Pod Insights Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Unraveling misleading popular science About this episode Daniel and Kelly uncover the real science behind some flashing recent popular science and talk about how to be an informed information consumer.
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1:56 Daniel Whiteson? So you're listening to this podcast, which means you're a curious person. You want to stay on top of the science news. You want to be along for the ride when big discoveries are made and you want to be in the know when scientists reveal new insights into the nature of the universe, about matter, about energy, space, time, fusion, parasites, maybe even the occasional step forward in chemistry. But it's hard sometimes to sort through all of the science headlines competing for your attention. What should you believe? Is this latest breakthrough in fusion technology going to finally move the needle? Did the James Webb Space Telescope really discover a universe where time goes backwards? How to know? Well, today on the podcast, we're going to help you with all that. We'll sort through some recent misleading popular physics articles and end by giving
2:40 Daniel Whiteson? you some advice about how to critically read this stuff on your own. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Responsibly Reported Extraordinary Universe.
3:03 Kelly Weinersmith? Hello, this is Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, and boy, do I get frustrated with misleading titles.
3:09 Daniel Whiteson? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. And the most frustrating thing for me about space news is that it's usually accompanied by an artist's impression rather than actual data from the paper.
3:22 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, OK, all right. Time out, time out. Daniel, I think most of us want to see an artist's impression and not like a pile of data. Like, you're a science communicator. Clearly, this is, and we like collaborating with artists. I married one. You do this all the time. Why are artist conceptions bad?
3:42 Daniel Whiteson? Artist conceptions aren't bad in and of themselves if you know what you're seeing and you understand which part the artist has filled in and which part we actually know. But the crucial thing about science and these science articles is understanding what we've learned and what remains unknown. And usually, these artist conceptions go way too far. Like, there's a discovery of some new planet, and then you see a drawing of the planet with like, you know, edges of the continents and ice caps and whatever. Adding all this information, that's just a guess, and the reader has no idea which part has the artist invented and which part has the scientist actually learned about the universe. That's what the data tells you, but the artists often go too far. So I love artists. I'm pro artist. Artists should definitely be collaborating with scientists, but you have to be very
4:26 Daniel Whiteson? careful about showing the edge of knowledge.
4:28 Kelly Weinersmith? So I feel like I don't want to see artist renderings go away, but I see your point. And I think this idea is probably never going to fly. But could we just have a box associated with every artistic rendering of a finding that says, like, here's where the imagination, the creativity was allowed to creep in to like, clarify these things?
4:47 Daniel Whiteson? Somehow, it's not even always obvious that it is an artist's impression.
4:51 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah.
4:51 Daniel Whiteson? Especially when you just see the headline and the picture and you're like, ooh, look at that planet. And then you scroll by and then later you're telling your friend, oh, we've totally seen pictures of continents and ice caps and other planets. And it's not your fault and it's not the artist's fault, but something about the way it's put together blurs the line between what we've learned and what we haven't learned.
5:09 Kelly Weinersmith? What is that famous photo that I think was from James Webb, the pillars of creation or something like that? And they're like pink. I didn't realize that they weren't actually those colors. And I realize that now because I like, I have them on my shoes and I try to make sure that any fashion thing that I have on my body, I can explain in case I get cornered. But you know what, like, how do you feel like that should have been portrayed?
5:34 Daniel Whiteson? That's a great question and a slightly different one because that is real data, right? Like, we're looking at an actual image from space from a telescope. The only thing that's been changed is the frequency of light shifted into the frequency we could see it because otherwise, if you're looking at the light from James Webb, it's just going to be black on your screen, right? Because James Webb only sees in wavelengths that we can't see. So it's like night vision goggles, right? It's job is to shift it into the visible spectrum so that we can see it and analyze it. I mean, otherwise you could just analyze it on the computer. But yeah, this should be clarified somewhere that this is shifted into our visible spectrum. I don't think that needs to be printed on your shoes.
6:12 Kelly Weinersmith? That's good. That's good because I really like my shoes and I think I'd like them less if there was an explanation on them.
6:17 Daniel Whiteson? But at least it's actual pictures of real data, right?
6:19 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay. So somebody just like, Slid the color knob over. And so like the difference in the colors between everything is like the same. Like, I guess I'm wondering, were there artistic choices made or it's just shifting it all over?
6:34 Daniel Whiteson? 100% there are choices made and there are different choices that could be made. And you'll sometimes see people reanalyze old data, make new images and the images pop better or they look more interesting. And that's because they're making different choices. Are there artistic choices, scientific choices? I don't know where the line is there, but there's definitely an arbitrary mapping from one set of wavelengths to another. And there are different choices that you could make and reasonable ways to defend all of them. So the bottom line is like, know what you're looking at.
7:01 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. Well, so I think a point that we are sort of skirting around here is that communicating science is hard.
7:07 Daniel Whiteson? It is.
7:08 Kelly Weinersmith? And trying to visualize science in a way that makes sense to people who don't spend eight hours of every day for the last decade of their lives, thinking about these sorts of things, like how, how do you get that message across is difficult. And today we're going to talk about ways that it has been done spectacularly incorrectly.
7:27 Daniel Whiteson? That's right. Today, we're going to go through a few examples of science communication sent to us by listeners where the headline and the picture are quite misleading. And then we're going to dig into the science, what it actually means, what the scientists actually learned, what we know about the universe and what we don't know after this study. And at the end, we're going to try to give you some tips for scientific literacy. How should you digest scientific information on the internet when you don't have Daniel and Kelly in your ear?
7:53 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, I mean, that's a sad world to live in, I think. And I'd just like to give a shout out to the DKEU Discord community, who helped us come up with these topics to talk about today and who always have amazing insights and great questions and are just, they're just all lovely people.
8:09 Daniel Whiteson? If you enjoy listening to this podcast and wish you could chat with other people who have listened and are curious about the universe, come join the Discord. Check out the link on our website, danielandkelly.org. You'll find the invitation there. Everybody's friendly, everybody's interested in science and we have a lot of nerdy jokes.
