Quantum Ontology (WHAT IS REAL?) Encore with Adam Becker

Is anything real? How many universes are there? Is everything a simulation being run by a quantum computer through a wormhole from a future era? Is the answer to everything really ... 42? The affable and charming astrophysicist, author and philosopher of tiny particles Dr. Adam Becker pulls up a seat. And enjoy this encore episode as Alie has an existential crisis or two as they discuss the drama, intellectual battles and drunken debates of science past, and the hope that a new era of thinkers will figure out what exactly is going on in the world. Either way: cut bangs and text your crush.

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

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:45Alie Ward?

  or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at hhm i.org/ologies. Father Ward, you say, there's no way you would need a career coach? You have it all together. That's a lie, and you know it. I actually hired a career coach, and without them, I wouldn't have started ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know where to find a career coach, I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions,

• 1:30Alie Ward?

  sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach, who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right, I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way, and you're maybe stuck in a rut, or you have to make a decision about expansion, or what direction you want to take your company, that's what I did. I went to strawberry.me, and I was like, okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to and what to say no to. And then we're super helpful in helping me streamline, and now I get to sleep more, and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies.

• 2:16Alie Ward?

  That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.

• 2:19Alie Ward?

  Hello, hello. This is 2026 Alley, and I'd like to toss us down a wormhole with one of my favorite episodes. But before we get into it, a little update. This ologist, Dr. Adam Becker, has recently released a new book. It's titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. It's about the ideology of technological salvation, where this religious belief comes from, who's pushing it by pretending it's science instead of religion, and how it's taking over Silicon Valley, and also how it threatens to take over the world. Again, his book More Everything Forever, that's his new one. And he told me by email, "I'm pretty hopeful that we can successfully fight back against this stuff." So you'll hear more about his book, What is Real? But also, just an update, More Everything Forever

• 3:04Alie Ward?

  is now out. Okay, onward.

• 3:06Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's your old internet uncle, Dad Ward Von Podcast, here with another episode of Ologies. Alley Ward, hi. So, do you remember your first real existential crisis? Also, if you clicked on this and don't know jack or shit about quantum physics, you're in the right place. You're in good company. Okay, before we spiral into deep, deep space and dark matter, let's shine a little light on some business. So first off, thank you to everyone on Patreon.com/ologies for supporting the show, sending in your questions. Thanks to everyone strutting about on Planet Earth in Ologies merch from OlogiesMerch.com.

• 3:43Alie Ward?

  And thank you to everyone who leaves reviews, which help the show so much. And here is a very fresh 2026 one from GlowingJellyBean555, who wrote, "I love this podcast so much, and it's a phenomenal way to stay lighthearted and informed on all sorts of things through trying times." Glowing Jellybean, thanks for the glowing review. We do our best.

• 4:02Alie Ward?

  Okay, quantum ontology. So many syllables. What do they mean? Quantum, in terms of physics, deals with matter and energy at its most fundamental level. And quantum comes from the Latin, meaning how much, how far, how great an extent. Already so many questions just to the definition of this. Also, ontology comes from the root ont, meaning being, and it is the branch of metaphysics. Dealing with the nature of being. So quantum ontology, matter, what the hell is it? What are we made of? What is real? Just tuck a bib under your brain, kiddos, because this week's episode is just a hearty, it's a feast of information. It's dense. It's like a bucket of mashed potatoes.

• 4:46Alie Ward?

  And it's filling, like drinking a pint of gravy. It's going to make you question everything about life itself. What is reality? What exists? Why are we here? But first, will we cover everything about this topic? Hell, no. Will we have to leave out a bunch? Hell, yes. Consider this like a warm welcome and entree into some of the basic concepts about the hiccups in observing and understanding existence. So this ologist has a BA in philosophy and in physics from Cornell and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan, is a celebrated science writer and the author of the new book, What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, which, by the way, the Wall Street Journal calls fascinating.

• 5:30Alie Ward?

  The New York Times calls a thorough illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science. Splendid, says the Washington Post. Science Magazine calls it riveting. So the book, it's good. I met this ologist about four years ago at SciCom camp and he handed me his business card, which read freelance astrophysicist. I was like, I like this guy. And then the next year, he mentioned he was pitching a book. And then the following year, he said he had a book deal and was writing it. And now, here we are. His book, it recounts a lot of the drama in the quantum physics worlds. Boy, howdy, is there some. Not only are you going to walk away with an exciting overview

• 6:10Alie Ward?

  of what the hell the universe may be all about, but you'll also hear about some academic infighting and why it's exciting that there are so many mysteries in the universe. So in between seminars and panels at SciCom camp, we pulled up a couch, we got to talking. So settle in for philosophical physics fun times wherein we discuss what matter is made of and how many universes there could be and why what we think we know just does not add up. How someone could say you're wrong, but maybe you're righter than everyone realizes. And also how an inbox can be a lot like a crackpot. And how to tackle your dreams when they seem too big to fathom.

• 6:51Alie Ward?

  And Einstein and string theory and gravity and tunneling and wormholes and cats and more with astrophysicist, author and quantum ontologist, Dr. Adam Becker.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Well, that would be fun.

• 7:23Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Okay. So is this good?

• 7:25Alie Ward?

  Yeah, let me check your levels.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Okay. Hi, how's this?

• 7:28Alie Ward?

  It's great. You have a good radio voice. Let's go back in time.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:31Alie Ward?

  If you will.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 7:32Alie Ward?

  Would it be a wormhole that I could go back in time to ask you about your childhood?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  I guess you could. Sure. Why not?

• 7:38Alie Ward?

  Would a wormhole do it? Or is it a different type of tunnel into time?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I mean, there's no, there's no known way that would definitely work to go back in time. But wormholes are one of the, you know, better theories about how you could maybe do it.

• 7:53Alie Ward?

  Okay, so let's go through a wormhole.

• 7:58Alie Ward?

  Now, going back, did you always like physics, astrophysics? How do you, how does someone decide that they're into something so complex?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. That's a good question. So, yeah, see, I didn't think that I was going to sit on a couch and talk about my childhood. But here we are. Yeah, you, you trapped me. Yeah. So when I was a really little kid, like a lot of other kids, I wanted to be a paleontologist because dinosaurs are awesome.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  And then I discovered space and decided, no, no, space is more awesome. And so I got really into space and astronomy and astrophysics and then sort of slowly slid from astrophysics just to physics. And so by the time I was in high school, I thought, okay, yeah, I think physics is the direction I want to go in. This seems really interesting. And I had read a lot of pop physics books and they said some confusing things. And in particular, they talked about two theories that said really wild and strange things about the world. One of them was Einstein's relativity and the other one was quantum physics.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  And, you know, really, really weird things in both of those theories, but turns out relativity doesn't require more than like early high school math. Okay. You don't need calculus. You don't even need precalculus, like it's just geometry and algebra. And so I learned relativity in high school and I thought, oh, all that weird stuff seems a lot less weird now. I bet when I get to college and I learn quantum physics, that's going to seem less weird too. That is not what happened. Oh, no. Yeah, no. So instead I got to college and I started learning quantum physics and it didn't get better, it got worse. Oh, no. And so I was, I was in this class where the professor was talking about one of the weird things in quantum physics.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  I don't remember exactly what, because it was a long time ago, but, you know, he was saying something about how when you're not looking at things, you can't talk about what's going on, but then when you look, things change. And I probably asked something like, okay, but what do you mean by looking? What, what does that mean? And we kind of got into it and I don't remember exactly how the fight went down, but I just remember that at the end, he said, in, in this like really haughty disdainful voice, he said, "Well, if that's the kind of question that you're interested in, then why don't you go to the philosophy department?"

• 10:30Alie Ward?

  Burn.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, but joke was on him. I'd already gone to the philosophy department and cited double major in physics and philosophy.

• 10:39Alie Ward?

  Oh, God.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  A lot of that was trying to wrap my head around like, what the heck is going on in quantum physics? Because like, this is, this is a really, it's a really weird area, but it's also supposed to be this really fundamental theory about, you know, the fundamental constituents of the world, right? Like, the tiniest things, the, the, the things that, the things that make us up are made of, right? Like, subatomic particles. And yet, it wasn't at all clear what was going on. And so I started digging into that. And the more I dug into it, the weirder it got. And I just did that more and more. And eventually thought, you know, I, I want to write a book about this, because this is just so strange. And I don't understand why this isn't more widely known.

