Dr. James Beacham – What's outside the universe? | The Conference 2019

what's outside the universe my friend melody asked me this question when I was eight years old I usually had good answers for science questions I was sort of a library guy but this time I had no idea what to say the question scared me I grew up in southern Utah in the western part of the United States and this is the home of Red Rocks hot dry summer nights clear skies and these are perfect conditions for stargazing and as a kid melody and I would often bicycle out of town to get away from the lights of the city and we would look up at the sky and we would ask each other questions about the cosmos how big is the earth what is the Sun made of how far away is that galaxy there why can't I see a black hole what's at the edge of the universe when she asked me that one I stopped and I thought about it and finally I said I don't know and melody said my ancestors thought that the earth was a big flat rock with a solid dome of sky a few kilometers above and the stars were painted on the dome and it was all held in the hand of a big creature that would occasionally shake it and we stared up at this dome of stars and eventually I said well they didn't have telescopes back then so I guess that's a good first guess but now that we know that the universe is huge I don't know what's at the edge of the universe melody was an indigenous Native American Indian from a local tribe I don't remember if she was Paiute or Navajo and the other kids at school would sometimes make fun of melody calling her nasty names she didn't like homework she didn't like tests but she ran circles around the other kids in classroom discussions with the teacher and there was a reason why she and I were friends because melody was never afraid to ask the big question and when she finally asked me what's outside the universe the question caught me off-guard well nothing the universe is everything and it doesn't make any sense to ask what's outside of everything everything is everything yeah but if the universe has an edge there must be something beyond the edge she reasoned and we thought about it for a long time and finally I said maybe there is no edge and no outside and melody said yeah maybe the universe just goes on forever and ever and that's all there is and then finally after a long pause I said everything is terrifying and as you can see I was an extremely serious child maybe not so completely serious because to me terrifying doesn't have to be a bad thing but before we go too far we need to answer a very important question what is the universe picture the last time you were out in wilderness and you looked up at the night sky thousands of pinpoints of light photons from stars and galaxies thousands of light-years away a Lightyear being the distance that light travels in one year to finally reach earth and smack into your eyes when you look up at the constellations you're looking backward in time but look closer between two of those points of light what do you see it looks like empty space but it's not your eyes are pretty good photon detectors for one particular type of photon but on cosmic scales your eyes are terrible experimental apparatuses because they can only see a relatively narrow range of photon wavelengths and there's much more smacking into the earth than what we can see with our eyes if you were to use humanity's best photon detectors like satellite telescopes you'd see hidden light photons from stars and galaxies these millions and billions of light years away and eventually if you keep looking you will see something absolutely remarkable the cosmic microwave background radiation light signals from when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old this is the closest that we can get to a baby picture of our universe but wait a minute baby picture a few hundred thousand years old that's a pretty old baby where's the light from before then most of that light hasn't had time to reach us yet and most of it never will the universe is expanding all of those galaxies you can see with your eyes they're all moving away from each other in all directions the universe is expanding but expanding into what is our universe like a limp balloon put into a box and then you blow it up and the balloon is inflating into the box No so what's expanding space itself is expanding the background metric spatial grid upon which everything rests is being stretched even inside your body right now completely imperceptibly two galaxies in our universe are like two pins stuck into a rubber sheet that is then being pulled from all directions from the perspective of an ant on the sheet nothing happened to make the pins move the fabric of space itself the sheet is being stretched and the distance between them is increasing thus if everything in the universe is moving apart from everything else we can simply run the clock backward and at some point everything in the universe had to be packed into a tiny dense little point which then started expanding and this as you know is the concept of the Big Bang but it's not just the fact of the universe's expansion that is interesting it's a particular way that it did so throughout its history there's so much that we can't explain right now if the universe always expanded at a constant rate why are there big things in the universe at all like galaxies and cosmic structures that clever astronomers can see why does the stuff in that part of the sky more or less look like the stuff in the other part of the sky over there why is this cosmic microwave background radiation essentially uniform in temperature everywhere don't let the color-coding fool you my astrophysics colleagues are quite clever to show the tiny gradations but that's basically constant none of this stuff makes any sense unless at the moment of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago the universe didn't just start expanding at a constant rate but instead insanely inflated and then tapered off to a much more gradual rate and this this inflation was not just some minor thing imagine if we took a horse and magically inflated it to the size of the observable universe now in ten to the minus thirty-two seconds that's what inflation was like at the moment of the Big Bang this inflation was much faster than the speed of light and as you know if something in the universe if if we're ever going to know that something exists in the universe we have to receive some kind of a light signal from it thus if this expansion was much faster than the speed of light most of the stuff in the universe was immediately separated from us and we'll