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Scientist at CERN Just Revealed Something TERRIFYING About Reality · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The largest machine human beings have ever constructed, was switched
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: on for the first time. 27 kilometers of tunnel under
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: the French and Swiss countryside. 10,000 scientists. Around $ 5 billion,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: two beams of protons, guided by magnets colder than the
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: empty space between galaxies, whipped around that ring 11,000 times
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: every second. It worked perfectly. Champagne was opened. The world
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: moved on to other news. Nine days later, it destroyed itself.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: A single faulty electrical connection, a joint smaller than your hand, overheated.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Six tons of liquid helium flashed into gas and detonated
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: through the tunnel with the force of an explosion. 53
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: of those enormous magnets were ripped from their mountings. Some
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: were thrown several meters. It took 14 months, and tens
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: of millions of dollars to repair. And the Large Hadron
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Collider did not perform a single high-energy collision until well
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: over a year later. Now hold that image, and let
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: me give you a second one. In 1993, the United
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: States was building something even bigger. The Superconducting Super Collider
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: in Texas would have been three times the size of
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: the machine in Geneva. and would have found the Higgs
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: boson roughly two decades earlier than we actually did. 23
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: kilometers of tunnel had already been dug. Two billion dollars
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: had already been spent. And then Congress, in a single vote,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: killed it. The tunnels were sealed. The site was eventually sold.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: To this day, it is the most expensive hole in
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: the ground in American history. Two attempts to reach the
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: same physics. Two collapses, for completely unrelated reasons, on opposite
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: sides of an ocean. And in 2009, two physicists published
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, suggesting that this was
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: not a coincidence. Their proposal, stated plainly, was that the
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Higgs boson is so profoundly unwelcome to the structure of
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: the universe that its own future existence reaches backward through
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: time to prevent itself from being created. I want to
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: be very careful here, because this is the exact point
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: where most videos about this topic drive off a cliff.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: That paper is real. You can read it. It is
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: not a blog post, it is not a forum thread,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: and it was not written by cranks. One of the
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: authors is Holger Beck-Nielsen, a Danish theoretical physicist who is
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: one of the people credited with independently inventing string theory
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: in 1970. His collaborator, Masao Ninomiya, is a respected Japanese theorist.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: These are not people on the edges of the field.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: These are people who helped build the middle of it.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: And what they proposed next is the part that still
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: makes me laugh and shiver at the same time. They
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: suggested an experiment. If the future really is reaching back
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: to stop this machine, they argued, it will do so
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: through whatever channel is cheapest, the path of least resistance
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: available to it. Machines breaking is expensive. So, give the
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: universe a cheaper option. Draw a card at random from
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: a deck of a million cards, they said. Let one
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: of those cards read, do not run the collider at
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: this energy. If the universe truly objects, then the improbably
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: unlikely card will come up, and everyone gets to go
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: home without another catastrophic quench. It is a bureaucratic form
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: handed to physics itself. A comment box for reality. Nobody
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: ran the card draw, but something else happened. In November
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: of 2009, while the machine was still being repaired, an
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: outdoor electrical substation feeding the collider suffered a sudden failure
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: and forced a shutdown. The cause was investigated and identified.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: A bird had dropped a piece of bread into the equipment. Baguette,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: according to most accounts. Though the sourcing on the bread
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: type is honestly a little loose, and I love that
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: this is a detail people argue about. A bird. A
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: piece of bread. The most sophisticated experiment in the history
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: of our species. Stopped by lunch. Now, the responsible thing
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: to say here is that machines fail, birds exist, and
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Congress cancels projects. All of that is true and I
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: am not going to insult you by pretending otherwise. But
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: notice what is actually strange about this story. Because it
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: is not the bird. It is that two serious physicists
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: looked at a chain of accidents and wrote down mathematics
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: in which those accidents were not accidents. And the mathematics
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: they wrote down is not gibberish. It involves adding an
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: imaginary component to the action. The quantity that determines how
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: a system evolves. And the consequence is a model where
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: the probability of a history occurring depends on what happens
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: later in that history. In their framework, the universe does
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: not roll forward blindly from now into next. It selects
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: from all possible complete histories the ones it finds acceptable.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And unacceptable histories simply do not get to happen. Most
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: physicists think they are wrong. Nielsen thinks he is probably wrong.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: That is not the point. The point is that backward
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: causation is a live-enough idea in physics that you can
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: publish it, defend it at conferences, and keep your job.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Remember that, because in Chapter 7, we are going to
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: look at real laboratory experiments where a choice made after
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: a photon has already passed through an apparatus appears to
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: change what that photon did. That is not a theory.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: That is a result, reproduced many times, and the argument
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: about what it means is still running. This is where
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: our journey starts, and I want to tell you exactly
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: what it is and what it is not. There is
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: an enormous body of internet belief about this machine. That
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: it opened a portal. That it split the timeline. That
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: it is why you remember a children's book series being
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: spelled differently. That it made time itself speed up after 2012.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: that the giant statue of a Hindu deity standing outside
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the main building is not decoration. Most videos about this
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: take one of two positions. They either play the whole
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: thing as spooky fact, which is dishonest, or they spend
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: an hour sneering at people for being stupid, which is
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: boring and worse, wrong. We are doing neither. Here is
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the promise of this video, and I intend to keep it.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Every single one of those claims grew out of something real,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Not a rumor, not a misunderstanding, but an actual piece
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: of published physics or documented history that somebody read, or half-read,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: and extended. The portal claim grew from a genuine search
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: for microscopic black holes that physicists ran on purpose, wrote
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: papers about, and are still refining. The destroy the universe
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: claim grew from a calculation showing that empty space itself
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: might not be stable. and that our universe may be
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: balanced on a knife edge because of the precise mass
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: of the particle this machine was built to find. The
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: alternate timeline claim sits on top of an interpretation of
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics that a substantial fraction of working physicists take
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: completely seriously. The statue is exactly what people say it is,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: and CERN put it there themselves. So instead of debunking,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: we are going to do something harder and much more interesting.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: we are going to take each claim, find the real
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: science underneath it, and then push that science further than
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: the conspiracy ever bothered to push it. Because here is
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: what I have found again and again while putting this together.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: And it is the thesis of the whole video, the
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: truth is consistently stranger than the myth. The people telling
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: you that CERN is hiding something wild are, if anything,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: underestimating what is going on in there. It is all published.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: That is the joke. Let me give you a sense
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: of the thing we are actually talking about, because scale matters,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and almost nobody gets it right. The Large Hadron Collider
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: is a ring of magnets buried about 100 meters underground,
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: crossing the border between Switzerland and France, so that a
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: proton in that beam changes country roughly 11,000 times per second.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Those magnets are cooled with liquid helium to about 1.9
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: degrees above absolute zero. That is colder than deep space.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: The interior of that machine is, as far as we know,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: the coldest large region in the universe. And we made
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: it on purpose under a wheat field. Inside it, protons
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: are accelerated to within a hair of the speed of light,
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: not close to it, within about three meters per second
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: of it. And when two of those beams are steered
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: into each other, For the briefest instant, the collision point
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: reaches temperatures around 5 trillion degrees. That is roughly a
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: quarter of a million times hotter than the core of
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: the Sun. It is hot enough to melt protons and
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: neutrons back into the soup of quarks and gluons that
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: filled the universe a few millionths of a second after
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang. We have made that soup. We have
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: measured its properties. It turns out to be a nearly
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: perfect liquid, which nobody expected. Coldest place in the universe.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: containing the hottest place in the universe, separated by a
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: few centimeters, and now the number that ruins everyone's intuition.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: The total energy in one of those proton collisions, the
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: full violence of it, is roughly the kinetic energy of
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: a mosquito in flight. That is all. A flying insect.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: The entire terrifying reputation of this machine comes from the
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: fact that we squeeze a mosquito's worth of energy into
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: a volume vastly smaller than a single atom. Energy is
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: not the scary part. Concentration is. Keep that mosquito in
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: your head. In Chapter 4, when we deal with the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: claim that this machine could annihilate reality, that insect is
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: going to come back and do something to your understanding
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: of the risk that I do not think you are expecting.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Here is the road we are taking. Next, we are
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: going to your own memory. because it is the strangest
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: exhibit in this entire case, and the one that touches
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: you personally. Thousands of people remember a film that does
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: not exist, a logo that was never drawn, and a
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: line of dialogue that was never spoken. And they remember
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: these things in exactly the same wrong way, with high confidence,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: without ever having talked to each other. That last part
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: is not internet folklore. It was tested properly, published in
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: a serious psychology journal, and the researchers who ran it
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: could not fully explain what they found. Their honest conclusion
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: was that the mechanism is still open. After that, we
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: go into the machine itself. The black holes we genuinely
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: tried to make. The hidden dimensions we are genuinely still hunting.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: The calculation that says empty space might have a lower
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: rung it has not fallen to yet. Then the interpretations
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: of quantum mechanics that allow, in perfectly respectable mathematics, for
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: every version of every moment to be equally real. And
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the deeply uncomfortable argument that explains why we should expect
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: to find ourselves alive in a universe where nothing has
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: gone wrong yet, no matter how often things went wrong.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Then time. Why physics contains no such thing as now.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Why the flow you feel, the one thing you would
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: swear you know for certain, has never appeared in a
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: single equation. And why the feeling that time has been
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: running faster since some point in the last 15 years
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: is measurable, real, and not caused by anything under that
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: wheat field. And at the end we come back to
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: the machine, and to the question that has been sitting
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: underneath this whole thing from the beginning. Not whether CERN
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: broke reality. A better one and a harder one. Why
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: it is that when human beings build something to look
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: directly at the foundations of existence, we start telling stories
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: about doorways and gods and lost timelines. Because we do.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Every time. And I think the reason says something about
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: us that is worth staying to the end for. But first,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: the memory. Because before we ask whether a machine in
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Geneva changed the world, we have to deal with a
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: much more unsettling possibility. That the world is fine, and
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: the record you carry of it is not. There is
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: a bear. You know the bear, and I am about
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: to tell you that you have almost certainly never once
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: seen its name spelled the way you remember it. Chapter 2.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: The Memory That Is Not Yours, Berenstain That is how
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: it is spelled. Bear. N. Stain. It has always been
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: spelled that way, on every book, in every printing, since
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: the first one appeared in 1962. The name comes from
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: the family who wrote them, Stan and Jan Berenstain, and
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: if you look at old library copies, old television credits,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: old merchandise, old newspaper reviews, the spelling is consistent all
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: the way back, and a very large number of adults
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: are absolutely certain it used to be Berenstain. Not vaguely.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Not with a shrug. They can describe the shelf it
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: sat on. They can hear a parent's voice saying it.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Before you decide how you feel about that, let me
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: stack a few more on the table. Because the effect
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: gets stronger the more of it you see at once.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Darth Vader never says, Luke, I am your father. The
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: line is, no, I am your father. Nobody in Snow
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: White ever says mirror, mirror on the wall. The Queen
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: says magic mirror on the wall. The Monopoly Man, the
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: moustached banker on the box, has no monocle and never has.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: The Fruit of the Loom logo has never contained a cornucopia,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: that brown wicker horn spilling fruit that a stunning number
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: of people can picture in detail. Pikachu has no black
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: tip on his tail. C-3PO, in the original film, has
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: one silver leg, which almost nobody remembers. And then there
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: is the one that goes further than all of them.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Sometime in the 1990s, there was a family comedy in
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: which the stand-up comedian Sinbad played a genie. It was
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: called Shazam. Thousands of people remember watching it. They remember
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the plot beats, the two children who find the lamp,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the box art at the rental store, the specific cover design.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Some of them remember arguing with their sibling about which
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: of them got to pick it. That film does not exist.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: It has never existed. Sinbad has spent years being asked
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: about it by strangers. This is what the internet calls
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: the Mandela Effect, named by a woman called Fiona Broom,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: who around 2009 discovered that she and a room full
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: of other people vividly remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: in the 1980s. complete with news coverage and a widow's speech.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Mandela was released, became president, and died in 2013. Now
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: here is why this ended up bolted to a collider
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: in Switzerland. If you accept that your memory is accurate,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: and thousands of other people's memories agree with yours, then
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: the only remaining explanation is that the world changed. And
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: if the world changed, something changed it, and it would
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: have to be something enormous, expensive, and pointed directly at
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: the machinery of reality. There is exactly one object on
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Earth that fits that description. So let us do this properly. First,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: the science of memory, which is genuinely disturbing on its own.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Then the specific published result that the standard science does
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: not fully explain. Because that result is the reason this
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: chapter exists. Start with what memory is not. It is
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: not a recording. There is no file, no tape, no
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: photograph stored anywhere in your skull. What your brain stores
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: is closer to a set of instructions for rebuilding an experience,
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: distributed across the same regions that originally processed it. Every
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: time you remember something, you are not playing it back.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: You are constructing it again, fresh, right now. Out of
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: fragments and expectations and general knowledge about how the world
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: usually works, The feeling of vividness is generated during that construction.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: It is not evidence that the construction is accurate. Elizabeth
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Loftus spent a career proving how easily that construction can
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: be steered. In one classic study, people watched a film
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: of a car accident and were asked how fast the
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: cars were going when they hit each other. Other people
