7 Ways To Ruin Your Life With Lies From Quantum Physics - Chris Ferrie

Chris Ferrie is a physicist and mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney and an author. The term “quantum” is liberally tossed around within the spiritual community, often suggesting a level of insight into this mysterious field of science. But what do these people actually mean? What have these gurus correctly interpreted about the field of quantum physics, and where are they very confused? Expect to learn why the word “quantum” is so frequently employed by spiritual gurus, what “quantum entanglement” actually means, whether energy healing heals anything at all, whether it's possible to raise your vibrational frequency thing, why Schrödinger’s cat does not mean that you can do whatever you want with no consequences, how something can be so incorrect it's “not even wrong” and much more... - 00:00 Intro 01:42 Debunking Quantum Bullshit 07:57 Is Quantum Energy Healing True? 11:49 The Problem with Spirituality 19:23 Explaining Vibrational Frequencies 27:24 Can Everything Be Measured? 30:26 Consequences of Believing Without Knowing 35:55 Why You Should Ignore Quantum Relationship Advice 38:58 Ethics of the Expectation Effect 43:31 What People Misunderstand About Uncertainty 48:18 Can We Be Quantum Entangled to Someone Else? 58:51 What Can & Can’t Quantum Computing Do? 1:06:41 Are We Part of a Multiverse? 1:14:07 Receiving Hate Mail from Spiritual People 1:19:05 Where to Find Chris - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Quantum physics isn't well understood. It has a reputation. Even scientists get out in front of public and say that it's counterintuitive and mystical. So when someone repeats that, you're inclined to believe it, especially if you have a problem where you went to a doctor and the doctor didn't help you. Now you're inclined to distrust science. And so when someone comes along, the rogue scientists that real doctors don't want you to know about, you feel compelled to believe them. I have the backing of this miraculous, super mysterious and complex theory. It's way better. People buy into it.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm very much looking forward to this episode. I have been for quite a while since I heard about your book. I feel like the world of quantum physics is one which is used by all manner of different people to explain things that they absolutely shouldn't be. But why should we listen to you as some sort of judgusal assassin of quantum physics? What are your credentials? Who are you?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Well, I'm an associate professor of quantum physics at the University of Technology, Sydney in Australia, one of the, one of the big places to do quantum technology research and development. And I've been studying quantum physics for 20 odd years now.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  You've also written 60 books on science in one form or another.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have quite a few. Most of them are children's books. So the latest one probably shouldn't read to children. And because of the place I had to sit in my house for the people watching, anyway.

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a lot of alcohol.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Not for children.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  You need it to study quantum physics.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  So what are the different types of quantum bullshit? Talking about quantum physics, there are ways in which people misuse and abuse and misappropriate it. What are the broad buckets of quantum bullshit?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in the book, I go through the major concepts in quantum physics. So like buzzwords that you might have heard, superposition, entanglement, energy. And they each have their own brand of bullshit attached to them. The there's sort of the good, the bad and the ugly. The the ugly is when it comes to quantum energy, which is associated with things like quantum healing, which suggests that people do things that are unscientific and not medically sound in lieu of of actual medical attention and medical advice. So that's very bad. And then there's like mundane things when people misinterpret, say, entanglement as

• 2:34Speaker 00

  some spiritual connection between things that are separated. Which, you know, if you're not wasting, if you're not stealing people's money and you're not harming people, no big deal. So there's a whole kind of range from from, yeah, harmful to just annoying and head scratching if you're an expert.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Who are the biggest culprits of quantum bullshit in your view? You know, do you remember the FBI had that deck of cards? And there was the ace of spades was number one and so on and so forth. Who would be in your deck of cards?

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good question. In the book, I try not to give much attention to specific instances because, you know, I'm afraid someone will go there and be like, oh, yeah, that that feels good to me. I'm I'm gonna go with that instead of the difficult.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Thankfully, everyone, everyone watching this is way too rational for that to be a concern. So you have carte blanche.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  I think the probably the most famous example is Deepak Chopra, who's been at it for a while. He had a book called Quantum Healing, Going Back Ages. But that's, you know, that kind of stuff has been debunked many times over, but it keeps keeps coming back, right? You know, someone will debunk it, he'll kind of disappear and then he'll discover like YouTube and then he'll blow up again because he has a new audience of people that didn't listen to the debunking. So, yeah, so I think he's he's one of the worst examples, I would say, just because he has such a such a huge influence and a big platform.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Most of them, they they're just they just disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. You know, if you've hopefully you didn't, nobody's done this, but like if you actually kind of click on a on a link that you shouldn't, it usually takes you down this path of, you know, websites that that look like you might be able to put your credit card information in, but sometimes you can't even do that, like the websites don't even work, like you have to be right on the ball if you want to actually waste money because they just happen so quickly.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  Mere quantum fluctuations in the world of quantum bullshit.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And then there's obviously, yeah, YouTube videos, it's endless, right?

• 4:55Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with um Gaia? Have you heard of that?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Gaia?

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Oh, like the the Hindu god?

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  It's a streaming platform that's reappropriated the name of a Hindu god. Um, and it's like Netflix, but for sort of spiritual woo stuff.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 5:17Chris Williamson?

  I I fear that you may have had an aneurysm if you discovered this before you um wrote your book. But yeah, man, I mean, you know, from what I know and from going through your work, it seems like Deepak Chopra would probably be pretty high up on the list. Didn't didn't you do go on his show or something? Or didn't you have an interaction with him?

• 5:36Speaker 00

  I went I went on uh his one of his shows, the one called The Chopra Well, and that was for my my last book. So the last book was called Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions. It's kind of I referred to it as my love letter to quantum physics, whereas the latest book, Quantum Bullshit, is my hate mail. Um, and it because it talks about how quantum physics, you know, explains everything we know about the universe on even on cosmological scales, it it really kind of connected with his point of view and his audience. Uh, I was really surprised, actually. When when when I spoke to him,

• 6:15Speaker 00

  I was totally expecting to have to, you know, argue with him, debunk his, you know, nonsense. But he he genuinely, when you talk to him one on one, he's just a really, really insatiably curious person who just wants to know everything, right? And he has this internal mental model and he's just extracting all this stuff and he doesn't spend enough time to actually go through it and. Dive deep. And so he's just at this superficial level. And that's a real problem. I mean, you know, if you've seen like the Dunning's Kruger Kruger effects curve, right? He's at like the the peak uh of, you know, misunderstanding.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  What's it called? The chasm of the chasm of ignorance or something?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he, you know, he he says, he says a lot of stuff. I think he believes some of it genuinely. Uh, and others, it's just him, just him like he's he's you do something for so long and you're just good at it and you have no, no choice but to do it. And he's really good at just spouting things that sound profound, but are but are basic, basically nonsense. I I don't know how, I think it's, you know, he's sitting there. I I don't know how harmful he is anymore. He's, you know, just an old dude, right? Um, who did someone puts a camera in front of him and he starts talking. But

• 7:47Speaker 00

  the movement around him, I think, is is, you know, it it's steamrolled, it's unstoppable. Um, and that's, that's the really harmful thing.