• 11:22Alie Ward?

  Am I gonna, am I gonna feel like I'm on mushrooms?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  I mean, look at the cover of my book. It says, What is Real? And it's got like, wavy rainbow lines. Yeah. So yeah, the answer is probably yes.

• 11:33Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 11:36Alie Ward?

  Well, let's go back first and define, what is quantum ontology?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, quantum, I mean, quantum physics is the physics of the ultra tiny, except that we think that ultra tiny things make up the world around us. So although it's the physics of the ultra tiny, there's also reason to think it's, it's just the physics of everything. Ontology is the study of what there is, of what stuff is in the world. So quantum ontology is, is the study of, okay, what does quantum physics tell us is in the world? Or, you know, the title of my book, right? What is Real? And it is not clear what quantum physics tells us about the world. It's just not clear at all, even though it's not a new theory. It's been around for almost 100 years.

• 12:21Alie Ward?

  Okay. Well, let's start with the theory of relativity, which someone with high school math could understand.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 12:27Alie Ward?

  Couldn't, can you give that to me in like, a nutshell?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 12:32Alie Ward?

  He sounds unsure, but that's okay.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Right. So, so here's one way of looking at what the theory of relativity tells us. So we sort of think, from our everyday lives, that

• 12:46Speaker 02

  If I'm standing still, or if I'm in a car going at like 20 miles an hour, there are some things that just don't change between those two situations. Like, how fast my watch runs shouldn't change between those two situations. Or how far it is between my house and the movie theater down the street. That shouldn't change either.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  No, it's not.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  It turns out, though, that these things that we think of as not changing between those two situations, we call those things invariant because they don't vary. The invariance between those two situations aren't what we think they are.

• 13:22Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  It turns out that actually, the rate that my watch runs at does change between those two situations. And the distance between my apartment and the movie theater down the street does change. There are things that don't change, but those things are not distances or time. They're a combination of space and time, spacetime.

• 13:44Alie Ward?

  Okay, is time the fourth dimension?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, in relativity it is.

• 13:48Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:49Alie Ward?

  And now, quantum.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:51Alie Ward?

  Theory.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, you want me to do the same thing for quantum theory?

• 13:55Alie Ward?

  Just in a nutshell. Just let us know what we're working with.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, quantum theory says that there is something very, very unusual going on in the world of the very tiny.

• 14:10Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yes. And we don't know what that is.

• 14:14Alie Ward?

  What's happening now? Is this a lot about dark matter? And it doesn't make sense that there's so much space between atoms. Holy shit, I just realized writing this, that Adam's name is Adam. Adam, what is life? Also, real quick, the matter all around you, the stuff that makes up everything you see and touch and smell and lick, all that matter in the universe is 5% of what exists. And according to NASA, dark matter is something that we can calculate, but we can't see or detect. And it interacts with gravity, but it doesn't emit or reflect light, hence it's dark. And it makes up about 27% of the universe. Something called dark energy makes up 68% of the universe.

• 14:56Alie Ward?

  And we know it's strong, and it's getting stronger, but we don't get what it is. So, just know, the wisest minds alive don't know shit. And it frustrates them enough to keep getting out of bed every morning just to figure it out.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Dark matter, sure, we don't really know what's going on there. We know it's around, but we don't know what it's made of. There is a lot of empty space inside of atoms, but that's not, that's not really what's going on here either. That's not why we don't understand this. What's going on instead is it is hard to understand the relationship between the mathematics of quantum physics and the world that we live in. Because the math works really well. We can use it to predict and explain all kinds of things. But it also doesn't really look like the world around us. And that's fine. You know, things can be weird. It's a big world. There's plenty of room for weirdness.

• 15:52Alie Ward?

  You're weird.

• 15:53Alie Ward?

  Thank you.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  But it's, it's not, it, it, there should be a story, even if it's a weird story, that quantum physics tells us about the world. And it needs to be a story that, that makes internal sense, even if it's a really, really weird story.

• 16:09Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Right? There's a difference between being bizarre and being internally contradictory, right?

• 16:15Alie Ward?

  So what he's saying is that the universe, kind of like a huge restaurant tab at a friend's birthday dinner, where no one has accounted for tax or tip, are there three beverages? Things just don't add up and everyone is testy about it.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  The weird thing is that the standard way of answering questions like, what does quantum physics tell us about the world around us is to say, shut up, that's a stupid question. There's actually a saying in physics to summarize this attitude, shut up and calculate.

• 16:48Alie Ward?

  Oh, boy.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Because, no, no, no one, that, that was originally coined by the physicist David Merman as, as like a pejorative, like he was describing an attitude that other people have.

• 17:00Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  He, no one actually should say that in earnest.

• 17:04Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  But some people do. And yeah, it's, it's completely

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Fucking ridiculous.

• 17:12Alie Ward?

  Well, where are these logic gaps? Like, I know that it's so bizarre, and at least if you could understand the bizarreness. But what is it that's so contradictory? Like, what do we think, what don't we get?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so there's this, there's this thing in quantum physics, this sort of fundamental role that the idea of measurement plays. Say that I want to describe, I'm holding a pen. Say I want to describe where this pen is, you know, or where I'm going to find this pen using the physics that we had before quantum physics, like Isaac Newton's physics.

• 17:44Alie Ward?

  Okay, quick aside, Newtonian physics is also called classical mechanics, and it deals with objects that aren't at a tiny, tiny scale, and how they move and rest and such. So apples falling on our heads, tossing your socks in the hamper from across the room, the inertia that causes you to spill hot tea on your crotch in the car. All of those things exist in space and behave in predictable ways.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I can do that with three numbers. I can say, okay, this pen is this height above the ground, and it's this far off to the right, and it's this far in front of me. That's three numbers. That's all I need. If I want to take all the information I have about where I'm going to find an electron or some subatomic particle in quantum physics, it's not going to require three numbers. It's going to require an infinity of numbers scattered across all of space. And, and this set of numbers is called a wave function.

• 18:37Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  And as the name implies, it kind of waves. It undulates smoothly, right? And that, that wavy motion is described by this very nice, pretty equation called the Schrodinger equation.

• 18:49Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  And the Schrodinger equation kind of smells like a law of physics.

• 18:53Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  It looks like a good candidate for a fundamental law of physics. And it says that wave functions, you know, they wave. They, they move smoothly, and they, they move in a completely determined fashion. There's nothing random or probabilistic about it.

• 19:10Alie Ward?

  Okay, so when we zoom all the way into an atom, or the elements that make up an atom, instead of having three dimensions, X, Y, Z, we have an infinity of numbers to describe its location, and those infinity of numbers make up a wave. Got it? Look, we understand. Everything makes sense. We're pretty much quantum physicists now, all of us. Just kidding, but we can still celebrate it.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  But the standard way of using quantum physics says, okay, wave functions obey the Schrodinger equation, except when you look, when you actually look for the electron, the Schrodinger equation is temporarily suspended, at which point this entire other law of physics that is completely different and contradictory comes in. It's called the Born Rule. This is Jason Bourne.

• 19:57Alie Ward?

  Okay, it's actually named for German mathematician and physicist Max Born, who helped develop quantum mechanics and was nominated for a Nobel Prize by Einstein himself. But most importantly, Max Born is the grandpa of Greece's Olivia Newton-John. When I read that, I had chills, like multiplying. But yeah, the Born Rule measures probability of a particle's position, and it came on the quantum scene in 1926.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And that says, oh yeah, that wave function that moves smoothly, it stops moving smoothly, it goes to zero everywhere except in the spot where you found the electron.

• 20:33Alie Ward?

  What?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so this, this leads to a couple of questions. First of all, that's weird.

• 20:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Why does that happen?

• 20:39Alie Ward?

  I don't know.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Weirdness, though, is fine. The real problem, the contradiction, right? The gap in logic is, okay, we have these two rules. They're not the same rule. When do we apply one and when do we apply the other?

• 20:51Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Because we need to know that, because they're not the same rule. The usual answer is, oh, we use the Schrodinger equation when we're not looking, when we're not making the measurement, and we use the Born Rule when we do. The problem is that the idea of measurement is really, really fucking vague.

• 21:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Like, is it when I make a measurement? Does quantum mechanics only apply to me, Adam Becker? Like, that, that, that can't be right, right? Does it work when a dog looks at an electron?

