captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivan: on this edition for sunday, september 15: a look ahead to the upcoming election in israel. politics with jeff greenfield. and in our signature segment author and physicist sean carroll on the existence of parallel lives. next on "pbs newshour weekend." >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: sbernard and irenartz. sue and edgar wachenheim iii.yl the chnd philip milstein family. the j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter, in memory of george o'neil.

barbara hope zuckerberg. decorporate funding is pro by mutual of america, designinu omized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additi.al support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public brocasting, a private corporation funded by the american people. and by contributns to your pbs station from viewers like v you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at rklincoln center in new yo hari sreenivasan. u sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joini iran is denying u.s. allegations that it wainvolved in drone attacks saudi arabia's two oil facilities yesterday morning. houthi rebels in yemen claimed responsibility for the attack and released drone footage.ut a leader said they were able to "exploit vulnerabilities" of saudi arabia's defense systems but the u.s. is putting the blame on iran, which backs the houthi rebels. secretary of state mike pompeo

tweeted yesterday, "iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply. there is no evidence the attacks isme from yemen." iran's foreign mr javad zarif responded that pompeo wa"o turninax deceit" and said the trump administration's" maximum pressure" sanctions campaign has "failed." to reduce oil prod by 50%.rabia today saudi officials said they hiy be able to restore one of the lost capacity by tomorrow. the united auto workers says itw negotiatioh general motors have broken down and that its nearly 50,000 members who work at g.m. plants in the u.s. will go on strike tonight.u. w. officials said the union and g.m. were far apart onsu several , including wages, healthcare, and job security. >> we do not take this lightly. ais is our last resort. >> sreenivasan: tatement, g.m. said it had negotiated in good faith and offeredmproved wages and additional u.s. jobs.

the u.a.w.'s four year contract with the automaker ended yesterday and baring an emergency breakthroughthis would be the first nationwide n strike at g.m. in 12 years. on friday, the u..a.w announced that contracts with ford and fiat chrysler would be temporarily extended while the union focuses on g.m. new york governor andrew cuomo announced executive action today to ban flavored cigarettes. calling vaping a public health emergency, cuomo said all flavors other than tobacco or menthol will be halted in new york as soon as early october. >> 68% of the use are flavored products. and the flavored products are highly attractive to young people. >> sreenivasan: the move follows statements by president trump last week that the food and drug administration is studying a similar ban at the federal level. the proposed ban comes in the wake of six deaths and nearly 400 hospitalizations nationwide possibly linked to vaping- related ng illnesses. afghan officials said that

government secity forces backed by u.s. airstrikes killed two senior taliban leaders and at least 85 taliban ghters last night. a taliban spokesman rejectgu the and claimed only seven fighters were killed and 11 wounded. the taliban also claimed that one of the leaders was still alive and not killed by afghan government forces. fighting between afghan forces ed offpresident trs increased u.s.-taliban peace talks last week. tsin the 15th week of prot clashes between pro-democracy supporters and police calated as protesters marched in deance of a police ban in anwntown hong kong today. a crowd of protesters-- some waving u.s. flags d others waving hong kong flags-- marched through a shopping district where many major businesses closed their doors. hundreds of demonstrators stood outside the british consulate and called on the united kingdom to help hong kong. outside a government office complex, some protesters threw molotov cocktails over a barricade and police responded with tear gas and sprayed water

laced with a blue chemical. at a train station nearby, firefighters put out small a fires, aanher station, asme protesters defaced signs and security cam >> sreivasan: twdays before nationwide elections, israeli prime minister benjamin potanyahu is rallying his base of far-right supers.ta nenyahu conven a cabinet meeting in the occupied west bank today, an area that he says he would annex if re-ected. s plan includes building a new settlement in an area which would be the center of any future palestinian state.ni officials in the organization of islamic cooperation condemned netanyahu's plan at an emergency meeting in saudi arabia. the saudi foreign minister called it a "dangerous escalation that endangs all of the efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace." with more on the ld up to tuesday's election in israel, newshour special correspondent ryan chilcote ins us now via

