The Observer Effect Is Not What You Think ⚡️

Transcript

[Music] Hey, so I have talked about the observer effect in quantum physics before, but over time I've come to realize I've I've gotten a lot wrong about that surprise. So I'm going to go in depth and straighten some of that out in today's lightning round video. Oh, and by the way, I'm sure you're watching this and thinking that something is different. It is going to be a little bit different today. I've literally got a flight tomorrow to go shoot this thing uh with uh Nebula this coming week.

So um this thing got a little bit rushed. It's a little bit less scripted than normal. Also, it's warm, so I'm running the mini splits, so the plant might be dancing around more than usual. Oh, and I got a little uh astronaut guy from Johnson Space Center. But besides that, there's there's nothing really different about this video or me.

You've already commented about the hair, haven't you? [Music] First question, as I referenced in the intro, goes to Cory Zahas. He said, "Does the universe only become real with the moment we observe it? If so, when does the observer effect actually come into play? At measurement, consciousness, or something deeper we haven't grasped yet?" Uh, okay. So, Corey, I'm actually going to I'm going to push back on your question just a little bit, uh, because it it arises from a misinterpretation of the of the observer effect, but, um, to be completely fair to you, it's a misinterpretation that I myself have pushed on this channel many times. Yeah, you can go back and look at the early days of my channel. I was a lot more into the the woo woo and the the mystical stuff.

I even covered bioentrism uh which is the idea that the universe is made up by consciousness as we observe it. Basically what you're describing um you can go check it out if you want to. But I made a huge mistake while doing this channel in that I uh learned things along the way. Yeah. And the more times that I've I've covered this topic, the more comments that I've gotten from you guys on it, um the more I've come to realize that the the the sort of mysticism that stems from the double slit experiment, um it all comes from a very flawed idea.

One that I am just as guilty as anybody of spreading. So, a quick rundown of the double slit experiment for anybody who somehow has no idea what it is and clicked on this video anyway. Uh now the double slit experiment basically comes from this experiment where they have a wall and then a separator that has two slits in it and they fire uh particles, photons, electrons, whatever through this double slit. And what they saw was an interference pattern meaning that the uh electrons or whatever the particles were going through and basically interacting with themselves, interfering with themselves and then hitting the back wall in an interference pattern. And so when they put a detector on one of the slits to see which one which slit that this was going through, what happened was they didn't get the interference pattern anymore.

They got two lines which would mean that they were operating more like a particle. So basically uh particles like electrons, photons, protons, they behave as wave functions until that wave function collapses and then they act like a particle. And the observer effect seems to come from when you measure or detect or observe these particles. That's when the waveform collapses and it acts differently. So a lot of people have interpreted that as consciousness or awareness actually affecting the physical world in some mystical, you know, the force is with you kind of way.

But even at my woowooiest, I've always wondered like how they detected the particles at the slits. like like how do you detect a particle without interacting with it? And the short answer is you kind of can't. So I looked it up and there's a few different ways that scientists use to measure the particles in experiments like this. One is called a photon detector and it basically emits photons across that slit and uh it picks up when an electron or a photon or something goes through it because it interacts with those photons that are going across the slit. So it's not like it just detects the uh the particle flying through there.

It it is actually interacting with it in a very physical way. There's also something called polarization tagging. So this doesn't scatter the particle like the photon uh method does, but it does reverse its polarization in a way that you can tell that it is gone through there. Another way of saying it is that it records which path information is what they call it. But by doing so, you're messing with the polarization of that particle.

In other words, you're interacting with it. And a third way is through magnetic or electric fields. Uh especially charged particles like protons and electrons. They can be influenced by uh electric fields around the slit. And uh the the the fields are able to pick up a little difference.

That's how you know which sled is going through. But again uh that field changes and entangles that particle. And once it's entangled, that particle cannot interfere with itself. Uh therefore creating that interference pattern. In other words, it's been decohered.

So, yeah, all of these different methods do actually interact with the wave functions. You know, it's it's not like just somebody is is looking at it and the awareness in the ether is what's doing it. They are physically being interfered with uh and that's what causes the waveform to collapse or decoherent. So, decoherence is an interesting um theory that I've never really gotten into on this channel, but it's sort of like a third theory of how this works. The other two being the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds theory.