• 21:19Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Right? Or, or, or, you know, do you need to be, like, better qualified?

• 21:23Alie Ward?

  This is bananas.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  It's completely nuts. And, and the other thing is, like I said, electrons aren't the only things that have wave functions. This pen has a wave function. You have a wave function. I have a wave function. The universe has a wave function.

• 21:42Alie Ward?

  Quantum ontology, it's like the Oprah of the physics world.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Was the wave function of the universe just waiting for billions and billions of years for someone to come along and, and, and suddenly collapse it and, you know, have the Schrodinger equation not apply? Like, it's just not clear when one equation applies and when another applies. There are people who would say that I am wrong about that. These are the same people who tell you to shut up and calculate. If you ask them, if you pin them down and try to ask them, "Okay, fine, hot shot, when do you use one and when do you use the other?" They're going to give you something that's either internally contradictory, or that contradicts the idea that quantum physics is more fundamental than Newton's physics.

• 22:26Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:27Alie Ward?

  And now, oivey.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:30Alie Ward?

  There's a lot going on there.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  There is a lot going on.

• 22:31Alie Ward?

  And so, the notion of, do you remember Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Of course I remember Snuffleupagus.

• 22:38Alie Ward?

  Is there a Snuffleupagus rule?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  He's only there when people who aren't Big Bird aren't looking?

• 22:47Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, man. Big Bird is definitely not the, the, the prime observer of quantum mechanics. I can tell you that right now. Carol Spiny does not have, like, special quantum powers.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  Big Bird, Big Bird, Big Bird, it's all right, it's all right.

• 23:06Alie Ward?

  No, it's not. Just side note, Carol Spiny is the actor and puppeteer who played Big Bird until his retirement last year. And also, did everyone else know his name? And then he also voiced Oscar the Grouch? Or do astrophysicists just have large brain buckets full of trivia? Where were we? Yes, okay. So the wave function that describes the place of a tiny particle collapses to a point when it's observed. This is wave function collapse. Does observing something make it exist differently?

• 23:36Alie Ward?

  Okay, so then what does that mean for us? Like, if I am a wave function until someone looks at me and then I'm not,

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:46Alie Ward?

  What does that mean for ontology, for the science and the study of being?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:51Alie Ward?

  What is anyone?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it means that there's something we don't understand here. It means that the story is clearly not complete. It means that shutting up and calculating is good practical advice if you want to, you know, calculate stuff, but it means it can't be the real story about the world. Like, it is good to ask these questions because there must be something else going on. So the problem then is, okay, what is that story of the world? And the answer is, we have multiple candidates for a possible story of the world, an interpretation of quantum physics. There are multiple interpretations running around. There isn't a consensus about which one is the right one.

• 24:31Alie Ward?

  Okay, so when it comes to quantum ontology, are we real? What are we? What is reality? How does it work? Why don't things add up between points versus waves? And why can't we detect or describe dark matter or dark energy? Nobody knows. But there have been scratch paper pads and whiteboards, just chock a block, filled with theories. Let's hear a few. Give me some of the top ones, like is multiverse is one?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one of them. That's probably the most popular one other than, you know, the non-answer of shut up, that's a stupid question. So the many worlds interpretation, which was developed by this joker named Hugh Everett III in nineteen, in the mid 1950s, while he was a grad student in physics. He basically got drunk on sherry one night with a couple of other physicists. And, and then like basically developed this interpretation in part to like stick it to the guy he was drunkenly arguing with, who was an assistant of this guy Niels Bohr, who's a big famous physicist.

• 25:35Alie Ward?

  Okay, so Hugh Everett, who as a child wrote a letter to Einstein and got a nice response, and then later in his life, sat in on some Einstein's lectures, ran with his posse. So this Hugh Everett, oh, he loved booze and smoking and quantum theory. And he got his PhD in it, in the quantum theory at least. And Niels Bohr, who, by the by, was a big deal. Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist and one of like the folks who proposed the structure of an atom with the electron spinning around it. And parts of what became known as the Copenhagen interpretation that a particle exists in every position of the wave function until it's observed. Okay, so Everett, he was gently schmammered and arguing with someone from Niels Bohr's lab

• 26:19Alie Ward?

  about Schrodinger's equation, which tries to find the probability of a particle at a certain point surfing that wave function when we look at it. Okay, so they're arguing.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Everett basically said, look, what if it's just all Schrodinger all the time? Like, what if that's the only thing that plays on the quantum physics radio station? It's just 100% Schrodinger. What if that other thing, the Born rule, never comes in? Wave functions never collapse?

• 26:43Alie Ward?

  What does it mean to be wall to wall Schrodinger? Is that like boxed in by Schrodinger? Is a dead cat involved?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Well, to explain that, I need, I need to bring in like the most famous thought experiment in all of quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat.

• 26:56Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Right, so Schrodinger came up with this way before Hugh Everett. He came up with his cat in the 1930s to explain why he thought there was a big problem here. Because Schrodinger and Einstein and a couple of the other founders of quantum physics were really bothered by this problem. It got a special name later on, the measurement problem. They, they were really, really concerned about this. They thought there was something missing from the theory. Schrodinger illustrated this by saying, look, you know, maybe quantum particles are weird. You know, maybe they can perform strange tricks. That wave function describing where you're going to find an electron is sort of smeared out over all of space. That kind of suggests that maybe the electron is in multiple places at once until you look.

• 27:42Alie Ward?

  But who's looking and what counts? Nobody actually knows, anyway.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  So he said, imagine that you have a box, a sealed box. And in that box, you have a very slightly radioactive, you know, lump lump of metal. And you have a radiation detector pointed at it. And you have this contraption set up so that when the detector detects radiation, it drops a little hammer that smashes a glass vial of cyanide. And there's a cat in there with this whole thing. So basically, if the lump of metal emits any radiation, the cat will die.

• 28:20Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Right. So you put this all together, you seal the box and you wait like 30 minutes. And at this point, the Schrodinger equation says, okay, look, the chunk of radiation that that could be emitted by this metal, it it either has or has not been emitted. And so the wave function sort of says, well, it's been emitted and not emitted, which means that the detector has and hasn't been tripped, which means that the glass vial has and has not broken. So the cat in there is, according to the Schrodinger equation, is is sort of part dead and part alive or both dead and alive. It's in this state called a superposition.

• 28:58Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Which is sort of generally the state that most things are in most of the time, according to the Schrodinger equation. But according to the usual way of thinking about quantum physics, this this sort of very unsatisfying and incomplete idea that you just, you know, shut up and don't think about what it means to measure. When you open the box, then the cat is either dead or alive. And somehow, opening the box made that happen. And that's ridiculous, Schrodinger say, you know, maybe particles can be in one place or more than one place at a time. But cats are either dead or alive. And if you open the box and find a dead cat, then the minute before you open the box, the cat was either dead or dying. And if you open it and find a living cat, it's not like it was not entirely living before you opened the box.

• 29:43Alie Ward?

  Right. All right. So remember our sherry shit hammered, fun-loving physicist, Hugh Everett, arguing with the biggest fish in the physics pond? That their Copenhagen interpretation was bull cock a horse bucky?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Everett solved this problem a different way.

• 29:57Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Everett said, no, no, no, it's all Schrodinger all the time. So when you open the box.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  What's in the box?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  You know, the cats both dead and alive before you open the box. And then when you open the box, you get entangled with the stuff in the box.

• 30:15Alie Ward?

  Okay, heads up on this next part. Entanglement sounds like a boundary issue in an unhealthy relationship, but it's actually quantum physics and it's cool as hell.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  So Everett said, sure. So what that means is, you know, the box split according to the Schrodinger equation. And then when you open the box to look, you split into two copies.

• 30:37Speaker 06

  Hello, John. Hello, John.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  And the reason that you don't see both a living and a dead cat is because you split. And so each copy of you only sees one cat. One of you sees a living cat.

• 30:50Alie Ward?

  Thank God.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  And one of you sees a dead cat. No! But both copies only see one cat.

• 30:58Alie Ward?

  So then every time there is a decision, it splits and splits and splits and splits.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's this entanglement sort of contagious and ends up going through the the whole world. And so the whole world eventually splits into the dead cat and the living cat branches. And this happens over and over again all the time. And so you end up with this massive collection of universes, a multiverse.

• 31:21Alie Ward?

