Dick Bond: Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Dick Bond is a theorist who has helped reshape our understanding of dark matter, entropy, and quantum mechanics. Dick is a renowned astrophysicist known for his significant contributions to cosmology and the study of the universe's large-scale structure. He has worked extensively on topics such as dark matter, dark energy, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and quantum cosmology. As a treat for all my members, Dick has graced us with a lecture titled Entropy in a Coherent Universe: Quantum Information Flows in the Cosmic SuperWeb. Don’t miss out! Join my YouTube membership to watch the full 90-minute lecture recording: Join this channel Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Dick Bond: 💻 Website: https://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~bond/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  Welcome to this very special audio version of Professor Dick Bond's lecture on entropy in the cosmos, including his thoughts on the cosmic superweb, and his many, many screwing interactions with some of the greatest physicists in history, from Hans Bethe to Richard Feynman and beyond. I hope you'll enjoy this episode. It's extracted from a video that is available only to members of my YouTube channel. A member of my YouTube channel is somebody who supports my channel financially so that I can continue doing the work that I do. But really, it's to engage you in being a participant in this cosmic journey that we're all on. So I don't really make that much money from it. The starting memberships are only 99 cents a month.

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  So I think many of you who are interested and can afford this will very much be interested in hearing the rest of this lecture and many of the other members-only content postings that I put on the YouTube channel. So I'm putting this on the audio. Feed so that you can get a taste of what the lecture is all about. It'll cut off at about 14 or 15 minutes and that's when the lecture slides really started in earnest, but I wanted to get a flavor of the brilliance of Dick Bond in the lecture that he gave here at UC San Diego in March. And hopefully what your appetite to join and support the channel in any way that you can. And the way that is least most indicative of your support is

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  a tiny amount, 99 cents or more that goes up to 1999 a month. And that's for one hour per month conversation with me and what I call private cosmic office hours. I hope you'll consider that as well, but it's by no means necessary. Just giving you an idea of the spectrum of support levels. And each one has some different perks, so you can click the link below and join the channel and then you get access to the lecture. And without any further heat deaths, ramblings from yours truly. Please enjoy this intro to Dick Bond's lecture on cosmic entropy.

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  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

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  Entropy, everybody thinks about as this kind of thermal heat with no correlations and all of that. And it seems to be completely opposite to the concept of coherence, where things are organized over large scales, but the two go together and it makes quantum mechanics and quantum cosmology, which is what quantum mechanics is because cosmology is everything. And so that's the title. But the point that is not in the abstract, but I want to emphasize here is something that, you know, well, I think it's true for everybody and every age in science,

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  that cosmic science is done by cosmic friends. That it's people who are close friends with each other that collaborate together. And usually it's sort of your era of PhD, post PhD. But if you're lucky, your great collaborations extend throughout your entire working life. So I'm going to. inject you with a very personal view of my development, which starts from actually being an undergraduate in Toronto. And it's a very personal kind of history, but it's all about how entropy has been underlying this.

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  And there are many fellow travelers on this journey with me at the many places I've been at, and these are some of the lists of those places. Caltech is where George and I first crossed paths.

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  So the general picture is one of quantum cosmology. And this is kind of things that you all know, but we should celebrate anyway. Unveiling fundamental physics from complexity to simplicity to complexity to simplicity, simplicity may or may not be the ultimate long-term future. Complexity is whatever things emerged from. Simplicity is how simple that seven parameter description is that has been so hard-won by cosmology in what we'd like to call the golden age, that got culminated by the various microwave backline experiments

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  plus all the large-scale structure experiments.

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  My goal is to actually write a book or maybe pamphlets or something. A tome, a tome. But it is, the issue is whether it'll be interesting enough for other people to hear about. But what we're going to see is a lot of relationship of quantum mechanics to the flow of the universe. And so this is the master equation, which you probably never seen before, which is the wave function of the universe is the exponent of the minus of the yin yang symbol. And so that mysterious thing I'm going to try and someone explain, but...