never be able to to detect it ever and it gets worse no sorry so it does get worse but that's it so thus were left with a new concept not just the universe but the observable universe which is a tiny volume a subset of the entire universe within which there must be a large number of other observable universes for other observers and will never be able to contact them ever and it does get worse if you look closely and you should always do this when someone gives you a physical theory if you look closely at the math behind it really at the details of the math behind this insane inflation of the fabric of space this insane inflation should go on forever but in our universe it didn't it tapered off and it's going to has been going at a much gret more gradual rate for the rest of the universe's history this mean our universe is essentially a little pocket that was popped into existence by this insane inflation of the fabric of space like a little bubble that popped up and is kind of just floating there and this gradual thing but if you look closely at that insane inflation it should go on forever but our universe it didn't one universe popped up but this this inflation should go on for infinity and as you know with infinity if something happens once it happens again and again and again there must be if our understanding of this inflation is correct there must be an almost infinite number of other universes that were also popped into existence by this insane inflation of the fabric of space in most of them structure probably never formed and there was nothing that the constants of nature were wrong so that nothing ever formed and there's no humans there's no life there's no nothing but with infinity there must be other universes like ours in one of them one of you were different shoes here today in another coffee is pink and in another an earth-like planet was obliterated by an asteroid just as protozoans were starting to evolve if our understanding of inflation is correct this mathematics of inflation is correct and this isn't just some science fiction idea but is required by infinity but I can see the looks on some of your faces and you're absolutely right to be skeptical because look I'm a scientist right you should be screaming at me this is a fine idea but where is the evidence man we need demonstration and you're absolutely right as it stands now this is just a circumstantial evidence idea right not enough to claim a discovery and no one's claiming such a thing but it turns out this is not the only piece of circumstantial evidence that we have our universe seems to be filled with magic numbers constants of nature that we measure and we know what their value are but we can't have we don't have any particular explanation for why these values are what they are and one of them is very important is called the the mass of the Higgs boson you don't need to know what that is now but it's related to this particle that my part of my my colleagues and I discovered at the Large Hadron Collider a few years ago and this particle is a very important and very weird particle as a reminder the Large Hadron Collider is a 27 kilometer circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland and these just to back up one second so these constants of nature or these things do we measure there's a lot of them and this Higgs boson mass is just one that I'm going to talk about but if any of these values were in fact a little bit different our universe would be a vastly different place and one of them has to do with this Higgs boson discovered here at the Large Hadron Collider 27 kilometers in the border of France and Switzerland therefore contrast this is what it would look like if a round Mel moon so I don't know if anyone lives out in this small town called oxy but if you happened if you happen to live there and you were a proton you could get two slug who sit in about a few nanoseconds in the in the Large Hadron Collider because in this machine we take superconducting magnets that are colder than outer space and we use them to accelerate protons you're made of protons to almost the speed of light and then we smash them into each other millions of times per second and we collect a debris of these collisions to look for to then sift through all this data that we collect to look for evidence of new undiscovered particles that could answer some of the biggest open questions of physics and the bigness of these open questions of physics is nicely concordant with the bigness of the experiment and so the experiment that I work on is one of the places at the four places on the ring where you bend these beams into each other and a collision happens and the place where the collision happens you better build a gigantic because quantum field theory magic is gonna happen and by gigantic I mean gigantic this one here whoops there we go oh it's not in this version well you can see at the very end of this slide the gigantic thing the one that I work on is called Atlas it's six stories high it's 46 meters long and if you come in the next year and a half at CERN where the current currently at kind of a shutdown mode you can actually go downstairs and see it so I highly encourage you all to come but so the bigness of these experiments is nicely concordant with the bigness of the questions that we're trying to answer and some of them are gigantic for example why is every galaxy in the universe spinning way faster than I should so take your favorite Hubble telescope photo of a galaxy like a spiral galaxy I love to look at Hubble photos and I've never gotten rid of that love take your favorite one and then count up all the stuff you can see all the stars and all the gas and stuff this gives you an estimate of an amount of visible matter in the universe and now take your favorite textbook on gravity and general relativity I assume all of you have a textbook on general activity on the bedside like I do you take that matter you plug it into the equation that says how fast a star should be moving as a function of how far away from the center of the galaxy it is this gets a straightforward calculation now go out and measure how fast those stars are moving its way off from the prediction and it's not just a little bit off its way off and it's not just one galaxy it's all of them everyone is completely wrong this means that one of two things is really wrong either gravity is wrong that's probably not or there's got to be more stuff there than what we can see with our eyes and if it's not light if it doesn't interact with light and it's dark hence dark matter and it turns out there's not just a little dark matter and