Our Mathematical Universe with Max Tegmark

so I want to encourage you to think big because we humans have again and again and again underestimated not only the size of our cosmos discovering that everything that we thought existed was just a small part of a much grander structure a planet the solar system a galaxy a universe and maybe even a hierarchy of parallel universes but we've also repeatedly underestimated the power of our human minds to understand and even improve our cosmos now to understand what I mean about the first part under estimating the size of things we have to remind ourselves what we humans have managed to figure out so far about our place in space so let's do that by going for a little ride together here let's start in the Himalayas and head up a little bit when ancient the cave dwellers looked up at those sparkly white dots in the sky they had beautiful myths of course what this was all supposed to be but I think many of them at the same time felt a little bit melancholy figuring that they would never be able to know for sure you know what the stars really were but they were wrong they really underestimated the power of our human minds because we've subsequently realized that we could figure out the Stars we didn't even need rocket power but just mental power letting our minds fly and with pure mental power Eratosthenes over 2,000 years ago cleverly figured out the size of the earth to be 40 thousand kilometers in diameter and since then the same kind of ingenuity has actually given us rocket power we see here exactly the scale where all the satellites are orbiting our planet right now the near-earth ComStat lights in green and then geostationary satellites and others farther out this is fully to scale rendering made by the American Museum of Natural History in New York and as we zoom out farther and the moon's orbit starts coming into view where is the moon you can't even see it because this is actual exactly the scale this is not like in one of these kids books where things were expanded this gives us a sense of how fast things are our son you see here we all know it takes about eight minutes for the lights to reach us from it just to get a sense of scale and as the planets come into view here with seeing things eyes are so big that it takes hours for light to reach us from the outer solar system now I would like you to raise your hands if you know anybody was born before 1925 I know so I see a lot of hands these people that you're now thinking about they in a sense were born in a much smaller universe than us they didn't know back then that there were other galaxies what's coming into focus here the Milky Way with its hundreds of billions of stars and it's majestic spiral structures been stretching a hundred thousand light years from side to side it only became clear that there are other galaxies in 1925 when Edwin Hubble discovered that and yet this much grander structure that we're all part of we now know of course it's also just one out of unbe ins and billions of other galaxies which together form even larger structures groups clusters super clusters enormous filaments and we see here the Sloan Great Wall that I am my colleagues discovered in this enormous 3d galaxy map which is up billion light-years from side to side and that too is in turn just part of an even grander structure what we affectionately call our universe when we start when astronomers talk about our universe we don't mean everything that exists or even all of space we just mean the spherical part of space from which life has that time to reach us so far during the 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang because stuff outside of that if it exists if there are more distant galaxies here no telescope could see them we would have to wait billions of years more for the light to have time to get here now so far most of what I said is pretty intuitive the farther away we look of course the more stuff we see but one on earth is this round ball and with all these funky yellowing green and blue colors to appreciate and understand that it's not enough to talk about our place in space we also have to explore our place in time fortunately that's remarkably easy in astronomy because looking into the sky it's like looking into a time machine we already talked about how we see the Sun not the way it is now but the way it was eight minutes ago if you see some stars this evening if the rain clears up you'll see them maybe hundreds of years ago so somebody out there looking at us they wouldn't see us but they might see the American Revolution or something of Shakespeare doing his things and if we look really far out with a good telescope here we see many galaxies the way they were billions and billions of years into the past so by simply looking at different distances from Earth we can actually watch how cosmic history has unfolded now what have we learned from this well we've learned something very very surprising and to fully appreciate how surprising these things are I'd like you for a moment to just imagine that each one of you is a galaxy and I'm looking at you with my telescope here what do I see first I see something really funny which is all of you guys here in the front seem like you're about 90 years old and then I see bunch of people here about a 70 60 and 50 and I see a way up there wrong with just teenagers and then I see a bunch of toddlers and the second-last role is only infants I'm very last row is entirely empty and as if that weren't surprising enough the whole back wall of this lecture theatre is glowing at me with a strange glow of microwaves and it's more puzzling still because for some reason you're all blushing you guys here just a little bit pink but those of you in the back look possibly tomato red this is exactly what we see when we look at