  What if there's three options? Because not everything's on a binary.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah. So then you get three copies. Or what if, what if you left the cat in there for 15 minutes, right? So instead of, instead of leaving it in there, uh, long enough that you had a 50 50 shot of finding a dead cat, you've probably got a living cat.

• 31:36Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Right?

• 31:37Speaker 06

  Sweet.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  So then there's two copies, but somehow you're more likely to be the copy that sees the living cat. And, and this is another part of the problem, right? Because, because quantum physics famously only gives you answers in terms of probabilities most, almost all of the time. But the Schrodinger equation isn't a random equation. It's completely determined. So where do the probabilities come from? Well, they come in when you use this other rule, the Born rule.

• 32:07Alie Ward?

  Born rule, to refresh, calculates the probability of measuring or observing a particle at a particular spot on the wave.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  One way of thinking about this is to say, oh, well, sure, you know that when you open the box, you're going to split, but you don't know which universe you're going to be in when you open the box. You don't know which branch of the wave function that you're going to be in. And so, you know, this, this rule is about figuring out the probability that you're going to be in the branch with a living cat or a dead cat. It gets really trippy.

• 32:41Alie Ward?

  Okay, well, so this is the many worlds theory, which is one of the ways that you could try to explain the inconsistency. What about your own life? Do you think about that when you are about to make a decision?

• 32:56Speaker 02

  You know, I, I don't go through my life assuming that there are multiple copies of me. Well, so part of the reason is that I don't subscribe to the many worlds interpretation. I think it's a reasonable option, but I don't know that it's the right answer. I don't know what the right answer is. And I don't think, I don't think anybody can say for sure that they know what the right answer is here, because we don't have a good scientific consensus on this debate. But I mean, in my everyday life, I mean, I don't know. I think I'm a pretty regular guy. I just do things the way I do.

• 33:33Alie Ward?

  You wouldn't be like, well, I might as well make this risky choice because somewhere there's someone making the less risky choice. I'll have the puffer fish.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not, that's definitely not how I approach my life. I do not recommend that anybody do that. Do not try that at home.

• 33:49Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Alie Ward?

  Does it ever, you're, you're a young guy. Does it ever, does it ever trip you out that like, in our lifetime, you may not figure out what's up?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  That is frustrating, right? Because like you asked me, again, we're on a couch talking about my childhood. But you asked me about, you know, what got me interested in this stuff in the first place? I wanted to know what was going on, right? I wanted to know what was up. This is why I keep saying, you know, it's fine if our theories are weird. We live in a weird place. There are so many weird things about the world. Have you seen a platypus? Like, like, have you, have you seen? This is, this is one of my favorite examples of like, just a weird thing in physics that has nothing to do with quantum anything. Have you done that demo at like a science museum where you sit in a, in a spinny chair? And you're holding a bicycle wheel and then you flip, you flip it upside down? And all of a sudden you start spinning? Like, that's weird.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  And the wheel feels like it's fighting you. What the fuck is going on? Like, there, there's a good answer there, right? So, like, this is just a strange place and I want to know what's going on in it. So, on the one hand, yeah, it's frustrating that we might not know. But on the other hand, it's kind of amazing that we don't know, right? Like, we, we have been doing science. We have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And every time we discover something new, we find more interesting questions. And this is a complete cliche and I'm not the first person to say this, but the idea that, that there are such fundamental things in the world that we do not understand, that

• 35:34Speaker 02

  we, we don't know why these things happen. We don't know what, what, like, the nature of the world is. And we are in it. We are of it. One of the great illusions that being human, and especially being human here and now in this culture, like, sort of fosters, is this idea that somehow we are separate from the world. We are of the world. We are pieces of the world. This is one of the things that's so frustrating about this idea that, oh, the rules are different when you measure. What's, I'm not special. I'm of the world. Like, I don't, there are not different rules for me than there are for

• 36:14Speaker 02

  anyone else. I'm a piece of the world. I'm part of the world. So are you. So is everyone. We are all of a part with this strange and wonderful place that we live in. And it is not clear how any of this works.

• 36:29Alie Ward?

  Well, what are some other theories? Okay, so we got multiverses, multi, many worlds. What are some other leading theories of what the hell's going on?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Okay, so, so another one, and this is really gonna piss some people off if I describe this as a leading theory, but it totally is, and they're wrong. There's, there's so much controversy here. There's like, it's, there's so much drama. This is, this is a lot of what drew me to this. Once I realized, like, there's so much weird stuff in this area and this unresolved debate, I, I started wondering, okay, why is it unresolved? And it turns out, a lot of it has to do with just like debate and interpersonal drama between really interesting people. And then I tried to find a book about it, and I couldn't find one, so I wrote one.

• 37:13Alie Ward?

  Again, the title is What Is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Dr. Adam Becker, available wherever you get books. It makes a great holiday gift. He did not ask me to say that, but it is legit a very good book.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Another leading theory is this, it's this thing, it goes by several different names, but I like to call it pilot wave theory. It's this idea that when you're, you know, when you're talking about, you know, where is that electron? It is in a place before you look. And when you look, you find it. Here it is. But there's a wave that's associated with each particle, and these waves sort of guide the motion of those particles. And that wave is sort of associated with that wave function that we were talking about before. And one of the things that really clued physicists in in the early 20th century to something really profoundly strange going on, was that they found that things that they thought were waves, sometimes acted

• 38:09Speaker 02

  like particles, and things that they thought were particles, sometimes acted like waves. Yeah, so like, something that you thought was in one place, suddenly like started rippling outward like a wave, something that you thought propagated like a wave and could ripple out and Do all those weird wave things, suddenly it was acting like a baseball. Like, it just really weird. So this is sort of a puzzle. Like, how can particles act like waves and vice versa? What's going on? Why does everything seem to have both a particle and a wave nature? And the answer in this theory, the pilot wave theory, is, oh, that's because there are particles and waves, and every particle has a wave associated with it that determines how it moves. And so that sounds really simple and really cool. There are problems, right?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  There's problems with everything, right? Otherwise, there'd be no controversy. The first issue, though I hesitate to call it a problem, is, remember entanglement? You know, when things get, when things interact, they start sharing a wave. So when you have two entangled particles, one particle, say that they're entangled and they go flying off in different directions. One of them's way over here and one of them's way over there, right? Like, one of them's in Mississippi and one of them's in Calgary, right? Okay? Then the one in Mississippi, if it moves a little bit, that's going to affect the pilot wave that guides the particle in Calgary.

• 39:29Alie Ward?

  Ooh.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Instantaneously, immediately, it happens faster than the speed of light. So that's weird, especially because, you know, we can prove in the math of the theory that that's what happens, but you can also prove that you can't use it for signaling. You can't send messages faster than the speed of light this way.

• 39:47Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  So somehow, there's this subtle connection that we don't see direct evidence of. When I say we don't see direct evidence, we do see evidence, but it's indirect evidence. It's evidence that they are connected. You can't, you can't use that connection, you know? Like, no one would dispute that they were connected if you could use one to instantly make the other one, you know, send a message. But that's not how this works.

• 40:13Alie Ward?

  So in the pilot wave theory, there's not a wave or a particle. There's a wave that the particle is kind of surfing, and it can affect the particles in numerous superpositions. But it would be faster than light, which really irks some people because old Alie Einstein's relativity says nothing is faster than light. So he didn't like that. Also, Adam says...

• 40:35Speaker 02

  This was developed... The basic idea was developed by one of the founders of quantum mechanics, a guy named Louis de Broglie in the late 1920s. But then he was convinced by some other physicists that it couldn't be right. He dropped it, was independently rediscovered by another physicist, David Bohm, in the early 1950s. And he sort of fixed up the problems that were with it, that de Broglie had sort of left and like sort of made it a fully fledged theory and published it. And then he, his life like descended into a living nightmare for mostly unrelated reasons.

• 41:11Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he got caught up in the red scare in the 1950s.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, he got, he got blacklisted. He ended up being effectively exiled to Brazil. Then the US government confiscated his passport. So he's trapped in Brazil. Like there's a whole, it's like a movie. It's like a frigging spy thriller. Like dude got the fucking short end of the stick.

• 41:35Alie Ward?