as you can see from the deviation there there's about five to six times more dark matter in the universe than there is you matter every single one of you probably has about a billion particles of dark matter flowing through your body every second and you've never felt it and you never will so this gives you senses this is kind of an important question we should figure out what the answer to this is is it a particle is something else so this is one of the big questions that we can we can address at the Large Hadron Collider and prior to its turning on about ten years ago there were a large number of big questions and one of them had to do with this Higgs boson particle which is a very important particle very weird particle and it's important because without the Higgs boson particle you would not be here right now so the Higgs boson is a very important particle well let me just so prior to it turning on the LHC turning on this was a big open question is the Higgs boson does it exist does this Higgs field exist and then after at once 2012 Renat came around we discovered this particle it was fantastic there was champagne and celebration and two white males won a Nobel Prize what else is new and there was also a little little bit of head-scratching too because honestly we probably shouldn't have discovered this particle at all this particle is important for the following reason here the Higgs boson is not the most important thing about this discovery we talk about this all the time the boson if you know anything about particle physics it has a particular that means particular values of some of its intrinsic properties doesn't matter but the boson particle the particle part is not the most important thing the most important part of this discovery was the fact that the Higgs boson demonstrates conclusively that there's something called the Higgs field that exists and the Higgs field is more or less an invisible jelly that permeates all of space where you don't feel it but your particles do and your particles feel this field because they have mass and mass for a particle is not the same thing that you and I use in colloquial sense is like whoa look at that massive building or something like that mass for particles in his intrinsic property it's a number put there by nature and it seems that certain particles have certain types of masses because they're dragged a little bit by this Higgs field if I'm a electron and I'm zipping through space a little bit of my kinetic energy is stuck into a point that we as mass and this is related to this concept of e equals mc-squared and this is one of Einstein's most famous equations showing that there's an equivalence between energy and mass and energy would you know but then mass is this thing where it's stuck a little bit into a point and we measure this thing as mass and it's really good that this Higgs field exists because if you're for example if electrons had a zero mass in the absence of a Higgs field if your electrons had a zero mass you and I would not be here to have this discussion because an electron with a zero mass would never have started to form atoms in the early universe and it's pretty good that atoms started to form so this is this is one example as to why you know that's important that we this type of a discovery actually gives us larger implications as to what you know as to our place in the universe and again I'm seeing some of the looks on your faces and of course you should again be yelling at me invisible jelly how are you gonna demonstrate that it's a very good question imagine if you were imagine you're standing on a bridge in the night completely dark night you're standing on this bridge and a friend has told you that down below underneath the bridge there's a muddy river maybe you're an enthusiast of muddy rivers you have like an Instagram account that's dedicated to mighty rivers I don't know but you're there and you look down and you don't see anything it's a completely pitch black night you look down and you don't see a thing at all you have a flashlight you trying the flashlight down but you can't see anything moving it just looks like dirt you think maybe your friend has lied to you so you think how from up here it's maybe you know 100 meters below or something how from up here could I ever possibly demonstrate that there's a river down there you could drop a rock so you drop a rock and just as it splashes you see a little splash that exists for a small amount of time but then it dies and it goes into a completely flat space again you've demonstrated very temporarily and briefly that that field there that that that muddy river does indeed exist and in this case the muddy river is this in visible higgs field and the rock I'm sorry the the vortex that little that little splash that's the Higgs boson particle and the rock is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN if you take reality and smack it just right with just the right resonant frequency you can make this Higgs boson vibrate into existence for a small amount of time before it then decays and goes back into nothing so this is how we were able to demonstrate that this Higgs field existed and without the Higgs field you would not be here right now because atoms would not have formed so it's good that the Higgs field exists but again go back to the math anytime someone shows you something about a physical theory go and talk it look at the math if you look at the math behind all this stuff there's nothing to prevent our Higgs boson mass from being something gigantic lehigh all way outside of the range of the Large Hadron Collider there's nothing to prevent that and in physics if something is not prevented it has to happen but we found the Higgs boson down here again it's really good that we did because you would not be here if we had not found this Higgs boson with this particular mass but there's got to be something that's preventing it from being all the way up here one good idea is if there were some extra particles that we also discovered at the Large Hadron Collider that through some complicated interactions they help regulate the Higgs boson mass and kind of keep it bumped right where we discovered it that would be great we do not see these particles at the Large Hadron Collider why is the higgs boson mass sitting right where it is do we just get lucky maybe it is just lucky but a particular type of luck nature loves statistical distributions I doubt you will hear an earlier statement all day long nature loves statistical distributions and the average resting heart rate of everyone this room will be distributed as a Gaussian distribution