This is an I-Hart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Imagine you're taking a test.

You sit down, pencils sharpened and your nice notepad ready to bend your mind to the task.

Your goal for each question is, of course, to find the answer,

because every question has an answer,

one that just needs to be revealed or discovered.

And whether you get question 17, right,

shouldn't depend on your answer to question 38, or whether the test

writers included question 10 or cut it. Because that's just how tests work. They have fixed,

predetermined answers. And that's how most of us think that the universe works. Something happens,

and it's our goal to figure out

what happened and why. Doesn't matter what order you ask the questions or what other questions

you asked. The answers are already set. Stuff happened. But the universe is quantum mechanical.

It works differently. The answer to a question, the result of a physics measurement, does actually depend on which other measurements you've made. But this is not because of the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle or quantum fuzziness or because measurements disturb the system. It's because fundamentally

quantum systems don't have a ground truth, a bedrock reality. Even if you avoid the Heisenberg

uncertainty principle, quantum measurements are contextual. They depend on the context, the other measurements you've made,

in a way that our classical brains really struggle to intuit. The answer to quantum question 17

does depend on your answer to question 38. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily

contextual universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, and today we are in for a really incredible explanation from

Daniel.

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