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: were asked how fast they were going when they smashed
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: into each other. The smashed group reported higher speeds and
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: a week later, they were significantly more likely to remember
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: seeing broken glass at the scene. There was no broken glass.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: One verb, planted at the right moment, grew glass into
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: their memory of an event they had watched with their
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: own eyes. She went further. In studies through the 1990s
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: and after, researchers implanted entire childhood events into adults, using
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: nothing more than a suggestion and a bit of encouragement.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: getting lost in a shopping mall as a small child.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: A hot air balloon ride that never happened, sold with
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: a doctored photograph. A meaningful fraction of participants did not
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: just accept these stories. They elaborated them. They added details
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: nobody had supplied. They remembered the fear, the crowd, the
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: man who helped them. And when they were finally told
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: the event was fabricated, some of them argued. Then add
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: source monitoring, which is the brain's ongoing struggle to remember
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: where a piece of information came from. You retain the
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: content far better than the origin. So you keep the
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: image of the cornucopia and lose the fact that you
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: saw it on a raisin box. You keep the phrase Luke,
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: I am your father, and lose the fact that you
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: heard it in a parody, an advert, a sketch, or
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: a thousand casual conversations, because that misquote has been repeated
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: to you far more often than the actual line ever has.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: And then, on top of all of that, add other people.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Human memory is socially contagious. If a group agrees on
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: a detail, individual members will adopt it, and afterward they
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: will not report it as something they were told. They
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: will report it as something they remember. Solomon Asch showed
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: decades ago that people will deny the evidence of their
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: own eyes about the length of a line if enough
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: strangers in the room disagree with them. Memory, which is
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: far softer than eyesight, folds even faster. So there is
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: the standard explanation, and honestly, it covers most of it. Vader,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: The Mirror, Mandela, Shazam, Sinbad, it turns out, hosted a
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: marathon of genie-themed films in the 90s while wearing genie costumes,
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: and once starred in a film with a similar title,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: and the wires in a lot of childhood brains crossed.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the part I have been building toward.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: and the reason I would not have made this chapter otherwise.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: In 2022, two researchers at the University of Chicago, Dipasri
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Prasad and Wilma Bainbridge, published a study in the journal
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Psychological Science on what they called the visual Mandela effect.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: They wanted to know whether these shared false memories were
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: just noise, the ordinary sloppiness of memory scattered randomly. or
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: whether something more specific was happening with images. They ran
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: a set of experiments with hundreds of participants and a
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: large pool of popular icons. Most images behaved normally, but
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: a small group of them, including the Monopoly Man, C-3PO,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Curious George, the Fruit of the Loom logo, and Pikachu,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: produced something the researchers had not expected. People did not
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: fail at random. They failed the same way. Shown the
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: correct image alongside manipulated versions, participants reliably picked the same
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: specific wrong version at rates far above chance. And they
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: picked it fast. And they reported high confidence while doing it.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Curious George gets a tail. The Monopoly Man gets a monocle.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: Pikachu gets a black tail tip. Not a fog of
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: vague errors. One consistent, shared, wrong picture. held with certainty
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: by strangers who have never spoken to one another. Then
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: the researchers went hunting for the cause, which is the
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: part I respect. They checked whether people had simply seen
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: the images less often or paid less attention to them.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: That did not explain it. They tracked eye movements to
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: see whether people were failing to look at the relevant
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: part of the image. People looked at the right places
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: and still got it wrong. They tested whether prior visual
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: experience predicted the error, and whether people who drew the
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: icons from memory produced the same mistakes, and they did.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Their conclusion, stated plainly in the paper, was that no
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: single existing account fully explains it, and that the mechanism
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: remains an open question. Sit with that for a second,
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: because the internet version of this story and the academic
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: version have quietly converged on the same sentence. Thousands of
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: people share a specific false memory of the same image,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: and the scientists who study it professionally cannot yet tell
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: you why. Now, does that mean the timeline changed? No.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: And I want to be straight with you about why.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Because it matters. Open question in science means we do
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: not have the mechanism yet. It does not mean all
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: explanations are now equally likely. There are candidate answers on
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: the table. and they are good ones. Schema effects, where
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: your brain corrects an image toward what that kind of
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: thing usually looks like, so a rich old cartoon banker
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: acquires the monocle he ought to have, and a monkey
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: acquires the tail a monkey ought to have. Prototype blending,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: where similar icons contaminate each other, and Mr. Peanut lends
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: his eyepiece to the man on the Monopoly box. The
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: research is ongoing. It will probably be solved But here
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: is where we push past the internet instead of stopping
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: where it stops. Because there is something about memory that
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: is far more unsettling than anything in that paper, and
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: almost nobody brings it up. Since around 2000, work on
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: memory reconsolidation, starting with experiments by Karim Nader and colleagues
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: on rats, has supported a startling idea. When you retrieve
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: a memory, it does not simply get read. It becomes
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: chemically unstable briefly and has to be actively rebuilt and
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: restored using fresh protein synthesis. Block that process during the
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: window and the memory can be weakened or lost. Which
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: means that recall is not a passive act. Recall is
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: a right operation. Follow that where it goes. The memories
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: you revisit most often, your most cherished ones, the ones
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: you are most certain of, are the ones that have
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: been rewritten the most times. They are the copies of
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: copies of copies. The childhood moment you have replayed a
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: thousand times is, mechanically speaking, the least original document in
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: your entire archive. The ones you have never gone back
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: to are, if anything, closer to the original. So the
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: honest position on the Mandela Effect is not that your
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: memory is fine and the universe shifted. It is not
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: that your memory is broken either. It is stranger than both.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: Your past is not stored anywhere. It is a performance
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: your brain gives you, live, on request, every single time,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: reconstructed from pieces. Edited by everyone you have ever discussed
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: it with, and re-saved with today's fingerprints on it. There
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: is no master copy to check it against. There never was.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: And that, I think, is why this idea attached itself
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: to a collider so ferociously. Because if your memory is unreliable,
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: the ground goes out from under everything you believe you know.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: But if a machine changed reality, then you were right
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: all along. It is not a story about physics. It
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: is a story about wanting to be right about your
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: own life. Still, wanting an explanation does not make it wrong.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: And I promised you at the start that we would
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: go looking for the real thing under every claim. So
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: let us take the idea seriously. and ask the physical question.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: If information from another version of events could reach you,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: it would need somewhere to come from, and something to
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: come through. It would need a doorway, which is the
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: exact word people use about that machine. A portal. A
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: hole punched in space-time. Here is what nobody who repeats
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: that claim seems to realize. We did try to make one.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: On purpose. There are papers describing how, There were detectors
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: built specifically to catch them, and physicists calculated that under
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: certain conditions the collider might produce one of them every second.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: They were not being reckless, and they were not being metaphorical.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: They were hunting for black holes. Small ones. And the
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: reason they thought it might work is that gravity, the
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: force you have been fighting since the moment you learned
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: to stand, may be leaking out of our universe into
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: dimensions we cannot see. Chapter 3. The doorway we tried
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: to build put a paperclip on a table. Now pick
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: it up with a fridge magnet. Look at what just happened,
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: because it is one of the most underrated facts in
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: all of physics. The entire mass of planet Earth, 6,000
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: billion billion tons of iron and rock, is pulling down
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: on that paperclip, with every scrap of gravity it has.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: And a magnet you could buy for pocket change beat it.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Not narrowly. Instantly. And without effort. Gravity is not just
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: the weakest of the four fundamental forces. It is weaker
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: by an amount that is genuinely difficult to write down.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Compared with the electromagnetic force, gravity is weaker by a
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: factor of around 10,000 billion billion billion billion. That is
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: a one with roughly 40 zeros after it. Physicists call
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: this the hierarchy problem, and it is not a small
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: technical annoyance. It is a hole in the middle of
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: our understanding of nature, and nobody has closed it. Why
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: would a force be that weak? There is no obvious reason.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: All the other forces sit within a few orders of
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: magnitude of each other. Gravity is off in a corner
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: by itself. absurdly embarrassingly feeble, and every attempt to explain
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: it from first principles has failed. So in 1998, three physicists,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Nima Arkani Hamed, Savas Dimopoulos, and Gia Dvali, proposed something
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: that sounds like science fiction and was published as serious theory.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: What if gravity is not weak at all? What if
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: gravity is exactly as strong as the other forces and
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: the reason we experience a pathetic trickle of it is
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: that most of it is going somewhere else? Somewhere we
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: cannot see. Extra Dimensions of Space Now, extra dimensions have
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: a reputation problem, so let me make this concrete. Imagine
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: a wire fence and an ant walking along it. To
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: that ant, the wire is a one-dimensional world, forward and back.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: But the wire has a second dimension, around, which is
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: so small and so tightly curled that from any distance
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the wire looks like a line. Something small enough could
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: walk around the wire. Something large enough never notices the
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: direction exists. The proposal is that our universe works like that.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Everything you are made of, every particle of matter, every
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: photon of light is stuck to a three-dimensional sheet. Electromagnetism
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: cannot leave it. The nuclear forces cannot leave it. But gravity, uniquely,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: is not a particle stuck to the sheet. Gravity is
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: the shape of space itself, and so it can spread
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: into whatever other directions exist. Dilute a force across extra dimensions,
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: and it arrives at your paperclip as a whisper. Here
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: is why that idea electrified a generation of physicists rather
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: than embarrassing them. It makes a prediction. If gravity is
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: secretly strong, then there is an energy scale at which
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: its true strength shows up, and in the standard picture
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: that scale is unreachable. roughly a quadrillion times beyond anything
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: we can build. But in the extra dimensions picture, that
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: scale collapses downward. It could sit at a few tera
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: electron volts, which is precisely the energy of the Large
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Hadron Collider. And what happens when you concentrate energy at
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: the scale where gravity becomes strong? You make a black hole.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: Not a metaphorical one. In 2001, Dimopoulos and Greg Landsberg
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: published a paper working out the details. and their estimate
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: was startling. If those extra dimensions exist in the right configuration,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: the collider could produce a microscopic black hole roughly once
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: per second. Around 100 million of them per year sitting
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: under a Swiss field produced deliberately in an experiment with
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: a published methodology. So when someone tells you scientists were
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: trying to open a hole in space-time at CERN, the
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: correct response is not laughter. It is yes. They wrote
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: it up, here is the paper, and here is what
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: they found. The detectors were configured to look for the signature.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: Atlas and CMS both ran dedicated searches. This was a
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: real research program, not a rumor. Why would anyone want
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: a black hole in their laboratory? Because it would be
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: the single greatest discovery in the history of physics. It
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: would prove extra dimensions exist. It would explain the weakness
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: of gravity. It would hand us the first experimental bridge
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: between gravity and quantum mechanics, the two halves of physics
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: that have refused to speak to each other for a century.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: Every physicist involved knew that if it worked, they were
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: looking at a Nobel Prize and a rewritten textbook. And
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: now the question that made the newspapers, which is fair, reasonable,
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: and deserves a real answer rather than a pat on
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: the head. What stops it from eating everything? Stephen Hawking
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: in 1974 worked out something that shocked his own field.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Black holes are not permanently black. Because of quantum effects
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: at the edge, a black hole radiates, slowly loses energy,
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: and eventually evaporates completely. And the crucial part, the part
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: that reverses your intuition entirely, is how the rate depends
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: on size. Big black holes are cold and evaporate over
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: unimaginable timescales. Small black holes are hot. Smaller means hotter
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: means faster. Go all the way down to a black
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: hole with the mass of a few thousand protons, which
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: is what a collider could conceivably produce. And the numbers
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: become almost comic. It would not sit there feeding. It
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: would explode into a spray of particles in something like
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: 10 to the minus 27 seconds. Written out, that is
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: a decimal point followed by 26 zeros and then a
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: 1 in seconds. It would be born and die so
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: fast that light in that interval would not cross a
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: single atomic nucleus. The only thing you would ever see
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: is the debris. And that, precisely, is what the searches
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: looked for. A characteristic burst of many particles flying out
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: in all directions with roughly equal energy. which is what
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: evaporation looks like from outside. Nothing, no such events. Repeated
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: searches through years of data at increasing energies have come
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: up empty, which has pushed the limits on the scale
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: of any extra dimensions steadily upward, past 10 tera electron
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: volts in most models. Every year the machine runs without
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: producing one, the version of the theory that predicted them
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: gets a little more dead. But now I want to
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: give you the honest, uncomfortable footnote, because most explainers skip
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: straight past it, and it is the most interesting thing
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: in this chapter. Hawking radiation has never been directly observed.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: Not once. Not from any black hole. Anywhere. It is
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: a theoretical result, derived beautifully, believed almost universally, and completely
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: unconfirmed by observation of an actual black hole. because real
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: astrophysical black holes are so cold that their radiation is
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: drowned out by the faint background warmth of the universe
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: itself by a laughable margin. What we do have is
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: the next best thing, and it is a wonderful piece
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: of experimental work. A physicist named Jeff Steinhauer at the
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Technion in Israel built an analog. He cooled atoms to
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: a fraction above absolute zero into a state of matter
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: called a Bose-Einstein condensate, then made it flow faster than
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: the speed of sound within itself. In that fluid, sound
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: waves cannot escape the fast-flowing region, exactly as light cannot
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: escape a black hole. He built a trap for sound,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: and in results published through the 2010s, he reported detecting
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: the analog of Hawking radiation coming out of it, paired
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: particles emerging from the horizons, with a spectrum matching the prediction.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: That is powerful support. It is not the same as
