Transcriber: İlayda Gökgöz Reviewer: IF I KNEW THEN
Queer. Differing in some way from what is usual or normal.
As a society, we tend to think in absolutes black or white,
gay or straight, male or female.
But what if I were to tell you that the universe is non-binary?
That from cosmological scales to subatomic scales,
that the universe is actually super queer.
So it isn't such a crazy leap to assume that everything inside our universe is
also clear. Does that make you uncomfortable?
Or are you cautiously optimistic that the universe may offer some comfort?
My name is Dr. Jessica Esquivel.
I'm a black Mexican queer neurodivergent woman. I'm also a particle physicist.
And today, leveraging my expertise on the intricacies of the quantum realm.
We are going to create a reimagining of our universe.
We're going to describe the laws of physics at the smaller scales,
where space and time become meaningless and is filled with a roiling,
bubbling foam of chaotic quantum fluctuations that put into question
the very fabric of human reality.
Physicists have been trying to explain the world around them since
the dawn of time. From mathematical calculations that explain how
a ball drops to theoretical simulations to describe spacetime curvature to
the most well known categorization of the elements. The periodic table.
We yearn for structure, for rigidity, and for absolutes.
But with new physics discoveries comes a shedding of what we deemed to be law.
Our rigid boxes must be open for new innovative thinking. Case in point.
The ancient Greeks looked up at the stars
and developed new math to describe what they were seeing. Trigonometry.
Newton's musings over orbiting celestial bodies looking up at those same stars
burst. Calculus. And even now,
we're in the midst of developing quantum field theory,
which describes the complexity of quantum mechanics and
the fundamental interactions that could possibly be the reason and
the reason that we've birthed the cosmos. Everything around us.
Everything from the galaxies filled with stars to
the extraordinary depths of our oceans,
filled with creatures beyond our wildest dreams are made up of
a fundamental set of particles.
These teensy tiny particles live and interact in a world unlike our own.
In our macro world, we tend to think binary categorisations and absolutes are
the norm. But if we tunneled down into the smallest spaces of our universe,
we enter a world where we are ness and chaos reigns supreme
In our mike macro world, the physics that we're used to disintegrates,
and what we’re left with is this counterintuitive,
topsy turvy through the looking glass world where nothing quite
fits your expectations.
Richard Feynman, who's a well-known physicist, he said, I can safely say.
That no one understands quantum mechanics.
And as a particle physicist myself, I 100% agree with that statement.
But I'm going to let you know what we know so far.
I've been sifting through the quantum realm for about a decade now.
And what I've learned is in the quantum space, in quantum, the quantum world,
there is no space, no time, no linearity, no orientation, no up, down, left,
right, past or present. In the quantum realm, there's also no empty space.
Space at that at those scales is filled
and brimming with these quantum fluctuations.
The experiment that I work on today, the muon G minus two experiment,
we dive headfirst into this back of a gurgling enigma.
In search for that new physics.
We use machines with unheard of precision to watch
a particle called muons circle around a 50 foot diameter magnet.
And we wait for the pandemonium of Quantum to rear its head.
What we see are virtual particles,
hints of the real thing that pop in and out of existence
and dislodge that muon off of its path.
And what we hope to see is a virtual particle that we've never seen before.
And we're pretty close.
I see a lot of comparisons between my ADHD symptoms and quantum mechanics.
Depending on what I'm doing, an hour can feel like 10 minutes or 10 hours.
I could be, you know, working on debugging code and all of
a sudden I'm pulling out my treehouse drawings because I just know that
a four by six try beam on that middle tree is just what I need.
And it would be cheaper to do, especially with Lumbar Tuesdays.
But but other times those wisps of thoughts pop in and out of my head,
like those virtual particles that pop in and out of existence.
And they are exactly what I need to solve the difficult problems that I'm working
on. I cannot tell you how many times I would be sitting in traffic,
usually on the way to Fermilab and a phrase or a word or, you know,
even something on the radio just jolts my brain back to that machine learning
algorithm that I'm working on
and almost shows me that this parameter right here needs to be changed
so that everything can work better.
And I'm not the only one that sees similarities between being neurodivergent
and quantum mechanics. There's actually a quantum physicist named Michael Fisher,
who's on an interdisciplinary journey to prove that all of our brains are quantum
brains. And this journey came to be
because of his struggle with mental health and debilitating depression
and his love of scientific inquiry.
