What Matter Makes Up Our Known Universe? | Jim Al-Khalili | Spark

there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download vili today [Music] how did humans acquire the power to transform the planet like this looking at the Earth at night reveals to us just how successful we've been in harnessing and manipulating energy and how important it is to our existence [Music] foreign is vital to us all we use it to build the structures that surround and protect us we use it to power our transport and light our homes and even more crucially energy is essential for life itself without the energy we get from the food we eat we die but what exactly is energy and what makes it so useful to us [Music] in attempting to answer these questions scientists would come up with a strange set of laws that would link together everything from engines to humans to Stars it turns out that energy so crucial to our daily lives also helps us make sense of the entire universe this film is the Intriguing story of how we discovered the rules that drive the universe [Music] it's the story of how we realized that all forms of energy are destined it's degrade and fall apart [Music] to move from order to disorder it's the story of how this amazing process has been harnessed by the universe to create everything that we see around us [Music] foreign [Music] over the course of human history we've come up with all sorts of different ways of extracting energy from our environment everything from picking fruit to burning wood to sailing boats to water wheels but around 300 years ago something incredible happened humans developed machines that were capable of processing extraordinary amounts of energy to carry out previously unimaginable tasks now this happened thanks to many people and for many different reasons but I'd like to begin this story with one of the most intriguing characters in The History of Science one of the first to attempt to understand energy [Music] gottsfried leibniz was a diplomat scientist philosopher and genius he was forever trying to understand the mechanisms that made the universe work leibniz like several of his great contemporaries was absolutely convinced that the world we see around us is a vast machine designed by a powerful and wise person and if you could understand how machines worked you could therefore understand how the universe and the principles that had been used to make the universe worked as well and so there was an extremely close relationship for leibniz between Theology and philosophy on the one hand and engineering and mechanics on the other [Music] it was this relationship between philosophy and Engineering that in 1676 would lead him to investigate what at First Sight seemed to be a very simple question [Music] what happens when objects Collide this is what leibniz and many of his contemporaries were grappling with so when these two balls bump into each other the movement of one gets transferred to the other it's as though something's been passed between them and this is what leibniz called The Living Force he thought of it as a stuff as a real physical substance that gets exchanged during collisions leibniz argue that the world is a living machine and that inside the machine there is a quantity of living Force put there by God at the creation that will stay the same forever so the amount of living force in the world will be conserved the puzzle was to define it [Music] leibniz would soon find a simple mathematical way to describe the living Force but he would also see something else he realized that in gunpowder fire and steam his living force was being released in violent and Powerful ways [Music] if this could be harnessed it could give humankind unimaginable power foreign become fascinated with ways of capturing the living Force a prolific letter writer leibniz struck up correspondence with a young French scientist called dini Papa as they corresponded leibniz and papa realized the living Force released in certain situations could indeed be harnessed heat could be converted into some form of useful action but how far could this idea be taken Papa was in no doubt this is an extract from his letter to leibniz I can assure you that the more I go forward the more I find reason to think highly of this invention which in Theory May augment the powers of man to Infinity but in practice I believe I can say without exaggeration that one man by this means will be able to do as much as a hundred others can do without it now you might expect me at this point to tell you that liveness and papan change the world forever well they hadn't their ideas have been profound and far-reaching yes but they hadn't really moved things forward for that you need something much more tangible you need Innovation industry you need countless skilled workers and craftsmen who are going to apply these ideas to experiment with them in in novel and new ways well in a century that followed liveness and papan this would take place in the most dramatic way imaginable [Music] 150 years after leibniz and Papas discussions the living Force had been harnessed in spectacular ways the machines they dreamed of had become a reality steam engines were Now The Cutting Edge of 19th century technology foreign if you look at steps in Civilization then one great step was the steam engine because it replaced muscle animal muscle including our muscle by steam power and the steam power was effectively Limitless and hugely important to doing almost unimaginable things [Music] steam technology would do more than just transform Human Society it would uncover the truth about what leibniz had called The Living force and reveal new insights about the workings of our universe [Music] this is cross nests in southeast London it's an incredible industrial Cathedral and home to some of the most impressive Victorian steam engines ever built [Music] constructed in 1854 cross Ness houses four huge engines that once required 5 000 tons of coal each year to drive their 47 ton beams everything about this place seems to have been built to impress from the lavish Iron Work the grand pillars like something out of a Greek or Roman Temple it's the sort of effort you think would have been lavished on a luxury ocean liner for the Rich and Famous and yet this place was built to process sewage although only a few workers and Engineers would have seen the insides of this place steam had become such a vital part of British power and economic Prosperity that it was afforded almost religious respect thank you but for all the great success and immense power the engines were bestowing on their creators there was still a great deal of confusion and mystery surrounding exactly how and why they worked in particular questions like how efficient could they be made were there limits to their power ultimately people wanted to know just what might it be possible to achieve with steam [Music] the reason these questions persisted was simple almost no one had understood the fundamental nature of the steam engine very few were aware of the cosmic principle which underpinned it this great lumbering machines that we think of as the earliest steam engines actually were the seed of understanding of everything that goes on in the universe as unlikely as it sounds steam engines held within them the secrets of the cosmos this is the Chateau de van sound in Paris events here would motivate one man's journey to uncover the cosmic truth about the steam engine and help to create a new science the science of heat and motion Thermo Dynamics [Music] in March 1814 during the Napoleonic Wars when Napoleon and his armies were fighting elsewhere Paris itself came under sustained attack from the combined forces of Russia Prussia and Austria and citizens of the city were deployed around key locations to protect them now this Chateau was being defended by a group of inexperienced young students who were forced to retreat under sustained artillery fire one of them was a brilliant young scientist and Soldier his name was Nicola Leona Saadi Kano and the humiliation he felt personally would drive him and motivate him to uncover a profound insight into how all engines work Kano came from a highly respected military family after the French defeat here and elsewhere around Europe he became determined to reclaim French Pride [Music] what really bothered Kano was the technological superiority that France's enemies seemed to possess and Britain in particular had this huge Advantage both militarily and economically because of its Mastery of steam power so Carno vowed to really try and understand how