Scientists are still trying to calculate how many YT channels simon is a presenter on.

@DimBeam1

6 ай бұрын

No you are wrong.

@Bacopa68

6 ай бұрын

I think he peaked at eleven, but is down to fewer. There are a couple he ditched that are still around, like Visual Politin EN, a russian propaganda channel. A couple others failed and are gone.

@livinginvancouverbc2247

6 ай бұрын

And Simon also has his Blaze channels where he shouts, jumps around and waves his arms a lot.

@Bacopa68

6 ай бұрын

@@livinginvancouverbc2247Since his second kid he doesn't do the Blaze standing. Nor does his space heater talk to him. But we have a mix of writers and two editors now, and stories of his son's giant dump.

@johnhawkins2717

6 ай бұрын

@@DimBeam1 oh, ok.

Jokes on you, i dont understand most of the things.

@peterwoods8299

6 ай бұрын

Take my damn like

@jonathanaddle9317

6 ай бұрын

I was thinking the same 🤔

@gracefulkimberella

6 ай бұрын

But even with this fact, to whom the joke is on is uncertain. 😊

@infigrins

6 ай бұрын

Sometimes that's not a bad thing, with any knowledge comes power. Just imagine if most people understood things like this, how many would blow their selves up or those next to them?

@V3RTIGO222

6 ай бұрын

​@@infigrins let's not confuse knowledge with recklessness...

Simon himself is the next best thing we have to an actually observable quantum particle - talking about any and every topic simultaneously, existing on all channels at once, with varying degrees of probability.

@scottmccrea1873

4 ай бұрын

I think Simon's writer(s) deserves a lot of credit he or they aren't getting.

@mrcryptozoic817

2 ай бұрын

I try to imagine footnotes by Richard Feynman. I sure wish Simon could have interviewed Richard.

Heisenberg's wife was unhappy with their marriage because when he had the time he didn't have the energy, and when he had the position he didn't have the momentum.

I remember seeing an interview with one of the Star Trek Next Gen writers. He said they had had received question from someone that asked how the transporter could properly map the structure of a person being transported because of the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. So the writers just added to the shows cannon a reference to a Heisenberg’s filter being part of the transporter system. I remember hearing that filter being mentioned in a couple of shows. The writer said he got a question from a physicist once wanting to know how a Heisenberg’s filter worked. The only answer the writer could come up with was, "Very well".

@eldiabloramon

6 ай бұрын

😂😂😂😂hahaha thats awesome!

@TheIronSavior

6 ай бұрын

Or Heisenberg "Compensators"

@KaiHenningsen

6 ай бұрын

@@TheIronSaviorShould have said "if I knew that, I'd be a theoretical physicist with a Nobel prize".

@MadScientist267

6 ай бұрын

"That's still uncertain"

@seantlewis376

6 ай бұрын

I was going to mention that, but to my memory, it was called the Heisenberg Compensator in the episode Relics.

A past Physics Professor told me, and I quote, "Quantum Physics is the dreams that stuff is made of!". I never forgot that and still get a chuckle out of it.

As a musician, I feel like an analogy for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is that if you hear a note, it is impossible to determine what kind of note it is (quarter-note, eighth-note, etc.) until you hear the note after it, and have a scale against which to measure both notes (tempo).

@ewen666

2 күн бұрын

That’s actually a genius analogy, brilliant. Thank you.

That's got to be the best explanation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle I've ever heard. Absolute props to the writer and editor

@Alphabunsquad

5 ай бұрын

It is very good, though I feel he should have emphasized how it is more or less an exaggerated version of how things do actually seem to work based on the math even though it started as a joke. Like with Einstein a lot of early thinkers on quantum physics made a lot of breakthroughs sarcastically

@bencollier9423

5 ай бұрын

I learned a classical analogy - To know the speed of an object you need to measure how long it takes to get from point A to point B. IF A an B are close together the uncertainty in the speed gradient is higher, in an instance you have no gradient. If they are far apart you don't know where the object was doing exactly the average speed you measure. This is not entirely accurate, but is a good starting point before learning about quantum weirdness.

@JohnDoe-dp8ji

2 ай бұрын

“I am the danger” - Heisenberg

@DrDeuteron

Ай бұрын

@@bencollier9423I don’t like it. HEP has nothing to do with observers, it’s that the thing can’t physically exist in known states of both observables at the same time. Which why the uncertainly in position has nothing to do with the actual velocity. Even at zero velocity.

@DrDeuteron

Ай бұрын

I just got to it….it’s pretty good, but if you really want to understand it, you need to use complex waves, not real ones. It simply doesn’t work with out a complex phase. But still, it was well done.

Our physics professor had a very appealing explanation of quantum physics: Understanding is nothing else than getting used to things. Our classical world just makes sense because it is all we know.

@Riin_Rio

6 ай бұрын

That’s true ! My dad, who got into relativity late in life, couldn’t quite accept the idea that there wasn’t a universal "now". I was exposed to the subject at an early age and am quite comfortable with the concepts involved. Hoping to get there with the quantum mechanical view of reality

@droidnick

5 ай бұрын

​@Riin_Rio your dad sounds awesome

After centuries of study by humanity's finest minds and observations from the most sophisticated equipment that are available, we can honestly and confidently say that the Universe is going to behave as it damn well pleases!!

@cpuuk

6 ай бұрын

As the James Webb Space Telescope has recently proved.

@ridethecurve55

6 ай бұрын

Quantum physics is complicated and NON INTUITIVE, Simon. But YOU'RE Weird!

@juzoli

6 ай бұрын

Our realistic goal is not to control the universe, but predict it.

@bryanpetersen1334

6 ай бұрын

Not bad, I enjoyed this video, and I appreciate that you didn’t associate the decreasing speed of light to climate change.

@juzoli

6 ай бұрын

@@bryanpetersen1334 You just did associate it. Why?

Just a couple of corrections that fall into my particular wheelhouse. Dark matter and dark energy aren't really hypotheses. They're more place-holders that are there to explain a couple of phenomena that don't make sense under our current understanding of the universe. Another correction is a common misunderstanding. It's not that matter cannot travel faster than the maximum speed of light in a vacuum, it's that matter cannot accelerate past that speed. Many things in our universe travel faster than light because of the expansion of the fabric of the universe itself. A good way to think of it is that your car under no circumstances could accelerate to over 66,000 miles per hour. However, even when it's sitting still, it's traveling faster than that because of the speed of the earth is traveling around the sun. Then we could tack on top of that the fact that our entire solar system is rotating around the center of our galaxy at about 448,000 miles per hour. Then on top of that our galaxy is moving through space at about 1.3 million miles per hour. And so on, and so on... It's best to think of speed as being, um... relative.

@racamacafo8069

Ай бұрын

Well, that's where Einstein comes in. But what is dark matter?

@lesterpittenger5992

Ай бұрын

Does it matter? ​@@racamacafo8069

@halibaitor

Ай бұрын

​@@racamacafo8069 YES

@ripleyhrgiger4669

Ай бұрын

@@racamacafo8069 No one knows for sure yet. But we're working on it.