these galaxies out there with telescope so what on earth does this mean well first of all why did you seem to order yourself by age as you walked into the lecture theater well we've already talked about how the farther way we look right the longer ago we're seeing things happen so that means that the galaxies that we that I see the near me here are galaxies which are quite old almost 30 in which I've been around long enough to mature and grow up and become big in look much like ours whereas if I look really far away I'm looking so far back in the past galaxies hadn't had time to grow up in mature we see juvenile and really far away just these tiny baby galaxies and if I look really far away correspond to the last row of the lecture theatre I see no galaxies at all because I'm looking and what happened so long ago the galaxies had not yet had time to form why were you are blushing are you embarrassed to be here tonight with me well we know that if you go down to the highway and you listen to cars you hear them go mmm they do not sound mmm this is because what we know is the Doppler effect where as you know something going away from you has its frequency lowered M and the exact same thing happens with light so if a galaxy is flying away the light frequency will be lower which means it's color will look redder we call that red shift in astronomy so the fact that you are blushing means that all of you guys for some reason are flying away from me which is what we mean when we say their universe is expanding I can figure out how long ago you for example we're right here by just taking your distance and dividing it by your speed and remarkably when Edwin Hubble did this for the first time he found that the answer he got was pretty much the same for every galaxy because galaxies there were twice as far away were flying away twice as fast that's why those of you in the back looked more tomato red than those nearby would have blush in a little bit so and when you do the math you find out that about 13.8 billion years ago or pretty much all the galaxies receive we're more less in the same place so there was some grand calamity that took place back then we don't know exactly what caused it or exactly what happened we have a fancy name for it we call it our Big Bang we can come back and you can ask me much more about it later if you'd like but we have a very good idea of what happened during the 13.8 billion years since because we can see most of this with our telescopes so what's the last strange thing I mentioned the fact the rear wall is glowing how can we understand that well all this black stuff in space pictures which I used to think was vacuum when I was a kid can't be empty space because the galaxies must have formed from something right and we now know that this is a mostly hydrogen gas gravity the greater later clumped together into galaxies now if everything is expanding then so is a gas and you know if you expand the gas it cools off that's how your refrigerator is an air conditioners work so as we go farther and farther into the past this gas must be hotter and hotter and hotter and if we take a nice cube and then we heat it up it turns into liquid water if we heat up the water it turns into let's have one of the kids answer what does it turn into here if I heat up water enough yeah steam very good now what if I take a gas like and I like steam and I heat it up more what it turned into grown-ups can answer to for this one plasma exactly which means that electrons get torn off from the atoms now a plus so a plasma is opaque not transparent like this gas so it looks to us like beyond all those galaxies and beyond the empty last row where there were no galaxies we see a plasma screen glowing at us but it's going to look of course exactly the same whatever direction you look if you look that far into the past so it actually looks to us like we are surrounded by this plasma screen that we can photograph from inside and here are some of these remarkable photos of this plasma screen made by the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe a satellite I had a lot of fun working with data from them one of the most successful NASA missions ever revolutionized cosmology for for a cost of about 25 pence per per American and if it's a I just mentioned that's in so many of my American colleagues seem to think that they're spending these enormous sum of the money on science when actually not now that you have to ask yourself though when you take pictures of what happened 13.8 billion years ago when our universe was only four hundred thousand years old how do we know that they're correct and this is a really hard measurement well you do another satellite which is even better and you compare and the European led Planck satellite which just released its data last year gave us this even sharper image and it's just astonishing how well it agrees look at any one spot here and it's still there except now it's not three megapixel with 50 megapixels fantastic fantastic data so in summary we humans have kept discovering more and more things about our cosmos and have a pretty good understanding of the last 13.8 billion years but it's important to not get hubris we have to be modest also how much we still do not understand for example we've come to realize that we have no clue what ninety-five percent of our universe is made out of and that the part we don't understand there's at least two separate mysteries dark matter and dark energy you can ask me more about that afterwards we would really like to know in particular what the dark energy is because it's going to determine the ultimate fate of our cosmos whether it's going to keep expanding forever or come crashing back on itself in a Big Crunch or something else we also would like to know more about what really happened early