8:25 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, my gosh, so many nerdy jokes. Love those people. All right, so let's go ahead and our first headline today is, is the universe inside a black hole?
8:37 Daniel Whiteson? No, no, that's not even the headline. That was my summary.
8:39 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, gosh.
8:40 Daniel Whiteson? The actual headline on the article is, quote, "Scientist Says He Found Evidence Our Entire Universe Is Trapped Inside A Black Hole." That's the literal title, the headline on this article.
8:53 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. So I think that we should start by saying that often the titles are not created by the science communicator themselves. And editors often have final say on the titles. I've had a couple of titles where I've been like, oh, all right. I guess we're going with that. I hope they read the whole thing. But anyway, still, they can be quite misleading.
9:13 Daniel Whiteson? Yes, exactly. And a lot of people don't read past the headline, right? Or the headline is the thing that gets them to read it. And so we understand this is a marketplace for attention and people got to ramp up the excitement level of the headline to get people to read it. But still, this is quite misleading.
9:30 Kelly Weinersmith? So where do we start with the debunking, Daniel?
9:32 Daniel Whiteson? First, let's talk about the science that was actually done by the person who did the actual science that underlined in this article. Then we'll talk about the claims made in the article and then clarify what we actually knew and don't know. Because there is a lot of interesting science going on here.
9:47 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
9:48 Daniel Whiteson? So what actually happened here? Well, there was a scientist who looked at a bunch of galaxies and tried to measure their spin. And this is a cool thing to do because we expect the galaxies to be evenly split. Some should spin clockwise and some should spin counterclockwise. And there's no reason why we should have more of one or the other. So if you look at a bunch of them, you can measure the clockwise versus counterclockwise, and it should be close to 50/50. And it's a standard thing to do in science to be like, well, this is what we expect. Let's go out and measure and maybe there's a discrepancy, right? This happens all the time and usually comes up, yeah, it's split evenly, yawn, move on, but sometimes it isn't.
10:26 Kelly Weinersmith? And am I remembering correctly that in a, so we previously did an episode, something to the effect of, does the universe show handedness? And I think you referenced a study that suggested that galaxies do show some evidence of handedness. So like a preference for turning in a certain direction. Is this related and building on that finding?
10:47 Daniel Whiteson? It's similar. That was a different study where they looked at quadruplets of galaxies. So you make like a little pyramid of galaxies and you order them by the biggest to smallest. And you ask, are there more left-handed versus right-handed? Where you define left and right-handed in a certain way. Dig into that episode if you want more details. Okay. But the basic question was the same, like if we define left-handed or right-handed in this way, we should still expect to see 50/50. And they also didn't see 50/50. They saw more left-handed arrangements of galaxies than right-handed, which was fascinating and connected to the question of that episode, which is, is the universe left-handed or right-handed? And this fascinating connections in biology and in particle physics that suggest a preference for left-handedness. But here, it's not about being left or right-handed,
11:33 Daniel Whiteson? because whether a galaxy spins clockwise or counterclockwise also depends on our view relative to the galaxy. Like if you're looking at a galaxy and you see it spinning clockwise, then if you're looking at it from the other side, it would be counterclockwise. So in some senses, it also depends on your relationship to the galaxy. So it's not a fundamental thing in that sense. But still, it should be evenly split. People out there might be asking, well, why should it be evenly split? You know, what's the argument there? So let's make it explicit. You know, why do galaxies spin at all? Galaxies spin at all because the original blob of stuff that formed the galaxy was spinning. So go way, way back to the very early universe. Imagine a universe filled with gas and it's mostly smooth, but there's little lumpy bits, right? This bit is a little denser and that bit is a little denser.
12:18 Daniel Whiteson? The bits that are denser have more gravity. They pull in more stuff, so they get denser, so they have more gravity, so they pull in more stuff. Runaway effect, you get clumps, right? So you go from smooth with very small clumps to a much more clumpy universe. And that's the formation of galaxies. And actually, dark matter plays a big role in that because it provides a lot of the gravity. So that explains the clumps. But where does the spin come from, right? You have these big clumps, why do they spin? Well, any of those individual clumps, if you measure their overall spin, it's going to be close to zero, but it's never exactly zero. Like, take a random scoop of gas. You have a bunch of particles flying around. This one's going this way, this one's going that way. You add up the effective spin contribution from all of those particles, it's going to be close to zero, but not exactly zero.
13:03 Daniel Whiteson? The big clump of gases can have an overall slightly positive or negative spin. And the one next to it is going to have another spin, overall positive or negative. On balance, it's all going to add up to nothing. But there are little fluctuations, just like there were fluctuations that led to the formation of galaxies. There are little fluctuations that make it very unlikely that it all adds up to zero. And so each clump of gas has a spin. And then as it collapses into a galaxy, it has to keep spinning because of conservation of angular momentum. And as it collapses, it spins faster and faster. So that's where the spin of the galaxy comes from. And the same story is true for spin of solar systems, which are like little mini galaxies inside a galaxy.
13:41 Kelly Weinersmith? That's fascinating. I don't think I'd ever thought of that before. I guess I had just kind of assumed that all of the stuff that was in the universe was already kind of spinning in the same direction. And maybe you would expect it to all be spinning in the same direction, at least within a small area.
13:55 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
13:55 Kelly Weinersmith? Now I understand that that was wrong. Okay, thanks.
13:58 Daniel Whiteson? Another way to think about it is like, say you flip a million coins, right? You expect roughly 50/50, right? 50% heads, 50% tails. But do you expect exactly 50/50?
14:08 Kelly Weinersmith? I do not.
