Neil deGrasse Tyson: We Might Be Living In Higher Dimensions…But Our Senses Can’t Tell Yet.

okay question is people there's he heard something he talked about God on CBS television and he's had he's like thinking about near-death experiences and he wonders whether these deep mysteries are interesting to you okay so one of the things we know from research and psychology as well as just practical matters in the conducting of scientific experiments is that one of the lowest forms of evidence you could possibly invoke is eyewitness testimony which is odd because it's one of the highest forms of evidence in the court of law which disturbs me greatly so if you cut if you come from a lab to a science conference and say this is true we say how do you know this because I saw it let's really the end of your talk and you just leave and then we say come back when you have a chart recorder or you have to just give me something that does not have to flow through your senses because your senses is some of the worst data taking devices that exist and science did not achieve maturity modern sites do not receive maturity until we had instruments that either extended our senses or replace them and Galileo is not an accident that we have modern science as I've described it experiment verification this these tactics these methods and tools began with Galileo and Francis Bacon and Galilei was around 1600 that was the invention in that period of the microscope and the telescope so it's not an accident that all this sort of came together at that time so now we have people who are in the act of dying and they come back from life and they report on mental experiences and that's intriguing it's intriguing but because it is in the realm of eyewitness testimony you can establish it perhaps as a personal truth but it will take more than that to establish it as an objective truth and an objective truth is the kind of truths that science discovers and it's the kind of truth that true whether or not you believe in it okay it exists outside of your culture your religion your political affiliation personal truths if I may consider that would be okay Jesus is your Savior that's your personal truth you cannot convince someone else that Jesus is their Savior in an objective way you have to persuade them you have to persuade them in some with in some cases by war right look at the wars that have been fought between religions that did not agree about who was their respective saviors so so sure we know if I walked on water made you unblind turned got created loaves and fishes out of nothing that would be a maze I think we would like investigate that and we would sit we would sit whoa let yes we would we would so it would be an amazing thing and then if we if we cannot account for that for by any other known laws of physics and it's only happening with you that we see we'd wonder if you were like alien or something first right but no it would be so easy to demonstrate divinity if in fact you had the power you wanted to display but getting back to the gentleman's point so part of this issue is what does it mean to be dead okay it used to be did you fog a mirror that was held up in front of you while you were laying there on your bed alright and if you didn't fog the mirror you were judged to be dead they would put you in a coffin and in some parts that it is told there's a string that they put into the coffin as they buried you and they put it over a tree branch and connected to a bell if you woke up you would pull the string and you that's where you get the term dead ringer okay you would pull the string and you come rescue me because you buried a living person okay so then it was you dead because your heart stops well we know why your heart beats its electrochemical so you do produce the heart beats again we got that one okay well is it when you're brain dead well you can be brain dead but your heart is still beating and we can keep you alive are you dead yet well no because your heart still beating is your brain functioning no okay I can tell you this that if you're dead long enough that your brain is deprived oxygen and then you we bring you back you're not talking about seeing any lights because you're brain dead okay so Plus this often happens to someone who is definitely ill to begin with and where are they they're in a hospital and if they go into cardiac arrest or something critical they take you from your hospital bed to an operating table and what is sitting above an operating table like bright lights okay and so if you say oh I was dead and I came back and I saw lights we maybe it's not all the cases but it's many of the cases okay now do skeptics who tried to do an experiment they're people who say they left their body hmm and they saw we got some of those Montesquiou so here's what they did when was Montesquieu he got rear-ended by some guy in a horse fell off flew up into the air looked down at himself in agony watched his wife wait oh we're in collisions in the air Montaigne Montaigne sorry Montaigne not bill they have rear-end collisions in the air well you ride a horse with a guy behind you is riding too fast is like a cab situation okay I didn't know that okay okay so I didn't know that well I love stopping you mid rear-end collision with the horses where was I so so there was an experiment so there's some descriptions that are part of this near-death experience literature where they come above and they see themselves down there on the bed okay so what they decided to do is for people who are about to die they would write a message facing upwards to the ceiling above the bed and suspend it there so if a person goes above their bed and looks down they'd be able to read the message so they rejoin their