skype from tel aviv. ryan, we're two days away, what are the big issues driving this eion and why are you sitting where you are sitng? >> well, i am sitting in a tiki bar, yes, i know, just outside of a building where the leader of the blue and ite party held a campaign rally. he is the biggest challenger to benjamin netanyahu, the prime minister, and the biggest iss that you were asking about in this campaign is benjaminne nyahu himse. because he is israel's longeste serving prnister and yet the question is will he be able to form a govnmt. there was an election in april, just five months ago and he failed to do that. so he called this election to see if he could do it the second time around. meanwhile he's als facing a whole host of corruption charges and just next month, in just a few weeks time, in fact, he is going to see those legal proceedings again and he is

facing the prospect of three indictments for taking bribes and ped.dling influence so the real thing in this election is do the israeli voters care enough abouthat to topple him. >> sreenivasan: you've got informion now that he had a cabinet meeting inside the west bank and he's laying out this plan saying listen, i want to annex this territory i tf elect, i want to put a settlm here. these are pretty bold statements. >> st a bold move to goth out e and say that we're going to do this. the fact is that the benefit minister could ge saying thisme just two days before the election is greater than the cost much of any potential international condemn nation. syou mention that he isaying this in the jordan valley which is also in the west bank, he just a couple of days ago was talking about annexing the jordan valley. that amounts to about a third of the west bank. this is something that is very popular, in fact, in israe

itself and so it is a campaign move. it's a campaign prohat not everyone here takes too seriously because at the end of the day it's noclear thahe would actually do it or whether the international community and the tmp administration would allow him to. though i have to say that thein trump adtration has been more accommodating than any administration in recent history when it comes to israel's plans in the west bank and the strip. >> sreenivasan: speaking of president trump does his support in tweets and otherwise, does it renate, does it matter with the electorate in israel? >> i think it does. president trump is very popular here. people like himi they consider hi to bethe best friend that israel has ever had. they thought that esident obama was very hard on israel. in contrast in 2017 precsident trumme here. so he has a big influence on things. and you know clearly benjamin netanyahu in the run-up to this election has been banking on

that. you drive around tel aviv and jerusalem and there are billboards with the two of the everywhere. >> sreenivasan: anything we should watch for. >> yes, watch for how many votbs amin netanyahuo any of the other people running, the other parties get, how many seats they get in the particle am calesd the t, there are 120 seats in it, in order to form a government you have to hav61 seats. inetanyahu wasn't able to do that bac april. he is hoping to do that this time but the polls say that it unlikely to happen. so what is most likely to happen after that is a hole lot of horse trading where either benjamin netanhu or benny gantz who had his rally today the 61 sets to form aion to get government and take this country out of the political impasse it has been in for months. >> sreenivasan: ryan chilcote live from tel aviv tonight, thanks so much. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: for continuing coverage of israel's election

and the latest news from around the world, visit pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: much of the analysis from last week's democrat debate focused on who won or lost or had the best or wot moments, but our speci correspondent, jeff greenfield, says the debate also revealed a significant division among the candidates. he joins unow from santa barbar california. so is this the split between the progressive, farther left wing and moderates of the dh,ocrats? >> y think that is comin into full display now. there is in social media a sense that the left is ascendant in democratic party ranks, and they clearly have moved to somewhat in thadirection. public opinion polls say more democrat lnter left in moderate position. so you had in the first part of e debate joe biden pushing back very hard on bernie sanders and elizabeth warren about ho?are you gonna pay for th amy klobuchar saying "you really want to take away private health insurance from 140 million people, some of whom like it?" and there's a concern on the moderate side thatf the democrats are a party of private health insuranc reparations, more or less open borders and immigration, this is

