Decoding the Universe: A Conversation with Lawrence M. Krauss, Theoretical Physicist & Author

Join Dr. Grant Cooper and Dr. Zinovy Meyler on The Performance Initiative Podcast as they engage in a profound conversation with theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. Delve into fascinating topics including the origins of the universe, quantum mechanics, and the possibility of multiverses. Krauss addresses scientific misconceptions, potential time travel through wormholes, and the nature of quantum entanglement. The discussion also explores the evolution and challenges of science education in schools, climate change, and the importance of rational policies and technological solutions like carbon capture and geoengineering. Don't miss a surprising magic trick demonstration that illuminates the wonder of quantum mechanics.

(00:00) Introduction
(00:39) Introducing Lawrence Krauss
(02:04) The Beginning of the Universe
(07:20) The Concept of Quantum Fluctuations
(10:25) Understanding Cosmic Inflation and the Multiverse
(17:45) Exploring Wormholes and Time Travel
(22:56) The Double Slit Experiment Explained
(26:31) Quantum Entanglement Demystified
(32:23) Quantum Mechanics in Pop Culture
(37:48) The Invisible Deck Trick
(38:01) Quantum Mechanics and Magic
(39:25) Discussing 'The Black Cloud'
(41:23) The Future of Cosmology
(43:09) The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
(48:10) Interplanetary Species Debate
(53:37) STEM and Woke Ideology
(57:12) The State of Education
(01:09:57) Climate Change Realities
(01:17:31) Closing Remarks

Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist known for his work on the early universe, dark matter, and dark energy. He has made significant contributions to the field of physics through both his research and his ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to the public. As a prolific author, Krauss has written several popular science books, including "The Physics of Star Trek" and "A Universe from Nothing," which explore the intersection of science, philosophy, and culture. In addition to his academic work, he is an advocate for scientific skepticism and secularism, often engaging in public debates and lectures to promote science literacy and critical thinking. Krauss has held various academic positions, including at Arizona State University, and has received numerous awards for his contributions to science and science communication.

#physics #quantum #quantumphysics #Lawrencemkrauss #startrek #climatechange #education #cosmology #wormholes #extraterrestrial

Thanks For Watching

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[EdwinElezerTomaneng]

I watch your reaction vids on some of our musicians - I'm from the Philippines - and I am surprised you do conversations of this kind, too! How pleasant, how fascinating!

[geoffmarcy]

Lawrence Krauss has amazing depth and breadth of our understanding of nature, and its fundamental origins.

[dosesandmimoses]

The professors of this industry are amazing.. it’s a spatial way of thinking - how to help people orientate and navigate in new ways

[RinkuJha-wyxs]

When quantum vacuum fluctuations are in a high-coherence phase the collective energy constructively sums to an extremely large value. Einstein field equations relate how energy or pressure (like of a fluid) bend spacetime and result in curved spacetime geometry. The high-coherence phase of quantum vacuum fluctuations at the core of the proton generate such a high spacetime curvature that it results in an event horizon, which encapsulates the vacuum energy and acts like a semi-permeable membrane. This results in an energy and a pressure gradient as the lower energy across the semi-permeable surface produces decoherence. The phase transition across the energy gradient going from higher to lower coherence of the quantum vacuum fluctuations results in a second semi-permeable surface where there is another precipitous reduction, or screening, of the energy and fluid pressure.

[dosesandmimoses]

Thank you gentlemen for allowing me to learn how to think critically about very difficult topics.. invaluable

[monkerud]

This is the measurement problem on the theoretical side, a quantum system you describe by a superposition, like a wave of probability for where a photon is, could just be in a specific state beforehand that is not just a photon at some locations but an actual wave and that wave and the detector is predetermined by nature to yeild a certain measurement outcome, but then if you measure it along the way that changes what the detemined value turns out to be, that is from one state to another state in a sense, but we don't know the initial state, and so the description of it as a superposition of possibilities that lead to different measured outcomes might be the best possible description given your knowledge, if then the only wau to probe it changes the system but also gives you incomplete information, then you would never be able to resolve what the original state was, just the resultant state. So whether you think its a real superposition in nature or not is not really the issue proper, the problem is knowledge, but the changing of the system by measuring has to be included in either case.

