SIO283: Quantum Physics 101, with the What the FUP Podcast!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. I'm so excited about today's show. I've got two guests. One of them, you already know, it's Dr. Lindsey Osterman, Associate Professor of Psychology at Roanoke College, but also, Lindsey brings a friend, Dr. Brian Gentry, who's a physics professor at Hollins University, because they are starting a show together. They've got a podcast called What the FUP, F-U-P, and that stands for Fucked Up Paradigms. And it's all about pseudoscience and kind of how misunderstandings of science get weaponized and maybe sold and all that kind of stuff. It's right up my alley. I can't wait to talk to them. We're to talk about quantum physics because, of course, Dr. Brian Gentry is a physicist and knows all about that and how weird it is, but also how much everybody gets it wrong.

0:01:14 Thomas: And we all watched, just for fun to illustrate the point, we watched that, I guess you could call it a documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know? Just to have a bit of a laugh at that and maybe break down how wrong it is. And I know the movie is a bit dated, but this stuff still goes on now, even today. And it's embarrassing how bad it is. And Brian and Lindsay are here to help illustrate that and explain what the actual science is. So I can't wait. Let's get over to that interview.

0:01:55 Thomas: Lindsey and Brian, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

0:01:58 Brian: Hi. Hi, thanks for having us.

0:02:00 Thomas: Oh, I'm excited. I don't know if this was required reading, but Lindsey had me watch this What the Bleep Do We Know?, so I'm mad about that, Brian. Can I blame you personally for that?

0:02:08 Lindsey: I'm sorry.

0:02:11 Brian: You can't, you can't.

0:02:12 Thomas: That was the worst thing I've ever seen, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Why don't we talk about everybody on your new show.

0:02:13 Lindsey: Brian made me watch it.

0:02:16 Brian: Yes, okay, So, my background as a physicist, of course, makes me particularly irritated at certain aspects, both of this movie, what the awful movie, What the Bleep?, but also, I decided to take a look around on the internet, as we often do, and I came across some stuff called quantum healing. And it turns out that this is a huge business right now. I believe the term initially is due to Deepak Chopra, who published a book under that name. But there are lots and lots of websites, lots and lots of people offering all kinds of so called quantum healing modalities. There's the quantum healing hypnosis stuff, which is, and it's got, you know, trademark R, whatever it's Uh, I think that's about past life regression. There's beyond quantum healing, matrix energetics, quantum touch, and just on and on, so it seems to be business, and

0:03:15 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, because it's way better than Newtonian healing, which is like involves ball bearings. And it.

0:03:19 Brian: Yeah. I know, they launch you from cannons and Stuff, but it just doesn't work out that well, so it's interesting that you bring that up, because one of the things on one of the websites, the first website I looked at, said that allopathic medicine is based on a Newtonian view of physics and is therefore linear and deterministic.

0:03:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:03:41 Thomas: Linear.

0:03:41 Brian: Yeah, yeah. And so it's interesting because my background is actually in nonlinear dynamics and this has nothing to do with nonlinearity, what they're talking. So I

0:03:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:51 Thomas: I was going to say like what. So like in what sense is had they never. I'm pretty sure they knew what, like, exponential, you know, curves were even before quantum physics. I don't know. What does the linearity have to do with anything? That seems weird.

0:04:05 Brian: Have no idea. None whatsoever. So you got me on that.

0:04:08 Thomas: That was my reaction to most of this movie, which is what I just literally, what are you even talking about? Like, know, I want to take the opportunity here to give just like the best life advice that I could ever give to anybody. Well, okay. People like me who have to watch really bad crap all the time. It turns out you're going to kick yourself, Lindsay. This is going to be very useful. Maybe for both of you, for your show. Turns out there's a Chrome plugin that you can install so that you Can watch videos at higher speeds, like any video.

0:04:16 Brian: Yeah.

0:04:40 Lindsey: Shit. Yeah.

0:04:41 Thomas: I know it's the, I can't believe I didn't know about until now. I've had to watch so many bad things that this would have been great for, but sometimes it's on YouTube, you know, I can do it anyway, but like this will even do it for anything for like Amazon for whatever. So just Google that. I don't know what it's called, but Google Chrome plug in video faster or something.

0:04:58 Thomas: I just saved you guys so much time.

0:04:58 Lindsey: I wish you hadn't I wish you hadn'Told me that I've watched this movie twice at regular speed. So thanks, yeah.

0:05:02 Thomas: Yeah. Oh my God. I watched it once at 1.7 speed. So think of like fractionally. Well, Well, you know, you're a physicist, Brian.

0:05:14 Thomas: Mathematically, how much time did I just save over Lindsay? I'm not sure.

0:05:17 Brian: Actually, you probably didn't save any because you probably got sucked into a wormhole or something and taken back to a past life and then you had to relive it all again in?

0:05:25 Thomas: So do you look at what the bleep as, I don't know if you've done a full taxonomy of this nonsense, like a bullshit taxonomy, but that would be interesting. But is what the bleed kind of the origin story for a lot of this or what do you think?

0:05:39 Brian: I think it probably predated that, but that's what really got it into the public discourse. I think that's brought it to a lot of people's attention. It was, what, 2004, 2005 when that came out. So that was really, of course, that kind of stuff had been going on before that, but this really amplified it, I would say. So it brought it a lot to people's attention.

0:05:51 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:03 Thomas: So I guess if you're starting from zero on this as a listener, what is quantum healing killing allegedly, and does it cure coronavirus? Will it work for that? Or anything?

0:06:15 Brian: Yeah, we'll come to that one at the end, maybe. But a couple of issues right off the bat with quantum healing and the stuff that's talked about in What the Bleep. And the first, I would say, is that it posits dualism, right? So, philosophical dualism. And this is a statement that says, you know, that both the physical and the material and the non-physical and non-material things exist, right? So spirit and being, right. And this is sort of an important distinction to make because they bring this in later to claim that quantum physics somehow is non-physical, which is a very bizarre claim.

And the other thing is because these things are non- physical and non material, they can exist outside of time, which means we can change the the past. So something that goes against all of physics and perhaps all of science. So that's one problem, just one little problem. And the other one is that they also claim that consciousness affects the quantum world. So, that's an additional claim, right? So we've got this thing called consciousness that they have some ideas about, which I would imagine Lindsay and And a lot of other people would have some serious problems with. I do, surprisingly enough. Yeah, I'm not surprised.

