This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's one Friday, my name is Jeff Sundo. Science is hard, we take things for granted, like the sky's staying where it is, because we're trying to figure out why it takes way more brain power and energy than most of us have to spare. Someone who has never let a lack of brain power or energy dissuade him from doing anything, his culture pops, so what are we mathsblaining this week?
Hey Jeff, everything we're explaining live, the universe, why 42 is the best number of cars to own. Today we're going to try and tackle all of the important questions, the mysteries of science, the secrets of chemistry, why BFM continues to give me this show. Today is an Idiot's Guide, not because you guys are all idiots, because this idiot has figured some stuff out. Probably the biggest secret is that we don't need to worry about all the stuff we don't understand, because nobody else does.
That means that someone has published a handy guide to something, right? Pretty much the 30th June edition of New Scientist features a bunch of thorny scientific topics cut down into bite-sized chunks. I know it sounds weird that they would do that, given that it's a scientific magazine, and you might assume a certain level of expertise and knowledge amongst its readers, except for Jeff and I of course, which brings me, of course, to topic number one, which the new scientist doesn't actually cover. Scientists themselves.
Exactly, in the media you often hear people like me saying a bunch of scientists have published a paper on invisibility or high altitude nukes or whatever. We use the term scientist interchangeably as though all scientists are the same, but that's actually really lacks on our part. It's kind of understandable to a point. When most of us study the sciences at school, it may seem that there's not that much separating biology or physics or chemistry, but that's because we're looking at the building box, the kind of common foundations that scientific knowledge is built on.
The people we call scientists, the ones who have studied and are experts, are way, way past the building blocks. You mean it's a bit like the universe when we look up to the stars, you think, okay, this may be normal? Yeah, when you study science at school, you think, yeah, I can handle this, I can get to grips with this, and then you go on to university, but there, you know, you can't study all the disciplines, there's just too much science to even think about, let alone, start to understand. So you have to narrow your focus and start following your interests.
You're not looking at that big picture so much anymore, you're working much more on your one tiny piece of the jigsaw, and you're hoping that the scientific community as a whole is going to put the whole picture together. You know, some people spend their whole lives researching mollusks and bivalves, and that's not a slur, there's so much research, there are so many things to discover just with mollusks. Other people will spend their working lives looking at a handful of cold or flu viruses. You know, the more involved you get in your chosen scientific field, the more you realise there is to know.
And even enormous breakthroughs only contribute a tiny amount in terms of expanding our knowledge as a whole. Which explains one of the things we often mention on the show, that scientists don't really collaborate much outside of their own discipline. Well, that's one of the areas where the dummies, like us, may actually have an advantage over the experts, from their so-and-sconced in their own world, that they may not look for the connections between disciplines that our ignorance actually allows us to make. For example, you know, we know that the search for new antibiotics is bringing together medical researchers as well as soil and marine biologists.
We've also reported in the past on cases in social sciences when economists have teamed up with historians to help build models that predict, say, the development of our societies and economies. So we shouldn't assume that a biologist has any more knowledge than an astrophysicist compared to any of our listeners there? Well, they probably have a better idea of how to process the terminology and certainly some of the basic ideas. But why should we assume that they have any of that higher knowledge that turns you from anything but an interested party into an expert?
I mean, do we automatically assume that a chemist is going to understand Bitcoin? Or should we assume that a cryptologist understands the circulatory system of the Tapia? You know, no, because what we consider to be science is so broad and a lot of its parts are completely unconnected. So today we're going to have a look at some of the biggest ideas and mysteries in science.
We'll try and explain some of them. And with others, we'll tell you why it's perfectly fine not to understand them. Excusing ignorance sound like a maths plane thing to do. Where shall we start with the concept of scientific understanding itself?
Well, as I said, you know, science as a term is a bit of a misnomer. It's a really broad church. Scientists don't understand science. They just understand the little bit of it that they're looking at.
And it's quite hard to convey how enormous those tiny little slices of science are to the rest of us. Take someone like Stephen Hawking, drop him into a basket titled science and he's pretty much a droplet. You know, you can think of him as a no-nothing in the kind of grandispema things. And if Stephen Hawking is a no-nothing, what does that make?