14:09 Daniel Whiteson? That would be pretty unusual. Most likely, you're not going to get exactly 50/50. And so you're going to get little imbalances. And each clump of gas that forms a galaxy has all those particles in it, some which contribute to its spinning clockwise, some contribute to its spinning counterclockwise, but never actually bouncing out. All right, anyway, so what did this scientist do? He looked at a bunch of galaxies and tried to measure their spin. Turns out this is hard because most of the galaxies we know about, and there are lots of them, are too far away for us to measure their spin. To measure the spin of a galaxy, you have to see different stars in the galaxy and measure like blue shift to this one and red shift to that one. You need to measure the relative velocity of stars inside the galaxy. It's not something we can do for super distant galaxies where we're barely observing them,
14:51 Daniel Whiteson? or even ones that are not that distant, but we can't resolve the individual stars inside them. So he was only able to do this for 263 galaxies that were like close enough and were arranged in the right way. And so not a huge sample, not tiny, but like relatively small compared to the number of galaxies in the universe. And what he saw is two thirds of them are going clockwise, one third of them are going counterclockwise. That's weird. That's the science that was actually done.
15:19 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, but. It also seems easy to imagine there could be a bias based on like stuff that's close by doing something different than if you look at another part of the solar system or?
15:30 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. And the scientist in you is like looking for prosaic explanations.
15:34 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah.
15:35 Daniel Whiteson? Right? You're not immediately jumping to maybe we live in a black hole, right? Every time you see weird data, you're not like, maybe I live in a black hole.
15:42 Kelly Weinersmith? That's my explanation for like everything. Like, oh, where did the apple go? Maybe we live in a black hole. Why is the house not clean?
15:48 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. Exactly. I put this piece of cake in the fridge yesterday and now it's gone. You know, this frosting on my husband's mustache, but maybe we live in a black hole.
15:57 Kelly Weinersmith? That's right. That's right. I think it usually had Zach who's like, no, no, no, it's because we live in a black hole. Oh, wow.
16:06 Daniel Whiteson? And, you know, this is a fine piece of science, but you're right, there are questions about it. Like, number one, we don't know how accurate this measurement is because there could be a bias. Like, you start with a huge number of galaxies, you filter for the ones where you can make a measurement. That filter removes most of the galaxies. You have to be very concerned about whether that filter has introduced a bias. Maybe you're somehow better at seeing galaxies that rotate clockwise relative to you than counterclockwise, right? There's lots of ways to introduce a bias that you can't expect. And it could be like third order effects. But if you're reducing from zillions of galaxies to 250, third, fourth order effects, these can dominate. And it's not even that hard to imagine mechanisms that can introduce that because, you know, our galaxy is spinning. We're in a certain
16:50 Daniel Whiteson? arm on that galaxy. And so it certainly could be easier to make measurements of stars in a certain redshift or blueshift range because otherwise they move out of our range to be able to measure them. So anyway, it's not that hard to imagine. But the claims in the articles are amazing. They suggest that this imbalance in rotation means we live inside a black hole. How do they get there?
17:12 Kelly Weinersmith? And by claims in the article, do you mean in the original scientific paper or in the futurism article?
17:18 Daniel Whiteson? So both, the actual scientific paper made these connections. So it wasn't just like, somebody did a study, said, what? This is interesting. And then futurism was like, dot, dot, dot, black hole. The paper itself did the dot, dot, dot, black hole part. And, you know, it has more qualified claims than the article itself. And this is a paper done by a computer scientist and not a physicist. So, you know, take this for a grain of salt. Not that people who don't have a physics PhD can't do physics, but you should be cautious when you read a paper from somebody who's writing far outside their expertise. Doesn't mean they're wrong, right? But be cautious about it.
17:52 Kelly Weinersmith? Well, if I could just go on a very short tangent, you know, I feel like in papers, it's good to like, start by saying like, here are all of the boring things that could explain these data. And boring could be like a bias by looking at things that are nearby. And I feel like you need to front load the boring things because quite often the boring things are what explains it. And there's nothing wrong with saying like, also, it's consistent with living inside of a black hole. But like, clearly we need more data. To be honest, the reason that I most frequently reject papers that I review is because they pick the most interesting interpretation and front load. Like, the introduction is about how maybe we live inside a black hole or something. And science has this problem where I think we try to incentivize, like, the most interesting interpretation is going to get you in the best journal.
18:33 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
18:33 Kelly Weinersmith? But it's so important to be like, the most interesting interpretation is also often the one that's least likely. And so you need to like, couch it appropriately. But anyway, so you're saying that this article maybe couched things appropriately, but did mention this black hole possibility? And that's what got clung to in the popular media, is that right?
18:52 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, I think the scientific article put it reasonably, but the popular article stretched it out. So what are the connections here? You know, this is a common concept, the idea that we might live inside a black hole. And it comes from two sort of ideas. One is, there are some superficial parallels between a black hole, where you think about a singularity and an event horizon, and the Big Bang. The Big Bang, people talk about a singularity in the early universe. And we also talk about a cosmic horizon, a region past which we cannot see. So they hear singularity, they hear horizon, they're like, hmm, that seems black hole-y, right? And there is a superficial relationship there, like, people imagine, maybe we're living inside a black hole and the Big Bang singularity was sort of like the singularity at the start of a black hole.
19:36 Daniel Whiteson? But it doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny, because the singularity at the start of the universe, if there even was one, remember, the Big Bang doesn't explicitly predict the singularity, it just takes you back in time to when the universe was super duper dense, not all the way to a singularity, because we can't extrapolate past a certain density, we need quantum gravity for that.
19:55 Kelly Weinersmith? Can we define singularity? What, what is a singularity?
19:58 Daniel Whiteson? Hmm, yeah, great question. So, singularity at the heart of a black hole is a location in space with infinite density. So you have finite mass and zero volume, infinite density. So that's a singularity at the heart of a black hole. The singularity in early universe theories, before the Big Bang, right, as an origin, and Stephen Hawking had these ideas, is a moment in time where the whole universe had infinite density. So in the center of a black hole, you have a singularity which should last forever and is a location in space, right, a dot in space that lasts forever. Singularity at the beginning of the universe is a moment in time, it doesn't last forever, and it's everywhere. So black hole is a singularity in space, Big Bang has a singularity in time.