if you stand on the street corner the rate with which cars will pass you follow some kind of boss distribution nature loves statistical distributions too in a sense it seems like sometimes physics sorry math and statistics transcend our universe so what if our Higgs boson mass is only one of a possibly infinite number of Higgs boson masses in a multiverse one of them was stable led to a stable universe for you and I are here to have this discussion and most of the other ones the Higgs boson mass was something completely different and these are two completely dull empty void universes and you never want a vacation there the lack of extra particles at the Large Hadron Collider is not definitive demonstration proof that we live in a multiverse but it's another circumstantial hint that we should take seriously this idea but again I see and acknowledge and love the looks on your faces right now because you're absolutely right again tell me listen man you're a scientist you need evidence and you're absolutely a hundred percent right you need to ask the question how are we ever gonna possibly test this idea is it just philosophy or is it something we could possibly demonstrate and test that's a very good question the answer to it is that we have some ideas but they're currently either very weird or technologically challenging to do at the moment one way is that we could look for a bruise on our universe remember that almost infinite number of universes in the multiverse due to this inflation of the fabric of space what if two of them inflated or a evolved right next to each other expanded right next to each other and bumped into each other as they as they expanded could that be what this little cold spot is here on this baby picture of the universe it remains to be seen whether this conclusion is supported by the evidence by the data better than some other conclusion but it's an open part it's an open door action of inquiry right now another way is to look for new revolutionary high mass particles that we haven't discovered yet aka my day job the largeness of experiments like the Large Hadron Collider is important because bigger machines allow you to go to higher energies and go back to the Einstein equation if nature has a particle with a mass M that's all the way up here and we as a species have only ever built a Collider that goes up to energy here we'll never be able to discover it measure its properties thus we need to push two directions push two energy regimes larger machines where we simply haven't looked yet because that's where the discoveries could be hiding we don't choose where nature puts the discoveries we only choose to keep exploring so a few months ago we announced at CERN our proposal plan to potentially build a an even bigger Collider at CERN this would be the future circular Collider if the Large Hadron Collider is 27 kilometers around this would be a hundred kilometers around and I live right in the middle there somewhere there so this would be a hundred kilometers around would allow us to get up to seven times the energies of what we can right now at the Large Hadron Collider this would open up unparalleled potential discovery opportunities but if we don't discover new particles at this hour at this FCC because it exit would be ok so if we discover these extra particles to help regulate the Higgs mass if we discover them just outside of the range of the Large Hadron Collider well within the range of this thing that would only be a little bit weird it would totally be really nice for us we'd be like okay our universe is fine it's awesome let's move on to other things to study we don't have to worry about whether we live in a multiverse it would be ok but if we build this thing and we don't find new particles would that satisfy me would that be satisfying enough for me to say I think that we live in a multiverse no we would have to go bigger why not go as big as possible why not think big let's build a particle collider around the circumference of the moon this would allow us to get to energies that are tens of thousands a time's the energy of the Large Hadron Collider and allow us to enter completely unparalleled discovery potential and you might think this is kind of a crazy idea but think about it there's a lot of innovators right now that are interested in going to the moon setting up some kind of a moon base doing some kind of moon mining or things like that why not work together and make this happen but obviously I can't do this alone I have a list of things I know what I want from this project I have a list of things that i'ma need from somebody in this audience so that we can make this happen okay I'm gonna need 11,000 kilometers worth of extremely strong magnets that don't currently exist I'm gonna need an amazing space transport system for personnel stuff you know uh you know supplies okay something there's robust and and and and reliable I need some kind of tunnel scouting and engineering and digging that doesn't currently exist you know we need to build a tunnel around the circumference of the moon but wait a minute maybe we don't need to build a tunnel maybe we could just put it on the surface and shield it from from radiation we'll be good so maybe we don't need some kind of self-directed robots to do tunnel scouting maybe we just need robots that do this the stuff on the surface so if you're a robotics person get on this right now I also need the next generation of particle detector the stuff that I work on at Atlas this this we need things that are much much more finely grained than we currently do we need them to scale up much much larger because the energy coming out of this collision is gonna be way bigger than what we can currently measure it with our current technology I need data science methods that don't currently exist the amount of data that would be coming out of the machine we run for a few decades exabyte level probably lots more than that okay so I need methods that don't exist yet to do data machine learning deep learning ideas I need some kind of robust earth to moon a data transfer system that's robust against solar flares and other types of disruptions I need some kind of next-generation power we're gonna use nuclear on there on the moon but maybe we could just use solar because there's copious Sun coming in because there's no atmosphere I also need all the other stuff I haven't thought of yet so what if we build the moon Collider would I then be satisfied maybe we build the moon Collider we don't find any new particles at all and we then I can then say yes the answer is no that's not big enough no to answer the