• 7:56Chris Williamson?

  One of the key terms that you're talking about here is quantum energy and energy medicine and quantum healing and stuff like that. What are the claims that are made by the people that talk about this stuff?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Well, there's this idea that, hmm, you know, every, yeah, okay. So some, some of it is morally true. You have to distinguish between like colloquial notions of energy that we we all use today, right? But, you know, we tell children and, you know, all energy comes from the sun. And plants take in energy from the sun, and that's where we get our energy. And if you don't eat, then you'll feel tired because you need energy, right? These are all just like colloquial definitions, but there's technical definitions as well. And people, people often. You know, mix these up and they'll say, well, I have my, you know, my everyday notion of energy.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  And then I read this thing about quantum physics and, and energy, the concept there. And they feel similar. So that supports my interpretation, right? Which is not grounded in science. So with energy, it's that there's this, you know, latent energy that's just spread out throughout the universe and you can somehow tap into it. If you, uh, you know, you think hard enough or you meditate or you pull out your credit card and spend 20 bucks or whatever. But that's not how energy works. There's no, uh, there's no, uh, kind of mystical source of, of energy. Scientifically, it's measurable.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, how do you know, how do you know that there isn't quantum energy?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Well, I don't, but the thing is, well, they're, okay. I, I know that there is, there is, there is quantum energy, right? I mean, that's sort of what, what we study and what we research and what I teach to, to students. But it's not the same kind of energy as this mystical force that permeates the universe. How do I know? Well, I think that's a deeper, deeper question. I mean, it's somewhat a philosophical question, like what does it mean to know something? In science, we have a very, a very clear notion, right? If, if you can measure and perform repeatable experiments and those experiments give similar or the same results,

• 10:22Speaker 00

  then we can say that we, we know something and we assign some, some objective notion to that. At least an inter-subjective notion that we, we all sort of come to agree that, that we're going to include that in our, in our mental model of reality. Uh, that's, that, yeah, that's how it works in science. So unless you can measure it and you can tell someone the procedure by which you measured it and they can repeat it. Then it's not scientific, but that doesn't mean it's it's wrong. It's just probably useless.

• 10:58Chris Williamson?

  Right. And when people talk about energy healing, they're not just talking about repurposing their kilojoules from a Snickers this afternoon into somebody else's body. They're talking about tapping into some sort of extra special quantum fields that gives them the ability to go in and fix your past trauma or or your athlete's foot or your your gluten intolerance or whatever it is that you're dealing with.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, that's right. So if you can put it, uh, put a number like kilojoules on it, then it becomes measurable and and then and then you can make predictions and yeah, say what what you could do with it by can now it's been connected to the rest, rest of the scientific corpus and you can start to make use of it.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case that spirituality is such a hotbed for so much of this stuff? It's like a quantum theory of the gaps almost.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Um, we, we do have a, a desire to know, like as humans, we, we despise uncertainty. We want to have some idea that we, we have everything sorted out. We know, uh, and when there is, when there is a gap in our knowledge, we have, we just can't help but but fill it. And really, the, the problem is it's sometimes it's not fillable. And so you get people that come in and provide, uh, yeah, very attractive options to fill these gaps.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  And people maybe just don't have the time or energy or or, you know, understanding to know when.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, when they should use a proposed solution or not.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  But what is it about quantum physics specifically, do you think, that's allowing this speculation to be sucked in?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  It, so I think the recipe is like, you have some, some, you start with some problem. You gave some examples, athlete's foot, you know, trauma or whatever. And then someone comes along and says, you know, that's a really, really hard problem, right? And it's going to take some, some complicated, almost miraculous solutions. I happen to have those, right? And, and don't worry, because, you know, I know quantum physics. And if you know anything about quantum physics, it's super complicated. And it has all this counterintuitive stuff, so don't worry about all that. Just, just know that I've talked to the experts or I'm an expert myself.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  And that sort of, you know, implicates the, the person into accepting this miraculous solution. So I think that's, that's kind of the, the crux of the problem, right? That quantum physics isn't well, well understood. It has a reputation, you know, even scientists get, get out in front of public and say that it's counterintuitive and mystical. And, and then, so when someone repeats that, you're, you're inclined to believe it. And if, especially if you have a problem where you have, you feel like you've somehow tested out the scientific route or the medical route, like you went to a doctor and the doctor didn't help you, right?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Didn't give you the right pills or didn't give you a procedure to, to fix your problem. Now you, you have, you're inclined to distrust science. And so when someone comes along, you know, the rogue scientists that, that real doctors don't want you to know about,

• 14:48Speaker 00

  then, yeah, you're kind of, you, you, you feel compelled to, to believe them. Because they're, they're somewhat aligned with you, right? They're saying, well, I'm against the status quo, I'm against convention. And, and I have the backing of this miraculous, super mysterious and complex, complex theory. So it's, you know, it's, it's way better. And yeah, people buy into it.

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a number of elements, I think, of quantum theory, the sort of quantum world that lends itself to charlatans and grifters being able to insert themselves. One of them being the fact that it is not particularly easy to understand. Even me, who's done episodes with Michio Kaku and Sean Carroll and, you know, a ton, a shit ton of different physicists who are very, very highly acclaimed. If someone asks me over a cocktail party to explain what quantum gravity is, or quantum theory, or why we can't reconcile general relativity with quantum gravity, I can't explain it. I can't even begin to explain it, right? And I've had hours and hours of conversations about it.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  So first off, you have a topic which is difficult for people to get into. That means that someone can be a gatekeeper to knowledge, kind of in the same way that in the Middle Ages, the Bible was not translated into the common language because that meant that the priests and the clergymen were the funnel through which your communication with God could only occur, right? You had to go through them. You were beholden to them because it was the only way that you could access this kind of information. And it kind of feels the same way. On top of that, I do think that, I'm gonna guess that you would agree, a lot of the information that you find out at the quantum level is very different to what we experience up here at the big sort of level. There's all, everything kind of behaves in a very different way. It's almost like a different universe, right? It's not.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  It's part of our universe. It's just really, really, really, really small. But it is very, it behaves in a different way. And that makes people think, oh, well, maybe because it behaves in a different way, there are some degrees of freedom that allow me to extract that type of movement and momentum and energy out into the real world. And I can kind of insert my own, choose your own adventure, choose your own energy healing thing into that world. And when you have that, it, the difficulty of being able to understand the blurriness around what it is and certain people that are able to posit themselves as experts, it is just a breeding ground for people that are charlatans and grifters. My roommate, Zach Calender, has this thing he calls the charlatan playbook.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  And diet is another one of these because, you know, even the best dieticians on the planet, it's really hard to do the interventions. We don't particularly know what's going on, despite the fact that everybody eats multiple times per day. And there's a ton of contested stuff around it. Why do they insert themselves? Right into diet because it's this gatekeeping knowledge and it's kind of hard to understand and you can sort of wish it, think it, believe it, achieve it. So I understand why I think both spirituality that attract a particular type of person, some wishful thinking, a lot of placebo effect, some of this sort of spiritual woo language and quantum theory, the world of quantum physics, which is like the scientific counterpart to that with sufficient unknowns and degrees of freedom that people can can make it happen.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  I can see how that would be a marriage made in hell, perhaps.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, quantum avocados. No, I think that's a very, yeah, no, you hit on some really good points. I totally agree that, but I guess, you know, sometimes public engagement, you know, scientific communicators do act really as the gatekeepers of knowledge. And I think some of them enjoy that, enjoy being in that position rather than, you know, maybe they set out to say, I'm gonna educate the world on my particular topic of interest. And then, and then they quickly, you know, buy into the fame, right? And become sort of the gurus. And, you know, I can imagine, you know, it feels good, you know, when people

