Things You Thought You Knew – Quantum Cat

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Coming up on Star Talk, it's another Things You Thought You Knew episode. This time, we bring to you a few fan favorites.
Death by Black Hole, Schrodinger's Cat, and Quantum Tunneling.

Don't want to miss it.

Welcome to Star Talk,

your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

I want to describe what it's like to die as you fall into a black hole. Now, are we recounting a personal experience here?

Perhaps that could be the reason for the delay in discussing this.

Are you sure you're ready for this after this? After this harrowing

one of the highest compliments I ever got was I i was giving a tour of the newly built hayden planetarium newly renovated to seinfeld okay who who lived across the street so he was a native what's the deal with the lights

so i've just i described the big bang to him in the first few moments and right in in exquisite detail and he says it sounds like you were there

i thought man that's a high compliment i i i i'd never forget that that's pretty funny i'm about to describe death by black hole, and no, I will alert you in advance. I was not there.
Okay.

But we know the physics of it. And

that's just as good. Okay.
All right.

So, a black hole. So you're standing here on Earth.
All right. I am, by the way, sitting.

You're sitting on Earth. And your feet are closer to the center of the Earth than the top of your head is.
Okay.

Do we agree? I will agree. I'm not that short.
So yeah.

You have to be really short for that knockout.

You got to be kind of like a Mr. Potato Head.

Just have your feet right at the bottom of your head, right up under you, right up under your neck.

I guess Mr. Potato Head didn't have a torso.
No. Oh my gosh.
That's right. Oh, that is.
That is sad. Yeah, it is.
Well, how come I never noticed that? That's right. Mr.
Potato Head was all head.

It was all head and feet. Arms and feet.
That was it.

Arms coming out of the side of his head. That's right.
Arms. Right.

All right.

So you can calculate the strength of Earth's gravity at your feet

and the strength of Earth's gravity at the top of your head. And you'll get a different number.

Wow.

Because your feet are closer to the center of the Earth. Okay.
And the closer you are to an object with gravity, the higher is the gravitational force operating on you. Okay.

So if I do that for you, you're 5'9, something like that. How tall are you? And so you're 5'10? I want that up to an inch.
You're a big guy, so you don't care.

You're like 6'3, so you don't give a damn. No, I'm 6'2.
See, that's what I'm saying.

I gave you an inch.

I was 6'2 in high school. I probably, you know, got the old man shrinkage from that.
So.

All right. So I can write down the difference between those two forces, and it's not going to be very much.

So, you know, you don't think about it, you don't care about it. It's not much because your height is small compared with the radius of the Earth.

Correct. Radius of the Earth is 4,000 miles, and here you are, you know, just under six feet.
So that's, so we don't think about this

difference in the gravitational force. We don't have occasion to think about it.

But that difference in force has a word.

It's called the tidal force.

Okay.

Okay. Now, the tidal force of the moon operating on the earth,

the side of the earth facing the moon, feels a stronger gravitational force of the moon than the side of the earth that's on the, than the other side of the earth that's farther away from the moon.

You can calculate this. Okay.

And so the entire Earth is stretched in the direction of the moon because of this tidal force. Okay.

The solid Earth is stretched, but that's less noticeable because we're walking around on the solid Earth. But what's most noticeable is the oceans are stretched.
And it's called a tidal bulge.

All right. And so wherever you're going to find the moon, you're going to find a tidal bulge.
elongated pointing to the moon.

It actually doesn't point, it points ahead ahead of the moon because we're dragging it in our, as Earth rotates, but that's a whole other explainer that we'll get into.

For now, just consider it, we're aligned with the moon, okay? So now watch.

That's because Earth is big compared to the distance between the moon and the Earth. Okay? So that's why.

Earth is bigger compared to that distance than you are compared to Earth's radius. Right.
So now watch what happens.

Let's turn Earth into a black hole. Let's just do that.
Okay. You know how you do that? You just shrink it.

Okay.