So quantum decoherence uh is this theory of how quantum systems lose their quantumness when they interact with the environment. It's kind of a way of explaining why a quantum system suddenly behaves like a physical thing uh when it interferes with a physical thing. So going back to the double slit experiment, if you have two slits and there's no detectors on it, what you're firing at it, say you're firing an electron, you're really firing like a cloud of potentialities, just a whole bunch of probabilities where it could go and it kind of tends to go through both slits and then interacts with itself on the other side. That's how you get the interference pattern on the wall. But when you have a detector on one of the slits, that cloud, you know, flies toward it and a tiny part of that cloud does interact with the detector on that slit and that causes the whole thing to collapse into any one of those clouds of potentialities.

And sometimes that goes through one slit and sometimes that goes through the other slit and so you get the two lines instead of the waveform. So the idea is like if if you if you fire a quantum object into the world, it'll just stay in this cloud of potentialities until it interacts with something something physical. It kind of causes like it just kind of catches a little piece of it and the whole thing collapses down. And that's why, you know, this coffee mug is made of quantum objects, but they act like a physical thing because they're all entangled with each other because they decohare together. And that's just like another way of of looking at how quantum objects, you know, operate in a physical world.

Um, and now now the way it actually collapses and decohairs, um, that's still something that is not fully understood. But the observer effect is not as woo woo as you think or as I used to think that it is. It's just weird. It's profoundly weird. And I'm still trying to get it figured out clearly.

Uh, every time I think I've got it figured out, it turns out I don't. I think it was Richard Feman that once said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." Or there's Verer Heisenberg's quote, um, "Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think." I like that quote. I couldn't decide on which quote to end this with, so I just went with both. But anyway, hopefully that straightens it out for you uh, for now anyway, until we realize that we don't understand it at all. Let's move on to the next question.

Reef Zero Humor Singer asked, "It's six quintilion years in the future and the first stellar mass black hole has nearly evaporated away. Does it suddenly spring back into a neutron star or does it stay a black hole?" All right, first of all, damn, good question, sir. I was not sure what the answer was on this, but my assumption was no, because the information is lost once it goes inside the black hole into the singularity. I was probably wrong about that, though. So yeah, the radiation that you're talking about, for anybody who's confused by that, it's called Hawking radiation.

It's it's named after Stephen Hawking, obviously he uh uh proposed that there would be this radiation that would basically evaporate a black hole over like like you said quintilions of years. But Hawking himself believed that the radiation went out evenly um because all the information was destroyed on the inside. But the thinking has changed on that since then. Um now it's believed that the information is not actually destroyed. It's actually kind of encoded on the 2D surface of the black hole.

The 3D information encoded on a 2D surface kind of like a hologram. So they call it the holographic theory. So uh because according to quantum theory, information is never destroyed. So that's kind of a way of maintaining the information after it's gone into the black hole. Uh this came from the work of later people like Leonard Suskin.

Um he was kind of inspired by string theory. And the the holographic idea by the way it's it's called the ads CFT duality and that's the anti-deceitter space and conformal field theory duality big words. Uh but the point is the information is preserved but it's scrambled. And now they believe that that Hawking radiation is not emitted at a constant rate like Stephven Hawking believed that it actually does come out um in a way that does encode that information into it. So technically the information that fell into the black hole can be decoded from the Hawking radiation that comes out of it.

It that's a big technically uh doing so according to what I saw anyway it would require an insane level of computation like it would require all the energy in the universe or something like that and even so you're not getting the matter itself you're getting the information about the matter like you're getting a blueprint of the matter not the matter itself. So when a black hole evaporates down small enough to where its mass might be the same as the neutron star maybe that that created it or maybe you have two neutron stars colliding and form the black hole. You don't suddenly those two neutron stars don't pop out of it. Um there is a possibility that with all the you know with a million universes worth of computation you could possibly extract the blueprint of that neutron star. Uh but you would not get the actual neutron star.

Sorry if you don't believe me though, just stick around for 6 quintilion years and you can see for yourself. All right, next up. Brian Bzwick asked, "Chrisper continues to change the world. If personal gene modification were available, what if anything might you want to change about yourself?" Uh, Brian, yes. Oh my god, so many so many things.

Uh, first thing that I would want to do is um the thing that Dr. Sinclair, Dr. Davidson Clair at Harvard has been working on. He's an anti-aging researcher and um he and his team have figured out a way to adapt the genes of mice to basically reverse their aging. So Dr.