body they what they should then tell us what message they saw that's never half this system no that's enough now now I have a cousin who when her father died was alone with him in the room and he's in an open casket and she's otherwise completely rational okay I'm not saying this a crazy person too completely when she's a real estate agent so ok thanks for itself ok among other town okay so she's in there she tells me of a conversation she had with her dead father and I said was it in your mind no he sat up and spoke to her I said what was the conversation and she said well he asked he said don't worry about him he's in a better place this sort of thing so this is her eyewitness testimony I'm not going to say it's wrong I'm just saying it's not scientifically useful that's all I'm really saying here okay I told her next time this happens ask these questions and not those questions okay don't say are you happy and did you how you know saying are you wearing clothes where are you where did you get your clothes what temperature is it are you just asked questions like this is this is an amazing scientific experiment you could be performing so so that's my lessons all of you don't find yourself in that situation okay cuz if a dead person sits up and starts talking to me oh my god but my iphone is coming out I'm getting charged the corners I'm I'm going to be all up in that as an experimental okay question is can you help us understand a multi-dimensional universe what would be the dimensions we are unaware of any dimension higher than the three that we're familiar with or the actual for that we're embedded in we live in a four-dimensional world and that might sound a little flaky freaky but consider the following fact you have never met someone at a place unless it was also at a time and you have never met someone at a time unless it was also at a place that requires four dimensions of a ordinary wave eight what about in a dream this is the dream happening inside your head yes I don't know when so the only point is we know intuitively that we need four dimensions to localize someone to meet up with them especially well only two dimensions if you don't have tall buildings you have tall buildings you need the third dimension so you don't say I'll meet you at the 20th floor of you know on 7:21 Park Avenue what time okay this is a full four dimensions going on there so just I want to convince you we live in a four dimensional world for that reason okay it may be that these four dimensions are manifest to us but that in fact we are embedded in higher them in a higher dimensional space and strength theorists on the frontier of this exercise are hypothesizing at least ten dimensions to account for everything we see in the universe even if we do not directly measure those dimensions themselves now with your permission may I go on a dimensional journey with you man might take you on a journey a dimensional Odyssey Odyssey are you ready yeah okay are you ready to get ready for this okay so I'm at my desk and the desk is a surface okay and I start putting pages down on the desk of tiling them on the desk and then I run out of room I have exhausted the two dimensions of the surface of my desk we have ways of accommodating this problem and so we have page organizers that go upwards so now and I don't have any more surface area of the desk I can enter a third dimension and put pages there if you are an ant embedded in this two-dimensional world of the surface of my desk and you fill up the desk with these sheets of paper the ants will say there is no more room and I say yes there is watch me and I take a piece of paper off the desk put it in the page organizer and according to the ant that's embedded into two dimensions that page disappeared it disappeared into a dimension that ant does not have access to what a brilliant invention this is you can put practically an unlimited number of pages but far more pages above the desk then on the desk so access to a third dimension is an extraordinarily useful storage device for a two dimensional creature does the ant trust you that what it cannot see is nevertheless there we have to then talk to it about this extra dimension and then it will have to just trust you yes because watch what happens next I now have my three dimensional room and I'm filling it with boxes now I've run out of space to put the boxes but now an alien four dimensional alien looks at us and says I got this just move it into the fourth dimension what are you talking about and the alien comes in reaches in takes one of the boxes and then the Box disappears disappears it went into a fourth dimension and this was captured in the film Monsters Inc did you guys see the film these are monsters that work in a door Factory and they make these doors and they open the door and it is the door of the kid's bedroom or their closet and they've step through and they're in the kid's closet and then they scare the kid because that's their job they're monsters this okay this doorway is a portal through the fourth dimension and then back to the third so imagine a new storage system we just go to Home Depot and buy a door and that door is your portal to a fourth dimension you open the door put your boxes close the door you look on the other side of the door there's nothing there so this is what's going on when you have access to higher dimensions wait don't you have to then talk to somebody as far as you know if you're a scientist and you need data what you have is something that you had it's gone and now a voice says I've got this yeah if that what data if it's a voice from the fourth dimension I'm gonna listen to it so does everything I'm not going to say I know you're a lie I if if there's a voice