SGU 10-Hour Show Part 3

SGU 10-Hour Show
2nd May 2015
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SGU 511                      SGU 512
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
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Part 3: https://youtu.be/nCsu0QhiVTo

Interview with Brian Wecht and George Hrab continued:

Note: This page is not transcribed, but it has been summarized, and statements of the rogues has been paraphrased in order to provide limited searchability. Text is in gray to distinguish it from normal transcription.

25 Years of the Hubble continued (0:00)

S: Some are not in the visible spectrum.

GH: So if you were flying around in space, what you would see is what you see in the night sky

S: If you were close to a nebula, that would dominate your view. You would have to be in the right place, and the color is false color.

S: Next picture: A happy face

B: That's gravitational lensing

S: The two eyes are globular galaxies

J: That's creepy

S: But what are the odds of having two perfectly spaced galaxies and a nose? But there are so many places to point the telescope ...

J: Phil Plaitt says it's mirrors on the Hubble, not lenses. Do I have to come on the show to explain this?

S: This is the Whirlpool galaxy, with a satellite galaxy next to it. It's gorgeous. One of my favorites.

GH: The distances between those points of light is pure black for billions of miles.

S: Trillions

GH: But if you were inside there, it would just look like what we see on Earth

S: This is the Eagle nebula. It's 9.5 lightyears tall. ... This is the Centaurus A galaxy, which has a lot of dust in it. This is the Helix nebula. Isn't that the eye they used in Cosmos? It looks like a circle, but it's two perpendicular disks that aren't perfectly round. This is the Sombrero galaxy.

B: That's one of my favorites. .. There's so much dust.

J: Bob, that's not dust, those are thetan souls

S: And this Moon is Ganymede.

E: And the Bill Nye bowtie nebula

S: The Butterfly nebula. A five solar mass nebula exploded. These were called planetary nebulas, and the name stuck even though the idea was wrong. A lot of misnomers stick. ... This is star cluster Pismus 44.

J: It looks like a movie poster.

S: These are two galaxies colliding. Galaxies are variable, but when they merge, all kinds of cool stuff happens.

GH: There's Galaxy Zoo, and Moon Zoo which are crowd sourced projects where you study these things.

S: This is star VA38 in Mono Seratus, the Unicorn nebula. This is the star in the middle, and there are light echoes, reflections of the same star in the planetary nebula.

J: Ooh! That is cool! A hundred years ago, people didn't know any of this was there, and they couldn't see it. ... This is the Bearded Man nebula.

S: This is the Ghost Head nebula.

GH: Who names these?

S: Frankie Gizzmore

S: M439, two interacting galaxies again.

J: Isn't that the Mars close approach, June 13, 2001?

S: ... This is Mars. That's a polar ice cap on the top, C02 ice. ... Look at that! That is a flockulent spiral.

J: That center light is a ton of stars together. Is that all gonna slowly spiral in?

S: ... This is another one where galaxies interact. The other one is off frame. That's the last one. Thank you Hubble.

J: That's a project that overachieved.

B: Now we've got the James Webb going up. It's bigger.

Physics equations with Brian Wecht: (15:23)

BW: When you put an equation in a book, you lose half your readers. Don't put in any equations! But theoretical physicists think through equations. So I thought I would explain the most important equation to particle physics. It might completely fail, but if it works at all, it will be with you guys.

16:20 ''(Massive series of equations appear on screen)''

GH: This is my pin number.

BW: I pulled this off Sean Carol's blog. The standard model of particle physics is all the particles we know, and their interactions. This part of the equation that describes particle physics. This describes one generation of the standard model. Quarks and Leptons come in three generations. Leptons and nutrino, muon, and its neutrino, tao and it's nutrino. This is only one of those things.
The quarks come in generations too.
In that equation, you see L's and R's for Left and Right particles.

S: So this is a fifth of the universe here

BW: A third of a fifth

J: Somebody actually started to think about this equation.

