Physicist Answers Physics Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
Physicist Jeffrey Hazboun visits WIRED to answer the internet's swirling questions about physics. How does one split an atom? Is light a wave or a particle...or both? How soon will the universe end? Is time travel is possible given physicists' current understanding? What's the deal with string theory?
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Marcus Niehaus
Talent: Jeffrey Hazboun
Creative Producer: Justin Wolfson
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production and Equipment Manager: Kevin Balash
Casting Producer: Vanessa Brown
Camera Operator: Lucas Vilicich
Sound Mixer: Kara Johnson
Production Assistant: Fernando Barajas
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
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This guy explains physics so clearly, that this is the closest I've ever come to still not quite understanding it.
haha it's the same for me. i had to pause after he showed the star bending spacetime because my mind was blown by how i've literally just understood for the first time lol
🤣
Can confirm this guy is just as clear in a classroom as in the video, he's actually my Astrophysics professor! :D
@@FuzzyFirechuthat must be awesome!
Lmfaooo 😂😂
I built a time machine when I was a kid. I flipped over a really large cardboard box, climbed inside, and waited ten minutes. When I climbed out, I had traveled ten minutes into the future. It was really exciting. My mother didn't understand the genius of my invention, though, and threw it away not long after I had made it.
@Bulldogg6404 dude you're practically the tony Stark of our world!!! Shame your mother threw the only hope of time travel 😶
I hope she at least didn't throw away Hobbes when she got rid of the box.
The hallmark of a great educator is one that can break down an idea into its purest form. This guy is it.
The opening question helped me tremendously. I've been trying to get my mother-in-law to stop orbiting me, and it turns out it's because she's both massive AND dense. Thanks, physics!
Your mama's so so fat that Stephen Hawking based his Black Hole Theory on her bum hole ( - brody)
LOL mother in law slander >
You’d actually be orbiting her then..
And if she disappears, it would be just 8 minutes before you realised 😅
@@lifesbutastumbleno man she is not at a distance of sun
I've watched numerous physics related videos in the past, but this physicist's explanations have been by far the most straightforward and easy to grasp compared to anyone I've encountered before.
It's because he's oversimplifying them knowing his audience is likely not that interested in physics.
And yet i still don’t understand physics…
Because his answers are simplified to the point they do not paint exact picture anymore. So while easy to grasp, they can also be a source for misconceptions.
@@SublustrisAvisI don't think he said anything false in and of itself. Maybe saying "pieces of atoms" when talking about fusion is technically less than precise but that's pretty pedantic.
@@mastod0n1 He didn't said anything false, I said he oversimplified explanations. Take his light wave/particle demostration. His plate has only one slit, yet interferense pattern still emerge, but his explanations doesn't give you answer why, as it involves two slits to "create" two waves. To understand some quantum effects you have to know they are often emerge as statistics phenomenons. Or his explanation to quantum entanglement might lead you to believe, that quantum states always match, when in fact they can be opposite, or that there's real FTL connection between entagled particles, while full explanation adds a lot more to it, like act of measurement/observation, decoherence etc.
I love the fact that he's explaining things while using regular objects. As if he was an elementary teacher talking to his class.
I like the fact that everyone still calls it "Twitter", feels like a mіddlе fingеr to Musk 🤗❤
What did he do to make you want to give him the finger?
musk doesnt care about your dumbass opinion hes too busy advancing the human race
@@isaiahblue7269he changed the social media name
@@isaiahblue7269 lolz.
@@isaiahblue7269 Musk dares challenge this guys overlords. This guy needs someone to do his thinking for him how can you do that with unadulterated free speech?! lol
Fun fact, the light physics that he talks about(LIGO, Young's double slit,etc) is known as optics, and if you don't know optics, you should check it out! Love to see my fellow optics people represented
nope, that's quantum mechanics (basically the birth of quantum mechanics)
@@jiuhuaqu372 It is both.
It is both@@jiuhuaqu372
@@jiuhuaqu372wait till you hear about quantum optics 😮
@@jiuhuaqu372the experimenters are using optics to study quantum physics. It's both.
Your energy and enthusiasm are infectious. Mad respect, indeed!
Too bad he said a Time Machine is not possible that would be more interesting than almost anything imho
bro its a bot @@ABc-nu6jb
@@ABc-nu6jbI mean it's "possible", just only theoretically. We do know of time dilation, and theoretically you'd have to go faster than the speed of light to travel back in time; but as far as we know that is impossible.