Yeah. As you shrink it, the gravity on the surface goes up.

Why?

You're getting closer to the center of the Earth, and it still has all the mass in this model that I'm describing. Okay.
Two things tell you how much you weigh: how far away you are,

and how much mass is tugging on you. Right.

As that happens,

your size, which is still 5 feet 10,

relative to the size that the Earth is becoming,

is actually more and more significant. Right.

Because the Earth is no longer 4,000 miles in radius.

Correct. That radius is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
So it's becoming much closer to my size as it's.

Correct. Correct.
And when you do the math,

the difference in the force between your feet and the top of the head gets greater and greater and greater.

Okay, so now

let's fall into a black hole and describe what happens. Okay? Okay.
So here you are falling into a black hole towards a black hole.

There's no air, so no one's hearing you. Damn it.
Okay

you're just catching flies with your open mouth there. That's all.
All right.

So meteor particles. So you're falling feet first.
Let's give your feet first dive.

And

the tidal force is slowly getting greater and greater. And initially, it feels kind of good.
Who doesn't love a good stretch?

Right? Best spa ever. I know.
And then you realize, wait a minute, that stretch is not only not abating, it's getting worse. Uh-oh, we're getting medieval.
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. We're getting medieval.

This ain't cool.

Don't make me get medieval on your ass.

I had not thought about how medieval this is. Because you look at the machines they had, it's like, what were they thinking? Let me tell you something.

Somebody was staying up at night. Thinking of different ways to torture and kill people.

That is effed up. Yeah, they excelled beyond, you know, imagination.
I heard there's another one where they disembowel you, and so that hurts enough.

And then they take your intestines out and put it on the fire so that you're not only in pain from being cut open, your organs are in pain after they've removed it because it's still, you know, your intestines are all stringy, right?

Yeah. So they're still connected to you.
And so, and then you know what being drawn and quartered is. You know what that is?

Is that the one where they put you on the horse with the four horses? Yeah, four horses, right? So a horse to each limb.

And then

they'll score you, right? They'll just, just so that you cut more easily. Oh, man.

We must perforate him now.

Wait for the perforation.

So you do that, and when the four horses run away, you are in four different pieces. That is

disgusting. No matter what, you are in four different pieces by the time that's done.
Well, really, five because there's a torso laying on the ground. No, no, no, no, no, that's not how it works.

No, I thought you, I thought you, so

each limb,

okay. So, if I, if, so, if three limbs are pulled off, the fourth limb is still attached to the rest of your body.
No, I thought it was four, like four horses, one for each limb.

And I know what I'm saying is, your body doesn't rip apart simultaneously, okay? Oh Oh my God. Okay.

So one horse rips off one arm. Oh, no.
And then one other leg. No.
And then another leg. And one arm has slightly more muscle tissue there.
It holds onto the rest of the torso.

I did not know this is how this thing worked. This is, I mean, you just made it 10 times worse.

I'm saying that what you described, the limbs would have to be equally

attached with a force

force tissue. Exactly.
Okay. That would be a pressure.
Equally.

and simultaneously pulled in exactly the right angles exactly for them to pull off all at the same instant and this is not how that works i that's my point you ruined my fantasy is what i'm saying okay sorry that you just drop down in the middle as you force i just drop in the middle and i'm sitting there like an oblong you know then you're not being quartered you're being dismembered that's different you're right

okay so this is all nice preamble for what's about to happen to you uh-oh okay so your feet first falling towards the black hole okay the stretch feels good, but then it becomes unrelenting

because your height is now a bigger and bigger fraction of the distance you are to the center of the black hole. All right, so now you start sliding it and what happens?

Oh my gosh, the tidal force exceed, there will be a point where the tidal force exceeds

the molecular forces that keep your body attached as one piece. Oh no, my molecular bond.
You're a molecular bond, so you'll snap into two parts. That's nasty.

And since all the forces are operating uniformly across your body, it's not like a horse yanking on one thing or another. I did a calculation.

