QBism: The New Theory That Shatters Our View of Reality

"The universe is a self-excited circuit." Science writer Amanda Gefter exposes the true origins of the quantum measurement problem and interpretations of quantum mechanics, QBism, and even consciousness.

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:56 - John Wheeler
07:42 - Participatory Universe / Quantum Mechanics
13:00 - QBism
18:38 - Probability and Bell’s Theorem
24:28 - Writing About Physics
30:26 - Simplifying Physics
36:02 - Philosophy and Physics Connection
40:02 - Quantum States
52:02 - Belief and QBism
01:11:30 - Quantum Field Theory
01:15:43 - Consciousness

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#science #physics #quantum #consciousness

[TheoriesofEverything]

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:56 - John Wheeler
07:42 - Participatory Universe / Quantum Mechanics
13:00 - QBism
18:38 - Probability and Bell’s Theorem
24:28 - Writing About Physics
30:26 - Simplifying Physics
36:02 - Philosophy and Physics Connection
40:02 - Quantum States
52:02 - Belief and QBism
01:11:30 - Quantum Field Theory
01:15:43 - Consciousness

[liminally-spacious]

Wow!! Amanda is a stellar guest! Quantum physics, philosophy, history, Wheeler anecdotes, enthusiasm... I'm in heaven. And great questions, Curt -- thank you for your honest dedication to instructing your audience and relating things back to us. I can definitely feel the love. ❤

[JasonAStillman]

She is the smartest, clearest non-physicist science communicator I've ever heard. By far, and better than many if not most physicists who do science communication. Very impressed.

[Doozy_Titter]

She really gave the best explanation of QBism I've ever heard😮

[memecat]

This is such a gem of an episode. Amanda’s articulate story telling skills are unmatched. She boiled down the most difficult concepts in a manner her audiences may never fail to grasp them. I want to read her book.

[DavidDavoDavidson]

Curt, the way you’re editing your videos now is fantastic. I remember when you started over editing some of your videos - trying to make them this massive physics course, and it was just too much. But the way you’re doing it now holds my attention and interest. You’re getting better and better.

[ababoo]

Amanda is so clear and easy to listen to. This was a terrific conversation. Thanks for having her on.

[MourningTalkShow]

The care with which she expresses these things (including, seemingly, running a query of her current state after each question instead of regurgitating rehearsed monologues) is as inspiring as the ideas themselves.

[MrTksharpless]

I love this woman. A true philosopher. You don't run into those very often, especially on YouTube. Bravo, Curt! Brava, Amanda!

[mathewdenboer]

This really helped me to finally grasp QBism, or at least begin to. Thank you both!

[FigmentHF]

You can see the honest curiosity radiating from Amanda’s eyes, aha.

Great guest so far! I’ve only been diving into quantum physics this last year or so, I was using Claude to tell me all about it, and every single one of my raw intuitions was that we live in a very participatory universe. I couldn’t understand why so many scientists said that reality was spooky and absurd, it was immediately obvious that reality simply is, and it’s us that’s absurd, it’s our very limited preconceptions about what reality should look like under the hood. We didn’t want to wake up from our Newtonian sandbox dream.

The thought that occurred to me, actually sounded like the opening to a Douglas Adams novel- “A bunch of macroscopic, metabolising 3D apes, attempted to create a grand theory of their existence, by removing the macroscopic, metabolising 3D apes from their equations. They became terribly confused”

Aha.

[bunberrier]

An excerpt from her book, very cool! :

My sudden urge to crash a physics conference with my father can be traced to a conversation seven years earlier.

I was fifteen at the time, and my father had taken me out for dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant near our home in a small suburb just west of Philadelphia. Usually we ate there with my mother and older brother, but this time it was just the two of us. I was pushing a cashew around my plate with a chopstick when he looked at me intently and asked, “How would you define nothing?”

It was a strange dinner-table question, to be sure, but not entirely out of character for my father, who, thanks to his days as an intellectual hippie Buddhist back in the sixties, was prone to posing Zen-koan-like questions.

I had discovered that side of him the day I came across his college yearbook, flipping pages only to discover a photo of my father sitting shirtless in a lotus pose reading a copy of Alan Watts’s This Is It—a hilarious sight considering that these days he was a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only wore a shirt every day but often sported a well-coordinated tie, too. He had made a name for himself by explaining how a whole array of lung diseases were caused by a single kind of fungus, and by inventing the disposable nipple marker—a sort of pastie that you stick on someone’s nipple when they’re getting a chest X-ray so the radiologists don’t mistake the nipple’s shadow for a tumor. But behind all the fungus and nipples, that groovy lotus-posing dude was still in there waiting for a chance to speak up. When he did, he would offer unlikely morsels of parental guidance, like, “There’s something about reality you need to know. I know it seems like there’s you and then there’s the rest of the world outside you. You feel that separation, but it’s all an illusion. Inside, outside—it’s all one thing.”

