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Yakir Aharonov: The Future Propagates Backward in Quantum Theory
October 13, 2025
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Transcription time: 49m 39s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines.
How could we have been so wrong for so long about quantum mechanics? All the things that we are told about quantum mechanics is wrong.
Standard quantum theory describes a wave function that evolves forward from an initial measurement. Professor Yakir Aharonov says this is wrong. Aharonov, the co-discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect and a pioneer of weak measurement theory, has spent 65 years revolutionizing quantum foundations and this is his first and only time he's given a podcast.
To him, quantum reality requires two wave functions, one propagating forward from the past and another propagating backward from the future. This is ABL theory, also known as the two-state vector formalism. It explains weak measurements, which are observations that are so gentle they extract information without ever collapsing the wave function. And that's why Yakir thinks it's absurd to think that the quantum system ever collapses,
Aharonov then discovered phenomenon such as quantum Sheshire cat, where a neutron spin physically separates from the neutron itself and travels independently. He's one of the most influential living quantum physicists.
This conversation was filmed directly in his home in Israel and it captures the revolutionary thinking process from the man Heisenberg champion whom Bohm mentored and whose ideas Feynman called beautiful. The professor has a thick accent and I've meticulously transcribed and verified every word so please enable subtitles for the optimal viewing experience. So sir, why don't you tell me a bit about how you view the world? I told you that I am
Getting close to really finally understanding quantum mechanics. You know, I have been working for 65 years and struggling all the time to understand better and better quantum mechanics. While I made progress, each time I made some progress in understanding, it led to a discovery of new phenomena
And I think I finally arrived at a complete new interpretation of quantum mechanics. You know that when you have a theory of the world, like quantum mechanics, it's not enough to have just a good mathematical formulation. You must have also
a story that you are able to tell about it that is free of mathematics. Because mathematics cannot tell you what questions to ask it. It can answer any question you ask, but it cannot tell you what are the interesting questions to ask. In order to know what interesting questions to ask, you must have a way to understand what the theory means, not in mathematical terms,
but a new kind of intuition or story you can tell about it that will be as much as possible free of mathematics. That story, if it's correct, can help you to see things in the mathematics that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to see. So that is the importance of good interpretation. So the first step is to show
The kind of story that everybody is telling about quantum mechanics is completely wrong. I will tell you the type of story that people usually tell about quantum mechanics. They say the following thing. First of all, they say that contrary to classical physics, the quantum world is not deterministic. That means that even if we know everything,
that we should know about a given system, like an atom, for example, we cannot predict when it will decay and emit a photon. One atom will emit the photon after one second, and the other atom, which is completely identical, and it has exactly the same surrounding, will emit the photon after an hour, for no reason at all.
That is the thing that made Einstein completely angry. He said, I don't believe that God plays dice. I don't believe that nature is capricious or unreasonable, because we always thought in science that everything that happens must have a reason. And here, for no reason at all, one has to behave one way and the other another way. So people say about quantum mechanics, we simply had to accept it.
that the world is non-deterministic for no reason at all. We thus have to take it as an axiom. And my first point is that it is not true. In fact, we can show that just because nature is not deterministic, it allows the system, the quantum system, to have properties that it could not have if nature was deterministic. So there is a reason for this indeterminism.
As I will describe, and once you find the reason for it, then it's not anymore that nature is capricious, it does it for a given reason. So that's the first thing that is wrong, what people tell us about quantum mechanics, that for no reason at all, the world is not deterministic, there is a reason for it. The next thing we are told about quantum mechanics, or quantum domain,
is that every measurement that we do on a quantum system necessarily disturbs it, disturbs it so much that we cannot say that what we saw, what was there before, because really most of what you see is because of the way that it is disturbing. So that is completely wrong again. I have discovered a new kind of measurement that I call
non-disturbing measurements or with measurements, measurements that don't disturb the system at all, and nevertheless tell us all the information that we need about the system, provided we can have many examples that we can test. So we will discuss it more carefully, but the idea is that it's not true that there is no reality in the quantum domain.
There is a reality, but in order to find it, you have to do the right measurements that don't disturb this reality. Okay? That's the next thing. The last, most important thing about what we are told about quantum mechanics, which is wrong, is that a quantum particle, like an electron, can be either a particle or a wave. They say that the electron, for example,
in hydrogen atom is like a wave surrounding the proton. Not a particle rotating around the proton, but a wave surrounding it. So, we think about quantum particle as if they are classical life waves. But a classical wave has a property that if you look at one point on the intensity of this wave, you don't change the wave at other places.
But the wave of the electron has the property that if you look at one point and find the electron there, the whole wave disappears magically and is left only at the place where you found the electron. Now that is an illogical behaviour because if a moment before the charge of the electron and the mass of the electron were spread all over the wave,
and then you finally find it in one place, then all these stars must have collapsed very quickly to this point. That will create a lot of radiation and disturbance that you never see. So that is not a high description. On the other hand, people say, but look, it must be weird because there is no other way to understand why we see interference only in the visual electron. For example,
You take an electron and send it through a screen that has two open sleets. And if only one of the sleets is open and later you put a photographic plate and collect one electron after the other, you see the pattern that called the fraction pattern. You see a space of points weighing the chain for one sleet. If the other sleet is open, you see the weight of the chain from the other sleet.
But if you open both slits, each electron that comes must go through both of them in order to explain that you wrote destructive interference, that there are points on the photographic string that suddenly no electrons appear there if the two slits are open. But if only one slit is open, any of them, it will appear there. So people say because of that there is no way
to understand the behavior, and it will say that the electron also can be a wave. And I will show again that that is not true. By doing the kind of neuro-experiment that I'm talking about, I can see the interference pattern, and nevertheless, afterward, I can do a measurement that will tell me through which slit the particle went.
So you must have another explanation for interference, not by weight. And I found that interpretation. In fact, I found that interpretation of this new behavior already in the sixties. In 1964, I came to Munich and I visited the Max Planck Institute and I
was introduced to Heisenberg, who was alive then. A few more years after that he was alive. And then when I entered his room and we were introduced, I asked Professor Heisenberg, do you know how to explain interference in your language? Because the language of Heisenberg was a language that was still used of position and momentum
and the new dynamics that correspond to matrices instead of usual variables. So that was the dynamics that's called non-commuting dynamics. So anyhow, I asked the old dynamics, do you know how to explain the interference? He said he doesn't know. So I showed him my new way to think about it, and he got so excited.
And from then on, anyone that came to visit him, I was told by his assistants, Peter Doe, that the first thing he would take him to a blackboard and show him how to understand the interference in his pistol. So the way that I think about interference is by showing that in quantum mechanics, there are the basic equations of motion, Heiseberg equations of motion are non-local.