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: watching a black hole evaporate. So the completely honest statement
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: of where we are is this. We attempted to create
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: black holes on purpose. We did not create any. We
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: are confident they would evaporate harmlessly, and that confidence rests
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: on a 50-year-old calculation that has been magnificently confirmed in
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: a laboratory analogue and never once directly in the sky.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: Physicists are not hiding this. It is in every review
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: paper on the subject. Now let me push past the conspiracy,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: as promised, because the internet's version of the portal is
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: far too small. A black hole is not a hole
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: to somewhere else in the naive sense, but it is
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: not merely an object either. It is a region where
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: the structure of space and time genuinely breaks down. Inside
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: a black hole, according to general relativity, the roles of
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: space and time swap. Falling toward the center becomes as
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: inevitable as falling toward next Tuesday. And the mathematics of
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: the equations, extended past the point where anyone believes them,
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: produces solutions with connections between distant regions, the objects usually
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: called wormholes. That is not fringe. In 2013, Juan Maldacena
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: and Leonard Suskind proposed a conjecture with a name that
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: fits on a t-shirt. ER equals EPR. In plain language,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: the claim is that two particles quantum entangled with each
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: other might be connected by a microscopic wormhole, and that
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: entanglement and geometry are the same phenomenon described in two languages.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: If that is right, then space itself is woven out
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: of entanglement. and the connections between distant places are not
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: a bug in the equations, but the thread the fabric
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: is made from. Add the holographic principle to that, which
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: is the mainstream tool used across theoretical physics today, and
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: which says the full description of a volume of space
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: can be encoded on its boundary, like a three-dimensional scene
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: stored in a flat hologram. Taken at face value, and
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: many serious people do take it at face value, the
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: room you are sitting in may be a projection of
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: information written on a distant surface. So consider what actually
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: happened here. A group of people online decided that CERN
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: was trying to open a doorway into another reality, and
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: they were mocked for it. Meanwhile, the actual field spent
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: that same decade arguing about whether space is made of entanglement,
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: whether black holes are wormholes, and whether our three-dimensional world
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: is a hologram of a two-dimensional one. Nobody made a
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: viral video about that and it is a hundred times weirder.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: The searches came up empty. The doorway was not found.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: But notice the shape of the result, because it sets
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: up the next problem exactly. We went looking for signs
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: that gravity becomes strong at accessible energies, and we found nothing,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: which means the enormous gap between the everyday world and
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: the scale where gravity matters is still there, unexplained, and
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: now harder to explain than before. And that gap has
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: a second victim. It makes the mass of the Higgs
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: boson the particle this machine was built to find look impossible.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: Not surprising. Impossible when they finally measured it in 2012,
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: the number came back. And then theorists did what theorists do,
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: which is take that number, plug it into the equations,
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: and ask what it implies about the long-term future of
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: the universe. The answer, in the papers, in the journals,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: published by the same collaboration that found the thing, was
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: that empty space might not be the bottom. That the
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: vacuum we live in may be balanced on a ledge,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: stable for now, with a lower state waiting underneath it.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: And that if it ever fell, the change would spread
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: outward at the speed of light, silently, with no warning possible.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Because the warning and the wall arrive together. That is
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: where the destroy the universe claim comes from. It is real,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: It is published, and it is far more interesting than
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: the version you have heard. Chapter 4 The knife edge
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: here is a sentence that appears in peer-reviewed physics literature,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: written by people with no interest in frightening anyone. Our
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: universe may be sitting in a false vacuum, a state
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: that looks perfectly stable but is not the lowest state available.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: And at some point, somewhere, it may fall. I want
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: to build this properly. Because it is the single most
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: misunderstood idea in this entire subject. And once you understand it,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: the version circulating online will look like a children's drawing
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: of it. Start with what empty space actually is. Not nothing.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: Physics has no nothing. What we call vacuum is the
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: lowest energy configuration of all the fields that fill the universe.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: And those fields are everywhere. Always. including inside you. One
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: of them is the Higgs field, and it is the
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: reason this whole story exists. The Higgs field is not
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: a particle floating around. It is a condition of space itself,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: switched on, everywhere, with a value that is not zero.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: Particles that interact with it strongly move as though they
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: are heavy. Particles that ignore it, like photons, travel at
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: the speed of light and have no mass at all. Mass,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: in the modern picture, is not a substance a thing contains.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: It is a description of how strongly that thing is
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: gripped by an invisible field it is swimming through. Your
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: body has mass because the quarks and electrons in you
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: are constantly interacting with a field that switched on a
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: fraction of a second after the universe began. The particle
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: they found in 2012, the Higgs boson, is a ripple
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: in that field. Making it required exactly the energies this
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: machine reaches, and detecting it required sifting quadrillions of collisions
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: for a bump in a graph. When they announced it,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: people cried in the auditorium. Peter Higgs, who had predicted
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: it in 1964, was in the room to watch a
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: machine that did not exist when he was young confirm
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: a hunch he had had as a young man. the
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: mass came out at about 125 giga electron volts. And
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: that number, which sounds like the most boring possible detail,
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: is the entire problem. Because in quantum field theory, the
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: strength of a field is not fixed across all scales.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: It runs. The way a field behaves depends on the
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: energy at which you probe it, and you can calculate
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: that behavior with what is called the renormalization group. which
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: is essentially a machine for asking how physics looks as
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: you zoom in. So theorists took the measured Higgs mass
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: and the measured mass of the top quark, the heaviest
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: particle we know, and they ran the equations upward, all
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: the way toward the enormous energies where gravity itself becomes relevant.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: They were looking to see whether the Higgs potential, the
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: landscape the field sits in, stays a well or turns
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: into something else. And what they found was that at
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: somewhere around 10 to the 11th giga electron volts, give
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: or take a lot, the potential dips negative. The valley
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: our vacuum sits in is not the deepest valley in
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: the landscape. There is lower ground further out. Three possible
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: answers came out of those calculations. Stable, meaning our vacuum
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: is the true floor and nothing can happen. Unstable, meaning
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: it should already have collapsed. and we would not be
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: here to discuss it. Or metastable, meaning our vacuum is
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: a ledge that will hold indefinitely under normal conditions but
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: is not the true bottom. The measured values put us
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: in the third category. Not comfortably in it. Right on
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: the boundary between metastable and stable, within the uncertainties, in
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: a way that makes physicists deeply uneasy for reasons I
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: will get to. Because that part is the good part.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: So what would a collapse actually look like? This is
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: where the standard description on the internet is dramatic, and
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: the real description is worse. It would begin with a bubble. Somewhere,
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: through quantum tunneling, a tiny region of space would flip
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: into the lower energy state. Because that state has lower energy,
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: the bubble is favorable, and it grows. And it grows
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: at essentially the speed of light. Because nothing stops it,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: and nothing slows it down. Inside that bubble, the constants
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: of nature are different. The Higgs field has a different value,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: so particle masses change, so chemistry does not work, so
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: atoms as we know them cannot exist. It is not
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: an explosion that destroys things, it is a change in
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: the rules under which things are allowed to be things.
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: And here is the detail that makes it genuinely singular
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: among catastrophes. You cannot see it coming, Ever. The wall
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: of the bubble travels at the speed of light, which
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: means the light that would tell you it is approaching
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: is traveling in the same wave, arriving at the same instant.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: There is no warning shot. There is no rising hum
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: on the instruments. There is the world, and then there
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: is not, and there is no interval between the two
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: in which anything could be noticed by anyone. Which is,
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: I have to admit, an oddly clean way to go.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: No suffering, no aftermath, nobody left to be sad about it.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: A physicist I read once described it as the only
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: disaster in the universe that comes with no grief attached.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: And I have not been able to shake that. Now,
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: does the collider cause this? No. And the argument is
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: not a reassurance, it is not a press release. And
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: it does not require you to trust anybody. It is
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: an observation. and it is one of the most elegant
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: safety arguments ever made. Remember the mosquito from Chapter 1,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: the total energy of a proton collision. Hold that. Space
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: is full of cosmic rays. These are particles, mostly protons,
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: accelerated by supernovae and by processes we still do not
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: fully understand. And they slam into Earth's upper atmosphere constantly,
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: every second of every day. and have done for four
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: and a half billion years. Most are low energy. Some
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: are not. On the 15th of October, 1991, a detector
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: in the Utah desert recorded a single subatomic particle carrying
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: about three times 10 to the 20th electron volts of energy.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: One particle. Its energy was roughly that of a baseball
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: thrown at a professional pitcher's speed, packed into something smaller
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: than an atom. Physicists named it the Oh My God particle,
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: which remains the finest name in the history of science.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: That single particle carried something like 40 million times more
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: energy than a proton in the Large Hadron Collider. And
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: it was not unique. We have detected others. And Earth's
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: atmosphere has been absorbing collisions like that for the entire
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: history of the planet. Every star, every moon, Every rock
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: in the galaxy has been bombarded at those energies for
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: billions of years. The number of natural collisions in the
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: observable universe that exceed anything we can produce is a
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: figure with dozens of zeros in it. If concentrating that
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: much energy could trigger vacuum decay, the universe would have
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: triggered it uncountable times over, long before Earth's Earth existed.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: It did not. Neutron stars, which are exposed to the
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: most violent environments in the cosmos, are still there, still spinning,
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: still made of the same physics. The sky is the experiment,
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: it has been running since the beginning, and the results
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: are in. That is why physicists are calm about it,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: not because they trust their models, because nature already ran
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the test at scales we cannot approach and published the
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: answer in the fact that anything exists at all. So
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: the collider is not a threat. Good, now let us
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: get to the part that actually keeps theorists awake, because
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with safety and everything to
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: do with a coincidence nobody can explain. Why does the
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: Higgs mass sit exactly at the boundary? Think about the
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: range of values it could have taken. The parameters could
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: have landed anywhere across an enormous span, and almost all
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: of that span gives you a clearly stable vacuum, or
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: a violently unstable one. Instead, the measured numbers put us
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: within a hair of the dividing line, in the narrow
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: strip where the vacuum is metastable with a lifetime vastly
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: longer than the current age of the universe. Estimates for
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: how long that ledge holds run to numbers like 10
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: to the 100th years and beyond, which is longer than
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: the era in which stars will exist by a margin
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: that makes stars look like a brief flash. Physicists call
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: this near criticality, and there is no accepted explanation for it.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: When a system sits precisely at a critical point, That
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: is usually a clue. In every other area of physics,
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: criticality means something is tuning it. Water at its critical
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: point is being held there by conditions. A pile of
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: sand that sits perpetually at the angle of collapse is
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: being maintained there by the process that built it. So
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: what is tuning the vacuum of our universe to the edge?
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: There are candidate answers, and every one of them is enormous.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: Some argue it is a hint of physics we have
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: not discovered. A symmetry that fixes the value for reasons
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: we cannot yet see. Some argue it points toward the multiverse,
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: that the parameters vary across an unimaginable number of regions,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: and we occupy one of the rare ones where the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: values permit atoms and chemistry and observers, so the tuning
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: is a selection effect rather than a design. Some argue
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: it is simply a coincidence, and we are reading meaning
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: into noise. which is always possible and is the position
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: I would probably defend on a Tuesday. But notice where
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: we have arrived because the journey of this chapter matters
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: more than any of its individual facts. We started with
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: a tabloid claim that a machine might destroy the universe.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: We found that the claim was rooted in real published physics.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: We found that the machine cannot possibly do it for
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: reasons written in the sky rather than in a safety report.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: And then, having cleared away the fear, we were left
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: with something far more disturbing than the fear was. The
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: universe appears to be balanced, deliberately or accidentally, on a
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: knife edge between existing and not. And the best explanations
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: anybody has for why involve either physics we have not
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: found or a vast number of other universes with other settings.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: That last one is not a throwaway. It is the
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: doorway into the next four chapters of this video, and
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: it is where the alternate timeline idea finally gets its
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: serious hearing. Because there is a version of quantum mechanics,
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: developed by a graduate student in the 1950s, defended today
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: by respected physicists at major institutions, in which every possible
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: outcome of every quantum event genuinely happens. Not as a metaphor.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: not as a mathematical convenience. All of them. All real.
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: All the time. Including the versions where the card was drawn,
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: the magnet held, and the bear's name was spelled differently.
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: The internet did not invent the many worlds. Physics did.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: And the reason it has survived 70 years of attack
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: is not that it is wild. It is that it
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: is the simplest option on the table. Chapter 5 Every
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: World at Once in 1957, a graduate student at Princeton
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: named Hugh Everett III submitted a doctoral thesis that solved
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: the deepest problem in quantum mechanics by deleting one line
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: from the theory. His reward was ridicule, a career change,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: and an early death. Today, his idea is defended by
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: physicists at Oxford. Caltech in Cambridge, and a meaningful fraction
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: of the people who work on the foundations of quantum
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: theory think he was simply right. To understand what he did,
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: you need to understand what was broken, so let me
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: show you the experiment that breaks it. You have probably
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: heard of it. I suspect you have never been told
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: the part that actually matters. Fire particles, one at a time,
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: at a barrier with two narrow slits in it, and
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: let them land on a screen behind. Common sense says
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: each particle goes through one slit or the other, and
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: you should get two bands on the screen. You do not.