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Alluring, man. Yeah, being the, being the fucking gatekeeper of this knowledge, it's alluring.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or, I mean, I haven't made it that far, that far yet. So I'm still

• 19:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm waiting for the, I'm waiting for the quantum energy healing that doctors don't really want you to know about pivot for Chris Ferrie. So one of the other terms that a lot of people listening will have heard about will have been vibrational frequencies. What do you think people mean? Or what do you think people think they mean when they talk about vibrational frequencies?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, well, let me, let me just point, point out that, uh, just so that like there's like a clear demarcation, right? So, energy, the conventional concept or everyday notion of energy is that includes the, the idea that it, it flows, right? It's continuous. And what quantum brings to the table is that that's not, that's not true at the most fundamental level of understanding we have. Energy comes in discrete chunks. So, energy is not like a slide that you can go up and down. It's like steps. You have to be on a step. These steps are incredibly tiny. You'd never notice them in everyday life, but they're there. Right? So, that's sort of the difference between quantum and classical energy.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  That, that's never actually used in any of the bullshit, right? They don't actually use the real kind of concept of energy.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  But frequency is similar, so, again, we kind of understand that the, how energy is mediated between things is through waves. So, you know, there's electromagnetic waves that we're using right now to communicate over the internet. Uh, there is sound waves that come from the speaker in, in your headset or, or on the speakers on your device. That's vibrating air molecules, that's traveling as a wave. So, waves carry energy. Now, in order for that energy to be received, that thing has to resonate.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  So, we, again, it's just another one of these words that is, has many meanings, right? There's colloquial meanings and there's technical meanings.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  It, they're very similar. So, when you say something resonates, it's like you're in tune with it. But technically, it's when the wave that could potentially interact with the thing is around the same size as, as the object. So, if you think about water waves, I think is an excellent example. So, imagine, you know, you're, you're a boat and there are, just in, there's an enormous swell in, in the middle of the ocean. You wouldn't even notice, right? Like, you look around and it looks like it's pretty flat around where you are because this, you know, you can't see the next, the next peak in the wave.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And if there's tiny ripples, you wouldn't notice those as well. When do you notice a wave if you're a boat? It's when the distance between the peaks is about the same size as the boat. Right, so that one end of the boat is at the top and the other end of the boat has gone to the bottom. So when things are around the same size as the wave, that's when there's there's an interaction. And that that's when you quote unquote resonate with it. Uh, so there's yeah. Example, just sort of look around you and there's examples everywhere like.

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  It's why we can't hear microwaves, right? Or we can't, we can't see radio waves.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that that they, your eye is basically tuned to only the visible portion of this vast electromagnetic spectrum. That includes radio waves, infrared, uh, microwaves. And then the other end, higher energy waves like ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. They're all, they're all hitting you all the time, right? But you can't, you can only see the the visible ones. And that's just an accident of evolution because it seemed to be useful uh for survival. Now, so people think that they can somehow, I guess, in in the implicit assumption is that they can change, change something about their themselves.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  What they think or what they do so that they can tune to some wave that's out there. And well, that's just somewhat ridiculous. I mean, it's it's true in like a, you know, a sort of mundane sense, right? If I, if I uncover my ears, then I've allowed my hearing apparatus and all the stuff that goes on inside my ear and my brain to be in tune with those waves. Or if I open my eyes, I can be in in tune with visible light. But I, there's nothing I can do to see infrared light. Unless, you know, unless you trust scientists and engineers and use technology, then you, then of course you can.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  But uh, you, you like, we're pretty limited uh when we think about the biology of these bodies that we're carrying around.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  So when people say vibrational frequencies, what they're probably talking about is their emotional state, how they're receiving other people's emotional states, what they're putting out into the universe, and how that's impacting a field, the quantum field, perhaps?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you do have several wavelengths associated with you in different parts of your body. Again, like your retina is associated with a certain wavelength that's tuned to visible light. Your eardrum is associated with wavelengths of sound, you know, 15 hertz up to, whatever it is, 44,000 hertz. And your entire body can act like an antenna as well, which is tuned to roughly 10 hertz. So if someone was blasting a speaker that was 10 hertz, and you know, if you've been to concerts, maybe you kind of can feel this, right? Really, really low bass,

• 25:20Speaker 00

  some of which you can't hear with your ears, but you can feel in your body. That's because you are an antenna. And certain parts of your body will resonate with electromagnetic frequencies as well. And those are regulated by the FCC, sometimes because it's unhealthy, but most of the time, just because, you know, if human bodies are absorbing the signal, then you're not going to be able to get signal to your smartphone. So don't use those frequencies, right? Like, engineers don't think of humans as things that they don't want to harm. They think of things that are in the way of their Wi-Fi signals. The, if, now, there is this notion

• 26:04Speaker 00

  that like, if, you know, if we agree on something or we have the same opinion, then somehow we are in tune. But, you know, that opinion resonates with me, which is, you know, it's a fine way to communicate. And it works because it's embedded within a system of language that we all understand and we can make use of. But it has its limitations. And if you start to say that it does things beyond just...

• 26:36Speaker 00

  You know, helping social interactions and people come to agreements, then then you're in trouble because, you know, th- those those things aren't verifiable.

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  And by this, we're talking about someone genuinely having a physical connection between themselves and somebody else, that them and the other interlocutor are moving or or attached through some kind of quantum wave or quantum energy field in a strange way.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. So that if if that were true, then you should be able to measure it, right? And if if you can't measure it, then you can't verify it. So it's it's just magical thinking otherwise.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  But how much quantum physics can we measure? Is is it possible, in your view, as somebody who has spent an awfully long time studying quantum physics, that this could be something that exists? Or is the only way that this exists if it is tapping into something which is outside of the field of quantum physics, most likely?