on in this bang bang bang what caused it etc there are many things we would like to understand better so how can we do that fortunately we have only harvested a tiny fraction of all this data yet it's this data which has transformed the field so much from when I was a grad student than we argued about whether our universe was ten billion years old or 20 billion years old until now when we argue about whether it's 13.7 billion or thirty about eight billion so let me show you how much data we have left to try to collect if you look inside of this on the same scale these beautiful baby pictures of the Cosmic Microwave Background the plasma screen or cover less than a percent of the volume just a yellow the of surface here and all those galaxies you flew around and earlier or just the stinky little stuff in the middle here again less than a percent of the volume so most of this is uncharted territory how can we map that we can't look here with an ordinary telescope and look at the galaxies because there were no galaxies so far why they haven't formed yet fortunately there's a very very cool technique which can do precisely this which can actually image simply the gas itself and see what it's up to and where there are clumps of it etc because hydrogen gas turns out to give off radio waves they're 21 centimeters long when they're emitted and by the time they get here the expansion of the universe has stretched them to longer wavelengths so by looking at how long they are when they get here we can figure out where they came from and make amazing 3d maps here in principle it's very hard no one has succeeded yet a bunch of teams across the planet are competing to try to do this we are part of this competition at MIT and I want to show you in just two minutes how to build your own radio telescope you you that was easy huh thank you the it's one of the most fun things with being a scientist is to get to work with so many awesome students and other researchers who are just so inspiring and another thing you notice about this is there were no moving parts at all in this telescope it doesn't look at all in fact like one of those big radio dishes that you saw have you seen raise your hand if you saw gold and I the Bond movie for example where the Arecibo telescope was in it's because we've discovered that using a technique that the George Royal here in Britain invented you can instead of building expensive dishes just buy a lot of mass-producible small antennas and cover a large field with them and just measure the volts in all of them and then feed all those volts after careful amplification into some really massive computing equipment and have the computers just figure out what the sky looks like and since computers are so much cheaper now that turns out to totally be the way to go building really large radio telescopes like this we can image not just a small part of the sky at a time like Christian astronomy by pointing your telescope we can look at figure out what the whole sky looks like boom all at once and here is a bunch of the friendly students who I worked with the builders and we're now joining forces with some more colleagues about to build one of these hopefully the covers about a tenth of a square kilometer which should help tackle further many of these open mysteries that I mentioned earlier about dark matter dark energy our origins and our ultimate fate now I told you in the beginning that I feel we humans have been the Masters of underestimation and how we've again and again realized that everything we thought existed was part of something bigger but how at the same time we had underestimated ourselves and our ability to understand things and it really is quite remarkable to think that those kids same cave people maybe you didn't think they could ever really know what the Stars were we're no smarter than they are but we've now managed to figure out in quite some detail what happened during the last 13.8 billion years so why is that how have we humans been able to figure out so much partly of course it's because the human mind turn out to be even more amazing and versatile then then they thought after all they hadn't even imagined that you could do such a thing as writing and so on let alone invent telescopes or program computers but I think there's more to it as well we've discovered two extremely powerful ideas in science and both of them were in a sense first really established firmly here in London and partly here in this building the first one was do experiments and the second was once you've done experiments use mathematical modeling they try to describe the data that you see and we've almost gotten so used to this in science that we forget to ask why this works but I want to ask why this works I explore this lot in the book and I think the reason it works is because nature turns out to encode all these hidden mathematical patterns and shapes and regularities so this approach of experiments and mathematical modeling it helps our minds find these clues these mathematical clues which we can then use to predict the future better to develop new technologies and so on and this is a very old idea of course Pythagoras over 2,000 years ago said that numbers seem to rule the universe in some sense and about 400 years ago Galileo said that our universe is a book written in the language of mathematics but where is all this math and that these guys are talking about I mean I look around in the room I can't even see any numbers anywhere and when we look at Galileo's quote here though we see that although many people think of mass mostly is a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers or maybe like my mom think that it's a sadistic form of torture invented by schoolteachers to make yourself feel bad about ourselves Galileo thinks of math in a broader sense