I'd probably have to speak with some physiologist about this, but I think you'll initially snap at your lower spine. Okay?

So those are the two bits. Now,

those two parts of you continue to feel the tidal force. Okay.

So they stretch.

Okay.

And so your bottom half snaps into two pieces. All right.
Your upper torso snaps into two pieces. And as best as I can judge, that would be at the base of your neck.
Okay.

Now, your brain is still working. You can, in principle, see this.
Okay,

this happens pretty fast. And by the way, they did these experiments from what I've read

in the French Revolution with the guillotine, right? If you're going to be guillotine, you might as well help out science, right?

So with your head on the ground, before your brain really knows that it can't get oxygen from blood,

do your eyes still work, okay?

And so I think they did experiments where they hold up one finger, two finger, and you blink if you saw two fingers or one finger just for that, because your eyes go straight to your brain.

They don't need your torso for none of that. Okay.

So

people were messed up in the past. Okay.

It's all like a setup.

All right. So now you're in four pieces and they continue to feel the tidal force.
And then you go from two to four to eight to 16 to 32 to 64. And this continues until you are a stream of atoms

like a train of atoms pouring down to the singularity. And that's not the worst of it.
Go ahead.

Okay?

The fabric of space and time

funnels,

funnels, and gets narrower and narrower because it ends up at a singularity.

So whatever horizontal volume you occupied,

you become extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube.

This form of death has a name,

and it's called spaghettification.

Okay.

Well, I mean, I can't believe something that horrific could have such a delicious name.

How did this happen?

So,

I, many years ago, wrote a book called Death by Black Hole.

And I thought the book would do well. And the publisher looked kind of askance at me, like, no, we don't think this is going to do well.
I said, dude, look at the title. Come on now.

And so they didn't print enough copies when it was first released. And it sold out in a day.
Wow. And then

this is before we had like Amazon and everything. So when you sell off the shelves, there's nothing there to buy.

But in that week, it hit the bestseller list, but it became a minimum bestseller, right? It hit number 15 for one week. That's a minimum bestseller.

But it would have stayed there if there were more books available. More copies.
Yeah, so I lorded that over the publisher ever since.

But anyhow, Death by Black Hole. And I described this, but also I want to share with you a poem that I composed about Death by Black Hole.
May I? Yeah, a place do.

Okay, I'm not a poet, so dare I call it a poem. I'll call it a rhyme.
Okay?

So

here it is. Okay.

In your feet first dive to this cosmic abyss, you will not survive because you will not miss. The tidal forces of gravity will create quite a calamity when you're stretched head to toe.

Are you sure you want to go? Your body's atoms, you'll see them, will enter one by one.

The singularity will eat them and you won't be having fun.

That, I have to say,

is the scariest Dr. Seuss book I have

good night, Timmy.

Behave tomorrow.

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Hello, I'm Thinky Brooke Allen, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Nailed Grass Tyson.

This is something you hear all the time, especially in jokes, believe it or not. Really?

Yeah, Schrödinger's cat. Wait a minute, you have a quantum division of the joke department?

Well, I don't think that the comedians know what Schrödinger's cat is, but it's such a

ubiquitous reference that they make reference to it a lot of times. It's interculture.
It's interpop culture. It has interculture.
I don't know why they don't call it Schrödinger's dog.

Okay.

All right. So, all right.
so it dates back to Irwin Schrodinger,

who Irwin, yes, and he was a physicist.

They all won Nobel Prizes, all these people who contributed to our understanding of the quantum. Right.

And

quantum mechanics is what it's officially called, but I like just calling it quantum physics because it's an entire branch of physics that deals with the small small things in the universe.

All that so you do sweat the small stuff. Yes, you do.

I see.

Precisely.

Precisely. And the Schrodinger's cat relates a little bit to what people have called the observer effect.

Okay. Where if you observe something, you change it.
So I can respond to both of those

in the same pop, if you allow me. Okay.
So let's do the observer effect for the moment.