The electron, even though it moves at one point, has another variable that will tell the electron later where to appear on the photographic plate, and that variable has non-local equations of motion. So although the electron goes through one slit, that variable knows that the other slit is open or not because there are non-local equations of motion.
At first you think if there are no local equations of motion, something terrible can happen because it will destroy causality. The party goes for one slit, you open the other slit, and instantaneously that variable knows that the other slit is open. So that way that quantum mechanics gets out of this problem is by having the uncertainties that, aha, did you know
So it's from the path to which field the particle goes, that variable that has the monochrome equation of motion is completely uncertain. But if you use pre- and post-selection, you can prepare initially the particle that you don't know through which field it goes, you then check the interference pattern by doing
The new thing about quantum mechanics is the normal quality that is allowed only before you
That's a very subtle point. Okay, so to summarize, all the things that we are told about quantum mechanics is wrong. I'm writing now an article that I say, I call it, how could we have been so wrong for so long about quantum mechanics? All the things that we have been told, telling about quantum mechanics to many in the streets,
Look, quantum mechanics is such a mysterious theory. The problem can be at the same time at two different locations. There is no reality there. There is no reason there because two atoms for no reason behave differently. So the world, according to this story, is so illogical that people, philosophers and writers now say that the whole, we have to look at the world.
and something completely uncertain because that is what quantum mechanics tell us about and that story is wrong. Okay, so this is my main mission to show that the way that we have thought about quantum mechanics is really wrong and we have to think about it in a new way. Now why don't you think about it in this new way?
and you learn to look at quantum systems without disturbing them, you find a beautiful new reality that can be checked only by this kind of weight measurement. And I found a host of new phenomena that is related to this reality. Perhaps the most entertaining phenomena is what I call the quantum cheshire effect.
Sorry about Alice in Wonderland, that was written by Carol, right? And Alice comes to this beautiful world, she can talk to animals there, and she met a cat, she talked to the cat, and after a while the cat gets angry and disappears, but it disappears in a very strange way.
Tent disappears, then the body disappears, then the face disappears, and only a smile is left. And every sense to herself, many times seems a head without a smile. But what could be a smile without a head? Doesn't make sense. So everybody that reads this, including me, when I read it in high school, I saw that the Lewis Carroll was crazy to talk about a smile
without the head. But it turns out that quantum mechanics tells us that that can really happen. What I've shown is there is a very interesting effect. You take a particle like a neutron that has a property that's called a spin. The neutron can rotate around itself and produce a magnetic moment. That rotation is called a spin. And it turns out that it's possible to do an experiment
Where you send the electron in one side and the spin leaves the electron and moves by itself from the other side and then they join again. So the spin is like the smile of the cat that can leave the neutron although everybody thought that the neutron can never exist without the spin and the spin cannot exist without the neutron. This is one of the
Kind of new phenomena that I found once I started to think correctly by using pre and post selection. And there are many, many other things that happen before super oscillations and quantum work that are new directions of mathematics that came out of this world. And there are many other beautiful results, especially that when you have an electron
When you do pre and post selection you find that the electron can have together with it a pair of another electron and a counter electron that has a negative mass and the opposite charge and if you only do with measurement you see those new kinds of entities that I call
So the first idea is when you have two atoms that are exactly the same but they behave later differently, you say that this later experiment tells you that in fact from the beginning the two atoms were different
But you couldn't find it in the past, you can only find it in the future. And I reformulated quantum mechanics by saying that in order to describe the present, in classical physics to describe fully the present, it's enough to know the initial conditions in the past. And quantum mechanics, in order to describe fully the pattern in the present, you must do two experiments, one before.
the past, the wave function that you found before propagates to the present, and later you do another experiment that gets different results from one instrument to the other. Those different results give you another boundary condition, and that new thing that is called the wave is propagating back from the future to the present, and both
information from the past and from the future, which has happened only quantum mechanically, because logically, once you know the past, there is no new information in the future. But in quantum mechanics, you have new information in the future, and both information are relevant in the present, provided you do only with measurement to tell them. Okay, that is in an actual
The ideas that I want to discuss in this interview, so that's perfect.
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So I want to see if I'm understanding correctly. Okay. Are you specifying right now the two-state vector formalism? Yes. In quantum mechanics, a particle is described by a vector in Hilbert space. That vector in the Schrodinger representation is described by a wave. In the Harry Asimov representation, it is described by some observable that tells you what this vector is. But anyhow, you're that vector that comes from
The measurement in the past, it propagates according to the Schrodinger or Heisman expression of motion to the present. Then, later, you do another experiment that distinguishes between the two particles that started in the same initial condition. One of them moves to the right and the other moves to the left. If you take only those that move to the right,
It gives you another boundary condition, another vector that will send it back from the future to the present. And both vectors on different terms tell you the full information about the present. That is called the true vector formulation that I did discover in the early sixties.
What I'm wondering, sir, and I would like to get to some historical stories with Bohm and with Heisenberg and so forth. But what I'm wondering right now is when we were speaking off air, you were referencing that you have. Let me tell you the history. The history of how I met Bohm and how we did work together. I studied at the section in Haifa in the science faculty, and I wrote a course
I was taught quantum mechanics by the famous Nathan Rosen. You know, the famous artist where Einstein produced Rosary, one of the most famous artists in history. Rosen is that Rosen. And he taught me quantum mechanics. Beautiful course. At the end of the course, each one of the students was supposed to write a final thesis.
on any subject that you want to choose in order to get the grade for the course. And we were supposed to come to Professor Rosen and tell him what we decided to work on for this grade. So I came to his office and said, Professor Rosen, I would like to work on the quantum theory of measurement. He said, no, no, no, that subject is only for very old people like me. You should do some
Proper physics works like something in a solid state or something that is real down to earth physics and not this philosophy about measurement theory because old people waste their time, nobody will understand it anyhow. By the way, Professor Rosen looked, the only reason I decided to study physics is because I was interested
In foundational problems, and that's why I want to work on it. He said, no, no, you will waste your time. So we had this impasse, and I went out to the corridor with a long face, and I met an assistant by the name of Yevgeny Kharmy. He told me when he heard what happened, look, there is a new professor that just arrived in the Technion by the name of David Bohm.
Go to his office, maybe he will help you. So I came to his office, I entered through the office and introduced myself, told him about my problem with Rosen. And he asked me, what do you want to do? What are you saying about? So I told him the kind of problem and interest me. Said, okay, it interests me too. You will work with me, I will tell Rosen that you will be now my student. And that's how we started
to
Because Princeton, that was very conservative, that dumb is called to testify in front of the Mechati committee, they immediately decided to fire him, not to give him tenure. And then they had to leave the United States. He went to Brazil. And then when he was in Brazil, he was called by the committee to come back and testify about the trial of Oppenheimer.