BW: This is the sum total of our knowledge. You asked how long it would take to rebuild particle physics, this is most of what we know. But this equation doesn't have the Higgs. When the electro-weak force splits, that's when the Higgs comes in.
This equation tells us all the fundamental particles, their masses, and how they interact.

J: How many man years did this take?

S: 2000 years

B: The standard model, even in its oldest form isn't that old

BW: Part was known in the late '60's. By the end of the '70's, this was pretty well known. The top was found in '93 or '94. People think of the seventies as the golden age of particle physics.

J: Brian, if I swap one of those F's for the letter Z, what would happen?

BW: You can't do that. The first equation says the full equation is everything else below. 

J: So all particles and their actions equals a bunch of these other equations.

BW: You can reformulate all of Newton's laws into Lagrangian.

B: If you gave this equation to an intelligent robot, they could extrapolate most other things from it, but not dark matter.

BW: Yes, but you wouldn't get emergent phenomenon from a microscopic equation. This doesn't reveal it. So this is not useful for our macroscopic lives.

B: Could you run simulations based on this and find the emergent properties.

BW: In theory, yes. This does not imply Newtonian gravity. This model does not speak to gravity at all. The language that describes it leads to infinities if you try to apply it to gravity, and you can't fix it. So this is why people want to find a theory of quantum gravity.

B: Then this doesn't speak to relativity

BW: This is consistent with Special Relativity, but not General Relativity.

B: So the Standard model meshes with special relativity and quantum mechanics?

BW: Yes, it is relativistic quantum mechanics. String theory is a theory that successfully unifies quantum mechanics and gravity, and there's a nice heuristic way of seeing why this fixes the problem. The infinities come when you calculate scattering. Anything that can happen might happen, so you have to sum them all up. Infinities happen when things are super close together. But string theory says that at some point, you stop using point particle crap, and use strings instead, which gives you a finite answer. Once you get close enough, you shouldn't think about point particles. That's the amazing thing about string theory.
So, this language here breaks down at some point. It's like how Newtonian physics work when things are slow, but when they move really fast, it breaks down.

B: But it's still not a full quantum gravity

BW: No, it works. But we don't know if it's ''the'' theory.

B: So is the problem then that it's hard to test?

BW: That's the big problem. To see these effects, you need to build something so energetic that it's never gonna happen in human history.

B: But we want to predict what happens in a singularity.

BW: We would like to remove the singularity, and say it's not a breakdown of our laws, it's another set of laws that we understand better.

J: I have a question now. You're hanging out with other people as smart as you, do you tell jokes based off this stuff?

BW: Sure! For jokes, it's knowing the words more than anything. ... So the terms in this first equation: L-Dirac, those are the kinetic energies of all the particles. Dirac found the theory of an electron. So, if you have spin, what is the equation that governs the electron? Dirac wrote down the equation, and it implied the existence of anti-particles. Then people found the positron. He did most of his work in the thirties, but he lived to be a very old man.
He was a weird guy, he is believed to have had some kind of autism. He was a very awkward guy.

E: Diracula

J: So, what's L-Mass?

BW: The first line says, “Hey, these particles move.”

J: Brain, we cannot possibly get through this whole thing

BW: The rest of it, let's skip to equation four. Two is all the particles. Equation four are the force carrying particles. G squared is the gluon, which mediates the strong force. Every term says the force carrying particles also move.

S: Could you write this from memory?

BW: I could derive. But I couldn't tell you the values of the masses. But the general form is pretty easy. The standard model has nineteen free parameters that you have to figure out experimentally.

B: You can't derive them; you have to observe them

BW: The dream of every theoretically physicist: I hand you an equation, from that, you derive every single property of our universe. So, for example, the masses of all the fundamental particles. Another example you can't derive from String Theory is the number of dimensions. It works in ten dimensions...

J: Who understands that? The human mind can't understand the three physical dimensions.

BW: That does us a disservice. Mathematicians work in higher dimensions, and you can do the calculations and get some intuitions.

