This is an I-Heart podcast.

The big picture task, the ultimate quest of physics, is to make sense of the universe,

to sort through our amazing and bonkers experience and find as compact

and simple an explanation as possible for why what happens happens.

We've made a lot of progress, but we've also struggled together.

Do quantum particles really collapse together across space time?

Why is gravity so difficult to unify with

quantum theory? Why does time flow forward? Sometimes I wonder if the reason we feel stuck

is that we started from the wrong place. What if there's a simple, basic assumption that we're

making that has led us down the wrong path.

It's happened to us before, like when we assumed that time flows the same way across

the universe, or that we were at the center of the solar system, or that light needed a

medium to propagate.

When we removed the mistaken assumption, the veil was pulled from our eyes and a simpler, clearer,

clearer, if weirder, explanation emerged. Could that be the cause of our current head scratching?

Is there some requirement we've imposed on physics that's keeping us from seeing the simple

explanation staring us in the face? Today on the podcast will we'll knock on the doors the most basic, intuitive,

foundational concepts in physics and ask, do we really need them? We'll question locality. Do

things have to be in the same place in order to interact? And its cousin, causality, do causes

have to come before effects? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary counterintuitive universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space. And after today's conversation,

I feel really lucky that locality and causality just make a lot more sense in biology.

...