Bob Berman - Strange Universe

you please help me in welcoming mr. Bob Berman thank you thank you for that great introduction even if I did write it myself it's great to be like that big letters time remaining so I can't blab too much we're going to really explore something very wild during this next 44 minutes and 36 seconds and that has to do with the basic questions probably the most ancient question ever that any seven-year-old would ask which is what is this place what where that I've been born into what is the universe and at one time the answers were given to us we're trusted into our our priests or spiritual people or our philosophers but in the last century so it's become the sole province essentially in the science world of cosmology cut cosmologies not haircuts and perms those that's cosmetology and cosmology here you hear all those TV shows about the universe and the Big Bang and all of it and I keep getting comments that people say I understand what's going on the answers don't seem satisfied so we're going to look at that really what we know about the universe why the answers aren't satisfying and where they go wrong we've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson on the the new Cosmo show and I'd love to have it seem in the ring with Mike Tyson remember that heavyweight champion that would be a great fight because Mike Tyson has become a really religious guy and Neil deGrasse Tyson goes around the country is really a fervent strident atheist be great to have them in the ring but you know you go away and you say you know I don't understand that part of the reason is that some of the things that are said like the Big Bang everything happened 13.8 billion years ago they said 13.7 just a few years ago an ounce more precisely fine-tuned which is great and we use real science excuse me to get to these to get to this data the flat topology of space which we're going to talk about in a moment the baryon acoustic oscillations which essentially is how sound waves propagated through the early universe the ratio of type 1a supernovae the flux of those compared to redshift the Hubble constant the well the Cosmic Microwave Background you know that 2.73 degree warm toasty radiation comes from all parts of the sky well it has a certain anisotropy angular power spectrum that tells us a lot the deuterium abundance is a lot of hard fast data and yet it's not giving us satisfying answers one of them is that the stuff doesn't make sense because it can't make sense this for real reasons I'm going to give you all for why this stuff doesn't work and what we have to do about it the first is the absence of of a lot of data I've just given you the the procedures we use and yet you know that most of the universe is dark energy 74% of that we have no idea what that is most of the rest is dark matter and we don't know what that is either so it leaves 4% made up of the 92 natural elements and all the subatomic particles but we only know about those in the in our vicinity because we look far in far away we see we know less and less for example here we're showing you space traveling through space we're going to see in a little bit that space actually is not real and we have a image all of us of the universe in a space and time framework the Big Bang happened a certain long time ago galaxies are separated from us by space so when we look at and see that space and time it may have a questionable reality that pulls it out from under us but worse than that the Big Bang was an explosion where the whole universe got created out of nothingness now that doesn't compute with us because partly because in our own everyday life we don't see puppies and lawn furniture popping out of nothingness a universe popping out of true nothingness how can that be and even if we figured out how it could be what are the antecedent conditions that produce this Big Bang they would only be guesswork how can we possibly know what things were like before the universe was the size of a grape and if we did know that then we'd still arrive at a question of where did that begin what produce that so we're set up with an infinite regression of questions that even if we pin down the Big Bang exactly we can't get to the answer of those so part of it is a matter of data for example on the moon we just found out in the last week that the moon has water on it well we've been studying the moon we've been there first the first Russian spacecraft passing it was in October of 59 so we're talking about half century no tech us this long to find out this well there's water on Mars but we've found out recently that there's ice also on the moon so we're just still learning about these things and when it comes to distant galaxies the information is is a little sparse so the data is is limited plus we're working on the assumption that studying the parts will give us the whole now it may or may not be true if somebody studied you and determine exactly what your composition was you're mostly oxygen by the way as is all you know life forms so is the moon actually when you get coyotes howling at the moon it's really oxygen howling at oxygen is basically what's going on but even if someone exactly analyzed what you were made of would they really know who you are can we really get the whole from the part sometimes not really those of you into chemistry know that if you studied sodium thoroughly knew its boiling point melting point everything about it knew how hydro antagonistic it is for a piece of sodium in a in a brook and just about explodes or chlorine one of the most deadly substances the main component of those gases in World War one those horrible gases no one could have figured out ahead of time that putting them together produces NaCl sodium chloride salt not only does it not explode when it hits water but it dissolves harmlessly in it the water stays just as unruffled and invisible as before not only is it not a poison but it's vital to life unlike chlorine its component chlorine that you couldn't live without sodium chloride you could not have figured what you'd have by combining the parts and yet in cosmology we have to study the part we don't know