For example if you measure the spin of an electron, and you don't know its state, then you have some superposition of uo and down with respect to your measurement, maybe 50/50 if you know nothing about measurments done prior to the measurement you intend to do, whether the electron has a state that is a superposition prior to your measurement or not, is not something you can check.

For example if i measure an electron in a certain axis beforehand and i hand you the electron, to measure its spin and i tell you nothing about what axis i measured it at, or what results i got, then your best description is to assume it is 50/50 up and down in whatever axis you measure. If i do that with a lot of electrons and i measure in random direction and tell you nothing about it then thats what you will see. However if i pick out one specific direction to measure and i filter the ups from the downs and hand you only downs at some axis, then by probing different axis you can find out that in one particular axis the results are always the same, and for different axis the distributon runs from 50/50 to 100/0 from 90 degrees off at 50/50 to on my axis at 100/0, and the probability is given by the squared cos of the angle. So I can set up a fimter for letting through just ups or just downs, if k out them back together, even if i know exactly which electrons is in each state, your distribution will not be 50/50 for all angles. So your best wavefunction to hypothesise would be of a randomly oriented electron. So it is with all quantum states, there could always be a perfectly deterministic state hiding behind the scenes set up by nature, but that does not mean that we can know it, and each individual state would have to have the properties associated with interference, when you change a system the relevant interface changes, thats all.

The spin of an electron could be perfectly well defined all the time, thats not a problem for quantum mechanic, and so it is for all quantum states. But there is some complications, some residual probabilities remain in this description, for electron spin, even if i filter and make sure you always get the same results for measurment along a special axis i prepared for you, if you choose to measure on a different axis then you don't get the same result anymore, and this is the minimum uncertainty in the quantum framework, and this uncertainty can be described as a sum over intial conditions as well, but then you need to extend the physics and add in more variables. So it is complicated, some uncertainty in quantum mechanics is about ignorance of quantum states and some of it has to be ignorance about different variables, and its this kind of uncertainty is what uncertainty principles apply to, it doesn't mean that this part of measured outcomes is underdetemined in nature, it could be perfectly deterministic, but it is underdetemined by any description in terms of quantum states. We don't have a theory of such variables that is terribly sophisticated, just simple proofs of concept like bohmian mechanics, but these are essential arbitrary maps from initial conditions to measurment outcomes, the form of that summing over initial conditions is not necessarily the right version at all, for bohmian mechanics its a one to one map, one initial condition for each outcome that is possible, but this is a bit sketchy, because the environment and measurment apparatus itself should also be described by the hidden variables, and each destinguishable outcome could correspond to many possible states of the experiment, the only description that needs to be one to one is a deterministic fundamental description, and the measured quantum states at the end could then Easily be non unique, just like a room of air with a certain pressure and temp might have a large amount of possible microstates. I'm skeptical about the form og bohmian mechanics because of this sort of thing, but i'm a believer in these additional variables in general.

Anyway, as you can see, its not so simple, and whether you think there are additional variables or not, its subtle whether you think the state of a system is unknown or in a physical superposition, ultimately thats a question that can only be answered empirically by means of additional observable associated with hidden variables theories or something like many worlds with different predictions from ordinary quantum mechanics.

[monkerud]

The physics joke for the ore med student was violence though. That hurt for sure lol.

[dosesandmimoses]

Power of suggestion requires only your mind to play tricks on itself

[dosesandmimoses]

These lectures abd discussions were available during COVID lockdown..

[SciD]

"Do wormholes exist?" "I don't know" "Do unicorn farts exist?" "I don't know"... 🤦🙄

[monkerud]

When we get the technology to travel practically to other star systems, then maybe its worth going. But its like asking whether we should build a gps satelite network in 1455, we simply don't know hom much sense it makes to even try.