@@gorgeousfreeman1318 Yes, but even that is just a theory…meaning we wouldn’t know if that’s theory is even valid because you can’t really prove it…imho
Quantum entanglement is so crazy that it can only be described to the layman as "it is what it is"
It’s actually very easy to describe. This guy just didn’t do a great job.
A better way of explaining Quantum Entanglement with Dice is that whenever one dice is rolled the other die has the opposite value where if you add them up the total value is 7. So if I roll my die and get a "1" then the other die will have the value of "6" thus always adding up to "7".
So the professor in the video is wrong?
@@mtzyzy I'm not stating one answer is more right than the other. I'm implying one answer is easier to understand.
如果我們觀察處於量子糾纏態的兩個粒子中的一個，並測得他是上自旋，則另一顆必為下自旋
Was in Geneva in May and visited Cern. Felt amazing just being near the eye into the tiny-verse
Oh gosh. Usually math and physics was my ptsd material but he explained it all very well. Thanks 😊
I appreciate Wired still calling it Twitter, that is all.
Whoa this guy has some intensity, I love it
More videos with this guy please!
This was awesome. I love physics, but I could never grasp the math. Like, I understand the theories and concepts, and I love learning about it, but the actual math is beyond me. I've tried!
So true 😶🌫️
A good teacher helps. It clicked for me when I realized that all the formulas are just complex explanations for how values relate to one another. If I write F=ma, then I am saying many things at once: for example, when I apply more force to the same mass, I get more acceleration. Or that I need more force to accelerate a larger mass the same as I'd need for a smaller mass. Stuff like that.
Small correction: when you move quickly you don't FEEL time going more slowly. But the time compared to someone stationary will differ (clocks not synchronized).
Right, both people holding a stopwatch would experience one second as feeling and looking like "one second", but they wouldn't line up when compared to each other, yes?
What do you mean exactly? Can you explain more concrete please?
@@shawnweddel1271Exactly
@@ABc-nu6jbHmm maybe the best way to explain is the following thought experiment: - Imagine you're in a spaceship moving at 90% lightspeed - At these speed the time slows down a lot; any kind of "motion" is slowed down within the spaceship. This includes chemical reactions, the circuits of your brain and any kind of clocks - Because everything in your brain is also slowed down the "subjective feeling" of time doesn't change at all. When you measure your pulse, it would seem normal as usual. - However, since clocks (time) are also slowed down within the ship, this causes the difference compared to a stationary one.
I don’t understand what he means with the entagled dices..example for that in real life?
When you said the universe IS infinite, you were a bit more confident in that statement than I think you should be. That is not a proven fact yet.
Yeah this guy is pushing his school of thoughts agenda
For all intent and purpose, it might as well be
To the best of our ability to know right now, yeah, it is. Our best measurements of the curvature of spacetime overall show it to be flat, which implies an infinite universe. Is that a 100% guarantee? No. But every experiment or equation we perform or write down that depends on that fact ends up working, so for the moment and for the foreseeable future it is perfectly reasonable to state definitively the universe is infinite.
@@ANGRYpooCHUCKER our best measurements can only put a lower bound on its size, not prove it's flat and infinite
Yeah but the known observable size of the universe is infinite as far as we can tell. Its a safe bet that its infinite or at least as close to infinity as possible in our reality
Physics has always been confusing for me but this dude explained it so well
THIS GUY IS AWESOME!!!!! WOW. He seems to really know his stuff.
One of those rare times where they show you an actual equation which helps answer a question
the balloon analogy for fission is the best one I have seen
Very interesting, on the topic of gravitational waves in elementary school I got to visit the LIGO center in Livingston Louisiana. If you ever get the chance look it to it. It’s crazy technology. Very cool place as well, kind of had a Riley’s believe it or not type of room with a nail bed and other physic related things.
50 billion years for the heat death of the universe? That doesn't sound right. It has to be wayyyyy longer than that.
No exactly 59 billion years not one day longer or shorter lol
He made a lot of shortcuts in explaining things, which is unavoidable with this format
he likely meant 50 billion trillion, which is in the ball park for the shorter theories about the heat death
We don’t actually know there will be a heat death.
Yeah wth was that about? Red dwarfs can last Trillions of years by current estimates.
You explain things so well! You would make a great teacher/professor :)
He is! He is currently a physics professor at Oregon State University (can confirm he's an amazing professor :) )
@@loganholler4137 Dude, I need to move to Oregon and enroll in his class!!!