he talks here about shapes and patterns and we of course geometry is a key part of mathematics and modern math books don't often don't even have any numbers in them at all now much more abstract than that and shapes and patterns is certainly something we have a lot of a nature if you throw an object and it moves under Earth's gravity it always moves in the same shape what do we call this shape a parabola exactly and it's described by a very simple equation like y equals x squared whenever we look in the sky at things moving under gravity again they all move in a simple shape regardless of whether they were orbiting a star or a black hole or something else what do we call this shape in the lips exactly in obeys again a very simple equation and moreover these two shapes are related because if you look at a very tiny part of an ellipse it's very well approximated by a parabola and if you do this traditional school math problem of figuring out how the object moves here more carefully you see it's actually not the parabola it's actually exactly a piece of an ellipse which Isaac Newton first showed and I have a very bad habit because I'm a physics professor which is I love giving unannounced pop quizzes so you're going to get one too now but don't worry it won't contribute to your final grade it's just diagnostic so so here are three discoveries discovery of Neptune discovery of the radio wave discovery of the Higgs boson what tool was it that triggered the discovery of these three things any takers this is Group quiz yes I just shout out madam maths exactly it was maths or if you want to be really finicky you could argue that it was technically the pencil because they were all predicted from mathematical calculations atoms here in Britain and Bolivian france realized that the planet uranus was just not moving according to Newton's equations quite exactly as it was supposed to it so he they calculated and calculated and calculated and one of them wrote a letter to this astronomer Garland Berlin and said hey won't you telescope it such a direction in the sky it's searching such a time and you'll find a new planet I don't know what God thought when he got this letter maybe he thought that this letter writer must be cuckoo for cocoa puffs but it was certainly curious enough to try and home know there was Neptune predicted through mathematics and just a few decades later here in Britain James Clerk Maxwell was studying electric realizing he could unify all of electricity in math and magnetism in the Maxwell equations and he did more calculations and predicted that if you built a certain kind of device then you could use it to send information at the speed of light through empty space through walls etc the device was of course built and you all know the results raise your hand if you have a cell phone in your pocket yeah predicted through mathematics again and most recently of course Peter Higgs took the most advanced mathematical description we had at the time of nature the so called standard model of particle physics and calculated and calculated and predicted that if we humans built the most advanced scientific instruments ever built in Geneva and use that the crash particles together near the speed of light in a certain way we were there discover a new particle you know the rest we built it boom there was the Higgs boson and he got a free trip to my hometown of Stockholm as a result and it's not the power of mathematics isn't limited of course to just these three examples there is an incredible wealth of predictive power in math much of which is summarized in equations of physics like these here and some people have been so impressed by these equations that they even put them on their tombstone like like Schrodinger and it's not just equations either it's even numbers just pure numbers in my book you'll find this table here with 32 numbers pure numbers with no units on them which remarkably can be used together with those equations to calculate every single fundamental physical constant ever measured in the history of science you can make more than a hundred thousand different measurements of various numbers to do with what colors of light come out of atoms for instance you can calculate them all from these 32 if you want to know why is that the proton is 1836 times heavier than electron you can calculate it from these numbers and so with any other constant you want so y-you know everything I've said so far is pretty uncontroversial but this is where it gets controversial what do we make of this by 1960 Eugene Wigner was so puzzled by this vote this famous essay we argued that this this is enormous usefulness of mathematics in Natural Sciences there's really something bordering on the mysterious and he said there's no rational explanation for it in the book I explore the whole spectrum of possible answers to this from a lot of people who say it means nothing to people who say well it's very useful that's what it means but we but that's all really we can say about it the people who think maybe somehow it's all about something with our brains maybe we invent math but I also explore the opposite extreme that it really means that nature is deeply mathematical a truth in particular explore the hypothesis that a universe isn't just described by mathematics but that it is mathematics in the sense of being a mathematical structure which I explained carefully in the book what I mean by so crudely speaking this hypothesis is that our world doesn't have it doesn't have merely some mathematical properties but it has only mathematical properties we know that we can often take a complicated mathematical structure and describe it by approximately with some simpler math just like we could approximate Einsteins really awesome theory of gravity with Newton's simpler theory of gravity