[dosesandmimoses]

But we educate and take accountability for informing ourselves. I had epilepsy and I read everything I could to help the neurologists help my brain. - so what if there were no neurologists

[dosesandmimoses]

I studied philosophy. Philosophy also provided different arguments for topics that may or may not be universal. It too is evolving - so we take some accountability to inform ourselves

[monkerud]

That being said, the additional variables might have a scale where they themselves are best described by a statistical framework like quantum mechanics. So you could view a hidden variable theory as a reduction to a more detailed quantum theory where our currently most fundamental entities emerge from the more fundamental quantum system and its behaviour. It is not trivial to scrap quantum mechanics as you can see, my view is that quantum mechanics is a framework for doing statistical physics ultimately, but not necessarily over simple classical variables, there might not be a clean bottom floor where everything looks like billiard balls or something with simple predictable trajectories and transformations of energy.

[monkerud]

In the case of electron spin for example, the residual uncertainty related to changing axis of measurement has to be deterministic by means of variables that are not in quantum mechanics as is, these variables must have certain properties to reproduce the distributions. And the changing of the system upon measurement has to be happening of the back of these variables, for example if we assume such variables exist, it could be that electrons are always spinning in a definite direction, but when you measure them in a different axis it forces the electron to flip into one of two orientations on the new axis, this is sufficient for reproducing the measured outcomes when measuring single electrons not interacting with anything but the measurement device. Which of the two orientations it jumps into has to be determined by the additional variables, not the quantum state of either the measurment apparatus or the electron itself.

So the additional variables always produce an avrage effect ranging from 0-100% chance for any resulting quantum state, and in addition to that, pick out the specific outcome in each case, and when you measure the exact same axis as the orientation of the electron the result is determined by the average effect every time. This means that such additional variables whether they have a quantum like behaviour or not, must conserve orientation between measurments when interactions don't happen along the way, that severly constrains what kind lf variables can account for the behaviour. Not a trivial problem at all.

[dosesandmimoses]

And we ask how is this question applicable to the objective you are trying to define.

[edstauffer]

The fascination with electrons began after reading a report about electrons moving faster than light. It seemed that electrons disappeared and reappeared at distances and time periods that meant that they had to move faster than the speed of light which physicists said was impossible. The most logical answer was that it was not the same electron. Vacuum energy appears and disappears all the time. It all had to come from somewhere.

The obvious answer was that there was a soup of the building blocks of matter outside of spacetime. Unfortunately we have yet to figure out how to see it.

Is it a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics makes more sense to me if there are actually waves of particles outside of space time that pop in and out when we do a measurement . Outside of spacetime they could instantly be where they need to be, as there is no space between the pieces that fit so they can be there in no time. It was not a big jump to realize that these particles could be part of the missing dark matter. By definition waves move, flow and circulate. On our planet we have the water cycle, water runs downhill pools and accumulates. If it becomes warm enough it evaporates. It then joins other particles in the atmosphere and eventually falls back to earth restarting the whole process. The evidence suggests that like water, dark matter can phase transition. This phase transition would accelerate waves of particles that make up the fabric of spacetime and gravity would pull them back down, these would be the drivers of the motion in the dark matter cycle.

I believe that the entirety of the universe formed as a pocket of spacetime all at once similar to a burst of vacuum energy. Once the fabric of the universe cooled most of it condensed and collapsed into swirling pools which pulled the baryonic matter into direct collapse black holes with the eddies forming the stars and galaxies. The dark matter of the fabric spacetime would collide and spray away from the center rather than be swallowed by the black hole. It would then rain back down on the plane of the galaxy. These pools of dark matter would only occupy about 0.1% of their former volume. The deepest gravity wells would experience time dilation and thus time would pass much more rapidly for areas not in them.(odd stars not in these gravity wells could be much older) Once stars and AGN formed they would begin the process of evaporating the liquid dark matter.. On average throughout the universe time would speed up from that point on while particle mass would slowly decrease as the average liquid dark matter content decreased. The altered ratio of dark matter to baryonic matter resulting from the vaporization process would then have influenced the formation and evolution of galaxies. Progressively smallerstars would have formed due to the shallower gravity wells. Larger diameter galaxies would also have evolved due to the lower LDM concentrations

Like the clouds of water that surround our planet, clouds of dark matter surround our galaxy. These clouds like fog banks can settle into the galaxy or if two systems collide actually rain down causing bursts of star formation. Anywhere in the universe can contain a deep pool of dark matter as well as any area can become a desert..

