Why Quantum and Relativity Still Don’t Agree

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]All right, here we go. You got another one. Bring it on. Here we go. This is Raphael who says Greetings Dr. Tyson's and Lou and of course the cosmological constant Lord Nice. Raphael Viga Vigod in Toronto, Canada. Okay. I have a phonetic spelling of his name. I I still think I got it wrong. Um The behavior of light seems to be intrinsic to both relativity and quantum mechanics. Yet the two systems cannot be reconciled at least not so far. Is there a single explanation for this and is the imposition of observation or measurement an obstacle that just can't be overcome?

[00:00:43]Ooh.

[00:00:44]I like that.

[00:00:45]>> Wow, Chuck.

[00:00:46]Okay.

[00:00:47]The The answer is the key to the answer, shall we say, Raphael. And again, an excellent question is we have not yet reconciled the situation. You see, general relativity's mathematical equations operate well down to a particular limit.

[00:01:04]But at that limit, it stops working in terms of how it explains how the universe works. Could you just give us a little overview there cuz like you say that, but what you're saying requires a lot of understanding. Sure. Real Real basic, okay? Einstein's general theory of relativity it in very general terms talks about space and time and how that interacts with us.

[00:01:30]Quantum mechanics, this quantum realm stuff, it deals mostly with like matter and energy on the tiniest scales and how we interact with that. Okay? When they come together, space and time, matter and energy, they seem to have a problem getting through from one to the other. In other words, the math of quantum physics doesn't work really well when we're talking about space and time. And the mathematics of general relativity don't seem to work very well when we're trying to talk about little sub subatomic particles.

[00:02:02]>> some kind of shotgun wedding waiting to happen with somebody has a new way to bring them together.

[00:02:07]>> Once you can combine them, right? Then we're in good shape. Now, people are working on this.

[00:02:13]Light does seem to be a place where you both somehow, for example, have a maximum speed of light, right? Speed of light is the maximum speed at which any object can move through space and time.

[00:02:26]Meanwhile, matter and energy, right?

[00:02:29]Light is both a particle and a wave and it's energy which can be converted into matter, things like that. So So light does seem to be some sort of linchpin in this sort of shotgun wedding that you was talking about.

[00:02:40]But it might not be shotgun. Um I'll venture this. Neil, you and I both know a very, very, very good guy named Jacob Barandes. Jacob is a preceptor at Harvard University. And he has recently >> When I was in graduate school, he was in high school and he programmed my website at the time.

[00:03:03]That's the same Jacob Barandes.

[00:03:05]>> It's that same Jacob Barandes, yes.

[00:03:06]>> Wow.

[00:03:07]>> Uh Uh but yes, that Jacob, who is now a preceptor at Harvard, he has written and published uh some articles just recently. He's one example of one of the many scientists that's trying to tie these systems together. And what he's basically saying is that there is actually a mathematical way to bridge general relativity, the macroscopic world, with quantum mechanics in the microscopic world. And it has to do with the math of statistical physics and chaos theory and the ability to take things which are uncertain and make them more certain. Not always certain, but more certain. And that pulled out from the microscopic to the macroscopic unites the two areas of physics.

[00:03:54]But we're not quite there yet. This just one hypothesis that appears to work sort of. And then there's going to be a lot more work and a lot more people have to keep working on it. So, in that case, if Jacob and his colleagues are right, then the wave-particle duality is only temporary. This this incompatibility is only there because we're not advanced enough yet in our mathematical construction of physics to unite them.

[00:04:19]Interesting. If it were a Venn diagram and you've got quantum in one circle and general relativity in another, is there a crossover at all or are they two separate?

[00:04:29]At the moment, they just touch. They do not have any crossover area if we're talking about Venn diagrams. For For anyone who don't don't know what a Venn diagram is, it's a box and then you get little circles that come overlapping things to sort of show uh what we're talking uses a box in a Venn diagram?

[00:04:45]What kind of who Wait, who taught you >> set on the outside. Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:04:50]Otherwise, you use little circles. But sometimes you can use different shapes.

[00:04:54]>> No, no, but if you have you have GR and quantum just kissing in the middle, the way physics has worked historically is somebody's going to come up with and maybe that is this Jacob Bekenstein's solution with another circle that encloses both of them within. Yes. Uh-huh. That's right.

[00:05:12]>> And so it's not like you shift somewhere else and discard anything that has already been demonstrated to work.

[00:05:17]That's exactly what Einstein did with Newtonian physics. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:05:23]So, we'll see how that goes.

[00:05:57]>> Mhm.