So it's unfortunate that somebody called it the observer effect, because then new age folk and other people who were basically scientifically illiterate were thinking it's your consciousness that affects what you're observing.

And oh my gosh, there's a consciousness field, and they go running off in a, you know, off the cliff. See, what you don't understand is that like particles

are totally alive. Okay.

And the reason why there is a collective consciousness in the universe is because like all of these particles that are spinning, what they're actually doing is conducting thought and consciousness.

They're thinking. They're thinking.
They're thinking, man.

Rocks think. Trees think.
Yeah. More than rocks.

So let me cut through all of that and simply say that you're sitting there and I can see you because in fact, you're illuminated by, if not sunlight through an open window, an uncurtained window, but artificial light within the room.

All right. That light hits your face, bounces off your face, goes through the computing system, and I see you.
Okay.

That light carries energy.

Every photon of light that strikes your face carries energy.

And

most of them reflect, others get absorbed. Actually, it depends on how dark your skin is.
Skin is very dark. It'll absorb most of them.

That's because, you know, photons, they want to be a part of this, baby.

Let me get some.

Let me get some.

I see where we're landing.

Oh, we got some good chocolate happening over here.

Yes, just to be more precise about Chuck's excursion there, darker-skinned people absorb more sunlight than lighter-skinned people. And it's your albedo.

It's the percentage of incident energy that you absorb relative to what you reflect.

Very important calculation for the Earth because what Earth absorbs drives our climate, whereas what Earth reflects back to space just goes back to space

from the sun and so glaciers reflect light cloud tops reflect light oceans reflect light that sort of thing so for climate change to solve it we just need to get a bunch of white people in one place

just reflect the light to reduce the do us a favor guys

sunbathe everybody just sunbathe right here reflect out the sun

okay all right i'm sorry i had to do it man all right don't write Don't write. Don't write.
But it was good. That was, that was funny.

That was a good one. Yeah.
I mean, if you, if the earth is getting hot, you just

increase its albedo to increase the reflectance of it. So, right.
Yeah.

So instead of Chuck's solution, everyone could just wear white clothing and that would be even better.

That's more inclusive. I'll give you

that's more inclusive.

The DEI authorities will tell you that's how you do that on the campus.

So

here's the thing. If I made you tinier and tinier and tinier,

so you're no longer a macroscopic human, you're a microscopic particle, there's a particle size below which when you open the curtains and shine light on you, that light will hit you and pop you into another location.

So I'm smaller than the photon? Then what the your

capacity to move to a different state of existence that the energy that that is required to make that happen

is

the same as the energy of the light that's hitting you. Gotcha.
So you hit me with

in order to see you. Right.
And then you pop somewhere else and I say, where'd you go? Right. What are you doing? So am I there? Am I not there?

Well, we'll never really know because you're hitting me with something that makes me not there once you're exposing me to it. Correct.

And since it happens on the moment you're exposed, not the moment I see you,

I will never know what you were doing. Exactly.
Okay. If you're small enough for that light energy to affect you in that way.

So that's why we don't think about this in everyday life because we're too big for light to pop us into other states of existence. Exactly.
But particles, electrons, atoms,

all of this, it happens all the time. And this was a very disturbing discovery in the 1920s.
We're in the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics in the 1920s.

Because you discover this, I want to see what you're doing. Oh my gosh, you're not going to let me see what you're doing because the light I shine on you in order to see it is.

So it's really, it's not so much an observer effect, it's a measurement effect. Exactly.
Okay, get the human brain out. It's just a device to measure you.

You can't know it. Okay.
Right.

So,

so

let's get on to, so it has nothing to do with consciousness. So, let's get on to Schrodinger's cat.
By the way, it's from an era where people spoke lightly of doing bad things to cats. Okay.

Oh, no, Peter. So, you know, yeah, but Peter wasn't around you.
So, so I'm a little disturbed that they picked cats, right?