0:06:57 Thomas: Yeah,

0:07:44 Brian: And this thing that they're calling consciousness actually can go in and affect the quantum world. They call it downward causality. So we are consciously engaging with things at the quantum level in order to manifest these possibilities that we want, right? Right. Like we want to be free of some disease or, you know, have Trump out of office or have, you know, some other good thing.

0:08:09 Thomas: I think I just single-handedly disproved that whole thing. I wasn't able to get him out for four years. Unless then you say like, well, he's voted out and then, you know, God works in mysterious ways. I guess it just takes a long time, maybe. I don't know.

0:08:12 Brian: Yeah. Well, clearly you just you didn't believe hard

0:08:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:22 Lindsey: Enough. You didn't you didn't create your day strongly enough.

0:08:24 Thomas: It's so hard not to just launch into a nine-hour diatribe on how bad this movie was, But just one quick comment is pretty fucking hilarious to have a movie about like, here's the thing I know about an infinite wish generation machine that can bend reality to whatever I want. And you're like, wow, it really seems like just your very appearance and existence disproves that. Like, shouldn't this shouldn't we be broadcasting this from your like space station where you have a laser that or something, you know, like, no, I just you know. You you just have to really try really hard and slowly over time, eventually, you know, like you'll get a parking spot or something.

0:08:25 Brian: That's right.

0:08:59 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, No, if I, if I could control reality, my day, I don't think I'd be a chiropractor. I'm pretty sure, and definitely not that chiropractor.

0:09:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So I got to ask You, though, because I think all this consciousness stuff in terms of quantum physics and all that probably, and tell me if I'm wrong, stems from the idea that like it seems as though at least to a layperson that there's this like observer thing where like when you, quote unquote, observe something like it goes from a, you know, a wave to a particle or vice versa. And is that kind of like the misunderstanding that's happening here? And if so, can you explain what's actually happening there rather than it being based on like a consciousness seeing it?

0:09:08 Lindsey: Boy. Guess.

0:09:41 Brian: Yes on, yes on both accounts. Um, what you're talking about is, uh, what's called non-locality, and they, again, this is, uh, featured prominently in these websites, you know, saying that, uh, the non-local properties, uh, of particles, of quantum objects, I should call them, um, which is a real thing, but this is then brought out as some kind of explanation that we can go in and shape reality at that level. And so, so you're right on the money there, that that's, uh, that's what they are referring to. And and then the so-called observer effect, right, when you make a measurement or you disturb a system that you fundamentally change it, uh, which is also a real effect.

0:10:27 Brian: At the quantum level, but the thing that is so irritating to me is what people are basically doing is saying, oh, consciousness is weird, right? There's all these things that are very mysterious that we don't understand, and quantum physics is weird, and there's things that aren't mysterious and we don't understand, so they must be connected, right? They, one weird thing has to explain the other.

0:10:50 Thomas: That sounds like science to

0:10:51 Brian: And, yep, there you go, that's pretty much it. And the other, I should say also, before we get into the quantum piece, and this is something that Lindsey and I talk about on our podcast, is the, the weaponization part is that, you know, a lot of people are really looking to, they're looking for something to help make sense of what they see around them and the problems in their life, and the world seems like a mess, and maybe, you know, my life seems like an ass and I don't understand what's going on. And people are overwhelmed, and they're anxious, there's a lot of things going on, and so they're looking for a way to explain this. And if you don't have an analysis of the systems and the paradigms that are influencing us, things like neoliberal capitalism or systemic racism or ideologies that are attributable to religious fundamentalism, these things that are going on, then it's easy to kind of like grasp for these other things and say, oh, that explains everything,

0:10:51 Thomas: Me.

0:11:52 Brian: Right? Quantum physics is one of these. Another perennial favorite is, you know, subversion by the left and erosion of traditional values. Satanic pedophile rings in the deep state, that's another distinct possibility that could explain everything, right? Right. So I think quantum physics gets pulled in to help people try to make sense of their lives by these people who are then making a tremendous amount of money from it. So grifters.

0:12:21 Thomas: Quantum physics was really like the biggest gift to Wu merchants ever. And I don't know how long it took them to figure that out. Cause I feel like a lot of the, doesn't a lot of this stuff, it's scientifically at least date back to like, I don't what the thirties, the twenties, the whatever, it feels like it took a while for them to realize, wait, we can turn this into the secret and sell it as a, as nonsense. Or maybe you just didn't hear about it until the internet. I donno, one or the other.

0:12:22 Lindsey: Yes, I

0:12:48 Brian: I think, I think that's exactly right. I mean, it took a lot of people a long time to realize it was there and to figure out, maybe in some small way, what it is. And also for us to get sort of real advances like the computer, based on some of these effects, right? So the silicon chip, sort of, real quantum effects, and then people say, oh, look, you know, there's this other branch of physics that explains this. So let me start then by explaining a couple of things, and I'm glad that you brought up the history, because I think it's important just to get a very brief window into the history of how quantum physics came about so that we can think about the questions that it's answering, potentially.

0:13:38 Brian: So I'm first going to talk about the meaning of quantum, because I don't think people really understand what quantum means when they use this word, and then get into the wave-particle duality, which is the stuff you were talking about, in non-locality and entanglement and probabilistic interpretations and all this weird stuff that's hard to grasp. So first, thinking about what quantum means, historically, and this was in the late 1800s, early 1900s, physicists were trying to explain how matter emits radiation. So let me ask you a question. Why do things glow when you heat them up?

0:14:18 Thomas: Just does anything glow when you hit it? If you hit enough, just anything does.

0:14:20 Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Like. Take. A take a piece of metal and and and heat it until it glows orange, why does it glow? Do you know, Lindsay, um, guess it's

0:14:22 Thomas: I have no idea. Never thought about it. No her answer that's great okay it's ghost well that's all the time we have for the show so uh catch no I'm

0:14:33 Lindsey: Yeah so so so

0:14:36 Brian: Yeah so You're absolutely right, it's ghosts. Um, no, really, what happens there, you put energy into to your material, let's say it's metal, and it, that energy gets absorbed by the electrons in the atoms, and they go into these higher, these excited, excited states, and those states are unstable, and then when they drop back down into their lower energy states, they emit photons, right? Right. So they emit light.