@@Terra_Incognita2004do it!! He’s great
That's awesome! My physics teachers in school managed to make it boring, when it doesn't have to be! I love physics, I've learned so much through youtube! 😊
He is already a professor, most physicists teach.
Brilliant guest! kudos wired
These guys are really-really-really patient.
The observable universe is finite. What is beyond the observable universe, as the name suggested, is not observable. We really know whether the universe is infinite or not.
Came here to say this. Idk how he could have made that mistake
The heat death of the universe is also not a certain thing.
time travel being impossible is clearly a lie, it happens to me whenever i go to sleep
You explain things like the double slit experiment better than any book I read
I love how he explained the equation for time dilation with a crayon marker! 🤣
I watched so many physics videos on yt that I was able to have the answers of almost all the questions in the video 💀
He describes physics like Oppenheimer. Very thorough and well explained
The problem with string theory is that it is unverifiable, THAT is why it is a dead end. It's beautiful and elegant and parts of it do describe all of these as-of-yet unexplainable problems in physics, but no observations and no repeatable experimentation = wishful math.
a lot of things in science are unverifiable. We're on a rock with limited resources 🤷♂️
@@V1ralB1ack No they aren't, if something is unverifiable/unfalsifiable, it is not science. All scientific ideas that are pushed nowadays need to be testable and you have to be able to prove them wrong. It's why science doesn't bother with faith or the concept of a deity, it cannot be proven right or wrong in the material world.
sounds like most science. If it works mathematically that's enough
How can someone explains complicated concepts in such a simple way? 😮😮
Yes I learned a lot... and yes I have more questions than before watching this.
One thing I'd like to ask to Jeff : what if the universe never ends? Yes, I know, data shows that its curvature is unlikely negative, BUT! What if its topology is like a Möbius strip, or a torus, and singularities just lead to the other face of the universe, made of dark matter and dark energy, that we cannot detect because we're on this side on the universe?
He looks like he could be Mark Ruffalo’s cousin
How physicists don’t walk around in a constant state of existential crisis is beyond me. 😅
I think it's because we're driven by a primal urge to KNOW the answers to the next question. No time to get hung up on the "feelings" it leaves us with. We physicists tend leave all that "existential crisis" stuff to the philosophers.🙃😉
This is how physics should be taught in schools! Fun, interesting and easy to understand.
thanks for the knowledge, Taika Waititi
I like this, make it a series with this guy, he's very energetic!
3:54 that's really interesting about the way that gravitational waves propagate. To me it seems similar to the way that sound waves move through a proper medium of matter.
Sound waves are scalar. Electromagnetic waves are vectors and gravitational waves a 2nd order tensors. Similar, yes, but there are very important technical details that make them very different.
best explanation so far..
This seems like it will be fun!
A nice video after long time 🎉🎉🎉🎉
This guy is great!
Bro he looks exactly like every physics professor I’ve ever seen that’s insane
He just explained it very simple
His answer to splitting a nucleus was interesting, because the most common splitting of atoms, nuclear reactors, require us to slow down the neutrons. They're not slamming into the nucleus, the idea is that you want the nucleus to capture the neutron.
That's because nuclear reactors use fuel that can undergo nuclear fission even when struck by a neutron of a low energy. If reactors required you to speed up atom to the speeds of the LHC it wouldnt be worth it.
@@Koooo4 I know, I'm aware of neutron capture cross sections, my point is that we probably split more nuclei in LWRs (that require slowing them down) than we do in something like the LHC (that requires speeding them up).
I don't know if the guy that Tweeted knew it and was making a joke, but special means something like "specific" in the sense of "restricted to a certain subset. It doesn't mean special in the most common use of the word we do today. In many languages it is translated as something like "restricted relativity", and after that came General Relativity, of which special relativity is a subset under specific conditions.
Yeah, like a lot of the answers in the video, that one left a lot to be desired.
this was a great video i loved it, this was info i needed for my test tomorrow I'm in the 4th grade and my mom will be proud of me for watching this video. IM also currently edging uhhhhh feeelllllssss so good
Today I learned that Interstellar is almost 10 years old. Definitely doesn't feel like it's been that long Also, would have loved if the answer to the time dilation question to have ended after saying "long story short"😂
I would love for Wired to get Brian Cox for a video. Also this guy is great and if he's not a science communicator already, he should be.