steam engines work and use that knowledge for the benefit of France he says absolutely explicitly that if you could take away steam engines from Britain then the British Empire would collapse and he's writing in the wake of French military defeat and he proposes to analyze literally the source of British power by analyzing the way in which fire and heat engines work living on half pay with his brother ipolitan a small apartment in Paris in 1824 Carno wrote the now legendary Reflections on the Motive Power of fire in just under 60 Pages he developed and abstracted the fundamental way in which all heat engines work Kano saw the tall heat engines comprised of a hot sauce in cooler surroundings now Kano believed that heat was some kind of substance that would flow like water from the hot to the cool and just like water falling from a height the flow of heat could be tapped to do useful work carno's crucial Insight was to show that to make any heat engine more efficient all you had to do was to increase the difference in temperature between the Heat source and the cooler surroundings this idea has guided Engineers for 200 years [Music] ultimately a car engine is more efficient than a steam engine because it runs at a much hotter temperature jet engines are more efficient still thanks to the incredible temperatures they can run at [Music] Carno had revealed that heat engines weren't just a clever invention they were tapping into a deeper property of nature they were exploiting the flow of energy hot and cold [Music] Kano had glimpsed the true nature of heat engines and in the process began a new branch of science but he would never see the impact his idea would have on the world In 1832 a cholera epidemic spread through Paris it was so severe it would kill almost 19 000 people now back then there was no real scientific understanding of how the disease spread so it must have been terrifying Kano undaunted by the risks decided to study and document the spread of the disease but unfortunately he contracted it himself and was dead a day later he was just 36 years old a lot of his precious scientific papers were burnt to stop the spread of contagion and his ideas fell into temporary obscurity seems the world wasn't quite ready for Kano Kano had made the first great contribution to the science of thermodynamics but as the 19th century progressed the study of heat motion and energy began to grip The Wider scientific community soon it was realized that these ideas could do much more than simply explain how heat engines worked just as leibniz had suspected with his notion of living Force these ideas were applicable on a much grander scale [Music] [Music] by the mid 19th century scientists and Engineers had worked out very precisely how different forms of energy relate to each other they measured how much of a particular kind of energy is needed to make a certain amount of a different kind let me give you an example the amount of energy needed to heat 30 milliliters of water by one degree Centigrade is the same as the amount of energy needed to lift this 12 and a half kilogram weight by one meter the deeper Point here that people realized was that although mechanical work and heat may seem very different they are in fact both facets of the same thing energy this idea would come to be known as the first law of thermodynamics the first law reveals that energy is never created or destroyed it just changes from one form to another 19th century scientists realized this meant the total energy of the entire universe is actually fixed amazingly there's a set amount of energy that just changes into many different forms so in a steam engine energy isn't created it's just changed from heat into mechanical work [Music] but impressive though the first law is it begged an enormous question what exactly is going on when one form of energy changes into another in fact why does it do it at all [Music] the answer would in part be found by German scientist Rudolf clausius and it would form the basis of what would become known as the second law of thermodynamics Rudolph clausius was a brilliant German physics student from Pomerania who studied in Berlin and at a ridiculously young age became a very brilliant professor in Berlin and then in Zurich at the new technology University set up there in Switzerland and in the 1850s and 60s clausius offered what is really the first coherent full-blown mathematical analysis of how thermodynamics works clausius realized that Not only was there a fixed amount of energy in the universe but that the energy seemed to be following a very strict rule put simply energy in the form of heat always moved in one particular direction this Insight of his is in fact one of the most important ideas in the whole of science as clausius put it heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body this is a very intuitive idea if left alone this hot mug of tea will always cool down what this means is that heat will pass from the hot mug say to my hand and then again from my hand to my chest this might seem completely obvious but it was a crucial insight flow of heat was a one-way process that seemed to be built very fundamentally into the workings of the entire universe of course objects can get hotter but you always need to do something to them to make this happen [Music] left alone energy seems to always go from being concentrated to being dispersed [Music] one of my favorite statements in science it was made by the biochemist Albertson George who said that science is all about seeing what everyone else has seen but thinking what no one else has thought and he Rudolph clausius um looked at the everyday world and saw what everyone else had seen that heat does not flow spontaneously from a cold body to a hot body it always goes the other way but he didn't just say ah I see that he actually sat down and thought about it clausius brought together all these ideas about how energy is transferred and put them into mathematical context it could be summarized by this equation [Music] foreign [Music] did was introduce a new quantity he called entropy this letter s basically what it's saying in the context of this equation is that as heat is transferred from hotter to colder bodies entropy always increases [Music] entropy seemed to be a measure of how heat dissipates or spreads out as hot things cool their entropy increases here to clausius that in any isolated system this process would be irreversible clausius was so confident about his mathematics that he figured out that this irreversible process was going on out there in the wider Cosmos he speculated that the entropy of the entire universe had to be increasing towards a maximum and that there was nothing we could do to avoid this this idea became known as the second law of Thermodynamics and it turned out to be stranger and More Beautiful more Universal than anything clausius could have imagined [Music] the second law of Thermodynamics seemed to say that all things that gave off heat were in some way connected together foreign all things that gave off heat were part of an irreversible process that was happening everywhere process of spreading out and dispersing a process of increasing entropy it seemed that somehow the universe shared the same fate as a cup of tea [Music] the wonderful thing about the the Victorian scientists is that they could make these great leaps and that they could see that their study of thermometer in a beaker actually it could be transferred it could be extrapolated could be enlarged to Encompass the whole universe [Music] despite the successes of thermodynamics in the middle of the 19th century there was great debate and confusion about the subject what exactly was this strange thing called entropy and why was it always increasing answering this question would take an incredible intellectual leap but it would end up revealing the truth about energy and the many forms of order and disorder we see in the universe around us [Music] many scientists would tackle the mysterious concept of entropy but one more than any other would shed light on the truth he'd show what entropy really was and why over time it always must increase his name was Ludwig boltzmann and he was one of science's true revolutionaries boltzmann had been born in Vienna in 1844. it was a world of scientific and cultural certainty but boltzmann took little notice of the entrenched beliefs of his contemporaries to him the physical world was something best explored with an open mind boltzmann wasn't your stereotypical scientist in fact he had the kind of temperament that most