0:15:10 Thomas: Gonna try popping some metal in the microwave right now and and just see, hold on, standby. Let's see, okay.

0:15:14 Brian: I highly recommend that. Yes. Yeah. So this, know, people knew for a long time that if you heat stuff up, it glows. But they couldn't figure out why. And chemists had observed a lot of things like this. They, they knew a lot of things about atomic interactions. They knew if you add, you know, this element and that element together, they would combine to make another kind of element, and they had measured a lot of things about the energies, but there was no explanation as to why.

And so this, what I just said about, um, electrons, you know, popping up into excited states and then popping back down, this was solved by Plunk, about 1900. And so, um, he figured out that emitted radiation from atoms is quantized. No one could solve this problem. They had this spectrum of light. They said, all right, we know what kind of light's coming out of this glowing object, but we can't explain the shape of the curve. And he just did a math trick where he said, instead of being able to emit in a continuous spectrum, they can only emit in little bits. So think digital versus analog, right? You can only emit energy in discrete bits. And he had no explanation for this whatsoever. He just said, he just tried it and it worked. And then Einstein came along and figured out that materials will also absorb energy in these little discrete bits, and so is where the quantized piece comes from, the quanta means, you know, you've got discrete

0:15:16 Thomas: Hmm. Huh

0:16:52 Brian: Values, one, two, three, four, integer values, nothing in between. So an electron can be in state one or state two, but it can never be in state 1.7. It's weird, it, it's very weird, we don't see this at the macroscopic level, we don't experience this, right? We have some, we have a kind of a continuous, uh, a spectrum of energies and distances, and, and so this threw people for a loop.

0:16:57 Thomas: Yeah

0:17:23 Brian: And Niels Bohr came along, and he's the one that proposed this orbital model of the atom, he's the one who said, hey, maybe an atom is like, you know, a little part in the center, and then these electrons orbiting around it, and there were a whole bunch of different models, but that time

0:17:40 Thomas: I made one in the eighth grade or something, I think, is that project totally worthless, what do we still do that

0:17:42 Brian: Yeah we we do it still, it still works for very, very simple cases, like the hydrogen atom, which, which is what he came up with that for.

0:17:52 Thomas: But don't you think that gives kids a, a bad idea, concept of what's going on in atoms, maybe, like, you do that as a kid and you think it's like a little solar system, you know, is that bad? Is that harmful?

0:18:04 Brian: Yeah. You know, maybe given the advent of quantum healing, it might be. I'm not sure. But problem is, in order to really explain this, requires a lot more math, and it requires a lot more sophisticated conceptual understanding. So it's probably a good place to start. And then you just have to tell your kids you've been lying to them this whole time, which is what I do anyways yeah It does. So Bohr proposed this orbital model and it worked, and and a bunch of things are quantized, the energy levels and this stuff called angular momentum, which is about the about the orbits. Um, and it, um, that went well for a while, but there was still no fundamental equation. People were trying to, you know, we've got in in Newton's second law, F equals MA, tells you how a force causes something to move. Um, but we didn't have an equation like that, and in order to develop that equation, a couple of other pieces had to come in, and this is where things, uh, get kind of screwy with the wave particle duality.

0:18:10 Thomas: Yeah always goes well yeah well Just to Clarify what equation, or what are you trying to explain, like, what, what equation for what exactly, right?

0:19:18 Brian: It's The Schrödinger equation equation, and this Is The equation

0:19:20 Thomas: So What's The thing Yeah, sorry, go ahead, I

0:19:21 Brian: Yeah So this, um, um, explains how, uh, basically a, we would say, a system evolves, like how particles move, where they end up, how fast they're going, things like that. That's what that's what Newton's second law tells you. If I kick a ball and, you know, with a certain force in a certain direction, you know, I can use that and some other equations to tell you how far it's going to go and how fast.

0:19:49 Thomas: Wasn't sure if that, that was just an analogy. If you're saying like, we're trying to figure out how far and how fast particles are going, or we're trying to figure out a totally different thing.

0:19:58 Brian: Yes. So we are trying to figure out how fast and how far particles Are going, and also then how they would interact with other particles if you put them all Together. Exactly. So that's that, that's a, that's a good clarifying point. So I will get to that equation in just a second. But it, it turns out out to be a very different equation, a very different, or equation of a very different form than Newton's second law, and that's because of this so-called wave-particle duality. And there are two pieces to that. One is that we have to think about waves as particles, and so think about light, and light is a wave, and actually that's something that just got figured out in maybe 1860s, 1880s, that light was electromagnetic radiation, and that it can be described as a wave. So we can think of waves, water waves are probably the easiest ones to think about, right?

0:20:01 Thomas: Okay. Gotcha.

0:20:54 Brian: Something's moving up and down, it's propagating through space, and it's propagating through some medium, right, so the water goes up and down in certain places, and in a wave like manner, out that light is a wave but also that light kind of hits like a particle, that it's made up of these little particle like things called photons. And so this was a real puzzle, like, this thing is supposed to be a wave, but it's also behaving like a part, and then de Broglie comes along and says, well, it's worse even than that, that particles also behave like waves. So So these things, these electrons that we talk about, that we think of as, like you said, these little orbital models, these little marbles or BBs, you know, orbiting around something, actually show wave phenomena.

0:21:50 Brian: And it's very, very bizarre. So a good example is with diffraction. Are you familiar with diffaction? Interference?

0:21:58 Thomas: I think we should just assume no one's familiar with what stuff coincidentally, I've heard lectures similar to this probably a hundred times in my life. I think it's so fascinating every time and I barely understand it most times. And I that for that reason, I always love hearing it again. Cause it's like, oh yeah, this is the the most interesting thing in the world and I can't really fully grapple with it every time, so it's great. Yeah, no, tell us about diffraction. Oh.

0:22:01 Brian: Okay, that's fine.

0:22:22 Brian: All right, I'll tell you about diffraction. Um, so two waves uh can interfere, and we see, you see this probably mostly with sound. This is how you get uh beats, if you have two waves of different frequencies and you'll hear this sound that goes wall wall wall, that kind of noise, that's that's an interference can you. I'll bet, I'll bet you can. You probably have to deal with that a lot.