Dark matter is like the ocean it has currents and streams. It also has different salinities (concentrations of normal matter) depending on how much dust and gas has been accumulated.

The distribution of dark matter in and around galaxies could also be explained by phase transitioning dark matter. The closer to the plane the higher the liquid dark matter content. As this dark matter encounters stars, planets and moons some of it is converted to gaseous dark matter and begins to rise away from the plane due to its phase transition acceleration. This causes it to circulate away from the plane until it encounters gas or dust and rains back into the gravity well. This whole process sweeps dust and gas back toward the middle of the galaxy. The plane of the galaxy would look like lake country with the flow from overflowing gravity wells streaming outward along the plane. This would be the (DDDM) double disk dark matter. Not necessarily a solid layer but more like a filamentary structure along the plane of the galaxy. The majority of dark matter that comprises the fabric of spacetime is movable. Mother nature was smart enough to ensure that wherever more material accumulated that the fabric that contained our spacetime bubble also accumulated more mass to contain it.

[monkerud]

Entanglement with statistical dependence, is about these minimum uncertainties so to speak, correlations of the random outcome that is not defined by the quantum state, ofc the system might be in a superposition of different states like this, but the correlations comes out because of the randomness that is not resolvable being correlated on eitver end, which further complicates attempts to produce hidden variable theories, since we need a local(in the sense of local interactions at any speed, not the speed of light) to make the individual resolution of the randomness work out mechanistically, but we need the correlations to appear independent of order or the spacelike time ordering of the two measurements, this simply doesn't fly at any finite velocity, it could not be the case that nature works exactly like quantum mechanics predicts entangled systems to act, and that the dynamics between them and locally at each measurement to be spacelike local interactions. It doesn't work, it means some spacelike orientations would have time for a signal to propagate and create the dependence on outcomes and some would not, the only way to retain the exact quantum predictions is ti habe either non local hidden variables, or tl change the physics a little bit so that some spacelike separations turn out like quantum mechanics predicts and some do not, also this would be the first physical effect to break lorentz symmetry explicitly, if we don't count relative velocities like interactions with the cmb and so on, this in itself is not so bad, every physical effect that break relativity could be relational, thats not an issue philosophically, relativity whether Galilean and Einsteinian is about nothing having no physical effects, only something does stuff, and so any breakage of special relativity might be considered more akin tl the cmb frame, a physical structure of relations that pick out a frame or a notion of simultaneity not that it is something absolute. The result would be a theory that has quantum behaviour as its limit when the interaction speed goes to infinity for these specific types of correlations, a well defined limit for a well defined class of theories that could be successor theories to quantum mechanics, but then again, as i said the quantum behaviour might be found again deep inside the substructure, its not like this substructure necessarily has a simole classical basis at the fundamental, the fundamental entities might not even be a coherent concept, it might be that the only fundamental entity proper is the entire pattern at every level of detailed behaviour, with no ground floor, that is certainly logically possible, and in that case, summing over states/intital conditions to define probability distrobutions becomes a much more complicated thing to do formally, and so frameworks like quantum mechanics might be indispensable approximate descriptions no matter how much progress you make within a paradigm like this.