• 27:45Speaker 00

  It so you you could take this point of view, right? That that everything in the world is is just atoms, right? You know, nowadays, we teach this to children, or at least I do, that all of the stuff around us, including your body, is made of atoms. And the world is just a one, everything you see is built up of several of 118 elements that we often see arranged on the periodic table. That's it. That's all there is to the to the universe. Everything is just a bunch of these atoms stuck together in different arrangements. And their their interactions are mediated by electromagnetic waves.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  So with that understanding, there are, there are things that are just ruled out. So I, I can't, I, I, I can't have a physical interaction with you. I mean, again, it's, it's somewhat subtle, right? Because in some sense, I, I can influence you, right? If, if I pause for long enough, then you'll probably say something.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  And that's happening at a distance. But so it really depends on the kind of claim that you want to make, right? It usually, they're, they're, they're quite, they're seemingly miraculous things. And, and you know, you, you apply a simple, a simple rule, right? If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So if, if it sounds too good to be true, then it, it, it's not part of science and not part of quantum physics. Quantum physics is used to explain this, this idea of the world. Everything is made of these fundamental building blocks. And what we see around us is, it's just a buildup of many, many interactions of many of these things.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And we, you know, we understand that to an extent that our entire modern world is built on, on quantum physics. Everything around you, you know, the, the device you're using, the, the scans you get when you go to, when you go see the doctor, uh, compact, this, if anyone remembers those, uh, you know, lasers,

• 30:07Speaker 00

  clocks, GPS, the internet, computers, everything is, is built from this understanding that the world is made of atoms. And if we put these together in various ways, then we can put that to good use.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  I was on a boat party, talking to a girl that was part of another group that had turned up. And she seemed perfectly nice and was explaining about her young son and what she hoped for him in the future and the job that she was doing and all of the rest of it. And I was asking about how she'd like changed, she'd made some job changes recently, I think. And she said, yeah, I just really started raising my frequency. And I thought, well, now I'm interested. And I asked, what do you mean when you say that? And she said, well, you know, I sort of changed the way that I thought and I adjusted my emotions. And I said, yeah, okay, but what about, what about the frequency thing? He says, well, you know, emotions have got a frequency, they vibrated a frequency.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  I was like, okay, what do you mean by that? He said, well, they, they, they vibrate, you know, because they vibrated a frequency and I changed. And I was like, right, but what do you mean by that? And I kept on asking the what question. And it resulted in her saying the sentence, I believe in quantum physics.

• 31:29Chris Williamson?

  Like, this was some, like a walled off garden, a castle that she could retreat into, that would explain something that I didn't understand. But self evidently, neither did she. I believe in quantum physics. And she did leave not long after this. I think that I was very polite. I didn't like, I don't know, take the piss. But I did push a good bit to say, what do you mean? I raised my frequency. What do you mean emotions have a frequency and they vibrate at a frequency? And what do you mean, I believe in quantum physics? Like genuinely, for the love of God,

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  what the fuck do you mean? And I don't think, I don't think that she really knew. And I think this kind of taps into what you're talking about with the, the good, the bad and the ugly of quantum physics, and also maybe even Deepak Chopra, as somebody who, from the outside, might seem

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  willfully negligent, or, or kind of like jovially ignorant, purposefully ignorant, in a way that benefits perhaps himself. But it can start people down a slippery slope toward believing in things that become increasingly and more and more disempowering, and less and less accurate to the world around them. And it can also cause people to do things like abandon their cancer treatment in place of going to do crystal healing and stuff. I'm pretty sure that, wasn't it Steve Jobs, who decided to try and do some very holistic sort of woo things to try and cure his, was

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  it pancreatic cancer, incredibly treatable, 90% recovery rate, had he have just decided to go and get standard treatment from Western medicine. And he went to somewhere in Tibet or India or something and in a cave and had some treatment. And, you know, we lost one of the greatest marketers and product inventors of ever because of that, which shows that it doesn't really matter how smart you are, that these kinds of ideas, I don't know how quantum me, Steve Jobs's worldview was, but that these ideas can take a hold of people. And it is a very slippery slope, you know, that if the thin end of the wedge is just believing in entanglement and two people that love each other have an emotional

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  connection that transcends space, time and physics as we know it. It is just a difference of degree all the way down to, I don't need chemotherapy because I've got some tiger stones at home.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, we like to say, okay, that's innocent, whatever. But I think the, the issue is that, again, people want simple stories, right? And they're, once they have a story that they're comfortable with, that they stick with it. The, as, as scientists, this is just our basic state, you know, we, in order to make progress, you need some, some assumptions, right? But we're always ready to abandon those assumptions when they lead us astray. So if, if you accept some set of assumptions, some story.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  Then you're eventually going to be led down that down the wrong path. If you need to have every new piece of evidence or new piece of information fit within that story. And you know, you extreme examples are like conspiracy theorists, like flat earthers, right? Um, so in order to believe that the the earth is flat and then be told that people live in Australia. In order to make those two things like fit together, right? You have to say that like, we're all actors, right? And, you know, we're in Hollywood and there isn't really a place called Australia.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  I mean, some of us don't even have Australian accents.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  But that that I think is is the problem, right? That I I'm I'm fine with people making assumptions and having simple stories. I I do it all the time, even within a scientific context. But you have to be ready to abandon them when those those analogies, those stories no longer are fit for purpose.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  You had a quote in the book from Quantum Love. And you said, when you use the power of the quantum field, honing your emotions and intentions to create the frequency or vibration of that desire, you will draw the things you want to you.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that doesn't doesn't work like.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck does that mean?

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Uh, that's, yeah, that's an interesting book. I think probably one of the my favorite examples of quantum bullshit, because the person who wrote that book, Dr. Laura Berman, I think she's Oprah's love expert or relationship expert or something. And has a PhD from New York University.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  In what?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Probably sociology. I don't.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  That's right, dude, the pivot, the seamless pivot from sociology into fucking quantum physics is so brazen. I work so hard to gain fucking millimeters every single year in self-confidence. And then there are people that decide to abandon social science and just dip into quantum theory. Like, fair play, you know what I mean? Fair play to it.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Well, I think, yeah, I mean, if if that's allowed, then then I can I can give people relationship advice. Why not?

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

  Damn right.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  But shows she in her book, actually, if you read like the first chapter, it's her explanation of quantum physics, which, you know, reads like something that would be in, you know, Scientific American or some popular science magazine. It's, it's, it's not accurate, but it's no less accurate than, than what you would see from even a science journalist. And then the problems start to arise is when she tries to connect that to her particular area of, of expertise.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, all relationship advice is the same. It's just has different sort of layers of bullshit slapped on it. And she decided, well, you know, there's a, there's a gap.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  Quantum it, make it quantum, quantum love.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  But that, yeah, that, the, then when you make a claim like that one that you just read out, that is a very specific claim, which is, it's cognitively untrue. I didn't mean, I, I don't know. Again, there are all of these cognitive biases that come in, right? So if I say, okay, well, I read the book and I did the sort of exercises that she suggested. And, and then, uh, you know, I played, I played the Lotto and I, I won 20 bucks. So it must've been, it must've been that, right? So there's confirmation bias happening all the time because the other 100 tickets that you played didn't win. Oh, so, yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Again, it's, you know, this is, it's these huge gaps and all of these cognitive biases that people aren't aware of that, that allow these things to thrive.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's also a placebo effect, which is unbelievably strong, right? And I'm kind of torn, and this is more an ethical question, but. The placebo effect, or the expectation effect, as David Robson would call it, which kind of expands it out from taking substances to expectations to that we have around the world, is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology or medicine, right? If you could bottle it, you would have a panacea. And, you know, they've shown that studies where people take sugar pills, that they've been told are sugar pills, have better outcomes than people that don't. And they've been told that it's a fucking placebo.

