ASM113 Virtual Particles, Movie Fear, and Sneezing at the Sun

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virtual particles movie fear and sneezing at the sun all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Applause]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host science mike uh that's my internet name my real name is mike mccarth i'm an author podcaster speaker of this little program uh this week i'm co-hosted by my dogs who are very likely to snore but hopefully that won't be too bad and we'll get a show done so let's get it started [Music] so there's big news in my life last fall when my first book came out it's called finding god in the waves and it explores a story i've told on approximately a billion podcasts about what it was like to grow up in the baptist faith become an atheist as an adult and then return to faith in a different way following a mystical experience and how i learned to understand god primarily through a scientific lens it's been a really really good time in my life since that book came out and seeing how people have responded to it and i'm sure many of you have a copy of finding god in the waves but this october october 3rd i believe the paperback is coming out of that book and i'll have more to talk about that as we get closer but if you don't have finding god in the waves yet um and you're interested in the paperback i did see it's on amazon for like eight dollars and sixty cents something like that really really low i don't know how long that price will stay there so if you want like to get finding on the waves the most affordable way uh that has ever been just to go to amazon and pre-order the book but you won't get it until october of course the hardback is available right now for a few more dollars other things uh will be talked about as we get closer to the book there's some really cool uh things my publisher publisher's working on that i don't think i can talk about yet but uh more more there finding god in the waves paperback coming in october let's talk about events tomorrow this this episode comes out may 15th and may 16th i'll be at buckhead church in atlanta georgia and that is a singles event so if you are single i think we'd love to see you there and then it'll be quiet for a little while september 15th i'll be at the liturgist gathering in los angeles october 6th the liturgist gathering in boston october 27th the liturgist gathering in seattle if you'd like to learn more about the liturgist gathering or grab your tickets go to theliturgistgathering.com in the middle of october i'll be doing a little uh a science mic tour in the united kingdom and the republic of ireland and october 21st i'll be at the rubicon conference in dublin ireland which oh my gosh i'm so excited uh really really cool people organizing that event and uh i haven't been before but i hear it is absolutely phenomenal conference november 15th i'll be at the ripple effect conference in lawrence massachusetts so that's the events on the calendar right now for the rest of the year i've got some private events that we don't put on the website so sorry about that um and if you're interested in bringing me to your conference or church uh or community or college or or whatever you can go to my website and asksciencemike.com click on the menu and then there's a little button that says speaking that'll let you invite me to your place i'd love to see you i will be keeping the summer clear because we're moving so yeah we're moving to la this summer so i don't want to stack a lot of events uh in the middle of all that but if you'd like maybe in the fall or the winter we do have a few spots available just a few spots left in 2017 and actually 2018 is uh already starting to book as well so if you would like a little science mic event don't hesitate i'd love to see you [Music] hey science mike i've read about virtual particles in a few different books but i realized that trying to explain it to my wife was very difficult so can you explain virtual particles in a way that's easy to understand for someone who hasn't read about them thank you i don't know if i can or not but i will give it my best shot here's how i think about virtual particles uh first you have to place them in the context of the theory they originate from so let's kind of picture the russian dolls of reality for a moment right everything is made of something if we think about a clock what is a clock made of well they're made of gears springs and screws and metal housing there's all these pieces of a clock well like what is a gear made of what is a spring made of well it's made of metal right we can go to uh factory and and watch metal be smelted and formed into the parts of the clock okay well what is metal made of molecules little bits of uh atomic structure which of course answers the next question what are molecules made of atoms which for a long time were believed to be the most fundamental piece of reality that you couldn't divide any further of course we know how to split the atom and we know that atoms are actually made out of protons neutrons and electrons right protons and neutrons can actually be divided into smaller little particles but uh let's ignore that for a second and just ask like what are electrons made of can you divide electrons into smaller little particles well no to our knowledge you can't so what are electrons made of uh we have gone all the way down the rabbit hole we don't think that electrons can be divided so what are they made of fields there's this idea in physics that's pretty well supported called quantum field theory and that says that everything there is matter and energy are uh emerge from these fields that pervade the entire universe now what kind of fields are they that depends on which model you're talking about and there are several actually more than several probably more than a dozen competing models that have different strengths at explaining different things we see and observe in reality but a really famous field is the higgs field okay the higgs field is everywhere and when particles interact with the higgs field they get mass in gravity they get weight but mass is independent of gravity uh every field has like a native particle a particle it really likes to create and the higgs field its favored particle its native particle is the higgs boson which was very famous for being called the god particle so electrons aren't made of the higgs field although the higgs field gives them mass they're made of a different field so electrons are made of the electron field and quantum field theory now if you're paying attention to physics you'll notice that different schools of physics would give you different explanations for what an electron is made up of but to talk about virtual particles we're just going to stick with a quantum field theory okay so you have these fields you can think of them like an ocean for a second even though an ocean has a two-dimensional surface uh you know the surface of an ocean it has waves right and you can imagine that particles are the peak of a wave that's how you have a particle you have an excitement of a field you have energy added to a field and that's what particles are real particles not virtual particles are these persistent excited points in a given field but here's the thing fields wobble they can't be still at least not without a tremendous amount of energy so when you look at a vacuum an empty portion of space then there's some wobble in those fields and sometimes there's enough of a random fluctuation to create a particle out of nothing what yeah a particle is created out of just the excitement of a field now you might say but wait about what about the conservation of energy matter can't just be created well that's true but it's not true on very small very short time intervals in quantum theory so as long as virtual particles appear and then disappear within a small enough window of time you haven't violated any physics now this is all mathematically plausible right math what's true in math is what's axiomatically consistent and so first virtual particles were predicted by mathematical models and the idea here is they appear in pairs the way they annihilate is if a if an electron appears as a virtual particle uh very nearby a positron does as well and then they're attracted to each other they collide they annihilate again physics is totally fine with that so they're mathematically plausible they're mathematically predicted but physics has a different standard for does something exist than axiomatic or mathematical plausibility physics wants observation so have virtual particles been observed yeah absolutely one example in 1948 hendrick casimir found that two metal plates placed very close together in a vacuum complete vacuum are actually pushed toward each other by the effect of virtual particles because they're so close together it affects the wavelength of the field energy and it means that you have higher wavelength virtual particles on the outside of the metal plates than within them which creates a pressure it begins to push the plates together now it's not very much it's a very small effect it's a about the mass energy of like a red blood cell so it's not a lot but it is a measurable effect and so that's what virtual particles are they are the oscillation of fields in space and in quantum field theory everything is made of fields isn't that wild isn't that wild now you might have different predictions in uh string theory but string theory right now is not nearly so well supported by observation as quantum field theory and this is a big thing in how science especially physics works we begin with some observations and then we create a mathematical model that explains those observations and makes new predictions so what virtual particles and quantum field theory have going for them is a predictions they predicted virtual particles before the effects of virtual particles were observed now notice i said the effects of virtual particles were observed because you can't directly observe virtual particles because they don't exist long enough you can only see if they create an effect on reality so i don't know how accessible an explanation that was if you don't want to do like a ton of reading i have uh four links on the website asksciencemike.com on this episode 113 uh that can help you understand that a little bit better totally fun to think about though so great question thank you [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike i've got a question about fear over the past few years i have found that one thing that gives me life the most is watching analyzing critiquing and discussing movies while i'm an any genre kind of guy i particularly love horror movies i'm usually not scared during horror movies because i have my critical glasses on but sometimes the concepts behind the film can freak me out for days or weeks at a time even if i logically know said concepts are impossible for example a malicious being who can only exist in the dark i know this is commonly experienced for people watching horror movies so my question is this why do people stay fearful of things we see in movies even if they haven't been a part of our lived experience and if we logically know they cannot be real what is going on in our brains here it's killing me to know okay this one's uh i think pretty straightforward logic is a really recent addition to the human experience really really really recent we're based on really old technology right every human represents an unbroken line back to the origin of life on this planet think about that you are an iteration of the earliest life on this planet an unbroken line of successful experiments led to you so that process has produced some incredible innovations i mean think about how cool skin is you have a barrier that keeps invading organisms away from the operational systems inside your body brains are amazing brains turned out to be an incredible accident of evolution and were highly favored once they emerged the human brain of course is quite remarkable and it mainly seems to have become so elaborate because of how highly social our species is you needed to imagine what other humans might think about you in order to survive so language came later language came later our brains were anatomically modern before we incorporated language in our communication and in our thinking and of course logic came much much much much later than language so the ancient systems of your brain tasked with keeping you alive well they they've never heard of logic and if they if they have they don't trust it what what survival advantage does logic give you when facing a large predator or an adversarial human logic is no help at all in that situation your limbic system is much much much much better suited to keeping you alive and that's what evolution wants to do evolution wants to keep you alive and help you pass on your genes and help members of your family and your social group pass on their genes and so one of the earliest best uses of language was describing dangers one human experienced to another human who had not had the same experience imagine the survival advantage of describing a snake a kind of snake you were the only one who had seen can you imagine or someone had been bit by a snake and who was falling ill because of it well they could describe the snake they saw that bit them and others could avoid that snake we use language to describe things that could hurt our survival chances we use language to describe places where we could successfully find food water and shelter so of course horror movies are effective they describe dangers that speak to our primitive brains our limbic systems the things our limbic systems are afraid of are at the heart of horror movies your mammal brain and your lizard brain are afraid of the dark because your senses are better adapted to function in daylight when the sun goes down homo sapiens are more vulnerable so the idea of something catching you unaware in the night is something your dna really wants you to be aware of now stories are particularly powerful in shaping our thoughts and what what are what are movies but extremely well told stories when we engage with a story we actually experience the point of view of the protagonist of that story what they see we see what they feel we feel as a social species when you see someone react and terror to something on screen while your logical mind while your analytical mind may be aware this is a story maybe even be slightly bemused the social functions of your brain are echoing the emotions displayed in body language and tone of voice on the screen and when you encapsulate that all into a narrative framework part of your brain follows the entire journey as if it was real and so that's sticky because the more ancient part of your brains think you've just learned about a warning of something that could get you in your life because your lizard brain and large portions of your mammalian brain have no awareness of cinema no awareness of abstraction merely danger and reward hey signs mike i'm katie from dallas texas my question is inspired by a question i just heard on an older ask science mic live episode from kansas city where someone asked about what believing in jesus does to your brain as opposed to believing in other religions you mentioned in your answer that if you scanned the brain of like a westerner when they're praying their prayer is more in their language part of their brain and if you scanned someone who's more eastern who's maybe like a buddhist monk that their visual cortex would light up this got me thinking what does the brain scan of the visual cortex of a blind person look like is it just completely dark or do blind people have maybe dreams in which they see do they experience thoughts in which their visual cortex is able to analyze whatever they're thinking about if a person is born blind and they don't know what site is i would imagine what they would imagine that they're seeing would not be accurate but i'm just curious do they see anything at all in their brain i have the same question for maybe like a helen keller type person who's blind and deaf and has no concept of language what did helen keller's brain look like before she felt the word water finger spelled into her hands was there anything there was it just a lot of frustration and anger towards not being able to communicate or was there even frustration and anger be without words and visions to express that i'm very curious i'm excited to hear your answer thanks science mike katie i really like your question i like your line of reasoning i love the way that you're searching with things you've learned and experienced to imagine what result you may expect and i like that instead of just following your instincts and assuming they're correct that you're trying to validate your hypothesis with research with observations from scientists you're an excellent thinker katie thank you so much for your question now in terms of the content of the question some of it is actually quite challenging um we'll talk about brain activity and blind people in a moment but the the larger question of you know what is it like in the inner landscape in the thought landscape of someone who is blind or blind and deaf and doesn't experience language that is incredibly difficult to speak to because we can't measure people's subjective experiences we can measure activity in the brain but the way that manifests into subjective experience we don't know and again our imaging of brain activity is very primitive very low resolution we we image neurons by the millions at a time a single voxel on a brain scan can include at the very least hundreds of thousands but more typically millions of neurons so it's hard to turn into an understanding of what someone is experiencing so we only know of of another's experiences and thoughts what they can tell us and describe to us and language has some pretty hard limits there are there's a term called qualia and this is an idea in philosophy but these are are things we've experienced but cannot describe i can give you a very easy example the color green if i say green you know exactly what i'm talking about because you've seen green but how would you describe a green to a person who has never seen the color green what would you say to evoke green in their mind if you have an answer please tell me because i've never heard a scientist or philosopher or anyone describe how they could vocally evoke a green experience in the mind of another person and this is what we're talking about here for a person who has an inner landscape but has never seen and a person who has seen there is a lack of common experience to frame qualia so there may be experiences that cannot be communicated between those two people using a shared language so we accidentally jumped into some philosophy there i think it was necessary to answer the question more on that in a moment now let's go back to the brain that easier thing to discuss you know neuroscience how delightful in terms of brain activity when a person became blind has a significant effect on what we see whether it's early blindness or late blindness but the brain is really resourceful and has high plasticity so our brain has the ability to repurpose parts of itself based on need based on damage based on changes in stimulus so the visual cortex has a lot of neurons it's a very elaborate part of the neocortex and why would the brain waste those just because you're not getting signals from the eyes anymore or ever so what we've seen in studies is that the visual cortex will actually begin to process sound and tactile meaning touch sensory data to give the brain additional processing resources related to those senses what that means is that there is a scientific basis to say that blind people may actually hear and feel with more and i mean feel with touch not emotionally but they hear and feel with more acuity than sighted persons that's that's supported by this research now studies have shown activity for example in the visual cortex when blind people read braille or when they hear sounds activity that we don't see in sighted people when their use is controls in an experiment now i mentioned that when someone became blind that has an effect on how the visual cortex processes these sensations and people with early blindness it tends to be uniform across both hemispheres of the brain and people who have late blindness who spent a large portion of their life with sight there tends to be an asymmetry particularly the right hemispheres