what the whole thing is so it may or may not result in in in something helpful but the worst is the is the lack of data for example we are recently finding and this is just two years ago team at Berkeley studying nine hundred thousand galaxies found that space is a perfectly flat topology that is space-time does it does not curve now everything that weighs it anything causes some curvature you know about round black holes or dense galaxies that images can actually warp around them so the whole universe which weighs quite a lot should start showing a long scale large-scale curvature so this study the largest ever shows that it does not in the least which indicates that at minimum the universe's tens of thousand times larger than anything we can see to the edge of the observable universe but most cosmologists are now leaning toward the universe being infinite in extent you can't ever prove infinity but that's the way it's going towards an infinite universe but there's a problem with that because if the universe is infinite then everything we can sample we've already seen that because most of the universe is dark energy and dark matter we have a very little sample size but if the universe is infinite that means everything we could ever possibly look at observe is not just a little tiny fraction of the whole universe no any fraction of infinity is zero so zero percent of the universe is ours to sample I don't have to tell you how reliable such as sample sizes so that's our first a first issue when we see these cosmology shows and the reason they're not getting anywhere is just a lack of data now we make up for it with models we're very model driven like we say that 380,000 years after the Big Bang the universe stopped being opaque and that's when electromagnetic radiation could radiate through the Cosmic Microwave Background comes from that moment but even if that's the case it still doesn't lead to ultimate answers we we we have a model that that's the way works it may not be the case and that's not a problem as long as people realize that these are just starter models and that they do change and will change in the course of our lifetimes all right the issue number two is the limits and this is a little wilder because they really don't talk about that of our dualistic logical mind system and that is what I'm going to do is tie my shoelaces here so I don't fall on the stage getting a laugh is good but not that kind of laugh what I'm saying is that there's two types of ways that we get information one is direct like if we touch a hot frying pan that's direct the other is indirect if someone tells us watch out for that hot frying pan the word water is not actual water the way our minds work where logic works is through symbols for things representational in some cases that's fine in science it's fine in some cases it won't work you unless you experience love let's say you would not know what it was and if you had been born blind you could not know when somebody talked about the color blue what they were referring to you have to have experience with the thing that the symbol represents and when it comes to the universe at large we run out of symbols we don't have pictures for that we've already seen that in the quantum realm of a very tiny our logical system doesn't work this is famously true famous physicists now for 30 40 years Fineman and others have been telling us you cannot understand quantum and the reason is that our logic doesn't work for it let me give you an example if we're discussing your cat and its relationship to your kitchen we could say that your cat at this moment is either in the kitchen or not in the kitchen or maybe also partly in the kitchen kitchen if it's sleeping in a doorway or something those are the only three choices can you think of any others in the kitchen or not in the kitchen or partially in the kitchen but when it comes to the land of the very tiny things go beyond our choices for example an electron can be created old TV sets used to create electrons we beam them toward a detector and on the way there's a series of the equivalent of mirrors that can make them either take paths a or path B so we have detectors that show us that the electron arrived but it did not take path a it did not take path B it did not take neither path because if we block them both it never arrives and it didn't somehow split itself off and take both paths simultaneously now those are the only choices a B both or neither did something else now we have a name for it for these impossible feats of non logic we say that the electron was in a state of superposition but just naming it doesn't mean that it makes sense logically it doesn't and is growing evidence that the meta universe cosmology this whole thing topic of this talk is the same way that our logic system just might not work with it we've already seen that with a big bang it doesn't because any answer that we have only leads to more questions there's never a solution to the birth of the universe how does the universe born because there's something before that we could say maybe it's eternal which is probably true but nobody can picture can visualize eternity I'm asking a lot all astronomers are about what is the big what is the universe since its expanding what is it expanding in - and my Pat answer you said do this when I talk College astronomy when I was lazy oh just say the problem is you've set up a non-existent vantage point to imagine the universe expanding you you've imagined yourself visualized it as if you're outside of it and that the whole universe is like a balloon getting larger but there is no location outside the universe so it can't be seen as expanding into something else rather the way to picture it is imagine yourself in any cluster of galaxies and you see the space between yours and all the others growing larger and everyone can picture that but that's still a cop-out because the universe is growing larger and it's fair enough to say well what does that mean and we can't picture that we'd say what is it expanding into and then what's outside of that if the universe is infinite we can't picture infinity either plus infinite