• 39:35Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, I disregard the expectation effect as little as I can. I think that it is very, very useful. But the mechanism that this thing is working on is not what's being claimed. The outcome can be something which is positive in the direction of what you wanted to occur, but the mechanism that you said it operated on is not accurate. And is conning people, or duping people, or lying to people, or convincing them that a particular thing works, worth the outcome? Because the only way that that outcome can be achieved is by getting them to believe it, which means that you need to give them a sufficiently convincing lie?

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure. And I'm definitely not sure when there is a slippery slope down toward believing things which stop you gaining some of the benefits of expectation effect and actually start causing you to believe a whole host of other silly woo.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. I guess the issue, I think, is that there's a huge gray area, right? There is no truth, right? We have, we have models of reality. We have these, these simple stories that tell cause and effect relationships, of chains of events, but these, but these aren't true in any universal sense of, of the word. There is no universal truth. There, there's a big gray area. And when you think about it that way, you can start to see, okay, well, there, there are things that are more truthy and things that, that are clearly untrue. But even our best theories.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Are are just useful theories. They're they're not true theories. So our understanding of how the placebo effect works probably has something to do with with, you know, human psychology and potentially we can get down to, you know, chemical, yeah, chemicals that that are being passed around within our body. And at some point, you can say, well, you know, those chemicals are made of molecules which are made of atoms. So, you know, it's all, yeah, at some point, it's all can be understood as being based on quantum physics. But I think you have to have these different layers of explanation

• 42:01Speaker 00

  and accept that at at at any point, none of them are true in any objective sense of the word. They're useful. So I think we should accept these lies if they if they give give us mileage. But as soon as they stop giving us a return for believing it, then we should abandon it. So if you want to say, well, you know, this placebo effect works because, you know, there's some some quantum interactions that are happening in the brain. And if you think the right way, you can make those align. And that achieves the outcome that you want.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  The person gets gets better. That's great. But maybe maybe everything should just have an implicit disclaimer, like, your mileage may vary. If you if you use this model to do something else, it probably won't work.

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  The problem that you have there is that stopping people at the bounds of this is what it's good for and it's not good for much else, or it's good for a small number of things, isn't the way that the human brains work, you know, if we if we find success and and win 20 quid because we did our right energy crystal healing and tapped into the quantum realm. I mean, that's going to fix everything, like my chronic flatulence is fixed by it, my erectile dysfunction is fixed by it, like everything, do you know what I mean? Moving on to another very common question around quantum physics, uncertainty, the uncertainty principle, what are people getting wrong about Schrödinger and his cat

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  and and uncertainty and all the rest of it?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this one's, I would say, is one of the probably more mild ones. So nobody's, it's such an abstract concept that I don't think it's made its way into into these other, these other places.

• 44:00Chris Williamson?

  No one's found a way to monetize it yet, is what you're saying, Chris.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So uncertainty, it's kind of the hallmark of quantum physics. So and there's this famous story that how it was discovered by Werner Heisenberg, who had hay fever. So he secluded himself on this island. And it came to him in like in a dream or something like that. He woke up one morning and had to write something down. And, you know, it wasn't like, oh, he just, you know, wrote it down on a stone tablet and then brought it back to Copenhagen. It was more, you know, he had this idea, scribbled it down, then he developed it over, over, you know, probably weeks to months. And it was probably some mess when it started, but eventually,

• 44:45Speaker 00

  you know, we retell the story as it was like this eureka moment where he basically had this idea of trying to measure the property of something. So there's this idea of Heisenberg's microscope. So if you know how a microscope works, a light microscope, you shine light on something, light bounces off of it and then, you know, gets magnified and enters your eye. Then he thought, well, what if the thing I was trying to to look at with the microscope was a single, a single atom or a single electron, fundamental subatomic particle? Well, when I shine light on it, which is fundamentally other particles, it's

• 45:30Speaker 00

  like two billiard balls hitting each other. So just the simple fact of trying to measure something alters it in some way. So if I shine the light on the electron,

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's gonna bounce off and then come and hit my eye and then I can infer something about where it was and other properties of it. But now I've imparted something onto that electron and it's gonna take off in some other direction, some random direction that I don't know. So that, so his notion was you can't simultaneously know where something is and how fast and where it's going at the same time. You can choose to measure one property, but you can't obtain everything there is to know about both properties. Nowadays, we understand the concept a bit more subtly. The, the real crux of the issue is that these properties aren't even defined.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Like, it, it, it doesn't make sense to say that there is something pre-existing in the world. And our job as observers is to go and figure out what those properties were, that were there regardless of whether we chose to go and measure them or not. So you can choose to measure by setting up some apparatus to measure position of, of something, find out where it is. But by doing so, by arranging that apparatus, you've caused something else about it to be undefined. So there isn't some set, a pre-existing set of properties in the world. Now, this gets sort of caricatured as, um, yeah, you, when you measure something, you affect it. And so you see this a lot in popular culture.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Um, there, there's another related effect in psychology called the Hawthorne effect or the observer effect, uh, which is like if I prime someone before I ask them questions, then the responses will be different than had I not primed them. So if, uh, if, like, when you do these psychological studies, like, if you know the context of the study, then you're not going to act in a natural way, right? So this is basically why you should take every psychological study with a grain of salt, because You know, people aren't going to act naturally when they're set in a, in a white room with one chair and asked to do a task, right? That's not their natural state. They know they're being observed, so they're going to behave, behave differently.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  And this sounds similar, like it has, uses a similar set of words and a similar set of concepts, but it's unrelated. Like the, the effect in psychology has nothing to do with, with the effect in quantum physics. They just seem similar.

