Aephraim Steinberg: The Physicist Who Measured Negative Time
4/13/20262 hr 27 min
SPONSORS: - Go to https://expressvpn.com/theoriesofeverythingyt to find out how you can get up to 4 extra months thanks to our sponsor, ExpressVPN - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! No other podcast has this: https://economist.com/TOE This conversation belongs in a category I wish were larger on this channel: the experimentalist who also thinks (deeply) about foundations. Professor Aephraim Steinberg, winner of Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year...
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First 90 secondsAephraim Steinberg· Guest0:00
We just realized we were wrong, and that makes no classical sense.
Curt Jaimungal· Host0:02
[gentle music] This physicist has been asking questions we're told not to ask. What is a particle doing between measurements? Where does it go? How long does it spend there? I travel to my alma mater of the University of Toronto to speak to Professor Steinberg, the winner of the Physics World's Breakthrough of the Year, whose lab investigates photons traveling through a barrier that apparently causes atoms to spend negative time in an excited state.
Aephraim Steinberg· Guest0:32
And it took us a while to appreciate it wasn't just any old negative number.
Curt Jaimungal· Host0:36
My name's Curt Jaimungal, and on this channel, I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, we discuss negative time beyond the pop science headlines, because if you just go by them, you'll be misled. Many other YouTubers or magazines will tell you that his results are about faster than light travel. But today we go into the recondite details, exploring the truth behind these negative time results. We also talk about what weak measurements are and how they recover Bohmian trajectories in the double-slit experiment, and why Heisenberg's original disturbance argument about his uncertainty principle was experimentally incorrect. Again, we're all taught that Heisenberg's uncertainty comes from literally disturbing the atoms with other measuring devices, but that's false. We close with consciousness, quantum computing, and whether Bell's inequalities mean what we think they mean.