They could have picked dogs, they could have picked worms, but cats are lovable and they'll fit in a box, right?

And so, because house cats don't come as large as house dogs do. Just think that through.

Can you imagine? Yeah, a box for a dog is called your living room.

Right.

So here's what happens. You say to yourself,

you put a cat in a box. And if the cat is a quantum cat

with two states, states of existence, it's either dead or alive.

While it's in the box, you have no idea which it is.

And so the way we describe this in quantum physics if you do the experiments okay

so some percentage of the time you open the box the cat will be alive others the cat will be dead and so you

what we say is that the the cat's existence is a superposition of being dead and being alive

i got you It's a superposition of those two states. Because it's in the box.
It's in the box and you're not looking at it. And you're not looking at it.
And that's why the superposition is

correct. And it's a quantum cat, not a macroscopic cat.

It's not Maru, the internet cat

that people love to see jump out of a box. Okay, all right.
Right. It's a hypothetical quantum cat.

By the way, do you know cats on the internet took a steep rise the same year that cats on Broadway closed? The music. Really? Yes.
Check your data on that. That is a weird little thing.
So

we need somebody to investigate that because where did those cats go?

So it was like 1990, you know, early internet, you know, and cats closes on Broadway. And so I think people needed their cat fix and it landed on the internet.
But anyhow, so here we go. Now,

the details of that experiment are more are more intricate than what I'm describing to you. Because what they wanted was to have like a something that's radioactive that would decay.

And then that would then trigger a gate that would open the box. You know, it's a little more Rube Goldbergian than what I'm describing.

But just to be clear, if you don't look in the box, you do not know if the cat is alive or dead.

And so the Schrodinger's cat is, you're talking about something that you don't know about until you actually investigate it. And then you'll end up in movie seven.

I didn't see that. That was a movie that came out many years ago with Morgan Freeman and the beautiful man.
I forget his name. Oh, God.
He's, he did 12 Monkeys. He's done Thelman Louise.

What's his name? Brad Pitt. Thank you.
Oh, Brad Pitt, of course. Brad Pitt.
So Brad Pitt is stalking a serial killer who is looking, who is using the seven deadly sins to kill people.

Long story short, the last

murder,

he puts the head of someone in the box.

And Brad Pitt wants to know what's in the box. And Morgan Freeman says, don't look in the box.
There's no reason for you to look in this box. And Brad Pitt goes, what's in the box?

Because he knows that it's his wife's head. That is completely morbid.
Like, what?

I know, but it's perfect. It should be called Schrodinger's cat.

It should be called Brad Pimp's wife's head. And,

Chuck, that is the most morbid analogy to this example I have ever heard. Oh, because a dead cat is perfectly fine.
Oh, no, okay.

So, this actually, in a way, applies to quantum computing, which you might have heard snippets about, or at least bits of headlines that are making the news.

So, if we think of regular computing is like a zeros and ones, bits, right? And all calculations are done in this way. Well, quantum computing,

a bit, a quantum bit,

otherwise known as a qubit,

can be either a zero or a one

or anything in between.

Okay. It can be 80% one, 20% zero, 50-50, 80% zero, 20% one, or anything on that continuum.

And so

the qubit has more computational versatility than a regular bit that can only be either a zero or a one.

And

when I say you can be anywhere between a zero or one, statistically, you can

have that bit represent 80% ones, 20% zeros,

50%. It can be any combination of those two in the service of the programming that you're introducing to the computer.
Holy shit. So all of that, Schrodinger's cat, your

dead wife's head in a box from this morbid movie that now I'm never going to see.

You were so excited about it, too. Because it's so much better than Schroeder's cat.

It actually represents something that is consequential that, you know, I mean, never mind. It doesn't really make a difference.

I mean, it doesn't make any difference once you're in the quantum. It doesn't make a difference, but it's just a much cooler reference.
Right, right, because it's not a quantum head.