@ripleyhrgiger4669

Ай бұрын

The universe is indeed expanding, and in a sense, parts of it are expanding away from us at speeds greater than the speed of light. This doesn't violate the laws of physics, particularly Einstein's theory of relativity, which states that nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light. The key here is "through space." The expansion of the universe is the expansion of space itself, not objects moving through space. The speed at which galaxies recede from us is proportional to their distance from us, a relationship described by Hubble's Law. For galaxies far enough away from us, this recession speed exceeds the speed of light. This doesn't mean these galaxies are traveling through space faster than light; rather, the space between us and those galaxies is expanding so rapidly that the light from those galaxies takes increasingly longer to reach us, and beyond a certain distance, known as the Hubble length, the space expands faster than light can traverse it. So, in summary, the universe's expansion does lead to galaxies moving away from us at an effective speed that exceeds the speed of light, due to the expansion of space itself, not because objects are moving through space faster than light. This concept is a cornerstone of modern cosmology and is well-supported by observations and theoretical models. Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The statement that dark matter and dark energy are "place-holders" rather than hypotheses might not fully capture their role in physics and cosmology. Both dark matter and dark energy are indeed hypotheses proposed to explain observations that cannot be accounted for by our current understanding of the universe. For example, dark matter is hypothesized to explain the "missing" gravitational forces observed in the rotation curves of galaxies, which cannot be explained by visible matter alone. Dark energy is proposed to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. These are not just placeholders but are based on a substantial body of indirect observational evidence. Scientists are actively trying to directly detect these phenomena and understand their nature. Matter Travelling Faster than Light: The clarification provided in the argument about matter not being able to accelerate past the speed of light is essentially correct and aligns with the theory of relativity. It's accurate that no massive object (something with rest mass) can reach or exceed the speed of light in a vacuum due to the relativistic effect of mass increasing with speed, which would require infinite energy to achieve. Expansion of the Universe and Speed: The analogy given to explain how objects can have superluminal (faster-than-light) recession speeds due to the expansion of the universe is helpful but needs a bit of precision. While it's true that due to the expansion of space, distant galaxies can recede from us at an effective speed greater than that of light, this doesn't mean they are moving through space faster than light. Instead, the space itself is expanding. This distinction is crucial to avoid misunderstanding how the speed limit of light works in relativity. The analogy of the car, Earth's rotation, the solar system's movement, etc., serves to illustrate that speeds can add up depending on your frame of reference, but the expansion of the universe is a different phenomenon where space itself expands. Relativity of Speed: The final point that speed is relative is fundamentally correct and is a core principle of Einstein's theory of special relativity. The speed of any object is always measured relative to some other object or frame of reference. However, the universality of the speed of light in a vacuum remains constant in all frames of reference, which is a unique aspect of light's speed and not applicable to speeds under non-relativistic conditions (like the movement of cars or planets). In summary, while the argument presents a generally correct view of certain complex astrophysical and cosmological concepts, it blends some analogies and explanations in a way that could be misleading without careful distinction between the phenomena being described (e.g., expansion of space vs. movement through space). So, no, the video is correct.

I love the crossroads of physics and philosophy. It’s the stuff that causes me existential dread at 3am (like now).

0:35 - Chapter 1 - Theory vs hypothesis 3:55 - Chapter 2 - The unbreakable speed of light 7:20 - Chapter 3 - Schrödinger's cat 10:45 - Chapter 4 - Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

@uneducatedguess6740

6 ай бұрын

Bunch of nonsense, better check Medium story about burning time (like by Cherenkov effect) lab experiment from 50s, when the speed of light exceeded, and the next outcome from that on what was instead of Big Bang: BURNING TIME IN LABS AND IN GALAXIES Galaxies, Not the Big Bang, Are Birthplace of Matter

@grovermatic

6 ай бұрын

👍

@Nupetiet

6 ай бұрын

Thank you, I hope wonderful things happen for you on wednesday

@MadScientist267

6 ай бұрын

​@@NupetietPeculiar specificity there 🤣

@mikaelbiilmann6826

6 ай бұрын

Heisenberg’s uncertain cat named Schrödi.

Fact: We observe Simon hosting an infinite number of channels in the Whistlerverse. Theory: Simon is both host and not-host until you click on the thumbnail. "Schroedinger's Simon," if you will.

@HarryNicNicholas

6 ай бұрын

you might be interested in "A Subway Named Mobius" is a 1950 science fiction short story by American astronomer Armin Joseph Deutsch." about adding a new connection to the subway system that results in trains going into another dimension...

@zegermanscientist2667

6 ай бұрын

And when he watches one of his own videos, things get REALLY complicated.

I remember awkward comparisons in macro-world and micro-world in a book, when I was a teenager. Something along the lines of how an egg, once broken, can't be returned to prior unbroken state, but in micro-world things could (but the explanation was incomplete). Then I remember when we had quantum mechanics (as part of a chemistry course, taught by a college professor). She threw out some phrase about electrons in energy levels of an atom and when I tried to ask specifically what it meant, she was puzzled and couldn't explain. With this video I at least understand what is meant, even though, admittedly, it's still impossible to visualize or experience. Thank you for the explanation. I also didn't know that Schrodinger was trolling with his cat analogy.

@brianbishop4753

3 ай бұрын

Up until about my early 30’s, long long ago, I thought there was an actual cat in a box and that’s it. That’s how it was explained in our 8th grade science class. No one touched on it after that. Then watching a series on the universe on discovery channel or history channel they talked about the radioactive substance but again that was it. This is the first I heard of the hammer and poison even after I learned there was no actual cat after listening to Neal Degrasse Tyson explain it.

@halibaitor

Ай бұрын

​@@brianbishop4753 You're right about there not being a cat. The animal in question is actually a skunk, and he's really ticked off, so you had best NOT open the box to look. 🤪😱

@brianbishop4753

Ай бұрын

@@halibaitor lol! I’ll leave it closed

EXCELLENT summation of Heisenberg's principle. "Uncertainty" makes it sound like there are properties we humans can't be certain of, but the actual principle is that there are properties that tiny particles DON'T EVEN HAVE. Good job!

@AdrianBoyko

5 ай бұрын

The actual principle is that particles don’t even exist, just wave functions. People think QM is “weird” because they expect it to answer questions about “particles” but the theory really only describes wave functions.

@bramvanduijn8086

5 ай бұрын

@@AdrianBoyko They're more like interaction probability blobs than waves. Until they hit something, at which point the probability of one of the interactions becomes one and the others become zero, which looks exactly like a particle, which is defined by already having been a single possible interaction. Symmetry would request that interference would make them stop being probability blobs, but that isn't how that works. The fact that there is a non-uniform distribution of probability is what makes it look and act exactly like a wave, so in that sense you're right: They do look and act exactly like waves until you force them into a particle-esque interaction by observing them.

@AdrianBoyko

5 ай бұрын

@@bramvanduijn8086 They NEVER look like a particle. What kind of particle has an INTRINSIC constraints on position & momentum?

@edwoodsr

4 ай бұрын

@@AdrianBoyko The uncertainty principle is concerned with the confidence intervals of a measurement, not the particle itself. What measurement device doesn't have intrinsic limitations on accuracy?

@AdrianBoyko

4 ай бұрын

@@edwoodsr The uncertainty principle has nothing to do with measurement devices.

I'm willing to bet cats have totally mastered quantum physics. I did have one known for its teleportation capability. 🙀

@OptimiSkeptic

6 ай бұрын

We have 1 of those. She self-observes and collapses her own wavefunction at will. She's the emobidment of the felinopic principle.

@DrDeuteron

Ай бұрын

True, cats have a 9 dimensional internal symmetry that’s unobservable.

I'm reminded of a joke I heard a while ago: Two quantum physicists are out driving when they get pulled over by a cop who comes up on the driver's side and checks their papers. He then asks "Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were driving?" The response is: "No, because I knew exactly where I was." At this point the officer asks them to pop the trunk and he walks around the back. Then approaching the passenger side he addresses "Dr. Schrödinger, do you know you halve a dead cat in a box in the trunk." The response being: "Well, it's dead now, you looked at it."

@abhir7823

6 ай бұрын

Cop: Dr Einstein, do you know how fast you were going ? Albert: Depends how fast YOU were going.

@satanicmicrochipv5656

6 ай бұрын

Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the road when they get pulled over by a cop. The cop asks Heisenberg... "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replies... "That is uncertain, but i know where I am." Heisenberg's answer makes the cop suspicious so he tells Heisenberg to pop the trunk and walks to the rear of the car. The cop looks in the trunk and yells... "Hey, did you know there's a dead cat in here?!" Schrodinger yells back... "Well I do now!!!"