  Okay. Now this guy's life, my word, he had his own work at Berkeley confiscated and then classified. So he didn't have access to it so that it could be used on the Manhattan Project. And he eventually in his seventies had to have electroconvulsive therapy for depression. And just the saga and the drama of his life and political affiliations affected the reception of his work sadly. Okay, but one hiccup is that the particle surfing a pilot wave doesn't work with other theories, like the relativistic quantum field theory that explains what happens when you smash particles together in a nearly 17 mile particle accelerator tube underground, which as discussed in the cosmology episode with Dr. Katie Mack,

• 42:18Alie Ward?

  is not called the hard on collider.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  No one has found a way to unequivocally take that theory and reframe it in terms of this pilot wave stuff.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means that if it's right, the job isn't finished. But there are a lot of physicists who don't like this stuff for that reason. And because it's got this weird tangled history. So yeah, so that's another option is this pilot wave theory. There are lots of other options.

• 42:50Alie Ward?

  How often do you think people get stoned and come up with their own theories and email physicists?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I can tell you that that happens a lot because I get a lot of those emails. Some of those people, by the way, I think are not stoned. I think that there could be like an interesting psychology paper done here. Oh, man, I'm gonna get some hate mail for this. That like being an old retired white male engineer must have some effect on the brain that is similar to like cannabis or alcohol or something. Because those people, I'm pretty sure they're sober and they send me all sorts of wacky stuff all the time and it's not correct.

• 43:31Alie Ward?

  Do you have a favorite?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 43:34Alie Ward?

  Any simulation theories?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I definitely get those. I also get, you know, Einstein was wrong and complete fraud and here's why. And I'm the only one who found it. And I'm like Galileo, I've been persecuted, right? There's this, there's this thing called the crackpot index.

• 43:49Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Online, which basically you assign more and more points to a crackpot email depending on like what kinds of claims they make.

• 43:58Alie Ward?

  Okay, side note, this crackpot index is indeed a real thing and it was published in 1998 by mathematical physicist John Bias. And one score is determined by points with infractions being five points for each word in all caps, 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it for fear that your ideas will be stolen. 10 points for each statement along the lines of, I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to just express it in terms of equations. 10 points for each comparison of yourself to Einstein. 20 points for emailing to complain about the crackpot index. 20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel Prize.

• 44:41Alie Ward?

  30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization. And

• 44:47Speaker 02

  And I think the worst thing on that index that you can do is compare yourself to Galileo.

• 44:52Alie Ward?

  Oh no.

• 44:53Alie Ward?

  In that vein.

• 44:54Speaker 07

  Either we're gonna create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.

• 45:01Alie Ward?

  And now, what about a simulation?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 45:05Alie Ward?

  What if the reason why we cannot reconcile the wave versus the particle?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:13Alie Ward?

  And the Bourne versus the Schrödinger, what if that is because it's all fake?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Right. So, so a couple of things there. First of all, you'd still need to have rules. Like, if it's a simulation in a computer, like any computer we know, there's still rules that the simulation runs on, right? So, and that, that means that there still has to be some internal logical coherence, right? It can't contradict itself, even if it's weird. So there's that. But, more importantly, and I don't know, I don't know if you're gonna like this answer.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  I think that the simulation thing is kind of, not kind, no, I'm not gonna admit this word. Simulation thing is fucking bullshit.

• 45:52Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  It's fucking bullshit, and here's why. And, and this is gonna take like a sharp left turn.

• 45:59Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  It assumes that that's something that, it assumes that that's a thing that you can do, which we still don't know that you can do that. And it also assumes that, and I guess what I'm really talking about here is this argument that, that we almost definitely live in a simulation, right? Like, there are those people who say, no, no, no, no, we definitely live in one, like, almost certainly, there's almost no chance that this is like the base reality, whatever that means. I really think that's wrong, because it assumes that technology prog-, it assumes a lot about the future progression of technology, but it also assumes that technology always progresses through like the same inevitable stages.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  It assumes a lot about history, and culture, and the nature of life, and intelligent life, and intelligence itself. And I think that basically all of those assumptions- That go into that argument, that fuel that argument are are hopelessly myopic. They're just like completely blinkered and and narrow minded about like the wide variety of ways that that things in the world can be and that, you know, technology and civilization and culture can be, even in this world here and now, like it's a very, it's a very Western centric, male centric, white centric, rich centric argument that, you know, basically,

• 47:29Speaker 02

  yeah, no, the inevitable progression of any intelligent being in any logically possible universe is basically gonna be like a rich white dude born between 1970 and 1990.

• 47:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Like, and that's some fucking bullshit.

• 47:46Alie Ward?

  Yeah, that is bullshit.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:47Alie Ward?

  So I, and also, I've been using maybe everything's a simulation as an excuse for why things are bad, but I shouldn't do that, right?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think, like, two things. First of all, you shouldn't do that.

• 47:59Alie Ward?

  Okay. So, yes, clearly, we can't look at global warming and agonizing political situations and forests burning and that time you farted in ninth grade history class and people having cancer and being driven from their homelands because of greed, just as a video game gone wrong, and that we should give up and fold our hands in our laps and just wait for the apocalypse or the game over screen.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Second, even if this is a simulation, the suffering is real.

• 48:26Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  I am suffering.

• 48:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  You are suffering.

• 48:29Alie Ward?

  True, true.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  We gotta fix that shit.

• 48:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:31Alie Ward?

  A lot of people out there, real suffering.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:34Alie Ward?

  We can't just shrug it off as it's all a video game.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:37Alie Ward?

  Right?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:37Alie Ward?

  Do you think that we're real?

• 48:39Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by real, but for any, like, good meaning of that word, sure, we're real. Yeah, I mean, uh, uh, say that, say that it is a simulation, say that everything I said was wrong, say that there's some other universe with other laws of physics and other beings, and for whatever reason, they decided to build this simulation, like, to build a computer and inside that computer, like, there's a simulation going on and we're in there. We're real. We're in that simulator. We're really in that simulation in that scenario. Like, there are, there are real entities in that simulation that are you and me and all the things around us, even if that's not how the programmers think about it. Like, I am having experiences here in this simulation,

• 49:25Speaker 02

  and I have a hand over here, and I'm waving it around, and I'm banging it on the edge of the sofa. Like, that's all happening. Does the actual structure of the world at its most fundamental level look anything like the way we think it looks? Probably not. Uh, whether or not we're in a simulation, I think that's wrong.

• 49:45Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  But does that mean that we're not real? Absolutely not, you know? Um, okay, so, so here's the thing. I think everyone, I hope everyone can agree, that temperature is a real thing. Like, things have temperatures. Uh, you know, I can, I can take my, um, my cool nerdy infrared thermometer and point it at the wall, and it will tell me that the wall is seventy-four point six degrees Fahrenheit, because we live in a country that doesn't know how to measure temperature. But the thing is, temperature, according to our best understanding of temperature in physics, it comes out of thermodynamics, which is itself something that comes out of statistical physics, a really, really interesting field of physics. Temperature is an emergent property. It's not a property that individual subatomic particles can have.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  It's something that only aggregate collections of stuff have.

• 50:36Alie Ward?

  So one molecule can't have a temperature, but a group of them can, because they're all moving around. So Adam likens temperature to existence in asking the question, are we real?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  These things in this world around us can emerge out of that lower level, in the same way that temperature is a property that emerges out of the lower level, you know, little jostlings of tiny things, because that's where temperature comes from. It's, you know, a tiny object, a tiny piece of that wall is moving around a little bit, and all that jiggling together comes out and looks to us like temperature. That's a real thing. That wall is actually a temperature. And we are here, and we are having this conversation, even if, you know, the perception that there is such a thing as space and time is something that emerges out of some lower level of reality,

• 51:31Speaker 02

  there's still a space and a time that we're in, even if it's not fundamental.

• 51:36Alie Ward?

  All right. You've not let me get off the hook about existing and I still have to like do all my bullshit and get through my to do list.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 51:43Alie Ward?

  Like, I can't. Okay, can I ask you Patreon questions?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, let's do it.

• 51:47Alie Ward?

  Are you ready?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I'm never gonna be completely ready, right? For the weirdness that is Patreon.

• 51:54Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  High Patreon.

• 51:55Alie Ward?

  That's the right answer. But before we get to your genius and weird and dry and perfect questions submitted on Patreon, each episode, we donate to a charity of the ologist's choosing. This week, Dr. Becker chose Tech Bridge Girls, which excites, educates, and equips girls from low-income communities by delivering high-quality STEM programming that empowers a girl to achieve economic mobility and better life chances. And Tech Bridge Girls was one of the earliest organizations to focus on introducing girls and marginalized communities to the STEM fields, and it's based in Oakland, California, where Adam lives. So that's techbridgegirls.org. That donation was made possible by sponsors of the show, and so you may hear some words about them right now. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

• 52:40Alie Ward?