in size also means that the Big Bang could not have been the start of anything because you can't get an infinite universe infinitely sized universe from a finite starting point so that means the Big Bang was just a local event in the hood and that the universe we're talking about is really the observable universe and there's an almost infinitely larger stuff beyond it also if the amount of material in each cubic light-years is the same everywhere as we think it is that means the Stars and the galaxies and the planets go on and on without end either can any of us picture limitless stars and galaxies without an end can't do that with our minds with our representative symbolic logical word based thinking process we can't grasp infinity we can't grasp galaxies without n we can't grasp a beginning so what I'm saying is that all these things even though cosmology is trying to pin down the moment of the Big Bang that's not answering the fundamental questions that we want to answer we want to understand this thing and it's not going to help us understand it you don't hear this on the on the TV shows the third is yeah this one is a real hard one is space in time I mentioned it before when we looked at this is that time we've always done I think most of you would agree that time doesn't really exist very few physicists think it's a it's a real thing it's true that we say the Sun was created four and a half billion years ago or so here's an old book about the Sun written a long time ago what do we know about the Sun back then almost nothing here in Chapter one says it's hot so all we know Sun is hot Newton's laws Einstein's field equations quantum mechanics none of them have a place for time time is no role because time is not really believed to be an actual item there's a lot of disagreement about that Newton thought it was other smart people like Immanuel Kant said no no it's not it's something that our minds create as an ordering system now we know that we have avalanches electrical activity in the brain and we're trying to make sense of it all and we do observe change but change is not the same thing as time it's true we could say that a candle burns down one inch and at the same time the Earth rotates one twenty-fourth of a turn we use the vibrations and the nucleus of the cesium 133 atom to define a second we say if you shoot microwaves out at a certain number per second it will maintain this state not flip over to another state the hyperfine state those of you who are real geeks have that number memorize how many of you have the number of the definition of a second memorize let me just see if there's anybody in here raise your hand I've got to see nobody all right 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second that's how we define a second but does that mean that a second is a real thing like a cucumber that you can grab and take to a lab no it's time is a ordering system something that we animals create we carry it around with us like turtles with shells and space is the same thing plus it changes its rate time does Einstein told us this that if you travel at a faster speed time will slow down if you go into a stronger gravitational field time slows down so some events will continue to occur at a certain rate while others occur at a slow rate we see this all the time each one of you has 240 muons caring for your bodies every second and they're not always harmless if one strikes the wrong bit of genetic material in one of your cells those muons theoretically should not get here they're only created 35 miles up when cosmic rays hit high up atoms in our atmosphere they only live for two millionths of a second that's not long enough even though they travel near the speed of light that's not enough time for them to make it all the way down 35 miles to the surface and through your bodies they do cell only because their time is now running so slowly relative to you thanks to their high speed so this isn't theory this is fact more surprisingly it's the same thing with space we might think of space as some absolute thing and the gap between us and the Andromeda galaxy is being inviolable but it isn't first of all space isn't even empty we've known now for a long time that it has fields magnetic electrical fields that photon zoom through it there's a billion photons for every neutrino that's the next most prevalent particle in the universe and since light and mass energy and mass have an equivalence it means all the this light means that space isn't really empty but worse than that since 1948 we've known about vacuum energy that the seemingly empty space between you and me here sieves with almost unimaginable power sometimes it's called Zee point energy zero-point energy because it starts showing itself when all other energies have been brought to a standstill there really is only one other kind of energy we now know we used to think it was frictional energy and chemical energy and gravitational potential energy but now we know it's all kinetic energy the energy of motion and atoms when they move we have a word for it it's called heat so all you have to do is slow down atoms and other cool things until there's no more of that kind of energy and then you reach equilibrium this ultra powerful but invisible vacuum energy or zero-point energy at 459 point 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit zero degrees Kelvin that's when all motion stops and that's when you start to see the signs of this all pervasive energy and it's powerful it's been estimate well the estimates are all over the place but one estimate is that each empty mayonnaise jar of empty space has enough power to boil away the Pacific Ocean in one second and you still wouldn't use it up because adjacent empty space would rush in why can't we see it we've not been designed to see it and by design I'm not using any spiritual things let's say structured what why should we how would it help us if we're looking for our socks in the morning or something to see this omnipresent unbelievably powerful energy that's equally everywhere that would just be distraction if we could perceive it but it's here it fills all space so empty