Let me see if I got this timeline correct.
You collaborated with Boehm to come up with the Aharonov-Boehm effect. Yes. Okay, that was toward the end of the 1950s. And then in the 60s, you articulated your two state vector formalism. Yeah, that was after I finished my PhD with Boehm at Bristol. I went for one year to Brandeis University as a sales associate. And then I came as a
assistant professor to Yeshiva University in New York. And when I was there, at that time it was a very good physics department that was very busy at that time, and Peter Bergman, who was the assistant of Einstein, was a physics professor there. And while I was there, I started to think about the idea of the
What was Bohm like personally? Oh, he was a beautiful person, was extremely intelligent but in
I think he was affected very badly by what happened to him at Princeton, and that is what caused him later to devote most of his time to work that was not really proper physics. I mean, it became more and more philosophical, but when I interacted with him, he was still really extremely brilliant. In fact,
It was Einstein told that he looked at Bohm as his real follower and Feynman, when we wrote the article of the AB, Feynman sent us back a cable saying how beautiful, how come I had not thought about it myself.
Feynman said also about Boehm that he was the only one that he knows that was smarter than him. So Boehm was really extremely smart, but a very kind person and it was a lovely, beautiful experience to work with him. That's rare of Feynman to admit. Feynman told it to someone, I don't know if it's true, that the only person that he met that was smarter than him was Boehm.
Tell me about what line of thinking led to the Aronoff-Bohm effect. What led us to the world? What led us to the idea? Yes, yes, that you can shift the electron's quantum phase and so you can have global gauge features, but not just local forces. Those local gauge features must be taken as physically real. I can tell you how I tend to think about this idea that led to the Aronoff-Bohm effect.
I was excited when the graduate student, when I learned about BLOSS that showed that if you have a periodic potential in space like in a crystal, then you have something that is very interesting that you develop a gap in energy because the particles
The periodic potential makes a party with positive momentum jumps to negative momentum and the superposition gives you a leap in energy. So when I thought about it, I thought why don't I try to do the same thing, not in space but in time. I will take a periodic potential in time and maybe then I will get a leap in momentum because if I change position
To time, I had to change energy from momentum. And luckily, I did not know anything about change transformation. I was ignorant. If I knew about change transformation, I would know that periodic potential in time cannot do anything. But I did not know about it, so I started to fathom it when I saw to my dismay
that the only thing that happens when you put a periodic function of time is that you change the phase of the wave function that does not lead to any observable effect. But then it occurred to me that if I will put one potential in one place and a different potential, time-dependent potential in another place, then I will get a different phase, and that different phase
can be observed. So I thought about an idea that I have two Faraday cages and the lesson can be either in one of them or in the other. When it's inside the Faraday cage, it's completely protected against any electric fields outside because it cannot penetrate the Faraday cage. The only thing it cannot penetrate is time dependent potential. So I have
different time-dependent potential in one Faraday stage and another in the other Faraday stage that will produce a different phase and then I can open the Faraday stages after I remove the electric field outside, the electron will go out and interfere and that interference will show that the most electric field between the two Faraday stages
And the electron did not touch that electric field, but it still felt it. So, that was the beginning. I went to Bohm and told him about this idea, and he said, that's very interesting, and he came out with the modification, and so the farther cage, the thing that appears in our article, is too long conductors.
But let's say for a while, we hadn't published it yet, and then I went to a summer school at Oxford, where they talked a lot about, at that time, the thing about the third-level civilian physics was a terrible time, when you had the insinuities of dyslexia-magnetic field, people didn't know what to do with it.
Hasenberg suggested that instead we have to talk only about scattering or asymmetries, and then there was a whole mathematics around it from dispersal relations, and the whole physics at that time was horrible, just not of mathematics. But anyhow, I wanted to find out what it's all about, and when I was there at Oxford, they discussed also the effect not only of scalar potential, but also vector potential.
And then it occurred to me that maybe we can generalize the thing that I talked about in the 2000 cases for the case where I have a magnetic field in the middle and different vector potential on both sides. I came and told that about to Broum and then he really got excited and he said, okay, if you are able to solve the problem of infinite line of flux,
I remember that at that time in England there was the fashion to have tea as for coffee in the afternoon while graduate students and professors in Bristol were sitting together and I told everybody about this idea
I said, nobody could do the experiment because the electron has such a small wavelength that if it has to go around a microscopic solenoid, there would be no stable way to see the interference. And there was a professor there by the name of Sir Fran who said, wait, wait, I know what you can do. If you have a single magnetic resistor that's like a small thin
Now it's very interesting that when we published the article and
Price, who was the chairman of the Texas Department at Bristol, went to visit the Niels Bohr Institute, and he said that Niels Bohr doesn't believe that the effect is for real. In fact, many people could not believe that the effect is right, but later the son of Niels Bohr finally convinced him that the effect is for real.
Even today there are still some people that think that something is wrong with the effect, because it looks very strange that the particle can feel the potential and not the force, but that's certainly a true quantum effect. That was the first occasion where I realized that the basic equations of quantum mechanics must be non-local, there are no equations.
Because the force affects non-lophally the particle that is at the distance away. So that was the beginning of my teaching about non-lophality and quantum mechanics.
Can you explain how you see what gauge theory is to people who aren't physicists, but also just keep in mind that many physicists watch this program, professors of physics, researchers, postdocs and so forth. So you can also explain to them how you see gauge theory. Because of all the interactions that we know in nature, the electromagnetic interaction, the storm interaction and the
We've written the observed and the gravitational, all of them are described by potentials. Now, and but that potential because then the, the, the local that was observed, they must have some freedom that you can change in them without changing the physics. Now, why do you need potentials? It turns out the issue in classical physics, it was known
that you can formulate it in two ways. Either you use the Newton equation of motion, which just uses forces, then can Hamilton ensure that you can also write from the classical physics by using Hamiltonians and using the Hamilton equation of motion, and from that you need potential. So in order to be able to describe
forces in the grammatical language by using Hamiltonian, you must have potentials. But the potentials have the property that they have a freedom. You can change the potential without changing the forces. That freedom is called gauge transformation. But the potentials are necessary if you want to formulate
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The fact that you write a local equation by using potentials, that is misleading, because suppose I say the vector moves only on one side, and there is a vector potential there, and it's affected by this vector potential, but I can use gaseous transformation that will completely make this vector potential on one side zero.
