Joe Rogan Gets Mind-Blown by NASA Scientist Explaining Quantum Entanglement & time travel

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]So, you know, when it comes to things like interstellar travel, I I I don't think we're ever going to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed of light, I I I mean, I we might get very close. There are particles in space that do have mass, like nutrinos, tiny little bits of mass. They travel very close to the speed of light, but they don't travel at the speed of light. But to me, you know, I I think that the the the idea of traveling interstellar distances or even intergalactic distances, you know, the thing that starts to really get me is the question of this this what is space and what is time at all? Quantum entanglement.

[00:00:34]>> Right. Glad you brought that up.

[00:00:36]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:00:38]Uh I I I I'm going to say I I hope your listeners I I I I don't want to get I don't want to I I want people to come along with us.

[00:00:45]>> Oh, they're coming along.

[00:00:46]>> Yeah. I I don't want to say things that sound so stupid. They're like, you know, why are they saying this? So please stop me if we need some more background.

[00:00:52]>> This does not sound stupid in any way, shape or form, >> but the idea of quantum entanglement, we should explain that to people.

[00:00:58]>> Yeah.

[00:00:59]>> And what it essentially means is that things are entangled, they're connected at regardless of the distance. Yes.

[00:01:06]>> And it could be an immeasurable amount of distance. Like literally >> any distance >> like >> Yeah. Literally the beginning of the universe distance like 13.8 billion life years away distance.

[00:01:19]you're entangled with that.

[00:01:20]>> It's amazing because once again, let's go back to the idea that this this is a real experimental fact, right? I mean, a lot of times this this crazy stuff that, you know, scientists will will say this stuff and and people hear it, you know, for the first time and they say, "Well, that that sounds like idiotic. That sounds stupid. Why where did they get that from?" And the the idea that time changes is now it's one of the most commonly proven facts every day. Like I said, we needed to calibrate the GPS satellites. It's easy to measure.

[00:01:52]Quantum entanglement was something that that even Albert Einstein 100 years ago, um, he understood that quantum mechanics was pointing that way, but he really didn't like it. He called it, he called it spooky action at a distance. He hated it because he realized that quantum mechanics had this implication that that if things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take them any distance away from each other and they would somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with with no time difference.

[00:02:20]And you know, he didn't think that would ever actually happen. And then back in the in the in the mid 1990s, we started to do experiments with atoms and we found out that it was real. That uh uh it it can start off pretty simply. you you have two atoms that are in an orbit around you know so an atom has a nucleus of protons and electrons in the middle sorry an atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons the electrons are flying around in orbits around the uh the atom um two electrons can be in the same orbit only if they are spinning in different directions they they have an an angular momentum it's called spin and the only way these two electrons can fit in that orbit together is if they're spinning one is spinning in an upward direction one say spinning in in a downward hate the broken finger.

[00:03:05]Um, so if if you take these electrons out of the atom and you can do that, you know that they're in different spins because they had to be to be in that that orbit together. So now you separate them. You can separate them by any distance you want. You can separate them by centimeters in a laboratory. The Chinese have done this up to the space station that they run in back. You you could conceivably do it to another galaxy. If you take those electrons and you separate them, you know that they were spinning in opposite directions. So if you take an electric field and you change the spin of one, the other one immediately changes in response >> regardless of the distance.

[00:03:39]>> Regardless of the distance and we know this to be true. We've done this. And the amazing thing is the universe is saying these two things are the same quantum mechanical system. They're basically the same object. They're connected to each other. They're entangled together. And it doesn't matter. Space and time don't matter. You can you separate them in space any distance you want. How does that work?

[00:04:05]The universe says the space and time between them. Doesn't matter. They're the same system.

[00:04:11]To me, that's the real intriguing thing about, you know, could a civilization learn how to harness that. You know, you're not really even having to worry about traveling from one part to another. Have did you watch the um uh the threebody problem show? Yeah. So, so you have these things called sons, right? and sofans are entangled to this alien civilization and they can respond instantaneously because they're entangled. Yes. I mean I mean that's fantastic science and as far as I can tell that that could be theoretically possible. Yeah.