space is not empty secondly what we call gaps or space are often a function of just our own language we divide things according to color or shape or utility waterfall where's that where does it end the Economist in or out about the Sun is that empty space we wouldn't say so we'd say that's a body but it's almost all empty space within its atoms between its atoms almost all empty space the whole human race if you took away all the empty space in all of us what almost eight billion people you'd be left with a sugar cube of actual solid material sugar cube it's a whole human race drop it in a cup of tea and the next reason has to do with this einstein thing and i talked about time but with space it's the same thing the faster you travel space shrinks there's no absolute space or gap between anything and anything else he told us that a whole century ago and countless experiments have shown that it's true if you could travel at 99.999999 9 7 9 s after the decimal point percent of the speed of light which is allowable this entire room would now only be a twentieth of an inch across you wouldn't notice anything amiss because you too would be smaller so there's no absolute size same thing was true of time changing Stephen Hawking used to think that there was an arrow to time a directionality to events he said that if the universe ever stops expanding and starts contracting the arrow will reverse itself but then later he changed his mind as if to demonstrate the process then maybe the worst of all is the finding of EPR correlations or particle entanglement which means that two objects that are created at the same time know what each other is doing now you can do this for example by shining a pulse a photon of light into certain crystals like beta Boreum borate and then what you get is on two photons come out each with double the wavelength or half the energy so there's no gain or loss of energy they each fly along separately for as far as they want but they're each aware of each other and this entanglement isn't necessarily light I was first done in 1998 in Switzerland but can be solid particles also electrons are even more substantial things than that but here's the thing John bel showed us in the 1960s that objects don't really have an existence until they're observed this is going to tie in with our next aspect of reality which is consciousness that only upon observation is an electron in a particular place until it's observed it's in kind of a blurry probabilistic state we used to think electrons you have their going around an atomic nucleus now we know they're nowhere until they're observed the observation is their reality so you observe one of these entangled particles and it snaps into existence its wavefunction collapses that's how John bel would have described it and it becomes an actual particle with some quality let's say an up spin well instantaneously its entangled twin even if it's halfway across the universe knows that you made this observation node knows that it's twin was observed and became an actual particle and in real time no delay for the information to get there becomes a particle of its own with the complimentary property a down spin in this case we've done experiments now since 1998 showing that this is true National Institute of Science and Technology we've done experiments over and over so particle entanglement is true the point is that if objects here can know and respond to an object three billion light-years away in another galaxy in real time simultaneously no delay it means that there is contact between everything and everything else in some sense in some real sense in the universe so that's yet another way in which there's no real space or emptiness or gap okay did we get that all there's the particle in time' there's einstein showing us that gaps change according to circumstances we saw that empty space isn't empty so for all these reasons space isn't really a real thing the relevance to this conversation is that it means that when we picture the universe all of us do this we visualize the cosmos here where we are in a space and time framework we picture the galaxies separated by distances and time played a role now knowing that they're not real they only have relative reality they seem real because we all went to high school where everyone hung out in the same gravitational field and nobody drove their sports car faster than like 1 6 million for the speed of light but if we had we'd have seen different objects going at different rates and different gaps between the universe and we'd know that all of this was true so we can't picture the universe if we really want to get a nice meaty handle on what it is we have to give up the space and time thing these are just tools of animal perception no such things so that visualization doesn't work we've already seen that infinity birth of the universe what is it expanding into infinite mass and matter that that doesn't jibe with our logical system and now we're seeing other ways in which it doesn't work as well now we introduce the strangest of all but perhaps the most important consciousness my friend Paul Hoffman former public publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica I'm only showing him off by mentioning him just to show you that he's a smart guy and that no-nonsense guy I lived not too far from Woodstock New York so a lot of of his some of his hippie stuff you'll hear that for me he doesn't have a new-age bone in his body and he's an atheist besides and yet he says that consciousness is the greatest unsolved problem in all of science because you see everything we experience we are seeing we're thinking we're concluding it's all taking place in our on the window screen of awareness or perception or consciousness obviously and we've known now since the 1930s early 1930s that experiments go differently depending upon if we measure them and how we measure them the double-slit experiment I won't get into that here but look it up and you'll see that how we decide to measure something where we measure it makes electrons or atoms or photons turn into waves or particles they'll materialize in different places depending