And nevertheless, the electron still affects the force. So, the fact that we can use it like a local equation is misleading. Because we can always move by gauge transformation, remove the potential from the region where the particle is moving, and the particle still feels the effect of the force, finally. So, there is no way to describe really
the effect of the force locally. It's a mathematical formulation that uses waves, but both the waves are not real and the potentials are not real. The only thing that you can really observe are the forces. And the idea that you describe the effect by waves, as I have shown, is misleading. You have to describe it by a particle that moves only on one side, but it still
You just mentioned that the waves are not real and the potential is not real. So in your mind, what is real? What is ontologically there in physical reality? I think that if you think about the way that the quantum mechanics started, that was just the Heiseberg approach. Before Schrodinger,
and heiseberg described physics still by using position and momentum as the fundamental concepts but he said that instead of using the position momentum as numbers I have to use them as matrices and he wrote the equations of motion for these matrices but it turns out that it was very complicated to solve
the Heisenberg equation of motion. People could do it for a monoc oscillator and for a kind of an atom, but the minute they tried to solve the Heisenberg equation of motion for something more complicated, like an atom with two electrons or any other non-harmonic oscillator, they could not do it. Then came Schrodinger following the brilliant idea that electrons could also be waves and
a very simple wave equation describing the electron and that wave equation is called the Schrodinger equation was extremely simple to solve and then there you could very quickly solve much more complicated problems and then people, old people left Heisenberg and went to Schrodinger equations and said that is the right physics and poor Heisenberg
was flaming all the time that could not be true. That is not what quantum mechanics is about, but nobody listens to it. People say that, no, an electron must be weighed, we see interference, we have the Schrodinger picture that's so nice, and I think now that the Schrodinger picture is only a mathematical way to solve the Heisenberg equations of motion. You've seen what happened to the
The wave is like potential. It's like a mathematical aid to solve the problem, but it does not show what is really there. And what is really there are observables that are a function of position and momentum, and you can follow what happens to those observables if you know how to solve the harmonic equations of motion.
So the parallel, even quantum mechanics, the parallel still has to be described by a point, you don't know where it is, but then you live in time, it moves very disorderly, but you can find a way to see the property of what happened with the loop pre and post, then you can see indirectly what is called the wave, if you have
Did you ever try to make a gravitational version of the Aronoff-Bohm effect? Yes, definitely. With my first case,
We rolled another roll of the AB effect, both for the Young-Greene COE, non-nuclear engages, and for gravitational seal. But later people made a lot of other modifications. By the way, there is a very interesting historical story, apart from the one I told you, that Yang, the one that rolled the Nobel Prize together with Li and Yang,
He did work on the Arono-Bohm effect and he continued, he showed, explained by using the A-B effect to explain why flux inside superconductor must be quantized. But each time we said to Arono-Bohm effect, he called it the Bohm-Arono-Bohm effect. So one time I met him in Japan, I came to a conference there,
I asked him, why do you call it the Burma Road number set? He said, oh, of course, because he was your thesis advisor, it must have been his idea. I said, no, it was my idea. So he said, look, if you want me to refer to it differently, ask David Brown to write me a letter in which he will state
that the
And he only helped me later to perform better. And then from then on, Young started to call it the Burma-Romov effect. You mean he then started to call it the Aronov-Bohm effect? Yeah, Aronov-Bohm effect. Right, right. He sent me a letter saying that indeed, Bohm confirmed that it was my idea.
At this point, we were having so many internet connection issues that we decided it was better to stop here, especially since Yakir wants to hear from you, answer your questions. So this is part one. Part two will be coming out in a few weeks. Leave any questions in the comments section below and of course, subscribe to get notified.
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"text": " To him, quantum reality requires two wave functions, one propagating forward from the past and another propagating backward from the future. This is ABL theory, also known as the two-state vector formalism. It explains weak measurements, which are observations that are so gentle they extract information without ever collapsing the wave function. And that's why Yakir thinks it's absurd to think that the quantum system ever collapses,"
},
{
"end_time": 144.275,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 130.725,
"text": " Aharonov then discovered phenomenon such as quantum Sheshire cat, where a neutron spin physically separates from the neutron itself and travels independently. He's one of the most influential living quantum physicists."
},
{
"end_time": 173.643,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 144.889,
"text": " This conversation was filmed directly in his home in Israel and it captures the revolutionary thinking process from the man Heisenberg champion whom Bohm mentored and whose ideas Feynman called beautiful. The professor has a thick accent and I've meticulously transcribed and verified every word so please enable subtitles for the optimal viewing experience. So sir, why don't you tell me a bit about how you view the world? I told you that I am"
},
{
"end_time": 203.763,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 174.718,
"text": " Getting close to really finally understanding quantum mechanics. You know, I have been working for 65 years and struggling all the time to understand better and better quantum mechanics. While I made progress, each time I made some progress in understanding, it led to a discovery of new phenomena"
},
{
"end_time": 228.848,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 203.968,
"text": " And I think I finally arrived at a complete new interpretation of quantum mechanics. You know that when you have a theory of the world, like quantum mechanics, it's not enough to have just a good mathematical formulation. You must have also"
},
{
"end_time": 257.995,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 229.616,
"text": " a story that you are able to tell about it that is free of mathematics. Because mathematics cannot tell you what questions to ask it. It can answer any question you ask, but it cannot tell you what are the interesting questions to ask. In order to know what interesting questions to ask, you must have a way to understand what the theory means, not in mathematical terms,"
},
{
"end_time": 285.776,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 258.524,
"text": " but a new kind of intuition or story you can tell about it that will be as much as possible free of mathematics. That story, if it's correct, can help you to see things in the mathematics that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to see. So that is the importance of good interpretation. So the first step is to show"
},
{
"end_time": 313.336,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 286.476,
"text": " The kind of story that everybody is telling about quantum mechanics is completely wrong. I will tell you the type of story that people usually tell about quantum mechanics. They say the following thing. First of all, they say that contrary to classical physics, the quantum world is not deterministic. That means that even if we know everything,"
},
{
"end_time": 339.718,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 313.951,
"text": " that we should know about a given system, like an atom, for example, we cannot predict when it will decay and emit a photon. One atom will emit the photon after one second, and the other atom, which is completely identical, and it has exactly the same surrounding, will emit the photon after an hour, for no reason at all."
},
{
"end_time": 370.35,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 340.503,
"text": " That is the thing that made Einstein completely angry. He said, I don't believe that God plays dice. I don't believe that nature is capricious or unreasonable, because we always thought in science that everything that happens must have a reason. And here, for no reason at all, one has to behave one way and the other another way. So people say about quantum mechanics, we simply had to accept it."
},
{
"end_time": 399.48,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 370.64,
"text": " that the world is non-deterministic for no reason at all. We thus have to take it as an axiom. And my first point is that it is not true. In fact, we can show that just because nature is not deterministic, it allows the system, the quantum system, to have properties that it could not have if nature was deterministic. So there is a reason for this indeterminism."