gonna turn off those swing voters, whereas on the left the argument is no, boldly progressive positions will bring new voters in from the ranks of women, and that's how we win. and this is an argumt i think you're going to hear over and over again as the campaign moves on. >> sreenivasan: i want to brg back also one of the answers that-- or non-answers-- that the vice president was asked a question about, the leof slavery, and it was kind of convoluted, but his response was, but it ended up kind of having a different effect after the fact. >> it was a word salad, but he inemed to be saying, apart from we need more helederal aid in education, we need to get socialorkers to help parents of black kids who may not be le to function right. we, we want to leave-- this was the famous answer-- we want to leave the record player and radio on in their homes becaus than whites.en hear fewer words that's a study that's been debunked. and it's important not because it created a firestorm.

he survived this in the short run, but i think the key here is that no democrat can win the nomition without a significa share of the black vote. walter mondale won it that way. barack obama won it that way. hillary clinton won it four years ago that way. and biden has a huge lead 3.5 to 1 among anybody else in the race g ong african americans because he does have a lcord. anything that jeopardizes that isr really serious problem biden. >> sreenivasan: you also lov to bring up the undercovered, the stories that kind of got buried this week and usually the tweet up making news. so, what are some of the stories this week that caughyour eye? >> well, there was a hearing at the senate banking committee omat, that's not necessari the most thrilling thing i could begin with. but at the hearing, treasury department officials and some ?nators said, you know wh these giant mortgage underwriters, fannie mae and freddie mac, arc severely unitalized. they're underwriting or guaranteeingrillions of dollars in mortgages with nowhere near the amount of money they'd need inase there was an

increase in defaults. thateveraging is the key to what happened ten years ago and the entire world economy almost went under. and we had the great recession. and so what you hope is that a year from now we're not going to be looking at this undercovered hearing i saw an article on only in political magazine about this, and say, "ge why didn't we pay more attention to the fact that we seem to be running the same kind of risk that got us in such horrible trouble a decade ago?" i'm hoping that doesn't happen to be the case, but i got some concerns here. >> sreenivasan: jeff greenfield joining us from santa barbara. thanks so much. >> you bet. >> sreenivasan: the term "quantum mechanics" describes the strange doings of the tiniest particles in the universe. wher for example, two object can occupy the exact same space at the same time. li affect each other, even though they're ms of miles apart.

but if that sounds outlandish, hold on to your hat. within the realm of quantum mechanics there is a highly abstract and controversi theory known as "many worlds." it describ the idea that withes every decision you make an entirely new universe springs into existence, containing a new veion of yourself. as bizarre as it sounds, some theoretical physicists believe at many worlds is an exact description of reality. sean carroll has stake reputation on it. he's a best-selling author and a eprofessor of physics at california institute of technology. atoshour weekend's tom c recently visited him at caltech to discuss his latest book and its implications not just for physics, but for all of us. >> the simplest system that we can imagine is a single, spinning particle. >> reporter: to speak with caltech theoretical physicist sean carroll about quantum mechics is to confront a bas contradiction.an you've written that one of the premises of science is that it renders the world

intelligib. you've also written uantum mechanics tells us that what we see isn't what's really happening. that already starts to sound a little unintelligible. >> well, it is. i think that qhintum mechanics orically is the great betrayal of the goal of science, which iso understand how the worlworks, right? >> reporter: and that's the problem, says carroll. while scientists use quantum mechanics all the time-- it's made possible the transistor, c the personputer, the laser and much more-- they don't rely understand it. he lays it all out in his new book, "something deeply hidden." >> the problem is what's called the measurement problem, right? you know, we aanays talk about lectron for example, an elementary particle. we say, well, it has a position you know, there it is.he >> reporter:i was a kid in science class, they showed the little nucleus and then the electrons were going arounit. >> yup. >> reporter: that's not what's happening?at >> lied, you were lied to, right. such thing as the on ofere's no the electron. what there is is where you would