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  This, number one, it kind of looks like a nest, but I'll explain that it's even more profound than that. But the wave function is e to the i action minus, it's actually half entropy, because it's the square root of number when you do derivative. And so, the two ingredients, which are fundamental in the title, phase, which is what action is, and information or entropy, that those go together and they make quantum mechanics. And so, after all of the efforts in my career that took me, that these two clearly go together, which was obvious, I guess, from the beginning,

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  but it takes a while to actually see things. And then you say, "Yeah, but everybody knows that." And the worst thing that you can say, "Well, it's just quantum mechanics." But the universe is just quantum mechanics, so it's not a tiny thing. And, you know, Feynman, I quoted von Neumann in his response to Shannon about his information quantum, he used to call it entropy. Feynman famously said, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics." And then there was the other dictum, which is shut up and calculate, which means that you try not to go down the rabbit hole of metaphysics, of physics, although you'll see that I'm probably going down that rabbit hole.

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  Our goal, actually, from the beginning, using the CMB large-scale structure with this fantastic convergence towards a standard model, has always been to find something that's beyond that standard model. And we're still in quest of that. And I can tell you, if we don't get it, our subject is going to become anemic. So we need to find things to look for that are beyond the standard model of cosmology. And tilt the lambda CDM, while great, is not got the sense of newness that we would like to have.

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  Okay, so I'm gonna go back to cosmic information and some of the people whose pictures you will recognize if we go into it in detail, but I don't have time for that. I'm going to emphasize though Pythagoras because we are all Pythagoreans. We ascribe to the fundamental view that you can describe the universe in terms of mathematics. He also introduced digital, that is to say counting numbers, but also harmonics, you know, playing the string instrument. And so, you know, with the, we'll see this later, 1, 2, 3, infinity ideas. He abstracted this to be a full description of the universe.

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  And you say, "Well, oh yeah, but that's a long time ago." They didn't really know anything. And my contention is they actually knew a lot. It's just that they didn't know the microcosm and the macrocosm that we know now because we dug so deep. But the information is there at the meso level that we inhabit of, you know, what is fundamental in physics. The other person I'm highlighting here is somebody that if you read him, you say quite profound, maybe it's just because he was Sartre's student. But he emphasized the concept of idea with a capital I from idea with a little i.

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  And my, we just did a Vlog with my good friend Brian here. And we got into this story that everything is information and you're gonna hear a little bit too much about that. Okay, so Plato, ideas, right? And the asymptotic middle ideas is capital idea of which you probably never get to because it's too ideal. This is Fred Foyle. This is damn off. And I won't name the others, this is Lemaître. So I'm not gonna name all of these others, I'll name this character, Newton.

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  Just because you may have, I don't know if you have, you may have seen the movie, The Mask. You ever seen the movie The Mask? My fellow Canadian starred in that movie. And so I was in Edinburgh, behind curtain as it were. And this is Newton's death mask.

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  And so I was able to take Newton's death mask.

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  And I did not get insight when I put it on my face and became the mask, but uh it's I find this a joyous picture. My the connectivity that we all have to these characters. That's what we're trying to move forward. That's the goal of our existence. I could spend arbitrarily long time on everybody else here.

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  Oh yeah, there's epsilon of t, which looms large. You all know about it. It's sometimes called the slow roll parameter. Complete misstatement of what it actually is. The parameter is the acceleration parameter of the universe. Epsilon approximately zero is inflation. Epsilon equals one is end of inflation. Epsilon is three halves is ordinary uh old matter. And epsilon of two is radiation. Epsilon of three is if it's completely kinetic and doesn't have the spatial the Plasians ingredients associated with that. Anyway, so um epsilon extremely important for understanding evolution of the universe.

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  Okay, so now I'm going to go back to how I learned about thermodynamics. And I'm going to emphasize some words here which you've heard, but I hope that they will really sink home. Gravity is not gravity. Thermodynamics is not thermodynamics. It's called gravothermal. And they're deeply connected to each other. And a long time ago, in

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  cosmology, the dynamics of galaxies, they understood that there was something they called the gravothermal catastrophe. And I'll get into this in more detail. But my view is that that's the fundamental thing that is defining how gravity is working and how the universe evolves. It is by uh a splitting of something that collapses into a core.