[monkerud]

Lots of things i agree with here. But i habe to disagree about curvature, we don't know the universe has any curvature locally or globally and we can't know, because coordinate chocies are arbitrary, the coordinate independent curvature you get from tensor analysis, is about what measurements would be inside the space for example, given rulers and clocks, and so on, thats not an indication of curvature of space and time necessarily, its about the relational physics going on inside the space, i would say there is a topology that comes out of how stuff is connected on the space, but whether a specific set of coordinates corresponding to what a ruler would say in some reference frame has any special physical significance cant be derived from general relativity, its not what the theory is about, the theory is about the intrinsic curvature you can experience and measure, which is not the same thing as there being a curved space, the curvature is a result of the coordinates used on the manifold, all we really get from the theory are intrinsic relations that can exist on any manifold with any curvature you want as long as the topology os the same, the question of what curvature is real or apparent in an extrinsic sense, or objective sense, is not really something that can be determined, it is something that has to fall out of some extension of the theory, just like a preffered reference frame in special relativity has no physical significance unless the theory is extended and some phhsical processes define a local order that gives rise to a special frame, for example there could be another set of lightcones with way way higher velocities, this would form its own local order and that can serve to restrict what spacelike trajectories count as forwards in time, or backwards in time, just like the lightcones of ordinary special relativity define a local order in time, but wya faster, if light propagates in a medium that is ultimately built up from a faster causal structure with similar properties to the usual light cone structures, then only the forward going radiation of this new more fundamental causal structure would count as forward evolving, and that would constrain what frames could be considered right about an approximate total order temporally. This is basically just adding in more physical effects to make the choice of coordinates less arbitrary, this is basically the same for curvature and simultaneity, in somewhat different ways, but still, within the theory, general or special, both of there things are arbitrary, it onoy describes the intrinsic curvature that can be observed, not things like what notion of simultaneity is correct, and what curvature is "real". Understanding what that means really requires knowing how gr and sr works, so incan see why it would not be explained in a podcast, but it is true, and it is important to keep in mind, any test of gr or sr ultimately comes down to measuring intrinsic relations, and indeed those are the only physical things going on in theories, gauges, reference frames or coordinate choices are not physical, to make them physical in any meaningful way, you have to extend the theories. And yeah the universe behaves like quantum mechanics, i'm just not so sure that means a departure from classical concepts, more so a departure from the simple expectation for how it will shake out in a more classical description, the real faithful hidden variables theories behind quantum mechanics might be infinitely complicated, to produce an appropriate approximation you might need to do something like a statistical framework at the ground floor, i don't think that says that quantum mechanics is fundamentally right, i just think that some features of it, like probability and long range correlations are general features of behaviour that nature produces, that could be true without any chancyness in nature what so ever. I feel like there is a paradigm to be had somewhere in between, where many classical principles stand just fine along side a necessary uncertainty related to the substructure being an emergent statistical phenomenon that is highly structured at any level of detail and pattern, thereby making the only true classical theory the one that includes every single detail of nature, an approximation must be statistical in some sense because there is ko ground floor where things are neat and predictable without the full details in hand, for example an electron in a given experiment could turn out to spin in two directions, which one in each case only being possible to predict with 100% certainty if you had the uv complete theory of everything, and the exact state of the entire universe innsome form, even including thigns we will never directly observe, because the density of detail is itself infinite in any system. Yet a structured world where many features look like they have been simulated by a perfect Monte Carlo simulation of some probability distribution of properties. This seems natural on its face, in some sense if our familiar patterns of reality like electrons or cars where really large scale patterns in a complete pattern with infinite density of information, then you would expect that randomness would be there at any scale in some measure given incomplete knowledge, if then the finer details are so tiny and subtle that picking them up directly is like measuring the temperature of a leaf in space using scattering with a planet, measuring the effects by how much it effected a distant solar systems orbits, then it is not clear why we would not end up with some kind of statistical description for the structure of the basic particles and fields, if they emerge from stuff we just don't have any way to see directly, and the emergence works lile ordinary statistical mechanics with some richer structures and effects related to it than when doingncrude ideal models of gases or materials for example. Its not that the universe isn't quantum, its lore that the implications of the behaviour is unclear in ultimate terms.

[dosesandmimoses]

It’s so esoteric, but I appreciate the fact these guys make the effort weekly and constantly to provide information at the time available