see it were you to look, and we really have trouble wrapping our atains around that concept. so here you are, and you have not yet observed the particle. >> reporter: in fact, that concept led to a split in the physics community. on one side, saying the theory that the observer is critical to the position of a particle wase med danish physicist, nobel-prize winner niels bohr. it's known as the "copn interpretation." carroll writes that no less a scientist than albert einstein was unsatisfied with the copenhagen interpretation. bohr's and einstein's disagreement was dramatized in the national geographic series, "geniu" >> it functions. and it allows us to make use of. the quantum wo >> the goal of scientific pursuit should not be merely to make use of the world around us. it should be to understand it fundamentally. >> reporter: in the end niels bohr prevailed. >> and he decisively won thede public relations battle. einstein sort of sat in his office in princeton, would

occasionally write a paper, wrote a lot of letters to his friends, but in the physics community bohr was just givenpr the victore. like, okay, we're going to do what you say. it got so bad that, u know people were pushed out of the the quantum dogma.d to question >> reporter: so the dogma that had hardened under nie bohr was that the observer was the important thing, that there was an element to quantum mechanics thatnvolved observation. >> absolutely, so the dogma says that the act of observation is crucial, but then you say well okay. what counts as an observer. does it have to be a human being? could it be a cat? what about a rock? the system rather than lookingat at it directly, and the copenhagen interpretation says no, no, no., don't answer those questions. reporter: really, don't answer those questions? >> we have nothing to say about that. it's obvious what an observer is. >> reporter: sean carroll is among a group of theoretical physicists who reject the orthodoxy, and refuse to just

"get on with their liv they call themselves "everettians," after a lesser known 20th century american physicist who carroll thinks should be a lot better known. his name was hugh everett. >> hugh everett was a graduate student at princeton. and hugh everett, came along saying "well, what if we studied the whole universe as a quantum mechanical system, then we wouldn't have a system a an observer, we only have the system." so everett said we need to iderstand quantum mechani and of itself. and he realized that that implied the existence of many worlds. and, know, everett gotve treate badly. he got ridiculed. he was told he didn't understand quantum mechanics, and we figured this out 20 years ago, the whole bit. so he didn't even apply for a faculty job as a physicist. he left and worked in the defense industry. but we've learned a lot more about how quantum mechanics works since the 1950s. so in fact in my mind everything we've learned has made his case stronger. and we look at and say yes, i see the worlds, there they are. i see them in my math. telescopes or microscopes.

>> reporter: so what does the math tell you about the universe? >> it tells us that the universa is an ab mathematical structure that evolves in a very certain way anmawith a very able consequence that when you look aa quantum system, when you observe it,ifferent copies of your universe are created. the universe you see around you is a tiny, tiny sliver of everything that there is. >> reporter: here's ere it starts to sound really crazy.st in the many worlds yterpretation, every timeou make aobservation, a new universe splits off from the one you were just in. does tt mean there are now two yous? stionere's a difficult q p many worlds as to how we should deal withsonal identity, right? >> reporter: is it like that 90's movie "sliding doors," where gwyneth paltrow catche the train, but she also misses the train? sort of. >> the people in other worlds ar't me. they might have come from the same youngster as i did. >> reporter: they might have. >> but thepere a different

on. >> reporter: slow down. what do you mean they might have come from the same youngster that you were? >> so, in other words, in many worlds there was a youngster. there was a person who i have descended from over the last some number of years, and the world has branched many, many n mes since then, and so there are other peopleese other worlds who were me back then but now they're different people because the world has branched since then and so we have to expand what we mean by personal identity because your rld line is a tree, right? it's like you're an amoeba that branches and splits. >> reporter: is there a person who used to be me, who is the point guard for the portland trail blazers? >> there is. yes. >> reporter: at my height? >> and you won the n.b.a. chs.pionship. ye >> reporter: with my lack of >> you know, so, this is hinting at a crucially important problem for many worlds which is how do you weigh the relative likelihood of different things happening? not every world is created equal