visual cortex tends to show more activity with tactile and sound stimulus but absolutely the visual cortex begins to process other things but it's not the same as an imagined site at all and i don't i don't know how to explain that now i would like to read this in terms of those lived experiences something i found fascinating from a peace and mental floss which is a website i love called is it possible to think without language i'm going to read you one paragraph there is also evidence that deaf people cut off from language spoken or signed think in sophisticated ways before they have been exposed to language when they later learn language they can describe the experience of having had thoughts like those of the 15 year old boy who wrote in 1836 after being educated at a school for the deaf that he remembered thinking in his pre-language days that perhaps the moon would strike me and i thought that perhaps my parents were strong and would fight the moon and it would fail and i mocked the moon also the spontaneous sign language developed by deaf students without language models in places like nicaragua display the kind of thinking that goes far beyond mere sensory impression or practical problem solving now those were deaf people without language i was not able to find much research for deaf blind brain scans and none that elucidated on what a thought process might be like in that landscape but the the truth is language doesn't affect the sophistication of our thoughts necessarily but it does affect what we can use thoughts for language allows us to use abstractions to contemplate ideas to pin thoughts in place to do more structural work in our cognition than we could do otherwise ultimately it's a mystery what uh it was like for someone like helen keller before learning language and it's it's not something we can possibly communicate uh and if someone like helen keller understood the question and tried to answer it the answer may not evoke in your mind their experience because of this thing qualia some parts of the human experience are beyond explanation using language [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike ever since i can remember i've always sneezed if i look directly at the sun or a light a lot of times i don't even need to directly look at the sun just being out on a bright day can cause me to sneeze uncontrollably sometimes if i feel a sneeze on the brink but it's not happening i'll intentionally look at a light bulb or into the sky and utilize this power to force a sneeze to come out though i understand it's probably not a good idea to stare at the sun or bright lights i know i'm not the only person with this affliction and arguably that third of the population suffers from it why does this happen what could possibly be going on in my body to cause me to sneeze because of bright light i have terrible news for you we don't know exactly why this happens i did a lot of research and yeah this is at least named it's called uh photic sneeze reflex so basically light sneeze reflex and in formal studies there have been no rigorous studies done but informal surveys say that 10 to 35 percent of people experience psr and again the reason we don't have a lot of studies on it is because it's not really a life impairing condition so it's pretty hard to get a research grant for something like that there's a theory on where it comes from and you have a nerve a cranial nerve called the trigeminal nerve and uh it triggers a sneeze when your nose is irritated it also helps deliver sensory sensation information from your face to some motor control as well but it's it's like very very responsible for sneezes it detects that uh irritation in the nose and what's interesting about this nerve is that it runs close to the optic nerve which delivers what the sensory information from your eyes so the idea the theory is that when you see a bright light and people who experience psr and one of my daughters does there's so much information traveling on the optic nerve that maybe some kind of leaks over or cross-talks onto the trigeminal nerve and that triggers a sneeze now what's interesting is it's not technically the brightness of the light that triggers this but the rapid change from dim light to bright light it's changes in brightness that triggers the sensation and it's it's not attached to any particular wavelength green light blue light red light whatever light you choose if it's bright enough can trigger the effect so if you if it bothers you and you want to mitigate it you want to control the rapid changes in light level so the easiest way to do that is a great pair of sunglasses and we have seen that sunglasses can actually minimize the effect and it can be dangerous one common trigger is people coming out of a tunnel and a car into sunlight then they sneeze and you go blind for a moment when you sneeze which is dangerous traveling at high speed in a metal object that has more force than the bullet coming out of a gun so uh that can be dangerous and a good pair of sunglasses can help you avoid an involuntary sneeze triggered by light [Music] what a fun episode that was that's a it's like two episodes in a row of just wall-to-wall science questions what do you think did you enjoy that are you liking the more science questions because ask science mike is not my show it's yours we talk about what you want to talk about 100 of the questions on this program come from the audience and i don't pick the questions for the show uh the patrons on patreon do that so whatever you want the show to be if if you know for a while we were in a real dear abbey zone a lot of advice questions now we seem to be getting really back into science questions sometimes we tend to go on these kind of theolo theological binges so whatever you want to talk about on this program you can make it happen by going to asksciencemike.com and submitting a question you can send me a voicemail on my website or an email voice questions have a much better chance of getting on the program but we'll take any question you've got and if you'd like to help pick the questions for the program just join me on patreon so there's a patreon button on asksciencemike.com you can click that to learn more five dollars a month gets you in the club and you vote on questions every week and thank you by the way to all you patrons who do that not only contribute financially but also like work and pick the questions for the program i do appreciate that i want to thank greg norgame for producing nasa science fight i want to thank andrew golucky for his work with pre-production and screening questions i want to thank jeff bonafer for writing the ass science mic theme song which is like one of my favorite songs ever i love it when i meet you all and you sing it to me that is hilarious and thanks for listening i can't wait to talk to you next week [Applause] [Music]