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: You get an interference pattern, many stripes, the signature of
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: waves overlapping and canceling, which is strange but manageable, until
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: you remember that you are sending them one at a time.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: A single particle, alone in the apparatus, with nothing else
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: to interfere with, still builds up the striped pattern over
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: thousands of runs. each particle interferes with itself. Which means
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: each particle, in some sense, went through both slits. Now
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: put a detector at the slits to see which one
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: it really used. The stripes vanish. You get two bands,
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: the common sense result. Look, and it behaves like a particle.
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: Do not look, and it behaves like both possibilities at once.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: The mathematics describes this perfectly, with no ambiguity whatsoever. The
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: quantum state contains both paths. And it evolves smoothly and deterministically,
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: according to an equation Erwin Schrodinger wrote down in 1925.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: That equation is arguably the most successful piece of mathematics
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: ever devised. Every transistor in the device you are watching
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: this on works because it is right. The trouble is
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: what physics bolted onto it afterwards. The standard teachings, associated
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen School, says that when
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: a measurement occurs, the state collapses. All the possibilities except
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: one vanish instantly, at random, and the one that survives
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: is what you observe. And that is the scandal at
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: the heart of the most successful theory in history. Nothing
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: in the mathematics describes collapse. There is no equation for it.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: There is no specification of what counts as a measurement,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: how big a device has to be to cause one,
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: how long it takes, or what physically happens. It was
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: added by hand because it matched the results. Generations of
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: students have asked when exactly the collapse occurs and been told,
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: in effect, to stop asking and calculate. Everett's move was
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: breathtakingly simple. He asked what happens if you do not
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: add collapse. If the equation just keeps running, for everything,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: including the measuring device, including the laboratory, including the physicist.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: The answer falls straight out. The particle goes through both slits.
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: The detector registers both outcomes. And the physicist, who is
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: made of particles obeying the same equation, ends up in
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: a superposition too. One version of her saw the left slit.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: One version saw the right. Neither is more real than
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: the other. Neither can perceive the other because each is
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: entangled with a different outcome and they no longer share
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: a description. The universe does not choose. The universe branches
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: and you branch with it. Everett called it the relative
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: state formulation. Somebody else later called it many worlds, which
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: is catchier and has done the idea both enormous favors
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: and enormous damage. because it makes people picture parallel worlds
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: sitting side by side in a warehouse somewhere. That is
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: not the claim. The claim is that there is one
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: quantum state, one wave function, describing everything, and it contains
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: structures that no longer interact with each other. The worlds
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: are not separate places. They are separate parts of the
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: same object. He took it to Copenhagen to present to Bohr,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: and it went badly. Bohr's circle was not interested. Everett was,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: by all accounts, wounded by it, and he left academic
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: physics entirely for a career in military operations research, working
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: on nuclear war strategy, which is a bleak second act
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: for a man who had just proposed that everything happens.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: He drank heavily, smoked constantly, and died of a heart
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: attack at 51. He had instructed his family to throw
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: his ashes in the rubbish. They did. His son, who
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: grew up in that house and later became the musician
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: who records as Eels, has spoken publicly about growing up
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: with a father who barely spoke, and whose greatest idea
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: was ignored in his lifetime. Everett died in 1982. Within
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: about a decade, his interpretation was on its way to
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: becoming one of the leading positions in the field. What
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: changed was decoherence, and this is the piece of physics
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: that made the whole thing respectable. So let me give
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: it to you properly. The obvious objection to Everett is,
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: if I am in a superposition, Why do I never
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: feel like it? Why does the world look sharp and single?
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: The answer, worked out by Dieter Zay in the early
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: 1970s and developed by Wojciech Zurek and others through the 80s,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: is that superposition is not fragile because it is delicate.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: It is fragile because it leaks. Any system interacting with
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: its environment and everything interacts with its environment spreads its
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: quantum state into that environment almost instantaneously. Air molecules bounce
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: off it. Photons scatter from it. Thermal radiation carries information away.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: Within an unimaginably short time, the information about which branch
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: you are in is smeared across billions of particles, and
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: the branches lose the ability to interfere with each other.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: Not because they were destroyed, because the information required to
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: bring them back together has escaped into the universe and
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: cannot be gathered back. Decoherence is not a theory anymore.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: It is measured. Experimentalists can tune the coupling between a
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: quantum system and its environment and watch interference die on schedule.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: Exactly as the equations predict, it is the single biggest
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: engineering obstacle in quantum computing. which is an entire industry
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: built around fighting it. And here is what Decoherence gives Everett.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: It explains, with no extra assumptions, why the world looks classical,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: why branches do not talk to each other, and why
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: you only ever experience one outcome. You do not need collapse.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: You need the equation and the fact that you are large, warm,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: and made of many parts. So when people tell you
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: the many worlds idea is fringe internet stuff, they have
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: it backwards. It is what you get by taking the
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: most tested equation in physics literally and refusing to add
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: anything to it. David Deutsch, one of the founders of
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: quantum computing, argues that it is the only interpretation that
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: makes sense of what a quantum computer is actually doing.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: Sean Carroll defends it in public constantly. Max Tegmark supports it.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: Informal polls at foundations conferences over the years have repeatedly
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: put it in the top two or three positions, sometimes
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: beating Copenhagen. Now, since I promised to widen these ideas
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: rather than flatten them, let me tell you what the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: many worlds picture would mean if it is true, because
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: it is much stranger than the sci-fi version. Branching is
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: not rare. It is not something that happens when a
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: physicist opens a box. It is happening constantly, everywhere, at
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: every interaction between particles, which is to say uncountably many
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: times per second in every cubic centimeter of the universe,
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: including the inside of your body. The number of branches
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: is not a number. Every time a photon from the
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: sun scatters off a leaf, the structure of reality has thickened.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: Which means that if this is right, there is a
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: version of the world where the collider quenched again. A
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: version where the card was drawn. A version where the
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: superconducting supercollider was funded and the Higgs was found in
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: Texas in the 90s. Versions where you did not click
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: on this video. And a version, somewhere in that unfathomable structure,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: where a children's book series was spelled with an E.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: So the internet was right? No, and I want to
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: be really precise here. because this is the most important
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: sentence in the chapter, and it is the reason many
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: worlds cannot rescue the Mandela effect. Decoherence is not a curtain.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: It is not a wall with a door in it.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: It is the physical statement that the information needed to
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: connect two branches has been dispersed into the environment irreversibly.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: There is no channel. There is no leakage. There is
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: no mechanism. Not a weak one. Not an exotic one.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: not one that a machine could strengthen, by which a
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: memory formed in one branch could arrive in another. The
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: very same physics that makes many worlds work is the
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: physics that makes communication between them impossible in principle. It
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: is worse than that, and more elegant. If branches could
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: exchange information, we would see it, immediately and obviously, as
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: interference in large systems. That is exactly what interference is.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: The absence of the ghostly stripes in everyday life is
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: the direct experimental measurement of how thoroughly sealed the branches are.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: Every time you look at a solid object and it
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: stays where it is, you are watching that seal hold.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: So many worlds does not give you a haunted memory.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: It gives you something colder and I think far more affecting.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: It says the other versions are real, and that they
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: are permanently, mathematically, unreachably not yours. That is the honest
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: scientific position, and if this were a debunking video I
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: would stop here and take a bow. But there is
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: a further step, and it is the one that genuinely
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: unsettles me, because it takes many worlds and applies it
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: not to memory but to survival. It was proposed by
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: serious people. It has been discussed in print by Max Tegmark.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: It is unfalsifiable in a way that I will not
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: hide from you. It says this, if every outcome happens,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: then in every situation where you might have died, some
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: branch contains a version of you that did not. And
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: since you cannot experience the branches where you are gone,
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: you will always, without exception, find yourself in a branch
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: where things worked out. Not because you were lucky. Because
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: the versions who were not lucky are not available have
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: the experience now apply that to a machine that some
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: people believed might end the world apply it to a
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: magnet that failed nine days in and a piece of
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: bread in a substation and a survey of collision after
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: collision in which the universe stubbornly continued to exist if
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: you are only ever able to observe the timeline in
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: which you survived then survival is not evidence of safety
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: It is not evidence of anything at all. Chapter 6.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: The universe of survivors there is an argument in physics
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: so uncomfortable that most people who understand it prefer not
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: to think about it, and the ones who do think
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: about it tend to lower their voices. It is not
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: a conspiracy theory. It has been discussed in print by
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: and it follows from the previous chapter with almost no
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: additional assumptions. It goes by an unpleasant name, quantum suicide,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: and I am going to explain it carefully, because the
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: sloppy version is genuinely dangerous nonsense, and the careful version
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: is a serious problem in the philosophy of physics. Set
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: up a machine. It reads a quantum event, something with
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: a 50-50 outcome at the particle level, and depending on
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: the result, it either does nothing or ends the life
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: of the person sitting in front of it, instantly, faster
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: than nerve conduction. Now, according to many worlds, both outcomes occur.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: The branch structure divides. In one branch, the person is dead.
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: In the other, the person is alive and heard a click.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: Ask the question from the inside. What does the person experience?
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: They cannot experience the dead branch, because there is nobody
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: there to experience anything. Experience requires an experiencer. So from
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: the first-person point of view, the only available outcome is
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: the click. Run the machine again. Same result, from the inside.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: Run it a thousand times. From the outside, in almost
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: every branch, there is a body and a sombre funeral.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: From the inside, from the only perspective that can be occupied,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: there is a person who has heard a thousand clicks
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: in a row, and is now looking at a statistical impossibility.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: That is the argument. It requires many worlds to be true,
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: it requires consciousness to track branches in a particular way,
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: and it is not a suggestion that anyone should ever
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: act on. But it exposes something about the nature of
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: evidence that does not go away even if you reject
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: the setup, and that something is called observer selection. Here
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: is the plain English version, and it applies to all
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: of us, right now, with no machine involved. You can
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: only ever find yourself in a situation compatible with your
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: own existence. Every observation you make is filtered through the
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: requirement that there was somebody there to make it, which
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: means certain categories of danger are structurally invisible to you.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: Not hidden, not covered up. Invisible in principle, because the
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: evidence of them would consist of your own absence. Brandon Carter,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: an Australian physicist, formalized versions of this reasoning in the 1970s,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: and it has been argued over ever since. most thoroughly
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. It sounds like wordplay. It
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: is not. It has teeth, and the teeth show up
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: when you try to estimate risks. Suppose you want to
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: know how dangerous a certain kind of catastrophe is. Normally,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: you look at the historical record. It has not happened. Therefore,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: it is rare. Therefore, we are probably fine. That reasoning
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: works for earthquakes and plane crashes because both outcomes leave
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: observers behind to count. Now try it for a catastrophe
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: that would have wiped out all observers. The historical record
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: shows it has never happened. But the historical record could
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: not possibly show anything else. Any planet with anyone standing
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: on it, in any universe, at any time, will have
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: a record showing that the observer-ending event never occurred no
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: matter how frequently it occurs across reality as a whole.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: The evidence is guaranteed in advance, which means it carries
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: no information. This has a name in the literature. Anthropic shadow.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: Certain risks cast a shadow over their own history, and
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: you cannot estimate their frequency from where you are standing.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: Now bring it back to the machine under the wheat field,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: because this is where the internet's instincts, though wrong in
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: their details, brushed against something real. The most common reassurance
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: offered about the Collider is the cosmic ray argument from
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: Chapter 4, and I meant everything I said about it.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: It is genuinely strong. But notice the version of the
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: safety argument that is not strong, the one you hear casually,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: we ran it and nothing happened, so it is safe.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: Under observer selections, that sentence carries much less weight than
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: it sounds like it does. If a run had ended everything,
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: there would be no branch containing people saying so. The
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: surviving observers are guaranteed to be reporting survival. This is
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: not my clever reframing. It is one of the reasons
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: careful risk analysts insisted that the safety case for the
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: collider be built on cosmic rays and neutron stars instead.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: rather than on the fact that previous runs went fine.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: Astrophysical evidence works because it does not depend on our
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: being here to see it. Neutron stars are still neutron
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: stars whether or not anyone is looking, and their continued
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: existence constrains vacuum decay in a way that our continued
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: existence does not. Follow this a little further, and it
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: does something strange to the Nielsen and Ninemeyer idea from
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: Chapter 1. The two physicists who suggested the future was
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: sabotaging the Higgs. Their model involved backward causation, which is exotic.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: But there is a version of their observation that needs
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: no time travel at all. If certain runs of certain
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: machines lead to branches with no observers, then the branches
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: that contain physicists' writing papers will systematically be the ones
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: where the machine kept failing for mundane reasons. Not because
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: anything reaches backward. Because the alternative branches are quiet, a
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: machine that keeps breaking and a machine that keeps ending
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: worlds look identical from the inside of the branches where
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: anyone is left to look. I want to be clear
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: that I do not believe this is happening at the
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider, and neither do the physicists who take
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: observer selection seriously. The cosmic ray argument closes that door properly.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: But look at the shape of the reasoning. because it
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: explains why this whole family of ideas is so hard
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: to kill. It is not that the evidence is against them.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: It is that this particular class of claim is built
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: so that evidence cannot reach it. Which brings me to
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: the part of this chapter I care about most, and
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: the reason I am not going to sell you this
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: idea despite having just made it sound compelling. It is unfalsifiable,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: and unfalsifiable is not a synonym for probably true. Any
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: observation whatsoever is consistent with observer selection. Machine works, machine breaks,
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: world continues, world does not. Every possible outcome slots neatly
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: into the framework. Karl Popper's whole point, made in the 1930s,
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: was that a theory which forbids nothing tells you nothing.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: A theory earns its keep by sticking its neck out,
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: by saying this specific thing will never be seen, and
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: then surviving the attempt to see it. Newton's gravity stuck
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: its neck out and got its head cut off by
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: the orbit of Mercury. Einstein's replacement stuck its neck out further,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: predicted that starlight would bend by a precise amount during
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: an eclipse, and survived in 1919. That is the difference
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: between physics and a story that fits. So the honest
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: scorecard on this chapter is uncomfortable in both directions. Observer
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: selection is real reasoning, used by real cosmologists, and it
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: genuinely undermines a category of casual safety argument that most
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: people find persuasive. And it also cannot be tested, cannot
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: be measured, and explains every outcome equally. Which means that
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: on its own, it should not move your beliefs about anything.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: I find that combination almost unbearable. and I think that
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: discomfort is the correct response rather than something to be resolved.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: Some true things may be permanently unverifiable. There is no
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: rule that reality has to be arranged for our convenience.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: But there is one more layer here, and it is
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: the layer that gets us out of philosophy and back
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: into the laboratory, which is where I would rather be.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: Everything in this chapter and the last one has assumed
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: a particular direction. Causes come before effects, the branches spread forward,
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: the past is fixed, the future is open, and information
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: flows from one to the other in the order you
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: would expect. That assumption is not written into the fundamental equations.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: It is not there. If you take the basic laws
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: of physics, mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum field theory, and reverse the
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: direction of time, they work just as well. Nothing in
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: them cares which way you run the film. The one
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: exception involves an obscure asymmetry in the decay of certain particles.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: First spotted in 1964 and studied at the Collider today,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: and even that does not give you the arrow you feel.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: The forward flow of time is not in the laws.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: It is something else, something added, something that has to
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: be explained rather than assumed. And that opens a door
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: that sounds absurd and is not. If the equations do
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: not care about direction, is it possible for an influence
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: to run backward? Could a choice made now affect what
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: already happened? That question is not rhetorical. It has been
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: tested in laboratories repeatedly with photons and beam splitters and detectors.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: The experiments are called delayed choice. and the results are
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: exactly as strange as the name suggests. Physicists have made
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: a decision after a particle had already committed to its path,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: and found the particle's earlier behavior matching the later decision.