The rest of us. So, you know, without hard truth, let's go with another one with scientific truth itself. Do we misunderstand what scientific truth is? Massively, especially as we seem to be moving into an era where all knowledge is doubted, our knowledge of the various branches of science is constantly evolving and enlarging.
We'll talk about multiverses later, but I'm mentioning it here to illustrate that the scope of our frame of reference is continuously expanding. You know, it would be great if we were able to think about science in terms of incontestable truths. But we can't do that because not everything is demonstrable. We might lack the technology to prove that an idea is true or realising that truth might be incredibly dangerous.
You know, we might suppose that a pathogen has the potential to be incredibly infectious and deadly. But that doesn't mean that we go and road test it on London and Singapore just to prove a point. In a sense, we rely on supposition and theories then. Yeah, it's a bit like creating a map.
We're trying to make the map as comprehensive as possible. We're adding hills and streams and the occasional village. But there are lots of places that we think should be on the map, or things that we know that are on the map, but we can't actually visit. So, science makes us all a bit like Christopher Columbus.
We think we found a new route to India. And actually, we're making an unscheduled colonial pit stop at the Americas. Isn't it a little bit backwards to formulate a hypothesis and then look for ways to prove it? Well, we have to be realistic about these things.
You know, it would be nice to think that everything starts with that Eureka moment. But I think far more of what we discover in science is achieved by the huge drudge of spending hours and hours of painstaking work, pouring over books and models and statistics. We have to take that leap into the unknown sometimes. The process of induction.
Yeah, that's right. And that's why methodology is so important in science. Induction on its own can be a dangerous tool. The new scientist quotes the classic philosophical argument by David Hume from the 18th century.
And that runs along the lines of, if you check the colour of all the swans you can find and all of those swans are white, then you might use that evidence to deduce that all swans are white. And then you start to state it as a fact. All swans are white. But what happens if you forgot to check the pond in the field next door?
Where a black swan is happily floating around and being mean in typical swan fashion. Suddenly, some swans are black and all swans are white is no longer a fact. So the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper tried to overcome the weaknesses of the induction method by introducing the concept of refutability. In other words, we look for things that we can disprove.
Yeah, and you know, we're really kind of simplifying and paraphrasing here. Popper held that there are no absolute truths. So we aren't looking to prove something but to shine a light on the things that we can disprove. So let's say I had a theory that donuts were healthy.
So firstly, someone would point out that they're fried in oil. Secondly, that they're coated in sugar. Thirdly, you know, blah, blah, blah. Until it becomes pretty clear that donuts are not especially healthy.
With things that are more likely to be true than my example, you do the same thing. You chip away at the surroundings of the hypothesis. When you figure out which bits are wrong or which parts you can't sustain, what you have left over is probably going to be the truth. That's the mythology that more scientists should use.
It is the methodology that they should use, but scientists aren't superheroes anymore than Elon Musk is. You know, there is fragile and brittle as ordinary people. Some of them are selfless. Some of them are egotistical.
Most of them fall somewhere in the middle, like the rest of us do. You know, some scientists are going to be well funded and others are going to be desperate to make a breakthrough that will bring them enough funding to keep not only themselves, but their team of researchers in work. Others are conducting work for commercial organisations where there's a clear profit motive attached to the work. And all of this can affect your commitment to refutability, whether it's something that happens consciously or subconsciously.
And you think that's the part of reason we have for the explosion of alternative facts? Yeah, because there are so many parties interested in the politicisation of scientific research and its findings. Media is part of this problem as well. You know, I hold up my hands and say, sorry.
It's easy to see that with some things like 2 plus 2 equals 4, or that we can predict the tides that gravity holds us down, some of those are easily provable, but not all sciences as definite as that. For example, we reported on the show about a year ago that there was a crisis in psychology, and the fact that many of the experiments in psychology can't be replicated. So sometimes when we talk about science and we think about science, we have to remember and remind ourselves that some of its branches may be more subjective than others. Well, when we come back, or if we come back, or at least in one of the dimensions, where we do come back, we will be met explaining the multiverse.