question definitively we would actually have to reach an energy called the Planck energy we'd have to reach something called the Planck scale and this is such an unimaginably high energy scale at which everything about physics would be revealed we would know everything about gravity about dark matter about how gravity and quantum mechanics work together everything about neutrinos about matter versus antimatter about probably whether we live in a multiverse we wouldn't need to know everything about this but to reach the Planck energy in a Collider experiment we would probably have to build a particle collider around the outer edge of the solar system clearly we're going to need some major innovation to make this happen but luckily we are at the conference the conference okay and a place where I can't seem to walk three meters without running into an world-changing innovator or an aspiring world-changing innovator so catch me catch me afterwards and we'll brainstorm ways to make this happen I'm here but so this is the ultimate hadron collider if we were to build this ultimate cadrin Collider and we will what will we do with the answers that we get from it even if we were to provide overwhelming circumstantial evidence that you and I live in a multiverse there's currently no way for us to ever contact or interact with another universe such a concept currently makes no sense thus are such questions meaningless you may say yes and in fact some scientists would agree with you in fact some scientists attack our attempts to learn more about such questions by by attacking our plans to build say this FCC at CERN saying that such questions are unscientific but is that true we started with known science observations of the world around us and we followed the chain of logic to arrive at the conclusion that we might live in a multiverse no one's claiming that's the truth but it's a possibility it's very startling and scary but it's definitely scientific just because we can't answer the question now doesn't mean that we never will this sort of thing sounds impossible but impossible this is definitely impossible impossible but something like a moon Collider that's just regular impossible and regular impossible we can do regular impossible is only impossible right up until that moment when somebody makes it possible so if so so does that mean that these questions are non-scientific it definitely does not these are definitely scientific questions so why do people object to questions like this could it be that they're afraid of the answer could it be that this is a similar fear that led people to object to question similar questions in the past such as is the earth really at the center of the solar system or are the stars painted on a solid dome a kilometer above our heads the fear that you and I are not really as special as we think we are perhaps more accurately the fear that what you know right now is not all there is to know but this fear is perhaps even more fundamental than the fear of knowledge or the fear that we are irrelevant to the universe and it seems that we kind of are it could be the fear of reconceptualizing humanity's very existence a curious thing happens when you study physics particle physics quantum mechanics and then quantum field theory for eight years you start with the basic physical objects we encounter every day like rocks and clouds and you think about how they do anything how they sit still how they move how they exist in these states and you do that and to do that you consider the forces that act on them so these are standard everyday ideas that we as humans have evolved with and that are understandable to us you calculate the various forces acting on a bridge and you're pleased to understand why physics exists to help structural engineers design safe roads and buildings and then you learn that the same essential set of ideas can help us understand why and how a rock thrown into the air will return to the Earth's surface and how the planets stars and galaxies move around each other how electricity works how a light bulb shines etc and then you take all these ideas and you go very small very small to the realm of the smallest things imaginable individual uncuttable particles and while many of the same principles apply there too very quickly things become extremely different at some point you realize that our understanding of particles being discrete separate chunks of stuff breaks down you realize that depending upon how you look at it something like an electron for example is either a particle a small chunk of stuff or is instead a miniature localized packet of vibrating waves this wave particle duality is not just some crazy idea but is an observation and consequence of quantum mechanics which is filled with starting startling conclusions like this that challenge our big bulky human conceptions of reality and depending upon how you look at them these conclusions are either limitations or Liberation's for example it's fundamentally impossible for me to know with arbitrary precision simultaneously where a given electron is and how fast it's moving you might think that's strange and you're right here on the surface of the earth I can stand still and watch and watch you as you zip past me in a wheelchair and I will know exactly where you are the whole time and I will know exactly how fast you're moving with an electron this is impossible the more precisely I know the electrons position the less I know about how fast it's moving and the more precisely I know its speed the less I know about where it is this is wild my human desire and hubris compels me to think that if I just work hard enough just figure out some clever method just wait for an advanced enough civilization I should be able to know everything about everything isn't that superficially one of the driving forces of science but quantum mechanics says this is fundamentally impossible there are limits to our knowledge and not just science knowledge not just regular knowledge but knowledge itself that's humbling and liberating because these ideas challenge our core understandings of reality and force us to reframe our view of humanity's place in the world it's disorienting and it gets worse because it turns out that quantum mechanics is not the end of the story when you take individual chunks of stuff and accelerate them to very high speeds those approaching the speed of light you realize that standard quantum mechanics doesn't cut it anymore the behavior of a thing moving at almost the speed of light is best described by something called special relativity another set of wild ideas that completely overturned