people might associate with great artists he was ruthlessly logical and analytical yes but while working he'd go through periods of intense emotion and these will be followed by terrible depressions which would leave him completely unable to think clearly oh he had terrible sort of mental crises and breakdowns in which he really thought that the world was coming apart at the seams and yet these were also accompanied by some of the most profound insights into the nature of our world outside of mathematics boltzmann was passionate about music and was captivated by the Grand and dramatic operas of Wagner and the raw emotion of Beethoven he was a brilliant pianist and could lose himself for hours in the works of his favorite composers just as he could lose himself in deep mathematical theories boltzmann was a scientist Guided by his emotions and instincts and also by his belief in the ability of mathematics to unlock the secrets of nature it was these traits that would lead him to become one of the champions of a shocking and controversial new Theory one that would describe reality at the very smallest scales far smaller than anything we could see with the naked eye foreign half of the 19th century a small group of scientists began speculating that at the smallest scales the universe might operate very differently to our everyday experiences [Music] if you could look close enough it seemed possible that the Universe might be made of tiny hard particles in constant motion foreign [Music] viewed in terms of atoms heat would suddenly become a much less mysterious concept boltzmann and others saw that if an object was hot it simply meant that its atoms were moving about more rapidly viewing the world as atoms seemed to be an immensely powerful idea but this picture of the universe had one seemingly insurmountable problem how could trillions and trillions of atoms even in a tiny volume of gas ever be studied how could we come up with mathematical equations to describe all of this after all atoms are constantly bumping into each other changing direction changing speed and there are just so many of them it seemed almost an impossible problem but then boltzmann saw there was a way boltzmann saw more clearly than anyone that for physics to explain this new strata of reality it had to abandon certainty [Music] instead of trying to understand and measure the exact movements of each individual atom boltzmann saw you could build working theories simply by using the probability that atoms will be traveling at certain speeds and in certain directions boltzmann had transported himself inside Mata he'd imagined a world beneath our everyday reality and found a mathematics to describe it it would be here at this scale that boltzmann would one day manage to unlock Energy's deepest Secret despite the widespread hostility to his theories [Music] Boltzmann's ideas were highly highly controversial and you have to remember that you know today we take atoms for granted but the reason we take atoms for granted is precisely because Boltzmann's mathematics married up so beautifully with experiment [Music] one of the most surprising aspects of this story is that many of Boltzmann's contemporaries viewed his ideas about atoms with intense hostility [Applause] today the existence of atoms the idea that all matter is composed of tiny particles is something we accept without question but back in Boltzmann's time there were notable eminent physicists who just didn't buy it why would they no one had ever seen an atom and probably no one ever would how could these particles be considered as real [Music] after one of Boltzmann's lectures of atomic theory in Vienna the great Austrian physicist Ernst March stood up and said simply I don't believe that atoms exist it was both cutting and dismissive and for such a comment to come from a highly regarded scientist like Ernst it would have been doubly hurtful [Music] they argued that no atoms don't exist their names labels convenient fictions calculating devices they don't really exist we can't observe them no one's ever seen one and for that reason so boltzman's critics said he was a fantasist [Music] but boltzmann was right he peered deeper into reality than anyone else had dared and seen that the Universe could be built from the atomic hypothesis and understood through the mathematics of probability the foundations and certainty of 19th century science were beginning to crumble [Music] as boltzmann stared into his Brave New World of atoms he began to realize his new vision of the universe contained within it an explanation to one of the biggest mysteries in science boltzmann saw that atoms could reveal why the second law of Thermodynamics was true why nature was engaged in an irreversible process had the power to reveal what entropy really was and why it must always increase [Music] boltzmann understood that all objects these walls view me the air in this room are made up of much tinier constituents basically everything we see is an assembly of trillions and trillions of atoms and molecules and this was the key to his insight about entropy and the second law boltzmann saw what clausius could not the real reason why a hot object left alone will always cool down imagine a lump of hot metal the atoms inside us are jostling around but as they jostle the atoms at the edge of the object transfer some of their energy to the atoms in the surface of the table these atoms then bump into their neighbors and in this way the heat energy slowly and very naturally spreads out and disperses the whole system has gone from being in a very special ordered state with all the energy concentrated in one place to a disordered state where the same amount of energy is now distributed among many more atoms Boltzmann's brilliant mind saw this whole process could be described mathematically looksman's great contribution was that although we can talk in rather sort of casual terms about things getting worse and disorder increases the the great contribution of boltzmann is that he could put numbers to it and so he was able to derive a formula which enabled you to calculate the disorder of a system this is Boltzmann's famous equation it will be his enduring contribution to science so much so it was engraved on his tombstone in Vienna what this equation means in essence is that there are many more ways for things to be messy and disordered than there are for them to be tidy and ordered [Music] that's why left to itself the universe will always get Messier things will move from order disorder [Music] it's a law that applies to everything from a drop jug to a burning star a hot cup of tea to the products that we consume every day [Music] all of this depression of the universe's tendency to move from order to disorder disorder is the fate of everything [Music] clausius had shown that something he called entropy was getting bigger all the time now boltzmann had revealed what this really meant entropy was in fact a measure of the disorder of things [Music] energy is crumbling away it's crumbling away now as we speak so the second law is all about entropy increasing which is just a technical way of saying that things get worse Boltzmann's passionate and romantic sensibility and his belief in the power of mathematics had led him to one of the most important discoveries in the history of science but those very same intense emotions had a dark and ultimately self-destructive side [Music] throughout his life boltzmann had been prone to severe bouts of depression sometimes these were induced by the criticisms of his theories and sometimes they just happened in 1906 he was forced to take a break from his studies in Vienna during a particularly bad episode [Music] in September 1906 boltzmann and his family were on holiday in duino near Trieste in Italy while his wife and family were out at the beach boltzmann hanged himself bringing his short time in our universe to an abrupt end but perhaps the saddest aspect of Boltzmann's story is that within just a few years of his death his ideas that had been attacked and ridiculed during his lifetime were finally accepted what's more they became the new scientific Orthodoxy [Music] in the end there is no escaping entropy the ultimate move from order to Decay and disorder that rules us all tzmann's equation contains within it the mortality of everything China jug to a human life to the universe itself [Music] process of change and degradation is unavoidable second law says the universe itself must one day reach a point of Maximum entropy maximum disorder universe itself must one day die [Music] foreign [Music] if everything degrades if everything becomes disordered you might be wondering how it is that we exist how exactly did the universe manage to create the Exquisite complexity and structure of life on Earth contrary to what you might think it's precisely because of the second law that all this exists the great disordering of the cosmos gives rise to its complexity [Music] it's possible to harness this natural flow from order to disorder to tap into the process and generate something new to create new order new structure it's what the early steam Pioneers had unwittingly Hit Upon with their engines and it's what makes everything we deem special in our world from this car to buildings to works of art even to life itself [Music] foreign the engine of my car like all engines is designed to exploit the second law it starts out with something nice and ordered like this petrol stuffed full of energy but when it's ignited in the engine it turns this compact liquid into a mixture of gases two thousand times greater in volume not to mention dumping heat and sound into an environment it's turning order into disorder [Music] foreign what so spectacularly clever about my car is that it can harness that dissipating energy it can siphon off a small bit of it and use it for a more ordered process like driving the Pistons which turn the wheels that's what engines do they tap into that flow from order to disorder and do something useful foreign but it's not just cars Evolution has designed our bodies to work thanks to the very same principle if I eat this chocolate bar packed full of nice ordered energy my body processes it and turns it into more disordered energy but powers itself off the proceeds both cars and humans power themselves by tapping into the great Cosmic flow from order to disorder although overall the world is falling apart in disorder it's doing it in a seriously interesting way [Music] it's like a a waterfall that is rushing down but the waterfall throws up a spray of structure and those that sprayer structure may be you or me or daffodil or whatever so you can see that the unwinding of the universe this collapse into disorder can in fact be constructive foreign engines power stations life on Earth all of these things harness the cosmic flow from order to disorder [Music] the reason the earth now looks the way it does is because we've learned to harness the disintegrating energy of the universe to maintain and improve our small pocket of order foreign [Music] has evolved we've had to find New pieces of concentrated energy we can break down to drive the ever more demanding construction of our Technologies our cities and our society from food to Wood to fossil fuels over human history we've discovered ever more concentrated forms of energy to unlock in order to flourish [Music] now in the 21st century we're on the cusp of harnessing the ultimate form of concentrated energy stuff that powers the sun hydrogen this is the column Center for Fusion Energy in Oxford and at this facility they're attempting to recreate a star here on Earth but as you might imagine creating and containing a small star is not an easy process it requires many hundreds of people and some extremely ingenious technology this machine is called a Tokamak and it's designed to extract an ancient type of highly concentrated energy ordered energy of hydrogen atoms these tiny packets of energy were forged in the early Universe just three minutes after the moment of creation itself Now using the Tokamak we can extract the concentrated energy contained in these atoms by fusing them together inside the Tokamak machine two types of hydrogen gas deuterium and tritium are mixed together into a super hot State called a plasma now when running this plasma can reach the incredible temperature of 150 million degrees large magnets in the wall of the Tokamak contain the plasma and stop it from touching the sides where it can cool down now when it gets hot enough the two types of hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium and spit out a neutron now these neutrons fly out of the plasma and hit the walls of the Tokamak but they carry energy and the hope is that this energy can one day be used to heat up water turn it into steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity essentially for a brief moment inside a Tokamak small donut-shaped star is created [Music] the problem is it's extremely difficult to sustain the fusion reaction for long enough to harvest the energy from it and that's what the scientists at column are working to perfect it's a it's a sort of boundary between physics and Engineering how do we hold on to this very very hot thing which is the plasma and and how do we optimize the way the performance of this plasma so what we really want is that the particles stay in there for as long as it's told possible to maximize their chance of hitting each other we are trying to push this this to the limits with what we have available in this machine and whatever we can learn to understand this personal picture will also allow us to design a better machine in the future see although it happened several times a day oh here we go the the scientists here all they all gather around the screens ah okay it's about to come on [Music] foreign [Music] is mining the fertile ashes of the Big Bang extracting concentrated energy captured at the beginning of time as hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe if future machines can sustain Fusion reactions they offer us the possibility of almost unlimited energy [Music] [Music] from a science that began as the byproduct of questions about steam engines thermodynamics has had a staggering impact on all our lives it has shown us why we must consume concentrated energy to stay alive and has revealed to us how the universe itself is likely to end looking at the Earth at night reveals how one seemingly simple idea transformed the planet [Music] over the past 300 years we've developed ever more ingenious ways to harness the concentrated energy from the world around us but all our efforts and achievements are quite insignificant when viewed from the perspective of The Wider universe as far as it's concerned all we're doing is trying to preserve this tiny pocket of order in a cosmos that's falling apart although we can never Escape our ultimate fate the laws of physics have allowed us this brief beautiful creative moment in the great Cosmic unwinding my hope is that by understanding the universe in ever greater detail we can stretch this moment for many millions maybe even billions of years to come [Music] we are surrounded by order over the last 300 years we've developed amazing new ways to harness energy and we've used this ability to transform our environment [Music] but all these structures that we see around us are just one type of visible order that we've created here on planet Earth there's another type of invisible order every bit as complex that we're only now beginning to understand it's something that nature has been harnessing for billions of years something we call information [Music] [Music] is a very strange one it's actually a very difficult idea to get your head round but in the journey to try and understand it scientists will discover that information is actually a fundamental part of our universe this film is the story of information and the immense Power released from manipulating it it's the story of how we discovered the power of symbols and how writing codes and computers would revolutionize our understanding of the universe [Music] is the story of how in a cosmos collapsing into disorder information can be used to create order and structure [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] at first glance information appears to be a very straightforward idea it exists everywhere in our world our brains are filled with it and we constantly exchange it between each other but information has been one of the subtlest and most difficult Concepts that science has had to Grapple with understanding and harnessing it has been an extremely long and difficult process power of information would first be glimpsed over 5 000 years ago when a revolutionary technology was developed one that would set the modern world in motion over the years mankind has come up with some pretty remarkable stuff but of all Humanity's inventions there's one that really stands out it's the most transformative disruptive creative technology ever conceived and it's also one of the simplest that invention is the written word at its heart writing is all about the transmission