on us as observers that's why John Wheeler Nobel physicist late John Wheeler just died a few years ago like to say that no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it's an observed phenomena so consciousness is bound up with the universe we want very much to know what this is an understanding cosmology this is remember this what the talk is about trying to figure out what and where is this place but we are we can't ignore fact of us as observers some people don't really get the profundity of consciousness and also they say well it's just some chemical thing in the brain that makes us see in here what's the big deal but it's very very deep and vital to all of us not to mention that it's very possible that the universe is correlative with consciousness in other words when we're talking about the universe as a whole we are talking about consciousness the two don't exist side-by-side I know the current view is that the universe existed for perhaps billions of lifeless years but then you have a problem you've got these little insensate dummies gravel actually there was gravel slamming into each other pieces of carbon and hydrogen bam bam bam bam bam and somehow they became that that skinny guy who always wins the hot dog eating contest how does dumb hydrogen and carbon slamming into each other forever develop a sense of smell the smell of a new-mown lawn or a wrap shirt seeing the purples of a twilight sky how do you go from just being dumb and random Carbon gravel oxygen to having consciousness and awareness how does it start we don't even know where to begin with that one we can map different areas of the brain that control different functions that's the farthest we've gotten but that doesn't explain the experience of thinking forget about how we think we want to know what is that experience of thinking like why have that experience how does the universe experience itself how did that begin we don't even know how consciousness enters a fetus at the Hindus say it's at the third month of pregnancy how do they know we don't know how it began electively on earth or maybe any other places and we certainly don't know if there is such a thing as the universe existing absent it all we know is that our awareness and perception this is more and more obvious to physicists are bound up with it there is no real reality unless it's an observed reality so consciousness is very very important one of the ways we can make it clear this may be with light because that's a an aspect of it these are the colors that every star including ours our Sun produces it wasn't long ago that people believed that if everyone left this auditorium those colors would still be there now we know of course that light is a wave of magnetism and it right angles to it a wave of electricity nobody can see magnetism and you can't see electricity so by itself what's there are electricity and magnetism nothing with color nothing with brightness the brightness and the color you create it can't be there and there's all sorts of oddities with it too for example the way the structure works is you might think is three universes versus the external world where you see those colors on that screen then they go into your eye and form two images on those six million cone-shaped cells that give us color vision then those produce electrical signals that go up heavy-duty cables to the brain mostly the occipital lobe where tens of billions of cells and one trillion synapses this is heavy-duty stuff Nature doesn't do anything for no reason and this is a lot of investment in that creates the actual image every textbook will tell you that that is where it's created and that is where it is perceived again George Burkley for whom the Epis and town were named like to say that the only things we can ever perceive are our perceptions we only assume as an external universe that corresponds with them so I just named three different visual worlds there's the external world out there which you all assume is not in your body but some distance from it there is the two images upside down on the back of your brain and then there is the third one the place where the image is created and perceived and the colors are created in the brain in the mind three different visual worlds and yet you're not seeing double let alone triple you're seeing one visual world so which is it where is the universe is that the external world they tell us now he just read dr. Roy Bishop prominent physicist in Canada writes in the Canadian astronomical handbook Isaac Newton said they are not in the external world he wrote a paper called the Rays are not colored that's been known for a long time and there's also sorts of vagaries for example yellow light may not even exist created by us when we see a combination of green and red see this yellow light if I shake it at the right speed you may be able to see the component red and green that makes up can you see that that is actually creating it you're creating that in your mind this yellow so it seems like we're getting to saying that that's the inside of your mind that your brain is not really that dark wet mushy place but it's that can't be you're saying no now here's my body my body ends with my fingertips no that's your body's image within your mind your mind has produced a body mind you rub your hands together you can even do it now and you'll feel something that of course is occurring in your mind otherwise you wouldn't experience it would you you're seeing your fingertips that image is also occurring in your mind it's the image of your body within your mind the image of these colors are also within your mind they're no farther away really than your fingertips they're both equally inside your mind inside your brain that's true that if you want you to walk to that screen it would take you a little time to do it for your body mind the body within your mind or we could say mind body to reach your the mind screen and then you can say well that's the gap I'll define that as the gap how long it takes this but understand that you're walking through your own mind the whole time I know Woodstock and all the rest and I'm going to but I tell you this