Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger’s Cat?

March 3rd, 2020

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To quote eminent scientist Tyler Durden: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Actually… not necessarily true. If the quantum multiverse is real there may be a version of you that lives forever.

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If we can’t ever peer into these other realities that are used to explain quantum mechanics, how do we know they exist? In order to understand what happens to those different branches, and to understand why we find ourselves in one of them, we need to embrace one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. For example the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that the wavefunction branches that we don’t observe somehow vanish at the moment of measurement. Or the Many Worlds interpretation, which states that those other branches are just as valid as ours – implying that reality may split and multiply in all possible ways. In that case we only see one branch because we live in that branch, and the others are rendered inaccessible by decoherence. But today I’m going to offer a test. Admittedly NOT a very useful one – but one that’s fun to think about. We’ll call this test quantum immortality. It’s based on the famous Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment.

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Posted in Physics |

How Decoherence Splits The Quantum Multiverse

February 24th, 2020

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Why is it that we can see these multiple histories play out on the quantum scale, and why do lose sight of them on our macroscopic scale? Many physicists believe that the answer lies in a process known as quantum decoherence.

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Does conscious observation of a quantum system cause the wavefunction to collapse? The upshot is that more and more physicists think that consciousness – and even measurement – doesn’t directly cause wavefunction collapse. In fact probably there IS no clear Heisenberg cut. The collapse itself may be an illusion, and the alternate histories that the wavefunction represents may continue forever. The question then becomes: why is it that we can see these multiple histories play out on the quantum scale, and why do lose sight of them on our macroscopic scale? Many physicists believe that the answer lies in a process known as quantum decoherence.

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Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?

February 18th, 2020

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It’s not surprising that the profound weirdness of the quantum world has inspired some outlandish explanations – nor that these have strayed into the realm of what we might call mysticism. One particularly pervasive notion is the idea that consciousness can directly influence quantum systems – and so influence reality. Today we’re going to see where this idea comes from, and whether quantum theory really supports it.

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The behavior of the quantum world is beyond weird. Objects being in multiple places at once, communicating faster than light, or simultaneously experiencing multiple entire timelines … that then talk to each other. The rules governing the tiny quantum world of atoms and photons seem alien. And yet we have a set of rules that give us incredible power in predicting the behavior of quantum system – rules encapsulated in the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Despite its stunning success, we’re now nearly a century past the foundation of quantum mechanics and physicists are still debating how to interpret its equations and the weirdness they represent.

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Posted in Physics |

Are Axions Dark Matter?

February 11th, 2020

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What does the strong nuclear force, the fundamental symmetries of nature, and a laundry detergent have in common? They’re all important parts of the tale of the axion – a tale whose end may take us beyond the standard model and solve one of the most vexing mysteries in astrophysics.

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The story of the axion is a classic physics tale: intrepid scientists delve deep into trackless mathematics in search of answers to a mystery. And there, against all expectations, they find the hint of a completely new and unexpected denizen of the natural world. In this case the mystery was a subtle inconsistency in the behavior of the fundamental forces. And the unexpected discovery? A brand new particle – the axion – which, while not proven to exist, may explain a much more famous conundrum. The axion may explain dark matter.

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Are there Infinite Versions of You?

February 3rd, 2020

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If the universe goes on forever, does that mean there are infinite versions of you out there?

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The cosmological equations that so beautifully describe our universe make an uncomfortable prediction: interpreting them in the most straightforward way, they tell us that the universe may be infinite. Or not; it could turn out that the universe contains enough matter and energy to close in on itself and be finite, or perhaps the simplest interpretation of the cosmological equations is TOO simple. But according to our best theoretical understanding, an infinite universe seems at least possible – and some would say likely. If so this raises an even more crazy possibility. An infinite universe may literally contain every possible thing allowable by the laws of physics – each in infinite multitude. And that includes infinite versions of you. Today I’m going to try to convince THIS version of the reality of all of the others.

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Hacking the Nature of Reality

January 27th, 2020

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In particle physics we try to understand reality by looking for smaller and smaller building blocks. But what if that has been the wrong philosophy all along?

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In standard use, the S-matrix can be calculated if you understand the forces in the interaction region – for example, in the nucleus of an atom. But what if you don’t know those internal interaction forces? Heisenberg sought a way to ignore that internal structure and, rather, treat the S-matrix as fundamental. The S-matrix was to become the physics of the interaction, rather than an emergent property of more fundamental, internal physics. Heisenberg’s made some progress in the 40s, but the approach came into its own 20 years later when the atomic nucleus refused to give up its mysteries.

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Posted in Physics |

Solving the Three Body Problem

January 20th, 2020

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The three body problem is famous for being impossible to solve. But actually it’s been solved many times, and in ingenious ways. Some of those solutions are incredibly useful, and some are incredibly bizarre.

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Physics – and arguably all of science changed forever in 1687 when Isaac Newton published his Principia. Within it were equations of motion and gravity that transformed our erratic-seeming cosmos into a perfectly tuned machine of clockwork predictability. Given the current positions and velocities of the bodies of the solar system, Newton’s equations could be used in principle be used to calculate their locations at any distant time, future or past. I say “in principle” because the reality isn’t so simple. Despite the beauty of Newton’s equations, they lead to a simple solution for planetary motion in only one case – when two and only two bodies orbit each other sans any other gravitational influence in the universe. Add just one more body and in most cases all motion becomes fundamentally chaotic – there exists no simple solution. This is the three-body problem, and we’ve been trying to solve it for over 300 years.

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Posted in Physics |

How To Capture Black Holes

January 13th, 2020

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Black holes are awesome – but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. This insane hypothesis is getting closer to reality, according to the papers in today’s space time journal club.

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Thanks to LIGO we’ve now seen black hole mergers, but there was some striking surprises. For one thing, many of the merging black holes were too massive to have been formed by the collapse of stellar cores. That is if our understanding of stellar evolution is half as good as we think it is. This led astrophysicists to think about new ways to produce black hole mergers. Here’s the most awesome possibility: what if black hole mergers actually occur in orbit around supermassive black holes, embedded deep in the whirlpools of searing gas that surround some of these monsters? Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll be looking at a pair of 2019 papers that talk about this possibility. We have Yang et al., which predicts the properties of black holes that merge this way, and McKernan et al. which proposes a way for us to actually test this hypothesis.

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Posted in Physics |

How To Detect a Neutrino

January 6th, 2020

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Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and we got to visit with Don Lincoln to explore it’s science and its engineering. These days many of the super-powered geniuses of Fermilab are tackling the mysteries of the neutrino. Why? Because this elusive particle may hold powerful secrets: from the unification of the forces of nature to the biggest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing?

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Do Black Holes Create New Universes?

December 17th, 2019

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What if every single black hole that formed in our universe sparked the big bang of a new universe? Cosmological natural selection proposes exactly this – but even better, it claims to be able to test the hypothesis.

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Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants – like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces – just right for the emergence of life? Tweak them too much and life, stars, galaxies, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. In recent episodes we explored one possible explanation for this – the anthropic principle and the idea of the multiverse. If there are countless universes with different fundamental constants, then it’s not surprising that a few exist with the right numbers for life – and certainly not surprising that we find ourselves in one of those good ones. But if you don’t like the anthropic principle – and many scientists don’t – then rest assured, there’s an alternative. You only need to accept two things: that our universe formed inside a black hole, and that universes can evolve.

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