonight.
