Aephraim Steinberg: The Physicist Who Measured Negative Time

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Curt Jaimungal

Physics, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2026

⏱️ 147 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

SPONSORS: - Go to https://expressvpn.com/theoriesofeverythingyt to find out how you can get up to 4 extra months thanks to our sponsor, ExpressVPN - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Professor Aephraim Steinberg, winner of Physics World's Breakthrough of the Year in 2011, is an experimentalist who thinks deeply about foundations. For 30 years he's measured aspects of physics others wouldn't touch: Bohmian trajectories, Heisenberg's disturbance bound (he showed it was wrong), even where the photon is inside the double slit. His lab measured negative time, and it keeps reappearing across different experiments. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Defining Negative Time - 00:06:50 - Quantum Trajectory Theory - 00:12:44 - The Holland Tunnel Analogy - 00:18:40 - Resonant Atomic Interactions - 00:26:05 - Superluminal Energy Propagation - 00:32:00 - Eight Velocities of Light - 00:38:00 - Causality and Retrocausality - 00:44:00 - Dwell Time vs. Delay - 00:50:24 - Time: Operator or Parameter? - 00:58:21 - Bell's Theorem and Realism - 01:04:55 - Heisenberg's Measurement Disturbance - 01:11:26 - Weak Measurement Formalism - 01:17:37 - Time Symmetry and Entropy - 01:27:07 - Bohmian Trajectories Observed - 01:35:56 - Spin-Statistics and Indistinguishability - 01:42:14 - Quantum Computational Advantage - 01:48:15 - Many Worlds vs. Complexity - 01:54:51 - Psi-Ontic vs. Psi-Epistemic - 02:01:37 - Collapsing Tunneling Particles - 02:08:48 - Larmor vs. Atto Clocks - 02:15:24 - Locality and Information LINKS: - Website: https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~aephraim/ - Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PzUyb6IAAAAJ - Photon Negative Time: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03680 - Photon Time as Excitation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00432 - Atoms in Excited State: https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.010314 - Tunneling Atom in Barrier: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.13523 - Single-Photon Tunneling: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.708 - Traversal Time: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.1739 - Gaussian Pulse Propagation: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.1.305 - Pulse in Absorbing Medium: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.48.738 - Eighth Velocity of Light: https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/45/6/538/1045817/Eighth-velocity-of-light - Attosecond Ionization: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1163439 - Tunneling Pulses, Band Gaps: https://attoworld.de/fileadmin/user_upload/tx_attoworld/publications/paper_PhysRevLett_Y1994_M10_D24_V73_P2308.pdf - Evidence of Negative Time: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-of-negative-time-found-in-quantum-physics-experiment/ - Light Speed Reduction: https://www.nature.com/articles/17561 - Theory of Light and Colors: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/107113.pdf - Wave Propagation: https://amazon.com/dp/1483253937?tag=toe08-20 - EPR: https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777 - Uncertainty Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle - QBism: https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5209 More: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We just realized we were wrong.
0:01.5	And that makes no classical sense.
0:06.0	This physicist has been asking questions we're told not to ask.
0:10.0	What is a particle doing between measurements?
0:13.0	Where does it go? How long does it spend there?
0:16.0	I traveled to my alma mater of the University of Toronto to speak to Professor Steinberg, the winner of
0:22.5	the physics world's breakthrough of the year, whose lab investigates photons traveling through
0:27.2	a barrier that apparently causes atoms to spend negative time in an excited state.
0:32.9	And it took us a while to appreciate it wasn't just any old negative number.
0:36.5	My name's Kurtzimungle, and on this channel I interviewed researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth.
0:43.9	Today, we discuss negative time beyond the pop science headlines, because if you just go by them, you'll be misled.
0:50.9	Many other YouTubers or magazines will tell you that his results are about faster than light
0:54.9	travel, but today we go into the recondite details exploring the truth behind these negative
1:00.4	time results. We also talk about what weak measurements are and how they recover
1:05.0	boeumian trajectories in the double-slid experiment, and why Heisenberg's original disturbance
1:09.7	argument about his uncertainty principle
1:11.9	was experimentally incorrect. Again, we're all taught that Heisenberg's uncertainty comes from
1:16.8	literally disturbing the atoms with other measuring devices, but that's false. We close with
1:22.8	consciousness, quantum computing, and whether Bell's inequalities mean what we think they mean.
1:30.2	Sir, your lab measured negative time. What does that mean?
1:35.3	You're really going to jump right in. That means many different things in different contexts.
1:40.8	And we got interested in it because there's an old context in which negative times
	...

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