  If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates. They have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients. You can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to

• 53:23Alie Ward?

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• 54:08Alie Ward?

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• 54:43Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has just beads and oil, and it tastes like mint. Easy down the hatch.

• 55:27Alie Ward?

  I usually take them in the morning, and the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule's all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast, sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month.

• 55:52Speaker 08

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• 55:57Speaker 08

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• 56:02Speaker 08

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• 56:21Speaker 08

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• 56:49Alie Ward?

  Okay, back to your questions. Travis DeMello wants to know, "How does quantum stuff relate to nature? What is its role beyond technology?"

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, that's a great question. Quantum physics explains a huge variety of natural phenomena. Like, without quantum physics, we wouldn't understand why the sun shines. We wouldn't understand how our eyes can see that the sun shines. We wouldn't understand, and I mean this in the most general way possible, the phenomenon of solidness. Like, we wouldn't understand not only why I'm not passing through this couch right now, but why my bones are solid at all in the first place.

• 57:32Alie Ward?

  For more on that topic, you can see the osteology episode about bones. Just saying.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Quantum physics is necessary for understanding

• 57:42Speaker 02

  where the periodic table of the elements comes from and the idea of molecular structure. So all of chemistry, and thus all of biochemistry, and thus all of life. So, quantum physics explains, you know, or has a really important role in explaining almost every... Every single possible natural phenomenon.

• 58:04Alie Ward?

  So it's important.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, just a little.

• 58:06Alie Ward?

  A little bit. So a bunch of folks asked about existence and what it really means and why, such as Wendy Lockhart, Sarah Piet, Matthew Thomas Hill, and Sam Gordon, who wants to know, how do you deal knowing what you know about existence? And Kristy Stewart wants to know, why does it matter if we exist or not?

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Humans are curious. If we're going to try to engage in the dangerous game of coming up with fundamental human behaviors that are true across cultures, I do think that curiosity is a really good candidate for one. And also, more generally, and this is me stealing from my book.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  So the ideas that we get from science, the picture of the world that comes with our best scientific theories, it filters out into the wider culture. Science is not a separate human activity from the rest of the human world. It is of a piece with the rest of human activity, with art and politics and music and, you know, the social sciences and the physical sciences and biological sciences. These all form a unified whole. And so the pictures of the world that come from science not only go out into the other sciences, but out into the wider world.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Like a really, really simple and facile and total white dude example. If Copernicus and company had not uncentered the earth and shown us that, no, the earth is not at the center of the universe. It seems hard to imagine that Charles Darwin or Chuckie D, who was friends, and company would have had the audacity to suggest that humans are not at the center of biological creation, right? And instead that we're just another ape, just another organism in a giant tree of organisms. And without both of those changes in the way that we think about the world? I mean, first of all, you can probably come up with your own examples here, but without

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Both of those changes. Stanley Kubrick wouldn't have been able to film 2001. Right? All those, all those apes at the beginning and you know, the like, come on, that, that wouldn't have happened. And there's lots of other art and culture and, and just important things that have happened because of our scientific theories and vice versa. Yeah.

• 1:00:32Alie Ward?

  Samuel Ball wants to know, has the impossible issue of tunneling been solved yet? Or are there any good theories out there? What is tunneling?

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  What is tunneling? So tunneling, so the short answer is, um, in classical physics, um, if I put my hand on this table and leave it here, um, then it will just sort of stay on top of this table. But in quantum physics, there's a small chance that my hand will suddenly pass through the table. Um, but it's phenomenally unlikely because my hand is, is quite large and the probability of that kind of tunneling has to do with, among other things, the size of the object involved. For tiny objects, tunneling happens all the time. In fact, if tunneling didn't happen, the sun would not shine. So we know that tunneling happens.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Tunneling is not more strange than the rest, or unexplained than the rest of quantum physics. So if you can get a good picture of the world that comes with quantum physics, you get tunneling for free.

• 1:01:35Alie Ward?

  Ooh. I didn't know what tunneling was until right now. I thought it was maybe something that, uh, college kids did at parties.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  It does, it does kind of sound like that.

• 1:01:45Alie Ward?

  This next question about something that we keep in our pants pocket was asked by patrons Julie Bear, Will Matlak, Jess, CJ Stewart Hodges, Mike Roch, Courtney Markham, Evan Monroe, Michael Preston, who wanted to know why we should give a rat's left ear about the topic, Philip Wayri and?

• 1:02:03Alie Ward?

  Spencer wants to know, no matter how much I research, I don't understand quantum computing. Is there an easy way to understand it? Also, will all, also will quantum computers replace all computers eventually, like our phones or just supercomputers?

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the second part first.

• 1:02:18Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  I don't think that anyone who works seriously in that field thinks that quantum computers will ultimately replace all computers.

• 1:02:26Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  I don't even think that they're going to replace all supercomputers. There are things that classical, normal computers can do better than quantum computers and vice versa.

• 1:02:36Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  And I don't think that that's going to change.

• 1:02:39Alie Ward?

  Also, let's explain what a quantum computer is.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Quantum computer is a computer that harnesses some of the strange and, no, that's not a good way of saying it, right? Because, because the usual way that people say it is, oh, quantum computer is a computer that runs in quantum physics. Everything runs on quantum physics, so all computers run on quantum physics. Then people say, oh, quantum computer is a computer that uses, you know, special properties of quantum physics to do, you know, certain computational tricks. That's not specific enough either, because semiconductors, which are what like the computer in your lap are, and, and in my pocket, and like all computers are built on, basically. Semiconducting itself is a quantum property. Like, you can explain, you can't explain that without quantum physics. A better definition of a quantum computer is a computer that uses specific quantum properties

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  like superposition and entanglement to perform certain computations that normal, conventional computers cannot perform as quickly in that way.

• 1:03:39Alie Ward?

  So it's using the superposition of, say, positive, negative here, there, as kind of a replacement for the, the binary 1, 0, 0, 1, 0.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Alie Ward?

  And so it can go much faster because it's at an elemental level?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Sort of. I mean, it can do some things more quickly. Basically, instead of having a bit that's either 1 or 0, you can have it in a superposition.

• 1:04:01Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  And then you can take advantage of some of the wave properties of matter to, to give you a speed up for certain kinds of computational algorithms. The more specific you get about this, the more wonky and less cool it sounds.

• 1:04:19Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  It is, I assure you, very cool.

• 1:04:21Alie Ward?

  Okay. Also, if you've been seeing the words "quantum supremacy" lately...

• 1:04:26Alie Ward?

  Thank Google. So in late 2019, just a few weeks ago, Google announced that their quantum computer, which looks to be about the size of a small chandelier that dangles in a cryo chamber colder than outer space is named Sycamore. Well, the processor, a small chip is Sycamore, but it needs all those kind of sparkly golden wires to function. Anyway, a team out of University of California Santa Barbara's labs just published a paper revealing that Sycamore had solved a math problem in 200 seconds. So way to go, Sycamore. Who cares? Well, a lot of people, because that same math problem would be booped by an existing supercomputer would take years to solve. How

• 1:05:06Alie Ward?

  many years, you wonder? 10,000 years. So what would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to calculate? Sycamore did it in 200 seconds, like three and a half minutes. So quantum computing, it might save us, it might kill us. Either way, get hype. But so you don't think that it's going to replace all supercomputers?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone serious in the field thinks that. I mean, there are people who know a lot more about quantum computers than I do. My book is, I mentioned quantum computing, I talked about it briefly. It's not primarily about that. I do touch on it because it's important. But, but I have talked with a lot of people who work in that field. I don't think anyone thinks that. So I almost everyone's wrong. I don't think this could happen.

• 1:05:49Alie Ward?

  Okay. Jennifer Coyle wants to know, a therapist once suggested to me that one day a physicist will prove the existence of God. Thoughts?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Get a new therapist. Fire your friggin therapist. She, is she on mushrooms? Yes, no. This is a safe space. You can tell us if you think your therapist is on mushrooms. Yeah, I, no.

• 1:06:15Alie Ward?