@user-tt4jz3tm6t

6 ай бұрын

Not exactly knee-slapper

@jjbenjamin8488

6 ай бұрын

@@user-tt4jz3tm6tbecause they told it wrong. They mixed two different jokes. Poorly

@darkgalaxy5548

6 ай бұрын

A few days later they get pulled over by another cop. "I clocked you doing 80mph in a 65mph zone", says the cop. Heisenberg replies "Great, now we're lost".

It is appalling how frequently some of these concepts are misunderstood, even by people trusted to provide authoritative information. Bravo for getting it right AND with such clear explanations. Very well done.

The interference explanation was the idea that first created the uncertainty principal and was first used to calculate Planck constant. It turned out to be a far deeper principle even though using it get you a remarkably close approximation of Planck constant. (much like the speed of light is far more than just being the speed that photons travel in a vacuum)

@scottmccrea1873

4 ай бұрын

The speculation is about going around the light speed barrier. Most of it hinges on some variation of multiverse concept. I don't really care how we do it, but if we don't we're not going to the stars. At least not quickly. And I also think there would be a psychological effect. Finally found a barrier we cannot pierce. So I very much hope the science hippies figure this one out - warp, wormholes, Einstein-Rosen bridges, interdimensional. Whatever.

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

@Bacopa68

6 ай бұрын

An IRL cat would have tried to escape. This would have put the detector closer to the radiation source, thus making the cat more likely to die, moved the detector and source farther away, making the cat certain to live, or knocked over the poison, killing the cat.

@halibaitor

Ай бұрын

Furious is the correct state, but rather than a cat, the animal is actually a skunk. I advise NOT opening the box. 🤪😱

I took a class in quantum chemistry in college as an undergrad. It was essentially quantum mechanics, only taught by a chemistry professor and with attention to implications for chemical behavior of elements. The class consisted of solving Schrodinger's equation over and over again with incrementally more accurate versions of the potential function, which is a component of the Hamiltonian (the Ĥ term.) It wasn't easy.

@Ryan_Harkin

6 ай бұрын

So it was just a maths class.

@RafaelRodrigues-rx9ry

6 ай бұрын

​@ryanharkin9893 What, do you think physicists just sit in a cafe philosophizing about cats in boxes?😂

@DBZHGWgamer

5 ай бұрын

@@Ryan_Harkin yes, like all physics classes... Math is the tool that lets you do science.

@CharlsonCKim

5 ай бұрын

sounds like you spent the entire chemistry class going over the first week of a physics quantum mechanics course. physicist quickly found "easier" ways of computing quantum mechanics than the differential equations you were probably grinding on.

@CharlsonCKim

5 ай бұрын

yes, just like other classes are just reading classes.@@Ryan_Harkin

Richard Feynman is supposed to have said something along the lines of, "If you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics."

That explanation of wave and position was exceptionally good. It also explains how things are particles and waves at the same time. I've always struggled conceptualizing that one. Now, it's so easy to explain, it seems stupid to have struggled with it.

@Verlamian

4 ай бұрын

It wasn't at all good and things most certainly are not particles and waves at the same time. That idea - "wave-particle duality" - is a long obsolete (but regrettably still prevalent) misconception arising from what was quickly understood to be an untenable interpretation of [the nature of] the quantum state (aka "wavefunction"). Ironically, Schrodinger himself used his cat to debunk it in his famous 1935 "cat paradox" paper. In fact even earlier, in 1928 in a lecture to the RI, he pointed out an even worse problem with the naive "quantum state as physical wave" ideas characteristic of some of the first attempts at interpreting QM. Similarly, the idea that superposition means "and" - e.g. that the particle _is_ in two (or more) places at once - is simply wrong. If it were true then it would also be true of classical objects! Classical mechanics can be written in the exact same Hilbert space and operator formalism as quantum mechanics ("Koopman-von Neumann classical mechanics") - superpositions included. Interference between the superposed components of vector states ("wavefunctions") and nonclassical correlations (entanglement) are the two phenomena that quantum physics exhibits but classical physics does not.

@bobshaw2232

3 ай бұрын

@@Verlamian all i know is if i roll a pair of dice down a craps table, it can be thought of as a wave of probabilities until they come to rest and the point is determined and the tumbling wave of probabilities collapses

3:41 Small correction; Dark Matter is not a theory, it’s an observation of data. We expect a certain amount of matter in the universe based on special and general relativity and/or quantum mechanics, but the result we actually measure doesn’t line up with those theories, and the name given to that result was Dark Matter. We have theories trying to explain what dark matter is, but dark matter itself is an observation of the data, not a theory.

@NotreDanish

6 ай бұрын

@acollierastro has a great video explaining that misunderstanding

@davemuckeye1516

22 күн бұрын

‘Dark matter’ is the result of a gap theory, because they have no actual idea how else to interpret their data…

And THANK YOU. For the Schrodinger segment. People don't get it when I tell them that the Universe knows if the cat is dead even if you don't. It's just a thought experiment, it was never meant to be a real thing.

@NotWithMyMoney

6 ай бұрын

It’s not about the universe knowing it’s about the interaction itself not the information, obviously the cat is either alive or dead but the interaction of observation having an “effect” is what’s important

@Alacritous

6 ай бұрын

@@NotWithMyMoney Did you not watch the video? People think that the experiment, the cat in a box experiment is meant to be real.

@NotWithMyMoney

6 ай бұрын

@@Alacritous who? What people? It was ALWAYS a thought experiment based on the data. Who are these people?

@sheep4521

6 ай бұрын

Why does it have to involve dead animals?

@sekaramochi1944

6 ай бұрын

The universe knows in advance if the (let's change the name we love cats) Putin within the said box is in fact Dead as you say the universe already knew this ( sorry Carl Sagan says it the best ) millions, billions,millions, billions, billions and millions of years ago. Speaking of millions and billions, we made a cake with hundreds and thousands on top, we're hungry you hungry too

This is my theory: What if it’s not particles that act differently occasionally - but it’s the space they are passing through that contains a difference? For a particle that decays - perhaps it’s not some random amount of time that causes the decay, but it’s encountering space that has a specific property? We always assume that the fabric of space time is smooth and consistent and this piece here is the same as that piece there - but we can’t see it - so how do we know it’s the exact same everywhere? Maybe it’s not completely smooth and consistent - but bumpy - and when a particle encountered a specific type of bump, that triggers the decay. We know that space time bends due to mass/gravity. Maybe it also has other invisible properties and isn’t as smooth or resilient as we think. 🤔 This would be insanely difficult to test since it would be impossible to keep track of one specific quanta of space between 2 successive tests on a spinning rock that’s orbiting a star in a galaxy that orbiting a huge black hole while all of that orbits an even bigger black hole - but maybe at one of the Lagrange points? 🤷🏻‍♂️ Was just kidding at the beginning when I called this “my theory”. It’s obviously just a hypothesis - and not a really well thought out one at that - but either way, I’m going to call this idea my contribution to physics and just go back to selling T-shirts. 😆 👕

@nade5557

5 ай бұрын

This is great 👍

@bramvanduijn8086

5 ай бұрын

But they're not particles, they're wave-like probability blobs.

@calutuu

Ай бұрын

We can measure the speed of light inside our solar system, but we are not able yet, to measure the speed of light outside our own solar system. You could be right about smoothness of the space. We need to send outside our solar system more probes like Voyager , to do measurements and have more data to compare. But to do that we need to be more unite and stop killing each other.