Sinclair is really well respected. He al is also kind of a controversial figure, but um he has this thing with that gene modification I was talking about where he's talked about that you could do that you could there's B. Okay. So, basically there's a gene in your body that when you're young, when you're a teenager, early 20s, that's what keeps you young. It makes your body rejuvenate itself and it keeps your skin healthy and everything.

Over time, that gene shuts off and that's when all the damage starts to accumulate and you eventually fall apart and uh deteriorate and die. I'm sorry. You become more distinguished and die. But this gene thing that he's talking about, it's something that you could introduce with a viral vector. It would like spread it throughout your entire body, adapt your your genes in your body, and then it would have that little tweak in there.

But the tweak could be turned on with a type of antibiotic. Like it could be tied to a specific type of antibiotic. So at any point in your life, you could take this antibiotic for a short period of time or forever, I guess, and your body would just like reverse itself back to its mid20s. So, first and foremost, I would want to do that because um dying isn't something I'm interested in doing anytime soon. By the way, serious question for the peanut gallery for discussion down in the comments.

So, if if there was a pill that you could take that would keep you from aging from this point forward with no downsides, no effects, uh it's free. There's no moral dilemma here. This isn't the substance or anything. It's just a pill you could take every day and you could just stay the age you are or maybe like even get a little bit younger u if you're my age say if that was a pill you could take would you do it to just live indefinitely? That's question number one. The second part of that question how long do you think you would take it before you decide I'll just live out the rest of my days? 100 years, 500 years, a thousand years? How long do you think you'd actually want to be alive? How long before you just get tired of it all? Have fun with that.

Anyway, I would do that first because that would solve a million of my other problems. But the second thing would be my skin. I would want to change my skin. As many of you have noticed over the years, I'm quite pale. Many jokes have been made about this by you and me.

And um I hate it. I kind of I kind of hate it. Like my dad uh my my dad doesn't have this problem. he could go out and mow the grass and come back in a shade darker and look great. But um I didn't get his skin.

I got my mother's skin who got my grandmother's skin and there's just been so much skin cancer on that side of the family. Even me, I had one in my 30s. I had a I had a skin cancer removed right there. Sometimes you can see the little divot in my forehead. It looks looks like somebody took a golf shot off of me.

Like look at look at my arm. See how splotchy that is? See how uneven the skin tone is there? And it's just like dotted. I'm I'm splotchy. I'm very splotchy. Like I don't have even distribution of melanin across my skin.

There's like there's like spots where there's melanin and there's like places in between where there's just like no protection at all. I I I actually do put on a little makeup, a little powder on my face before I record these things because I'm a little bit splotchy. I'm sure that that's the first thing anybody notices when they meet me in public, when they see me out somewhere. That's how how what a splotchy boy I am. Splotchy Boy T-shirts now available at lastmartner.com.

And I'm just I'm I'm constantly dealing with the sun damage on my face and arms. I get these little crusty places that they call actctinic keratossis. You probably saw one on my arm right now when I was when I was showing that. Um, no. I go to see the dermatologist every 6 months.

And uh I always joke that whenever I come back it looks like I just went hunting with Dick Cheney. And uh only people who look this old will even get that joke. But I have to stay out of the sun like all the time. And I hate it. I hate it.

It's It's like It's like I'm allergic to the sun or something. I can't enjoy the beach. I like the idea of the beach, but every time I'm on the beach, I'm just anxious the whole time. Boating sounds crazy to me to be out in the middle of the water with no sun protection whatsoever, no shade. Any any place where there's no shade.

I I just I'm not comfortable. Like swimming pools. I'm always the only guy in a stupid shirt in the water and then it's all stuck to me, which I hate. I can't play tennis comfortably, which I love playing tennis. I can only play it at night for the most part.

A friend of mine once asked me if I'd play golf with him. I was like, "Are you out of your mind? Just ask me to drink plutonium while you're at it." And and you're probably thinking, "Just wear sunscreen." Well, wearing sunscreen doesn't help. I'm still just anxious the whole time. And oh, oh god, the sunscreen. I've got to put on sunscreen all the time.

Even if I'm just going outside for like 10, 15 minutes, everybody else just like goes out and doesn't think anything of it. No, I've got to like put this goop all over me and all over my face. Plus, in Texas, you usually have to have mosquito spray on as well. So, I'm like this sticky pine tree and I got to rotate myself whenever I walk somewhere. So, I got rotisserie going on.