},
{
"end_time": 428.933,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 400.009,
"text": " As I will describe, and once you find the reason for it, then it's not anymore that nature is capricious, it does it for a given reason. So that's the first thing that is wrong, what people tell us about quantum mechanics, that for no reason at all, the world is not deterministic, there is a reason for it. The next thing we are told about quantum mechanics, or quantum domain,"
},
{
"end_time": 456.459,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 429.36,
"text": " is that every measurement that we do on a quantum system necessarily disturbs it, disturbs it so much that we cannot say that what we saw, what was there before, because really most of what you see is because of the way that it is disturbing. So that is completely wrong again. I have discovered a new kind of measurement that I call"
},
{
"end_time": 484.445,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 456.749,
"text": " non-disturbing measurements or with measurements, measurements that don't disturb the system at all, and nevertheless tell us all the information that we need about the system, provided we can have many examples that we can test. So we will discuss it more carefully, but the idea is that it's not true that there is no reality in the quantum domain."
},
{
"end_time": 511.869,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 484.77,
"text": " There is a reality, but in order to find it, you have to do the right measurements that don't disturb this reality. Okay? That's the next thing. The last, most important thing about what we are told about quantum mechanics, which is wrong, is that a quantum particle, like an electron, can be either a particle or a wave. They say that the electron, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 539.735,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 512.261,
"text": " in hydrogen atom is like a wave surrounding the proton. Not a particle rotating around the proton, but a wave surrounding it. So, we think about quantum particle as if they are classical life waves. But a classical wave has a property that if you look at one point on the intensity of this wave, you don't change the wave at other places."
},
{
"end_time": 567.346,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 540.145,
"text": " But the wave of the electron has the property that if you look at one point and find the electron there, the whole wave disappears magically and is left only at the place where you found the electron. Now that is an illogical behaviour because if a moment before the charge of the electron and the mass of the electron were spread all over the wave,"
},
{
"end_time": 595.213,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 567.79,
"text": " and then you finally find it in one place, then all these stars must have collapsed very quickly to this point. That will create a lot of radiation and disturbance that you never see. So that is not a high description. On the other hand, people say, but look, it must be weird because there is no other way to understand why we see interference only in the visual electron. For example,"
},
{
"end_time": 624.343,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 595.845,
"text": " You take an electron and send it through a screen that has two open sleets. And if only one of the sleets is open and later you put a photographic plate and collect one electron after the other, you see the pattern that called the fraction pattern. You see a space of points weighing the chain for one sleet. If the other sleet is open, you see the weight of the chain from the other sleet."
},
{
"end_time": 651.783,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 624.804,
"text": " But if you open both slits, each electron that comes must go through both of them in order to explain that you wrote destructive interference, that there are points on the photographic string that suddenly no electrons appear there if the two slits are open. But if only one slit is open, any of them, it will appear there. So people say because of that there is no way"
},
{
"end_time": 678.524,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 652.312,
"text": " to understand the behavior, and it will say that the electron also can be a wave. And I will show again that that is not true. By doing the kind of neuro-experiment that I'm talking about, I can see the interference pattern, and nevertheless, afterward, I can do a measurement that will tell me through which slit the particle went."
},
{
"end_time": 706.323,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 678.933,
"text": " So you must have another explanation for interference, not by weight. And I found that interpretation. In fact, I found that interpretation of this new behavior already in the sixties. In 1964, I came to Munich and I visited the Max Planck Institute and I"
},
{
"end_time": 735.452,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 706.698,
"text": " was introduced to Heisenberg, who was alive then. A few more years after that he was alive. And then when I entered his room and we were introduced, I asked Professor Heisenberg, do you know how to explain interference in your language? Because the language of Heisenberg was a language that was still used of position and momentum"
},
{
"end_time": 764.104,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 735.913,
"text": " and the new dynamics that correspond to matrices instead of usual variables. So that was the dynamics that's called non-commuting dynamics. So anyhow, I asked the old dynamics, do you know how to explain the interference? He said he doesn't know. So I showed him my new way to think about it, and he got so excited."
},
{
"end_time": 793.712,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 764.548,
"text": " And from then on, anyone that came to visit him, I was told by his assistants, Peter Doe, that the first thing he would take him to a blackboard and show him how to understand the interference in his pistol. So the way that I think about interference is by showing that in quantum mechanics, there are the basic equations of motion, Heiseberg equations of motion are non-local."
},
{
"end_time": 823.234,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 794.428,
"text": " The electron, even though it moves at one point, has another variable that will tell the electron later where to appear on the photographic plate, and that variable has non-local equations of motion. So although the electron goes through one slit, that variable knows that the other slit is open or not because there are non-local equations of motion."
},
{
"end_time": 852.176,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 823.592,
"text": " At first you think if there are no local equations of motion, something terrible can happen because it will destroy causality. The party goes for one slit, you open the other slit, and instantaneously that variable knows that the other slit is open. So that way that quantum mechanics gets out of this problem is by having the uncertainties that, aha, did you know"
},
{
"end_time": 875.401,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 853.353,
"text": " So it's from the path to which field the particle goes, that variable that has the monochrome equation of motion is completely uncertain. But if you use pre- and post-selection, you can prepare initially the particle that you don't know through which field it goes, you then check the interference pattern by doing"
},
{
"end_time": 905.247,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 875.998,
"text": " The new thing about quantum mechanics is the normal quality that is allowed only before you"
},
{
"end_time": 933.387,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 905.572,
"text": " That's a very subtle point. Okay, so to summarize, all the things that we are told about quantum mechanics is wrong. I'm writing now an article that I say, I call it, how could we have been so wrong for so long about quantum mechanics? All the things that we have been told, telling about quantum mechanics to many in the streets,"
},
{
"end_time": 961.903,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 933.933,
"text": " Look, quantum mechanics is such a mysterious theory. The problem can be at the same time at two different locations. There is no reality there. There is no reason there because two atoms for no reason behave differently. So the world, according to this story, is so illogical that people, philosophers and writers now say that the whole, we have to look at the world."
},
{
"end_time": 984.599,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 962.398,
"text": " and something completely uncertain because that is what quantum mechanics tell us about and that story is wrong. Okay, so this is my main mission to show that the way that we have thought about quantum mechanics is really wrong and we have to think about it in a new way. Now why don't you think about it in this new way?"
},
{
"end_time": 1014.445,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 984.957,
"text": " and you learn to look at quantum systems without disturbing them, you find a beautiful new reality that can be checked only by this kind of weight measurement. And I found a host of new phenomena that is related to this reality. Perhaps the most entertaining phenomena is what I call the quantum cheshire effect."