I've explained the concept of a theory a few times in the past and twice I've received hateful DMs proclaiming how I was wrong. It's so strange how people just attach themselves to concepts and refuse to let them go. I think the biggest issue is that if there is anything that scientists, as a whole, are really bad at, it would be naming things. Scientists are notoriously bad at naming things. And not because they uniformly lack the ability to name things, but rather they simply don't put a lot of thought or effort into it because they don't think the names matter. It's like you saving your thesis paper as "Untitled Document," or that one art layer in photoshop as "Layer 7." There is no naming consistency because the meat of the study is in the paper, not the name. But since so many people rely on things like names and headlines for their information, it starts to propagate incorrect information when the names of things are shared as being factual insights into certain studies.

@TrollCapAmerica

5 ай бұрын

Its like on a small enough scale of information only for scientists things work differently on the macro scale for regular people then?

@siritio3553

5 ай бұрын

​@@TrollCapAmericaIt's weird how I understood your comment with no trouble after the first read, but it increasingly loses its meaning with subsequent reads.

@normansimonsen1203

2 ай бұрын

True. Cat lovers are probably not happy with Schrodinger.

Another name I've heard used colloquially for cherenkov radiation, in keeping with the sonic boom, is the photonic boom. Quite a catchy name, I think.

@sydhenderson6753

6 ай бұрын

I love that, and it's actually kind of true.

Schrödinger was misunderstood about his thought experiment because he has forgotten to quantifie the only relevant variable: DOES THE VIAL OF POISON IS LOCATED ON A TABLE? If it is, the cat would certainly trow it on the floor WAY before the hammer even has a chance to break it.

@mickmccrory8534

4 ай бұрын

In Quantum Mechanics, the cat can be both dead & alive at the same time. In General Relativity, cats have 9 lives.

My high school physics teacher explained the Uncertainty Principle like this: Let's say you look out the window, counting how many cars pass by in an hour. But because you had to start counting at some point, you don't know how long ago a car passed by before you started counting, thus your frequency calculation can never be completely accurate. I guess that was a pretty good explanation after all.

@bramvanduijn8086

5 ай бұрын

I would say more like "You look out the window, counting how many cars pass by in an hour. You write down the number after the hour is over. Then you see the second question on the exam: Where is the first car now? So you hop into your timemachine to find out. You hop into your car and follow the first car around. You fail the first question on the exam because there is now 1 car more."

Schrödinger's cat was perhaps the most famous (maybe first documented) example of someone saying something and people not only misunderstanding it, but then using it in the complete opposite way it was meant and running with it for so long that everyone now associates it that way.

12:04 It's not that you can't make predictions with perfect data, it's that you can't have perfect data. You can't know both location and momentum at the same time.

@Games_and_Music

6 ай бұрын

Exactly, i think PBS Space-Time had a video on that recently. If you know the momentum, in this case could be the speed of light, it will be pretty much impossible to have an observer flying along with the particle/object to determine it's location. And vice versa, it is just not possible to measure both at once as the physics involved go way beyond our capabilities.

@hugegamer5988

6 ай бұрын

@@Games_and_Music it goes beyond the fundamental principles of being able to measure in the first place. It’s like trying to measure a single gravaton

@DrDeuteron

6 ай бұрын

No, everything here is wrong. It’s not data or measuring that makes the HUP, unless by measure you mean apply an operator to a state.

I once read that a high school physics teacher gave this real world illustration of quantum superposition: The instant you put one of a pair of socks on your right foot, you instantly know that no matter how far away your other sock is, it's your left sock.

@WaywardVet

6 ай бұрын

Rotate your socks after each wash so the stretched out toe goes on the pinkie toe. Then I don't know where the other one is, I just know it must be one with the opposite stretch and so it could be anywhere. So yeah, I guess I know it's somewhere. I never go out without two.

@preppen78

6 ай бұрын

@@WaywardVet Well, he never stated he put the right sock on the right foot. It seems to be more of a decision that the remaining sock must be a lefty. If I'm always right, I can't be wrong.

@WaywardVet

6 ай бұрын

@@preppen78 😆

@The_Canonical_Ensemble

6 ай бұрын

Thats an illustration of quantum entanglement, not superposition.

@ilionreactor1079

6 ай бұрын

That is a description of the "hidden variables" interpretation, which has been disproven by Bell's Theorem.

Amazing wide topic coverage from your crew Simon! Well done :)

Fascinating. I like your delivery of the information and the explanations without having to do the math. The concepts were delightful. Thank you.

The most amazing thing that I was taught at school was quantum tunnelling, where a particle can pass through a limit or barrier that would not be predicted in classical physics.

@adamredwine774

5 ай бұрын

Yup. If you watch the recent Kurzgesagt video on "the last thing that will ever happen," they talk about how quantum tunneling in dead stars will... eventually, cause them to implode.

As a scientist, thank you so much for clarifying the difference between "theory" and "hypothesis". This one drive me absolutely crazy and your explanation was spot on. Nice work!

@ThatWriterKevin

6 ай бұрын

You're welcome, and glad you enjoyed!

@wefinishthisnow3883

6 ай бұрын

He also needed to explain a law though, e.g. law of thermodynamics.

@FTATRWSY69

6 ай бұрын

The real issue comes down to two points: 1. There are more hypotheses than there are theories. 2. It is much easier to speak or write theory than it is to speak or write hypothesis. And that, I assure you, is an untested fact.

@hhf39p

6 ай бұрын

With all due respect to @ThatWriterKevin, what is given here it is more laymen's definition than a scientific one. A hypothesis is a testable proposition, while a theory is a model for a phenomena. Experiments are used to test hypotheses. Theories have as a purpose to predict the outcomes of observations. If you wanted to, you could hypothesize that string theory will never be modified to successfully predict current observations, though the outcomes would be either wait longer, or the hypothesis is wrong. Presentations of 'Simulation 'Theory' I've seen thus far lack a model. Most models are given as mathematics to be evaluated to compute the prediction. Thus 'Simulation Theory' indeed is not a theory. Nor is the statement 'We are in a simulation.' a hypothesis, as there is not enough information for the statement to be tested. Thus it is correctly called 'speculation'. (No insult to Mr. Babbage, Konrad Zuse, Ed Fredkin, Dr. Wolfram, or Dr. Bostwick' intended .. actually Zuse and Wolfram both posed finite automata models, but didn't say where we would find them. Mr. Babbage asked us to imagine a 'divine legislator' which was before computers, and he went on to invent the modern computer architecture, so his meaning seems clear enough. Still he didn't say how we access this computer to test if it is there.)

@dangerfly

6 ай бұрын

A lot of people were taught theories "graduate" to become laws. TED-Ed has a video titled "What's the difference between a scientific law and theory?" because it's so common. Simply, a law answers WHAT and theories answers WHY.

Great video. Thanks for reinforcing this foundational distinction between hypothesis and theories. It is somewhat overlooked and therefore misunderstood.

I've watch hours of this stuff on you tube. Good effort Simon, you covered a lot of topic in a very short period of time.

@jesusbermudez6775

5 ай бұрын

Yes he read aloud at an incredibly fast pace.

Having a condition that causes hand cramps after a short period of writing,I took a lot of classes in highschool that had more practical aspects than writing. One word Filled me with dread in those classes when I heard it "Theory". It meant that I had to write down whatever it was we were learning about. My takeaway from that experience was that a theory is a statement of how something is meant to work. My first reaction to people saying a theory about something isn't real, is "I know the theory of dovetail joints does that mean they're not real"

@jackvos8047

6 ай бұрын

@@jappp3105 you don't know much about carpentry I see. I bet you use Butt joints in all your woodworking.

@onegreenev

6 ай бұрын

@@jappp3105 Birds aren't fake and they have arms that we call wings because of the way they work.

@jackvos8047

6 ай бұрын

@@RockBrentwood whilst I appreciate the suggestion, using short hand uses the same fine motor skills as long hand when it comes to writing things down. Typing is the way to go for people with Dysgraphia like me.