pretty good so if this picture is correct then what we physicists have unwittingly been doing all along is finding better and better math approximations for the correct equations that we haven't found yet but hopefully one of the younger talents here in the audience can find you know the correct theory of quantum gravity that everything else we've done is just trying to approximate now this sounds pretty crazy saying that nature has only mathematical properties because that's the absolutely not how it seems right so to address this a bit more head-on I want to introduce you to mr. huggles mr. huggles is a groundhog or a woodchuck and some people prefer to call him and then he lives in our backyard actually he would probably claim that we live in his backyard and then he moved in first he if he if you ask what are his properties they don't seem like very mathematical properties to me maybe the property of cuteness the property of passion for grass eating or obsession with digging holes in our lawn or herbivorous nests yet as physicists we know that mr. huggles and everything else in our universe is ultimately made up of elementary particles like electrons and quarks and what properties does an electron actually have an electron doesn't have the property of cuteness it doesn't even have a color or smell or a texture the only property is that the electron has as far as we can tell and as you can see in this table here our property is like -1 1/2 and 1 and now we physicists have come up with geeky names for these properties like electric charge and spin and lepton number but the electron doesn't care or we call these properties because they are just fundamental mathematical properties they're numbers and to the best of our knowledge and the same goes for every other elementary particle that makes up everything in our universe that they have they're purely mathematical objects in the sense that they have no properties at all except for mathematical properties now if all the stuff in space is purely mathematical in that sense what about space itself you know what what properties of space have it has a property 3 that's the largest number of fingers I can hold perpendicularly to one another right we have a nice nerdy name for that too in science right we call it the what the don't be shy what is 3 that that's the dimensionality of space but again space doesn't care what we call it the property that's as human language we invent but we did not invent is the fact that it's 3 the property itself Einstein discovered that space also has some more properties called curvature and topology which also purely mathematical properties mathematicians study so it and to the best of our knowledge and space itself also is a purely mathematical structure in the sense that it has no non mathematical properties that we've been able to find so if we take seriously this idea that both space itself and everything in space has no properties except mathematical properties it starts to sound a little bit less insane the idea that maybe everything is in fact purely mathematical now so to come back to the main theme here I've said both that we humans have kept under estimating the size of our physical world and also that we kept under estimating the power power to understand it and I've argued that the reason we have been so successful in understanding the world much better than we ever anticipated is because of all these mathematical patterns were hidden in nature that the cave-dwelling ancestors hadn't noticed yet so what does this all mean well if this hypothesis that it's all mathematical is wrong then it means that physics is ultimately going to be doomed we're one day going to hit a roadblock beyond which we can't proceed because we've discovered all the mathematical patterns the word to discover and the rest of the stuff we still don't understand we won't get any more hints about and we're stuck whereas if this is correct if it really is all mathematical that means very good news for physics there is no roadblock we still might not be creative enough to figure everything out but at least we will know that there is nothing that we are in principle incapable of understanding and our ultimate ability to figure things out better about our world will only be limited by our own imagination we obviously don't know which of these two possibilities were actually facing but I think it's actually pretty good working hypothesis to assume that it is possible first to understand more and try our best because you all know that there's no better recipe for failure in any enterprise than to assume just from the get-go that what you're trying to do is impossible and therefore never really try your best now if there is nothing fundamental preventing us from understanding things better and better and better that means really that there is nothing in science it's totally off limits to it tumescent mathematical understanding for example consciousness if if consciousness can actually be understood as particles that are moving in beautifully complex patterns that process information then that would mean that I should be ultimately mathematically describable as well and it was really interesting for me a few weeks ago when I was organizing a physics conference because we had some neuroscientist who came Giulio Tononi increased of CO and they have this fascinating idea now that they can find out that they can understand why a rose has the fragrance of a rose and why the color red looks red in terms of mathematical shapes to do with the information processing that the particles and their brains do and we don't of course know yet whether whether their ideas are going to turn out to be correct or not but this is the sort of thing which it's going to be really fascinating to see how it plays out to see okay how well they