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: Those results are real, reproduced, and undisputed. What they mean
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: is one of the great arguments in modern physics. And
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: it is the closest thing to time travel that has
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: ever appeared inside a working laboratory. Chapter 7 The Arrow
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: That Points Both Ways in 1978, the physicist John Archibald
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: Wheeler proposed an experiment designed to embarrass reality. Wheeler is
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: the man who popularized the term black hole, taught Richard Feynman,
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: and had a gift for finding the exact question that
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: makes a comfortable idea fall apart. His question here was
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: simple and vicious. If a particle decides whether to behave
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: like a wave or a particle based on how you
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: measure it, what happens if you wait until after it
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: has already passed the point of decision and only then
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: choose your measurement? Let me set it up in a
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: way you can picture. Send a single photon into an
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: apparatus where it can take two possible paths. If you
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: leave both paths open and recombine them at the end,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: you get interference, the signature of a wave that traveled
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: both routes. If you place detectors on the paths to
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: see which one it used, you get particle behavior, no interference,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: one route only. Wheeler's twist was to make the choice late.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: Leave the apparatus in one configuration while the photon is
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: in flight. And then, after the photon is past the
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: split and committed, switch the configuration. The photon has already
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: done whatever it was going to do. The decision comes afterward.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: The experiment was performed. It has been performed many times,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: with better and better technology, most famously by a French
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: team led by Alain Aspect and Jean-Francois Roche in 2007,
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: using a random choice generated after the photon entered the apparatus.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: The result, the photon always matches the later choice. Set
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: it up for interference late, and the photon behaves as
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: though it took both paths all along. set it up
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: to detect the path late, and it behaves as though
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: it committed to one route from the start. The behavior
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: in the earlier part of the experiment always corresponds to
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: a decision that had not yet been made when that
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: part happened. Wheeler went further and pointed out that you
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: can run this on a cosmic scale without building anything.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: Light from a distant quasar, bent around a massive galaxy
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: on its way to us, has two possible routes. That
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: light left its source billions of years ago. If we choose, tonight,
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: how to combine the beams, we are making the delayed
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: choice about a journey that started before the Earth existed.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: Wheeler's phrase for it stuck in my head the first
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: time I read it, we are participants in the making
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: of the past. Now let us do the honest work,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: because this is exactly the point where a certain kind
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: of video says therefore time travel and moves on, and
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: I am not going to insult you like that. There
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: are two ways to read those results, and both are
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: held by serious physicists. The first reading says nothing travels backward.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: What travels backward is our description. The photon never had
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: a definite property to be changed, so nothing was changed.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: The wave function is not a thing in the world,
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: it is a catalog of what can be predicted, and
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: updating a catalog late is not causing anything. On this view,
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: the delayed choice experiment is not spooky. It is a
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: demonstration that our habit of imagining a particle having a
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: definite hidden history is a habit, and a bad one.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: That is probably the majority position, and it is a
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: good one, and it comes with a cost. It requires
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: you to accept that between measurements there is no fact
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: of the matter about what happened. Not unknown. Not hidden. Absent,
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: the universe, on this reading, does not keep a complete
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: record of itself. The second reading takes the arrow seriously
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: and says influences can genuinely run backward in time at
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: the microscopic level. This is called retrocausality, and it is
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: not a fringe embarrassment. It has a lineage. In 1945,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: Wheeler and Feynman built a theory of electromagnetism in which
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: every charge emits waves both forward and backward in time,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: and the backward ones cancel out except in ways that
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: produce the familiar behavior of radiation. It works. It was
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: never adopted as standard, but it was never shown to
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: be wrong either. Feynman's own diagrams, the visual language every
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: particle physicist now uses, represent antimatter as ordinary matter traveling
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: backward in time. That is not a metaphor bolted on afterwards.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: It is how the mathematics is written. and every calculation
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: done at the collider uses it. Then, in 1986, John
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: Kramer proposed the transactional interpretation, in which a quantum event
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: is a handshake. The emitter sends an offer wave forward
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: in time, the absorber sends a confirmation wave backward, and
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: the transaction completes across the interval. The event is not
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: a thing that happens at one moment, It is an
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: agreement between two moments. And more recently, physicists including Ho
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: Price and Ken Wharton have argued that retrocausality may be
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: the cleanest way to explain quantum entanglement without giving up locality,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: the principle that things only affect their immediate neighborhood. Their
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: argument is that we are willing to accept spooky action
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: across space precisely because we refuse to consider ordinary action
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: across time. and that this preference is a prejudice rather
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: than a result. So there is a real, live, published
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: research program in which the future has a say in
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: the past. Which brings us right back to Chapter 1,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: and the paper that opened this video. Nielsen and Ninomiya
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: were not inventing backward causation out of nothing. They were
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: taking an existing thread in theoretical physics and pulling it hard.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: Their model was extreme, and most physicists think it is wrong,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: but it sits at the end of a road that
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: runs through Wheeler, Feynman and Kramer, and that road is paved.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: Now the essential caveat, and I want to give it
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: real weight because it is what separates this from wishful thinking.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: Not one of these frameworks lets you send a message backward.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: The reason is beautiful, and it is called the no
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: signaling theorem. In every one of these experiments, the strange
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: correlations only become visible after you compare results from both ends.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: Look at either half on its own, without the other
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: half's data, and you see nothing but random noise with
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: exactly the statistics you would expect. The pattern exists in
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: the correlation, not in either stream. Which means to extract
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: any information about the late choice from the early data,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: you need the late data. and the late data can
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: only reach you by ordinary means, at or below the
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: speed of light, forward in time. The universe permits the
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: correlation and forbids the telegram. Every attempt to build a
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: scheme that beats this has failed. And the failure is
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: not technological. It is structural. So the honest statement is this. Retrocausality,
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: in the sense of a link between later and earlier events,
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: is on the table in mainstream physics and is being
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: actively defended. Retrocausality in the sense of anyone, human or
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: machine or civilization, sending a usable signal into the past
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: is not, and the barrier against it is one of
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: the sturdiest results we have. And that distinction matters enormously
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: for the topic of this video, because it draws a
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: precise line. If a piece of information from another version
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: of events reached your memory, It would be a signal.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: It would carry usable content. It would tell you a spelling.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly the thing that every framework we have,
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: forward or backward, classical or quantum, sealed shut. Which leaves
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: us in a strange position. We have now walked through
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: many worlds, observer selection, and backward causation. Three of the
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: most exotic ideas in physics. All of them real, all
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: of them defended by working scientists, and none of them
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: able to deliver what the internet needs them to deliver.
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: So let me change the question, because I think the
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: question has been wrong for six chapters. We have been
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: asking whether time could be altered, redirected, branched, or reversed.
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: Every one of those questions assumes that time is a
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: thing that flows, a river that could be dammed or diverted,
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: a current with a direction and a speed. Physics does
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: not contain that river. There is no equation in any
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: fundamental theory that describes time flowing. There is no term
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: for now. Relativity, which is our best and most exhaustively
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: confirmed theory of space and time, does not merely leave
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: the present moment out. It actively forbids it from being universal,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: because two observers moving relative to each other genuinely disagree
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: about which distant events are happening at the same time,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: and neither one is wrong. The thing you are most
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: certain of, the passage of the moment you are in
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: right now, the sensation of the present sliding forward, is
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: the one feature of time that has never appeared anywhere
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: in the mathematics of the universe. Einstein knew this, and
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: it troubled him for the rest of his life. When
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: his oldest friend died, he wrote a letter to the
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: family about it that I still cannot read without stopping
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: halfway through. Chapter 8. There is no now in March
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: of 1955, Michel Besso died. He had been Einstein's closest
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: friend since they were young men in Switzerland, the person
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: Einstein talked to while he was assembling special relativity, and
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: the only individual thanked by name in the 1905 paper
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: that changed physics forever. Einstein wrote to the Besso family.
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: The line everybody quotes is this, He meant it technically.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: Einstein died five weeks later, and he had spent the
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: rest of his life That was not poetry, and it
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: was not comfort dressed up as science. He meant it technically.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: Einstein died five weeks later, and he had spent the
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: last decades of his life arguing with philosophers about exactly this,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: insisting that the now they kept talking about had no
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: place in the theory he had built. So let me
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: show you why, because once you see it, the phrase
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: time shift stops meaning what you thought it meant, and
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: starts meaning something much more interesting. Special Relativity, 1905, rests
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: on one strange fact that has since been confirmed to
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: absurd precision. The speed of light is the same for
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: every observer, no matter how they are moving. Chase a
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: beam of light at nine-tenths of light speed, and it
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: still recedes from you at the full speed of light.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: Run away from it, same answer. This is not a
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: measurement error, it is how the universe is built. Follow
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: that through. and time and space have to bend to
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: accommodate it. A moving clock ticks slower, measurably, and we
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: have measured it. Fly atomic clocks around the world on
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: commercial aircraft, which was done in 1971, and they come
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: back disagreeing with the clocks that stayed home by exactly
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: the predicted amount. The satellite navigation in your phone would
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: drift by kilometers per day if the engineers did not
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: correct for both the speed of the satellites and the
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: weaker gravity they sit in. Time dilation is not a theory.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: It is a maintenance requirement. And at the collider, it
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: is not subtle. Muons are unstable particles that decay in
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: about two millionths of a second when at rest, accelerate
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: them close to light speed, and they survive long enough
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: to travel distances that should be impossible for them. Every
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: particle physics experiment on Earth relies on this working. and
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: it works every day to the decimal place. But here
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: is the consequence people skip, and it is the important one.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: If moving observers disagree about durations, they also disagree about simultaneity.
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: Two events that happen at the same moment according to
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: you are not simultaneous according to someone moving relative to you.
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: And this is not an illusion or a signaling delay.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: Neither of you is mistaken. There is no fact of
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: the matter about which distant events are happening now. The
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: philosopher Roger Penrose sharpened this into something called the Andromeda Paradox.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: And I think it is the most vertigo-inducing thought in
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: all of relativity. Two people walk past each other on
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: a street. One is strolling toward the Andromeda galaxy, the
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: other away from it. Because of their relative motion, their
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: planes of simultaneity tilt slightly. And because Andromeda is two
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: and a half million light years away, that tiny tilt translates,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: out there, into a difference of days. For one pedestrian,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: a fleet has already launched. For the other, the decision
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: has not yet been made. They are standing next to
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: each other, on the same pavement, at the same instant
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: of their own experience. Whose now is correct? The answer
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: relativity gives is that the question is malformed. There is
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: no universal present. There is no shared moment. Now is
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: a local convenience, not a feature of the universe. Which
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: leads to the picture most physicists working in relativity end
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: up accepting, formally or informally. It is called the block universe.
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: In this picture, space-time is a single four-dimensional structure containing
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: all events, past, present, and future, laid out and complete.
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: Your birth is at one location in that block. Your
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: death is at another. Both are simply there, in the
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: same sense that London and Tokyo are both there while
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: you stand in one of them. The block does not evolve.
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: It does not need to. Evolution is a description of
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: how things vary along one of its directions. You do
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: not move through time in this picture. You are extended
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: along it, a long thin shape in four dimensions. And
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: each cross section of that shape is a moment of you.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: And each of those moments contains memories of the moments
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: closer to one end. That is why you feel like
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: you are moving. The version of you at every point
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: has a record of the earlier points and none of
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: the later ones. And each of those versions reports the
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: sensation of being in the present, because that is what
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: having a memory feels like from the inside. Now I
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: want to be fair to the disagreement, because this is
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: not settled and I do not like videos that pretend otherwise.
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: There are serious physicists who reject the block. Lee Smolin
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: has argued at length that time is the most real
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: thing in the universe, and that the block picture is
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: a mathematical convenience mistaken for reality. Presentists in philosophy argue
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: that only the present exists. The debate is live, But
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: the block is where the mathematics points if you take
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: relativity at face value, and relativity has never once been wrong.
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: So here is where this lands on our topic, and
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: it is not what you would expect. The internet claims
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: a timeline was shifted, a change made somewhere, propagating outward,
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: altering what had already been. That claim assumes a very
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: specific model of time, a moving present, a fixed past
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: behind it, an open future ahead, and a mechanism that
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: could reach behind the moving edge and edit the record.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: Physics does not have the moving edge. There is no
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: edge to reach behind. In the block picture, the past
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: is not a place that has been finalized, because finalizing
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: implies a process, and processes happen in time, and there
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: is no meta-time in which the whole block could be revised.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: You cannot change the past for the same reason you
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: cannot change the number seven. It is not that it
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: is guarded. It is that changing it is not a
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: coherent operation. And that is more radical than the conspiracy.
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: Not less. The conspiracy says the timeline was altered. Relativity
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: says there is no such object as the timeline. No
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: single ordered sequence that everyone shares. And no now sweeping
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: along it. The internet imagined the tape being spliced. The
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: physics says there is no tape and no playhead, and
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: the sensation that there is one is generated inside your skull.
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: Which raises the question that has been waiting since I
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: mentioned Einstein's letter. If the flow of time is not
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: out there in the world, then it is in here,
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: in us. It is a construction. Something in the nervous
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: system produces the feeling of duration, the feeling of passage.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: the feeling that the moment is moving, and anything constructed
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: can be miscalibrated. That matters enormously, because there is one
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: claim in this entire subject that I have not addressed yet,
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: and it is the one that comes up most often,
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: in the most sincere way, from the most ordinary people.
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: Not portals. Not spelling. This one. Time feels faster now.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: It feels like it broke somewhere in the last 10
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: or 15 years. The days are normal, but the years
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: are gone. People say it constantly, they say it about
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: the same period, and they say it with a kind
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: of unease that has nothing to do with physics. I
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: am going to tell you something that surprised me while
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: researching this. That feeling is not imaginary. It has been
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: measured in controlled studies, and psychologists can now explain a
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: large part of it with mechanisms that are specific, testable,
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: and have been confirmed. It is one of the best
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: documented effects in this entire video. It has nothing to
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: do with a machine in Switzerland. It has to do
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: with what your brain uses to build a moment, and
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: what happens when you stop giving it new material. Chapter
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: 9 Why Time Feels Broken Think back to a summer
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: when you were seven years old. Not a specific day.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: The shape of it. That season had a length to it,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: a vastness, a sense that September was somewhere over the
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: horizon and might never actually arrive. Now think about last year.
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: For most adults, that comparison produces a small drop in
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: the stomach, and it is not nostalgia. It is a
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: real perceptual difference, and it is measurable. When researchers ask
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: people across age groups to estimate how quickly the last
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: decade passed, older participants consistently report faster passage. Ask them
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: about the last hour or the last week, and the
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: difference largely disappears. Short intervals feel roughly the same at
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: every age. It is the long ones that compress. So
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: something is happening, and it is happening to almost everybody,
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: and it accelerates as you get older. Let me take
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: you through what we actually know about why. Because there
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: are several mechanisms, they stack, and every one of them
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: has been sharpening in the exact period people point at.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: The oldest explanation is proportional. It is usually credited to
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: Paul Janet in the 19th century, and the idea is
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: that you judge a stretch of time against a the
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: total you have lived. A year is a seventh of
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: the life of a seven-year-old, an enormous slice. That same
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: year is a fortieth of the life of a 40-year-old.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: By this reckoning, the interval from 5 to 10 feels
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: comparable to the interval from 20 to 40. It is
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: a neat idea and It matches the direction of the effect,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: and on its own it is not enough. It predicts smooth,
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: gradual compression, and what people actually report is lumpy. Certain
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: years vanish, and certain years are enormous, and the proportional
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: model has nothing to say about which. The stronger explanation
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: comes from studying how memory builds the sense of duration
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: after the fact. And this is where it gets useful.
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: Your brain does not have a clock for long intervals.
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: What it does instead, when asked how long a period was,
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: is estimate based on how much distinct material it can
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: retrieve from that period. Rich, varied, novel experience lays down
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: many distinguishable memory traces. Repetitive experience lays down almost none.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: Because your brain, sensibly... does not store the 10,000th version
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: of an event it already has a template for. This
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: produces a cruel asymmetry that you have felt without naming it.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: A week of travel in an unfamiliar country feels endless
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: while you are living it and enormous in memory afterwards.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: A week of identical commutes feels tolerable while you live
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: it and, in memory, is simply not there. It did
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: not shorten. It failed to be recorded. Now compound that
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: across a life. Childhood is almost entirely novel. Every food
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: is a first food. Every root is an unknown root.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: The brain is laying down dense, distinguishable traces at a
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: furious rate, and when you look back, that period is
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: thick with retrievable material. So it reads as long. Adulthood
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: settles into routine, competence, the same streets, the same rooms,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: the same tasks performed by an expert who no longer
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: has to attend to them, and the memory record thins
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: out until whole years compress into a smear. There is
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: also a beautiful laboratory effect that supports this from the
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: other direction, called the oddball effect. Show someone a sequence
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: of identical images with an occasional different one mixed in,
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: and ask them to judge duration. The odd image is
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: consistently reported as lasting longer, even though every image is
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: displayed for exactly the same time. Novelty inflates duration. The
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: measurements are precise, and the effect is robust. Your sense
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: of time is not reading a clock. It is reading
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: how much processing just happened. Add the internal clock machinery,
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: which is real and chemical. Work on interval timing implicates
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: dopamine signaling in the striatum. and drugs that raise dopamine
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: make people underestimate intervals, while drugs that lower it do
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: the reverse. Body temperature affects it. Attention affects it enormously,
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: which is why a watched pot is agony and a
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: good conversation eats an evening. Emotional arousal affects it, which
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: is why people in car accidents report everything going into
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: slow motion, though careful experiments suggest that is memory density,
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: in hindsight, rather than genuinely enhanced perception during the event.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: So we have a system built from proportion, novelty, attention,
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: and neurochemistry, all of which vary, none of which is
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: calibrated against anything external, and all of which can be
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: pushed around. Now here is the part that puts a
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: date on it. When researchers studied time perception during the
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: pandemic years, the results were dramatic and consistent across countries.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: A large study in the United Kingdom, led by Ruth Ogden,
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: found that the overwhelming majority of people reported distorted time. Crucially,
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: it was not distortion in one direction. Some experienced enormous slowing.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: Some experienced days collapsing into each other. And the split
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: correlated with things like age, stress, social satisfaction, and how
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: much routine had been imposed. When you strip novelty out
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: of daily life and replace it with a single repeating template,
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: the machinery that estimates duration loses its raw material and
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: the record goes blank. That was a global experiment nobody designed,
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: and its results are exactly what the memory-based model predicts.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: Then look at the other thing that has changed in
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: the same period, and I say this without any hand-wringing
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: about screens. because the mechanism is specific rather than moralistic.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: Enormous portions of modern attention are now spent on media
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: designed to be maximally engaging and minimally distinctive. An hour
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: of scrolling generates high engagement and almost no episodic material.
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: You cannot retrieve it afterwards. Ask yourself what you looked
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: at on your phone last Tuesday evening, and the honest
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: answer is usually nothing at all. Not because you did nothing,
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: but because nothing was encoded. That is a machine for
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: deleting time from the record. And a very large number
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: of people started using one heavily in roughly the mid 2010s.
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: So when someone says time broke around 2012 or 2015
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: or whenever they place it, I do not think they
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: are confused and I do not think they are lying.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: I think they are reporting a real measurement of their
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: own experience with an incorrect attribution attached. The measurement is
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: that their years are producing fewer retrievable traces than their
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: years used to. That is true. That is happening. The
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: attribution to a collider is wrong, and it is wrong
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: in a way that is worth noticing, because the collider
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: explanation is oddly comforting. If a machine did it, nothing
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: is required of you. The real explanation is harder. because
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: it hands you responsibility. And here is where the science
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: becomes something you can actually use, which is not a
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: sentence I get to say often in a video about
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: particle physics. If the length of your life in memory
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: is a function of how much distinguishable material you lay down,
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: then the felt duration of your remaining years is not fixed.
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: It is partly under your control. Novelty is the lever,
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: new routes, new skills, new places, new people, anything that
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: forces your brain out of template mode and back into
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: recording mode. People who take up something difficult in middle
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: age routinely report that the year felt long, and by
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: this model, they are not imagining it. They generated more
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: of it. There is a version of this that I
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: find genuinely moving. Your subjective lifespan is not measured in years.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: It is measured in encoded experience. Two people can live
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: the same 80 years, and one of them will have
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: lived far more of it. Not metaphorically. In the only
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: accounting system you will ever have access to. So the
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: time shift is real, and it is the most personally
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: consequential thing in this entire video. And it is happening
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: inside a nervous system, rather than inside a tunnel. which
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: finally lets me ask the question I have been circling
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: since Chapter 1. If every claim in this subject has
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: a real phenomenon underneath it, and none of the real
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: phenomena involve the machine, then why the machine? Why did
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: all of this attach itself to a particular building in Geneva,
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: rather than to anything else? Part of the answer is
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: that CERN made it very easy. There is a statue
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: outside the main entrance of a Hindu deity in the
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: middle of a cosmic dance of destruction. There is a video,
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: filmed in that courtyard, of hooded figures performing what looks
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: like a ritual sacrifice. And CERN confirmed it was real
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: footage and opened an investigation. There is a logo that
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: a great many people are convinced contains three sixes. Every
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: one of those is true. None of them means what
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: the internet decided it means. and the actual explanations are,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: once again, better stories than the conspiracy. Chapter 10. The
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: Dancing God A.N.D. The Ritual in the Courtyard Walk up
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: to the main site in Mehrin, on the outskirts of Geneva,
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: and before you reach the buildings, you pass a statue
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: about two meters tall. It is a bronze figure of
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: a four-armed deity, standing inside a ring of flame, one
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: foot crushing a small crouching figure. hair flying outward, caught mid-dance.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: It is Shiva in the form called Nataraja, lord of
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: the dance. And it is genuinely there. It has been
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: there since 2004. Now if you were assembling a conspiracy
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: from scratch, and you needed one image to anchor it,
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: you could not do better. A god of destruction, in bronze,
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: standing guard outside the most powerful machine ever built, at
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: an institution devoted to taking apart the fabric of matter.
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: Nobody had to invent that. CERN accepted it, mounted it,
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: and put a plaque next to it. So here is
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: what it actually is. and I want to give you
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: the real story because it is a better one. The
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: statue was a gift from the government of India in 2004,
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: marking India's long-standing relationship with CERN as a participating nation.