and storage of information [Music] words allow ideas to endure Through Time these are some of the earliest texts in existence and they give us an incredible insight into the development of writing I've come to meet one of the few people who can still read them Dr Irving Finkel we take writing so much for granted these days that I guess it's easy to forget that it was invented it certainly was how did it first come about the earliest writing that we have is written on clay tablets and it comes from Iraq ancient Mesopotamia and it comes from the culture of the Sumerians and what happened here was that they started off with purely pictographic signs to express an idea and this lasted for quite a long time until it occurred to somebody perhaps accidentally that what you could do is to make one of these graphic symbols on the surface of the clay not for what it looked like but for what the sound it represented right so not a picture of an object a picture of a sound that's what we always call the giant leap for mankind by combining different sounding pictures the ancient Mesopotamians could express any idea imaginable the essence of their breakthrough was to see for example that a picture of an eye and a picture of a deer didn't have to mean an eye and a deer the pictures could be used simply for the sounds they made in this case idea [Music] once this system was discovered it meant anything that could be spoken even the most strange or abstract thoughts could be transformed into symbols information could now live outside of the human brain and this meant it could endure over vast spans of time it was an idea that fascinated the ancient Mesopotamians [Music] this lovely tablet here this king ornam who lived in about uh 2100 BC okay he buried this in the foundations of this Temple as a message for the future this King will now move with a powerful male king of UR king of Suma and akkad so that's the South and the north part of ancient Mesopotamia her house he built for her and he even restored it afterwards so this is a proud thing and he wants everybody to know about it and this is a real message for the future what's so remarkable for me is that this is information stored on clay for thousands of years yes ideas that someone had four thousand years ago are still there you have ideas you have speech you have human hopes you have literature you have prayers you have all these sorts of outpourings of the human soul fixed forever in clay foreign by turning sounds into symbols the Mesopotamian scribes had discovered that information could be changed very easily from one form to another from something that existed as spoken sounds for something that existed as symbols on clay tablets but this was just the beginning humans were yet to realize the true power of symbols [Music] foreign years writing was pretty much the only information technology people used but in the 19th century during the great industrial revolution things would begin to change in the Maelstrom of ideas and inventions a series of seemingly unconnected Technologies would emerge that all began to hint at the immense power of information foreign these Technologies would all come from very practical very un theoretical Origins but they would start to reveal that information was a much deeper and more powerful concept than anyone had realized one of the first of a new breed of information Technologies would be developed in the French city of Lyon at the end of the 18th century laughs [Music] 18th century Lyon was home to some of the best Craftsmen in the world it was also a place of great opulence Grandeur and above all money thanks to the rich and fashionable Aristocrats and bankers who live there it will become home to the greatest silk weaving industry in the world almost a third of the city's inhabitants worked in the silk industry and it was home to over 14 000 Looms this is brocade the material that made Leon famous it's a beautiful and intricately woven fabric that as you might imagine is incredibly labor intensive to produce a two-man team working flat out for a day could it best produce about an inch of this amazing stuff the demand for the Fine Fabrics of Leon was immense but the silk weaving process was painfully slow but thanks to a soldier and Weaver named Joseph Marie Jacquard a device will be developed to help speed up weaving in the process it would reveal a fundamental truth about information [Music] building on the work of a number of others in 1804 Jacquard patented his invention at the time the loom was the most complex mechanism ever built by humankind [Music] foreign [Music] was a miracle of Ingenuity you see he designed a single machine which without any alteration to its construction it's hard way to use a modern term could be programmed to weave any pattern a designer could think up in fact it could produce a whole range of silk designs with barely a pause in production Jacquard had found the Holy Grail of weaving and his secret was a simple punched card [Music] the punched card held within it the essence of the designs that the loom would weave when these punched cards were fed into the loom they would act to lower and lift the relevant threads recreating the pattern in silk any design you could think of could be broken down and translated into a series of Punch Cards and could then be woven by the loom [Music] information was being translated from picture to punch card to the finished fabric it is a machine for weaving textiles that's its tasks but there is nothing specific about what textile it should we that is contained in the information which is encoded on the cards so if you like the cards program it that is to say instructed what to do and this has huge resonances for what came later jacquard's Loom revolutionized the silk industry but at its heart was something deeper something more Universal than its industrial Origins and its ability to speed up weaving The Loon revealed the power of abstracting information it showed that you can take the essence of something extract the Vital Information and represent it in another form [Music] writing had revealed you could use a set of symbols to capture spoken language now Jacquard had shown that with just two symbols a whole or a blank space it was possible to capture the information in any picture imaginable foreign this is a portrait of Jacquard that's been woven in silk it's spectacularly detailed with hundreds of thousands of stitches and yet all the information you need to capture this lifelike image can be stored in a series of punched cards 24 000 of them to be precise [Music] this picture is a fantastic example of a really far-reaching idea that the simplest of systems in this case cards with a series of holes punched in them can capture the essence of something much much more complicated 24 000 Punch Cards could create an image like this [Applause] what would happen if you had 24 million or 24 trillion cards foreign [Music] new types of complex information might be able to be captured and represented [Music] Jacquard had stumbled on an incredibly deep and far-reaching idea [Music] as long as you have enough of them simple symbols can be used to describe anything in the entire universe foreign information into abstract symbols to store and process had proven to be an extremely powerful idea but the way information was sent the way it was communicated hadn't changed for thousands of years the world before telecommunications technology was a very different place because you can only send messages as fast as you could send objects so you'd write a message on a piece of paper or something like that and then you'd either give it to somebody who could run very fast or could go on a horse or on a ship very fast but the point was you could only send information as far as as you could send Mata but in the 19th century the speed which information could be sent would dramatically increase thanks to an incredible new information carrying medium electricity very soon after electricity was discovered excitement grew about its potential as a medium to transmit messages it seemed that if it could be controlled and summoned at will electricity would be the perfect medium for sending information electricity seemed to offer many advantages as a way of sending messages it was sent down a wire which means it could pretty much go anywhere it wasn't affected by bad weather conditions and most importantly it could move very quickly but there was one big problem facing those in the early 19th century who wanted to use electricity as a means to communicate how could such a simple