[00:04:42]>> Well, that's what's bonkers is that we are made out of all this stuff that's entangled.

[00:04:48]>> What's it entangled to? Is it entangled to stuff inside a black hole right now?

[00:04:51]Is it entangled to stuff that is on the other side of the universe from us? If the big bang had all of this stuff in a small volume at once, are we entangled to everything in some way?

[00:05:04]>> Seriously.

[00:05:05]>> Seriously.

[00:05:05]>> I mean I mean are is a part of me quantum mechanically right now in the Andromeda galaxy? Yeah, actually that would be the implication.

[00:05:14]I mean talk about I don't think we understand yet what reality is. I really don't. What does it mean? Are we all somehow the same particle entangled to each other? You know, are we connected to everything all at once?

[00:05:32]I mean, that could be where physics is taking us now.

[00:05:36]>> That's bananas. It's very difficult to think about when you you think you're a person in Austin. My feet are on the ground. Yeah.

[00:05:44]>> Here I am touching this desk. I'm going to get in my car later and go get something to eat.

[00:05:48]>> No kidding. You got to feed the cat, right?

[00:05:50]>> Yeah. But that's not really what's going on.

[00:05:52]It's way more complex, way bigger. And you were speculating that that could be how some advanced, super advanced intelligent life form travels.

[00:06:04]>> It's always been more compelling to me than the idea of taking a spaceship and traveling somewhere.

[00:06:09]>> That seems super crude.

[00:06:10]>> Yeah.

[00:06:11]>> That seems like the idea of making a horse fly.

[00:06:14]>> Yeah. Yeah. I I you know we we we talked about that movie Interstellar because there were a lot of good teaching moments in that movie for for a physicist. You know the idea that time really does slow down close to a black hole. And again we we observe this when we observe things orbiting close to a black hole. You can tell that that happens and the idea that this advanced civilization that we never actually see in the movie somehow communicates through basically space and time itself through gravity. Um, you know, that's how Matthew McConna is able to even like go back, you know, in time and space to help his daughter solve, you know, gravity and all that. You know, I was like, I was like, I wonder I wonder if that's really more what it be like, you know, advanced civilizations. I mean, you got to think, right? I mean, you look around the Earth and there are, you know, things like grasshoppers and hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings, but I mean, you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask them to, you know, crochet a blanket or whatever. they don't have the capacity and you you've got to think that there's the similar jump where I mean we don't even know the right questions to ask that sort of a civilization >> you know I mean can they see the universe as a whole thing do they know that they're connected to everything and can they somehow use that to travel you know maybe >> maybe and if you just extrapolate if you just think about where we've gone from primitive man to what we're currently experiencing and you take that thousands of years, millions of years, whatever it is.

[00:07:41]>> Yeah.

[00:07:41]>> You you keep going and as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster, you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation for millions of years. And you would imagine that it would go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things. Yeah. Yeah. And its ability to not just not even things that we can imagine like we have a crude understanding amazing understanding of the universe but crude in comparison to what's potentially out there. What we could pot we could potentially be observing in a physical way every planet on every star one day.

[00:08:32]But we're not, we can't even think of that as being a possibility now. But but what we're doing right now is insane to people that lived in the 1400s.

[00:08:41]>> Yeah.

[00:08:42]>> If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they'd be like, "What the [ __ ] are you guys doing?"

[00:08:48]Like, "What is this?" If you showed them a nuclear detonate, if you showed them a FaceTime on a phone, they'd be like, "This is insanity."

[00:08:55]>> I just got on a little metal tube and came here from Milwaukee and I'll fly back tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:09:00]And we're just accustomed to it. It it it becomes normal. And it would become normal as technology increased further and further and further. And this idea that the entire universe would be accessible is just bananas.