@hherpdderp

6 ай бұрын

I'd be more crude. Gravity is a theory... test it .

@jackvos8047

6 ай бұрын

@@cropduster123 none that were affordable and convenient. The most advanced recording technology of the day was a cassette tape and portable cassette players were a banned item at my school.

It’s not commonly understood that Schrödinger’s experiment would work equally well with a dog. It’s just that where Schrödinger lived had a cat problem and Schrödinger wanted to sell boxes.

@ih4286

6 ай бұрын

Cats like boxes so it's a win win

@Rkolb2798

6 ай бұрын

Everyone’s happy 😂

@David-dl6zg

6 ай бұрын

one problem with using dogs for experiments is that dogs can't go into MRI machines............ ......But cats can.

@randomthoughts9463

6 ай бұрын

Let's not be too hasty on scrapping Schrödinger’s cat experiment. My neighbour's cat is volunteering, let me know, I will pay for travel and living expenses. Anywhere.

@MB-rn4ul

6 ай бұрын

There is no such thing as a cat problem.

Your delivery on the cat was priceless Simon. Good work.

Great job on explaining the uncertainty principle. So many people confidently explain that it's "just" the "observer effect". It's not, and it shows a much deeper truth about the fundamentals of reality.

@Animalis_Mundana

6 ай бұрын

I know this is a mind twister but what we observe is mental images, that's everything we experience, matter, space, color, motion, as an appearance, we can't actually directly observe "out there" . Phenomena and noumena. Not like we are staring out through a window, more like a sensor. A camera would be the closest and we only have what's on the screen, it's 100% mental images as representations, not 1 to 1 of 100% external, not even 50/50. This is crucial to understand. So easy to just ignore the implications. The brain is an object. May be hard to believe but noumena (thing in themselves) are unobservable/unmeasurable, non-existent, can never be experienced except as phenomena, in the medium of consciousness. That would be what we call "real". And no I'm not saying reality only exists in our heads, that's what materialism states. Easy to see why we make the inference of an external reality based on appearances. This is a metaphysical assumption. "Realism, in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them."

@DBZHGWgamer

5 ай бұрын

@@Animalis_Mundana Eh, this isn't really true. We don't observe mental images. Our experiences and perception are mental images, but the things we observe may or may not be. You confuse observing something with perceiving something. The only thing we know about the reality outside our mind is our perceptions. And those perceptions can be and generally are heavily distorted.

@Animalis_Mundana

5 ай бұрын

@@DBZHGWgamer All experience is mental, regardless of whether or not anything extra-mental causes or informs it. We can only ever directly interact with and experience mental experience/phenomena. We have direct, empirical evidence mind exists and that is the only thing we can have such evidence exists, even in principle. What we actually experience as “reality” is thus necessarily, entirely mental (again, whether or not anything extra-mental causes or informs it.) Thus, “mental reality,” the mental world that we all live in, is not a theory; it is an undeniable fact of our existence. The only relevant question is if an additional, extra-mental “world” exists that our mental reality interacts with in any meaningful way. Since mental reality is an experiential and logical fact, it does not have to be supported by argument or evidence any more than “I exist” needs to be supported. The proposed existence of extra-mental phenomena that interacts meaningfully with mind cannot be empirically experienced as such. Thus, this proposition requires rational argument and/or evidence to support it. All evidence that is gathered can only be experienced as mental phenomena and thus is necessarily congruent with mental reality theory, otherwise it could not be experienced mentally (if it can be experienced mentally, it necessarily can be generated mentally.) All rational arguments for the existence of an external physical world originate and operate entirely within mind and strictly obey the rules and principles of mind. As per #’s 1, 8 & 9, such argument can only ever be about mental experience using mental capacities, following mental rules in making any argument, reaching a conclusion contained entirely within mind. Given all the above, there can never be, even in principle, evidence gathered or rational argument presented to support the existence of extra-mental reality that can distinguish it from mental reality. Thus, belief in an extra-mental reality is necessarily irrational because (1) it cannot be directly experienced, (2) no evidence can be gathered that can distinguish it from mental reality, and (3) no rational argument can be levied in support of it that does not innately rely upon that supposed “external world” being entirely consonant with, indeed subordinate to, the entirely mental nature of logical principles and processes. the saddest part is people think I'm trying to tell them the world isn't real or that it's fake or "all just in their head" because they equate their mind/consciousness to arise from the brain/matter, that the outside is more real than the inside. As if they are automatons or zombies or something, that's why they fear death so much and consider matter to be more fundamental than the inner self that would be immersed in space-time and that's it. Ask any person what they imagine soul to be, how they think it's said to exist(or even if it does)and I guarantee you they will tell you it's some invisible energy inside our bodies that control us like a ghost in a machine and that either they go up to heaven in space or go to the center of the earth or some crap for eternity, or more common they float off into non-existence, poof. Non-existence is unimaginable. That was never what the soul was, it's psyche. It's like they're starting off "out there" observing concensus reality directly without the medium of consciousness at the center of awareness. To me it sounds like they are really saying they think they are fake. They can't even fathom consciousness being fundamental and everything emerging from it because they don't have the self awareness to actually contemplate what they are actually experiencing, as it is. In fact materialism states the world we experience is inside our heads but also says there's another abstract reality out there that our senses pick up and the mental images we perceive are electrochemical images, a reconstruction of some concrete external reality "out there", it really does double, inside and outside, seperated but still miraculously 1. Even you think the representation is 1 for 1, you admitted it.

It's actually the speed of Causality that can't be exceeded, not light (hence the C in Einstein's equation)

@alaska4joe

Ай бұрын

Right. Causality incorporates all energy, matter, and information. The bundle of goods that make “the world go round.” Just don't be the guy at the party who explains physics around the punch bowl 😂

Thank you for highlighting the difference between Hypothesis and Theory. Now if we could only get people to understand the difference between "Reading" (for bias confirmation typically) and "Research". Beyond that - well done - thank you!

@onegreenev

6 ай бұрын

Research requires reading and we are all bias.

@UnicornsPoopRainbows

6 ай бұрын

Those people would have to expand out of their Facebook groups first…

@onegreenev

6 ай бұрын

@@UnicornsPoopRainbows LOL

Thank you. It's frustrating to try and explain these concepts to people but you've made your case with much more clarity than I have when attempting to explain the very same concepts.

@jesusbermudez6775

5 ай бұрын

Of course he has not. He talks too fast.

@AnthonyJ504

5 ай бұрын

Because most people's brains aren't capable of understanding such concepts. That's not on them (or you). It's the limited nature of human biology. Who has hit the genetic lottery and who hasn't (the overwhelming majority of humanity). It's like trying to explain the size of our sun compared to the largest stars in the universe. When talking about sizes of that scale with no actual visual (or anything close to it) reference, It just doesn't compute.

@jesusbermudez6775

5 ай бұрын

these concepts took months if not more for those who came up with them for them to understand them. So of course it will take time for any one that is expose to them for the first time some time to understand them. Also some people may not want to understand them because at the end of the day most people just want to make money and that is their main interest. I agree with you that not all can understand these concepts. As a 14 year old I observed life in the following manner 1. Why do I need information if I can do mathematics and solve problems from scratch. 2 Adults are like children who play with other things. 3 I should be fine because I can do mathematics and play football. I can outdo those children who play football better than me because I can do mathematics better then than them; and I can outdo the children who do better mathematics than me because I can play football better than them. Einstein would never have been able to understand this. Can you?@@AnthonyJ504

@josemv25

4 ай бұрын

Is it frustrating because they don't understand? Or because you don't understand it enough to be able to explain in a simplified way that they can understand?

@SciMajor1

4 ай бұрын

@@josemv25 Probably both.