},
{
"end_time": 1039.872,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1015.555,
"text": " Sorry about Alice in Wonderland, that was written by Carol, right? And Alice comes to this beautiful world, she can talk to animals there, and she met a cat, she talked to the cat, and after a while the cat gets angry and disappears, but it disappears in a very strange way."
},
{
"end_time": 1069.565,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1040.435,
"text": " Tent disappears, then the body disappears, then the face disappears, and only a smile is left. And every sense to herself, many times seems a head without a smile. But what could be a smile without a head? Doesn't make sense. So everybody that reads this, including me, when I read it in high school, I saw that the Lewis Carroll was crazy to talk about a smile"
},
{
"end_time": 1098.131,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1069.94,
"text": " without the head. But it turns out that quantum mechanics tells us that that can really happen. What I've shown is there is a very interesting effect. You take a particle like a neutron that has a property that's called a spin. The neutron can rotate around itself and produce a magnetic moment. That rotation is called a spin. And it turns out that it's possible to do an experiment"
},
{
"end_time": 1125.947,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1098.507,
"text": " Where you send the electron in one side and the spin leaves the electron and moves by itself from the other side and then they join again. So the spin is like the smile of the cat that can leave the neutron although everybody thought that the neutron can never exist without the spin and the spin cannot exist without the neutron. This is one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1154.411,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1126.596,
"text": " Kind of new phenomena that I found once I started to think correctly by using pre and post selection. And there are many, many other things that happen before super oscillations and quantum work that are new directions of mathematics that came out of this world. And there are many other beautiful results, especially that when you have an electron"
},
{
"end_time": 1180.794,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1155.026,
"text": " When you do pre and post selection you find that the electron can have together with it a pair of another electron and a counter electron that has a negative mass and the opposite charge and if you only do with measurement you see those new kinds of entities that I call"
},
{
"end_time": 1210.077,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1181.067,
"text": " So the first idea is when you have two atoms that are exactly the same but they behave later differently, you say that this later experiment tells you that in fact from the beginning the two atoms were different"
},
{
"end_time": 1239.002,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1210.316,
"text": " But you couldn't find it in the past, you can only find it in the future. And I reformulated quantum mechanics by saying that in order to describe the present, in classical physics to describe fully the present, it's enough to know the initial conditions in the past. And quantum mechanics, in order to describe fully the pattern in the present, you must do two experiments, one before."
},
{
"end_time": 1268.387,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1239.718,
"text": " the past, the wave function that you found before propagates to the present, and later you do another experiment that gets different results from one instrument to the other. Those different results give you another boundary condition, and that new thing that is called the wave is propagating back from the future to the present, and both"
},
{
"end_time": 1298.609,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1269.599,
"text": " information from the past and from the future, which has happened only quantum mechanically, because logically, once you know the past, there is no new information in the future. But in quantum mechanics, you have new information in the future, and both information are relevant in the present, provided you do only with measurement to tell them. Okay, that is in an actual"
},
{
"end_time": 1303.609,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1298.951,
"text": " The ideas that I want to discuss in this interview, so that's perfect."
},
{
"end_time": 1330.964,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1304.445,
"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been in Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details."
},
{
"end_time": 1361.8,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1331.92,
"text": " So I want to see if I'm understanding correctly. Okay. Are you specifying right now the two-state vector formalism? Yes. In quantum mechanics, a particle is described by a vector in Hilbert space. That vector in the Schrodinger representation is described by a wave. In the Harry Asimov representation, it is described by some observable that tells you what this vector is. But anyhow, you're that vector that comes from"
},
{
"end_time": 1389.957,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1362.193,
"text": " The measurement in the past, it propagates according to the Schrodinger or Heisman expression of motion to the present. Then, later, you do another experiment that distinguishes between the two particles that started in the same initial condition. One of them moves to the right and the other moves to the left. If you take only those that move to the right,"
},
{
"end_time": 1413.968,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1390.23,
"text": " It gives you another boundary condition, another vector that will send it back from the future to the present. And both vectors on different terms tell you the full information about the present. That is called the true vector formulation that I did discover in the early sixties."
},
{
"end_time": 1445.503,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1415.913,
"text": " What I'm wondering, sir, and I would like to get to some historical stories with Bohm and with Heisenberg and so forth. But what I'm wondering right now is when we were speaking off air, you were referencing that you have. Let me tell you the history. The history of how I met Bohm and how we did work together. I studied at the section in Haifa in the science faculty, and I wrote a course"
},
{
"end_time": 1473.677,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1445.896,
"text": " I was taught quantum mechanics by the famous Nathan Rosen. You know, the famous artist where Einstein produced Rosary, one of the most famous artists in history. Rosen is that Rosen. And he taught me quantum mechanics. Beautiful course. At the end of the course, each one of the students was supposed to write a final thesis."
},
{
"end_time": 1504.258,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1474.343,
"text": " on any subject that you want to choose in order to get the grade for the course. And we were supposed to come to Professor Rosen and tell him what we decided to work on for this grade. So I came to his office and said, Professor Rosen, I would like to work on the quantum theory of measurement. He said, no, no, no, that subject is only for very old people like me. You should do some"
},
{
"end_time": 1529.07,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1504.787,
"text": " Proper physics works like something in a solid state or something that is real down to earth physics and not this philosophy about measurement theory because old people waste their time, nobody will understand it anyhow. By the way, Professor Rosen looked, the only reason I decided to study physics is because I was interested"
},
{
"end_time": 1557.807,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1529.514,
"text": " In foundational problems, and that's why I want to work on it. He said, no, no, you will waste your time. So we had this impasse, and I went out to the corridor with a long face, and I met an assistant by the name of Yevgeny Kharmy. He told me when he heard what happened, look, there is a new professor that just arrived in the Technion by the name of David Bohm."
},
{
"end_time": 1587.449,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1558.336,
"text": " Go to his office, maybe he will help you. So I came to his office, I entered through the office and introduced myself, told him about my problem with Rosen. And he asked me, what do you want to do? What are you saying about? So I told him the kind of problem and interest me. Said, okay, it interests me too. You will work with me, I will tell Rosen that you will be now my student. And that's how we started"
},
{
"end_time": 1617.517,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1587.722,
"text": " to"
},
{
"end_time": 1647.5,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1618.063,
"text": " Because Princeton, that was very conservative, that dumb is called to testify in front of the Mechati committee, they immediately decided to fire him, not to give him tenure. And then they had to leave the United States. He went to Brazil. And then when he was in Brazil, he was called by the committee to come back and testify about the trial of Oppenheimer."