I love this series! Would love to see an economist at some point :)
Strangely quantum physics makes a 'worm hole' between the two disciplines as economics is built on probability and related concepts.
The blue‘s clues crayon was a nice touch 🥰
Dang, wish I was in this guy's Astrophysics class
Yippee finally a physics one!
Let's go physics!!!! ❤
So if I'm not mistaken, you could play snakes and ladders light-years apart?
When is he on next. I want to ask where the boundary is between physics and chemistry.
Lots of fun
0:57 is almost a good example, except the fabric is more like a cubed those sheets in all directions, and it doesn't get more tension so the orbiting marbles are actually able to keep motion because they create their own curvature within the curvature of another object.
I mean, it's a pretty bad example IMO but people love it in these kinds of videos and leave at least believing they've learned something (even if that's pretty questionable).
that makes a lot of sense, every time I see this demonstration I'm like "can't you see it doesn't act like it's in orbit whatsoever", thought it was a friction issue but it still goes off "orbit" way too fast for that
To the people saying that this is the first time they've had physics explained to them in a way that makes sense: that's not on you, that's on the people who expected you to just accept one form of presentation. It's not terrifying, and you're not incapable of getting it. I think maybe you just figured that out 😊 By the way, props for what must be an underappreciated joke using dice to demonstrate entanglement.
re - 8:20 Yeah, but according to relativity, motion is relative. So, relatively, it wasn't the spaceship that moved, rather, the earth moved away at the speed of light (or near it) and then came back to the astronaut. So how do we decide which is true? According to relativity, they're both true, so does that cancel the time dilation effects? Does it double them?
(My second comment disappeared: Minute Physics made a video to explain it : search for "The Twins Paradox Hands-On Explanation | Special Relativity Ch. 8" on KZhead, it's a very good explanation in just less than 5 minutes 🙂)
No, that’s the paradox, right, both view each other as the stationary body, but the actual explanation is the twin on the rocket ship has to accelerate
@@epicchocolate1866 When you say "This twin accelerates/ has to accelerate," you're _collapsing the wave form._ You're ending the paradox. You've identified a mover and a stay-er
@@Raz.C That's... that's not the point of the paradox; of course you'd identify a mover or a stayer, because by your relative state, there is one. But, someone in a different state would have a different answer. That's the point of relativity, they are both true RELATIVE to the person. If you went the speed of light, you'd say someone else's clock is slower, and they'd say yours is slower. You are both correct.
The Large Hadron Collider is not in Switzerland. It straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva, with the larger portion actually in France.
Both CERN and the LHC are listed as being in Switzerland, it's irrelevant where the majority of it lies.
Considering going the speed of light slows down time for the traveler, would that not be a form of time travel? You're essentially traveling into the future further than you would have naturally.
In theory yes, exactly : if we could approach enough the speed of light we could go as far in the futur as we want in just seconds for us ! (If you like to read, I recommend "The Forever War", a hard science fiction book written by Joe Haldeman, talking about this precise topic 🙂) (When he said it's impossible, he probably talked about travelling in the past)
@pritzilpalazzo Ya I figured. Time travel typically refers to traveling through time itself outside of a linear method. Like the show Timeless.
@@Drewsterman777 I didn't watch this show, maybe I'll try at least the pilot ^^ And yes, that's what people think about when the talk about time travel, but we still can say that we are actually travelling in time, like, one second in the futur every second :p
1:30 so, how do you get that neutron, how was that particle split?
Taking physics next year and using these specific types of videos as a recovery method may correlate with my chances of becoming a individual within physics right?
Physics was the bane of my existence in high school. Thank god I barely passed it.
Why doesn't a particle accelerator explode? We always talk about the huge amount of energy that arises when the particles hit. How huge is it? And how do we get the particles nearly as fast as the light?
re - 6:00 I LOVE it!!! Far too few people these days use the phrase "Heat death of the universe." I LOVE that it was his go-to answer. I wish it were more commonly used, but people seem to have found descriptions that they prefer, that don't have the same impact as I feel this one has!
That's great....thank you...
Question for Wired!! How do you all go about selecting the folks featured on Tech Support? I know a Professor that would be PERFECT!
So one thing he says about splitting atoms is that you shoot a neutron at a nucleus "very very fast" to induce fission. This isn't the necessarily the case, for U235 slower neutrons are more effective
13:50 "If I don't know how fast [a particle is] moving, I don't know where it is." This simply isn't true and is a source of a lot of misconceptions about quantum mechanics. You *_can_* measure both position and momentum, even in quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle simply puts a limit on how *precisely* our predictions for our measurements of both position and momentum can be.