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: Indian physicists and Indian institutions have been deeply involved in
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: the experiments there for decades, including major contributions to the
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: detectors themselves. It is a diplomatic gift, of the kind
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: that gets exchanged between countries constantly, and it happens to
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: be a very good one. Why that particular image? Because
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: of a book. In 1975, the physicist Fritjof Capra published
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: The Tao of Physics, which drew parallels between quantum theory
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: and eastern mysticism, and the Nataraja was his central image.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: Capra's argument is, which physicists have spent 50 years arguing about,
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: was that the dance of Shiva, the endless cycle of
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: creation and destruction, resembles what particle physics had discovered about
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: matter at small scales. Particles are not permanent little balls.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: They are created and annihilated constantly, appearing out of fields
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: and vanishing back into them, in a continuous churn that
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: never stops. That parallel is on the plaque. It is
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: quoted directly. CERN is not hiding the connection. They put
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: the connection in bronze and wrote it down in English
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: next to the statue, which is a strange way to
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: run a secret. And I will say something in defense
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: of the image, because I think it is more apt
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: than the physicists who accepted it may have realized. In
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: that dance, destruction is not evil. It is the necessary
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: counterpart of creation. And the two are the same motion
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: viewed from different sides. That is, as it happens, a
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: decent description of a particle collision. You annihilate two protons
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: in order to bring into existence things that could not
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: otherwise exist. The Higgs boson they found in 2012 had
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: to be created out of the destruction of the things
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: that made it. If you were choosing a myth to
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: put outside that building, you would struggle to find one
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: that fits better. Now the video, because this is the
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: one that genuinely surprised people, and the one where the
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: honest answer is stranger than the debunk. In 2016, footage
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: appeared online, filmed from an upper window overlooking that courtyard
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: at night. Figures in black hooded robes gather around the statue.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: They perform something choreographed. A woman lies down on the ground.
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: One figure raises a knife. Then the camera shakes, the
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: person filming swears in shock, and the footage cuts. CERN's
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: response was not a denial. They confirmed the footage was
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: filmed on their premises, said it was a prank carried
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: out by people with access to the site, stated that
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: such behavior was unacceptable, and announced an internal investigation. So,
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: real place, real robes, real knife prop, real staff... confirmed
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: by the institution. That is not a debunk, that is
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: a confirmation with a boring adjective attached. And honestly, if
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: you spend any time around physicists, the prank explanation is
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: not merely plausible, it is almost inevitable. This is a
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: community whose sense of humor runs to naming a particle
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: the Oh My God particle, whose detectors are named after
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: Greek mythological figures, and which has spent 20 years being
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: told by the internet that they are summoning demons. Put
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: a few hundred young researchers on a campus with a
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: statue of a destroyer god that everyone jokes about, and
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: someone is going to put on a robe. The remarkable
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: part is that it took until 2016 for a video
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: to leak. Then there is the logo, which is my
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: favorite of these because it is so easy to check.
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: The CERN logo is a set of interlocking circles with
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: lines through them. A widespread claim is that these form
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: three sixes, a hidden mark. Look at the actual mark
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: and what you see is a schematic of accelerator rings
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: with beam lines feeding into them, which is what the
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: organization is. The original design was drawn in the 1960s,
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: went through revisions, and represents exactly what it depicts. The
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: number of rings has varied across versions of the logo.
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: which is inconvenient for a numerological reading that requires exactly three.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: And there is a mundane detail that quietly finishes the argument.
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: If you were going to hide a mark of the
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: beast in your corporate identity, you would presumably not then
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: spend 60 years publishing every experimental result, every dataset, and
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: every internal report on a public website, host school groups
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: on tours through the tunnel, and invent the World Wide
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: Web and give it away for free. which CERN did
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: in 1989 through Tim Berners-Lee. Without patenting it, the organization
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: most accused of secrecy is the one that built the
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: technology this accusation travels on, and then declined to charge
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: anyone for it. So all three of the big symbolic
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: claims turn out to be real objects with unremarkable explanations.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: And that combination, real thing plus boring reason, is precisely
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: the fuel that keeps this going. Because the real thing
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: is verifiable, and the boring reason feels like a cover story.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: Which brings me to the question I actually want to
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: spend this chapter on, and it is not about CERN
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: at all. Why does this happen every single time? Because
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: it does. It is not unique to Geneva, and it
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: is not a product of social media. In the 19th century,
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: When the first railways began carrying passengers at previously impossible speeds,
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: physicians published warnings that the human body might not survive
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: traveling at 30 miles an hour, and there were widespread
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: beliefs that the speed would derange the mind. When electric
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: lighting arrived, there were serious public fears about what it
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: would do to sleep, to morality, to the natural order.
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: The Large Hadron Collider's predecessor at Brookhaven, the Relativistic Heavy
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: Ion Collider, faced lawsuits and headlines about creating strangelets that
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: would convert the Earth. Before that, a number of scientists
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: at Los Alamos genuinely calculated, and I mean genuinely, whether
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: the first atomic test might ignite the atmosphere. Hans Bethe
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: worked out that it could not. Enrico Fermi took bets
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: on it the morning of the test, which is the
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: darkest joke in the history of physics. There is a pattern.
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: When human beings build something that operates at the boundary
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: of what is understood, we generate mythology around it. And
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: the mythology is always about doorways, gods, forbidden knowledge, and
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: the ending of the world. Always, the Tower of Babel
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: is the same story with bricks. And I do not
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: think that is stupidity. I think it is a reasonable
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: response to a real situation. Most people cannot verify what
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: happens inside that tunnel. Neither can I, not directly. What
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: I can do is follow the papers, check the reasoning,
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: look at whether independent groups in competing countries confirm each other,
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: and notice that the results are published in a form
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: that would let a rival tear them apart. That is
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: what trust in science actually is. It is not faith
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: in scientists. It is confidence in a process specifically designed
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: for a world where everyone involved would love to prove
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: everyone else wrong. But that process is invisible from outside.
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: What is visible is a hole in the ground, a
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: budget with a lot of zeros, a statue of a
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: destroyer god, and a group of people using words nobody
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: else understands. Mythology fills gaps. It always has. The gap
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: here is enormous. And here is the thing that redeems
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: all of it, and the reason this chapter is not
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: a lecture about credulity. The instinct that something extraordinary is
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: going on in there is correct. Something extraordinary is going
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: on in there. And in the last 15 years, on
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: more than one occasion, the data coming out of that
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: machine has genuinely appeared to break the laws of physics.
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: Not in a rumour. In papers, at press conferences, with
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: error bars and significance levels. In results that made hundreds
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: of theorists drop what they were doing and start writing.
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: Particles that arrived before they should have been able to.
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: A bump in a graph that spawned 500 papers in
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: six months. A measurement that contradicted the entire standard model
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: and has never been fully resolved. Some of those ghosts
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: were killed. One of them, as of the time I
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: am making this, is still standing. Chapter 11. The ghosts
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: in the data on on the 22nd of September, 2011.
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: A research collaboration called Opera announced that they had measured
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: neutrinos traveling faster than light. Understand what that sentence meant.
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: The speed of light is not a speed limit in
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: the way a motorway has a speed limit. It is
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: the conversion factor between space and time, welded into the
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: structure of relativity. And if anything exceeds it, causality itself
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: comes apart. Because in some reference frame, the effect precedes
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: the cause. Beating light is not a record. It is
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: the end of the framework. The measurement came from firing
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: a beam of neutrinos from CERN through the crust of
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: the Earth to a detector 730 kilometers away in a
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: mountain laboratory in Italy. Neutrinos barely interact with matter, so
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: they go straight through rock as though it were not there.
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: The team timed the journey and found the particles arriving
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: about 60 nanoseconds earlier than light would have. Now watch
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: what the scientists actually did, because this is the part
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: that never gets told properly. They did not hold a
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: triumphant press conference declaring Einstein overthrown. They spent months hunting
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: for their own mistake, failed to find it, and then
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: published the results specifically asking the rest of the world
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: to find the error for them. The spokesperson said plainly
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: that they were not claiming to have broken relativity and
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: that they wanted independent scrutiny. The physics community responded with
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: a wave of septicism so uniform it was almost funny.
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: Nobody believed it. including most of the people who had
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: measured it. In February of 2012, they found it. A
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: fiber optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to a computer
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: was not fully screwed in. A loose connector worth a
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: few dollars introduced a timing offset. There was also a
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: clock oscillator running slightly fast, pulling in the other direction.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: Tighten the cable, redo the measurement, and the neutrinos arrive
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: exactly on time. The head of the collaboration, Antonio Ereditato, resigned.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: And I have complicated feelings about that, because as far
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: as I can tell, his crime was doing science correctly
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: in public. He published an anomaly he could not explain,
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: invited the world to check it, and the world found
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: the fault, which is precisely the system working. The cost
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: of that transparency was his job. That is the first ghost.
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: Here is the second, and it is the one that
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: shows you what physicists are actually like when they smell blood.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: In December of 2015, both major detectors at the collider,
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: ATLAS and CMS, independently reported a small excess of events
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: in which collisions produced two photons carrying a combined energy
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: of around 750 giga electron volts. A bump. A tiny
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: hill on a graph where the standard model predicts a
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 1: smooth slope. Two independent detectors run by rival teams who
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: do not share data seeing a bump in the same place.
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: What happened next was one of the great stampedes in
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: the history of theoretical physics. Within six months, more than
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: 500 papers had been written about it. New particles were proposed.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: Extra dimensions were invoked. Whole families of models were constructed
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: to accommodate a bump that had not been confirmed. Physicists
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: canceled holidays. Careers were briefly redirected. By August of 2016,
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: with more data collected, the bump was gone. It had
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: been a statistical fluctuation, the kind that appears when you
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: look at enough graphs. And every one of those 500
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: papers became an artifact of a moment of collective hope.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: I love that episode more than almost anything else in
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: this subject because it is such an honest picture of
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: what these people are like. The stereotype says scientists defend orthodoxy.
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: The reality is that several hundred of the smartest people
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: alive dropped everything and sprinted toward a chance that the
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: standard model was wrong because being the person who breaks
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: it is the greatest prize in the field. They do
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: not want the textbook to be right They are trying
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: to kill it, constantly, and it keeps surviving. Third ghost,
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: and this one lived longer. For about a decade, the
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: LHCb experiment reported that a certain type of particle decay
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: was misbehaving. The standard model insists on a principle called
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: lepton universality, which says that electrons, muons, and tau particles
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: are identical in every respect except mass. and that the
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: forces treat them exactly the same. LHCb measured how often
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: certain beauty quarks decayed into electrons versus muons, and the
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: ratio kept coming out wrong. Muons were appearing less often
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: than they should. It reached around three standard deviations, which
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: in particle physics means interesting, but not yet real. Theorists
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: got excited. New forces were proposed to explain it, Particles
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: called leptocorks were dusted off, and for a while this
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: looked like the crack everyone had been waiting for. In
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: December of 2022, LHCb published a much more careful reanalysis,
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: with better control of how electrons are identified in the detector,
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: which turns out to be a genuinely difficult experimental problem.
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: The anomaly shrank into agreement with the standard model. The
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: team who killed it were the same team who found it. Fourth,
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: in 2022, the CDF collaboration in the United States published
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: a measurement of the mass of the W. boson, a
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: carrier of the weak force, using old data analyzed with
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: painstaking care. Their result disagreed with the standard model prediction
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: by about seven standard deviations, which is not a hint,
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: it is a scream. It also disagreed with every other
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: measurement including subsequent ones from ATLAS and LHCb, which sit
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: comfortably with the prediction. Nobody has fully explained the discrepancy.
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: It is most likely something subtle in the analysis, and
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: it is still unresolved. And then there is the muon,
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: which has been the most persistent anomaly of them all.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: Muons behave like heavy electrons, and they wobble in a
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: magnetic field at a rate that depends on every particle
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: in existence, including ones we have not discovered, because those
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: unknown particles flicker in and out of the vacuum around
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: the muon and nudge it. Measure the wobble precisely enough
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: and you are effectively taking a census of reality itself.
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: Experiments beginning at CERN decades ago and continued at Fermilab
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: in the United States found the wobble disagreeing with prediction,
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: which would mean unknown particles exist. The theoretical prediction, however,
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: turned out to be harder to calculate than expected, and
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: different methods of computing it have disagreed with each other.
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: That argument has been narrowing over the past few years,
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: and may well be settled by the time you watch this,
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: so treat my summary as a snapshot rather than a verdict.
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: Now let me pull the pattern out, because the pattern
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: is the point. Every one of those anomalies was found, published, attacked,
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: and either killed or left honestly open. The killing was
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: done by the field itself, usually by the same people
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: who had the most to gain from it being real.
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: There is no case here of an inconvenient result being buried.
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: The results were paraded and then dismantled in public by
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: rivals with every incentive to be brutal. That is why
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: I trust it, not because physicists are noble, because they
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: are competitive, and the structure of the enterprise turns that
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: competitiveness into a filter. So five ghosts, four dead or dying,
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: and one more I have been saving. Because it is
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: not a statistical fluctuation, and it will not be killed
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: by better analysis. It is the oldest anomaly in physics,
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: it is completely unexplained. And it is far more alarming
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: than anything the internet has ever accused this machine of.
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: You should not exist. When energy converts into matter, it
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: produces matter and antimatter in equal amounts. We do this
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: constantly at the collider and watch it happen. Antimatter is
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: identical to matter with opposite charge, and when the two meet,
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: they annihilate completely into light. In the first instance after
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: the Big Bang, the universe was pure energy converting into particles.