Thanks to this video I have finally comprehended the Heisenberg uncertainty principle! Great job!

Thank you for explaining the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. I'm ESL so this was really helpful.

@autonomouscollective2599

5 ай бұрын

Unfortunately most English speakers get the difference between theory and hypothesis wrong. Outside of science, anytime someone uses the word “theory,” they almost always mean it as a hypothesis.

I took quantum chemistry (P Chem 2) and that might be the best explanation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I've heard. Short, simple, and a consequence of reality rather than a result of some math or experiment.

@ThatWriterKevin

6 ай бұрын

Why thank you!

@Nathan-vt1jz

6 ай бұрын

Yes and no. It’s based off of data we’ve gathered, but it still includes several interpretive elements or conclusions that are not so definitive. There’s still a lot we don’t know even what we don’t know in quantum physics that will have an effect.

@Virtuous_Rogue

6 ай бұрын

@@Nathan-vt1jz True, but at that point he'd be writing a textbook, not a simple and succinct explanation.

@hugegamer5988

6 ай бұрын

@@Nathan-vt1jz the problem is the more precisely you identify the theory the more it’s place in the big picture becomes uncertain. The universe is conspiring against us all!

@kiabtoomlauj6249

6 ай бұрын

SR & GR are theories. Dark Matter and String Theory are hypothesis. Anyone who thinks he has "found dark matter" is a fool, regardless where he got his multiple PhDs from. Dark matter has been postulated in the early 1900s, by Caltech odd ball Fritz Zwicky, around the same time Hubble started looking at the Universe via the largest telescopes that could be constructed in the early 1900s, using the most advanced ideas and technologies. And while the Hubble's observations have been distilled into a "Hubble Law" gas become actual basic, testable science --- which concluded roughly that the farther away a galaxy is away from the Milky Way/Earth, the faster it "moves away from it" ... with the "Hubble Constant" saying, at the best estimates, that, in general, for every megaparsec or ~3.26 light years that a galaxy is away from Andromeda, it is "receding" from it roughly 70 KM per second --- Dark Matter and these other Ether or Planet Vulcan things (that are SUPPOSED to be needed to explain this or that cosmological or astronomical issue)... are still 100% assertions. Think about it: If "Dark Matter" is supposed to be the SCAFFOLD --- the 95% or so of gravity that's needed, in addition to normal/Baryonic matter's mere 5% ---- that forced the COALESCING of matter, so molecules could form from atoms... to allow the formations of large things and structures like stars and galaxies, local clusters, super clusters, and sheets of super cluster structure filaments that extended hundreds of millions of years, or billions of years.... why, AT THE SAME TIME, go on to say utter nonsense like, "but galaxy" X or Y doesn't seem to have dark matter? If one or two galaxies didn't need these invisible hands to grab hold onto them, to "keep them in place, to allow their FORMATION IN THE FIRST PLACE... WHY ON EARTH would any other galaxy need this imaginary Zwicky-proposed stuff? How do we know it's not Black Holes, or what's included in General Relativity, or other large-&-presently-unknown structures... that's keeping galaxies & large structures of the Cosmos... from "flying every which way into the darkness of space"? Every major, regularly shaped galaxy has at least one major central black hole and millions to billions of star-sized ones around it... enough to distort space-time tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of light years around them... And all the irregular ones ---- e.g. the Large and Small Magellanic clouds --- have hundreds of thousands to millions of star sized black holes, too, from supernovas and/or neutron collisions. Why shouldn't such natural existences be more than enough to nail down matter in and around a galaxy, so it wouldn't go "flying every which way" into the darkness of space? The Sun and Earth are roughly 25,000 light years from the Milky Way's center and its large black hole. We aren't going around and around the Milky Way because we were given free tickets but could get off the ride any moment we wanted to. Instead, we are STUCK where we are, 25,000 light years away from the Milky Way's center --- as per Einsteins GR --- because we are in a "gravity well" created by the central black hole of the Milky Way. The Sun/Earth is orbiting around the Milky Way at roughly 230km/second. If we want to go "flying every which way" into space, we need to be almost TRIPLING our orbiting speed. THAT is why stars don't flying every which way from their galaxies.... Some invisible hand like this 95% extra gravity from Dark Matter (faulty calculations based on faulty hypotheses: it's what Freeman Dyson's old boss, Enrico Fermi told him)... has nothing to do with it...

Thanks for the clarification on the Uncertainty Principle. It makes a lot more sense compared to what I'd been taught.

10:50 Heisenberg was driving along a highway speeding when a State Trooper clocked him on radar and pulled him over. The Trooper walked up to his window and said, "You were driving 83 in a 65 zone." Heisenberg immediately exclaimed, "Ach! Now I am lost!" On a more serious note, it does not say you cannot know both quantities simultaneously, as you said in your first statement, it gives a limit on how precisely you can measure both quantities. The more precisely you measure position the less precisely you can measure momentum, and vice versa. The first pair of quantities are position and momentum; the second pair are energy and time.

If they changed the "Schrodinger's Cat" thought experiment to the "Foghorn Leghorn just might be in the feed box" thought experiment, I bet people would be less confused.

@DrDeuteron

6 ай бұрын

I better not check, I just might be in Thar.

Thank you for explaining the difference between theory and hypothesis. I mentioned this same thing to my chemistry students but whether or not it sunk in ....

@DBZHGWgamer

5 ай бұрын

His explanation isn't really accurate. A scientific theory does not have to be proven to be a theory. A scientific theory attempts to explain and predict a natural phenomena. A scientific hypothesis is an idea that can be tested and falsified.

@jm-lc3jp

5 ай бұрын

Yep he's incorrect. Evolutionary theory was no less a theory the millisecond prior to emperical verification. Theory describes the a complex attempt at a descriptive framework. A framework which may or may not be correct or verified. He's basically trying to tell the millions that study inflationary, string, multiverse theory or many other unverified theories that it's just a mere hypothesis. It's far more than that and it's HE who is using it incorrectly. I assume he's trying to head off the 'oh evolution is JUST a theory' crowd. But there are already good responses to those folk without denying common and expert parlance. Imagine part of quantum theory is found to be wrong. Was only part of it a hypothesis all along. It's just silly: theory describes the framework not the epestemic status.

this explanation of waves and knowledge of speed and position is brilliant visual representation. I haven't seen it before.

At 14:57: The Schrodinger wave equation and its applications are routinely taught to junior or senior level Physics undergraduate college students.

I think schrodingers cat goes over a lot of people’s heads because people just dont want to understand cats.

@julianaylor4351

6 ай бұрын

Meowrr. 😆

Part of the confusion is the word "theorem" which is used in maths (which is NOT a science) to denote something that has a proof. That's the difference between science and mathematics. In mathematics you can prove things, in science you can only show that something is not the case (it gets interesting when that something is very carefully designed to have a dual).

@Sciencesimplified-tv

6 ай бұрын

This is most of the times the case

@oldyogi23

6 ай бұрын

There is a problem with calling math not a science. It is both a science and an art. An art of science if you will. It is also a part of formal science. So it can be considered its own category, but it is generally used to create scientific theory and laws which in the literal definition of creation is what one does in art. Mathematics is the backbone of science, and in turn the backbone of some forms of art mainly architecture. Consequently the study of mathematical equations is a scientific adventure. This is a long-winded form of saying that math falls in the middle of a Venn diagram between art and science. Conclusively making math both an art and a science.

Heisenberg gets pulled over by a cop, because he is driving 50kph over the speed limit. "Do you know, how fast you drove?" the angry cops asks him. Heisenberg shrugs his shoulders and replies "No, of course not....I knew exactly where I was the whole time."