coming out of the fourth dimension and makes one of my boxes disappear I'm thinking it's got more power than I do and more knowledge of the space-time continuum so I'm going with it does that mean that in order for scientists to credit another dimension with reality with real existence it will need a testifier from beyond so you need a dimension plus a dimension dimension voice demand a dimension a dimensionless voice yeah that comes from another from another place now there are things that happen in quantum physics that kind of defy our sensibilities like particles pop in and out of existence they don't they defy any rational attempt to understand it particles can be entangled with one another a particle can be here and there's a barrier and it can spontaneously show up on the other side of the barrier at faster than the speed of light all of this is just mysterious let me ask you suppose you have a sphere and I live in a 2-dimensional world and you take this hollow sphere so it's a shell and you pass that sphere through my two-dimensional universe how will I describe that I will say this point just appeared out of nowhere oops now it's a circle a small circle and that circle is getting bigger by the moment oh my gosh well if we study maximum size now that circle is just shrinking it's shrinking up now it's a point now the whole thing disappeared this will be completely freaky to a two-dimensional being but it makes complete sense if you live in three dimensions and you passed a sphere through my universe so who is to say that some of the mysterious things we are describing accurately but don't otherwise make sense makes sense in a higher dimension and these are just the manifestations of higher dimensional phenomena in our world and that's an aspect of what these higher dimensional physicists are trying to establish at this point out I want to totally blow their minds if I can if I may but you got to stay with me on this okay we'll roll Upper East Siders so you got this you ready okay these are not all Upper East so haha era suspiciously um Upper East Side people littering the room okay but you got to stay with me okay a point has no dimensions there's no height width depth so it has zero dimensions a line has one dimension length okay a square has two dimensions so the height and width a cube has three dimensions Pike with depth we got this now follow me a line is one dimensional but it's bounded by two zero dimensional things those are the points one dimension bounded by two zero dimensional points a square is two dimensions bounded by four one-dimensional sides a cube is three dimensions bounded by six two-dimensional sides so in other words the dimensions of your sides are going up your line is bound by zero dimensional points your square is bound by two-dimensional lines I mean by by um by one dimensional size the cube is bound by two dimensional squares okay so we going up to four six two points four sides of a square six sides of a cube and each side is one dimension less they're squares on the sides of the cube they're lines on the side of a square they're dots on the sides of a line let's go up to a four dimensional cube a four dimensional cube has eight sides a regular cube has six sides we're going up by two a four dimensional cube has eight sides and each of those sides is a three dimensional cube one dimension down from itself in the same way each side of a three-dimensional cube is a two-dimensional square so when you get to four dimensions the sides are three dimensional surfaces and you can take this all the way up and our brains can't picture what we call a hypercube in some circles our tesseract we can't picture a volume bounded by three-dimensional cubes what does it even mean this is because we evolved in the plains of Africa just not wanting to get eaten by a lion our neuro synapses are ill-equipped to do to do the distance on this and this is why we invent mathematics that can take us there well the mathematics can help us imagine it but if we want to credit it with reality then you have to design an experiment that somehow touches your own world yes yes so you can invent something that you can't see if it has testable consequences in ways that you can see that's perfectly allowed not a problem oh and by the way there's some people that say you cannot prove a negative some people like coming after so you generally won't hear a scientist say that it's others like philosophers and people who like criticizing scientists but who are not scientist so that you can't prove a neck we kind of do that all the time ok but we don't use the word proof we demonstrate without any further discussion that the negative is true okay so here's an example there's a cave there is there a bear in the cave I don't know I'm not going in to find out okay I'm going to set up cameras and see if a bear comes out okay so I set up the cameras all throughout summer no bear goes in and out but then I okay then I take down the camera maybe a bear went in there to hibernate so here's what you do you set up powder outside of the cave something that will record a footprint and you just monitor this month after month after month after month do it for 12 months look up in the charts how often a bear has to eat and how long would take a bear to die for not eating if the period of time you waited is long enough so that there are no footprints you conclude that there is no bear in that cave I just demonstrated a negative sufficient enough for me to no longer pose that question and go on to another problem but if you were so distracted that it's not a formal proof of a negative then you could just keep sitting there wondering while the rest of us decode the nature of the universe if we have a was