20:41 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
20:42 Daniel Whiteson? So they're both infinite densities, but they're quite different, like fundamentally really very, very different. And the cosmic horizon is not really like an event horizon. The cosmic horizon is how far we can see, but that's growing. You know, as time goes on, we can see further and further into the universe. It's quite different from an event horizon.
21:01 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, and so, the similarities kind of in these ideas led, I'm confused.
21:07 Daniel Whiteson? So there's this trope out there that maybe we live inside a black hole, and black holes are often spinning. Black holes spin in the universe for the same reason that galaxies spin. They start from a big chunk of mass, which then gets condensed down. If that mass was originally spinning even slightly, then that spin gets exaggerated as it collapses into a black hole. So black holes in the universe often spinning. So the idea is, so maybe our universe is inside a black hole, and that black hole is spinning, and that spin somehow trickles down to causes galaxies to spin, and therefore there's an imbalance in the spin, and that's what he saw. That's the thread of the connection.
21:43 Kelly Weinersmith? Shouldn't that make everything spin the same way, then?
21:45 Daniel Whiteson? Well, you still expect some sort of chaos inside of it, right? You still expect the distribution of spin from the galaxies. So what you would expect in that scenario is a bias towards one direction rather than the other.
21:55 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
21:55 Daniel Whiteson? So it's not impossible that we live inside a black hole, but the theory that connects the Big Bang and black holes has some issues. I mean, there's really just superficial simulators there. And there are lots of other ways you can explain galaxies spinning clockwise versus counterclockwise. You don't have to go all the way to a black hole. And there's no positive definitive evidence at all that suggests a black hole. Just these sort of suggestive things, right? There's nothing here which requires a black hole and eliminates other possibilities. So, you know, it's a cool study and I'm glad that people did it. I'm glad this paper was written and the paper itself is fine. But the science communication interpretation of it is definitely way too heavy on the connections.
22:37 Daniel Whiteson? Remember, the title was "Scientists Found Evidence Our Entire Universe Is Trapped Inside A Black Hole." Like, that title is definitely not true.
22:45 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes. And was the article a bit better at describing the nuances? Or was the article pretty much leading off from the title?
22:52 Daniel Whiteson? As usual, it's a gradation. The scientific paper behind it is fine. The article is a little bit too excited and the title is just flat out lying to you.
23:01 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, let's take a break and get to another flat-out lying title when we get back.
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25:54 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, welcome back. Today, we're talking about science articles that way oversell the results they're talking about. And Daniel, can I read the next headline?
26:02 Daniel Whiteson? Please do.
26:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, here we go. Gravity may be key evidence that our universe is a simulation. Groundbreaking new research suggests. Oh, this is fun.
26:12 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, and you know, this title is not nearly as bad as the other one, because they use the word "may" and "suggests."
26:17 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
26:18 Daniel Whiteson? Right, so "Gravity may be key evidence, research suggests." Like, kudos to this writer, this editor, whoever wrote this title, for like, keeping some of the qualifiers in there. So you don't go running off to your grandma saying, "See, I told you, scientists have proven we live in the matrix."
26:34 Kelly Weinersmith? That's right. I used to fight with my grandma about that all the time.
26:41 Daniel Whiteson? So what's the science here? What do people actually do? Well, you know, we don't understand gravity. For gravity, we have Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is awesome and suggests that gravity isn't a force, but instead, it's the curvature of spacetime. Crucially, the invisible curvature of spacetime. You cannot see the curvature. You just notice its effects, and its effects mimic the effects of a force. Things follow the curvature of spacetime. If you can't see that curvature, it looks like something is applying a force to it. But we don't fully understand gravity. There's lots of questions about it. We can't marry it with quantum mechanics. We know that Einstein's general relativity needs an upgrade. So people are still working on gravity, and they should be. And they're exploring all sorts of crazy and fascinating ideas.
27:23 Daniel Whiteson? String theory, loop quantum gravity, gravitons, all sorts of stuff. And there's an idea in the last couple of decades that's sort of out of left field, which is my favorite kind of idea, that suggests that gravity is not the bending of spacetime, and it's not a force like Newton, but it's some illusion that comes out of entropy of information in a two-dimensional universe. And our 3D universe is an illusion, a hologram, from that 2D universe.
27:50 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, so it sounds like you are portraying this idea as something that isn't totally nuts.
27:56 Daniel Whiteson? Not totally nuts.
27:57 Kelly Weinersmith? Not totally nuts? Question mark.
28:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Maybe we should have a whole episode on why it's not totally nuts. Because it does kind of sound totally nuts.
28:07 Daniel Whiteson? Well, you know what? The universe could be totally nuts, right? We have no guarantee that the universe isn't insane or isn't crazy. In fact, I kind of hope that it is. That's much more fun. And this is an idea that cropped up in the last few decades. It's called holography. And the idea is that we seem to live in a three dimensional space and we have gravity. But people noticed that if you build a two dimensional universe, right? So like just X and Y, no Z. But then you add quantum fuzziness to that universe, that that quantum fuzziness can act like a third dimension. It's like enough fuzziness there to encode what you would need to describe a third dimension. And then you can build a map from 2D plus quantum information to 3D.
28:48 Daniel Whiteson? You can make arrows back and forth, like this location in my 2D universe maps to that location in my 3D universe. Why would you want to do that? This seems like, you know, something fun for a math nerd on a Saturday afternoon. But why would anybody who cares about the universe want to do this? Because remember, we don't have a quantum theory of gravity. We don't understand quantum mechanics and gravity. So any way you can connect quantum theories with gravity is exciting. So people showed that in a 2D plus quantum stuff universe, you can just do quantum theories and then you can map them to the 3D universe and you get gravity. Whoa. So there is some weird connection. There's some hint between gravity and quantum mechanics. So that's holography. These guys are doing something slightly different.