As a dogmatically skeptical teenager, I had my own Zen-like practice of zoning out when adults offered me advice, but when it came to my father I listened—maybe because when he spoke it sounded less like an authoritarian command and more like the confession of a secret. It’s all an illusion. Now here he was speaking in that same quietly intense tone, leaning in so as not to let the other diners overhear, asking me how I’d define nothing.

I wondered if he was asking me about nothing because he suspected I was entertaining some kind of nihilistic streak. I was a contemplative but restless kid, the kind that parents describe as “hard to handle.” In truth I think I was just bored and not cut out for the suburbs. An aspiring writer with a learner’s permit, I had read Jack Kerouac and I was itching to hit the road. To make matters worse, I had discovered philosophy. When you’re fifteen, boredom plus suburbia plus existentialism equals trouble …

“How would I define nothing? I guess I’d define it as the absence of something. The absence of everything. Why?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for years, ” he said, “this question of how you can get something from nothing. It just seemed so impossible, but I figured we must be thinking about nothing the wrong way. And then the other day I was at the mechanic waiting for my car to be fixed and it just hit me! I finally understood it.”

“You understood nothing?”

He nodded excitedly. “I thought, what if you had a state that was infinite, unbounded, and perfectly the same everywhere?”

I shrugged. “I’m guessing it would be nothing?”

“Right! Think about it—a ‘thing’ is defined by its boundaries. By what differentiates it from something else. That’s why when you draw something, it’s enough to draw its outline. Its edges. The edges define the ‘thing.’ But if you have a completely homogenous state with no edges, and it’s infinite so there’s nothing else to differentiate it from … it would contain no ‘things.’ It would be nothing!”

My father had once told me that when he was a teenager on summer vacation, he was lying on a hammock in the backyard of his family home, not two miles from the home in which he and my mother would later raise me, reading The Way of Zen. “The book was talking about the illusion of the ego, ” my father had told me, “and the duality of subject and object. I was totally blown away by this idea, which was so simple and yet so profound. It had such an effect on me that I became hyperaware of everything around me. I was so in the moment. And then a bee landed on the page and pooped on it and then flew away. So I circled the stain on the page and wrote in the margin, ‘A bee pooped here.’”

When he told me that story, I found myself wondering what I would have done if a bee had shat on my teenage reading, which was pretty much the opposite of everything Zen. Most likely I would have circled the stain in my Sartre and written, “Figures.” But the funny thing is, unbeknownst to my father, when I had snuck out of this house to get my first tattoo at the age of fourteen, I had, amidst my existentialism and angst, gotten a tattoo of the Chinese character for Zen, which looked like a little Hawaiian man carrying a tiki torch on my hip, because even though I was rebelling, I really just wanted to be like my father, to have the kind of subterranean wisdom I saw lurking behind his eyes, which were large and brown and sloped downward at the edges so that he appeared perpetually sleepy or stoned, eyes I had inherited from him and regarded not as mere genetic facsimile but as a secret handshake. It was his Zen-like thinking that led my father to his epiphany, the H-state, a way of thinking about nothing that made it the ontological equal of everything, and it was his H-state that led me to dream up a life, and a book, and a universe.

[ScaleScarborough-jqzx]

Behavior and consciousness can have such extraordinary effects in this living world. Most of the time, I think, we underestimate the gift that life is.

[benharter]

"Soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 TOE's. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like". LOL

[tod]

Wow, this was so well presented. Great guest, great questions, great editing with extra explanations. You've outdone yourself with this one, Curt. Thank you.

[RatheadX]

This guest was of course stellar, but I also really appreciated how you helt yourself back, had the lights on her, just letting her speak without interrupting. Excellent work!

[Jacobk-gr]

Relativity isn’t bound by reality, it reflects it. I saw a game the other day where people used words to create everything and i thought how it’s a game of relativity and our brain makes a map out of relativity. If we focus on the negatives, the relatives kinda slowly reveal themselves but if we share our mind with the positives and look with understanding not just judgement, then maybe we could help each other instead of tearing each other down.

[TheMikesylv]

This is the best explanation of quantum mechanics I have ever heard. It makes sense it answers the questions

[bretmccormick]

This is one of your most enlightening and uplifting interviews. It reawakens the belief in me that new knowledge should be jubilant.

[admspacemonkey]

Makes me feel like I am live action maxwell's equations, possibly confused and probably anti-confused at the same time. This is an intense, quantum probability thriller. Thank you Kurt and Amanda, great film!