It's not a quantum head, so it doesn't make a difference. You know, once you're in a quantum, it's not a cat.
It's a quantum cat, and it's not a head. It's a quantum head.
So

I see what you're saying. It was never really a cat to begin with.
Right. It was a fictional quantum cat in the same way that it's a quantum head.
Exactly.

Exactly.

The world according to Chuck.

So funny. You're like, Chuck, go have another bowl and get back to me.

So, Chuck, there it is. That's like, you know, Schrodinger's cat 101.
He could have called it Schrodinger's coin. Is it heads or tails? Right, right.
Exactly. It's just,

is the quantum state only have two possibilities in that description?

And so once you open the box and thereby gain access to information that is otherwise hidden from any observer or any device that would make the measurement.

Coin is actually the best representation since if it's a superposition like we said, or like you said, like I said, right? Please.

Look at me taking credit for quantum discoveries.

However, that means it's always a probability. So

it's always a probability. So that means quantum coin is actually, you came up with the best one.
Why you got to do that? Why you got to best me on? I come up with a head in the box

and then

you still got to outdo me. Really?

We can't leave our fans with a head in the box version of this. I'm sorry.

And just to be clear, the quantum state doesn't have to be one or the other. Right.

It depends on the atom and the circumstances, but it can be any number of different states that each have a probability of being true. Exactly.

And in fact, the wave function of the particle extends outside of the box.

Oh.

So the probability drops rapidly across the border of the box, but it still exists in a little bit outside the box. So

what's inside the box has a probability of spontaneously disappearing from inside the box and appearing outside the box that's called tunneling.

And it does that instantaneously, like faster than the speed of light. Another spooky, freaky thing in quantum physics.

And that relates in part to quantum entanglement, because you can have two different particles.

whose wave functions interact on a way that when you do something that one particle, the other one knows about it instantly because their wave functions communicate.

This is quantum 101, it's like the fun parts of quantum. That is a lot of fun.
It's crazy. So we should do a lot of these about quantum physics.
This is like an overview.

I could spend a whole explainer on each one of these things because this is the decade in the 1920s.

It was a watershed decade in physics where Hubble discovers that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy. There are other island universes, they were called.

Andromeda is another galaxy containing 400 billion stars. And

three years later,

in 1929, he discovers that the universe is expanding. And we apply Einstein's relativity to show that we've got possibly a Big Bang, which would later make 50 years before we have the supporting data.

And most of what we now know, understand, and love about quantum physics was discovered in the 1920s. And we knew all of that before the neutron was discovered.

And before Texas Instrument actually made a calculator.

Uh, yeah,

and why is that

because

that means these guys had to work that math

okay before anybody made a calculator, right? Right, exactly, uh, exactly.

By the way, I had a friend who had the very first Texas Instrument scientific calculator, and he knew it was the first because it didn't even have a model number on it. Wow.
It predated models.

It would ultimately become the TI-35.

But I remember we all crowded around it, staring at it. It was one of those moments that you never forget.
Okay, I just love the visual of a bunch of nerds crowding around.

And then, you know, you think they're looking at a magazine or something. And then you part the ways and they're all around a calculator.
They're like, oh,

look at that. Can you believe this thing? Welcome to the Geekiverse.
Do the cosign. Do the cosine again.

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So if you're standing

on one side of a hill okay and you've got to get to the other side of the hill hill

you you're gonna climb over the top of the hill and come down the other side yeah or I mean that's why I had children they're going to pull me up over the hill let them all you're out

I'm gonna sit right here in this little cart y'all get moving

so another way to do it is to bore a hole through the mountain through the hill and come out the other side so true by doing so you've made a tunnel correct okay so you've you've you've you've made it easier to get from one side of the hill to the other because you don't have to go up and then come back down as a person who lives in jersey i appreciate that kind of the tunneling the tunneling from in and out of manhattan that's correct correct okay

so

um here's something interesting in quantum physics we can think of the hill as a as an energy barrier to you.

Okay?