our understanding of time and space and when you combine this description with quantum mechanics you get something called quantum field theory the implications of which are absolutely breathtaking quantum field theory begins with the notion that for a given kind of particle like our electron every single electron in the universe is fundamentally indistinguishable from every other electron let's say I put a bunch of tennis balls in a washing machine I can paint one of them black and after letting them bump around for a while I can easily find that black tennis ball still among the many yellow ones I can tag and elect a tennis ball I cannot tag an electron if I try to keep track of an electron I send toward an atom for example an atom that already has a bunch of electrons swarming around it and the electron bumps into the atom and another another electron comes flying out the other side it's impossible for me to state which electron this is and where the electron I sent in is now there's no way to tag an electron this means that an electron in an atom here in my hand and an electron currently in a star on the other side of the Milky Way are fundamentally identical so perhaps the best way to think about an electron at all is not as an individual chunk of stuff a discreet piece of the universe that I can track like a black tennis ball but instead perhaps an electron is really an excitation in a background quantum field that permeates all of space or throughout the universe in this way of viewing things the most fundamental object in the universe is not a particle not an individual chunk of something but universal but instead the universe wide field that is everywhere all the time and from which any given particle can vibrate into existence temporarily as a small small wobble in this field and then once it's done what it needed to do it dissolves back into this field this cosmic quantum field this vast smooth continuum of activity possibility and localized vibration everywhere in space all the time is the most fundamental way describing our universe you and I and everything in the universe are simply gloriously temporary collections of vibrations in fundamental quantum fields and we wobble into existence just long enough to taste a perfectly ripe peach watch a sunset while holding hands with another collection of quantum vibrations and help a temporary fellow being in need and then we eventually return to the background field from which we arose a continuum field that has existed for as long as we can define time space and existence and will probably always always exist the hottest and latest in physics requires a radical reframing of humanity's place in the universe fundamentally shifting the focus from us humans as some kind of authoritative benchmarks of existence and perception to the background continua the context within which we observe ourselves as having vibrated and evolved now not only and you are you and I not the most prominent things in the universe ours might not be the only universe and not only are you not any more or less important than any other human being but if we were to zoom in and look at the particles of which you are composed you and I are these sets of gloriously indistinguishable quantum vibrations excitations in quantum fields but although this quantum equitability is true at the scale of unfathomably huge in a tiny scale of the particles that composed you and me you and I don't live and conduct our lives in either the level of expanding universes or the quantum well realm in some ways this is a good thing if I put an electron next to a solid barrier there's a nonzero probability that I will suddenly measure the electron as existing on the other side of the barrier this is a possible quantum mechanics and we determine it we measure it all the time we observe it luckily this is not true of you leaning against the door of a high-speed train you and I conduct our lives on the scale of this right here on the surface of the earth with joy and pain and sorrow and pleasure in the notion that two humans are essentially indistinguishable sets of quantum vibrations in fields is cold comfort to a woman or a person of color or a gender non-conforming person or a person with a disability experiencing prejudice and bigotry at the hands of a privileged person so I mention all of this not because I think that this delicate observation that physics renders us all gloriously equal will have some kind of immediate effect on the current nearly catastrophic social and political situation in which we find ourselves but it's an interesting metaphor and it's a promising start because our current perception of the world around us is shaped by one particular set of dominant paradigms driven primarily by the culture of context in society within which many of us exist whether we chose to or not this culture of profit zero-sum competition accumulation and consumption but perceptions can evolve and paradigms can shift and context can change and metaphors especially those that speak to the fundamental empirical nature of everything around us can be very powerful and this is good because shifting these sets of dominant attitudes is going to be very difficult hegemonies persist by a little unrelentingly convincing you that they're inevitable and dependent upon who you are within some given hegemony the thing that often prevents you from disrupting it is fear for those beings subjugated it's a real fear of physical harm for those benefiting from it it's a fear of a loss of privilege or more generally a fear of change this kind of softly constantly lene fear shows up in a large number of places in our lives for example does this same fear affect you what might happen if you quit your current job and you did that thing you've been thinking about for years like starting a humanitarian organization what might happen if if you what might happen if you decided that what might happen if you know if you're in the tech world or the innovation world what what might happen if you stopped working on a long series of smartphone apps and instead worked upon a bigger idea that you've been kind of thinking in the back of your head for a long time like solving poverty or coming up with a way of preventing governments from secretly surveilling their citizens what might happen if you stopped working on what you're doing right now and instead worked on something gigantically awesome - all of that stuff that I said about a particle collider around the moon or around the outer edge of the solar system as awesome as that is it's totally based upon extrapolations from existing current technology