  That's going to be a no from you, dog. Got it. Okay. Old Uncle Dad word here popping in to say, everyone is entitled to their own spiritual beliefs, just so long as it's not oppressing or screwing up other people's lives. But if you're wondering if scientists tend to be atheists at a higher rate than the general public, that's a yes. Rice University. Sociologist Dr. Elaine Howard Uklund had the same question. And in her 2010 paper, "Science Versus Religion: What Scientists Really Think," she crunched the numbers. So only 2% of the general US population says, "I don't believe in God." But over a third of what she describes as elite scientists are atheists.

• 1:06:56Alie Ward?

  But, Uklund continues, "22% of the scientists who identified themselves as spiritual also described themselves as atheists." So wait, huh? What is a spiritual atheist? Dr. Uklund interviewed one biologist who described spirituality this way. Said, "That feeling you get by the seashore, looking over the endless expanse of water, or the feeling you get considering the age of all things in existence and how long it could go on, sort of an awe at the totality of things. If that's what spirituality is, then I get it," said the biologist. So while the narrative of what's controlling our existence, is it a sentient, shadowy figure in a cloud watching over us, getting pissed when we lie?

• 1:07:37Alie Ward?

  Or is it chaos, mixed with chance, mixed with logic, and a heavy proportion of mystery? Those sources may change. They might be different for each individual. But in the end, perhaps what matters most is the awe that keeps you inspired and the respect that you show to the fellow lumps of molecules with whom you share the universe. Or maybe it's all a video game. Are we real? Probably, but nobody knows. And that is why quantum ontology is cool.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Favorite Uncertainty Principle Joke?

• 1:08:06Alie Ward?

  Yes. Hi, me again. So the Uncertainty Principle was drafted by German physicist Werner Heisenberg. And yes, Breaking Bad's Walter White took his alter ego name after this very renowned physicist, who, Adam explains in his book, "had a deep loyalty to Germany and was the head of its World War II nuclear program." Gross. Anyway, the Uncertainty Principle theorizes that when it comes to a particle, its momentum and location cannot be known at the same time. And Adam remains on the spot for a good Uncertainty Principle joke, per listener Julie Bear. Julie Bear wants to know, favorite Uncertainty Principle joke?

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean...

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  God, they're all just flying out of my head right now, except for the most boring one. The most, the most boring one is, this is, I, yeah, I apologize to physicists who are listening, you've all heard this before, and, and probably the person who asked this. A cop pulls Heisenberg over for speeding and says, you know, sir, do you know how fast you were going? And he says, no, but I know exactly where I am.

• 1:09:19Alie Ward?

  Amazing.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:26Alie Ward?

  Isabel B. Holper wants to know which movie or TV show gets it best?

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Ooh, like just quantum?

• 1:09:32Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  General, which movie or TV show gets it best?

• 1:09:35Alie Ward?

  How does Quantum Leap do?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Uh, oh man, Quantum Leap. Ah, Quantum Leap has almost nothing to do with quantum physics, but I watched that show so much growing up.

• 1:09:44Alie Ward?

  It was a good one.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was good.

• 1:09:46Speaker 09

  Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator.

• 1:09:57Alie Ward?

  What about What the Bleep Do We Know? Julian Hoppe wants to know.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Are people affecting the world or reality that they see? You betcha they are. What is reality? What is reality?

• 1:10:09Speaker 07

  Have you ever thought about what thoughts are made of?

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  It is so mysterious that you can't explain it.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Oh, really? What the bleep do we know is, um, okay, so take it out of what computer you've got it in, put it on like a thumb drive that you don't care about, set it on fire, bury it. What the bleep do we know is wrong about everything and the people who made it are malicious. They tricked a friend of mine who is in that movie, they tricked him into participating and then they misleadingly edited his contributions to make it sound like he supported their crazy stuff. Also, they are literally a cult.

• 1:10:48Alie Ward?

  Oh, no. Okay, so you heard it here first.

• 1:10:51Alie Ward?

  Okay, this next one is about string theory. And as patron Nick Rinders inquires, "String theory? Come on, what the fuck?" That's an excellent question, Nate. I will attempt to summarize it in the smallest, jankiest nutshell I can. String theory is that particles are actually teeny, tiny, tiny, tiny strings, which means that there could be more dimensions. And also, string theory may unify Einstein's theory of relativity, about gravity, with the other quantum physics that just do not comply. In his book, Adam writes, quote, "String theory doesn't describe a single universe, but instead describes a string landscape, a phenomenally huge number of possible universes,

• 1:11:34Alie Ward?

  10 to the 500th power or more," quote. So what is happening in all those universes? Is my dog there? Am I still wearing this yellow sweater? And does string theory finally reconcile the other theories that don't mesh together? Is string theory the dongle that all of science is waiting for? Kitty Halverson also asked about it, as did... Graham Tetersaw wants to know, "String theory, flim flam or science?"

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Sure seems like science.

• 1:12:00Alie Ward?

  Okay. Amanda J. wants to know, "Does quantum physics have anything to do with our consciousness?"

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Alie Ward?

  Because it has something to do with everything.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, so, yeah, on the one hand, sure, right? So it was sort of like, putting my cards on the table, I see no reason to think that consciousness is not something that arises purely out of, you know, the behavior of neurons in our brain.

• 1:12:23Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of good evidence for that. Our neurons are made of subatomic particles. Those subatomic particles are governed by quantum physics. So in one sense, yes. But there's often another sense that people have in mind when they ask this question.

• 1:12:38Alie Ward?

  Okay, real quick, remember Schrödinger's cat? So if you observe or measure it, it flips to one position. Meow, meow, or, "Oh, no."

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  But what's measurement, right? What counts as measurement? Some people will say things like, well, maybe consciousness counts as measurement. Maybe it's when a conscious being interacts with a thing. Maybe that's what measurement is in quantum physics.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  A couple of things. First of all, that still leaves you with this problem of, okay, but, but does that mean that like the wave function of the universe was waiting for a conscious being to come along? Also, what is conscious? What do you mean by consciousness? What counts as conscious? You still have that problem.

• 1:13:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Really seems like a very human centric view. And I'm always really wary of human centric views. There is a mystery in human consciousness, right? Or, or there seems to be one, like, you know, what is human consciousness? Where does it come from? Sure, you can have different views on, on how consciousness works and what it is and like there, there, whether or not there's even a mystery there. But I do not see a compelling reason to invoke consciousness in quantum physics, given that there are alternatives. And I do not see why we would say that it is more related to quantum physics than to any other, you know, issues in physics.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Like, I don't think that consciousness plays a more special role in quantum physics than it does in any other area of physics. The question of consciousness? Sure, whatever. That's a, that's a good question. We can have interesting conversations about it, but I don't see it as related to these questions about quantum physics.

• 1:14:19Alie Ward?

  Catherine W. asked Adam, what does an average day of your life look like? So as an author, he took me through his process of writing the book, which is so, so, so helpful, no matter what you're working on. And earlier off mic, he had mentioned that he has ADHD. You can see the molecular neurobiology episode with Dr. Crystal Dilworth, where we touch on that. And so these are his secret tips on how he accomplished these huge goals. This is earnestly life changing. I love this.

• 1:14:47Alie Ward?

  What was the process of writing the book like?

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Ah, so first it was abject terror after I got the contract because I, you know, like after I, I finished partying, right? I was, I realized I was on the hook for 90,000 words and I'd never published anything longer than about 3,000. So that was completely fucking terrifying. I had a history earlier on in my career of having difficulty getting work done and getting it done on time or getting it finished. And I had by that point, you know, moved past that. I'd finished my, my degree and whatnot, but I still had this mental image of myself as someone who had difficulty getting work done on time. And so I was really extra scared.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  But I, I decided, okay, the only way that I'm going to get through this is if I plan it and then just only pay attention to whatever's in front of me. Because I can't write 90,000 words, but I can write 600 words a day. And if I do that for a while, eventually I'll have 90,000 words. So, so yeah, so I outlined it and I went over the outline with my publisher and they liked the outline. Of course it changed, right? No, no plan survives contact with the editor. So for each chapter, I'd outline the chapter and then I'd just sort of work through the

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  outline and write a really shitty first draft and try to do 600 words a day. And what I'd do is I would do 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off. And in the 10 minutes off, I wouldn't look at anything with a screen and I wouldn't read any nonfiction. I would, I read exclusively novels and that really helped my brain work because I found that if I didn't read it all, I couldn't write. Because if there's nothing going in, nothing's going to come out.