},
{
"end_time": 1673.814,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1647.961,
"text": " Let me see if I got this timeline correct."
},
{
"end_time": 1704.735,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1674.872,
"text": " You collaborated with Boehm to come up with the Aharonov-Boehm effect. Yes. Okay, that was toward the end of the 1950s. And then in the 60s, you articulated your two state vector formalism. Yeah, that was after I finished my PhD with Boehm at Bristol. I went for one year to Brandeis University as a sales associate. And then I came as a"
},
{
"end_time": 1735.316,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1705.333,
"text": " assistant professor to Yeshiva University in New York. And when I was there, at that time it was a very good physics department that was very busy at that time, and Peter Bergman, who was the assistant of Einstein, was a physics professor there. And while I was there, I started to think about the idea of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1764.735,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1736.015,
"text": " What was Bohm like personally? Oh, he was a beautiful person, was extremely intelligent but in"
},
{
"end_time": 1793.797,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1765.674,
"text": " I think he was affected very badly by what happened to him at Princeton, and that is what caused him later to devote most of his time to work that was not really proper physics. I mean, it became more and more philosophical, but when I interacted with him, he was still really extremely brilliant. In fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 1820.367,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1794.138,
"text": " It was Einstein told that he looked at Bohm as his real follower and Feynman, when we wrote the article of the AB, Feynman sent us back a cable saying how beautiful, how come I had not thought about it myself."
},
{
"end_time": 1851.527,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1823.166,
"text": " Feynman said also about Boehm that he was the only one that he knows that was smarter than him. So Boehm was really extremely smart, but a very kind person and it was a lovely, beautiful experience to work with him. That's rare of Feynman to admit. Feynman told it to someone, I don't know if it's true, that the only person that he met that was smarter than him was Boehm."
},
{
"end_time": 1879.872,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1852.671,
"text": " Tell me about what line of thinking led to the Aronoff-Bohm effect. What led us to the world? What led us to the idea? Yes, yes, that you can shift the electron's quantum phase and so you can have global gauge features, but not just local forces. Those local gauge features must be taken as physically real. I can tell you how I tend to think about this idea that led to the Aronoff-Bohm effect."
},
{
"end_time": 1905.759,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1882.108,
"text": " I was excited when the graduate student, when I learned about BLOSS that showed that if you have a periodic potential in space like in a crystal, then you have something that is very interesting that you develop a gap in energy because the particles"
},
{
"end_time": 1933.626,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1906.749,
"text": " The periodic potential makes a party with positive momentum jumps to negative momentum and the superposition gives you a leap in energy. So when I thought about it, I thought why don't I try to do the same thing, not in space but in time. I will take a periodic potential in time and maybe then I will get a leap in momentum because if I change position"
},
{
"end_time": 1957.363,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1934.206,
"text": " To time, I had to change energy from momentum. And luckily, I did not know anything about change transformation. I was ignorant. If I knew about change transformation, I would know that periodic potential in time cannot do anything. But I did not know about it, so I started to fathom it when I saw to my dismay"
},
{
"end_time": 1986.015,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1957.841,
"text": " that the only thing that happens when you put a periodic function of time is that you change the phase of the wave function that does not lead to any observable effect. But then it occurred to me that if I will put one potential in one place and a different potential, time-dependent potential in another place, then I will get a different phase, and that different phase"
},
{
"end_time": 2015.879,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1986.237,
"text": " can be observed. So I thought about an idea that I have two Faraday cages and the lesson can be either in one of them or in the other. When it's inside the Faraday cage, it's completely protected against any electric fields outside because it cannot penetrate the Faraday cage. The only thing it cannot penetrate is time dependent potential. So I have"
},
{
"end_time": 2043.387,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 2016.22,
"text": " different time-dependent potential in one Faraday stage and another in the other Faraday stage that will produce a different phase and then I can open the Faraday stages after I remove the electric field outside, the electron will go out and interfere and that interference will show that the most electric field between the two Faraday stages"
},
{
"end_time": 2072.039,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2044.087,
"text": " And the electron did not touch that electric field, but it still felt it. So, that was the beginning. I went to Bohm and told him about this idea, and he said, that's very interesting, and he came out with the modification, and so the farther cage, the thing that appears in our article, is too long conductors."
},
{
"end_time": 2100.93,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2072.705,
"text": " But let's say for a while, we hadn't published it yet, and then I went to a summer school at Oxford, where they talked a lot about, at that time, the thing about the third-level civilian physics was a terrible time, when you had the insinuities of dyslexia-magnetic field, people didn't know what to do with it."
},
{
"end_time": 2130.64,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2101.084,
"text": " Hasenberg suggested that instead we have to talk only about scattering or asymmetries, and then there was a whole mathematics around it from dispersal relations, and the whole physics at that time was horrible, just not of mathematics. But anyhow, I wanted to find out what it's all about, and when I was there at Oxford, they discussed also the effect not only of scalar potential, but also vector potential."
},
{
"end_time": 2159.957,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2130.93,
"text": " And then it occurred to me that maybe we can generalize the thing that I talked about in the 2000 cases for the case where I have a magnetic field in the middle and different vector potential on both sides. I came and told that about to Broum and then he really got excited and he said, okay, if you are able to solve the problem of infinite line of flux,"
},
{
"end_time": 2187.978,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2160.64,
"text": " I remember that at that time in England there was the fashion to have tea as for coffee in the afternoon while graduate students and professors in Bristol were sitting together and I told everybody about this idea"
},
{
"end_time": 2217.705,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2188.387,
"text": " I said, nobody could do the experiment because the electron has such a small wavelength that if it has to go around a microscopic solenoid, there would be no stable way to see the interference. And there was a professor there by the name of Sir Fran who said, wait, wait, I know what you can do. If you have a single magnetic resistor that's like a small thin"
},
{
"end_time": 2246.186,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2218.097,
"text": " Now it's very interesting that when we published the article and"
},
{
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"index": 81,
"start_time": 2247.551,
"text": " Price, who was the chairman of the Texas Department at Bristol, went to visit the Niels Bohr Institute, and he said that Niels Bohr doesn't believe that the effect is for real. In fact, many people could not believe that the effect is right, but later the son of Niels Bohr finally convinced him that the effect is for real."
},
{
"end_time": 2303.012,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2275.026,
"text": " Even today there are still some people that think that something is wrong with the effect, because it looks very strange that the particle can feel the potential and not the force, but that's certainly a true quantum effect. That was the first occasion where I realized that the basic equations of quantum mechanics must be non-local, there are no equations."