• 48:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there is a associated phenomenon that people talk about a lot, I guess, which is quantum entanglement. The ability of something to travel faster than the speed of light. And then this kind of gets stretched out to talk about connection to the cosmos. Because we're becoming quantum entangled with somebody else through love and spiritual connection and stuff like that. What is and is not bullshit about quantum entanglement?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a tough one because it's probably the most abstract and concept in quantum physics. At, at its basis, if you try to understand quantum physics from the point of view of information, maybe more of an engineering point of view, then a lot of these things become clearer. Again, the, the issue in quantum physics is that it, at, at the same time, it tells us that there, there is no fundamental reality. There is no thing out there that's independent of us, waiting for us to come and observe it. But in order to make progress as humans with our limited, you know, mental capabilities,

• 49:25Speaker 00

  we have to create these sort of concrete stories of reality. But, you know, as soon as you do that, you've violated the one principle of quantum physics. So we, we do this as physicists as well, because, you know, it's difficult to carry around all of these abstract conceptual concepts. It's much easier to just have some concrete physical model in mind and then apply our notions to that. So with entanglement, you know, the basic idea is, say you have two, two particles and you interact them in some way and then you separate them. And if you've done it in a, in a clever way, then they, the state of those particles is,

• 50:09Speaker 00

  is some special state that we call entangled. And And what that means is if I measure a property of one and I get some outcome which is random, I'll I'll get the same outcome on on the other one. And it seems like because I can choose which measurement to do on one side, that I have somehow influenced the other one. And you'll see this in repeated by scientists and, you know, in science magazines. And there was a recent article even in the New York Times that quoted a scientist that said exactly this. Entanglement is when things, particles are separated and doing one thing in instantaneously affects the other one. But that's not at all what what happens.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  This is, this is, you know, the, all of these problems that we've been talking about, repeated but by scientists. Once you've committed to this story of there's physical things in the world. And and then you have this other, this other piece of information, oh, that, you know, they seem to be correlated in every possible way I can choose. Then you're forced to say something instantaneous hap- happened. But that's just not true. There's, there's no, there's no influence, there's no information, nothing is traveling faster than light. Now, everything is connected, right? So there, gravity is is a simple example, right? Um, the gravity has no, no bound, right?

• 51:38Speaker 00

  It, it, the force of gravity drops off the further two objects get to move away from each other. But there is a force of gravity between you and the moon and you and the sun and you and all of the planets and all of the stars, right? It's just imperceptibly small. And that, but that, that, the connection, say, it's between those two is mediated by, you know, Einstein's field.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  But it can't travel faster than light. So there's no sense in which those things can influence me on any time scale that's relevant to me. I can shoot a laser and, you know, it, it, it, it, it will take a few seconds to, to hit the moon a- and back. And if I go further and further away, it just, it just takes longer. So yes, you know, in some real technical sense, everything in the universe is connected. And probably everything has some small amount of entanglement if you try to model it with quantum physics. But that doesn't actually help you do anything,

• 52:48Speaker 00

  anything that was, is relevant on human scales, but in time or in space.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  How much truth is there in people talking about uh, using quantum entanglement to be able to communicate in the future across galaxies? Well, we could use, we could entangle these two things and then we'll spread them apart. And then that means that we can communicate. Is there a future in which you think that could happen?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  No, you, I mean, we're always limited by, by the speed of light. So you, if I, if I take, if I entangle two particles, take one to Alpha Centauri or, or something. And then, you know, I've done it in a very clever way. You saw all of our advanced engineering, future technology, whatever. What it means is that they're just correlated, right? It's like photocopying a book, right? Uh, but not knowing what's in it. And you separate those two books. What, what do you know? You know that when you, when those books are opened, they're going to have the same words in them.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  But you, you, you know, you can't use that to communicate faster than light. In order to do anything with it, some, some more communication would, would happen. Now, the correlation is useful. You, you can use these correlations and in some sense. There's a, there's, everything about our, our experience is ultimately about correlations. Like this conversation deals with correlations, like we, we have a correlated dictionary of English, right? So that when I speak these words, they have a meaning to you because there's this prior correlation

• 54:38Speaker 00

  that has been set up. But just because that correlation was there, doesn't mean we could have said everything that needed to be said without actually having the conversation, right? So that everything will be limited by the speed of light and entanglement is just a new kind of correlation that we can, we can create in the world and it can allow us to do things more efficiently, but ultimately, nothing, nothing miraculous.

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  Any sense, any sense that two humans can become entangled together?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Hmm, no. So the, the quantum, I think, the way I like to think about quantum physics is it's a theory about isolation. So when you have an object and you completely isolate it from its environment, then if you use anything but quantum physics to describe that object, and when I say describe, I mean make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that you might do, then you'll be wrong. You need to use quantum physics to, to describe that object if it's isolated from its environment. Now, if you think about, okay, well, you know, the atoms in my body aren't isolated, you know, why can I stick it in an MRI machine

• 55:54Speaker 00

  or something and quantum physics somehow is the, is what's powering that technology? It's that if you, if you've heard anything about atoms, it's that they are mostly empty space. So maybe you've heard this idea that the chair you're sitting on is mostly empty space and when you sit on the chair, you're not even touching the chair. There's, you know, an enormous amount of space, at least on, you know, a small enough scale between you and the chair. Nothing ever touches, right? And, and the parts of the atoms, uh, there's, you know, vast orders of magnitude and scale between the size of the parts of the atoms like protons, neutrons and electrons and the actual space between them. So basically,

• 56:39Speaker 00

  everything is, everything is empty space.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  So the, uh, that's why quantum physics is useful to describe those things. Because in some sense, they're isolated from the other things around them. Now, if you want to have something as big as a human body to be usefully explained by quantum physics, you would have to isolate it. And, well, that means no, no light, no air. Uh, and it would cease to be a human pretty quickly. Uh, so, yeah, you could, you could get a large, massive object, or two of them,

• 57:22Speaker 00

  and, and have them entangled, but it would be nearly impossible to isolate them from their environment. And that's the real issue. Like, the bigger the object is, the more ways it can interact with stuff around it. And so you have to remove all of those possible ways in order for it to start to behave in a way that's different from our everyday, our everyday experience with the world. And I think, you know, the, the largest thing that we could probably get to be entangled might be like a, a future computer chip, right? That would, is, would be the basis of quantum computing technology. But even then, the, the apparatus that you have to stick around it

• 58:05Speaker 00

  in order to isolate it from its environment would be huge. So the places that they put these things, so if you've ever seen a picture of a quantum computer, it looks like, uh, it, I mean, it looks like a giant tube, right? Uh, an enormous sort of cylindrical that. And what that is, is a dilution refrigerator. And liquid helium is used to cool the inside of that thing down to a thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, which is, which is that, you know, thousands of times colder than even outer space. So we've created the most extreme environment in the entire universe here on Earth, just so that we can... You know, watch, watch an atom do something.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned quantum computing. You also do a ton of stuff to do with computer science. We're supposedly on the cusp of a quantum computing age. And if we get there, it's going to break all of the algorithms. Because everything that we've used to do credentials and security for cryptography is going to be out the window. What can and can't quantum computing do?