BFM 89.9. Bringing fresh meaning. BFM 89.9. And we're back.
It's fun Friday. My name is Jasandu. We've had a lot of different maths on today's show, and also previously on the show as well. Present, Matt, is of course our usual suspect.
But future, Matt comes and visits sometimes, although past Matt is someone we hear about rather than form. In a multiverse, what Matt can we expect to be hearing from? Hello, I'm Multimat. I live in a version of your world that is very different in our world, cats are the rulers.
In that world, I have a very important job. I'm the Chief Mouse Catcher to his highness, King Jafal. Fortunately, that sleep a lot, so when our mouse is an app, we have plenty of time to study. So we're a lot smarter than you.
So, Multimat, you can tell us how the multiverse works? Well, even though our worlds are both products of the multiverse, we cannot say for certain how the multiverse works. What is increasingly likely is that the multiverse is a fact, rather than a theory. We just have to work out which version of the theory is the actual one.
Wait, hang on. They're nice in your studio. I think we've lost Multimat. That's possibly a good thing.
The other me's are also weird. You tell me. I know. What was he saying?
Because we can't inhabit the same space at the same time, so I don't know how far he got. So he was talking to us about the various multiverse alternative theories. OK, so he didn't get very far. So let's give a little context.
Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He says that the multiverse is a prediction, but we have good reason to think that it's correct. So let's start with one model, which is the cosmological multiverses. Here, the theory goes that just after the big bang, spacetime started to expand exponentially.
Quantum effects, which we don't really have to worry about, and may or may not be helpful to think of as lumps in your gravy, started to slow or end that expansion in different parts of spacetime. And the slowdown regions became bubble universes, like the one that we live in? Well, due to the constraints of physics, we're stuck in our bubble. Even if we traveled at close to the speed of light, we would never be able to reach the end of our constantly expanding bubble.
In any case, you probably wouldn't want to jump into another bubble universe, because it's unlikely that the things we consider to be the constraints of nature, such as, say, the mass of an electron, would be duplicated in another universe. In fact, string theory predicts that around 10 to the 500 configurations of physics exist across the multiverse. What's that in real numbers? That's 10 with 500 zeros.
I don't even know if that has a name. As far as you are, I'm concerned, it might as well be infinity, because we can afford to be more ignorant than the scientists. There's also a many worlds theory, isn't it? Yeah, in a way that's more straightforward than the cosmological multiverse and floating in bubbles, but it's kind of way more mind-bending.
Every time you make a decision or a choice, the world will split according to the number of those choices. So if you want that in slightly more scientific terms, the quantum world exists in what's known as a fuzzy state. When we make a choice or we observe something, we're essentially forcing that thing into existence. But that choice also forces all the other possible outcomes into existence, which break off from where we are as parallel words.
Like the Schrodinger's cat. Yes, we'll be getting back to the cat soon, but do you want to know where all the parallel worlds are? They exist in a version of space that isn't actually space, by which I mean they exist in some kind of mathematical structure, but that structure doesn't look anything like the universes that we inhabit. Do we have to worry about multimatter and multijef?
No, our many worlds selves exist entirely independently of us and each other. There's no way we can reach from one world and influence another, so we don't have to worry about our duplicate selves. I had to get special permission to break all the laws of physics in order to bring multimatter into the studio. It costs an absolute fortune and it diverted the use of a super glider for a fortnight.
It turns out the guy's only interested in mice. So trust me, dealing with the past and future versions of yourself is going to be more than you want to handle. Alright, let's get to the real meat of today's show. Who killed Schrodinger's cat?
Well, most of us are aware of the model of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment that places a cat in a box and wonders whether it's alive or dead. So hopefully I can make this next picture here, but you may want to download the podcast and listen to it again, because it does get a little bit twisty. So the one that most of us know is actually known as the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. So this holds that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box to check on it, in which case, by golly, the cat is alive.
Because generally, when you hear about people talking about this model, the cat is usually dead. I like cats, so for me, it's going to be alive. If I've got this right, while it's in the box, the cat is fuzzy. It's alive and dead at the same time.