is all true we don't we can quickly get it because we spend a lifetime of imagining that everything we see visually is occurring in front of our noses in some external world we call it the external world but if that wasn't your mind you wouldn't be experiencing it that's the only place colors occur but even if you don't accept all of that certainly accept the consciousness and the universe go together in some way that if we have not grasped that we have not really gotten the picture and so for all these reasons when you hear the TV cosmology shows they are unsatisfactory they do not yield any results that feel that feel good they can't so we need we need to go in a different direction if we're really going to solve these things hopefully there will be more studies of consciousness perhaps we'll find ways of accessing the universe more directly than the ways we are oh and with the space thing not being real the takeaway I want you to have from that is that the universe is not huge yes compared to that little mind body that's being presented in your mind yeah it's it seems bigger than you but because there is no absolute distance and because things are actually in touch with everything else a much better way to think of it is that the universe is actually sizeless that's the truth it's sizeless and when you hear the TV sign shows don't assume that they're smart you're not that's why it doesn't make sense to you truth is most of them are not even aware of these things these four main factors that are given you which is why you cannot get answers at this point with them because I might just forget to mention it the book zoom I love this because it's the first time I have written nine books and the New York Times finally woke up to my existence this year by writing a nice half page review a rave review so just to let you know that book is not about this stuff it's not about is mind twisting stuff it's about motion of all types the poles shifting you know that the magnetic poles have moved the length of the stage while weave while I've been here and it's been doing this for decades what does that really mean I have spent a year of research learning all sorts of cool stuff I didn't know that snowflakes 85% of them form around a living germ so that there's a bacterium a living ones I did 85% of all snowflakes I didn't know germs could travel 20 times faster than fish relative to their size so that bacteria can some can swim across a kitchen counter in an hour and all sorts of cess that's all different areas of motion natural motion deserts and wind the first guy who taught us how the wind blows why the wind blows so it's all solid science amazing science I think not this stuff this talk was really designed to be a supplement a supplement to that because in that I couldn't get into we got into the parts of the universe in that not the universe as a whole and we all want to know what this is that we've been born into so what's the answer where can we go with this hopefully there are ways if our thought process just like what the quantum world doesn't really work with the macro universe the universe at large if it always yields puzzles any process that always produces an unsatisfactory answer means you're asking the wrong questions are you using the wrong process and this is this is always producing answers that make no sense infinity a universe popping out of nothingness and the rest and it doesn't mean that we can understand it we are representatives of the universe we didn't just get here from somewhere else we have the universe inside of us so it may be that those who look at it maybe in a more simple way William Blake in 1803 talking about seeing the universe in a blade of grass understanding everything in a grain of sand it could be that the secret meg might lie in in seeing that the thing we're looking for is is obvious rather than hidden and present rather than absent 18 seconds all right thank you thank you everybody a very serious question start off with what the hell are you talking about and I'm so I'm really saw a slip through science in high school I mean this so let me start out by saying you say I said and I said Bob spoke four or five years ago as well you can see why we brought it back that's just tell me a little bit try to explain a bit more for my feeble mind when you say the universe is sizeless well the universe has a resize list if the gap between anything and anything else mutates according to any number of parameters when they get changed okay and if there's no real separation between anything anything else which is way quantum theory has already showed us then there's no absolute size for sure we can say that from our perspective in this gravitational field traveling at this speed we measure the farthest visible galaxies to be some thirteen billion layers away that's valid we can say the distance to the nearest stars four point three layers that's valid but that's only valid as long as we define the parameters in this gravitational field traveling at your speed if you really lined up the actual reality that's what we're talking about here no there's no real size is that influence that is that influencing whereby you know at least I guess and I guess in a sense what you're saying also is this the speed of light is something that is is a part of our gravitational experience I mean because we know we can I mean we know that it takes ten ten light years to get to X is there if if we were not if you were not if that was not a boundary if we could speed go faster than the speed of light it may go faster than the speed of light but you can experience different things depending upon how close to light speed you get when you shine a flashlight beam out your window the moment you've turned that flashlight on each photon experiences itself already reaching the edges of the universe if there is no passage of time for a photon and there wouldn't be for someone traveling at that speed and even if you kept it legal and travel just under the speed of light under the speed of light you'd essentially find yourself everywhere in the universe at once there'd be no gap between you and anything else so