signal be used to send complex messages here in the science museum archive they have one of the most impressive collections of early electronic communications technology in the world here are just some of the early devices designed to send signals using electricity this one's particularly fun it was developed in 1809 in Bavaria by Samuel sommering so if the sender wants to send letter A he sends a current through that corresponding wire at the receiver's end is a tank full of liquid and the electric current forces a chemical reaction causing bubbles to appear above the corresponding letter A the whole process is ingenious if a little laborious but what's really fun is that the sender has to let the receiver know he's about to send a signal he does that by sending extra electric currents so that more bubbles appear forcing an arm upwards which releases a ball actually there's a battle as you can imagine this wouldn't be the quickest of systems after summering all sorts of approaches were taken in trying to crack the problem of sending messages using electricity are they all suffered from having over complex codes these devices each cunning and Innovative in its own way were all destined for the scrap heap of History and that's because in the 1840s they were superseded by a way of sending signals that still endures to this day it was developed by artist and entrepreneur Samuel Morse together with his colleague Alfred Vale what was so special about their system wasn't the technology that was used to carry their messages but the incredibly simple and effective code they used to send them [Music] just like jacquard's Punch Cards The Genius of Morse and veil's code lay in its simplicity using a collection of short and long pulses of electrical current they could spell out the letters of the alphabet [Music] Vale suggested that the most frequent letters in the English language get the shortest code so an e is sent like this while an X is sent like this this means that messages can be sent quickly and efficiently figuring out the code part of it the software if you like was as complicated as figuring out the hardware side of things with the batteries and the and the wires and together they made an entirely new technology which was the electric Telegraph the telegraph had once again revealed the power of translating information from one medium to another information had at first been fixed in human brains then held in symbols in clay and paper and punched cards [Music] now thanks to Morse information could reside in electricity and this made it unimaginably lighter and quicker than it had ever been before in just a few short years the telegraph Network would spread around the entire Globe laying the foundations of the modern Information Age [Music] foreign Jacquard and Morse had found new and novel ways to manipulate process and transmit information what had begun with the invention of writing thousands of years ago had culminated in The Binding of the entire planet in a lattice of wires carrying highly abstracted information at incredible speeds for people at the end of the 19th century it may have seemed that Humanity's ability to manipulate and transmit information was at its zenith they couldn't have been more wrong information would reveal itself to be a more important more fundamental concept than anyone could have imagined it would soon become apparent that information wasn't just about human communication it was a much further reaching idea than that [Music] the true nature of information would first be hinted at thanks to a strange problem one dreamed up by a brilliant Scottish physicist who appeared to be thinking about something else entirely [Music] foreign [Music] Maxwell was one of the great minds of the 19th century among his many interests Maxwell became fascinated by the science of thermodynamics the study of heat and motion that had sprung up with the birth of the steam engine foreign Maxwell was one of the first to understand that heat is really just the motion of molecules the hotter something is the faster its molecules are moving this idea would lead Maxwell to dream up a very bizarre thought experiment in which information played a crucial role [Music] Maxwell theorized that simply by knowing what's going on inside a box full of air it will be possible to make one half hotter and the other half colder think of it like building an oven next to a fridge without using any energy it sounds crazy but Maxwell's argument was extremely persuasive it goes like this imagine a small demon perched on top of the box who has such excellent eyesight that he could observe accurately the motion of all the molecules of air inside the Box foreign now crucially he's in control of a partition that divides the box into two halves every time he sees a fast-moving molecule approaching the partition from the right hand side he opens it up allowing it through to the left and every time he sees a slow-moving molecule approaching the partition from the left he opens it up allowing the molecule through to the right now you can see what's going to happen over time all the fast-moving hot molecules will accumulate on the left hand side of the box and all the slow-moving cold molecules on the right crucially the demon has done this sorting with nothing more than information about the motion of the molecules Maxwell's demon seemed to say that just by having information about the molecules you could create order from disorder this idea flew in the face of 19th century thinking the science of thermodynamics had shown very clearly that over time the entropy of the universe it's disorder would always increase things were destined to fall apart [Music] but the demon seemed to suggest that you could put things back together without using any energy at all just by using information you could create order it would prove to be a fiendishly difficult problem to solve not least because the brilliant Maxwell had come up with an idea far far ahead of its time it's amazing the the impact he had on physics and that he came up with this very intricate concept and that he already in some sense pre well anticipated the the notion of information that wasn't actually there at that time there was no such thing I think this idea was was astonishing he didn't really have a resolution he raised it as a concern and he left it open and I think what followed is more or less 120 years of extremely exciting debates and developments to try to resolve and address this concern [Music] so what was going on with Maxwell's demon it may sound far-fetched and fanciful but imagine the possibilities if we could build a machine in the real world that could mimic the actions of the demon I could use it to heat a cup of coffee or to run an engine or to power a city or using nothing more than pure information it says that we could create order in the universe without expending any energy scientists felt intuitively that it had to be wrong the problem was it would take over a hundred years to solve the problem while Maxwell's riddle rumbled on something quite unexpected was to happen a new device was dreamed up that could perform quite incredible and complex tasks simply by processing information what's more this was a device that could actually be built the machine would come to be known as the computer and the idea behind it came from a quite remarkable and Visionary scientist thank you Alan Turing was the first person to conceive of the modern computer a machine whose sole function is to manipulate and process information a machine that harnesses the power of abstract symbols a machine that enables almost every aspect of the modern world turing's incredible idea would first appear in a now legendary mathematical paper published in 1936 in his brief life Alan Turing brought fresh groundbreaking ideas to a whole range of topics from cryptography through to biology sheer breadth of his thinking is breathtaking for most scientists it's the concepts he outlined in these 36 pages that Mark him out as truly special it's this work that makes him worthy of the title genius published when Turing was just 24 years old on computable numbers with an application to the enchiladon's problem tackles the foundations of mathematical logic what's amazing about it is that the idea for the modern computer emerged simply as a consequence of turing's brilliant reasoning he was thinking about something else entirely he wasn't you know sort of sitting there thinking I want to try and invent the modern computer he was thinking about this very abstract problem in the foundations