what if instead you join the effort to understand how to accelerate particles to higher energies within a much smaller space so my colleagues are working at something called plasma wake field acceleration you can look up the details if you want but in principle if that were to come if that were to come to fruition and come to to be able to be ready for prime time in principle we'll be able to reach the Planck scale in a much much smaller space what if you did this instead what if what if what if what if the answer to all of these questions is indeed quite possibly nothing but you currently don't know that and you never will unless you take this leap and find out and to me the safety of ignorance will never compete with the scary beauty and the terrifying joy of knowledge always seek always ask the big question always allow yourself the bravery of stepping into the unknown and always seek out new knowledge to vanquish the fear because you know what this fear distracts us from some of the key basic objective physical truths of reality you and I don't need to be afraid of an almost infinite number of universes and you and I don't need to be afraid of really conceptualize in our position in the in the universe as being some kind of central thing instead of being instead instead to some perception of us being temporary collections of vibrations and quantum fills we don't need to be afraid of these things because at the end of the day we know one thing for sure there is at least one universe and you and I are parts of that universe and when you and I humans ask questions about the universe we humans are the method by which the universe asks questions about itself and when I see the government of the United States putting children into literal cages on the us-mexico border and when I see that the third largest political party in the swedish parliament in 2019 2019 is rooted in fascism and its representatives continually use racist xenophobic misogynistic language and when I when I see that we're we've allowed decades of unfettered global capitalism to essentially destroy the earth and we're not acting fast enough to fix it and when I think about my friend melody and how the other kids made fun of her because of the color of her skin and how she had a difficult time going to class because of it and how she never went to high school I feel anger it's not just regular anger oh I feel regular anger too but as a physicist I feel an extra layer of anger because when we allow these things to happen we're betraying a cosmic truth you and I are parts of the same universe and we're all in this universe together and so back on that mountain when I was a child eight years old I said everything is terrifying and after a long time melody said yes it's scary but it would be scarier if I were out here by myself and it looked up at the sky then I looked at her and I said yeah and the two of us looked up at the night sky the stars and galaxies watching us from very far away [Applause] thank you thank you thank you oh you're too kind thank you I'd ask you a question thank you thank you thank you if you had introduced me to tears we do have time for one or two questions do you have one let's I mean I have some too I'm sure was a hundred percent understandable every single physics part you all now have you all now have honorary PhDs in physics so there's a question right there just a moment you'll get a microphone and thank you for waving vigorously yes you said that we should not be scared about reliving cryin and universe that is part of a set of funny universes but you also said that another universe might have been the cause of steam patent a background noise waves so how can we not be sure that another universe will not collide with ours and cause an impact on us that's it yeah well it was great see you later no the answer is that is a kind of it sounds like a logically circular thing but the answer is that we're here and everything seems fine that's really the answer I mean but the other part of it is that yeah of course we don't we cannot rule out the possibility that our universe is expanding right now and it still is it's still expanding in fact it's going faster and faster but maybe there is some other universe that eventually it might actually bump to bump into but you can you can rest assured that that's probably not gonna be a problem because think about what I said we have this like this tiny subset volume that's our observable universe that anything we can possibly see or contact with is defined by that the universe itself is way bigger than that so if the kind of outer edge of the universe started to bump into another one it would probably the only way this propagated this this bump or you know any kind of catastrophic thing from the bump could ever possibly get to us it could only at the it could only probably happen at the at the speed of light so you can probably rest assured that's that's gonna be okay if we do actually collide within our universe also if you want to do some calculations if that were possible it would probably would only happen trillions of years from now and you'll be dead by then so also is is probably gone I have potentially like a really stupid question please but if I mean the fact that we're talking about like directions and expansion that seems to imply that time is a thing that exists and has a direction yeah right yes so okay like we're not gonna have time travel like so my terminator plan of saving the world is gone so it seems that time travel at least going backward in time is going to be a very very difficult thing to do if not impossible it's another one of those kind of open questions that's right in the borderlands of science it's like what's outside the universe I noticed that I didn't actually give you an answer cuz we don't know it's also the answer will we be able ever be able to travel backward in time we don't really know it seems in principle possible but to make it happen we would probably have to do something that is almost as crazy as building a particle collider around the outer edge of the solar system we would probably have to take an entire like a star that's probably ten times the size of the Sun we would somehow have to figure out how to collapse that into a tiny space of a few kilometers maybe even a few meters apart and then somehow this would hopefully create a wormhole in space that would bend both space and time so severely that in principle you could traverse some in time to go back but then you somehow have to figure out how to control that to point you toward a specific point in time I don't have to do any of these