When you open the box, you are bringing one of those outcomes into existence. The cat can only be alive or dead. So what happens in the many worlds approach then? Much the same except you don't have that either or.
If you open the box and find that the cat is alive, then you're also creating a new world in which the cat is dead, except that neither you or the cat will ever know that there was another option. But that's not even the most bonkers outcome. And this is where you talk about quantum Bayesianism. Yeah, under this theory, it's not the cat in the box which is uncertain, because the cat is definitely alive.
What's at fault is our state of mind. To understand Bayesianism, we have to accept that there are fundamental limits of what we know about reality. Inside the box, the cat is alive and well. When we look at the cat, our brain is just catching up with the cat's reality.
And even that's not the most bonkers outcome. There's another one called objective collapse theory. This posits that we don't force anything into being by observing it. Things leak into the surroundings via something that is called a spontaneous wave function collapse.
And they will eventually disappear. Which is so bonkers that it's entirely baffling. And I can't find any description of what a spontaneous wave function collapse actually is. Are we ever likely to find out what actually happens to the cat?
Well, the cat is in what is termed as a superposition in that it could be alive or dead at the same time. So we can now do experiments that put molecules and electrical circuits into these superpositions and test them. We've talked about quantum computing on the show before, the ability of its ones and zeros to be in multiple places, doing multiple calculations at the same time, basically existing in different dimensions. So some researchers are now looking at ways to do this kind of testing with viruses and biological organisms.
Things that are almost but not quite alive. I think we're running out of time. And that just goes to show how little you and the rest of us understand about time. We're not running out of time.
In fact, this show is already over and it hasn't even started. And honestly, that's very confusing. Because we think of time as linear that it moves forward at a constant rate. In relation to our own lives, it kind of almost does.
But our lives are quite constant. We live on a planet that rotates at a pretty constant speed and it maintains the same gravitational field throughout our lives. And this is what gives us the false idea that time is an absolute because we don't see it in relation to anything else. Einstein?
Yep, relativity, baby. According to the standard model of physics, space time is altered by gravity and motion. So the new scientists suggest we adopt two rules when thinking about time. Rule one, forget the idea that time always ticks at the same rate.
Rule two, be prepared to deny that time ticks at all. So does that mean I'm never actually late to the office? Yeah, although I'm not sure that your HR department is going to accept this podcast as evidence. As I said, we tend to think of time as being linear.
Einstein's relativity would seem to suggest that reality is actually static. It's a four-dimensional block of space time inside which all of time exists at the same time. In the quantum model of physics, time should work just as effortlessly forward as it goes backwards. And if you're wondering, on the evidence from this show, it would seem that quantum physics is a cross between a VCR recorder and a choose your own adventure novel.
I don't know if that in any way tracks to the life experiences of quantum physicists. You know, man, you're doing a very good job in making this clear. That's because we're in the quantum world where I suck. Competent that is off doing this show in another world.
Even our greatest minds still don't understand time. Earlier, or it might have been tomorrow, I mentioned scientists who spend their lives researching by valves. There are plenty of scientists devoting their lives to exploring time, even though they may suspect that they've already done it or they may never start. Marina Cortez at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh describes time as the most mysterious aspect of nature.
So it's fine that we just don't understand time. Because no one does, our linear concept may be wrong, but it does help to make sense in our lives. And for most of us, that's sufficient. That's enough.
Like I said at the start, there are some things that it's OK, or possibly even more practical for us to be ignorant about. And that's precisely why we shouldn't integrate and dump on scientists for dealing with all the stuff that we don't want to think about. In any case, today's show never happened, and I was never here. Honestly, I am left confused.
Most of all, before we even started the show. And apparently, that is meant I'm going to say it's the Idiot's Guide to Science. Also, you can check out the culturepop.com website for transcripts of these shows, but I'm very sure it's just all in one-cent zeros instead of words. Of course, you can also find out how to bring a little bit of Matt's training to your company.
We'll be right back with Dixbox, or we have. We are back already. And we did it last week. But in the future.
OK, confused. BFM 89.9.