of mathematics and the computer kind of fell sideways out of that research completely unexpectedly I mean nobody could have guessed that turing's you know very abstract abstruse research in the foundations of mathematics could produce anything of any practical value whatsoever let alone a machine that was going to change the lives of you know nearly everyone on the planet Turing had set out to understand if certain processes in mathematics could be done simply by following a set of rules and this is what would get him thinking about computers in 1936 the word computer had a very different meaning to what it does today it meant a real person with a pencil and paper engaged in arithmetical calculations Banks hired many such people often women to work out interest payments the Inland Revenue employed them to work out how much tax to charge observatories hired them to calculate navigational data human computers were vital to the modern world dealing with the huge amounts of information produced as science and industry grew ever more complex what Turing did in his 1936 paper was asked a simple but profound question what goes on in the mind of a person carrying out a computation to do this he first had to discard all the Superfluous details so that only the very essence of the process of computation remained so first off when the ink pot then the pen then the slide rule then the pencils and the pads of paper all these things made it easier but none of them were absolutely crucial to the person carrying out the computation now Turing asked what goes on in the brain of a human computer it's a vastly complex biological system capable of Consciousness thoughts and insights but to Turing none of these was critical to the process of computation either Turing realized that to compute something a set of rules had to be followed precisely that was all it takes the higher level intelligence that was presupposed to be involved in calculation which is thinking and says you can have a mechanical process that is and by mechanically means an unthinking process to perform the same act and therefore eliminates the necessity of human agency with all its high level level functions and that is what is revolutionary about what he tries to do foreign 's brilliant mind saw that any calculation had two aspects the data and the instructions for what to do with the data and this will be the key to his insight Turing had to find a way of getting machines to understand instructions like add subtract multiply divide and so on in the same way that humans do in other words he had to find a way of translating instructions like these into a language that machines could understand and with flawless impeccable logic Turing did exactly that this may look like a random series of ones and zeros but to a Computing machine it's a set of instructions that can be read off step by step telling the machine to behave in a certain way so while a human computer could look at this symbol and understand the process that was required the Computing machine had to have it explained like this this paper tape that Turing envisaged is what we would Now call the memory of the computer but Turing didn't stop there Turing realized that feeding a machine instructions in this way had an amazing consequence it meant that just one machine is needed to perform almost any task you can think of a beautifully simple Concept in order to get the machine to do something new all you had to do was feed it a new set of instructions new information this idea became known as the universal turing machine the more you wanted your machine to do the longer the tape had to be bigger memories could hold complex multi-layered instructions about how to process and order any kind of information imaginable with a big enough memory the computer will be capable of an almost Limitless number of tasks this idea of tourings that a multitude of different tasks can be carried out Simply by giving a Computing machine a long sequence of instructions is his greatest Legacy since his paper turing's dream has been realized so calculations making phone calls recording moving images writing letters listening to music none of these require bespoke machines they can all be carried out on a single device a Computing machine this phone is a modern incarnation of turing's amazing idea inside here are many many instructions what we call programs or software or apps that are nothing more than a long sequence of numbers telling the phone what to do what's amazing about turing's idea is its incredible scope the sets of instructions that can be fed to a computer could tell it how to mimic telephones or typewriters but they could also describe the rules of nature the laws of physics processes of the natural world this is a simulation of many millions of particles behaving like a fluid to work out how it flows the computer simply follows a set of instructions held in its memory this only begins to hint at the power of computing machines [Music] this is a computer simulation of the large-scale structure of the entire universe and it reveals the true power of touring's idea turning instructions into symbols that a machine can understand allows you to recreate not just a simple picture or sound but a process a system something that is changing and evolving foreign simple symbols computers are capable of capturing the essence the order of the natural world itself [Music] by thinking about how the human brain processes and computes information Alan Turing had had one of the most important ideas of the 20th century the power of information was revealing itself [Music] it would be very easy to think that after turing's ideas Were Made Real the true power of information would be Unleashed but Turing was only half the story The Modern information Aid would require another idea one that would finally pin down the nature of information and its relationship to the order and disorder of the universe it was an idea that will be dreamed up by a gifted and eccentric mathematician and engineer foreign was a true Maverick and his desire to tackle unusual problems would lead to a revolutionary new idea one that would uncover the fundamental nature of information and the process of communication in all its varied forms this is Claude Shannon's paper a mathematical theory of communication now the title may sound a bit dry but trust me it's one of the most important scientific papers of the 20th century not only did it lay the foundations for the modern world's communication Network it also gave us fresh insights into human language into things we do intuitively like speaking and writing the paper was published in 1948 while Shannon was working at the Bell labs in New Jersey the research arm of the vast Bell Telephone Network it was an institution famous for its forward-thinking relaxed atmosphere the mathematicians were free to work on any problem that interested them the only thing that the laboratory management required of them is that they keep an open door and if anybody from any other department came with a problem that they would at least think about it otherwise they were absolutely free and the atmosphere the atmosphere was incredible people were playing and encouraged to play oh I'm Paul Chan I'm a mathematician here at the Bell Telephone laboratory Claude Shannon in particular was given free reign to do pretty much whatever he wanted an electrically controlled Mouse all right oh they treated him as the darling I never saw him juggle but I certainly saw him right as unicycle he brought it to work one day and he must of course Bell Labs at at least a hundred man hours of time but despite the frivolity the Bell Telephone Network faced a huge problem every day they transmitted vast amounts of electronic information all across the world but they had no real idea of how to measure this information properly or how to quantify it in short their entire business was built on something they didn't actually under ly understand amazingly their Superstar employee Claude Shannon would give them exactly what they needed [Music] [Music] in this paper Shannon did something absolutely incredible he took the vague mysterious concept of information and managed to pin it down now he didn't do this using some cleverly worded philosophical definition he actually found a way to measure the information contained in a message amazingly Shannon realized that the quantity of information in a message had nothing to do with its meaning instead he showed it was related solely to how unusual the message was information is related to unexpectedness