Okay, that makes sense. All right.
so you need energy to ascend the hill. Otherwise, you'll just stay where you are.
So now we check, how much energy do you have?

Oh, I can get halfway up the hill, but not any further. Three quarters of the way, but not any further, okay?

So in quantum physics, if there's a hill, we call them potential barriers, because, all right,

they're actual barriers, but they're called potential barriers.

So there it is, and you have a particle on one side of that barrier. And you give the particle energy.
I can't make it, I can't make it.

This steel is too much.

Why you gotta

let's just stay here. Why don't we just live here now?

You're wiping the sweat off your brow like

electron, like electron sweat.

You have no idea how hot that nucleus

is.

So,

so

what I have, so the particle, however,

is not only a particle, it's also a wave. Okay.
And when you're a wave, there's something called a wave function.

And a wave function is the probability of finding it anywhere in a volume spanned by that wave function.

Okay? So you're more likely to find it where the wave peaks, and where the wave drops off, you're less and less likely to find it there.

And there's a point where don't ever wait around because it won't show up for trillions of years.

But there's an actual likelihood it can show up anywhere in the wave function, even in the low probability places. All right.
So that wave doesn't know about and doesn't care about the mountain. Okay.

So you can ask, does some of that wave show up on the other side of the mountain?

Aha.

If it does,

then there is a probability that the particle that's stuck on one side will just simply appear on the other side of the mountain

having never had to ascend it in the first place because it didn't have enough energy to do it

but because it exists as a wave function there will always be a probability that it can show up where it was not invited

oh that's called quantum mechanical tunneling quantum wedding crashing

we built this wall for people to stay up and did you see that potential barrier? Did you see that wall? Does the potential barriers mean anything to you?

This would be good for a Trump.

We built the wall

to keep you out.

But they're still tunneling in. They must be quantum mechanical entities.

This is the thing.

Why aren't these

from Norway?

I'm sorry. can't.

Why can't we get the ones from Norway?

They wouldn't have to tunnel.

Okay.

So that's just quantum tunneling. So here's, so I'll show you how that manifests.
Very interesting little history here. And then we'll call it quits because this is just an explainer.

In the early days, 100 some years ago, we didn't know where you made, where you got all the elements in the universe.

By the way, I remembered asking my high school chemistry teacher, where do the elements come from? He's all they're in the earth. And I would later learn: no, we made these suckers and stars, dude.

All right, won't you look up every now and then? Oh, that is so funny. Okay,

so it's not his fault. He's a chemistry teacher.

He thinks of it. And we know how stupid they are.

Come on.

Let's be honest. He's a chemistry teacher.
He's no physicist. Come on.
What do you want? Jack. What do you want? So,

so

in the early days, the question was, where do we get these elements from? You could build them from smaller elements, all right, if you merge them.

So, they did the calculation of what it would take to merge two hydrogen atoms. Okay, now what's in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom? A proton.

So, you have a proton here and a proton there, and I want to merge them to make a nucleus that has

two protons in it, which would be helium. That's a way to build elements from scratch.

Okay.

So

a proton is what charge?

Wait, the proton is positive. Positive.
And the charge on the other proton? It's also positive. It's also positive.
Like charges.

Oh, they don't really like each other. They repel.
Okay. So you have to get them close enough

so that

a strong nuclear force kicks in and holds them together. Okay?

That's the basic task you have to accomplish here. Sounds like Thanksgiving dinner at my crib.
To force it in. Right, get in there.
Get in there. Right.

So it turns out the electromagnetic repulsion, the two positive charges, you can sort of get them closer and closer if you speed them up by increasing the temperature of the plasma.

They'll speed up, they'll get closer and closer and closer to each other as you increase the temperature.

So you ask, at what temperature will they be close enough for the strong nuclear force to kick in and grab them?

Okay. That's the question.
Okay, that's the question. Okay, that temperature is like a billion degrees.
Well, there you have it.

A billion, and we look, and we do the calculation for the centers of stars. It's not a billion degrees.
So I'm taking it that the building of the elements doesn't work by getting a billion degrees.