• 1:16:39Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  So I, I would write 600 words a day and then get this shitty first draft done and then walk away from it and then come back and clean it up and fill in all of the blank spots where I had, you know, where I knew I had a quote, but I had to find the quote and stuff like that and things would change. And then eventually I'd have a chapter draft that I wasn't embarrassed about and then I'd send it to my editor and move on to the next one. It was terrifying. There was a lot of research involved. There was a lot of running around and interviewing people, like a lot of people. If you look, if you look in the references there, the very beginning of the references of the book has the list of interviews I conducted. I think it's like. Forty-two interviews or something like that, most of which were in person.

• 1:17:20Alie Ward?

  Isn't forty-two, though, the answer to the universe?

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  It is. I don't know if it's actually forty-two. I know, I know that it's like, it's somewhere around forty.

• 1:17:29Alie Ward?

  Okay, at this point in the interview, another ologist had stopped in to record, and I'm gonna make you wait to find out who it was. But we counted his list of interviews in the back of his book, and...

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  It's like, I love Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. It's forty-two! It is forty-two, yeah.

• 1:17:46Alie Ward?

  So, yes, it was indeed forty-two interviews.

• 1:17:49Speaker 10

  The answer to the ultimate question

• 1:17:54Speaker 10

  of life, the universe, and everything is

• 1:18:07Speaker 10

  forty-two.

• 1:18:10Alie Ward?

  For more on why, you can see The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Oh, my God, Adams, again, Adams, is anything fucking real? But yes, Adam Becker says, "Don't be afraid to start something. Start writing. Just jump in. Shitty drafts are your BFF."

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, shitty drafts are really important. I also had, um, I had like a spare parts bin, where if I had like, one of my, one of my darlings that I couldn't kill, like a sentence that I didn't want to get rid of, but it didn't fit, I'd put it in there and tell myself, like, I'd lie to myself and tell myself that it'd come back. It never came back.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  But more generally, like, I spent a lot of time thinking about narrative structure. Like, my overall approach was, this is a book about really abstract ideas. People care about ideas, but they generally care more about people than they care about ideas. And I wanted to make it compelling. I wanted to see if I could write a, a book about some of the most abstract and strange ideas in physics or in all of science that was difficult to put down. And so I thought, okay, the way to do that is to wrap these ideas up in people and stories about people. So then it was a question of, okay, how do I build a narrative arc that, that will give me good excuses along the way to explain the idea? And introduce the new characters that are that are going to come into the story.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  And that was a real learning process for me and I spent a lot of time like watching YouTube videos about film editing to learn like what narrative structure looked like in other forms of stories.

• 1:19:43Alie Ward?

  Also, Adam stuck to another edict to make a book about quantum ontology accessible.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  Oh, and no math. That was the rule.

• 1:19:51Alie Ward?

  Oh, no math in the book?

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  No math. No math. There was, there was one equation in the book.

• 1:19:56Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  And I didn't want to have any math in the book, so I wrote it out in words. The equation was two times three equals three times two.

• 1:20:06Alie Ward?

  That's it.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  And that's it.

• 1:20:07Alie Ward?

  Nice.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Alie Ward?

  And what's the shittiest thing about quantum ontology? Is it answering those maybe religious questions or too philosophical or, or too loaded questions? Or what's the shittiest thing?

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  The shittiest thing is definitely dealing with physicists who think that this was all resolved 90 years ago and we should just shut up and calculate. There are so many of them. They are wrong. There are so many good arguments about why they're wrong and why these questions are interesting. And they're still out there and, and it's just kind of astonishing, but it is getting better. And I really think that, you know, as, as like a new generation comes into physics, we will see more and more acceptance of these questions as legitimate areas of scientific inquiry.

• 1:20:54Alie Ward?

  Now, what's the best thing about quantum ontology? What do you love the most about it?

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  You get to ask the biggest questions.

• 1:21:00Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Right? Like, these are the, these are the biggest questions.

• 1:21:03Alie Ward?

  Oh, I thought you meant me right now.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no. Well, you totally do. That's the best part about your job. The best part about thinking about quantum ontology is you get to ask questions like, what is real? Like, what's going on?

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  And other Marvin Gaye songs. You get to ask these really deep questions about the world. You get to think about these wonderful things. And so like chemists have really good demos, right? They get to blow things up and, and you know, uh, put, put one liquid into another liquid and suddenly it's foaming everywhere and stuff like that.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  And because for some reason, John, you're a 42-year-old man who needs his attention sustained with tricks. Here's some fucking Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  And like biology, you get like creepy crawly things and like cute baby chickens and things like that. Like, there's all sorts of fun stuff. Physics doesn't have, you know, cute baby chicks. I mean, you can have cool explosions, but like chemistry really is really, really sweet for that kind of thing. But physics does have the truly, you know, pervasive on its side, right? Like, if you want me to talk about some of these questions in the foundations of quantum physics, I can point to literally any object and say, "Look, let's talk about the constituents of that object. Let's talk about why that chair is solid. Let's talk about why this ring on my finger is yellowish instead of

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  silvery," right? All of these things come back to quantum physics and thus ultimately to foundations of quantum physics. And it's just amazing. Like, it goes after a lot of the reasons why I wanted to go into science in the first place.

• 1:22:54Alie Ward?

  So it's everything and it's everywhere and we don't understand it?

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:59Alie Ward?

  It's what it comes down to.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:23:02Alie Ward?

  Well, thank you. I'm more confused about my existence.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  Good. That means I did my job.

• 1:23:07Alie Ward?

  Okay, good.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  There's a question mark at the end of the title of my book, right?

• 1:23:10Alie Ward?

  I love it. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. This is so much fun. Thank you for doing this with me.

• 1:23:16Alie Ward?

  You're my favorite quantum ontologist.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:23:20Alie Ward?

  So remember, ask smart people the big questions, even if it's about the littlest stuff, because how else in the world would you discover that there was another you eating puffer fish and cutting bangs and texting your crush? Also, if you're jealous of that person, then go do those things yourself, except maybe the poisonous poisson. That means fish. Whatever. So more links are up in the show notes and up at alieward.com/ologies/quantumontology. And you can get merch through that site or at ologiesmerch.com. And be sure to follow Dr. Adam Becker on Blue Sky, @adambecker, and on Instagram, @freelanceastro. And once again, get his book, What Is Real, or his new one,

• 1:24:01Alie Ward?

  More Everything Forever about AI overlords. And for shorter, kid-friendly episodes, we have Smologies, they're in their own feed. Wherever you get podcasts, you can tell your friends or students. Also, updates, editors, thank you Jake Chaffee and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for working on this updated one, as well as Susan Hale, who is our managing director, and of course, Noelle Delworth is our scheduling producer.

• 1:24:23Alie Ward?

  And Erin Talbert for adminning the wonderful Facebook group, and to Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for assistant editing, and of course, to the Wizard of Aw, Stephen Ray Morris, who edits all these pieces together and also hosts the kiddie pod, The PerCast, and the dino-centric Seed Jurassic Right, and the theme song was written by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. Thank you also to Emily White and everyone in the transcribers group, making transcriptions available at alieward.com/ologies-extras. I'll link it in the show notes. Now, if you stick around to the end of the episode, I'll tell you a secret. This week, my friend Simone Jesch was in town, and I was telling her that I wish there was a word for when you try to improve something, but you make it way shittier.

• 1:25:06Alie Ward?

  Essentially, a word for one of those things where you want to make something good, and somehow, it would have been so much better if you had just not. In the etymology episode, I was talking to Helen Saltzman, and I pitched maybe a bon mal, like French for good-bad, or Greek, like voy-vlap. Anyway, I told Simone, I wish there was a word, and she said, "There is. In Swedish, it's called a bear-favor, and it's from a fable about a bear trying to help someone by shooing away a fly with a boulder on their face and kills them." So, a bear-favor. Y'all, there's a word for it. I'm thrilled. It's very exciting. Okay. Bye-bye.

• 1:25:43Alie Ward?

  Pachydermatology, omeology, cryptozoology, litology, anticoology, meteorology, geology, anthropology, seriology, et cetera.

• 1:26:03Speaker 11

  Yeah Lois, that'll be about as much fun as a lecture on ontological empiricism.

• 1:26:09Speaker 12

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