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: By that rule, it should have produced exactly equal quantities
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: of matter an antimatter, which should have met, annihilated, and
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: left a universe containing nothing but photons. No galaxies. no planets,
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: no people. A vast, evenly lit, permanently empty cosmos. Instead,
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: there is a universe made of matter, with essentially no
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: antimatter anywhere in it, and we can tell because the
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: boundary between a region of matter and a region of
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: antimatter is would blaze with annihilation radiation, and we see
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: no such boundaries anywhere. So something broke the symmetry. For
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: every billion antimatter particles, there must have been a billion
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: and one particles of matter. Everything that exists, every star,
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: every atom in your body, is the leftover from that
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: one part in a billion excess. We know a mechanism
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: exists that treats matter and antimatter differently. It was discovered
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: in 1964, and it is called CP violation, and the
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: collider studies it intensely. LHCb was built substantially for this purpose,
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: and in 2025, the collaboration reported observing the effect in baryons,
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: the class of particle that protons and neutrons belong to,
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: for the first time. And here is the problem that
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: has stood for 60 years. The amount of CP violation
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: in the standard model is far too small, not slightly short,
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: off by many orders of magnitude from what is needed
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: to explain why there is anything here at all. That
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: is the real anomaly at CERN. Not a portal, not
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 1: a timeline. The fact that the universe contains matter is,
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 1: by our best theory, impossible, and we have known this
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: for six decades. And it is written openly in every textbook,
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 1: and nobody has solved it. The conspiracy says they are
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: hiding something enormous. They are not hiding it. They published it.
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: It is that our best description of reality forbids reality,
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: and the machine was built, in part, to find out why.
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter 12. What we actually built everything you have ever seen, touched, tasted,
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: or measured. Every star in every photograph ever taken, every
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 1: galaxy in every survey, all of it together accounts for
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: about 5% of what the universe is made of. That
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: is not speculation, and it is not a fringe position.
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: It is the standard model of cosmology, supported by multiple
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: independent lines of evidence that were not designed to agree
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: and do anyway. The rotation of galaxies. The way clusters
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: bend light. The pattern of ripples in the leftover heat
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: of the Big Bang. All of them say the same thing.
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: There is roughly five times more matter out there than
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: the kind that shines. and it does not interact with
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: light at all, and we do not know what it is.
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: That is dark matter, and it is about 27% of
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: the universe. The remaining 68% is worse. In 1998, two
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: competing teams measuring distant supernovae discovered that the expansion of
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: the universe is speeding up, not slowing under gravity, as
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: everyone expected. Accelerating. Something is pushing space apart. Its influence
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: grows as space grows, and we call it dark energy,
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: which is a label for our ignorance rather than an explanation.
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: When theorists attempt to calculate its value from quantum field theory,
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: the answer comes out too large by a factor with
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: something like 120 zeros in it. That is generally described
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: as the worst prediction in the history of physics, and
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: the description is not a joke. So the honest summary
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: of our situation is that we live inside a phenomenon
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: we can describe with breathtaking precision in the 5% we
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 1: can see, and have no idea about the rest. Now,
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: with that in your hands, let me finally give you
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: the multiverse. Not the internet's version. The version that appears
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: in cosmology journals. Because it is stranger, and it is
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: built out of measurements. It starts with inflation. To explain
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: why the universe looks so uniform in every direction, why
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 1: regions on opposite sides of the sky that could never
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 1: have exchanged light are the same temperature to within a
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: fraction of a degree, Alan Guth and others proposed in
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 1: the early 1980s that the very early universe underwent a
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: burst of exponential expansion. doubling in size again and again
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: in a period so short that writing it down requires
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: a decimal point followed by more than 30 zeros. The
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: prediction that came with it, a specific pattern of tiny
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: density variations, was later measured in the cosmic microwave background
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: and matched. Inflation is not proven, but it earns its
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: place by having stuck its neck out and survived. Here
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 1: is the consequence nobody wanted. In most versions of the mathematics,
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: inflation does not stop everywhere. It stops in patches. The
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 1: field driving it decays in one region, producing a universe
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: like ours, while the space between such regions continues to inflate,
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: faster than the pockets can spread. The process, once started,
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: does not end. It generates bubble universes forever. each one
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: a separate region with its own history, separated by space
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: that is expanding too fast for anything to ever cross.
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 1: That is eternal inflation, and it comes out of the
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 1: equations whether or not you want it. It is not
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: an added assumption. It is a side effect of the
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: theory that explains the sky. Now add string theory's contribution,
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: which is the landscape. The mathematics permits an enormous number
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: of ways for the extra dimensions to be curled up,
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: and each configuration produces different physical constants, different particle masses,
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: different strengths of force. The number of possibilities usually quoted
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: is around 10 to the 500th, a figure with no
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: meaningful comparison because it exceeds the number of atoms in
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: the observable universe by hundreds of orders of magnitude. Put
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 1: those two together, and you get a picture in which
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: reality is unimaginably larger than the region we can see,
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 1: containing regions where the constants are different, where chemistry does
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: not work, where matter cannot form, and where nobody is
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: ever there to notice. And now remember chapter 4. The
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 1: Higgs mass sits precisely on the knife edge between a
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: stable and unstable vacuum, and nobody knows why. In the
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: landscape picture, the answer is that it does not need
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 1: a reason. Every value occurs somewhere. And observers can only
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 1: arise in the small subset of regions where the values
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: permit atoms. We find ourselves in a finely balanced universe
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 1: because finely balanced universes are the only ones with anyone
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 1: in them to ask the question. I want to be
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: straight about this. Many physicists hate that argument, and their
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: objection is legitimate. it risks turning physics into a shrug.
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: If any observation can be explained by saying it happened
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: to be that way here, then the search for deeper
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: reasons stops. Others think it is simply what the evidence
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: has forced on us, and that our preference for elegant,
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 1: unique explanations is a human aesthetic rather than a law
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: of nature. That argument is live and unresolved, and it
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 1: is being had by serious people in print, Right now,
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: Max Tegmark organized these ideas into four levels, and they
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 1: are worth knowing because they are constantly confused with each other.
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 1: Level one is regions of space beyond our observable horizon,
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: which almost certainly exist and require no exotic physics whatsoever,
• 2:16:12
  Speaker 1: just more of the same. Level two is the bubble
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 1: universes of eternal inflation with different constants. Level three is
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: Everett's branching from chapter five which is not a separate
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 1: multiverse at all, but the same structure viewed differently. And
• 2:16:29
  Speaker 1: level 4, which is Tegmark's own, and the most extreme,
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 1: holds that every mathematically consistent structure exists as a physical reality.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: So when the internet says CERN proved the multiverse, the
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: reality is that cosmologists have three separate, differently motivated arguments
• 2:16:47
  Speaker 1: for one, none of which came from a collider. and
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: all of which are far larger than the alternate timeline
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 1: anyone imagined. Let me now close the loops, because I
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 1: made you promises at the start of this video, and
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 1: I intend to keep every one of them. The two
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 1: physicists who thought the future was sabotaging the machine, Nielsen
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: and Ninomiya's model was never adopted, and is regarded by
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: nearly everyone as wrong. But backward causation, as we saw
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 1: in Chapter 7, remains a genuine research program with Wheeler,
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 1: Feynman and Kramer behind it. And the delayed choice experiments
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 1: remain undisputed and unexplained in their meaning. The card draw
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 1: was never performed. Nobody has ever handed the universe a
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 1: form to fill in. The bird and the bread. A
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 1: real event, a real shutdown, and a reminder that the
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 1: most sophisticated experiment in history still lives in a world
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 1: containing birds. The collider went on to run for years,
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 1: found the Higgs, mapped its properties, produced quark-gluon plasma, tested
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: antimatter's response to gravity by literally dropping antihydrogen and confirming
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: that it falls down, and is now being upgraded into
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 1: a high-luminosity machine that will collect roughly 10 times more
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 1: data than everything gathered so far. There are proposals on
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: the table for a successor ring around 90 kilometers in circumference,
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: which if built would be the largest object humanity has
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: ever constructed. The mosquito. All that fear about energy and
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 1: the total energy of a proton collision is that of
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 1: an insect in flight, while a single cosmic ray detected
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 1: over Utah in 1991 carried 40 million times more, and
• 2:18:40
  Speaker 1: hit our atmosphere without incident, as such particles have for
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 1: billions of years. That is why the vacuum is safe
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: from us, not a promise from an institution. An experiment
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: run by the sky since before the Earth existed. The statue.
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 1: A gift from India, chosen because of a 1975 book
• 2:19:01
  Speaker 1: about the parallels between particle physics and the dance of
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: creation and destruction. with the explanation written on a plaque
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 1: in public view. The ritual video was a prank, confirmed
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: by CERN, investigated by CERN, and entirely in character for
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: the kind of people who name a particle the Oh
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 1: My God particle. The bear, Berenstain, always, and thousands of
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: people are certain otherwise, and a peer-reviewed study in 2022
• 2:19:33
  Speaker 1: found that these shared visual false memories are consistent specific, confident,
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 1: and not yet fully explained by any single existing mechanism.
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: That is an open scientific question about human memory being
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: investigated properly, and it is not evidence that reality was edited.
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: Your past is reconstructed every time you visit it, and
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 1: resaved with today's fingerprints on it, and there is no
• 2:20:00
  Speaker 1: master copy to check. The feeling that time is running faster, real,
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 1: measured and explained by novelty, attention, routine, and the way
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: memory estimates duration after the fact, sharpened enormously by a
• 2:20:15
  Speaker 1: global period in which routine replaced experience for almost everyone
• 2:20:19
  Speaker 1: at once. That one is not a mystery. That one
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: is a lever you can actually pull. And the branches.
• 2:20:28
  Speaker 1: If ever it is right, they are real, and they
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: are permanently unreachable. Sealed not by a barrier, but by
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: the physical dispersal of the information that would connect them.
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: And the sealing is the very thing you observe every
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 1: time an object stays where you left it. So no doorway.
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 1: No shifted timeline. No leak between worlds. And here is
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: what we found instead, which I want to lay out plainly,
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: because I think it is the most persuasive argument I
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 1: can make. We found that 95% of the universe is
• 2:21:01
  Speaker 1: made of things we cannot identify. That the matter you
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: are built from should have annihilated itself completely in the
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: first second, and did not, for reasons our best theory forbids.
• 2:21:13
  Speaker 1: That empty space may be a ledge rather than a floor,
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 1: balanced at a critical point nobody can explain. That the
• 2:21:21
  Speaker 1: equations of physics contain no now, no flow, and no
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: privileged present. And that Einstein considered the distinction between past
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 1: and future a stubbornly persistent illusion. and said so in
• 2:21:34
  Speaker 1: a letter to a dying friend's family, that the most
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: successful theory ever devised describes a world which, taken literally
• 2:21:41
  Speaker 1: and without additions, contains every outcome of every event, that
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 1: a choice made today matches the behavior of a photon
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: that has already passed the decision point, and that light
• 2:21:52
  Speaker 1: from a quasar which set out before Earth existed will
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: conform to what we decide tonight, and that our best
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: account of why the constants are what they are may
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: be that they are everything, everywhere, and we are standing
• 2:22:07
  Speaker 1: in the narrow band that permits standing. Every single one
• 2:22:11
  Speaker 1: of those is published, checkable, and not in dispute as
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 1: a description of where we are. The conspiracy said there
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: is something enormous hidden inside that machine. There is. It
• 2:22:25
  Speaker 1: is on the website. That is the punchline of this
• 2:22:29
  Speaker 1: entire video, and I have been walking toward it for
• 2:22:32
  Speaker 1: 12 chapters. The truth was never hidden. It was worse
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: than hidden. It was published, in full, in a form
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: so technical and so unadvertised that almost nobody outside the
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: field has ever read it, while the interesting story got
• 2:22:49
  Speaker 1: told by people who had not. And I do not
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 1: think that is anyone's fault. Exactly. I think it is
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 1: a failure of translation. And I think it is why
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 1: videos like this one should exist. So let me finish
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 1: where we started. A tunnel under a wheat field, 100
• 2:23:07
  Speaker 1: meters down, 27 kilometers around, holding a beam colder than
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 1: deep space that briefly makes the hottest place in the universe. 10,000
• 2:23:18
  Speaker 1: people from more than 100 nations, including nations that do
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: not otherwise speak to each other, sharing a machine. The
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: place that gave away the world wide web for nothing.
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: We built it to ask what everything is made of,
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: And in the process we discovered that we do not
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: know what most of it is, that our best theory
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 1: says we should not be here, and that the flow
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 1: of time you are experiencing while you watch this does
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 1: not appear anywhere in the laws of nature. The internet
• 2:23:48
  Speaker 1: looked at that building and saw a doorway to another reality.
• 2:23:52
  Speaker 1: I think it got the location wrong and the instinct right.
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 1: The doorway is not in the tunnel. The doorway is
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 1: the discovery that the reality you are standing in, the
• 2:24:02
  Speaker 1: ordinary one, the one with kitchens and traffic and Tuesdays
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 1: is already a rounding error inside something vastly larger and
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 1: almost entirely unknown and that the strangest thing in this
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 1: whole story is that a species of primate on a
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 1: wet rock built an instrument capable of noticing nobody is
• 2:24:22
  Speaker 1: hiding it from you it is stranger than the secret
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 1: would have been and it is all still open stay
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 1: curious go and read the papers they are free