No, it would if you could. If you could.
But I'm saying that, yeah. Right, right.
So the question was,

so I think it was Eddington, a a famous physicist of the day, astrophysicist, he was asked, he said, well, then where are we going to get the elements?

He said, I don't know where, but if it's going to happen anywhere, it's going to be in the center of stars. Okay.

So even though we couldn't give him a billion degrees, he still said, I don't see any place else in the universe that will satisfy the needs of this requirement, except the centers of stars. Okay.

So there it just sat for decades. Okay.

Not many decades, but it just sat there as an unsolved problem

until quantum physics came along.

And then they said, okay, here's a proton coming close to another proton. So there's a barrier there that it can't cross.

But wait a minute, the particles are also waves. And part of that wave exists within the

grasp of the strong nuclear force. Right.

And so there's a probability that some of these particles will merge and make helium.

Wow. So they say, what is that probability? So, so they say, well, what is the temperature of the center of the star? They said 10 million degrees.
It's not a billion. It's like 10, 15 million.

So you do the math on the quantum physics and you say, what percentage of collisions

will tunnel

through this barrier and end up making helium? You come up with that percent and bada bing, you recreate the total energy output of the sun.

Look at that.

So you're glad it's not converting every encounter into energy. Right.
The sun would just be good with

smithereens. Well, yeah, yes.
Just like, why is everything,

God,

damn, it's hot.

Says the person who by then is just a puff of smoke. Exactly.

You don't have time to utter those words. Right.
Wow. Okay, that.
All right. So

the thermonuclear fusion in stars that generates the energy at the temperatures it does

can only happen because of quantum mechanical tunneling. That's

boom. That is amazing.
And so just think about the challenges the physical we astrophysicists have. We have an idea.
And by the way, so Eddington was right. It does happen in the centers of stars.

Of course. Right?

Because nowhere else was rational, right? But we didn't know enough physics at the time it was proposed to answer that question. New physics had to be invented.

And this is why we are always so excited when new physics comes along.

There are people saying, people say, oh, someone has a new physics idea, but everyone else is rejecting it because they don't want to lose their highly invested lives in this.

They're thinking that we don't like new ideas. They got to you, Neil.

We love new ideas because they give a whole new understanding on the frontier of stuff that we didn't previously understand. Right.

And so, yeah, that's quantum mechanical tunneling. Oh, oh, one other thing.

No matter the size of that potential barrier,

it tunnels and appears on the other side instantly.

Oh, so, okay. So,

the wave function just collapses and it's there.

It doesn't travel there. It was always there probabilistically.
Okay.

So when your wave becomes the particle, boom, it is there.

So then distance makes no, it's immaterial. It's immaterial.
It's immaterial. It's instantaneous.

So we think that it moved, but it really didn't. It was always there to begin with.
It was always there to begin with. That is so freaky.
It's freaky. That is so freaky.

All of quantum physics is, that's only part of the freaky stuff.

That's like the 12th freakiest thing I could tell you because you can't handle the other 11. I can't handle this.

You can't handle it.

Oh, there's another one. Let's save it for another one to talk about a Bose Einstein condensate.
The Bose-Einstein condensate. Yeah, let's save that for another explainer.
Yeah, okay, cool.

That's a good one. Yeah.
That's a totally good one. That sounds delicious, like something like that.

You know,

tonight's special is a farm raised Bose-Einstein condensate

with an arugula compote that we have

distilled down into a deconstructed quantum.

My boy's been to some restaurants lately.

Get that fancy restaurant vocabulary going. That's pretty wild.
The Bose?

We'll get that.

Condensate.

We'll do that later.

A little bit relates to,

not really, but it's another freaky, wacky quantum phenomenon that we'll save for another time. We got it.
All right, Chuck. That was

explaining great quantum quantum tunneling, baby. Be there.
All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here with Chuck Nice

for Star Talk. Keep working out.

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