29:30 Daniel Whiteson? They're saying, think about that 2D universe with quantum stuff. Think about how energy flows in that quantum universe and think about entropy. Remember, we had a whole episode about entropy and talked about how entropy is like the reason cold milk spreads out in your hot coffee or the reason that ice melts on a hot day is not just because energy flows. Energy flows to increase entropy, to increase the number of available microscopic states to a system. So people were thinking about energy flowing in this weird 2D universe that we might actually be living in, and then mapped that back to three dimensions and they discovered, oh, actually, all you need is entropy. If you map entropy in this 2D world to the 3D
30:10 Daniel Whiteson? world, you get gravity. So that's the entropic theory of gravity, which Eric Verlinda and other folks are exploring. And it's not totally insane. There's problems with it and unsolved issues, like with any Nissen theory, but it's totally a reasonable thing to be exploring and a fascinating idea.
30:27 Kelly Weinersmith? Like with physics in general, yeah.
30:28 Daniel Whiteson? Like with physics in general. Hey, the whole thing is a work in progress, right? Or like with your kitchen, you know? Who knows that's ever gonna get finished?
30:35 Kelly Weinersmith? It's never gonna get finished.
30:38 Daniel Whiteson? The entropic theory of Kelly's home improvement projects.
30:41 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah, probably never gonna get finished.
30:43 Daniel Whiteson? Let's have a race. Let's see if we figure out quantum gravity before Kelly finishes her kitchen.
30:47 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, gosh. Well, my marriage is on the line. I think we've gotta, we've gotta get the kitchen figured out sooner. So I, I started my career as an animal behaviorist, and I'm really interested in the like, culture of certain fields. Do the people who study whether or not the universe is a simulation, like, do those people act differently in their day-to-day lives? Like, does it impact their behavior?
31:09 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, good question. I'm not one of those people, right? So I don't know.
31:13 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
31:14 Daniel Whiteson? I wonder if it really changes that. That's a great question, because it measures whether they really believe it. Like, does it impact the way you live your life? I'm not sure.
31:23 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. Anyway, let's get back to the science.
31:25 Daniel Whiteson? All right. So so far, we've explained entropic gravity. Now, this paper is not about vanilla entropic gravity, which isn't weird enough. There's a guy who's built a version of entropic gravity, not using the normal entropy ideas, but information entropy. This is based on Shannon's theory of information. And it measures like, how much information can be stored in a message, etc. And then the entropy of that information. And in this paper, he showed that if you think about the information stored in that 2D universe, and then you try to minimize the computational expense of simulating that universe, that those requirements translate into gravity in the 3D universe.
32:06 Daniel Whiteson? So take your 2D universe and say, boy, this is complicated for me to simulate. What if I required entropy to act in a certain way that minimized that computation? And what he discovered is doing that effectively requires things to clump together, like as if matter was moving to reduce the computational, the informational cost in this universe. So he's playing with his 2D universe, imposes some computational constraints. He discovers that imposing those constraints requires gravity in the 3D version of that universe. And he says, ooh, that's fascinating. Maybe our gravity is a consequence of people who are programming the simulation having a limitation on their computing. And so they decided the only kind of universe they can simulate is one that has to have
32:50 Daniel Whiteson? this rule because they have a limit on their computers, and that's why we have gravity.
32:54 Kelly Weinersmith? I'll admit that it sounds like we are skipping over some big black boxes and I'm not quite following all of the steps, but I see the general picture. And so he published this and it was given a lot more credit than it deserved?
33:10 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, so he published this, and this is a fine thing to research, and the work is itself solid. And it's cool that he shows the universe works in a way that might make it easier to represent inside a computer. Does that suggest we live in a simulation? Hmm, that's a really big leap. I mean, even think about this question. I feel like there's a lot of coverage of this in popular media that skips over a lot of important details, like remember that if our universe is a simulation, then what is the computer it's running on? It's running on a computer that's not in our universe. Our universe is in that computer. And what are the rules of physics that that universe has that that computer is following? We have no idea, any more than like Super Mario can do experiments to measure laws of physics
33:55 Daniel Whiteson? in our universe, right? He's living in an artificial universe. There's no way he can measure anything or deduce anything about the computing platform he is on. So like, what is computationally expensive for these folks encoding the universe simulation? We have no idea because we don't know how their computer works. Even in our universe, we have different kinds of computers, right? Analog, digital, quantum, on which different things are expensive and different things are cheap. So how can we possibly speculate about what could be cheap or expensive on a computer that can simulate the universe, following laws of physics from another universe we have no access to? It's totally impossible. It's really just popular science clickbait. And if you hear folks on podcasts talking about how like, it's more likely we live in
34:39 Daniel Whiteson? a simulation than not, then you know, they're saying exciting things to get you to listen to podcasts. They're not really digging into the details.
34:46 Kelly Weinersmith? So lots of banana peels being smoked is what I'm coming away with here.
34:52 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. And really cool ideas, really fun to think about. Don't want to be negative about exploring crazy ideas, but like, let's be careful about what we've actually learned and what's just like exciting to think about.
35:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah, so, all right, so we've got this idea here that's kind of out there, but is totally reasonable to explore. And you want to get people excited about it.
35:10 Daniel Whiteson? Mm hmm, absolutely.
35:11 Kelly Weinersmith? It feels almost inevitable to me that people are kind of going to oversell it and get sort of hooked on the like, kind of, you know, smoking banana peels aspects of it. So do you think this result gets shared with the general public in any other way than like a kind of overblown way? Like, do you think there's an appetite?
35:30 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
35:30 Kelly Weinersmith? Amongst the general public? I mean, clearly there is for our listeners because like, they ask very good, deep, in-depth questions. But like, how would you present this paper if you were writing the article?