0:22:40 Thomas: I could tell you all about that yeah yeah Yeah, and acoustics and, yeah, trying to get my my sound quality uh good, you know, waves interfering with each other, messing up the spectrum, that kind of thing, that

0:22:54 Brian: Exactly, that's a good example of that. And you can do this with light. If you take some really small slits in a piece of an opaque material and you shine light at it, it will make this kind of characteristic stripy pattern, or or this pattern of dots, because the light wave will go through both of those slits. And in some places, it will interfere destructively, which means that there'll be a dark spot there. And in some places, that will interfere constructively, and the waves add, and there's a bright spot there. So you get this very characteristic series of and dark spots, or you can do it with with stripes.

This is actually how we know what stars are made out of. We look at the light from a star and we put it through a diffraction pattern, and it turns out that if you heat a particular element, say cobalt or hydrogen, it will have a very characteristic striped pattern. That's like a fingerprint. And so we can look at that that light and say, oh, this one's got cobalt and this one doesn't, this one has iron in it, this one doesn't. And so we know what stars are made of just from looking at these these uh kind of light fingerprints, they

0:24:14 Thomas: Just blows my mind because stars are, and this is scientifically accurate, really fucking far away, just check fact check that real quick. Yeah, like it's so crazy. That's like a zillion miles away, and we're like, well, the light is this, so we know what's in it. That's so cool. I don't know, I love science. Does this have anything to do. I remember I read QED by Feynman, which I loved, and I remember him saying something about like, one clue to all this is the fact that glass is like kind of reflective, and and I think he said like, even, oh, who was it, Newton, somebody, somebody, like, made this observation and was like, yeah, no matter how much you clean it or polish it, doesn't seem to affect that fact, and and he said like this, he could have kind of figured this out based on that. And I always was like, that sounds really cool, I don't understand it. Or maybe did I get that right? Do I have that story correct at all?

0:24:21 Brian: Are yeah yeah yes, yes No, that is a great thing. You

0:25:05 Thomas: So what's going on there?

0:25:06 Brian: Do That that comes about from a light wave going going from one medium to another with a different index of refraction. So the index of refraction tells you how the light interacts with that material. And so anytime you have a boundary between two different indices of refaction, so air and glass or glass and water, you're going to have both a reflection at the surface and a transmission. And in some, some materials will refract that, which means the light bends when it goes through, which is why when you look at a straw in a glass, it looks like the straw is bent.

0:25:40 Thomas: Right. I just always love that idea that like there's... there's stuff we take for granted every day. You know, like sometimes quantum physics feels like this thing that only someone in a lab somewhere with amazing equipment can even detect or something like that. But it's just so cool to me to think like, you know, great scientists throughout history maybe have just looked at things that we all take for granted, you know, and just thought like, wait, why is that happening? Like when you ask me why something glows when you heat it up, I'm like, I don't know, never thought about it.

0:25:43 Brian: Yeah Yeah, some people think it's really cool and some people find it irritating. My kids, my poor kids, like I always say that, they, you know, they're little and they say why is the sky blue, and two and a half hours later I'm still talking. So, you know, anyway, um, it turns out, so you have this double slit uh experiment, which you can do with light. Well, there's a very strange experiment that was done where they fired electrons at these double slits, and they made the same interference pattern. And so uh, this is very actually very hard to explain, because that means that they are interfering with one another in the way that a wave does. So you, and if you fire enough electrons, you see, see an interference pattern where you see sort of not exactly bright spots, but you see spots where lots of electrons hit and spots where not many electrons hit at all.

0:27:09 Brian: And so you get that sort of stripy pattern, which you should not get from particles. It's, I imagine, like firing a BB gun at two slits, and then somehow they end up clustering together because the BBs are interfering with one another the way a light wave would. What it means is that the particles are going through both slits at the same time. A minute. So it means they're acting like waves. And here's the rub. If you put a detector at one of those slits, it'll only go through one.

0:27:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:42 Brian: But if you don't put a detector there, it will go through both. And

0:27:46 Thomas: And therefore, if I visualize a parking spot, I will have one.

0:27:46 Lindsey: Therefore, we create our days.

0:27:52 Brian: That's, you know, that's a logical conclusion to go from that to to the parking spot. I agree with you 100. Well,

0:27:57 Thomas: It seems so. Yeah. So what's happening there? Like I, we always hear about that as like the, you know, because it's being quote unquote observed, like I mentioned earlier, but it's not really about a person observing it, right? It's not Really about a consciousness or anything, right.

0:28:13 Brian: It's it's about its interaction with a classical object. Yes, so, um, so this is, there's one more piece before we get to that, and that's back to the Schrödinger equation. And so people figured this stuff out, and well, or I should say they discovered these things and we're still very confused. And Schrödinger came along and says, hey, I've got an equation that expects this, that explains this stuff, but it's a wave equation. So instead of having an equation like Newton's second law for macroscopic objects, he wrote one that is in the form of a wave equation, so it describes waves and not particles. And this is that fundamental difference between quantum physics and classical physics, is that the thing that describes how these particles move around and interact is a wave equation, but we're talking about particles.

And so the wave waves are are characterized or described by things like frequency and wavelength and amplitude, right, which makes sense again if you think about a sound wave. Amplitude is related to the how loud it it is. Um, you know, the amplitude of a water wave is how tall it is, um, but quantum amplitudes are a little bit different. Quantum amplitudes are probabilities of a particular phenomenon to occur. In quantum physics, they're called observables. So that could be the position, or it could be energy, or it would be the momentum, or basically the velocity, how fast it's moving, moving. So at its core, these amplitudes, which we're talking about the waves, so instead of talking about how loud the sound is or how tall the water wave is, we're taking about a probability

0:28:24 Thomas: Okay.

0:30:13 Brian: Of finding this particle, let's say, at a particular location or with a particular speed. And that means we can't really predict exactly where they will be or how fast they will be going. All we can say is if we look at a whole lot of them, then they are most likely to be over here or moving that fast. Yeah, it's nuts. It it is nuts. It is, this is, I, I feel sorry. Yeah, I just, I, I feel like I, you know, I have a pretty good grasp of probability through through knowing about statistics, and this, it's it's very hard to visualize, like, what this, what this means. Um, um, it's not very hard to visualize, it's impossible. Okay, that makes me feel better, Brian. There's a very famous quote that no one understands quantum mechanics. And really, what I've seen is that you have to fall back on the mathematics, and because you try to visualize this stuff and you can't, you really just can't.