S: You can't visualize it ... Eistein's brilliance was ... saying this isn't just some mathematical trick. The universe actually works this way. Mathematically, you are dealing with these higher dimensions. Are they real?

BW: The leap Einstien made was that the symmetry of electromagnetism could apply to everything. String theorists say that these extra dimensions are real. But six are curled up, and we don't have access to them.

J: Is it possible to find the equations that will really explain everything?

BW: It may. It's a very hard problem.

J: Would you rather have a trillion dollars, or one of these equations? How important are these equations? What would they be worth in dollar terms.

S: There would be a cost of doing the research

BW: It's worth more than a trillion. To test string theory, the accelerator would be very expensive. 

J: If an alien who will give you the equation or two trillion quatlouds ... would the appearance of one of these equations help humanity?

BW: It would be an amazing ... if we knew for a fact that there was a single correct unified theory that explained everything, that would be amazing. That's the goal. It would say that the goal would be achieved. ... The things that we see every day aren't affected much by this stuff though. This is below nuclear reactions even.

J: When I think about the practicality, I think it's important, but what's the pay off.

BW: What does the Higgs do for us? Nothing. Maybe some day. I would liken it to knowing our place in our universe. As this program has not reached a successful conclusion, more and more people are defecting from this reductionist approach because maybe there is no unifying equation. It could be just a bunch of random points.

J: If we met aliens, they may have their version of these equations.

BW: Another interesting question there is do the laws of physics look the same everywhere. If they come from some part of the multiverse that we can't interact with ...

S: Even if their laws are different, they might just be looking at it differently.

BW: Yeah, let's imagine a sentient species that reached our level, but grew up in the water. Things that we find hard, like turbulence, they might find it easy, and they might find other things like balls rolling down ramps to be hard.

S: Every time somebody claims to have spoken to aliens, and gotten some important knowledge, it's never the next equation.

B: Steve, even in science fiction, no one asks the aliens for the ultimate equation. But that would be one of my first things.

Advice for Hollywood (52:10)

GH: If you could give a single piece of advice to Hollywood, what would it be? Plot matters.

S: Yeah

J: Take three quarters of the special effects budget, and spend it on a plot.

S: There's no substitute for a good film.

B: Give Joss Whedon the money to do whatever he wants

BW: Take chances. Give some one a hundred thousand dollars, and see what they can do with it.

GH: Give some one the rights to make an independent Batman movie

S: Hire science advisors.

BW: Eyes Wide Shut ... Pace. I have no problem with slow movies, but the pace of that movie was so glacial. It drove me insane.

GH: It seems like some one's idea of what people in New York could be like. It's a pseudo-idealized version with glacial pacing. I didn't connect with the characters.

BW: It's about the tension of a marriage. The unreality didn't bother me as much. I couldn't see the justification for how slow it was.

GH: He wanted to make an erotic thing, but he chickened out.

S: Every choice was deliberate. The movie isn't about those things. Kubrick is trying to create something. What he was trying to convey was: The movie was trying to portray a microcosm of civilization. For example, there's lots of scenes with an excess of stuff, like food. It's similar to The Shining where they show how much food is there. One of the things that happens in civilization is we ensure for ourselves sex, power, and food. In the movie, people secure things like sex. 
But what I read is, the main character, his whole journey, he was looking for sex. It wasn't about his marriage. Throughout the movie, there is this continuous, there is a constant confusion between sex and death? He was associating the two. At the funeral, a woman hits on him, and he's almost having a sexual moment with the corpse.

BW: But explain the pace.

S: It's supposed to be cold, frustrating, uncomfortable. You can feel how frustrated he was. He couldn't even get laid by a hooker because death got in the way. The last word of the movie is “Fuck.” Think about it on a deeper level. It was a superficially difficult to enjoy movie, but it had deeper stuff. I find his film making so gripping, the pace different bother me.

E: The pace of 2001 ...

S: Yeah, 2001 

Part 4: