5 Most Controversial Scientific Theories

one of the most amazing things about science is that genuine competing theories can actually be tested to see which one is right it's kind of like a ufc tournament for the mind with the strongest theory coming out on top great now all i can think about is people in white lab coats choking each other out engraving anyway some areas in science generate controversial ideas that have the power to completely change the way that we think about ourselves as well as the world around us some of them are mind-blowing while others are simply profound but they're always fiercely contested so hold on to your beakers because we're going in here are the five most controversial scientific theories black hole cosmology billions of years ago in our universe okay i can't keep that going billions of years ago our universe burst into life through an unimaginable event known as the big bang after a period of intense inflation where the energy from the bang expanded quickly the universe cooled and stars began to form that's when the journey towards the universe that we see today truly began at least that's the conventional explanation but there are competing ideas in cosmology about just how the big bang was started that are incredible one such theory is known as black hole cosmology and it's pretty controversial created by physicist raj pathria and mathematician ij goode this theory about how the universe began turns the big bang theory on its head in black hole cosmology the universe was brought into existence through a huge amount of material coalescing around a point of gravity contracting it until it caused a gigantic crunch the matter became so dense that at that point it collapsed in on itself possibly even breaking the physical laws of the universe in the process this created a singularity at the heart of the universe which mathematically at least leads to one infinitely tiny point where time and space break down what i'm describing is in essence a black hole and what's a little spooky is that the description of a black hole matches some of the things that we know about the universe today some people ask what happened before the big bang and while we don't know yet and some physicists even believe that there was no before because time as we know it didn't exist many theories lead to the idea that the universe itself was born from a similar singularity a point of almost infinite mass and energy this similarity has led some cosmologists to suggest that our entire universe exists inside a black hole one good reason for thinking this is that if you know how much energy and matter has fallen into a black hole you can calculate how big the radius of the event horizon should be the event horizon is the spherical boundary around the singularity that once crossed you cannot come back from it's kind of like eating a single pringle you know you just can't stop but in all seriousness even light can't escape it and if you're outside the black hole looking in you can't even see the event horizon or what's inside when you add up all the known mass and energy in our universe and calculate the size of the event horizon as if it were a black hole you arrive at a measurement that is very close to the size of the observable universe so maybe just maybe our universe was birthed from a black hole and that black hole sits in some exotic universe that itself may have been born from a black hole basically this chain would go up and up until we reached the original universe which could be unrecognizable from our own with its own laws of physics but i'm betting in that universe the ice cream machine at the mcdonald's is still broken that's just always going to be the case pan psychism have you ever wondered why you experience things i know it's a bizarre question but think about it for a second why do any of us experience the things around us if the brain is like a biological computer then it should just take in information process it and output a behavior so why then do we feel something when we see the red of a rose for example or the beauty of a sunset this is called the hard problem of consciousness and it's called that because well it's hard nobody has been able to come up with a well-tested theory as to why human beings are conscious of the world we should theoretically just be zombies with no thoughts and feelings for decades neuroscience physics and psychology have argued that science will just figure it out one day the brain clearly becomes conscious when it's in a certain state and all we need is to figure out exactly what that state is there's a pretty big problem with thinking that we'll just explain consciousness the more we understand the physical properties of the brain you see consciousness is a brand new property of matter it's different from non-living things having an inner life and experiencing things is completely different from not experiencing things what i'm saying is the fact that you're watching this video right now and feeling something makes you different from a lump of cheese watching the video now i want nachos how can we explain then that the brain suddenly becomes aware of things and has a new property of consciousness now there's another word that we often use for something spontaneous like that happening and that word is magic now neuroscientists obviously don't believe in magic and that's why some scientists are turning to pan-psychism as a solution you see pan-psychism argues that the only way to explain the brain having this consciousness property is if matter itself has some form of consciousness already built in that way you don't need to explain how the brain becomes conscious because all the particles that make up your brain already have that ability it's essentially adding a fifth fundamental force to the universe alongside gravity electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces and there are some wild implications of this if all matter is conscious then what about your computer or the phone that you're on or your hat or what about life after death if our consciousness is locked into something more fundamental than the brain then could we continue on in some form after we die these questions are speculative of course and highly controversial but with each passing year pan psychism is being taken more seriously by science and if it's true might fundamentally change how we see ourselves as part of the infinite universe bicameralism have you ever talked to yourself when you're alone maybe you've thought through a conversation or almost spoke to yourself to get something straight in your head do i want a chocolate donut or a vanilla donut chocolate vanilla chocolate vanilla contrary to popular belief this is actually a healthy trait and not a sign of a split personality however there is one controversial theory about how our brains have drastically changed in the last few thousand years that gives a pretty incredible origin for why we might enjoy conversing with ourselves and this theory is bicameralism it's controversial because it forces us to reinterpret our past and why our brains function the way that they do the word bicameralism essentially means to be divided into two chambers our brains have a left and right hemisphere split down the middle the two sides allow information to pass back and forth between both hemispheres through a connection in the middle known as the corpus callosum there are various theories as to why we have two hemispheres ranging from speculation to having redundancy when something goes wrong in the brain an american psychology researcher named julian james offers up a radically different idea in the book of the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind in this book julian argues that the human mind went through a radical transformation just 3000 years ago and it's probably responsible for the modern age that we live in now the theory goes that up until the modern era human beings didn't just have one mind but we actually each had two these parts of the brain would literally talk to each other the experience would have been like having someone in your head talking to you giving you ideas and even telling you what to do kind of like an annoying boss or overbearing parent in a bizarre turn julian argues that when ancient peoples wrote about hearing god speak to them they were actually hearing a part of their brain giving orders and statements the ancient gods then weren't just mythical concepts but real day-to-day experiences so basically people heard voices all the time julian offers historical evidence for this in the way that stories were written down up until 3000 years ago poets and writers spoke about their muses talking to them singing poetry and giving them ideas for some reason humans then quickly evolved a more unified consciousness that was capable of introspection rather than taking commands from another part of the brain with introspection came an explosion of art culture and technology that would not have been possible previously other supporters of bicameralism as a theory suggest that mental health issues such as schizophrenia where individuals hear voices talking to them may be the last remnants of our previous spri camera minds perhaps by understanding this theory doctors will be able to treat those suffering with such debilitating conditions maybe just maybe we'd even be able to awaken that dormant part of ourselves to see what it has to say i'll tell you something having two minds might not have been such a bad thing during lockdown at least it would have someone to play chess with aliens have seen us already it seems that more and more people in the mainstream are opening their minds to the possibility that aliens have visited our little neighborhood already with the pentagon releasing video footage of strange objects in the sky and people coming forward about working on alleged crashed alien spacecraft it seems more legitimate than ever to at least open our minds to the possibility however some scientists are doing more than considering the possibility some are outright stating that aliens have already seen us on the 19th of october 2017 the pan-starrs survey which detects objects passing nearby earth detected something that we'd never seen before an object later named omuamua was hurtling through our solar system now this in and of itself wouldn't have been strange as asteroids and comets move in and out of our solar system all the time however this object had some unusual characteristics specifically how fast it was moving over time scientists studying omuamua came to the conclusion that something that fast could only have come from the outside of our solar system that's right this object is the first verified visitor from another star system kind of like elf conventional explanations suggest that omuamua was ejected from its home star system by a huge force like its supernova or aliens that's right the chair of the astronomy department at harvard university himself abraham loeb reckons that we not only caught some sort of space probe passing by but that it more than likely gathered information about our planet and sent it off to some alien master but it'll be okay i like aliens not so much the ones with acid for blood and the pointy thing coming out of their mouth but anyway one reason to believe that omuamua is an alien spaceship or probe is that it moved across part of our sky at such a speed that it would have been camouflaged against our stars moving in the background and that seems like a pretty intelligent move another reason is that while we don't have a picture of it light measurements taken as it passed by suggest that it might have been a highly unusual pancake shape you know like a flying saucer no infrared radiation was detected from the object suggesting that it's an incredibly shiny perhaps made out of metal like i don't know a flying saucer you picking up what i'm putting down yeah omuamua also had a trajectory where it moved unexpectedly as if it was being controlled by a propulsion system like a flying saucer i had to it is like i said this theory is highly controversial but if it's true and some reputable scientists are warming up to the idea then it means that our alien buddies up there probably took a snapshot of what they saw when they passed i hope i was wearing something smart that day because you know it's important to make a solid first impression boltzmann brains okay stop me if you've heard this one before but when is a brain not a brain well it's when it's created out of randomly coalescing matter and energy what if my brain or yours for that matter was not born into this universe through mom and dad having a little cuddle time but through a random process of atoms crashing into each other australian physicist ludwig boltzmann and his assistant ignis schultz introduced the seeds of this idea back in the 1800s they believe that the universe spends most of its existence in a state of heat death this is actually a popular idea in modern physics basically the universe eventually ceases producing new stars entropy smears out over the dead atoms across the dark void and what was once a fascinating reality teeming with endless possibilities essentially ceases to do anything at all nothing happens it's like detention but for all of reality eons would pass but boltzmann believed that even in heat death strange things would eventually happen at some point given an almost infinite amount of time there would be a thermal fluctuation across the universe that would cause atoms to bounce off of each other in such a way that they would forge new structures in one very specific instance this structure would be identical to the universe in which we now live it essentially means that an entire universe with trillions of galaxies each containing billions of star systems planets and even life would come into being whole and complete people living in that universe wouldn't even be able to tell how their universe was truly created if we lived in that universe it would appear as though it started with the big bang but in reality it would just be that the universe came into being through random combination of atoms a few decades after this idea was suggested an astronomer named arthur eddington proposed a shocking idea that builds on boltzmann and schultz's work he claimed that it was unlikely that an entire universe would come together in this way however it was very possible that when the universe was in heat death atoms could occasionally come together to create brains in space okay it kind of sounds like a terrible sci-fi movie but these brains would come into existence and then die off but not before they had a moment to think or experience something as it turns out if these brains genuinely do exist temporarily in space then there would be a lot of them in fact over a near infinite span of time there would be a near infinite number of them being created and dying off somewhere in the cold void i know it sounds crazy but why should we care if this prediction about boltzmann's brains is true well i hate to break it to you but if heat death is the thing in the universe then there would be trillions upon trillions of these brains over time this means embrace yourself that there's one real you but there are potentially trillions of boltzmann brains that think that they're you the chance is then that you yourself are a boltzmann brain momentarily created in the blackness of space from random atoms combining together and all of the experience you are now having are completely fabricated soon your boltzmann brain will perish in the icy coldness of space yeah i know bummer but let's remember this is just a controversial theory it doesn't mean that it's necessarily true so don't have a freak out and besides being a floating brain in space would be a pretty epic way to go out be sure to tune in every monday wednesday and saturday at 3 p.m eastern standard time for brand new content from me and remember to follow me on discord and twitch as well as my team who make these videos possible you'll find all of their respective links in the description below this video thanks for watching

Channel: Matthew Santoro

Views: 177,006

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Id: SDsVYU2dQcI

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021