35:40 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, it's a great question, right? We can't just criticize here. We should give some positive constructive tips. I think the options are either explain the caveats, right? Like, sure, pull people in with the excitement of the possibility. And again, kudos to the These writers were saying maybe suggests rather than explicitly claiming like in the previous article, but then also be like, well, that's exciting, but also you should know, or here's the work that needs to be done to actually connect the dots between these ideas. Or go deep enough like we do, or like we try to do to give people the understanding so that they can make those connections themselves. They can be like, okay, yeah, I mean, I see that, but I don't buy this step or that piece didn't really convince me or whatever. And like,
36:23 Daniel Whiteson? equip people with what they need to know, because I think, and I know you think, which is why we're doing this project, that it's possible for folks outside of academia to understand this stuff. It can be explained in a way that's deep and insightful and accessible. And so I'd like to see much more of that, because then people can draw their own conclusions. Rather than just being told, you should accept X, or you should accept Y, they'd be like, well, I think this, but I want to wait for that study or whatever. Yeah. So either you got to do a deep dive, or you got to include the caveats. And I think this article is not the worst, but it definitely didn't include enough caveats for my taste.
36:57 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah, yeah. I mean, my personal strategy is I try to include all the caveats, but then I try to, you know, lean on Zach to tell jokes or something along the way. Like, like, try to get people to stay with you, because it's hard. Because when you start getting into the caveats, I get that people lose interest. And there are so many of us that have short attention spans. But I think those caveats, for the right audience, is the fascinating thing. And I feel like the hard job of a science communicator is to make the caveats as interesting as they need to be to get people to stick with the explanations. Because otherwise, otherwise you get headlines. Yeah. Like the first one we talked about. All right, let's move on to our last amazing headline, which we will get to after the break.
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40:24 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, Daniel. Do we have free will? Quantum experiments may soon reveal the answer, or so says this physics article that we are going to talk about now.
40:36 Daniel Whiteson? Depending, of course, on what you mean by soon, reveal, answer, and quantum experiments.
40:41 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, wow. Wow, that's a lot of caveats. Do we need to define free will? Or is that straightforward? Because that doesn't sound straightforward to me.
40:47 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, and the subtitle of this headline says, whether or not we have partial free will could soon be resolved by experimenting quantum physics with potential consequences for everything, from religion to quantum computers.
40:59 Kelly Weinersmith? Holy cow.
41:00 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, pay attention.
41:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, my God. Although I'll note, we've already downgraded from free will to partial free will when you get to the subtitle. But, okay, so what are, what's the science here?
41:10 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, so there is some really interesting stuff here in quantum physics on the edge of science and philosophy. It has to do with something we talk about in the podcast a lot, whether quantum mechanics really is random, whether the universe is deterministic. And so, like, brief history context, Newton and folks discovered that the universe follows laws, and the laws seem to be deterministic. Like, you throw a ball exactly the same way twice, it follows exactly the same trajectory. You fire a cue ball at an eight ball, and you know exactly the angles and the masses, you can predict exactly what's going to happen. And this leads to a view of the universe as like a clockwork universe. Like, given a moment in time, a snapshot in time, you can predict everything that happens. Where is there room in that universe
41:54 Daniel Whiteson? for people making decisions, for Zach deciding, I'm going to eat Kelly's piece of cake, or I'm going to leave it in the fridge, right?
42:00 Kelly Weinersmith? That's always a bad choice to eat my cake.
42:03 Daniel Whiteson? But is he making a decision? Or is it just a consequence of a clockwork husband that you married, right?
42:09 Kelly Weinersmith? Everyone's always giving him excuses, man. He made a choice. Leave my cake alone.
42:15 Daniel Whiteson? Quantum experiments may soon unravel Kelly's marriage.
42:19 Kelly Weinersmith? I feel like I'm getting mad at him for a cake he didn't even eat.
42:23 Daniel Whiteson? I know, our hypothetical cake, yeah. So that's the pre-quantum view of the universe. Quantum mechanics comes along and says, oh, hold on a second. Actually, things are fundamentally random. You can have exactly the same experiment, shoot an electron at a target twice with the same initial conditions and get different outcomes. Because at the quantum level, the microscopic level, things are not determined, only the probability is determined. So it's not like the universe is totally random and chaotic, but like the universe predicts, oh, the electron has a 70% chance to do this and a 30% chance to do that. And what actually happens depends on a roll of the die when you look. Right? So that's the quantum introduction of randomness. And that gives people some relief because they imagine, okay, the universe is not totally deterministic, there's some fuzziness in there.
43:08 Daniel Whiteson? And that's where philosophically free will tries to creep in.
43:12 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay. And you, just like living in a simulation, you feel like this is a reasonable connection between physics and free will?
43:21 Daniel Whiteson? I wouldn't go that far, but there are interesting angles about these experiments and loopholes that we should explore. And some of them do have potential implications for free will. So like the reason that we think that quantum mechanics is fundamentally random is because of a series of really incredible ingenious experiments that go by the name of Bell's Inequality or Bell's Experiments. And these sought to answer the question, which is really, really difficult. How do we know that the universe is actually fundamentally random? Things are not determined until we measure, rather than things being determined before we measure and just unknown to us. Say, for example, Zach has two bags and he puts a red ball in one and a blue ball in the other one. And he gives you one of the bags and you haven't looked inside and you go off and you run a bunch of errands.
44:04 Daniel Whiteson? Then Zach opens the bag and he sees, oh, he's got the blue one. You know instantly that Kelly has the red one, right? But it was determined in advance. We just didn't know. So people wanted to know that, well, is the universe like that where it really was determined? We just didn't know about it. These are called hidden variables. Or Is the ball really uncertain? Is it really red or blue until Zach opens it and then it decides?
44:28 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
44:29 Daniel Whiteson? And that seems like a really hard thing to distinguish, right? Like, how could you possibly know? Because the only thing you can do is look at it and you can just see red or blue. So John Bell came up with this ingenious set of experiments and the experiments, you can't tell from an individual run of the experiment. It's not like you see red, you see blue, you know the answer, right? Because both ideas, hidden variables or truly random, predict the same thing there. But he came up with a set of experiments that, of course, don't use marbles. In Kelly's kitchen, they use particles and particles spin. And it's not red or blue, but it's spin up or spin down. And these experiments take advantage of the fact that particles have three directions where you can measure the spin, like three axes in space. And the quantum version of the universe predicts a difference in the correlations between the measurements in different directions than the hidden variables version.
45:14 Daniel Whiteson? So Zach and Kelly have their bags and they randomly decide, okay, I'm going to measure the spin in this direction. And Kelly decides randomly, I'm going to measure the spin in that direction. If we look at the correlation between their measurements, quantum mechanics predicts a different correlation than the hidden variables version. Like, if they both predict the same axis, they should get the same answer. If they predict different axes, there should be correlations in one theory that are different from correlations in the other theory. Crucial step there, they're randomly deciding which axis to choose.
45:43 Kelly Weinersmith? And the answer they got was not consistent with the idea that it was a hidden variable so that you could have known all along, but you only found out when you opened it.
45:50 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly.
45:50 Kelly Weinersmith? But that it actually is being determined the moment you open it.
45:53 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. Conclusively, over and over, these experiments, mind blowing conclusion is the universe really is fundamentally random. The things are not determined until you measure it. Like, the universe can maintain an uncertainty. Really incredible. Requires like a total upheaval of your understanding of the nature of reality. Really mind blowing. But there is a potential loophole here. And the loophole is, how do we know that Zach and Kelly's choices really are random? What if there's some like correlation there so that they're making choices that are not random? They're determined by something else that happened earlier. So they're correlated in a way that confuses us, misleads us into thinking the quantum answer is right, but really it's super determined.
46:37 Kelly Weinersmith? The Wiener Smiths are entangled in some way.
46:41 Daniel Whiteson? So this is a theory called super determinism that says like something that happened early, early on in the universe, some structural formation, or some super intelligent alien designed this whole thing. So we would think that the universe is random, but really it's deterministic and we've been confused. And the way they're controlling us is by influencing the random choices, right? Those random choices are not really random. It's all downstream of something.
47:06 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow. Okay.
47:07 Daniel Whiteson? And so people explore these ideas. And this article discusses some papers in philosophy about how you might be able to close these loopholes and figure out, is super determinism real? Can you test it? It's very hard to test. And so it explores these concepts. It doesn't suggest that we're going to learn the answer to free will, right? It's like, maybe we could try to close this super determinism loophole. But dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, free will is a much bigger question, right? Like, and if you read the paper, philosophers don't even agree about what we mean by free will. Like, what does free will even mean? Like, let's start with defining that, you know, like, some people think you can have free will, even if the universe is deterministic. You just like draw a dotted line around a certain
47:51 Daniel Whiteson? set of processes and say, I'm calling this Daniel, and these are Daniel's choices. And, you know, we attribute those to him. And other people think the free will requires some like supernatural thing that's separate from the physical universe, where you have like a mind realm that's influencing matter somehow in the physical universe. There's a whole set of ideas for what free will could even mean. So yes, this is a study in philosophy, not a set of quantum experiments, that touches on questions which are adjacent to free will, but it certainly doesn't suggest a set of experiments that are going to tell us conclusively, do we have free will or not?
48:27 Kelly Weinersmith? So did the paper mention free will in passing? Like, how, how did this all become about free will? Was that completely on the part of the science communicator?
48:34 Daniel Whiteson? Well, again, the paper is reasonable and talks about free will because, you know, these questions do brush up against these issues of free will. But this article in the New Scientist, not my favorite source, definitely oversells it. And the title is like totally irresponsible, in my view. And, you know, people have thought about this a lot already. Like, people go to great lengths to make these Bell's experiments not susceptible to super intelligent alien manipulation. Like, the lengths they go to to make these choices random is hilarious. There were experiments done in 2015 where the decisions were determined by taking a bunch of bits from three independent sources. One of them is the digits of pi.
49:16 Daniel Whiteson? Another are strings chosen at random from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Back to the Future trilogy, episodes of Doctor Who, Saved by the Bell, and Star Trek.
49:26 Kelly Weinersmith? How did Saved by the Bell get in there?
49:29 Daniel Whiteson? I think they were worried that they were only choosing nerdy things. And they were like, oh, what if the aliens are only manipulating, you know, the nerd culture? So they're like, let's, this is like the nerd view of what popular culture is. Like, let's do Saved by the Bell.
49:43 Kelly Weinersmith? Amazing.
49:43 Daniel Whiteson? So if you want to affect these experiments and contrive some way to make them non-random, you have to manipulate the digits of pi and somehow influence the people who wrote all of those episodes of all of those shows so that you can end up with a set of experiments which seemed like they were random, but they weren't really.
50:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, so we have gone to great lengths to back up Bell's experiments to solve the super determinism problem. But we have not yet weighed in on free will.
50:11 Daniel Whiteson? That's right. And let's say that we close this loophole. We say, okay, super determinism, we've proven it's not true. We know the universe is fundamentally quantum. That still does not prove free will, right? Randomness is not free will, right? Even if we show that the universe has some elements of randomness, that doesn't give you control over it, right? That just means that there's some parts that are probabilistic instead of deterministic. It's not even clear to me that has any relevance to free will. It's just like, seems intellectually adjacent to it, but it's not actually a trapdoor in which you can sneak in free will, in my view.
50:45 Kelly Weinersmith? So this is only an audio podcast, so the video people can't see that Daniel is gesticulating wildly and getting super worked up and almost knocked his coffee mug off the table.
50:57 Daniel Whiteson? Well, you know, one of the things I love about physics is that it has philosophical implications that are exciting, that are fascinating. You can learn about where the universe comes from and how it works and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it's disappointing to me when people try to make those philosophical connections when they aren't there yet. Like, you know, let's reserve that from when we really do learn something deep about the universe.
51:17 Kelly Weinersmith? I also feel like every time a pop science article oversells something and makes it sound like science is about to answer a big question that it's really not even close to answering, you hurt the ability to communicate well with the public because they're like, oh, you guys have been promising answers to all this stuff and it's not happening. And I get that, like, to get your articles published, you need to convince an editor that you have the most exciting idea. But I feel like maybe it's the editor's job. Someone's job needs to be to make sure that we're not overselling things and making science feel like, you know, one, what are we even doing?