And of course, being super pale or even worse having like a farmer's tan. Um, doesn't exactly make you feel a whole lot of confidence when you go shirtless, you know? And like that's the worst thing about being pale is that even if I got in the best shape of my life, even if I was like super jacked and ripped, it still doesn't matter. People would still look at me and be like, "Dude, nobody wants to see that." When I shot my movie Oceanfront Property, they actually used my chest as a white balance. That's actually that's a true story. So, yes, if I could change one thing about myself, it would be my skin.

And and it's not even that I want to be like tan necessarily. I just want like just just even distribution of melanin would be nice. I would love to go outside and just enjoy it, you know, and not feel like there's this dread coming from the sky like I'm in God's microwave or something. Um, I do understand many people have wor much worse skin problems than I do. Uh, if you ever heard of epidermis blossa, EB, it's it's this condition where like anytime any kind of pressure is put on the skin, it causes it to blister and peel.

Um, people who have that would need this uh gene altering thing far earlier than me. They are first in line. I'm at the back of the line. But yeah, there's your answer. And there are many other non-skin related things that, you know, people should get way ahead of me on.

Overall, I'm very lucky in my jeans. I think I'm in pretty decent shape. And uh perspective is good. But that is the one thing I would definitely want to change about myself. All right, we got one more question, but before we do, we got to bless the new Patreons and members with the power of Zoe.

So, first off, we have Patreon members Lucas Liebuset, Chris Baird, Pascal Contro, Gear Lens, Skin Go, Kenny, You're awesome, Joe Rotanda. Oh, that's very nice. Thank you. Uh, Kelly Miller, Herbfield, Max, and Keith Ferris, and Morgan Stratton. And new members are uh Bji Snar, Hannah Alyssa Luca, Jesse Lawrence Brown, James Cave, Ronan Vandervekin, Tim Robinson, Andrew D, Cam M, Shia Harmon, uh Electric Ranger, Leslie Perry, Sam's, and Loki Dandy.

Uh as always, thank you guys so much for joining up. If you would like to join them and become an active member of this community, uh there's a lot of really great people there. You get access to a Discord server and early access to videos, all kinds of cool stuff. Uh, you can either hit the member button down below to join on YouTube or go to patreon.com/anserswithjo. All right, let's wrap this up with our last question of the day goes to JD Creeper.

Uh, why are tech bros trying to emulate the sci-fi they saw as a child? They've already decided what the future looks like and strive towards those bygon visions that do not actually benefit society. So, um, yeah, I've covered topics like technofudalism, uh, accelerationism. I've talked about the ways that the current reigning industry in the world that being the tech industry is trying to reshape society and reshape governments in their own vision. And uh it is definitely a thing. You're not wrong about that.

Um but if the question is why are they doing that? Um I think I would just point that this is something that has always been a thing. This is something that's always happened. You could go back 500 years or so and every single time period from here to there, there's been some industry that has dominated the global sphere. And every single one of those industries has used their power and used their wealth and influence to try to shape the world in a way that best benefits them. You can just call it greed if you want to be reductionist about it, but I think when it comes down to it, there's there's always been somebody trying to make the world in their image because they can.

I mean, just for a handful of examples, I've I I've covered the spice trade on here. Back in the 1500s, 1600s, there was the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company. Um, these were arguably the most powerful companies in the history of the world. They actually had their own armies where they would go and enslave and slaughter native populations. they you know uh pushed governments to uh enact laws and and actually go to war with countries to get what they wanted.

There was this thing in uh 1494 called the treaty of tortoisilus that basically divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal. Uh the pope blessed this and it it basically just divided all of the the new worlds that were being discovered between Spain and Portugal. And these were done by the the traders and the merchants and and the shipping companies. And obviously that decision shaped world politics. I mean to this day arguably you could look at the plantation economy of the 1600s up into the 1800s and the slave trade that came along with that.

All the laws that were pushed and lobbied for to to enable slavery. You know the vast sums of money that were procured through sugar plantations and whatnot and the rum uh running. I mean, these guys successfully lobbyed in a way that literally divided the United States between its northern and southern states and led to a massive civil war, the consequences of which we're still dealing with today. Then in the 1800s, you got people like Carnegie and Rockefeller and Morgan running things like steel and oil banking, Vanderbilt with the railroads, um the the guilded age that you always hear about. I mean, they basically installed presidents and controlled media and controlled populations and states.