I'm so happy the title says twitter and not "x"
6:05 so squidward was right all along Aware
12:10, didn't know this was confirmed 😮
It’s speculation. We can’t see or measure what is beyond cosmological horizons, only make predictions.
It's actually mind boggling to think about how gravitational waves are compression waves through the fabric of reality itself.
The edge of the observable universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Thumbnail Question answer: Yes. 🔦
space and time are measurements, they aren't things. we live in electricity. gravitational waves are electric currents. (gravity is electrical compression and anti gravity is electrical expansion aka matter and space). light is what we live in. a particular reverberation of light is what we call 'visible light' or illumination. (the particle is the compression phase of the disturbance. a wave isn't a thing - waving is what something does.)
50 billion years feels a bit early for universal heat death, I believe he forgot a few orders of magnitude lmao
he probably meant to say billion trillion years, 10^21 is atleast in the ballpark of the shortest estimates for heat death
Yeah, that was definitely an accidental understatement on my part! Good catch
He has such beautiful fingernails. And a beautiful smile. Oh, and a beautiful way of explaining science.
thirsty much?..
I can't stop looking at his fingernails now they look so healthy
I thought he was going to do the pencil-and-paper wormhole analogy for a bit there...
It seems like Pr. habzoun is certain about heat death as our future, what about other scenarios (rebound etc.), aren’t they as plausible as heat death ?
Thought experiment: What if the universe is made of array of zero point particles that have no mass These particles have no properties until energy is applied. So instead of a particle moving through space, the energy is transmitted across these tiny particles. Light passes its energy across each particle and when that energy is ‘occupying’ that point in space we can measure it as a particle but the movement is actually a wave of energy flowing through and across these particles.
It behaves both like a particle and a wave but there's nothing like that in our day to day perception of reality. It's not a paradox, it's just not intuitive to understand, nothing in quantum physics really is
I REALLY hate that first example, because it portrays space as a flat, 2-dimensional plane, that only ever extends into a 3rd dimension, when a mass is introduced. There already exists numerous animations of space being represented as a 3-dimensional matrix, and the introduction of mass warps that 3-d structure in a 3-dimensional way, which is far more accurate and realistic, than portraying space-time as a 2-dimensional, flat surface.
actually i think that fission is more efficient with thermal neutrons than very fast ones
*Question:* If I had a lever with a handle that was 100,000 km in length and I had infinite strength and I was able to move the fulcrum with ease, would not the tip of that handle be moving faster than the speed of light?
Yep (if the lever was also infinitely rigid). But "infinite strength", infinitely rigid levers etc. don't exist in our universe - physics doesn't have to explain everything we can imagine, just everything that's actually part of our physical universe. (a similar example that crops up in textbooks involves giant scissors - if they're big enough, infinitely rigid etc. then you can close the handles at < c but the tips will close at > c)
Rigidity is limited because nothing is actually solid in the sense that we imagine it to be. It's all just meshes of particles that exert force on one another. So if you move the handle atom, the next atom is told to follow suit, and then that tells the next one to come along. At infinite strength, you'd just remove the atoms out of their structure. Or you'd probably vaporize your hand or the rod.
Do gravitational waves get affected by changes in space time? As gravity increases time passes more slowly does that include the time for propagation of a gravitational wave??? Can we have gravitational gravitational wave lensing??
Gravitational waves are moving at the speed of light and are not affected by time dilation. I doubt you can use it as a lense if it moves that fast
One of the rare "support" videos where I'm more confused post-viewing.
I would be happy to help answer any other questions as simply as I can and also link you to the exact things you'd like to understand better. Ask them here in the reply.😎
One may age or not age not based on speed of travel but condition one is travelling in.
When that guy mentioned a $1,000 he cut the lights and did a while demonstration to answer it 😂
why does the camera jump back and forth everytime mid sentence
Can we put geniuses on very fast moving machines in order to have them live longer and provide more output?
9:11 Shoutout to the “Long story short” meta joke
One thing I don’t understand. He was talking about heat death of the universe in about 40-50 billion years, and then he used the life of the universe as an example of infinity. Anyone can clarify?
The idea is things will cease to happen, but the vast nothingness will continue to exist forever.