things anyway and anyone that tells you they do they're probably an amazing science fiction writer you can read all their stuff but there's nothing in there that tells us how to do this in principle it's possible but going backward in time is probably outside of the realm of our civilization also thank you yes all right let's do one more so I tried to pay attention to all that you said I didn't hear I heard a lot about dark matter but not dark energy there is that another school or no it's another it's another one of the big open questions of physics that we're trying to solve with a lot of different directions a lot of different experiments right now and I did it's mostly because of time I didn't have to go into it very briefly dark matter and dark energy they both have the word dark in them other very different things and some people have said that you know anytime a physicist says that they use the time you hear a physicist use the word dark and in theory it means they have no idea what they're talking about it's not entirely true as I point to that right I mean Dark Matter has a little reason why it's called dark but dark energy really is a sort of like a question mark energy at that dark part there means we have no idea basically what happened it's the other part of this the the the history of the universe's expansion I said that right at the moment of the Big Bang it did this inflation the horse going to the size of the universe in ten to the minus thirty two seconds and then it tapered off and for like about ten billion years it went at that kind of a sort of understandable slow speed and then a few billion years ago for some reason it started speeding up again not catastrophic Li not yet again like infinitely like the the horse to ten to the power minus 10 to the minus thirty two seconds but it started speeding up again and we're like wow no one really knows exactly why that happened but there's a lot of fantastic research going on as to what turned on what happened a few billion years ago so that suddenly this there's this there's accelerated expansion of space it's not something that it's entirely clear that we can say so much of Collider experiments about right now but it's mostly the it's mostly within the wheelhouse of Astro Astro physics experiments of straw astronomy experiments there is some overlap but it's not entirely clear what that connection is right now again once we get to the point of being our civilization is able to build a Collider around the outer edge of the solar system it's probably the connections gonna be much clearer so we're a little while away from that I come from the humanities as I said I'm a leader and thank you so much for explaining things so that I think I understand them isn't quite the same as actually understanding them but I I don't didn't read any science basically but I did read critical theory and semiotic Sande things like that which also involves sitting in a room and like thinking about how meaning is arbitrary and which words attached to its symbols how that work and like what is language in the brain and things like that and what I always found at the end of that hour was that you know I would leave the room and it felt like reality was melting around me and I wonder like what happens in your brain when you engage with these ideas all the time like do you do you get this feeling sometimes that everything is very unstable and you need to turn it off no not so much it's it I mean it's a very good question in fact there's we could probably have an entire hours worth of discussion about the type of language that we use you know that humanity has especially like well you know the again we white males over the years of the ones that have been the mostly driving the the construction of science over the last few decades entries the types of words that get used why they're important why these implicit you know why why they have why those ideas have helped drive you know the things that we've looked at for the second for the last couple of few centuries and we could talk about that for a very long time but really what happens is one of the good questions that often gets answers it was asked with respect to quantum mechanics right because it's really true quant very you often hear people say it's like oh yeah quantum mechanics is so weird and it has all these kind of bizarre things and no one can ever understand quantum mechanics and there's a famous quote by some physicists back in the 30s is like Oh anyone who tells you they understand they understand quantum mechanics hasn't thought about it for long enough that's not entirely true even though it's non-intuitive for the reasons that I outlined the way that things interact within the quantum realm it's not intuitive for you and I just because we were you know we've evolved on this very friendly fuzzy you know planet with this narrow range of really nice conditions that is very rare in the universe the universe doesn't operate operate that that way normally so when you start thinking about these things the math isn't controvert able eventually you get used to this concept and you start to think of it you start to bring these quantum concepts more into your intuition as a scientist so it honestly the the the g-wiz feeling never goes away but they turn like the feeling of your brain melting that that goes away you're like you've never I've never be able to do my research if I was constantly walking around CERN it's like dark matter through my body that said yours I mean yes so I went I saw the Atlas detector like 10 11 years ago just before he was finished it's like a Cathedral you have to go I do advise I have a little language tip for you because I'm very excited about your moon Collider don't call it a moon Collider it suggests the moon will collide with things and that's nobody wants that you never get the funding all right part of the reason I agree I agree part of the reason I call it that is so that I can get people's attention exactly like that effect oh yes let's do it it's not a moon Collider it's not a real Collider we're over time unfortunately we have to and thank you so much thank you James Mitchell thank you it's my pleasure thank you

Channel: The Conference / Media Evolution

Views: 445,286

Keywords: 2019, the conference 2019, what's outside the universe

Id: GxghuChsQPo

Length: 59min 6sec (3546 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/zalos]

I learned a lot from this video, some of the concepts at a high level were great. Not a huge fan of the SJW stuff but I understand the need when you have a platform.

[u/FakeRacer]

Aaaaannd there it is...