I mean, the the amount of influence these guys held is is still baffling today. Then you got the oil industry in the early 1900s. I mean, they they called it an oil oil cartel for a reason. There were like seven companies that basically controlled everything. They paid off the US government to coup uh Iran in 1953 to give uh us access to their oil, which led to no negative repercussions.

And you can argue that the media and uh the mass uh entertainment of the 50s up through the 2000s or so. Um I mean they definitely wielded their power to shape public opinion on a variety of topics. So yeah, I mean if the question is why are they doing it? I would just make the argument that it's because what rich and powerful people have always done. And today the big people who are in charge uh the big dominating industry of this particular period in history is the tech companies especially when it comes to AI. Like I don't know if you saw the news but um Meta Zuckerberg is clearly one of these tech bros.

They're um they're actually working on super intelligence now. They're calling it super intelligence. We're going straight to that. But we got an article here about how they acquired this company called Scale and the CEO left. That's a 14 billion deal.

It says, "This investment represents Meta's biggest commitment to an external AI venture to date, highlighting increased rivalry in AI innovation in a strategic effort to sidestep regulatory challenges associated with acquisition." So, you can see right there the regulatory challenges. They're going out of their way to change the laws to do things the way they want to do it. Again, nothing new about this. So, you might have noticed I used Ground News to research that last story, and you're probably thinking that they're sponsoring this video. they are sponsoring the video.

But that is exactly how I use ground news. When I'm gathering information on something, like it usually goes like this for me. When a big news story breaks, the first places I go to are people that I know and I trust. I happen to be in some Slack channels and Discord servers with people that I know personally and I think they're really smart in these kinds of things and I value their perspective. So, I kind of check there first.

Then, I might pop on the socials to see how much people are freaking out about it. You know, what the general vibe is. What's the word on the street? understanding that what I'm seeing there is algorithmically skewed and generated and and it's it's skewed toward emotions and not facts. But after that, if I really want to dig into the story and I really want to get the facts and get the full perspective, I go to ground news. Because at ground news, you get everything, all the perspectives, all the biases laid out clear as day, you know what you're getting with ground news.

It shows the general bias of the news source as well as the ownership information because they may have conflicts of interest or a monetary incentive to bend things a certain way. They've got factuality reports based on thirdparty media watchdog groups. And if you just kind of want to check your bias, they've got this blind spot feature, which is one of my favorites features. You can see stories that people on your side just aren't covering. Like, it's actually kind of calming going to ground news and getting my news from there.

Like, social media is designed to rouse you up and and raise your anxiety by showing you the most extreme takes on things. Ground news shows you all the takes. So, yeah. Like there have been times when I, you know, was going on social media and I was getting all riled up about something, getting all anxious about a story and then I went on ground news and I saw, oh, there's there's actually a whole other side to this that I hadn't seen before. Cortisol level dropping.

I like to say that ground news gives you more information about your information. And I and I think that that's just a necessity right now in our current media landscape. So, if you'd like to get a little bit smarter about your media consumption, just head over to my link ground.news/jo. For a limited time only, you can get 40% off a Vantage plan subscription, which is what I use. And you can get unlimited access to all their features.

You can find that down in the description or just scan this handy QR code on the screen right now. So, thanks to Ground News for supporting this video and for lowering my anxiety a little. I can use all the help I can get. Links down below. All right, so that's it for today.

I want to thank everybody who submitted their lightning round questions. And if you want to join that uh that team of people, that awesome group of people that support this channel on Patreon, the links are down below. Uh I invite you to go check it out. And to anybody who watched all the way to the end of this, um just to let you know in next week's video or the next video that you see from me, my hair might be long again cuz I recorded a few videos early because of this trip that I'm taking and it's kind of getting in the ways and things. So, my hair is going to get long and short back and forth a little bit over the next couple of months, but uh we'll get through this.

We'll get through it together. But anyway, uh thank you guys for watching. If this is your first time here and you don't know what this is all about, I do videos that are lightning round videos where I cover various topics like this. Most of my videos are more focused on one topic. You can go look at any of the other videos on my channel that have my name on them.

Uh take a look. Hope you enjoy them. If you do, I invite you to subscribe. Uh and if you are subscribed or not and you like this video, give a thumbs up. helps in the algorithm, all that.

Uh, I think I've given plenty of fodder for comments down below, so have at it. But aside from that, wish me luck uh at my thing next week. It's going to be a big deal, and I can't wait to share it with everybody. Uh, but until next time, you guys, go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week, stay safe, and I'll see you next week. Love you guys.

Take care.