0:31:13 Thomas: Yeah, I hear Sean Carroll say that on his podcast from time to time, where it's like, he doesn't want to come up with an analogy, because there just isn't an, out, like, analogies by definition require putting things into terms that, you know, kind of feel like things we understand, and quantum physics may just be, or more specifically, this, you know, this thing you're talking about, may just be something, there is no comparison to a thing we see in everyday life that we can say, oh, it's like that thing.

0:31:38 Brian: I think that's absolutely right. Yes, but that's this sort of indeterminacy piece, right? This built-in indeterminate see And it's not due to measurement error, it's not, you know, if we could just measure these things more precisely and better, we could get rid of this indetermine see this inability to say exact things about single particles. It's it's fundamental, it's baked in. And I think that speaks to what you're saying, that we don't, we we don't have things like that that we encounter very often, at least in our everyday lives. Another piece here is what's called quantum superposition. And that means that things, so if you have a wave equation, if you two sound waves, you can add them together.

0:32:28 Brian: We talked about interference, right? And they can add in different ways. They can cancel each other out. They can reinforce each other. But, um, you can add up a whole bunch of them to get, um, a particular result, that's how exactly that's exactly right, that's exact, correct. Uh, the, our, the sounds that we're making now are a whole lot of different frequencies added together, right? So there's a superposition there, air. And so this means that particles that we think of, like electrons, can also be in superposition. They can be in multiple states at once, again, not really easy to take in.

0:32:41 Thomas: Death metal. Oh, no, sorry. Yeah.

0:33:10 Thomas: So and but that so that's just because of the duality thing, right? Or I say just because but because like, is there a compare? Do you do you mean literally sound is also doing this kind of thing? Or just just because there's the fact that like light and photons, like because light acts as a wave and a particle, that's why it can be in all these places at once.

0:33:30 Brian: Yes, the latter. Sound does that because sound is a wave.

0:33:35 Thomas: Just a wave.

0:33:35 Brian: It's just a wave, and it makes sense to have a pressure wave in the air add together in a certain way, um, but it doesn't make sense for particles to do that, so

0:33:36 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right. So what's a thing? Sorry, this is, I don't know if you know this, but the thing you know a lot about is really complicated and people can't really understand it.

0:33:59 Thomas: Actually, so I don't, what's it like being you? Cause like I've, I be, I've always thought like, yeah, there are a lot of things where like, that's your thing. That's your hobby. That you're interested and you hear people do it badly. Or you see a TV show where, you know, somebody like if there's ever audio equipment or, oh, by the way, if there was ever a guitar in a movie or TV show, every single time, my wife already knows. I'm just gonna be like, they're not playing. Oh, that stupid. Why would, that's not where your hand would be. Anyway. Oh every time. Oh he's not strumming it. They're literally not even strumming. It's not happening. Sometimes they just, the hand, they don't even move the left hand. There's, oh, the whole song is just the same chord, I guess. Anyway, stuff like that. But for quantum physicists, it feels like there's not a good version of that. Like it's all every day, everything you see, if it ever mentions quantum physics in any way is probably doing it badly. Does it get on your nerves? What's that like?

0:34:23 Brian: Yes.

0:34:50 Brian: It gets on my nerves a lot. I, I like, I cannot really watch science fiction movies or TV shows. I just, I don't last very long because it's just this just crap, you know, and I I can't

0:35:02 Thomas: Or you'd have to just let it go. Just like, ah, just treat it like it's Lord of the Rings. And it's just a fantasy version of science or something, I guess. Maybe that works.

0:35:05 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:35:12 Brian: Not so much. I, can it's hard for me to let that go, and it can be hard to find people to talk to this stuff, about At least without them getting irritated, you now,

0:35:21 Thomas: But I guess I was going to try to ask a question. I don't know if this will make sense, but, like, is there a way to illustrate the difference? Like, is there a thing that light does that makes it behave like a particle that if you try to do that with a sound wave, like, nothing would happen, or it wouldn't work because it's just a wave? Like, I'm just trying to understand kind of the difference there.

0:35:40 Brian: The thing that I can think of for light is what Einstein figured out, which is called the photoelectric effect, and so he, he showed that if you shine light on metal, that it will, this is back to the black metal maybe, that it will actually absorb in these little quanta. So the answer to your question is no.

0:36:02 Brian: There isn't anything that you can do without doing some kind of experiment like that to illustrate this stuff. We just don't see it.

0:36:02 Thomas: Oh, I didn't mean literally Do I just meant you could explain the difference, and we could, kind of, you know, like, just to just illustrate the difference there in our minds.

0:36:12 Brian: Oh, no. Okay. Okay, so the energy transmitted by a sound wave, it can be continuous, right? It can have any value depending on the energy you put into it. That means the volume, for instance, right. So, you know, you can feel the effect of a soundwave hitting you, compressed air, and that can be continuous. It can Have any value that you want. You will absorb any of that energy, but light, um, not, it's, it's only absorbed in these little packets. So that's saying that you can only, you're only going to get, uh, absorb the energy from the volume if it's on one or two or three, but Not.

0:36:38 Thomas: Right. Oh.

0:37:02 Thomas: I was gonna say like, it's, what if it was only like a major scale? Like, you can only hear like exact notes, you know, like a 440, but you couldn't hear like 445 or something. Yeah.

0:37:02 Brian: Yeah. You Know, that's, that's a really good example. I like that that's

0:37:14 Thomas: Thank you. That's Interesting. Wow, that is so weird. Okay, sorry if I derailed you, where were we? Yeah.

0:37:20 Brian: No, no, no problem, no problem. So we're getting to the some of the pieces now that are these claims in things like What the Bleep and quantum healing, and that's, that's this, uh, non-locality. So what we've, what, what physicists figured out is that these particles are in some sense spread out and not localized. This is the non- locality, right? And this has been experimentally verified. You can, uh, get, uh, two or more particles. So you could create two particles from some process, right, and they can be in the same quantum state, and then you can separate them, um, and the, but the particles are what we call entangled, right?

So they have these correlations between them, so and this is something that the really irritating, uh, guy, one of the, of the really irritating guys and Yeah, I'm sorry, that's, uh, I'm being non-local here, um, he, uh, it was, uh, Santanova, the, uh, the homophobic, um, psychiatrist guy, psychiatrist, yeah, um, he said that, you know, you've got these two particles and you're looking at this one blob of light and the other blob of, and it's, not they're the same thing, and that's true in a sense, that's, or that's accurate right, these two particles are in the same quantum state, and so if you measure one, um, the other one will have the, um, same value of that thing that you're measuring, or if you mesure one and cause it to change through the observer effect, the change is, uh, occurs in the other one as well.