the last bear in the cave but I guess let's see oh by the way maybe the cave is not a closed cave you might have a rear way have a back door yeah okay that's possible I suppose that's possible so then the assumption that there's no bear in the cave would be wrong but I'm or the cave could have a cave and that cave could have another cave you see there is just so much to worry about right and so you will sit there you'll sit there arrested by your own capacity to doubt an experimental reality yes well like I said the rest of us go and keep making discoveries well we we need we have time for one more question in your career as a scientist if there is one question that you wish to address what would that science question be yeah okay so I'm going to give an answer but then I want your permission to give you a kind of a cop-out answer I'll give both a full answer and then a cop-out answer that my full answer is I wonder if in fact the human intellect is sufficient to actually decode the full operations of this universe in which we live and it's not specifically an Astrophysical question it's just more we are in intelligent species because we defined ourselves that way we don't have the benefit of another species to compare ourselves with against whom we might fail miserably and so when we compare ourselves to chimps we sit up righteously and say we have poetry and the Hubble telescope and philosophy and the trim just stacks banana stacks boxes to reach a banana yet there's only 1% difference in our DNA but then you'll say what a difference that 1% makes and I would say maybe that 1% DNA difference corresponds with an equally small difference in the intelligence between a chimp and humans and you say I can't believe that no no well imagine some other species that visits us that's 1% along on that same scale smarter than us consider the smartest chimp does what our toddlers can do and there's no way you will explain to a chimp all of dinner ready at 6:30 if you pick up some sub juice on the way home that the simplest human thoughts are inconceivable to a chimp and their talents are about what our toddlers can do so let's get back to this 1% smarter alien that we've discovered corresponding this analogy we now say what would we look like to them well they would roll Stephen Hawking forward after combing the human species and they'd say this one is slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head like little Timmy over here but who just came home from preschool Oh Timmy you just composed three sonnets isn't that cute let's put it up on the refrigerator door oh you just derived the fundamental law of calculus isn't that kid put it up on the refrigerator their simplest thoughts would transcend our deepest thoughts and maybe they to them it is obvious what dark matter is and dark energy maybe to them particles popping in and out of existence is a trivial exercise in their understanding of the multi-dimensional space-time continuum and we are here groping at the sides of a wall not knowing how tall wide or deep it is because we have the limits of the human physiology evolved off the plains of Africa just to try to understand the entire universe so I lose sleep on that question each night so that's my way did you almost say at the beginning of that answers that you are wondering where you may be something of a mysterious you you're not sure I'm not sure the world is so the universe is so complicated that it may be more complicated than we can ever fathom no that's the hubristic way to say it it's not how I said it okay how did you say it again we might not be smart enough okay not you eristic if you're hubristic you would say we are smart but the universe is just really complicated that's not what I said well I said we might not be smart enough to figure out a universe that could be trivial to the brain of a more intelligent species okay so check your hubris at the door otherwise you're you will not bask in the cosmic perspective that so much of this discussion brings upon us so may I now give you my comp out answer my cop-out answer is I think often about the questions we do not yet know to ask because discoveries yet to come but when they arrive we'll put us in a new Vista a new place to stand enabling us to see questions undreamt of and unimaginable when I again lay awake at night I ponder what kinds of questions lay beyond our reach because the questions that we even know how to pose they're there those are not even interesting to me anymore because we knew how to ask the question I want to know the question that is beyond everyone's reach and by definition I can't because we haven't gotten there yet but that doesn't mean I shouldn't dream of that frontier and that sounded like a coda to me I got a save I can hear the orchestra playing today huh can man offer a better coda yes and then we'll let you go but we don't have long sorry we went long try not to ever forget that the history of this exercise this beautiful exercise where we find out where we fit in this great unfolding of cosmic events and phenomenon that the larger grows the area of knowledge the bigger that area grows just remember so - grows our perimeter of ignorance it may be that as much as we think we know as much as we know we know as much as the more things that we ultimately learn for all we know we could be steeped in the center of infinite ignorant which then provides job security forever for scientists rubber crawlers you're right

Channel: DW360

Views: 4,934,454

Rating: 4.8102846 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, higher dimensions, near death experience

Id: lM_HPAXwJFw

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017

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