where would distance be and that's not theory this is not Woodstock that's the fact of it I'm sure glad I drink go ahead well it's good to know that sizeless matters but I think that I am givers yourself please oh I'm sorry David by B I think that I'm conscious and I perceive you sitting there and I also think that you are conscious and perceive me but I'm coming to the concept that maybe there is only one consciousness ah very good very good you know Nobel Prize winners at least one said exactly that the consciousness is always singular and the plural is unknown but then we start getting over into solipsistic realms that you can't really blur them one is the direct experience and the other is the conceptual or representational or symbolic world you know we're solved we say sit pass the salt everyone knows who we're talking about even though the word salt is not actual salt so you can't blur between the levels if you have direct experience then perhaps you get this you get it but as long as you're in the kind of conceptual realm eat then it's cheating and it doesn't work if you try to sort of use that but say the other stuff sort of it's one or the other what about the notion that I think some of them were some people you know see the consciousness is in fact everywhere universal we are simply receptacles for that or part of that you have any sense of that means that resonate once we define who we is exactly yes yes sir America Karski University of Kentucky thanks for coming out great talk did you understand it um I understood a little bit of it not as much as I would have liked to unfortunately which is why I'm here to ask questions but so to probably pretty quick ones you mentioned time not necessarily being at an absolute and I don't see any necessarily direct problem with that but what about time dependent solutions to say the Schrodinger equation or more specifically these these fundamental constants that are time dependent for instance Planck's constant so how does that factor into what fundamental constant is time dependent not necessarily fundamental but because there are no fundamental constants that are time dependent when I say fundamental I mean things that we we are using in very basic models of science I mean tell like timing an egg so it doesn't get too well-done perhaps or like plunks constant well of course in the relative world of course we use of the GPS tells us that if we stay on a particular Road we're going to reach Indy in two hours and we do so you know it works as a relative concept the question is whether it's a tool of our perception or whether it's an actual item now if it's an actual reality dimension that's one thing but if it isn't then it certainly can't be measured on its own you certainly can't travel through time if it's not a dimension of its own if it's only a tool of our perception and that's what that's the way physics is going that like our numbering system it's like that it's the way we think and order things so does science simply do you think science is perhaps more of just a model for what our consciousness may observe and perceive and less so a set of objective true isms about the universe science generally ignores consciousness because it sounds weird it probably sounded weird to many of you in the sciences because that we so don't understand it not just how it arose but what it is that what we do quite properly in science when we don't understand something we leave it alone and so that's that's what we do we leave it alone so much that if it comes up as it did here it sounds new agey or strange thank you yes sir hi I'm Jason Clark actually your answer to this last question is kind of an leads in to mine yesterday there was a really fun interaction with dr. Roman yeah Polsky very Froman again oh so um he working in artificial intelligence his assertion was that there is no scientific proof for the existence of consciousness so the question about self-aware machines is a moot point because we can't prove that we're conscious so do you want to I guess what you want me to tell you that you're conscious that you're experiencing consciousness then you know if you don't perceive consciousness if you don't think that you hear and see and experience if that's not self-evident then there's nothing I can add to it so even if we're deluding ourselves to think we're conscious that's proof of consciousness you may be overthinking yes sir Gary from Louisville I'm still trying to understand one of your first statements about an infinite universe can you give me a concrete example what that is what that is explaining infinity infinity can't really be explained however if this holds up and it appears to that there's a perfectly flat topology it means that the universe keeps going and there's no boundary see we used to think that there is a essentially a positive curvature to things but there's no trace of it if the universe is infinite in spatial extent then it's also infinite and inventory that's an assumption but we assume that would be the case and you're back with you know good luck picturing that if you can I can't you know John barreled the cosmologists written circle but John spoke I think back around 2007 here and he wrote a book on infinity and one of the things in his book of his reactors that if in fact we live in an infinite universe that means anything that can happen is happening infinitely somewhere right again that's maybe that's a line of thinking that if there you know there's something to think that of course we need in math infinity it's required in math but is there such a thing as a physical infinity does it exist in the physical universe and they are thinking and it doesn't certainly comes up in the singularities and black holes where things may collapse to infinite density but what does it mean for things to be infinite infinitely dense and it occupy no volume of space at all does that really have meaning so it could be that other forces in this case perhaps the strong force steps in to prevent infinity from happening however the alternative to infinity still leaves us with insuperable questions unfortunately yes sir jim welch at brown-forman i'm