in some sense. so the worlds that you think o as crazy or unlikely really are. you are, ain, less likely to find yourself in those worlds than in the normal ones. pl>> reporter: are there p who think you're out of your mind? >> yeah, there's plenty of people who think that i'm ouof mind and that's part of what is troubling. not that they think that i'm wrong, but that we haven't settled this yet.an i these were all questions that shod have been hashed out in the 1920s and '30s. but as a field, physics decided not to face up to this puzzle, d i think that it's been holding us back as physicists. i think that our understanding of cosmology and grasn't nearly as good as it could have been had we worked harder at understanding quantum mechanics. >> reporter: many worlds suggests a new you is created in a new universe thousands of times per second so the you in this universe n'be surprised to learn the theory is controversial. iencenline math-and- journal "quanta magazine" has of interpretations," sayinging "some physicists consider ital

st self-evidently absurd." do you say this at some risk tof your you are a best selling author,h and you te caltech, you're in a pretty firm position as these things go. >> i'm not in a super firm posion, 'cause i don't have tenure at caltech, so, but i don't care either. like, i think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to get it right. and it's not like i'm going to be blackballed or ostracized by the community, there's plenty of other people who are are everettian it's not so much that i'm a fan of many worlds, it's thai care about the foundations of quantum mechanics. >> reporter: i'm just wondering if decades from now we're going to find you on the cornewith a bottle, babbling about many worlds. >> there is a world in which that happens, yes. but you know what, i could change my mind next week if someone showed me a better theory that didn't have some of these problems and still have i think it t unlikely. i would love to be the person to come uwith that theory myself. but i think that we should have the courage to follow our best theories and accept what they

predict. ee this is pbs newshournd, sunday. >> sreenivasan: tonight, pbs begins exploring the history ofq a ly american art form: country music. the eight-part, 16-hour-seriesre is directed and produced by ken burns. here is a preview. country music ces from right in here. this heart and soul that we all have. >> you can dance to it. you can make love to it you can play it at a funeral. it has something in it for >> country musics about human emotions. for always looking for those topics that are going to tell ut a lot abho we are, not just to the era that we cover but who we are now. >> if you want to look for like superstrong woman telling really amazing countries, you look to country. >> i mean the sgs are just

life. i've seen it or i've lived it.my and i tel husband which one it was. >> i believe that you can go look to find a country song that will help you feel better. sotime it might make yory >> hellok i'm johnny cash. >> my dad, he worked out al of his problems on stage. that's where he took his anguish and fears and grief. and he worked them out with arch audience that is just who he was. >> i hope that when people hear of the series that they will tune in, it made a convert out of me. it's a wonderful story. >> crazy. ♪ i'm crazy. ♪. >> i always thought its with a ood song. and i played it por pat for patsy cline and she thought its with a great song. >> it is phenomenalically great music about people who thought

their stories weren't being told. i think that is utterly american. >>t,reenivasan: finally toni it has been six months since a gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in christchurch, new zealand. on friday, the country's prime minister, jacinda arden, marked thanniversary of the mass murders with an announcement of new legislation that will create a register to traccrl guns in the country. this is the second round of gun leislation since the murders. less than a month after the shootings, new zealand's parliament voted almost unanimously to b most semiwe automatic apons, and the government started a buybackba program that has alreadyd collecout 19,000 weapons. that's all for this edition of" s newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioacd by mediss group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by:

bernard and irene schwartz. sue and edgar wachenheim iii. the cheryl and philip milstein family.j. thb. foundation. rosalind p. walter, in memory of geoe o'neil. barbara hope zuckerberg.rp ate funding is provided by mutual ofmerica, designing i customizividual and group retirement products. pahat's why we're your retirement c. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by e american people. and by contributions to your pbs ation from viewers like you. thank you. be more. pbs.

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