succeed because this this hypothesis that it's all mathematical it makes the firm prediction that there is there are no non mathematical properties so if any scientific endeavor can identify some aspect of nature and show that this cannot be described by math that kills off the whole idea and rules it out now we've talked about what this all means for the future of science the future of physics but I want to end today with discussions by talking about what it means also for us humans and for the future of our life here in the cosmos we in the place where it's very appropriate to talk about this because with very venerable history and when we look at the our path ahead here the fact that we've discovered that our cosmos is so much grander than we thought you know some people take that to be depressing because they think say oh it means that I'm much smaller relative to everything that I thought and that hurts my ego earth or whatever to me it's actually the opposite it's me this is a very positive thing to me the fact that we live in a much grander cosmos is actually wonderful it means we have much more potential than we thought it's much better to be in a really big universe than to find that you're trapped on this puny little place that you can't get out of right we have 10 to the power 57 times more volume at our disposal for life maybe one day spread into we have not hundreds or thousands of years a future we can dream about but billions and billions of years so what's going to happen well you've all seen a lot of books and movies that have speculated about what might happen there are a lot of optimistic scenarios some dream about life one day spreading and making much of the cosmos come alive then there are others who have more this topic visions of the future because the same technologies that have enabled us to fly into space and cure a lot of diseases also of course giving us various creative ways we can annihilate ourselves completely we could have an accidental nuclear war we could build superhuman artists artificial intelligence which some people think would be awesome and other people have have conjectured will actually destroy all of human life and everything we care about and they're a lot more significantly more realistic scenarios you know in this kind of bad movies for how that could happen and we have many other ways in which we could mess up our planet as well so in the last part of the book I take your broad view of all the most commonly discussed threats to our survival as a civilization and it's very interesting that if you organize them like this by how far into the future they're most likely to pose a great risk to us what you find is that all of the most urgent the ones on the left side here that could wipe us out the soonest our threats that we cannot blame a mother nature like asteroids or the Sun about boiling off the oceans or our universe collapsing or these sort of things but rather things we can only blame ourselves for human created risks now this is also encouraging in the sense that it means that if we can avoid wiping ourselves out by getting our act together we have a vast amount of time to take on these various other risks and if you ask me at the end I can tell you about quite promising technical solutions that exist so pretty much all of these problems including the Sun getting too hot then enormous asteroids striking earth as long as we can get past this immediate crunch here now I told you I confess to you that physics professors tend to have a lot of bad habits and I already gave you a pop quiz another bad habit I have is I like to give grades unsolicited so I decided to give humanity a grade for risk management 101 based on how we're doing so far so I asked some friends what they thought was a fair grade and b-plus was a suggestion the argument being that yes you know we humans have been pretty reckless many times like the Cuban Missile Crisis was probably playing Russian roulette a little bit too carelessly you know but we're still here you know b-plus but I decided to actually give us a d-minus I don't know what that would be it translate into in the British grading system can someone help me out here d-minus - so it's okay and I'm still known as a pretty lenient grader at MIT you should know so I why is this well you know different it's very hard to estimate the probability that we're gonna wipe ourselves out in any given decade some people say it's very unlikely maybe only a thousandth of a percent each decade other people think it's more likely you know maybe one in ten Martin Rees has written in his famous book that he thinks maybe about 1 in 10 these kind of numbers might be considered acceptable back in the old days when you know a hundred years or a thousand years seemed like a really long time and we had no clue how much time we really had on this planet but in the cosmic perspective we have now where we have this enormous opportunity in billions of years I mean this is just absolutely ridiculous to be taking these kind of risks there's no way we're going to last a billion years if we're the Skee this careless so d- now if you ever give somebody a low-grade they will come and complain immediately and ask you to justify it of course so I thought I need to justify this a little bit better I'm going to justify it with this very very simple comparison between these two gentlemen here which one of these two guys is more famous the usual answer I get is who is Vasily arkhipov and they're clearly a lot more people have heard of Justin Bieber even though today would actually have been Vasily octopops birthday it had he been alive so it's very improper that's why I'd showing him today now but we should ask a second question to which one of these two people should we really thank for us all being alive here tonight