so news is news because it's unexpected and the more unexpected it is the more newsworthy it is so if today's news was the same as yesterday's news there would be no news at all and their information content would be zero so suddenly you have a relationship between and information but Shannon was to go further and give information its very own unit of measurement foreign so how did he do this well he showed that any message you cared to send could be translated into binary digits a long sequence of ones and zeros so a simple greeting like hello could be written like this or like this just think of this as another way of writing the same message foreign that transforming information into binary digits would be an immensely powerful act it would make information manageable exact controllable and precise in his paper Shannon showed that a single binary digit one of these ones or zeros is a fundamental unit of information think of it as an atom of information the smallest possible piece then having defined this basic unit he even gave us a name for it one we're all familiar with today he used a shortening of the phrase binary digits bit The Humble bit turned out to be an enormously powerful idea [Music] the bit is the smallest quantity of information it is highly significant because it's the fundamental atom it is the smallest unit of information in which there is sufficient discrimination to communicate anything at all foreign the power of the bit lay in its universality any system that has two states like a coin with heads or tails can carry one bit of information [Music] one or zero punched or not punched on or off stop or go all of these systems can store one bit of information thanks to Shannon the bit became the common language of all information anything sounds pictures text can be turned into bits and transmitted by any system capable of being in just two states [Music] Shannon had founded a new far-reaching Theory the idea is he began to explore would form the Cornerstone of what we now call information Theory he'd taken an abstract concept information and turn it into something tangible what had been just a vague notion was now measurable something real the idea of converting into bits into making things digital would fundamentally transform many aspects of human society thank you but information isn't just something humans create we're beginning to understand that this concept lies at the heart not only of 21st century Human Society but also at the heart of the physical world itself every bit of information we've ever created every book every film the entire contents of the internet amounts to pretty much nothing when compared with the information content of nature and that's because even the most insignificant event contains a spectacular amount of information let me show you [Music] imagine how many bits of information you would need to describe this [Music] full and intricate interplay of physical laws taking place at scales and time frames that are normally imperceptible to us [Music] but here you're still only seeing a fraction of the complexity of nature [Music] imagine the interplay between the trillions upon trillions of atoms [Music] the amount of bits you would need to describe this is almost unimaginable but what's amazing is that now thanks to the ideas of Turing and Shannon we're able to describe model and simulate nature in ever greater detail but this isn't the end of the story information it seems isn't just a way of describing reality in the last few years we've discovered that information is actually an Inseparable part of the physical world [Music] it's a really difficult idea to get to grips with but information everything from a Beethoven symphony to the contents of a dictionary even a fleeting thought all information needs to be embodied in some form of physical system amazingly the reason we understand the true connection between information and reality is because of Maxwell's demon remember it seemed like the demon could use information to create order in a box of air that started out completely disordered moreover it could do this without expending any effort information seem to be able to break the laws of physics well that's not true it can't [Music] the reason why Maxwell's demon can't get energy for free lies here in his head what was discovered was this the demon really is using nothing more than information to create useful energy but this doesn't mean that he's getting something for nothing remember how the demon works he spots a fast-moving molecule on one side of the Box opens a partition and lets it through to the other side but each time he does that he has to store information about that molecule speed in his memory soon his memory will fill up and then he can only continue if he starts deleting information crucially this deletion would require him to expend energy the demon needs to keep a record of which molecules are moving where and if the record-keeping device is only finite size at some point the name is gonna have to erase it that's an irreversible process that increases the entropy of the universe it's the Erasure of information that increases entropy once and for all what was discovered is that there's a certain specific minimum amount of energy known as the landauer limit that's required to delete one bit of information it's tiny less than a trillion trillionth of the amount of energy in a gram of sugar but it's real it's a part of the fundamental fabric of the universe amazingly we can now do real experiments that test aspects of Maxwell's idea by using lasers and tiny particles of dust scientists around the world have explored the relationship between information and energy with Incredible accuracy [Music] Maxwell's thought experiment dreamed up in the age of steam Still Remains at The Cutting Edge of scientific research today Maxwell's demon links together two of the most important Concepts in science the study of energy and the study of information and shows that the two are profoundly linked what we now know is that information far from being some abstract concept obeys the same laws of physics as everything else in the universe [Music] people information is not just an abstraction just a mathematical thing or formula that you write on the paper it actually information is carried by something so it's encoded onto something a stone a book a CD whatever there's a carrier where the information is on and that means that information behaves according to the laws of physics so it cannot break the laws of physics what Humanity has learned over the last few Millennia is that information can never be divorced from the physical world [Music] but this is not a hindrance what makes information so powerful is the fact it can be stored in any physical system we choose from using Stone and Clay to allow information to be preserved over eons to using electricity and light so it can be sent quickly the medium that stores information gives it unique properties today scientists are exploring new ways of manipulating information using everything from DNA to Quantum particles they hope that this work will Usher in a new information age every bit as transformative as the last what we now know is that we're just at the beginning of our journey to unlock the power of information [Music] thank you foreign it's always been clear that creating physical order the structures we see around us has a cost we need to do work to expend energy to build them but in the last few years we've learned that ordering information creating the invisible digital structures of the modern world also has an inescapable cost as abstract and ethereal as information seems we now know it must always be embodied in a physical system I find this an incredibly exciting idea think about it this way a lump of clay can be used to write a poem on molecules of air can carry the sound of a symphony and a single photon is like a paintbrush every aspect of the physical Universe can be thought of as a blank canvas which we can use to build Beauty structure and Order [Music]

Channel: Spark

Views: 2,482,831

Keywords: Atomic concepts, Atomic demonstrations, Atomic exploration, Atomic laws, Atomic modeling techniques, Atomic physics theories, Atomic predictions, Atomic principles, Atomic revolution, Atomic systems, Atomic understanding, Atomic world view, Boltzmann constant, Engineering, Evolution of physics, Heat, Physical laws, Quantum physics, Spark, Statistical mechanics, Theoretical physicists

Id: 2gLRFuX5yNE

Length: 117min 22sec (7042 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022