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  And something that has entropy radiated into it, which is effectively voids and things like that. So that that's universal. We usually think about it in terms of the formation of red giant stars or in terms of very dense star clusters doing this gravathermal catastrophe. But in fact, it's very general. So these are some of the great champions. This was a textbook from me being an undergraduate of the thermodynamic history. This is Boltzmann. This is the great beginning of American physics, Gibbs. And you know, you know, all the names of all these characters.

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  There's a name here which you know, but you probably don't know. This is Cardo's book, 1824. He was the one who introduced entropy, but he didn't call it entropy, somebody else did. So Carnot died extremely young, but made this profound thing by looking at heat and engines. And that's of course, how you were taught thermodynamics back in the day. And one way of doing that, here we have what's called the ideal Carnot cycle for engines. And the ideal Carnot cycle has entropy in this direction, temperature in that direction,

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  and it goes up and down and it can go around and around and around. But in the real world, at the macroscopic level, there is always, what is in effect, you might call it a hysteresis in which the entropy is positive and increasing. And so that's sort of the thing that one learned about. But that wasn't the only thing that one learned about. Because you're doing physics, you probably did chemistry. In chemistry, entropy plays an extremely important role. But that's not really the way one is wording it. It is the balance of chemical potentials which is occurring in reactions, where this is in ingredients and this is the out ingredients for a reaction which is in thermal equilibrium.

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  And so this is the sort of thing that I was steeped in in my youth at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. Curiously enough, I passed much of my career at the same university I was an undergraduate in, which is a rare phenomenon. I don't know how many of you will have done something similar to that. Probably not many. Some of the books that were on my shelf, not just this, which was the textbook of the time, is Fermi. Little book, really profound, but classical thermodynamics in the whole sense of the word, not into the statistical physics of the whole thing. And another book here.

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  So I went from the University of Toronto to Caltech fifty years ago, fifty-one to be sure. And I was keen about seeing the universe as a coherent entity, all interacting together. And part of that was because as an undergraduate, among other things that I worked on, I worked on superfluids. And so, superfluids are supposed to be this collective quantum phenomenon that's effectively macroscopic, just like superconductors are. And so, I was intrigued by that. And then, with the neutrinos, the way I was envisioning it through my thesis and all of

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  that, it was that the neutrino comes in, it tickles the medium, and the medium is a unit and a collective response, which is what happens, and you can describe it in terms of current-correlation function response, which is, I'm getting a little bit too technical there. But then, as you will see, what should have happened right at the beginning, because I was well steeped in it, but the entropic went closely connected to the coherent. But why we all became anthropologists will be revealed in the next slide. So, then my whole career, out of all of the time, from that period to now, with every

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  problem that I've worked on, it is, in order to go from the ultra-low universe to ultra-late universe, with these two... Concepts in mind to try and explain to myself and hopefully to you, but to myself, how things are put together and how they work.

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  Thanks so much for listening to this intro to whet your appetite, this little hors d'oeuvre in the cosmos, hopefully not too hot on the subject of cosmic entropy. The lecture really gets going in earnest. It'll last for about an hour and a half or a little bit more, some questions throughout it, and the slides are quite informative and really quite beautiful, if I don't say so myself, but it's a tremendous amount of information on each slide, approaching black hole information density entropy. So I hope you'll do that again. You can join for 99 cents or more, going up from there to whopping 1999. And that's for those of you that want to share your ideas about the cosmos, your theories of everything, your thoughts on unified theories, as well as

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  cosmic information and so forth. I run these group chats for those of you at the highest tier level of membership here on my YouTube channel at least, and you can join there. And that's really a way that you can support me in the mission that I do and really be an indicator, a signpost, a cosmic luminosity indicator that will help me understand how you guys appreciate this show, if you do. And so I thank you very much. And last but not least, if you're made it all the way to the end of this and you're not too mad, please give a five star asterism, a review of the podcast. You can do that on Spotify

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  and on Apple. So with that, I hope you will see me on the membership side of the YouTube channel. Thank you as always for going into the impossible.

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