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Well, quantum, we don't know. I mean, the, a great quote from, I think, like the late 1940s from the then CTO of IBM was there'll never be a market in the world for more than six computers. So clearly, you know, even someone of that caliber can't make accurate predictions about future technology.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  So, I mean, I can say a few things, but the disclaimer is, I don't know, and nobody knows what, what, what this will be useful for. You know, the first application of a transistor was for an hearing aid, right? And now we carry around a billion of them in our pocket.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  The, we have algorithms. So these are like, you know, recipes. If you can, if you can transform this, this data into this data, then you can, you can solve some problem. One of them is factoring numbers. And this is what you'd have to do to break current encryption systems that, that secure the internet.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  But I don't think that would be a big problem for when, when quantum computing happens. And we can already see certain people with, with really important secrets, like state governments and large corporations that are moving to what's called post quantum cryptography, different encryption schemes that quantum computers, we think, won't be able to break. So if you say, you have to, you have to ask yourself, well, how, you know, how important is my secret? And important is, is how long do I need to keep it? Right? So you can't keep a secret forever. Maybe you need to keep it for 50 years. And then if you say, Well, if someone learned this in fifty years' time, that would be bad.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And then you say, well, quantum computers might be around in fifty years, then I should probably switch. But if you're like, you know, I just, I, you know, I don't care if people know this next year.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  If someone leaks my nudes in twenty years' time, that's totally.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't care. Yeah. So you, you don't, you don't have to worry right now. You can, you can keep using.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  iCloud or whatever. Right.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fine. But i- if you think that's, that's really important, maybe you, maybe you want to switch or, um, you know, send some customer feedback to, to Apple, asking them to switch. The, but that's, so, yeah, you know, we, we say quantum computers will break the internet, but probably not. Most likely not. People will, you know, people are in the process of switching to post quantum cryptography. And when quantum computers become ubiquitous, then we just will use something different. The, the other thing, I think, the, kind of the thing that you should keep in mind, you know, the back of your mind when you think about future technology is that, um, it, it happens slowly, right? Like, you know, even think about probably the most transformative,

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  uh, example would be something like ChatGPT, where it had the fastest adoption of, of any technology. Yet, it doesn't, it hasn't broken the way the world works, right? Like, we, we still basically interact and engage with the world the same way we did before. And the, the same will be true of quantum technology. It will happen over a longer time scale. But it won't be like, okay, one day, you just throw out your old computer, and now you have a quantum computer in your house. Now it'd be, it'll be slowly integrated. And the end user won't have a different experience because that would be terrible, right?

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  You, at the end of the day, it's all driven by, uh, the economy and the, the customers, right? And what they want and what, what they'll buy. You know, Henry Ford could crawl out of the grave and step into a Tesla and happily drive it away. The interface hasn't changed, even though the entire technology behind it is different. So with quantum computers, you know, if you're just an average consumer and you're like, oh, what I care about is, you know, can, will I still be able to use TikTok? Then, yeah, of course, right? Because we wouldn't develop technology that, you know, can't, can't be used in the exact same way and, and sold to the same set of people.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  The, the other, like, promising future prospects of quantum technology include things, uh, like quantum simulations. And that sounds like just more complicated and, and, uh, annoyingly complex, but it, it's incredibly important. So when we design new materials, when we design new, when we design new drugs and when we want to understand how things are made, we, we want to understand them at the deepest and most fundamental level possible. So that, that is basically at the level of atoms. Like, if I could understand, uh, what sort of atoms I need to put together to make a

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  super strong material, or to make, uh, a, a material that can conduct electricity without dissipation or resistance, then, then I could, you know, there's no, there's no limit to the imagination at that point, right? Like, just, yeah, for example, imagine you could make a, uh, a material called a superconductor that works, uh, at, at high temperatures. And so these are the things that make like levitating trains and, and, I don't know, maybe you've seen the levitating frog on YouTube. If you could create a material that can conduct electricity with, with absolutely no resistance, then you wouldn't have to build, you know, coal-fired smoke plants right next to cities, right?

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  You could just throw a whole bunch of solar panels out in the middle of the desert and the entire world would have free electricity. Why can't we do that? Well, because it's nearly impossible for us to simulate using conventional technology. What happens when we put even just a few atoms together? But the number of degrees of freedom and the amount of data that we'd have to track is is just impossible for even today's supercomputing clusters. Which, you know, still attempt to do this, like, you know, a huge fraction of the world's energy budget is just simulating interactions so that we can make better fertilizer, right?

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  If you could create a computer that just natively does this without having to to attempt to encode all of this information in a in a really inefficient way, which is what we seem to have to do with conventional computers, then, yeah, then then all you have all of these sort of dream applications. But we don't know exactly how we would do that with a quantum computer. We have, you know, the basic fundamental idea and some simple examples and some understanding of what it would be, what would be required. But, you know, if someone dropped a quantum computer on my lap, it's not like I would be able to get going on this right away. So the the progress again will be slow.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  We'll see, we'll see incremental improvements. Uh, but, you know, maybe thirty years down the line, it'll, and if you look back and say, okay, compared now to thirty years ago, you'll say it's a huge, you know, it's an enormous change.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  What about many worlds? Are we part of a multiverse? Is the fact that I decided to say many worlds instead of multiple worlds meant that we've branched off into a different universe as well now?

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  So quantum, this sort of quantum metaphysics, quantum philosophy, um, it's an interesting place. It's a very interesting place because it's like, it's like Wu, but.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  But it's people with PhDs. So it's kind of like, it's a really, it's a really strange thing. So I think it just goes to show that, yeah, there's no matter how much you learn, no matter how educated you are, you can still just get attached to, to things that are, to me, comically, comically miraculous. So there's no, it's an interpretation of, of quantum physics. So you have this idea of superposition and then the cartoon explanation is like, things can be in two, two states at once. But when you go to measure them, only one, one of them occurs. So you mentioned earlier Schrodinger's cat.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  So that's like a famous example of you put the cat, you put a cat in a box and inside the box, there's a vial of poison and a hammer which breaks the vial. But the hammer is, will only fall if some quantum event happens. So you arrange for that event to be in superposition. You know, an atom decayed or not decayed at the same time. So that means the hammer has broken the vial or not broken the vial at the same time, which means the cat is alive and dead at the same time. But you, whenever you, you attempted to perform this thought experiment and open the box, you'd either find an alive cat or a dead cat. Okay, so then the many worlds interpretation says, well,

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  uh, there's a multiverse and in one branch of the multiverse, there's an alive cat and that one branch, there's, there's a dead cat. And you, as an observer, are on one of these branches. It's not testable. And it, it's not, it doesn't simplify anything. I mean, I think for most people, it's, it's alluring because it gives you this.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it gives you this sense that, uh, that, you know, that, that you could have, you could have done things differently or that there, um, you know, there, there are better, better options that, that you could take, right? There's another, there's another version of me that, you know, it was more successful or didn't, didn't have health problems. And I think this idea that, you know, you could go back and change things. Uh, it's just something that people kind of, yeah, people like, but it's, there's no, it's not, it's not based on, uh, on anything that's measurable. Like you can't test, test the many worlds hypothesis.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  It removes the pressure of having to make decisions as well. Because if the decision that you make now, whether it be going left or going right, is just one of a number and it, it, it almost creates this, uh, like liminal excuse, this kind of get out of jail free card that you have, uh, which I understand, you know, it's psychologically comforting to not be beholden to being locked into the future by whatever decisions you make now. And I understand, you know, there's parts of me that really understands, uh, is it agoraphobia? That's why people sometimes don't like to leave the house, I think. Uh, I, I kind of get that. I almost get the, you know,