One thing the helped me wrap my tiny brain around theories and thought experiments involving the speed of light is to think of it more as the universe’s bandwidth. 300,000 km/s is the fastest speed in which information can travel within our universe. And when scientists measured the speed of light, they’re technically measuring how fast a photon can go. And since it’s massless, it can reach the universe’s limit.

Other things subject to discussion, thank you for making the very specific point that the term 'theory' does NOT mean what most people seem to believe it means. People will frequently use the term 'theoretically' when they mean 'hypothetically'. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life explaining to people that a 'theory' has tested, testable data behind it whereas a 'hypothesis' is a guess, opinion, or postulate. The next most common misconception I spend a lot of time on is when 'math' is used interchangeably with 'science'. MATH is NOT SCIENCE. It is symbolic logic. It can be a tool used in science or it can be studied scientifically but in and of itself it is NOT science. It can be frustrating when you see actual scientists, physicists, astronomers, and so on, otherwise smart and educated people, making this mistake (I'm looking at you, string theorists 😉). Or the problems that arise from research being dominated solely by specialists who are unfamiliar with anything outside of their specialty. I've seen electrical engineers absolutely shut down astronomers who made assumptions and extracted conclusions in their research that were painfully incorrect simply because they couldn't be bothered to walk down the hallway and ask someone who knew more about the subject of those assumptions to review their findings. Anyway, before I write a paper here myself I'll bring it to a close.

@bpdmf2798

6 ай бұрын

Theory is used colloquially as hypothesis. Unless you are talking science there's no reason to correct somebody using the word theory.

@dlee645

6 ай бұрын

A quote by Inigo Montoya comes to mind: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

@volkris

6 ай бұрын

Have you considered that maybe when scientists use scientific terminology differently from you, perhaps they're not in the wrong, and you should reconsider your understanding of the terms? It seems funny that you're talking about correcting experts on their own fields of expertise without doing anything to recognize how that's at least questionable.

@leandercarey

6 ай бұрын

@@volkris It never occurred to you that I AM a scientist? I am intimately familiar with the 'terminology' scientist use. I was sharing some of my experience and recognizing someone for having a similar experience or, at least, pointing out that such experiences occur. Would you like to add to the discussion by sharing some of your experiences in physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering, biology, or any field of scientific research? Or teaching, perhaps? The truth is that most 'scientists', with perhaps a few exceptions, know the difference between 'theory' and 'hypothesis'. It's the rest of society who seem to confuse the two which leads to a lot of misinformation, misunderstanding, and students having to be corrected. In creative writing, poetry, literature, the arts in general one can use artistic license and get away with stretching and redefining terms. In science precision is paramount. Everyone must agree on the definitions of terms and measurements or there can be no accurate testing and reporting of findings. You can't arbitrarily decide a word means something else because you feel like it should. If scientists in New York decided to use the term "velocity" instead of the term "direction", scientists anywhere else on earth would, at best, be confused by their experiments, HYPOTHESES, and results. They don't get to change the definition of the terms simply because they're 'scientists'. It's possible to have different terms with similar definitions, like 'speed' and 'velocity' but when engaged in scientific research the terms must be specifically chosen and defined and used consistently for their experiments and data to be reviewed and/or FALSIFIED by other scientists. 'Theory' and 'hypothesis' have very specific and EXCLUSIVE meanings. ESPECIALLY to scientists. The 'scientific method' doesn't START with a 'theory'. It, hopefully, concludes with one that brings us closer to understanding the universe in which we exist. A scientist wants one of two outcomes: either their research leads to or validates a 'theory' OR it is falsified or it falsifies an existing 'theory'. Before the research begins is the 'hypothesis' stage. The 'educated guessing' stage. The hypothesis can exist in a vacuum all by itself. The THEORY can only exist where observation and tested data validate it.

@volkris

6 ай бұрын

@@leandercarey Oh it definitely occurred to me that you might be a scientist, one completely unfamiliar with the way we use that terminology in our field.

Finally someone who logically and correctly explains the role of the Geiger Counter and even the Cat in Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. I had to think a lot and very hard sometime in the 1990s (as a non-physicist, but with all the knowledge I have about Quantum Physics) to get to this conclusion.

@BillAnt

4 ай бұрын

If the vial contained crack, the cat would still be alive twitching like a crack-head. lol

Schrodinger and Heisenberg were on a road trip, and Heisenberg was driving. They got pulled over for speeding. The officer said "I clocked you going 85 back there." Heisenberg said "Impossible! You can not have measured my speed and position at the same time!" Suspicious, the officer decides to search their car. He opens the trunk, and finds a dead cat. He goes back to the window and said "Do you know you have a dead cat back there?" Schrodinger: ((facepalm)) "I do NOW. . ."

7:22 Thank you for pointing out the origin and intent of Schrodinger's cat.

This is really well done. Simon does a good job. I'll be on the look out for more from this guy.

@ericvulgate7091

5 ай бұрын

It might be hard to find!

@DaxxTerryGreen

4 ай бұрын

He's on a TRILLION channels!

The fastest thing in the Universe is gossip.

Thank you for your opening message. I’ve been saying this for a long time and i get shouted down from folks on the internet.

Schrödinger's genius was in using a cat in his thought experiment. If he had used a lizard or spider it would have been just as accurate but nobody outside of Einstien would have cared a fig if anything in that box was alive or dead. We ALL care bout a cat. Genius.

So there's a 50% chance something will happen or it won't. A useful piece of information. Thank you. 😂

@steveunderhill5935

6 ай бұрын

Not even coin flips are 50/50

Thank you for the clear explanation of concept of the “observer”. Most physicists still fumble with it and make it sound more mysterious than it really is.

The Uncertainty Principle was explained to me as trying to observe a game of pool through a camera with very limited memory card space. You can only record one high resolution picture or one low resolution video at a time, and subsequent observations nullify the previous ones as the next shot is already taking place.

I know not many people here would have a good answer, but one thing that always bends my mind is the relationship between light speed and the size of space. Lightspeed is a measure of 'time'. The distance quotient is relative to the universes scale. So, when the universe was half the size, the speed of light was half the speed. Of course, that means that for this to work, time ran at half the speed otherwise in the early universe the speed of light would have easily have outpaced the expansion. So, this infers an asymptotic relationship between time and space... which kinda means that there is actually no beginning if the beginning is an asymptote. I'm open to comments here as I've held this idea for a few years now.

The key to quantum mechanics is probability. There’s always a probability that a photon will be generated at a certain energy level, and in that graph of probability when it’s most likely a photon will be emitted they are going to be dips and holes to where it is very improbable, but not impossible for them to be emitted . There you go quantum mechanics in a box.

It's Maria Skłodowska-Curie. I don't think, she ever introduced herself differently.

@Bacopa68

6 ай бұрын

True, and her daughter and her daughter's husband both used hyphenated last names. But most textbooks say Curie. I guess in a video you have to keep it simple. But you are right. It's "skwoh-dov-ska" for anyone out there who wants to say it.

@marekjakubicki5795

6 ай бұрын

@@Bacopa68 most textbooks are incorrect then :) Maria Skłodowska-Curie is as simple as it's gets :)

@Bacopa68

6 ай бұрын

@@marekjakubicki5795 I agree, and we do learn in the US that Marie S-C did name Polonium because she was a Polish nationalist.

@KasumiRINA

5 ай бұрын

@@Bacopa68 let's just admit that this bit is just accepted casual racism Westerners have towards Central and Eastern Europe, when literally unpronounceable names like Schroesdignerbergs or Heisengburgelander are considered "normal" but Sklodowska is "exotic". (No, I am not installing another layout to cross the "L")

I like to explain Heisenberg like this: Suppose you measure the speed of the car. You install two detectors, a fixed distance apart, each made of a lazer and a photodiode. The car will trigger the two detectors and speed is distance divided by time. Now let's make a 'Flinstone' detector, a slingshot that shoots 500 lbs rocks into a funnel, again, two of them at a fixed distance. A passing car would catch a rock, so you can use it to detect the car, but the car will be considerably disturbed by the rock, it will skid sideways and so on. The first system is precise because the tiny photons have negligible influence on the car, but when you're measuring subatomic stuff 'there are only rocks'.