0:38:12 Thomas: You're gonna have to to specify.

0:39:04 Brian: Explain, but okay, but wait, that, but that is, that is how they're trying to, or that's a piece anyway of how they're trying to say that that consciousness influences the physical world. Then exactly, okay, um, yeah, this is how you get things like superconductivity, um, from what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is the fifth state of matter, and it's, you usually have to get things really, really cold, right, like down close to absolute zero, and then things fall into this, uh, uh, the same quantum state, and they display weird properties, like they don't, there's no resistance, right? So they superconduct. And again, due to things being entangled so that they are essentially in the same quantum states.

0:39:51 Brian: And again, there's no analog for this at the macroscopic level. You can't say, oh, I'm at this temperature and you're at that temperature and therefore we're the same, same person, right? So, fortunately we can't say that. So, Lindsay, that was a very good point, because this is exactly where we, where they bring in this thing of like, oh, well, if, if these particles are all in the same state, then maybe we can reach in there with our minds, right, and change one, and it will change all of them, um, they make an egg that's

0:40:24 Thomas: Yeah. To parking spot particle. It always comes back to parking spots. It really is the secret. Is this the same thing as the secret pretty much? Do you know the secret? If you don't, check that out for your show.

0:40:27 Brian: Right Yeah. We've, we've talked about going over that one, but I think after What the Bleep we have to take a break from this

0:40:40 Thomas: Yeah, I

0:40:40 Lindsey: It stuff, so, but it is the same idea, right? Like, the, the, the quote-unquote, like, theoretical foundation that they use in the secret is the, the same, isn't it? I think so, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's right, and

0:40:53 Thomas: Mean, the basic formula is like magic science, quantum words to try to get you to like observer, change observer to, you know, consciousness or rather than that being, as you said, just any classical object, which I think means like a violin or something. No, like any just Newtonian interaction that turns, converts it into whatever the thingy is, either a particle or a wave or whatever. And then like they turn that into like, well, that means an observer can affect it. And then from there, it's just a quick hop, skip and a jump to therefore any observer conscious person can use their thoughts to like change the world. And that's like the basic formula for most of this stuff, right?

0:40:53 Brian: And that's good.

0:41:13 Brian: Big stuff.

0:41:33 Brian: That's exactly right. Yes. Then you can just go in, you can reach inside and observe your own quantum states and then, you know, decide that, you know, you don't want this disease. This disease doesn't exist anymore. Yeah.

0:41:45 Thomas: Yeah. Who observes the observer? Yeah.

0:41:49 Lindsey: Which, Brian, like, I'm sorry, you're never going to get to your last point. But I just want to say that, like, the steps that they use to make this case are just infinitely more stupid than just saying magic, right? Like, they go through, like, all of these steps to be like, so, you know, what we perceive isn't objective reality. And, you now, we sense more than we perceive and thought has a physical basis and then all this quantum stuff that Brian's talking about, out, and they're like, and therefore, here are the scientific steps that get us to, I can imagine a parking space into reality, and it just, it's infinitely more stupid than saying it's magic.

0:42:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:42:24 Thomas: Just be like, Gandalf's real. End of movie. I saved you two hours.

0:42:31 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:42:31 Brian: Yeah, I would have more respect for that. Yes, I think you're, you know, and to your point about, you know, Lord of the Rings and and sci-fi stuff, you're exactly, I can believe, I can do suspension of belief and say Gandalf is real and now I can watch this movie easier than I can read this stuff and say parking spot.

0:42:48 Thomas: Right. Right. Well, but the issue is, though, you got to get a bunch of people to believe it. And unfortunately, it really seems like this is plausible to some people. You know, I mean, especially when you talk because, like, honestly, quantum physics is super weird. You know. I think we can blame Brian for that. Hold him directly responsible. It's really weird. It's your fault. And so therefore, I think, as somebody said earlier, I can't remember who the weird stuff equals weird stuff. That was you, Brian. That was Lindsay. But, you know, I think that for, you know, most people are not very well versed in this stuff. And even people who try to be like me, it's too hard to understand. So I can't really repeat what I even just learned a minute ago. So it's hard to blame people for, you know being taken in by some of this stuff, I think.

0:42:52 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:43:04 Brian: Yes. You can Right. Absolutely, absolutely, that's why I wanted to say that piece up front, you know, especially people, I mean, you know, someone's got a terminal illness, of course they're going to to look around, you know, for whatever they can find, especially if, you know, doctors are telling them, sorry, we, you know, there's nothing we can do about this. So I agree with that completely. All right, one last piece, one last piece, and I'm done with the quantum stuff. And that's the so-called wave function collapse, because this gets brought up again and again on these websites and in the movie. And so, is a proposed solution to the so-call measurement problem. And that brings in the observer effect, which is the other strong claim that's made.

So, so physicists are trying to explain non-locality, because this doesn't make sense, as we've said, really, to our macroscopic minds, to our classical violins, because we're trying to explain non-locality and the probabilistic nature of the quantum world. Old. And what we notice is that if we measure an electron, let's say, it's always in a definite state. You know, it is always in particular place or has a particular velocity. Now, there are some built-in limitations there through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that if you know one very exactly, you can't know the other one very, exactly. But nonetheless, we don't look at an electron and say, oh, it's spread out, you know, all across the universe. It's in one place, right? So we find it in a definite state. And this is what's called the measurement problem. And this has what led physicists to say, well, when the observer makes this measurement,

0:43:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:45:23 Brian: Then they do something to the particle. They cause it to be no longer non-local. They, after that, then the evolution of our system is deterministic, so after that we don't have to deal with probabilities anymore, after that point we know, uh, we can say things that you can say with classical physics, like if I give this thing a kick, you know, how fast will it go or where will it end up, so this is a very strange thing, right? This is the measurement problem that brings in the observer effect. So there isn't actually a completely agreed upon solution to this. The two main ones are the wave function collapse, due to Heisenberg and Bohr. The other one, and there are actually more than this, but two of the best known ones include the Everett interpretation, which is the many worlds theorem, which I'm not going to get into today. That could be another show.