It's going to be interesting to see where this path leads,
but I know that my ADHD symptoms look and feel like quantum mechanics,
and that further ties us closer to the queerness of our universe.
Digging deeper. Let's talk about quantum superposition. So.
All particles travel and move as a wave. Let's visualize that.
If we imagine shooting paintballs at a wall with two slits in it and a screen
on the other side. What you're going to get on that screen is a pattern where
the paint splatter accumulates, where those slits are, right.
If you have particles that are acting like a point,
you get that same pattern on the screen.
However, when particles act as a wave,
you get a completely different pattern on that screen.
We call that pattern the interference pattern,
and it is a collection of bright and dark spots.
And those bright and dark spots correlate with the constructive
and deconstructive way that those waves, those particles, waves interfere.
What's this experiment actually was done in 1801 by Thomas Young.
And what was really weird about that was that
the particles went from wave like to point like by
the act of just measuring which slit that particle went through. Weird enough.
But the truly odd thing about quantum superposition is that I'm essentially
saying the laws of physics are essentially saying that a particle can be
an infinite places at one time.
What's even more exciting
is that all matter in the universe is made up of these fundamental particles
that obey the law of quantum superposition.
So you and I, to a certain extent,
can move through the world as a wave at quantum scales. Right.
But where does the quantum realm end? And our classical world began.
Is there even a boundary? Does that boundary even exist?
And if, in fact, we are living in the quantum realm and don't even know it,
then we literally are nonbinary. We're not here. We're not there.
We're everywhere. We're fluid. We're queer.
I'm going to close out by talking about quantum entanglement.
So what quantum entanglement is, is when two particles interact with each other,
they become intertwined or entangled.
And what's cool about this is that by looking at one particle, even at large,
large distances, you can gain information about the other particle.
This is a particle physicist like me. This is our bread and butter.
This is how we do our job. The experiment that I worked on, the microbe.
An experiment. We studied a particle for a particle called a neutrino.
And I love neutrinos. I like geek out about neutrinos.
Neutrinos are really cool because they can go through so much matter unscathed,
and they have no electrical charge.
In fact, there's about a trillion neutrinos going through
the width of your nail bed right now as we speak.
Because neutrinos are so elusive. We had to build a detector.
That was really, really, really dense.
And we also created a neutrino beam that was really,
really intense to try and increase the probability that we'd have
a collision inside of our detector.
But even when that did happen, then you Trino was still invisible to us.
So we leverage the law of quantum entanglement
and we become private investigators.
We collect all of the shrapnel that was left in our detector.
And we know that if we can just pick up every single one of those pieces,
it would point us back to that invisible neutrino
and give us information about our whereabouts. Its whereabouts.
When I learned about quantum entanglement,
I was in grad school and I had been dating my wife for about three years
and we were doing that long distance thing.
And I remember the professor explaining it and I was like, Yeah,
that totally makes sense. It clicked. That's our queer love.
How many of you all have been in love?
I've been with my wife now for, what, 12 years? She says 13. I don't know.
And I feel like I know her at a quantum level. Knowing that type of love.
Knowing that you can be quantum li entangled with another human being.
It's obvious that the universe
and everything that resides in it is queer.
But if that hasn't convinced you, let me tell you this.
In the first fractions of a second.
After the universe popped into existence, there was absolute chaos and carnage.
Matter and anti-matter. We created an equal parts.
And they were sworn enemies.
An epic battle ensued, surpassing even the most famous fight scenes of
the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And in that bloodshed, everything should have been obliterated.
But in inventors, small amounts of matter survived
and that insignificant amount of matter.
Is what everything in the world is comprised of.
And physicists are still trying to figure out why that is.
All matter in the universe is an anomaly to the physics as it is written.
All matter is a peculiar conundrum that we don't quite understand.
Even confounding still.
Even though all mattered in the universe, including atoms, molecules, humans,
plants, planets, galaxies, oceans,
all of that only consist of 5% of
the visible matter that we can see in our universe. 5% .
So the rest of it is dark energy and dark matter,
and that's another confounding topic for another talk.
But all this to say that. It is
an existential fact that we are anomalies in our universe.
And the most existential question at
the heart of my research is not if we are queer, but why we are queer.
And I wonder if we were to let
the chaos of quantum mechanics infiltrate our thinking,
if we were to let go of those rigid processes we have and become one with
the queer universe. I wonder maybe,
possibly scientific discoveries would become easier. Thank you.