There's a big problem with Schroedinger's cat is the question is not "is the cat dead or alive?" Its more "Is the cat in the box ready to claw you when you open the box, or is it next door enjoying a home without being stuffed into a box?"

Schrodinger's cat is an example of when the tool is harder to understand than the actual fact

@owlredshift

6 ай бұрын

.........nah

The speed of light. It's not just a good idea. It's the Law.

Two things about the uncertainty principle: - Every measurement is an interaction. This counts as an observer. - A quantum wave/particle is a range of possible interactions. You cannot interact with it without changing the range of possible/probable interactions. So you would have to recreate an identical wave/particle to make a new measurement, but when you do it is not the same particle! So while it has the same range of probable interactions, it will not have the same position or momentum. And you cannot create two particles in the same position with the same momentum, because then they would interact, collapsing the wave function!

Thank you, this was excellent! I learned quite a lot from your work

Thank you for clarifying the cat in the box thing. I always said the same thing Einstein said, it's either dead or alive regardless of whether anyone sees it. I always thought people who took that literally were stupid, or at least extremely obtuse.

@DrDeuteron

6 ай бұрын

Well that’s not the point at all. The problem is the unitary evolution of a radioactive atom, which is weird. If I have a carbon 14 made today, and you have one that is 1,000,000 years old..who’s is more likely to decay first? The half life is thousands of years.

@imaginaryuniverse632

6 ай бұрын

I haven't seen any evidence that Shroedinger didn't take it literally. I believe it's a legitimate theory as well. It is one of the many worlds theories where Universes branch off into two separate time streams like a cell divides in mitosis. I think we see that every person has their own reality from not just their point of view but in their individual interpretation of information. I think it's likely there are many things that can't be proven but are nevertheless true. There may be many things which we can prove for ourselves but not to another and yet these things may also be true for all.

@georgehh2574

6 ай бұрын

People are not stupid for not understanding quantum physics. Nobody fully understands much about quantum physics. It always has the potential to evolve.

@jimbrogan9835

6 ай бұрын

@@georgehh2574 The cat is both alive and dead is stupid. The author of that statement knew it was stupid, so did the man he sent it to. It was not intended to be serious. You don't need to know quantum physics to recognize absurdity. Or, at least I don't need to.

@georgehh2574

6 ай бұрын

@@jimbrogan9835 Well yeah, no shit. I wasn't just talking about the cat thought experiment, I was talking about quantum physics broadly. Even if it's not an explanation of theories, it still concerns quantum theory, so I assumed you were calling people who are out of the loop as stupid.

Theory. Hypothesis. Thank Simon. That really boils my piss that one. Another one is when people say they are doing research. No. No, you're not. You're READING.

work colleague, faced with a tech puzzle: "I've got a theory..." me, pedantically, & avoiding saying hypothesis, "no, you've got a *notion* "

@EricStegemoller-kl8wm

4 ай бұрын

Theory in casual conversation....nothing nevermind. Lol

That was a good explanation of the cat thought experiment. The idea that a collapse of a quantum state requires a conscious observer came from a “magical” property of wave-particles - if a definitive value CAN be known, the quantum function collapses. The most freaky experiment is the quantum bomb experiment, where the quantum function collapses not because a photon went through a detector, but merely because a detector exists.

Interviewer in 1944 to Arthur Eddington : "Professor you must be one of only three people in the world who understands Einstein's General Relativity" Eddington : Eddington : "I'm trying to think who the *third* person is ... " ?

Its amazing how much easier something is when the one telling is good at explaining.

Thank you. I might understand a minuscule amount more, but its more than before your videos. ❤ Keep up the amazing work!

A police officer pulls over a partial physicist for speeding: Do you know how fast you were going? No, officer, but I know exactly where I am. You were going 83 miles per hour. Great, now I'm lost. Just a little uncertain humor.

This was an unexpectedly great video (many summary videos on KZread are not so excellent) but it does need a couple of corrections. I especially liked the description of theory vs. hypothesis, and plan to reference it in conversation. 1. Photons *always* travel at C and can never slow down regardless of medium. This makes sense if you consider that they are passing through mostly empty space at a quantum scale. Light or EM radiation induced from charged particles it passes near yields destructive/constructive interference. The apparent group velocity appears slower, but the light itself is not. This may seem pedantic, but consider the title of the video. 2. Quantum physics does apply to objects the size of a baseball, or a planet. The effect in individual particle effects may be so tiny as to be negligible, but macro physics is the sum of probability distributions. Probably -- I don't actually understand quantum physics. True, not all effects likely appear at this scale, such as your superposition example, but it is not accurate to say that quantum physics is negligible, in general, at a macro scale.

@EdwardChopuryan

Ай бұрын

Good points. One thing regarding the 1st one: Not only the group velocity slows down due to the induced EM fields but also the phase velocity, thus the light itself (combined wave) slows down. The group/phase velocity doesn't appear slower but is slower. Unless you are defining light differently this means that light does indeed slow down in a medium. If I remember correctly, there have been many experiments done, namely foucault experiment that showed light travels slower in water than through air. Looking Glass Universe has 2 part video where she talks about the math/theory as well as conducts a basic test that one can do themselves too confirm the phenomenon.

THANK YOU for explaining the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. I also want to note that the existence of dark matter is very very close to being a theory (and some of my astrophysics professors have cited it as a theory) due to an increasingly large and diverse body of evidence supporting it. What exactly it IS is still being hypothesized, but the existence of dark matter is reasonably well established -- at least well enough for it to be taught in graduate level astrophysics/cosmology classes (we even used some data on galactic rotation to find the ratios of luminous matter to dark matter in several galaxies as a class exercise. It was very interesting!).

Very clear, well researched, and entertaining. Good work!

Excellent video. I'd add a couple more items to Simon's list: (1) The concept of Nothingness. See Robert Kuhn's article, "Levels of Nothing" or Sabine Hossenfelder's video on the same subject. (2) The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as it relates to entropy is nearly always (and often by scientists) phrased as "the entropy in any (closed) system will always increase", but it can also stay the same. This has been demonstrated in experiments with simple closed systems that increase in entropy, but return to their original state. As outlandish as it may seem, there may be a Law of Conservation of Entropy in the universe in which entropy increases along a timeline, but the timeline changes sign (travels in the opposite direction) and entropy increases along that timeline (which appears to be decreasing entropy from the original timeline), resulting in a net change in entropy of zero. Of course, that would require a FEW more speculations involving spacetime topology, the nature of the time dimension, and antimatter. Nevertheless, it may be important to keep that phrase in our descriptions of entropy.

I was about to say something about the uncertainty principle but then checked the time and saw you had a minute left. Then you explained it great and i was glad i shut up. Good episode.

Great explanation! Can you explain the double slit experiment with respect to the observer for electrons, and how the observer impacts the observation and it’s philosophical importance.

The only fact I was (and still am) fuzzy on is the last. Uncertainty is very very weird. Also, Cherenkov radiation, as with seen with my own eyeballs through many meters of water, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

You ain't kidding, I dunno how you can reel off all this stuff It's so mind-boggling It makes my head spin

Best explanation of uncertainty I've heard yet. Well done

The cat is an observer was what I tried to say back in the 1970s when I first heard about this in elementary school. I still believe that and no one ever took my statement seriously.

The only thing that is certain about science is that we are uncertain. The path to knowledge isn’t precise, and is a road leading into the horizon, going on forever. The more we learn, the most questions need to be asked. It is unending.

And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a piece of cake!