},
{
"end_time": 2316.118,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2303.439,
"text": " Because the force affects non-lophally the particle that is at the distance away. So that was the beginning of my teaching about non-lophality and quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 2345.316,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2316.869,
"text": " Can you explain how you see what gauge theory is to people who aren't physicists, but also just keep in mind that many physicists watch this program, professors of physics, researchers, postdocs and so forth. So you can also explain to them how you see gauge theory. Because of all the interactions that we know in nature, the electromagnetic interaction, the storm interaction and the"
},
{
"end_time": 2374.224,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2345.708,
"text": " We've written the observed and the gravitational, all of them are described by potentials. Now, and but that potential because then the, the, the local that was observed, they must have some freedom that you can change in them without changing the physics. Now, why do you need potentials? It turns out the issue in classical physics, it was known"
},
{
"end_time": 2403.148,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2374.497,
"text": " that you can formulate it in two ways. Either you use the Newton equation of motion, which just uses forces, then can Hamilton ensure that you can also write from the classical physics by using Hamiltonians and using the Hamilton equation of motion, and from that you need potential. So in order to be able to describe"
},
{
"end_time": 2430.486,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2403.729,
"text": " forces in the grammatical language by using Hamiltonian, you must have potentials. But the potentials have the property that they have a freedom. You can change the potential without changing the forces. That freedom is called gauge transformation. But the potentials are necessary if you want to formulate"
},
{
"end_time": 2455.93,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2431.015,
"text": " Ford Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control."
},
{
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"text": " Enjoy the drive in Blue Cruise enabled vehicles like the F-150, Explorer and Mustang Mach-E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. C4.com slash Blue Cruise for more details. Why is it that you're saying that the Aronoff-Bohm effect indicates that reality or nature is non-local? Because I believe that"
},
{
"end_time": 2517.398,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2487.466,
"text": " The fact that you write a local equation by using potentials, that is misleading, because suppose I say the vector moves only on one side, and there is a vector potential there, and it's affected by this vector potential, but I can use gaseous transformation that will completely make this vector potential on one side zero."
},
{
"end_time": 2547.244,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2517.722,
"text": " And nevertheless, the electron still affects the force. So, the fact that we can use it like a local equation is misleading. Because we can always move by gauge transformation, remove the potential from the region where the particle is moving, and the particle still feels the effect of the force, finally. So, there is no way to describe really"
},
{
"end_time": 2576.937,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2547.756,
"text": " the effect of the force locally. It's a mathematical formulation that uses waves, but both the waves are not real and the potentials are not real. The only thing that you can really observe are the forces. And the idea that you describe the effect by waves, as I have shown, is misleading. You have to describe it by a particle that moves only on one side, but it still"
},
{
"end_time": 2605.435,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2577.329,
"text": " You just mentioned that the waves are not real and the potential is not real. So in your mind, what is real? What is ontologically there in physical reality? I think that if you think about the way that the quantum mechanics started, that was just the Heiseberg approach. Before Schrodinger,"
},
{
"end_time": 2634.514,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2606.135,
"text": " and heiseberg described physics still by using position and momentum as the fundamental concepts but he said that instead of using the position momentum as numbers I have to use them as matrices and he wrote the equations of motion for these matrices but it turns out that it was very complicated to solve"
},
{
"end_time": 2663.387,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2635.077,
"text": " the Heisenberg equation of motion. People could do it for a monoc oscillator and for a kind of an atom, but the minute they tried to solve the Heisenberg equation of motion for something more complicated, like an atom with two electrons or any other non-harmonic oscillator, they could not do it. Then came Schrodinger following the brilliant idea that electrons could also be waves and"
},
{
"end_time": 2691.254,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2663.746,
"text": " a very simple wave equation describing the electron and that wave equation is called the Schrodinger equation was extremely simple to solve and then there you could very quickly solve much more complicated problems and then people, old people left Heisenberg and went to Schrodinger equations and said that is the right physics and poor Heisenberg"
},
{
"end_time": 2720.947,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2691.749,
"text": " was flaming all the time that could not be true. That is not what quantum mechanics is about, but nobody listens to it. People say that, no, an electron must be weighed, we see interference, we have the Schrodinger picture that's so nice, and I think now that the Schrodinger picture is only a mathematical way to solve the Heisenberg equations of motion. You've seen what happened to the"
},
{
"end_time": 2749.804,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2721.203,
"text": " The wave is like potential. It's like a mathematical aid to solve the problem, but it does not show what is really there. And what is really there are observables that are a function of position and momentum, and you can follow what happens to those observables if you know how to solve the harmonic equations of motion."
},
{
"end_time": 2780.299,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2750.759,
"text": " So the parallel, even quantum mechanics, the parallel still has to be described by a point, you don't know where it is, but then you live in time, it moves very disorderly, but you can find a way to see the property of what happened with the loop pre and post, then you can see indirectly what is called the wave, if you have"
},
{
"end_time": 2809.121,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2780.623,
"text": " Did you ever try to make a gravitational version of the Aronoff-Bohm effect? Yes, definitely. With my first case,"
},
{
"end_time": 2837.91,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2809.684,
"text": " We rolled another roll of the AB effect, both for the Young-Greene COE, non-nuclear engages, and for gravitational seal. But later people made a lot of other modifications. By the way, there is a very interesting historical story, apart from the one I told you, that Yang, the one that rolled the Nobel Prize together with Li and Yang,"
},
{
"end_time": 2867.005,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2838.729,
"text": " He did work on the Arono-Bohm effect and he continued, he showed, explained by using the A-B effect to explain why flux inside superconductor must be quantized. But each time we said to Arono-Bohm effect, he called it the Bohm-Arono-Bohm effect. So one time I met him in Japan, I came to a conference there,"
},
{
"end_time": 2889.275,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2867.278,
"text": " I asked him, why do you call it the Burma Road number set? He said, oh, of course, because he was your thesis advisor, it must have been his idea. I said, no, it was my idea. So he said, look, if you want me to refer to it differently, ask David Brown to write me a letter in which he will state"
},
{
"end_time": 2919.514,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2889.582,
"text": " that the"
},
{
"end_time": 2943.319,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2920.009,
"text": " And he only helped me later to perform better. And then from then on, Young started to call it the Burma-Romov effect. You mean he then started to call it the Aronov-Bohm effect? Yeah, Aronov-Bohm effect. Right, right. He sent me a letter saying that indeed, Bohm confirmed that it was my idea."
},
{
"end_time": 2963.387,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2944.838,
"text": " At this point, we were having so many internet connection issues that we decided it was better to stop here, especially since Yakir wants to hear from you, answer your questions. So this is part one. Part two will be coming out in a few weeks. Leave any questions in the comments section below and of course, subscribe to get notified."
},
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"text": " This holiday, discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start? Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift, in-store or online. Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season, only at K."
}
]
}No transcript available.