0:46:26 Thomas: Well, a lot of this stuff could be another show, we didn't even get to, get to the movie, we're gonna run out of time, that's okay, we'll do another show.

0:46:26 Lindsey: Show. Yeah. I know.

0:46:31 Brian: Yeah. Well, I think it's okay. Yeah.

0:46:34 Thomas: I, I, yeah, you know, like, you guys made me watch this movie, so I might, you know, I might insist on it,

0:46:39 Brian: As long as we don't have to watch it again, that's, that's fine.

0:46:42 Thomas: Lindsey. Does, no, I'm just kidding, just revenge, and I'm gonna tell you what, I'm gonna put it at 0.75 speed too, Lindsay, you gotta, with my new, with my, my new plugin.

0:46:55 Lindsey: Gross, okay,

0:46:56 Brian: So so you know, time's subjective anyway, Lindsey, you know, well, so it's all a segment of your imagination, and if you would just believe, you could make that fast forward,

0:46:58 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:47:07 Lindsey: I'm addicted to my emotions about what the bleep, that's

0:47:10 Thomas: Yeah. Oh my God. The addiction stuff. Oh, there's so much.

0:47:10 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:47:11 Brian: Yes. There's a lot of horrible stuff there. All right, back to wave function collapse. So what Heisenberg and Boar said was, all right, maybe when we make this measurement with a classical object, right, so we put our detector in there, this wave function, which is spread out all through space, collapses into a single state. And that's what we measure. And that is probably the most accepted version of what happens to explain why we don't see this wave, we don't see all these possibilities at once, we just see one thing. Right? But it's got a couple of ramifications.

Here one is that before we make that measurement, that particle did not have definite values of position or speed, so it is not possible to say exactly where it was or how fast it was, before we, before we measured, so before that we don't know, before it's a probability, afterwards it's, it's not a probability, it's in a definite state. So that's what happens according to this interpretation when we put that detector in at the double slit, we force it to be in, in so to speak, to be in that one location. So interaction with the environment causes what's known as as quantum decoherence, things decohere, they move apart and they move into definite states, and some of that quantum information kind of leaks out into the environment and we find things in particular states, so that kind of weird stuff tends to go away when we measure things.

0:48:54 Thomas: Yeah. And that's kind of, you know, I always hear it's like whenever there have been these claims about quantum, whatever it's Like, well, it essentially cancels out at the macro level. Is that kind of what you're sort of what they're saying? They're like, we don't, we don't see this in our everyday lives really, because it's really, really tiny and weird.

0:48:55 Brian: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. That's Exactly right, that's, that's where I was going with that, more or less, is that, you know, this is the one of the claims that's made, oh, things are entangled, and, you know, they're all interacting and they're just these fields of probabilities at this level, but yeah, but we don't interact with things on that level, and if you don't buy that consciousness can do that, then I'm afraid you've got no quantum healing. So, so why don't you buy that righteousness can do that, Brian, or I mean, is it just the the canceling out thing? Uh, no, and that's a very good segue into, uh, what I was gonna, what I was thinking of next. And that's this connection between quantum physics and consciousness, and that it's bogus, right? So there's two pieces of that. One is because the quantum physics that they're talking about is bogus.

0:50:00 Brian: It's misunderstood. And then there's the other basic misunderstanding of what consciousness is, which maybe you have more to say about than I do. But I think this misapplies ideas of both quantum physics and consciousness by extrapolating them to be these sort of vaguely defined fields that permeate all things, and I use this word fields because I think this whole genre of of self-help stuff that we're talking about really, uh, of attached itself to this idea of fields from physics, right? And, you know, we have gravitational fields, for instance, that, that, you know, some mass can can exert a force on something even without touching it, right? So fields have, um, they, they have energy stored in them, and you can transmit energy through them, right?

They have forces that are associated with them, so the gravitational field has has a gravitational force, the electromagnetic field, uh, has has forces, it has electrical and magnetic forces, and each one of these fields also has a quanta or a particle, right? So the quanta of the electromagnetic field is the photon, and these things can produce local interactions. So yes, electromagnetic fields extend through space, but they're able to act locally. And I think that that's the idea that really at the core of a lot of this stuff, where people are like, oh, oh, I like this weird idea about fields, and it sounds just like spirituality to me, right?

0:51:38 Brian: So that, you know, there are these fields that permeate the universe, and one of these is consciousness. One of the quotes I have is, from quote, uh, from one of these websites, but the key takeaway is that by working with the field of consciousness that pervades the universe, you can create outcomes in a way that defies the reductionist model of Newtonian physics. So, um, they also say consciousness already exists without your participation, so it exists outside of the human mind, so it is, it's, it's some kind of, it's pantheism is what it is. It's some kind of, of, uh, field that permeates all things, right? Pantheism says that, you know, we are all one thing.

0:52:26 Lindsey: We are all spirit. We're all God. Um, there's no distinctions between those things. So what's, what is the point then of, like, going through all of those steps of saying, like, you know, making the false claim that, uh, interactions between neurons is through electrical signaling, if, if consciousness is everywhere and it doesn't depend on having a brain or substrate or whatever, then like, what, what is the point of that? What, do you know what I mean? Uh, know, you tell me, because I think that's where it starts getting really fuzzy and really hand wavy where they're like, oh yeah, um, there's this consciousness field and they're these quantum fields, and again, one's weird and the other's weird, so, um, how it comes together at at at the neuron level, I have no idea. That I think that's where it's

0:53:14 Thomas: Well, This is, this comes up often, I think I brought it up with Q-Anon too, where it's like different bullshit merchants don't have to have compatible bullshit, they just Have To all be selling some sort of bullshit that they, you know, like they can, all these Q-Anons conspiracy theories can be like honestly contradictory, but it doesn't matter, they can always be a part of something called Q-Anon as long as they're still kind of, there's something that holds it together, I'm not not entirely sure what. Similarly, these woo merchants, they each, especially, you know, in this movie we watch, like they each have their different, you know, completely bogus angle on stuff and they aren't compatible. So you might ask, like, why would it matter if, you know, if everything's conscious, if there's a field of consciousness, why would any of the stuff matter about the neutrons and all that? And it's like, well, those are two different types of bullshit.

0:53:14 Brian: It's totally hand-wavy, that's

0:53:26 Lindsey: True. Yeah.