looking forward to having one of our products shortly where I'm sure it'll make this become a lot clearer to make we're in the wine and spirits business anyway so one of the last sentences you said was that doesn't mean that we can't understand it moon in the universe when actually my takeaway from your whole talk is that it will be impossible for us to understand the universe because we are fundamentally limited by all the things that you're creating and anything that we might come up with to explain it is of course a human construct and therefore can't be true am I missing something no I'd agree with you that as long as we use this one word at a time conceptual realm where things stand for other things for the four main reasons that I gave that's not working to really grab hold of what this thing is what this universe is however I did mention this is a science talk so I don't want to get into mysticism but perhaps there are direct ways of perceiving where one can fully grasp the universe but not through logical symbolism I'm offering that because I don't want to end on a glooming note and say it's impossible and there's certainly been mystics through the ages that have come away smiling and oh yeah I've got it this place is okay I mean I kind of feels like it's okay doesn't it actually I think that's the most hopeful thing you said today actually no seriously I think that's great yeah but isn't it like I mean I think what you're saying I agree with is I mean that's why our imaginations become so important it's almost a being able to use our imagination to suspend to the extent that we can the preconceptions and assumptions that we have I mean Einstein with that right thought experiments I mean scientists do all that time you know Einstein a lot of his big discoveries were thought experiment the math came later he didn't sit down and say let me figure this out he's basically suspended instead of wait wonder what it would look like if this happened so I think what you're saying I do think in that sense it we are capable of trying to find the answers by using our amount using one tool we do i which is imagination right right or futility needn't be depressing either you know the ancient Greeks when they come upon something they could so they would just have another another glass of wine and they'd laugh yeah didn't bother I get that yes sir hi i'm yun sangmin I teach computer science at Kentucky State University and sell our fundamental models that we make and I understand the difference between model and reality are still based and if you look at the Schrodinger equation that's continuous in space and time yet when we collapse the wave function we end up at something that's discrete what if anything would change if we ever find out real or not in our models that we have to treat space and or time as discrete as well itself well we do I think we're already there where we have where we have to even when Einstein created space time showing that space and time did not have a separate reality again that's why this stuff is not new when I tell you that space doesn't really exist as a real item and neither does time I said this a century ago but he wasn't saying that space time is a real thing either like a three dimensional graph paper as a matrix of everything existed it was merely a mathematical way of explaining motion that would otherwise be contradictory and wouldn't make sense so it was really a explaining as you know how different reference frames perceive the same phenomena was it meant to be putting out a new type of reality to replace the old we have time for one more question yes sir let me Bob is going to be here the rest of the day he's doing an ideas night out tonight some of you want to sign up for his dinner so go ahead Grayson Salyer is Boyd County High School what are you take what is your take on parallel universes or universes you created when you make a decision like that so that one that you said about making a decision that's a little tougher that's a spin-off of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which is that every time a leaf falls here and not there it becomes part of a whole universe where that happened and the consequences happen if you turn left at a traffic light instead of right you continue on with your decision but another you immediately exists that's unaware of the first view that goes on in a universe that makes those that's one type of parallel universe that never smelled right to me frankly it really just doesn't now all universes could exist in an infinity of you what you're talking about one type of universe no doubt exists one type of parallel universe and that is the one that we can't see so beyond where objects are receding at the speed of life is more stuff our universe doesn't end and so if you call that another universe we'll go along with that unfortunately there's a whole host of new universes some of them based on string theory which is now proven to be a failed theory I think almost everybody is in agreement with that at this point in that it offers 10 to the 500th possible realities and it's sort of justifying itself anew by saying well you see all those could be separate universes but there it's trying to keep alive something that shouldn't be kept alive this is a theory that needs to be discarded there's no evidence for all those dimensions and the other aspects of string theory in there most physicists feel that way now Bob thank you another great talk we have just so you know the connecting innovation network is giving away some mini iPads so if you've registered on there if they're at their booth out there they'll send you an email if you've won one in fact well somebody won one yesterday so make sure you check with that Bob will be signing books out front right after this talk and again he's doing an ideas night out thank you very much you

Channel: IFTV

Views: 13,854

Rating: 4.8809524 out of 5

Keywords: Bob Berman, IdeaFesetival, astronomy, astrophysics, philosophy, physics, quantum mechanics, nature, time, space, albert einstein

Id: IIIaQdaMcbI

Length: 61min 15sec (3675 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016