because he single-handedly stopped a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis divy hint he's not not Canadian okay and and this is this reflects some pretty seriously screwed up priorities I feel for us humans that something so important is nonetheless deemed to be just so irrelevant that we don't even bother teaching about it in schools or making nearly a big deal at as a big deal about it as Justin Bieber's so why is this why are we so short-sighted you know we've humans have figured out so much cool stuff about our universe we have so much opportunity yet we spend very little resources on actually safeguarding our future and trying to be good stewards for a planet why is this well the most common answer I get when I ask people it's all we just don't have the money you know the economy is tough you know and if we had more money we would yeah sure but can't afford it but I'm kind of a numbers guy so let's look at some numbers there are some organizations I talked about in the book in England and the US etcetera who who try to raise money and do what they can to reduce these kind of risks the future of humanity Institute here in Oxford is one such organization the Cambridge Centre for existential risk is another such organization the Royals I saw the Royal Institution the Royal Society also put some efforts into these things the biggest the best one the best funded one is probably the Union of Concerned Scientists in BO in Boston in the u.s. from Cambridge they get about 20 million a year that they raise which sounds like a lot of money but let's shrink that down so twenty million dollars represents these few pixels here and and look at a few other things that Americans spent money on last year really important things like plastic surgery that was ten billion dollars per year or maybe air conditioning and that's just air conditioning for US troops only twenty billion last year its what about the oh this is really important smoking one hundred billion last year don't get me wrong I'm all for personal choice if you one of you guys wants to light up you know fine by me but does this really reflect the relative importance of these two activities the relative size of these things no no and I couldn't even fit on my slide here the biggest budget item for the u.s. last year because it's too large so I have to actually shrink everything down to fit the military spending so clearly lack of money is not the real reason why else could it be that we're so careless about our all these future opportunities well and not another answer - get especially in the US is that it would simply be irresponsible for us to spend resources on risks that have not been proven I hear a lot of people especially on a particular US News Channel say it's irresponsible to spend money combating global climate change when it hasn't been scientifically proven okay so if you think about that for a moment the easiest way to see the logical flaw on that argument is just imagine that you are in a store shopping for a baby carriage for the baby of a really close friend of yours okay and this very slick salesman comes over and said hey I that's really really nice robust stroller here for only only 49 pounds 99 pence and it's it's it's been on the market for over ten years we haven't had any reported safety problems with it at all you know I'm solid buy but then for only thirty nine pounds in 99 pence I can sell you this one I know there have been some media reports about it sometimes collapsing and crushing the baby and stuff but they haven't fairly been substantiated and honestly nobody has ever been able to prove in court that any of the deaths of these babies were actually caused by you know manufacturing flaws by the manufacturers and it so wouldn't it be irresponsible for you wouldn't it be irresponsible to spend twenty percent more money on this risk which hasn't been proven so which one are you going to buy well if you feel that it's ceará still e to say that it's irresponsible to spend money and risks aren't proven and if you feel that it's rather the other way around that it's irresponsible to not spend money on risks unless we can prove that they're not dangerous when the life of one child is at stake surely you'd feel the same way if we're talking about the lives of all children not just all children on the planet now but all future generations that could live during billions and billions of years right so in summary we've talked about how research in cosmology has made very clear that we have much much greater potential for the future of life than we thought but we also have and we also have much more power to really make a difference from our better understanding between some pretty happy outcomes and some significantly less happy outcomes so in summary what I would like you to take away from this is that even though we humans are small you know we really have a great power to understand and improve the world around us so let's make a difference thank you quantum mechanics suggests that if anything future is more like your branching tree where there are there many different ways it could go so I wouldn't lose any sleep about not having freewill I would continue feeling good about your mind knowing that the thought process you go through is actually exactly what it is it's make making a meaningful difference

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 284,366

Keywords: Science, Ri, Royal Institution, Science Communication, Education, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest For The Ultimate Nature Of Reality, Max Tegmark (Academic), Physics (Field Of Study), mathematics, universe, cosmos, math, MIT, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis

Id: _3UxvycpqYo

Length: 45min 8sec (2708 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 08 2014