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  or, or the, the, um, concern around germs and stuff like that. Like there's just so many things that could happen that are outside of my control. And, and if I don't make any sort of decision or commitment, or if I try and change things as little as possible, I try and make as few changes as possible to whatever state I'm in now, that would suggest that I'm going to stay safe moving forward. It, it's a, a fundamental fear of the unknown, the unexpected, the uncertain, the future. I understand, I understand that, why that's psychologically disquieting. Um, but again, with the many worlds thing, if it's, if the quantum physicist says it's untestable and therefore difficult for us to work out whether or not it's true.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, you know, you can allow people to indulge in it as a sort of psychologically comforting fantasy.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  So the person who developed it, his name is Hugh Everett III, which is the worst.

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  Three generations of Hughes.

• 1:11:30Speaker 00

  He had a terrible life. People didn't take his ideas seriously. And he, he had this, he also developed this notion of quantum suicide, which was basically that there is, you know, like, think about quantum Russian roulette, right? You know, in six of the world, there's six worlds, and only one of which I'm dead in, right? And in five of which I live. So, you know, why not play the game? Because I'll survive in one of them. So if you,

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  you know, imagine this, this sort of thought experiment, right? Like someone says, I flip a coin, heads, I give you a million dollars, tails, you die. Then you should play, you should, if you believe the many worlds, you should play the game, right? Because in one of the worlds, you're a million dollars richer. And in the other one, you don't care. So I think it sounds innocuous, but, you know, I think if you really took it to its logical conclusion, you'd be forced to, to also believe some pretty ridiculous things. And that's, that's basically my problem with it.

• 1:12:44Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you use the term not even wrong.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  Where did that come from?

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  I'd never heard that before. Can you explain what that is for the people that are uninducted?

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I recently was told that it goes back to Pauli, which is a quantum physicist. But there's a book by that title. And it is basically about, well, the book was written about these ideas in theoretical physics that are just not testable, right? So there, you can't even say that they're wrong. So it's it's just a mental masturbation essentially that you you come up with all these ideas and theories and they you know you can say well because they have mathematical symmetry they're beautiful therefore they must be true things like that but you know a practical person would come along and say I can't tell you not to believe that because it's not even testable

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  and you know the the mental state that you've put put yourself in is difficult to get out of so yeah you're it's not even wrong I can't even say it's wrong it's what is it it's nothing

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's um that's maybe one of the most like not kind of patronizing but like good insults or pushbacks that I can think of when someone starts spouting out a lot of horseshit you mentioned previously that you wrote a book in the past that was a love letter to physics and quantum physics and this is your hate mail did I see on your Twitter that you've been receiving genuine hate mail from some people that are a part of the spiritual community that took a little bit of upset at what you've been pushing?

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I slough it off to be honest it's the recommendation I give in the book is to just not engage there's there's no really no no good can come out of it unless you're prepared to put in the time and it takes a lot of time so

• 1:14:41Chris Williamson?

  What have people been accusing you of?

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  Well, it's I mean they they accuse me of everything you can imagine like that I've lost my way I need to find Jesus you know

• 1:14:54Chris Williamson?

  Quantum Jesus

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, like religious stuff to to like they have their pet theory and and they you know they'll accuse me that I don't really understand quantum physics because yeah and then they'll just repeat something that's again not even wrong and it's not even worth it's not even worth my time to engage because it would be like the conversation that you had with with with that woman that they they would just repeat themselves or go in circles

• 1:15:25Chris Williamson?

  That was enjoyable. That conversation I actually took an awful lot away from it. But yeah, man, I think as somebody that is a world-class expert at receiving comments from the internet, my theory is absolutely just engage where you want to and draw the line at that. Like, if you want to find out, I wanted to find out from that girl. And it was a very enjoyable and respectful conversation. And I wanted to find out, what do you mean when you say raise your frequency? What do you mean when you say I believe in quantum physics? What do you mean? What do you mean? That was perfectly enjoyable. It wasn't cantankerous at all or anything else. But the line on the internet is just don't

• 1:16:07Chris Williamson?

  feed the trolls unless you want to, unless you've got some spare food lying around and some spare sanity that you want to throw at them. I have friends, Destiny, this guy, he's a streamer, and he lives, he absolutely breathes for opposition and for antagonism and for debate and stuff like that. And that's his lifeblood. It's like he's a plant and that's the sun. Whereas for me, and perhaps for you too, that's not how I would enjoy spending my Saturday afternoon. So I would choose to do other things. And every time

• 1:16:46Chris Williamson?

  that I see some of my smart friends on the internet getting into spats with people, and I understand in some regards, if you use it to kind of make an example, to signal boost a bad idea and show how easily it can be fixed, that's not necessarily a bad way to do things. But one-on-one in the DMs or in a message thread or a thread on Twitter or whatever, trying to slowly chip away at some person's worldview. It's like, look, I've done the work. I've broadcasted my stuff in a video or in a book or at a presentation or whatever.

• 1:17:26Chris Williamson?

  And if you disagree with that, that's fine. But I don't know what you think my time or your time or anybody else's time is worth, but I can promise you that it is worth way, way more than trying to convince somebody that doesn't like me and doesn't agree with my worldview that they're in the wrong.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Don't, don't feed the trolls. I think it's, it's good advice. It, it will often have the opposite effect than, than you expect.

• 1:17:54Chris Williamson?

  Catalyze, you catalyze the trolls rather than, yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Unless you're prepared to put in the time, like I, you know, if you have a, a family member that believes in some conspiracy, then you, then maybe you want to slowly, you kind of remove that, remove those, those, those beliefs. But it probably takes, you know, the problem is like, it takes orders of magnitude more time to fix than it does to create. It takes, it took me a second to create bullshit on the internet. And, and then the damage is almost irreparable because even if all of the scientists in the world went to, to debunk that, well, I could, I now I could just create 10 more pieces of bullshit in the time it took them to do.

• 1:18:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you, have you heard of Brandolini's Law, which is what you're describing there? Brand, Brandolini's Law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle. It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Chris Williamson?

  There you are. There's a law, there's a law for everything, including the production of bullshit on the internet. Dr. Chris Ferrie, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do and check out some of your work, where should you go?

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  So the website is csfery.com and there you can contact me. You can follow me on, on all the social media platforms, though I tend not to use them very often. But yeah, a bit secret, but you can contact me via my website if you want, or follow me on, apparently you can follow people even on Amazon now. So you can follow me on Amazon.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Chris, I appreciate you. Thank you for today.