0:54:06 Lindsey: But I don't, I don't think it is though, because I, because they make, they make both points in What the Bleep, they make, they, they try to make the point that like, like all thought is physical and then They parlay That back in the movie, right?

0:54:13 Thomas: Well, who's they? Because I

0:54:17 Lindsey: Like the people that are –

0:54:17 Thomas: Think they yeah, but they I think the The filmmakers interviewed a bunch of different woo merchants. They're not all in on it together. They're just all different bullshit artists who are giving their spiel. It's kind of – quantum it's physics, I think. That was how I took it. But, yeah.

0:54:22 Lindsey: Oh, okay. Okay.

0:54:33 Lindsey: All right. It is, but that's a good point, Lindsay, that they took this detour, this left turn into sort of basic neuroanatomy or neurophysiology. But it didn't really connect to the rest of the stuff. I just, because what I, what I thought at the end of it was that, um, they were trying to make the point that, like, thought is has like an electrical basis, and then that ties into the idea about the electro, electro, electromagnetic fields or whatever, and that that was like a mechanism for talking about how thought is interacting with quantum particles. You know, I, the more I thought about this, the more confused I got.

0:55:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:55:12 Brian: Because you, you're, and that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense, and you're exactly right, they just pulled in two totally different things, kind of stuck them together with chewing gum and said, "Hey, look, it's a thing," and, and, and if you think about it the way you have, it doesn't hold up at

0:55:29 Thomas: Well, it is a real problem and a sign of bullshit. You know, like because when you with a lot of this woo or again with QAnon or stuff like that, you have to kind of turn off your brain and get into the mode of as long as these people are in my tribe, I'm accepting what they're saying, you know, because we're all kind of in on this together. Other. And I think the side effect of that is people aren't really doing too much quibbling with whatever brand of woo bullshit they're selling. So it can be contradictory and weird and it doesn't, you know, there's no, they've kind of had to give up the very thing which would critique and, understand this stuff. They have to check that at the door to be part of this club, I think.

0:55:29 Lindsey: All. Yeah. Yeah.

0:56:11 Brian: I think you're right, and I think the reason why you're asking those questions, Lindsay, is because of what you actually do know about neurons and, the you know, the way things happen in the brain. And so

0:56:23 Lindsey: There's not a lightning storm in the synapse. Just saying. There's not a lightning storm in the synapse!

0:56:27 Thomas: My favorite, the thing is the philosophy in this movie was as bad as anything else. Like it's, there was one where I, I just, I couldn't even handle the quote. I'm pretty sure it was, I was going to write it down. And I was like, I think I remember it word for word. Somebody says, well, the cell is the smallest unit of consciousness in the brain.

0:56:46 Lindsey: Oh, my God.

0:56:49 Thomas: I was, like, oh, just ran right through that hard problem, huh? You just, you just know that the smallest, you know, the smallest unit of consciousness is the cell. What does that mean? So am I conscious then? Or are the cells conscious? Each cell is conscious. How am I conscious then? But if they're conscious, like, what, is there a smaller thing in them that makes them cry? Or just, no, that's the smallest gene. I just love that it was asserted without anything. Like, well, we all know this. Yeah.

0:57:12 Brian: I'm glad you brought that up, because this is one of my biggest problems with this, besides all the rest, is that they make a fundamental error of reductionism. And this is really ironic, given this criticism of Newtonian materialism. So they're trying to critique reductionism. And so reductionism means that we are going to break things down into their smallest parts and that we can explain everything from knowing the parts, right? This is, for instance, it works for a crystal. We know what the atoms are, we know where they are, we know the angles between them and the kind of lattice that they're in, and that explains everything about a crystal, that explains why it looks the way it does, that's explains its hardness, exactly, it also explains what Hetzelian powers, you Know, its hardness, the way it fractures, the the index of refraction, which tells you why it's shiny or sparkly or anything like that, that can all be explained by knowing everything about the individual parts, right?

And this has worked well for many, many things. What it doesn't work for is complex systems, um, that cannot be reduced to just their parts. And knowing everything thing about the parts is not enough to figure out why the thing is the way it is. And that's because complex systems that have lots of interactions, you have to take into account not only the parts, but also the interaction between the parts. So that's the greater than the sum of their parts piece, is the interaction.

0:58:05 Thomas: And why it has healing powers. Oh, no. Sorry. Why it doesn't have healing power.

0:59:00 Brian: The example I like to use best is a flock of birds. So you have a whole bunch of birds sitting on a telephone wire, and they get disturbed, and they start flying, and they form a flock, right? And this flock is a thing, right? It's like an envelope, and they all fly together, and you'll see them, like, they'll bend around and twist and maintain that shape in a fluid way. And I can tell you that there is no leader bird up there going, "Turn left, turn right, turn left, left, turn right, right?" That is an emergent property. That is a steady state. It's a thing on a higher scale than the scale of an individual bird. And you cannot predict how that will behave by knowing only about the birds.

0:59:51 Brian: You can track every single bird and its velocity and its position, and that still will not tell you why you get this flock.

0:59:59 Thomas: Well, I thought that was still up for a debate whether or not, emergent properties are like completely like you physically cannot predict them based on the constituent parts. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

1:00:10 Brian: I think there are a lot of examples. I'll just go ahead and make that bold claim. And that's why I use simple physical systems like cloud patterns or birds, because I think we can make those claims there. And I would make, I would argue that possibly maybe a better way of thinking about consciousness could be as an Emergent property from the brain, right? And this doesn't get us off into another tangent, but I just find it ironic that they're trying to apply the same kind of scientific approach that they are excoriating, you know, they're saying, "Oh, evil determinism and Newtonian mechanics," blah blah, and then they're to do the same thing by saying, "Oh yeah, you can find consciousness in the cell." Or, you know, there's the identity neuron. There's the consciousness neuron. So they're actually using the wrong scientific approach to justify the claims that they're making, which is just adds another level of irritation, at least to me.

1:00:15 Thomas: OK, yeah.

1:01:13 Thomas: Well, Brian and Lindsey, that was so fascinating. Uh, we could go on for hours, I think we already have, several, uh, spin-off, you know, episodes maybe of your show, uh, or maybe I can get you back on to talk more about What the Bleep Do We Know, just for fun. Either way, uh, that podcast is What the FUP, that's F-U-P, and uh, go check it out right now, and thanks so much for coming on.

1:01:34 Brian: You.

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