51:49 Daniel Whiteson? New breakthrough means fusion is just around the corner.
51:51 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes.
51:52 Daniel Whiteson? How many times you read that article?
51:53 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, my gosh. That's right. Yes. Over and over again. And so, anyway, it's very important. But, okay, so I think the field needs to be doing a slightly better job. But Daniel, you promised us at the beginning that you were going to give us tips to make sure that we could be critical readers so that our BS detectors could go off when they needed to go off. So what should we be looking for?
52:12 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, so I read a lot of science that's outside of my field of expertise. I mean, if there's an article on particle physics, I can read it and tell what's nonsense and what isn't. But I can't always in other areas. So I have to learn to be a critical reader. So number one, I go to trusted sources. I like the New York Times science coverage. I like Quantum Magazine. And there are very, very few other places that I will really trust where if I'm reading something I don't understand, I can be like, well, I think I'm going to believe this. And so you need to build up confidence with a source. Like, they need to repeatedly cover things in a level-headed way. You need to see stuff that you understand covered wells, that you can trust it when you don't understand it. And if your trusted source has not covered some big breakthrough in science, there's
52:53 Daniel Whiteson? probably a reason. So if you're only seeing this in like sciencebuzz.com, then it's probably overblown. That's number one.
53:02 Kelly Weinersmith? I had the opportunity to write for the New York Times twice. And one thing that really impressed me about that process was they had an independent fact checker go through.
53:10 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
53:10 Kelly Weinersmith? And I had to provide citations for everything. They made sure all of my citations were good. And there were a couple of places where I had a citation that was like 20 years old. And they're like, we want you to find a more, more recent reference. Convince us that this is still the case. And I was like, oh, nice. And I, I was able to do that, but I loved that they were like making me defend every single line of my article. So anyway, yeah, I've been impressed with how the New York Times does their science.
53:33 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I'm not going to speak to their political coverage or whatever. And I know they've taken a lot of hits fairly or unfairly for all sorts of coverage, but their science section is good. You know, their science writers know their science and do the work and they're not just like, hey, consumer beware, it's up to you to decide whether to believe this. They're doing the work behind the scenes to try to make sure this stuff is legit, just like we try to do. Second piece of advice is ignore the headline. Usually the headline is not written by the person who wrote the article, right? It's written by some editor trying to get clicks. And often the author disagrees with the headline and was overruled, right?
54:11 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah.
54:11 Daniel Whiteson? And so it's not the author article's fault. And it doesn't say that anywhere on the page. It's like, you know, crazy claim by, you know, reputable writer. And you're like, oh, I feel bad for that guy.
54:23 Kelly Weinersmith? Yep, yep.
54:23 Daniel Whiteson? So be careful about that. Make sure you read the article, not the headline. And also in the article, look for comments from uninvolved scientists. Some articles are just regurgitations of press releases from universities who listen to scientists spew claims about their work. I discovered we all live in a black hole. Yay, reputable scientist. But did they go off and find somebody else in the field who knows what they're talking about, who is not involved and therefore has nothing at stake and can say, well, yeah, I read Daniel's paper and I think it's pretty solid. This is seminal work. Or, you know, I read Daniel's paper and I think these are big leaps and there's still a lot of work to be done. Look for those quotes because number one, it means the journalist did their job and
55:05 Daniel Whiteson? consulted with experts and listen to what those other experts have to say.
55:09 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah.
55:10 Daniel Whiteson? So I think that's an important part of any responsible bit of science journalism. And you should look for it.
55:14 Kelly Weinersmith? Ed Yong does such a great job with that. Often when my research gets covered by popular press, I don't read it, partly because I'm going to get frustrated if it was wrong or if my quote was taken out of context. And so I don't read it to avoid the frustration. But I read the articles that Ed Yong writes because I want to see like, oh, who did he ask? And what is like a serious critique of the work? And every once in a while, I will see like, oh, that's such and such that I oversold this a little bit. And yeah, maybe they're right. And anyway, I feel like I learned something from his science reporting because he digs so deep into everything. And anyway, that's, that's just, I just, I never get tired of saying great things about Ed Yong's work.
55:54 Daniel Whiteson? Well, it's so admirable when people have built up a brand of being reputable. It's hard work, right?
55:59 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah.
56:00 Daniel Whiteson? He's done all that hard work that, you know, boots on the ground reporting to understand, is this right? Is this wrong? What is the nuance? What are the experts that say, what are ways to disagree with this? And he deserves that credibility and it's rare. And so, yeah, I read everything Ed Yong writes also for that same reason. And there are science writers I know and I follow, and I will read whatever they write because it's good.
56:20 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah, yep, amen. All right, any other tips?
56:23 Daniel Whiteson? Keep reading, you know? The more you read, the more you'll become literate in the topic and you'll be able to spot baloney on your own.
56:29 Kelly Weinersmith? My last tip is you should join our Discord community, where anytime you come across an article that lands on your BS detector a little bit, you can pop it up on there and we'd be happy to tell you what we think. And there's a whole community of people willing to critically read the articles and weigh in. So find us at danielandkelly.org. And there's a link to our Discord community there.
56:50 Daniel Whiteson? And if you don't like Discord, you can just write to us. Send us an email to [email protected] and we will help you break it down.
56:57 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, until next time.
57:05 Kelly Weinersmith? Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.
57:10 Daniel Whiteson? We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.
57:17 Kelly Weinersmith? We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.
57:23 Daniel Whiteson? We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected] .
57:30 Kelly Weinersmith? Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky. And on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.
57:39 Daniel Whiteson? Don't be shy, write to us.
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59:13 Speaker 04 Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
59:45 Kelly Weinersmith? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous Listener Questions #16 Next Xenotransplantation Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated