1 00:00:13,540 --> 00:00:20,110 Well, thank you so much for coming on such a sunny day. I thought I wouldn't get any audience at all on such a wonderful sunny day. 2 00:00:20,120 --> 00:00:25,750 And but this is a wonderful opportunity for you and for me, because this book actually isn't out yet. 3 00:00:26,800 --> 00:00:34,510 So it's kind of exciting that you getting a little advance glimpse of what I've been up to for the last three years in 4 00:00:34,510 --> 00:00:43,390 writing this book as the catalyst for this book was partly the fact that I took over this this new job from Richard Dawkins, 5 00:00:43,960 --> 00:00:51,280 the professor for the Public Understanding of Science. And the title always makes me laugh somehow, because, you know, 6 00:00:51,280 --> 00:00:57,189 there's a kind of expectation with this professorship that maybe I know the whole of science and that, 7 00:00:57,190 --> 00:01:05,079 you know, I mean, I'm here to explain it to the public. And actually, quite a few journalists seem to have this impression as well, 8 00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:09,160 because when I first got this job, I would get these phone calls from people. 9 00:01:09,370 --> 00:01:11,680 So I remember a journalist phoning me up. 10 00:01:12,130 --> 00:01:18,730 The Nobel Prize for Medicine had just been announced and this journalist phoned me up from one of the broadsheets. 11 00:01:18,730 --> 00:01:22,870 So yes, Nobel Prize Medicine has just been announced for the discovery of telomeres. 12 00:01:22,870 --> 00:01:30,969 Could you tell me what a telomere is? Now, biology has never been my strong points, so I was like, Oh my gosh, never even heard of a telomere. 13 00:01:30,970 --> 00:01:34,200 So I'm really embarrassed to admit. 14 00:01:34,210 --> 00:01:38,740 I mean, you can look me up on Wikipedia, but you can look a lot of things up on Wikipedia, actually. 15 00:01:39,220 --> 00:01:44,860 So I quickly went online, I pulled up telomeres, read quickly through what a telomere was, 16 00:01:44,860 --> 00:01:53,229 and then confidently told this journalist that the pieces at the end of the DNA, which control how long a piece of DNA will last. 17 00:01:53,230 --> 00:01:56,440 And, and so I realised this is kind of crazy. 18 00:01:56,710 --> 00:02:00,220 There's no way I can be expected to know it all. 19 00:02:01,270 --> 00:02:11,110 But actually it began to make me think. Is it possible at any point in history that scientists, science might know it all? 20 00:02:11,110 --> 00:02:14,140 Could we answer everything? Could we know everything? 21 00:02:14,710 --> 00:02:18,010 And so that was partly the sort of inspiration for this journey, 22 00:02:18,010 --> 00:02:26,650 was to see whether there are any problems in science that by their very nature, we will never be able to solve. 23 00:02:27,430 --> 00:02:31,540 So actually the books are divided up into seven ages of knowledge, 24 00:02:31,960 --> 00:02:36,700 which kind of took me on this journey outside of my own area of mathematics into different regions. 25 00:02:36,700 --> 00:02:40,030 And I'm going to take you a few, a few through a few of these stories. 26 00:02:40,360 --> 00:02:44,679 But I think that kind of a desire to know is absolutely basic. 27 00:02:44,680 --> 00:02:50,469 And it is extraordinary how much we have discovered or the new news stories coming out each week. 28 00:02:50,470 --> 00:02:54,190 I mean, I think since I took over this job, the sort of things we discovered, 29 00:02:54,190 --> 00:02:58,990 we managed to land a kind of spaceship the size of a washing machine machine on the side of a comet. 30 00:02:59,200 --> 00:03:05,710 Absolutely extraordinary. We've got robots that we've programmed to develop their own language that we as humans can't understand. 31 00:03:05,830 --> 00:03:08,860 We have to interact with the robots to be able to understand that language. 32 00:03:09,430 --> 00:03:17,080 We've a sequence, the DNA of a 50,000 year old cave girl and repaired the pancreas using stem cells of a diabetic patients. 33 00:03:17,260 --> 00:03:22,570 I mean, it's a catalogue of things that we've achieved and the things we've discovered is extraordinary. 34 00:03:22,780 --> 00:03:30,669 And I think that basic desire to know is almost as basic as the desire to reproduce and hence Aristotle, the beginning of metaphysics. 35 00:03:30,670 --> 00:03:34,420 He says everyone by nature desires to know. 36 00:03:34,690 --> 00:03:44,290 In fact, I did a little research and the word to know is actually one of only about 100, which have a universal translation across all languages. 37 00:03:44,470 --> 00:03:49,390 Not even the word eat is necessarily clearly translatable into each language. 38 00:03:49,570 --> 00:03:59,020 So an incredibly basic desire. But it's always dangerous at any point in history to declare you will never know something. 39 00:03:59,260 --> 00:04:05,589 I know I've kept in mind on my journey throughout the last three years, trying to find out those things that we cannot know a few stories. 40 00:04:05,590 --> 00:04:10,870 One in particular is this guy, Auguste Conte, who in the middle of the 19th century declared, 41 00:04:11,020 --> 00:04:16,600 We shall never be able to study by any method the chemical composition of stars. 42 00:04:16,900 --> 00:04:19,600 Now, at the time, that seemed completely fair. 43 00:04:19,600 --> 00:04:24,670 I mean, how on earth are we ever going to visit a star to dig a base out and actually find out what it's made of? 44 00:04:24,910 --> 00:04:29,740 But of course, you know, a few decades later, we knew exactly what stars were made out of. 45 00:04:29,830 --> 00:04:32,830 Why? Because we don't necessarily have to go and visit the star. 46 00:04:32,830 --> 00:04:39,790 The star is visiting us every night. The light coming from the star is telling us what the star is made of. 47 00:04:40,480 --> 00:04:44,860 So it's always dangerous. And I'm sort of very clear that, you know, 48 00:04:44,860 --> 00:04:51,120 I'm not sure whether I've got any definitive answers here about things that you can absolutely say you can't know better. 49 00:04:51,160 --> 00:04:57,160 But that was the journey to try and understand whether maybe you can articulate that there are things that you will never know. 50 00:04:57,700 --> 00:05:03,529 Of course, the desire to know about the unknowable isn't restricted to science. 51 00:05:03,530 --> 00:05:12,460 So, I mean, there's a very famous example of a politician who got into quite a scrambled mess trying to describe his theory of knowledge. 52 00:05:12,780 --> 00:05:20,099 Here he goes. Donald Rumsfeld trying to explain about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and whether they were there or not declared. 53 00:05:20,100 --> 00:05:24,510 There are known knowns. There are things that we know that we know. 54 00:05:24,750 --> 00:05:29,670 We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. 55 00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:34,290 But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know. 56 00:05:35,220 --> 00:05:43,350 Now, actually, Donald Rumsfeld got awarded the Foot in the Mouth award by the plain English Speaking Society for this statement. 57 00:05:43,350 --> 00:05:51,659 But I actually think it's very unfair because I think this is a wonderful statement about states of knowledge, the unknown unknowns. 58 00:05:51,660 --> 00:05:55,110 Those are those black swan events. I can't tell you about the unknown unknowns. 59 00:05:55,110 --> 00:06:02,010 I would say be known. I'm going to try and tell you about the known unknowns, whether we can know what those unknowns are. 60 00:06:02,220 --> 00:06:07,860 There's another category here that I think he missed, though, which I think is very interesting when it comes to a politician, 61 00:06:08,550 --> 00:06:13,860 which is, of course, the unknown unknowns, which Slavoj Zizek actually pointed out to us. 62 00:06:14,010 --> 00:06:18,510 You know, those are those Freudian things that you actually know, but you don't deny that you know them. 63 00:06:18,510 --> 00:06:24,900 And they sort of but they come out and somehow and I think probably those are the most relevant to a politician as the unknown known. 64 00:06:26,130 --> 00:06:31,410 So that was. So this journey to try and find the unknown unknowns. 65 00:06:31,920 --> 00:06:41,100 The unknown unknowns. I wanted to try and apply my mathematical mind to see whether I could articulate whether there were any questions in the signs. 66 00:06:42,300 --> 00:06:42,540 No. 67 00:06:42,630 --> 00:06:51,570 The inspiration for this book actually came from the person that I took over this job as a sum only professor for the public understanding of science, 68 00:06:51,570 --> 00:06:53,670 because my predecessor was Richard Dawkins. 69 00:06:54,360 --> 00:07:01,050 Now, you, of course, know that Richard spent a lot of time not just talking about biology and evolution, but also about gods. 70 00:07:01,650 --> 00:07:06,700 The His God Delusion book was probably one of his most popular books. 71 00:07:06,720 --> 00:07:12,060 So. So I kind of braced myself when I took over this job for getting a lot of questions, 72 00:07:12,060 --> 00:07:17,790 not about telomeres, but about what my beliefs in about religion were and gods were. 73 00:07:18,390 --> 00:07:22,620 Now I was quite keen to just create a sort of distance between me and Richard. 74 00:07:22,620 --> 00:07:24,630 We do very different things scientifically, 75 00:07:25,320 --> 00:07:31,950 and so I kind of prepared this response to journalists who would phone up and say, and yeah, what was your religious beliefs? 76 00:07:32,640 --> 00:07:37,980 And I would tell them, I'm a deeply religious man. My religion happens to be the arsenal. 77 00:07:38,610 --> 00:07:42,689 I have a faith every year and faith every year. 78 00:07:42,690 --> 00:07:46,920 And I've been tested once again that next season we will win the Premiership. 79 00:07:48,060 --> 00:07:52,290 I go to my temple every Saturday or Sunday. This weekend it'll be Sunday. 80 00:07:52,800 --> 00:08:00,720 I sing songs to my idols and I worship them. And so I hoped that this would kind of bat away these questions about religion. 81 00:08:00,960 --> 00:08:03,210 But some of these journalists were very persistent. 82 00:08:03,900 --> 00:08:13,950 So I remember one instance on it was a Sunday morning on BBC Northern Ireland Radio on a program about philosophy and religion. 83 00:08:13,950 --> 00:08:18,870 And I said, I'm quite happy to talk about philosophy and science and things like that, but I really don't want to talk about religion. 84 00:08:19,530 --> 00:08:24,450 Of course, as soon as we got on air, that went out the window and he was like some orchestra. 85 00:08:24,450 --> 00:08:27,629 I believe in God. That's right. And he wasn't from India. 86 00:08:27,630 --> 00:08:32,190 Sorry. I will stop doing that. So. 87 00:08:32,600 --> 00:08:35,100 So he just kept on pressing me, kept on pressing me. 88 00:08:35,100 --> 00:08:42,240 And it became quite an aggressive interview to the point that as a mathematician, you say if you're asking me whether something exists, 89 00:08:42,420 --> 00:08:46,650 actually we spend a lot of time at the Maths Institute here proving things exist, 90 00:08:46,830 --> 00:08:53,280 maybe without being able to know what they look like, but we can prove that they exist, or often we prove that things don't exist. 91 00:08:53,490 --> 00:08:59,160 Andrew Wiles This building is named after proved that there aren't solutions to Fermat's occasions. 92 00:08:59,330 --> 00:09:04,830 He had a way to prove these things do not exist. So I said, okay, I'm quite happy to engage in this. 93 00:09:05,040 --> 00:09:09,360 If you give me a definition that I can start to engage my mathematical mind with. 94 00:09:09,780 --> 00:09:15,060 So I said, Oh, well, God, that's something which transcends human understanding. 95 00:09:16,680 --> 00:09:20,370 Oh, you've just played me out of the game. I mean, how can I engage with that? 96 00:09:20,460 --> 00:09:25,860 So it just was it seemed to me just until I got far say, well, how can we start with the debate with that? 97 00:09:26,220 --> 00:09:31,320 But actually, that definition sort of stuck in my mind is quite an intriguing one. 98 00:09:31,330 --> 00:09:39,750 So as the years went on and I sort of decided to engage a little bit more perhaps with this kind of the bridge between science and religion, 99 00:09:39,750 --> 00:09:41,850 I began to think about what is the definition? 100 00:09:41,850 --> 00:09:49,410 What about the definition of God being, the things that we cannot understand, the things that we cannot know, the things which transcend us. 101 00:09:50,010 --> 00:09:54,780 So can I apply my scientific mind to what that gods would be like? 102 00:09:55,080 --> 00:10:01,709 And I talked to a philosopher in my college, in New College, Stephen Mulhall, just before I was doing an event with the Chief Rabbi, 103 00:10:01,710 --> 00:10:06,090 actually, about he's got a wonderful book called Science and Religion The Great Partnership. 104 00:10:06,660 --> 00:10:12,420 And he referred me to this guy, Herbert McCabe, who is a theologian here in Oxford, who actually I'm. 105 00:10:12,510 --> 00:10:22,110 Marxist theologian get that? That's quite cool. So but he has he's got quite a lot of crazy articles about Christian kind of traditions and things, 106 00:10:22,320 --> 00:10:26,160 but he had this one article which Steven referred me to, 107 00:10:26,160 --> 00:10:33,720 and in there he says, To assert the existence of God is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe. 108 00:10:34,500 --> 00:10:36,750 So I thought that's quite an interesting definition, 109 00:10:36,750 --> 00:10:43,590 and I sort of threw the book I run with sort of just exploring a little bit about what sort of idea that is. 110 00:10:43,590 --> 00:10:51,930 And as a god, Herman McCain says, you know, religion basically committed iconoclasm by giving this very abstract, 111 00:10:51,930 --> 00:10:54,870 high concept to many properties it just didn't have. 112 00:10:55,020 --> 00:11:00,600 And of course, as kids, that's what we get introduced to all the silly things, and then we sort of discard that. 113 00:11:01,200 --> 00:11:08,310 So I sort of wanted to have a perhaps a more nuanced engagement with this question by defining something abstract like this. 114 00:11:08,550 --> 00:11:11,220 Now, there is this term, the God of the gaps, which you may have heard of, 115 00:11:11,490 --> 00:11:15,930 but that's actually used by religious people as a sort of as a kind of negative thing. 116 00:11:15,940 --> 00:11:19,530 They a lot of religious people would say, no, you're meant to know God. 117 00:11:19,530 --> 00:11:25,919 You're meant to attempt to know God. So actually, the God of the gaps is something that they sort of uses as kind of a negative statement. 118 00:11:25,920 --> 00:11:31,890 But I want to try and reclaim that maybe and just explore through this book and a little bit with you now 119 00:11:32,310 --> 00:11:39,450 as we go through these attempts to find out what is it that could transcend our understanding forever? 120 00:11:40,200 --> 00:11:44,309 So as I understand, the the book is divided up into these seven edges of knowledge, 121 00:11:44,310 --> 00:11:49,770 seven areas that I've sort of explored, which go from trying to understand the nature of the universe. 122 00:11:49,890 --> 00:11:55,660 Is it infinite whether we can infinitely divide matter what's going on inside our brain? 123 00:11:56,310 --> 00:11:59,280 So I'm going to take you on a little tour of a few of these to give you a sort of 124 00:11:59,280 --> 00:12:03,600 feel for what might be unknowable and whether we can know that sort of thing. 125 00:12:04,680 --> 00:12:09,870 I think one of the ultimate symbols of the unknowable is, in fact, the dice. 126 00:12:10,320 --> 00:12:17,130 You know, a dice would not make a fun game if you could actually predict what this was going to do next. 127 00:12:17,640 --> 00:12:22,590 So the first age that I explored is about the nature of the future. 128 00:12:22,650 --> 00:12:29,580 Can we predict the future? And in fact, mathematics at its heart is is very much trying to do that. 129 00:12:30,030 --> 00:12:32,260 I call a mathematician, a pattern searcher. 130 00:12:32,280 --> 00:12:38,460 What we do is look at patterns in the past and try and use those to extrapolate, to understand patterns into the future. 131 00:12:39,120 --> 00:12:44,640 So how powerful is my language of mathematics and being able to predict what is going to happen next? 132 00:12:45,360 --> 00:12:51,540 So actually each of the edges is accompanied by an object which kind of sparks my journey into the unknown. 133 00:12:51,550 --> 00:13:01,110 So the object for this particular edge is the casino dice, and this is in fact a casino dice that I picked up when I was in Vegas. 134 00:13:01,110 --> 00:13:07,689 And it's it's, you know, I was trying to use my maths to make a lot of money and I've lost so much money, but they let me keep the dice. 135 00:13:07,690 --> 00:13:11,670 So that's nice of them. I know it's a thing. 136 00:13:11,910 --> 00:13:17,340 It's a thing of beauty. I mean, I'm a look at it. It's afterwards, it's because it has to be incredibly fair. 137 00:13:17,340 --> 00:13:20,570 It's really a pretty much perfect cube. 138 00:13:20,580 --> 00:13:27,180 The edges are just beautifully sharp. And the the paint has been sort of has the same density that the acetate is. 139 00:13:27,180 --> 00:13:33,690 It's really I mean, it is a thing of beauty, yet it also is something that I absolutely hate because I cannot you know, 140 00:13:33,690 --> 00:13:39,670 my desire to do mathematics was was partly about wanting to know with 100% certainty that something was true. 141 00:13:40,650 --> 00:13:45,629 And, you know, here was this thing which, you know, when I roll it, I just I know what I got a one that time, you know, 142 00:13:45,630 --> 00:13:51,420 and and I might be able to I've got the equations for this thing, but, you know, how can I tell what it's going to do next? 143 00:13:52,050 --> 00:13:58,770 So that was a kind of challenge, actually. Maybe if I work hard enough, I could know what this was going to do. 144 00:13:59,070 --> 00:14:06,209 And I guess the hero on my journey to try and use mathematics to be able to predict the future is Isaac Newton. 145 00:14:06,210 --> 00:14:11,700 Because Isaac Newton came up with the laws of motion, the physical laws of motion, the idea of calculus. 146 00:14:11,700 --> 00:14:14,880 He showed us how the universe can be controlled. 147 00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:21,630 You know, we can predict when an eclipse is going to happen. We were able to predict that mercury was going to grow across the the sun just recently. 148 00:14:22,170 --> 00:14:25,860 And that's all thanks to this revolution that Newton started, 149 00:14:26,040 --> 00:14:31,800 which kind of revealed that the universe may be a kind of clockwork universe controlled by these equations. 150 00:14:32,070 --> 00:14:37,320 If you know how things are set up, you run the equations, you can know what's going to happen into the future. 151 00:14:37,980 --> 00:14:43,620 Well, if Newton is my hero, my nemesis in this whole desire to know the future, is this guy here? 152 00:14:43,620 --> 00:14:52,319 Honoré. Poincaré, a French mathematician, who, at the beginning of the 20th century said, Yeah, well, the universe may be controlled by equations. 153 00:14:52,320 --> 00:14:59,790 It may be that if you know the absolute start up of any system, you run the equations, you'll know exactly what's going to happen in the future. 154 00:15:00,210 --> 00:15:06,510 But he said, unfortunately, you're never going to have that complete knowledge of how a system is set up because there's always a little bit of error. 155 00:15:06,660 --> 00:15:11,910 If you're measuring how the solar system is set up, then, you know, how can you be sure that? 156 00:15:12,230 --> 00:15:14,060 Got the 50th decimal place, right. 157 00:15:14,390 --> 00:15:22,640 And what Poincaré showed is that just a very small change in maybe the 50th decimal place may cause a dramatically different outcome. 158 00:15:23,270 --> 00:15:26,629 Now, one of my favourite examples of a chaos in motion, 159 00:15:26,630 --> 00:15:34,190 and this is an illustration that even something very simple can have a very difficult future to try and predict. 160 00:15:34,190 --> 00:15:38,749 So this is a pendulum. Now, a pendulum is generally something so simple and predictable. 161 00:15:38,750 --> 00:15:42,710 We use it to keep track of time. But this is a slightly different pendulum. 162 00:15:42,720 --> 00:15:46,760 So this is what I call a double pendulum. So it's a it's jointed. 163 00:15:46,760 --> 00:15:50,000 So it's a little bit like a leg. So it's just two metal pieces here. 164 00:15:50,660 --> 00:15:56,840 So the, you know, very simple geometric description and the equations are equally quite simple. 165 00:15:57,470 --> 00:16:01,420 But being able to predict the behaviour of this thing is almost impossible. 166 00:16:01,430 --> 00:16:07,340 So let's set this off. And you see. 167 00:16:07,350 --> 00:16:12,310 Why are you laughing? Why? Because it's so hilariously funny that you can't predict it, he says. 168 00:16:12,820 --> 00:16:16,149 I mean, it's boring. So it just always makes me laugh. And I look, I'm going to try. 169 00:16:16,150 --> 00:16:20,049 And I had a little notch there. So I guess the point is I'm going to try and repeat that behaviour. 170 00:16:20,050 --> 00:16:23,740 I'm going to try and start it off in exactly the same starting position. 171 00:16:24,410 --> 00:16:32,190 So that's. Wow. Oh I know it's completely different behaviour that time and I think I've tightened it a little bit too far. 172 00:16:32,190 --> 00:16:37,800 It's because it's it's a little. A big one here as I. That's right. 173 00:16:38,240 --> 00:16:46,070 This is my favourite desktop toy. I can play with this for absolutely hours, so but it sort of illustrates that even very simple systems, 174 00:16:46,250 --> 00:16:50,149 you make a very small change to the conditions and it can go in a completely different direction. 175 00:16:50,150 --> 00:16:55,670 And this is the signature of something called Chaos. Another my favourite desktop toys is this one here. 176 00:16:55,670 --> 00:17:01,120 I use this to make all my decisions about life. So you can see it has different options. 177 00:17:01,130 --> 00:17:04,310 Ask a friend. Try again. No way. Definitely. Maybe. 178 00:17:04,310 --> 00:17:10,160 Yes. And what you do is. So here's a little I'll show you a little video of this. 179 00:17:10,670 --> 00:17:14,810 So this is one set up in a lab. You start this thing off and trying to predict this. 180 00:17:14,870 --> 00:17:18,590 So I'm going to ask it. Should I go to have a beer in the pub after this lecture? 181 00:17:19,860 --> 00:17:23,160 Seem more cautious. Kind of. Oh, definitely. 182 00:17:23,250 --> 00:17:29,879 Oh, great. So that's good. Excellent. Yeah, I think I've to always says definitely when I ask get about the beer. 183 00:17:29,880 --> 00:17:36,540 It's really great. Thanks. Yeah. So, but you can see from this that, you know, just if I run that again trying to see, 184 00:17:36,540 --> 00:17:40,370 you know, beer beforehand, which magnet that's going to end up in. 185 00:17:40,380 --> 00:17:43,740 So there are three magnets here. And the thing is just being, you know, pulled it out. 186 00:17:43,740 --> 00:17:47,850 It's a bit like an asteroid flying round three planets. And which planet is it going to hit? 187 00:17:48,180 --> 00:17:54,810 Will eventually goes for this one here. And here's to three computer simulations I did where I actually just changed the 188 00:17:54,990 --> 00:17:59,580 something like the sixth decimal place of the coordinate where the pendulum started. 189 00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:04,709 And you can see so I've coloured the pendulum, the magnets up now, so I've got blue magnets, 190 00:18:04,710 --> 00:18:09,620 a yellow magnet and a red magnet and just a very small change cause a completely different behaviour, 191 00:18:09,630 --> 00:18:12,570 different path, different planet that the asteroid hit. 192 00:18:13,260 --> 00:18:21,630 And here is a computer simulation which tells you helps you to predict maybe where the pendulum is going to end up. 193 00:18:21,990 --> 00:18:26,790 So there are some regions which are very predictable. So if you're close to the yellow magnet. 194 00:18:26,970 --> 00:18:31,200 So the idea is if you start the pendulum off over a particular point, 195 00:18:31,320 --> 00:18:36,090 you look at the colour under that point and that will tell you where the pendulum is going to end up. 196 00:18:36,570 --> 00:18:42,479 So if I start near a yellow magnet, then the thing just wobbles about and goes back to the yellow magnet. 197 00:18:42,480 --> 00:18:46,049 So it's but there are other regions which are a little bit further away. 198 00:18:46,050 --> 00:18:52,290 So here's a very large swathe of red. You start there, it'll swing out, but will then have it and end up at the red magnet. 199 00:18:52,290 --> 00:18:57,900 So small changes are not going to be cause any dramatic difference in where the magnet will end up. 200 00:18:58,140 --> 00:19:01,590 But I was starting that magnet in the top left hand corner. 201 00:19:01,770 --> 00:19:07,590 And in this region you have what's called a fractal. So this is a shape which has infinite complexity. 202 00:19:07,770 --> 00:19:12,960 So as I zoom in on it, it never simplifies, it never becomes a single colour. 203 00:19:13,380 --> 00:19:18,240 So it means that however accurately I try and measure this thing, 204 00:19:18,390 --> 00:19:23,280 just a few more decimal places can kick it quite easily from going from the yellow to the red magnet. 205 00:19:23,580 --> 00:19:32,879 So this is saying that unless I have a complete description of how the universe is set up, I cannot know the future in this region. 206 00:19:32,880 --> 00:19:38,910 Just a small change in a decimal place will cause a completely different outcome to happen now. 207 00:19:38,910 --> 00:19:45,450 I also was accompanied on my journey into these edges of knowledge by a few experts. 208 00:19:45,450 --> 00:19:49,620 I chose a lot of areas I'm not expert at all. It's very much. It was a learning curve for me. 209 00:19:49,620 --> 00:19:56,790 Some of this and in this chapter about chaos, I actually chose a colleague of ours here in Oxford. 210 00:19:56,970 --> 00:19:59,970 This is Bob May, Lord May as he is now. 211 00:20:00,480 --> 00:20:07,140 And he actually discovered I mean, this idea of chaos theory affects so much of what we're trying to predict about the future. 212 00:20:07,380 --> 00:20:11,160 The reason that I wasn't sure whether it was going to be a monsoon out there. 213 00:20:11,160 --> 00:20:14,370 I mean, yesterday we had monsoons kind of weather hitting us. 214 00:20:15,510 --> 00:20:21,270 You know, being able to predict the weather five days in advance is impossible because just a very small change in some of 215 00:20:21,270 --> 00:20:26,790 those measurements of the wind speed temperature can cause within five days things to go dramatically different. 216 00:20:27,240 --> 00:20:33,569 The planets, too, are very sensitive, but on a fortunately, on a longer scale than five days, I mean, we're talking sort of 5 billion years. 217 00:20:33,570 --> 00:20:37,920 A very small change can actually cause the solar system to do something completely different. 218 00:20:38,310 --> 00:20:45,060 But Bob May has discovered that not only in these kind of physical systems, but also in biology as well. 219 00:20:45,570 --> 00:20:52,890 He's a mathematical biologist. He discovered that I'm trying to keep track of population dynamics is also controlled by chaotic equations. 220 00:20:53,340 --> 00:20:57,809 So just a very small change. You put in one extra animal and the dynamics can be completely different. 221 00:20:57,810 --> 00:21:05,610 You can have the whole system collapsing, whilst without that animal you can have a very healthy pack of animals the next year. 222 00:21:06,060 --> 00:21:12,990 And in fact now he's working. He's a cross-party member in the House of Lords and he spends a lot of time actually working on 223 00:21:12,990 --> 00:21:18,120 the banking crisis and trying to understand whether that was an example of a chaotic behaviour. 224 00:21:18,690 --> 00:21:20,999 And sure enough, you know, people in economics, 225 00:21:21,000 --> 00:21:28,049 there are regions like those yellow regions where things are very predictable and then it can go into very strange, unpredictable regions. 226 00:21:28,050 --> 00:21:29,910 And he said this to me whilst we were talking. 227 00:21:30,090 --> 00:21:36,479 I went to him and had lunch with him at the House of Lords and he's he said not only in research but in the everyday world of politics and economics. 228 00:21:36,480 --> 00:21:43,200 It would be better off if more people realised that simple systems do not necessarily possess simple, dynamic properties. 229 00:21:43,200 --> 00:21:45,140 And and I asked him, you know, 230 00:21:45,150 --> 00:21:51,030 how are you getting on in trying to persuade your fellow kind of politicians about the importance of knowing about chaos theory? 231 00:21:51,030 --> 00:21:54,780 And he said, Marcus, there are just egos here. Nobody's interested in what I say. 232 00:21:54,960 --> 00:21:58,290 It's just they all were interested in their careers. So he was very down on that. 233 00:21:59,340 --> 00:22:02,819 But but I think that is one of the important things when you're trying to do 234 00:22:02,820 --> 00:22:07,350 policy is knowing when you can be confident about what's going to happen next. 235 00:22:07,350 --> 00:22:14,910 I'm not saying that mathematics is completely useless. We've been able to land that spaceship on the side of a comet because of Newton's equations. 236 00:22:15,480 --> 00:22:19,230 But it's also important to know when you are in those regions, maybe in the top left. 237 00:22:19,340 --> 00:22:24,050 And corner of that fractal picture where now you can say you can't know. 238 00:22:24,320 --> 00:22:28,580 So it's almost as important to know when you can't know as to know when you can know. 239 00:22:28,580 --> 00:22:36,080 Because then you can be conservative and hunker down and kind of avoid the mess that might emerge. 240 00:22:36,500 --> 00:22:41,510 So I came back to my advice and I was very interested, okay, well, what about this? Is this just chaotic? 241 00:22:42,200 --> 00:22:47,540 Or if I knew this to a certain amount of detail, could I actually predict what it was going to do next? 242 00:22:47,690 --> 00:22:52,220 I have the laws of motion which control how this falls, how it hits the table. 243 00:22:53,060 --> 00:22:57,770 And I actually discovered a piece, recent piece of research done by four Hungarians, 244 00:22:57,770 --> 00:23:01,820 which revealed that actually this is more predictable than I thought it was going to be. 245 00:23:02,840 --> 00:23:07,910 So what they've done is to I mean, I had that picture with the three magnets, which I had three colours for. 246 00:23:08,330 --> 00:23:12,020 So now we've got six points and so we've got six colours to keep track of. 247 00:23:12,020 --> 00:23:18,799 So we can draw a picture of how we start off advice and what what that effect will have on the outcome. 248 00:23:18,800 --> 00:23:28,370 Which kind of face will it land on? And it turns out that if the table that you're throwing it on is the dissipates quite a lot of energy. 249 00:23:28,370 --> 00:23:31,429 So it's sort of when it falls, the energy kind of gets sucked out of it. 250 00:23:31,430 --> 00:23:39,020 So like a carpet for example. Then actually the behaviour of this is described by the picture in the top left hand corner. 251 00:23:39,650 --> 00:23:45,350 So actually if the energy is being dissipated, so if I throw this on the floor here, it doesn't bounce very much. 252 00:23:45,530 --> 00:23:53,840 And actually, it turns out we don't have this fractal quality that's swathes of yellow, swathes of green, swathes of blue. 253 00:23:53,900 --> 00:23:57,290 And so a small change is not going to change where that doneness is going to land up. 254 00:23:57,590 --> 00:24:02,570 So here's a tip. If you want to know which way it's going to end, what you need to look at is the bottom number, 255 00:24:02,600 --> 00:24:07,070 because it's more likely to land when you throw it like that on the bottom number. 256 00:24:07,310 --> 00:24:10,100 So in fact, I had a one on the bottom and it came up one there. 257 00:24:10,130 --> 00:24:19,970 So quids in so but if you think about it the craps table in the you know, it's it's you know, you've got a sort of felt on there. 258 00:24:19,970 --> 00:24:24,010 It's dissipating some sort of energy. But here this is very hard this table. 259 00:24:24,020 --> 00:24:30,540 So as you move through here, the rigidity of the table is increasing and so it's losing less energy as you go through. 260 00:24:30,560 --> 00:24:36,410 So let's try and do that again, see whether. So down in here, we get a very fractal regions and now a very small change. 261 00:24:37,010 --> 00:24:42,530 So yes. So it landed a four was I had the one on the bottom at that time. 262 00:24:42,530 --> 00:24:50,300 So so it depends on the circumstances. But they're all regions where this where I can know what this dice is going to do next. 263 00:24:50,660 --> 00:24:55,250 And actually, that's kind of your one thought is, you know, I've sort of brought up on, yeah, 264 00:24:55,250 --> 00:25:00,800 the universe is controlled by equations and if you know the complete set up, you should be able to know exactly what's going to happen next. 265 00:25:00,950 --> 00:25:05,080 Of course, we may not know the complete set up. That's what chaos this theory is saying. 266 00:25:05,090 --> 00:25:09,410 A small change means that you might lose a lot of knowledge about what's happening next. 267 00:25:09,710 --> 00:25:15,080 But in fact, there's part of science which says, look, even if you know the complete set up of the universe, 268 00:25:15,260 --> 00:25:20,540 there are still a certain set of certain circumstances where there's no way you're going to know what's going to happen next. 269 00:25:20,840 --> 00:25:30,510 And one of them is in the chapter that I explored next was trying to predict the behaviour of a pot of uranium. 270 00:25:30,530 --> 00:25:32,600 So it's amazing what you can buy on the internet. 271 00:25:34,220 --> 00:25:45,680 So this, this pot of uranium, I ordered it over the internet and I'm assured it's because I'm assured that it's completely safe. 272 00:25:46,520 --> 00:25:57,830 But the instructions say don't eat it. But this actually at its heart is the question of when this is going to radiate at the side. 273 00:25:58,010 --> 00:26:03,559 It says that it has it's going to emit 984 counts of radiation. 274 00:26:03,560 --> 00:26:07,790 So if you have a Geiger counter, you get 984 counts per minute. 275 00:26:08,450 --> 00:26:12,649 So it's got some sort of estimate of what it's going to do, but that's only an approximate estimate. 276 00:26:12,650 --> 00:26:16,550 So it says, you know, over a minute, on average, that's what you'll get. 277 00:26:16,790 --> 00:26:21,680 What it can't tell me is when it's going to emit an alpha particle, for example. 278 00:26:22,430 --> 00:26:30,170 And the extraordinary thing is the current state of physics says that this is just how the universe is, that there is no mechanism, 279 00:26:30,590 --> 00:26:37,580 nothing that we can do, which is going to tell us when this uranium is going to emit its next particle particle. 280 00:26:37,970 --> 00:26:42,680 This, we say, is random, but that's actually just an expression of our lack of knowledge of the start up. 281 00:26:42,920 --> 00:26:47,629 This seems to be something which the physics says is genuinely random and actually the 282 00:26:47,630 --> 00:26:52,040 person sort of at the heart of trying to explain what this bit of uranium is doing, 283 00:26:52,040 --> 00:26:55,999 why it's emitting a particular point is Heisenberg. 284 00:26:56,000 --> 00:27:01,340 This is a picture of Heisenberg. I, I'm trying to embrace and love Heisenberg, but he's another person I don't really like. 285 00:27:03,290 --> 00:27:07,790 And this equation. So you've probably heard of this thing, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. 286 00:27:08,180 --> 00:27:12,770 Heisenberg's uncertainty principle almost embeds the idea that there are things you cannot 287 00:27:12,770 --> 00:27:17,630 know that you will never be able to know about the physical system and its expression. 288 00:27:17,650 --> 00:27:21,640 It's not a kind of vague, wishy. While she I think about cats and Schrodinger and things like that. 289 00:27:21,760 --> 00:27:26,110 It's actually a very explicit mathematical formula and follows out of the mathematics. 290 00:27:26,650 --> 00:27:32,170 So these two terms here, Delta X and Delta P, this is about a position and momentum. 291 00:27:32,770 --> 00:27:36,520 So basically these two things are all kind of paired up. 292 00:27:36,520 --> 00:27:43,310 And the more knowledge you get about the position of something, the less you know about the potential momentum. 293 00:27:43,330 --> 00:27:48,310 Momentum a remember is is how something is travelling, evolves the speed of the thing. 294 00:27:48,880 --> 00:27:51,490 And in fact, one this is why I've got to tell you one of my favourite jokes. 295 00:27:51,490 --> 00:27:59,110 So this is Heisenberg is storming down the autobahn in Germany and and the police pull him over and they get him out of the car and say, 296 00:27:59,620 --> 00:28:04,420 Sir, do you know how fast you were going? No, but I know exactly where I was. 297 00:28:05,590 --> 00:28:11,739 Now, that's good. That's good. Sign that you're laughing, because if anyone who didn't laugh and I now have to explain the joke a little bit, 298 00:28:11,740 --> 00:28:15,280 is that there's a trade off here, and this is what this equation says. 299 00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:22,929 The more I know about the position of something that's the Delta X is controlling what the error is. 300 00:28:22,930 --> 00:28:29,650 So the more I know about it and the smaller the error. In order to make this equation true, the momentum has to increase. 301 00:28:29,890 --> 00:28:38,050 The uncertainty, sorry, in the momentum has to increase the the knowledge I have of the momentum, I lose knowledge about it. 302 00:28:38,290 --> 00:28:43,509 And I she's perfectly summed up in some of these lovely experiments now you might have experienced or seen or heard 303 00:28:43,510 --> 00:28:49,479 about this thing called the double slit experiments where you send an electron through and it doesn't really decide. 304 00:28:49,480 --> 00:28:57,100 It seems to go through both slits at the same time. And actually this thing about uncertainty is even revealed with just one single slit. 305 00:28:57,580 --> 00:29:00,700 So all I'm going to do is to take my uranium off in a very far distance. 306 00:29:00,700 --> 00:29:05,980 So that's going to be my particle gun. I'm going to have, say, alpha particle shooting out of here. 307 00:29:06,370 --> 00:29:11,290 And I've got this a large distance away. I've got a screen with a slit in it. 308 00:29:11,860 --> 00:29:18,790 And it means that if a particle passes through there, then there can be no momentum in the up down direction. 309 00:29:19,240 --> 00:29:23,680 So because any momentum in the up down direction would push it off and it would hit the screen and not go through. 310 00:29:23,690 --> 00:29:34,360 So if any particle that goes through that slit I know has almost zero momentum in the the vertical position because that's the only way. 311 00:29:34,360 --> 00:29:39,580 If it had any momentum, it would not go through that slit because the distance I've made very large. 312 00:29:39,970 --> 00:29:41,770 But as soon as it goes through that slit, 313 00:29:41,770 --> 00:29:48,669 I also have now gained very tight knowledge about where that particle is because it's gone through that slit. 314 00:29:48,670 --> 00:29:54,460 So I seem to have got the trade off. I know exactly the momentum and I know exactly the position of this thing. 315 00:29:54,670 --> 00:30:00,100 But as soon as I know the position, it causes a sudden uncertainty to occur in the momentum. 316 00:30:00,100 --> 00:30:05,440 So suddenly this thing gains momentum when it didn't have it before and the uncertainty is expressed here. 317 00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:10,480 So this is actually experimental data where they took particles, they sent them through here. 318 00:30:10,630 --> 00:30:18,280 And the larger the the smaller the slits, the more information I have about where that particle is, 319 00:30:18,580 --> 00:30:22,360 which means there must be a larger trade off in the spread of momentum. 320 00:30:22,570 --> 00:30:26,650 And you can see this, there's the narrower slit is the bottom graph. 321 00:30:26,740 --> 00:30:33,610 And then suddenly the momentum is spread all over the place of where the particle arrives on the screen can be in a wide range of possible values. 322 00:30:33,850 --> 00:30:40,120 But as I lose information about the position by widening the slit, the momentum comes back in again. 323 00:30:40,120 --> 00:30:44,110 And I have more information about the momentum now. This is absolutely extraordinary. 324 00:30:44,500 --> 00:30:52,930 It kind of says that I can't know these two things together, but actually some physicists have started to interpret this and saying, 325 00:30:52,960 --> 00:30:59,740 actually, this is a mistake in language that actually these particles don't have a momentum and a position. 326 00:30:59,740 --> 00:31:03,250 We're so hooked on the way Newton thought about the world, we just think, yes, 327 00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:08,530 you've got this electron, it's got some position, it is somewhere and it's got some momentum. 328 00:31:08,530 --> 00:31:13,690 And you use that to try and make predictions. But physicists now say, no, you shouldn't think of it like that. 329 00:31:13,930 --> 00:31:20,590 It's wrong language so often that some of these kind of unknowns turn out to be just that we aren't able to use language properly. 330 00:31:21,280 --> 00:31:30,640 And so people now think that you should say, well, now that electron doesn't have a position, an identifiable position, until you observe where it is. 331 00:31:30,910 --> 00:31:38,139 And so we have to see now they're called a quantum wave, which actually describes the probability about where you'll find that electron 332 00:31:38,140 --> 00:31:42,070 should you or that particle alpha particle should you want to observe it. 333 00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:48,640 So you should think of this thing is not having a position, it's got a sort of probabilistic position spread out over space. 334 00:31:48,850 --> 00:31:56,080 The peaks of this wave function tell you is more likely to be there, the troughs tell you it's less likely to be there. 335 00:31:56,140 --> 00:32:02,350 And this is all you can know. And you can't know where that and where that electron is going to be more dramatically. 336 00:32:02,350 --> 00:32:06,999 You can't know from the wave function when you observe it where it's going to be. 337 00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:10,960 It could be in any of these kind of peaks or even in the troughs as well. 338 00:32:11,440 --> 00:32:18,760 And so quantum physics at the moment has at its heart this belief that you will it doesn't matter what you do, you will not be able to know. 339 00:32:18,960 --> 00:32:23,070 Predict. And you can run the experiments over and over again and you'll get different answers 340 00:32:23,070 --> 00:32:27,180 with with the same set up if you could ever start the thing in the same way. 341 00:32:27,330 --> 00:32:31,979 And actually this is responsible for the uranium emitting particles because you 342 00:32:31,980 --> 00:32:35,970 know a lot about the momentum of the things inside the nucleus of this uranium, 343 00:32:36,120 --> 00:32:38,520 which causes an uncertainty in the position. 344 00:32:38,670 --> 00:32:46,020 So at some points, suddenly the particle would say, hey, I seem to be outside the nucleus, I'm not inside it anymore, and it goes flying off. 345 00:32:46,230 --> 00:32:52,350 So this is actually Heisenberg's uncertainty principle helps to understand why this thing is actually emitting particles. 346 00:32:53,280 --> 00:32:58,200 Now, there are some people who just believe this can't be how the universe is really behaving. 347 00:32:58,200 --> 00:33:01,950 You know, surely this just can't be random about what this is doing. 348 00:33:01,950 --> 00:33:07,379 And there must be some mechanism for deciding, okay, it might look probabilistic, the same as the dice. 349 00:33:07,380 --> 00:33:10,680 The best things we had to predict the dice is probability. 350 00:33:10,680 --> 00:33:14,310 But we know that there are laws of physics controlling what that dice is going to do. 351 00:33:14,520 --> 00:33:17,940 I'm one of those who really believe this just can't be the answer. 352 00:33:18,270 --> 00:33:23,849 Was Einstein and only Stein had this famous quote Quantum mechanics is very impressive, and it certainly is. 353 00:33:23,850 --> 00:33:28,169 It's one of the most well-tested theories we have on the scientific books. 354 00:33:28,170 --> 00:33:35,790 It with such accuracy that, you know, we know we're on to something, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. 355 00:33:36,030 --> 00:33:40,770 The theory produces a good deal, but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the old one. 356 00:33:40,980 --> 00:33:48,890 I am at all events convinced that he does not play dice, and I think maybe it's the mathematician in me is you know, 357 00:33:48,900 --> 00:33:52,830 I also I'm still with Einstein with this that, you know, 358 00:33:52,830 --> 00:33:55,979 surely we will come to a point where we have a new theory, 359 00:33:55,980 --> 00:34:00,960 a new Einstein that tells us something about the mechanism which is going on, which is controlling this. 360 00:34:01,320 --> 00:34:04,680 But we know that the mechanism is going to be really freaky. 361 00:34:05,280 --> 00:34:08,660 We know this thing called entanglement, which shows us that any mechanism, you know, 362 00:34:08,670 --> 00:34:13,800 they can't be a sort of little internal clock in there, which is just saying, okay, now you're spitting out, now you're not in. 363 00:34:13,890 --> 00:34:20,310 Whenever you look at this system, if it is there, we know must be sort of spread across the whole of the universe, 364 00:34:20,310 --> 00:34:23,110 which is controlling what this thing is doing now. 365 00:34:23,910 --> 00:34:30,510 Now, I mentioned right at the beginning that's part of this exploration was about this idea of God being the things that we cannot know. 366 00:34:30,510 --> 00:34:38,040 So here is something that apparently we are not able to know when this thing is going to spit out a bit of its nucleus. 367 00:34:39,360 --> 00:34:46,260 So the actually, the person I took on my journey to the This Age of knowledge is a quantum physicist, but he's also a priest. 368 00:34:46,920 --> 00:34:48,360 So this is John Polkinghorne. 369 00:34:49,080 --> 00:34:55,140 He likes to call himself a vegetarian butcher because, you know, how can somebody be a quantum physicist and also a priest at the same time? 370 00:34:55,980 --> 00:35:02,639 John Polkinghorne, he has incredibly good credentials. He's trained with Dirac in Cambridge, then went to trained with Feynman. 371 00:35:02,640 --> 00:35:05,040 He made great discoveries about corks. 372 00:35:05,640 --> 00:35:12,510 And then about halfway through his kind of scientific life or his life, he then decided that he wanted to be ordained. 373 00:35:12,750 --> 00:35:19,410 And so I was very intrigued to talk to him about how does he believe his God works in the world. 374 00:35:19,650 --> 00:35:22,530 I think that, you know, there are a lot of religious scientists and I must say, 375 00:35:22,530 --> 00:35:26,610 although I'm a said, I believe in the arsenal, I am an atheist at heart and I would declare that. 376 00:35:27,600 --> 00:35:34,079 But there are quite a lot of religious scientists, but they divide into two groups and one are the deists. 377 00:35:34,080 --> 00:35:39,659 And one of the theists, the deists say, okay, look, I don't know where this universe came from. 378 00:35:39,660 --> 00:35:42,300 I don't know what, you know, what started it or what created it. 379 00:35:42,600 --> 00:35:48,330 But once it's been created, there's no, okay, I'm going to call that God because I really don't know what it is which kicked this whole thing off. 380 00:35:48,750 --> 00:35:54,180 But after that, basically the laws of physics take over and the whole thing is now something I can talk about. 381 00:35:54,750 --> 00:35:58,560 And so they don't think God acts in this world in any sort of meaningful way. 382 00:35:58,890 --> 00:36:05,040 But John Polkinghorne is a theist and he really, really believes whatever this thing God is, that it acts in the world. 383 00:36:05,310 --> 00:36:09,270 And so I was trying to press him. Okay, well, how are your scientists? 384 00:36:09,270 --> 00:36:12,839 How is he acting in the world or it how is this thing? 385 00:36:12,840 --> 00:36:16,200 It's acting in the world. And, you know, we're thinking of it as the unknowns. 386 00:36:16,860 --> 00:36:19,860 So that's strange thing. So here we have an unknown quantum physics. 387 00:36:19,860 --> 00:36:24,780 I don't know when this particle is going to emit or where I'm going to find a particle. 388 00:36:24,930 --> 00:36:27,990 Is that an unknown that can have influence in the world? 389 00:36:28,260 --> 00:36:29,690 Well, yes, it can. 390 00:36:29,700 --> 00:36:38,429 I mean, whether it has any sort of belief, whether there's any sort of meaning to what that action is, but times intrigue, you know, 391 00:36:38,430 --> 00:36:42,600 all you're going to say, maybe your God is using quantum physics so it can make a decision, 392 00:36:42,600 --> 00:36:44,850 you know, okay, I'm going to put the electron here in here. 393 00:36:44,940 --> 00:36:50,430 And that might actually have a dramatic effect on the universe because chaos says that small changes can have big effects. 394 00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:55,950 So I thought he was going to say, yes, it's quantum physics, perfect place, my God, to act in the world. 395 00:36:56,520 --> 00:37:00,510 But he wasn't going to buy that at all. He said, no, no, no, no. Because it really depends. 396 00:37:00,690 --> 00:37:08,190 All of these observations, all of these decisions about where the electron is going to be depend on an observation. 397 00:37:08,370 --> 00:37:14,220 It depends on interacting with the thing. And before that it's just described by wave function and deterministic wave function. 398 00:37:15,090 --> 00:37:18,690 And actually, we're all part of a system. So surely the whole what is an observation? 399 00:37:18,830 --> 00:37:22,340 Anyway. Surely we're all just part of some huge, great big universe, a wave function. 400 00:37:22,580 --> 00:37:27,100 So he wasn't into using quantum physics as the way that his God was acting in the world. 401 00:37:27,110 --> 00:37:30,110 So I said, okay, well, how are you doing this? How is it doing it? 402 00:37:30,680 --> 00:37:33,190 And he actually went back to chaos theory intriguingly. 403 00:37:33,200 --> 00:37:41,599 So his theory is that as humans, we can never know the the set up of a system with complete accuracy. 404 00:37:41,600 --> 00:37:44,840 There will always be decimal places which we don't know about. 405 00:37:44,990 --> 00:37:50,780 And he believes that that's where a God could act and tinker with things and change things. 406 00:37:51,110 --> 00:37:55,339 So it could be different as the thing evolves. Actually, Newton used to think this as well. 407 00:37:55,340 --> 00:37:59,659 And. LYDEN It's who is his great competitor over the calculus just said that's totally ridiculous. 408 00:37:59,660 --> 00:38:02,270 Why an earth would do you have to tinker why couldn't you just set the whole 409 00:38:02,270 --> 00:38:06,620 thing up and let it go running in the way that it was meant to at the beginning? 410 00:38:06,740 --> 00:38:10,400 You know, surely God is outside of times. They knew exactly what was going to happen anyway. 411 00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:16,459 So it was a kind of intriguing journey talking to him about how would you use science 412 00:38:16,460 --> 00:38:21,590 to to kind of marry up with your fantastic beliefs and of God acting in the world. 413 00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:25,420 But the interesting thing is I went into this journey is that one of the that 414 00:38:25,460 --> 00:38:29,960 reason that a lot of the scientific religious people who had deists who say, 415 00:38:29,960 --> 00:38:35,210 okay, I don't know where all of this came from, let's call that creator a god. 416 00:38:35,210 --> 00:38:41,450 And then I'm just going to do science. And so the unknown, because it is you know, we don't know where it all came from, 417 00:38:41,720 --> 00:38:47,990 but actually this Heisenberg uncertainty principle gives us a chance to actually see where this stuff came from. 418 00:38:48,230 --> 00:38:51,320 Because. Okay, wait a minute. Part of uranium come from. 419 00:38:52,040 --> 00:38:55,729 Well, I went to an Amazon, so I bought it on Amazon. So that's its first source. 420 00:38:55,730 --> 00:38:59,120 And actually it's amazing kind of reviews you can find on Amazon. 421 00:38:59,130 --> 00:39:02,660 So, so glad five stars, so glad. 422 00:39:02,660 --> 00:39:05,990 I don't have to buy this from the Libyans in the parking lot at the mall anymore. 423 00:39:07,040 --> 00:39:13,610 There were some others complaining about the fact that the thing had disappeared, you know, gone down by half as it's after yours. 424 00:39:13,730 --> 00:39:17,330 So good you're laughing. And I don't have to explain about half lifes. Oh, that's so good. 425 00:39:18,680 --> 00:39:22,300 Anyway, so. Yeah, but if I trace this back, okay, I probably, as I. 426 00:39:22,480 --> 00:39:27,430 I talked to somebody on Tuesday about this, they said he was he was a minor and he said it was just clear it came from a mine. 427 00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:30,710 Yeah. Yes. Okay. Yeah, but where did it come from? Before the mine? 428 00:39:30,800 --> 00:39:34,220 And you trace it back. And of course, it was made in a store. The most amazing thing. 429 00:39:34,220 --> 00:39:38,299 You know how stars make all of these extraordinary atoms, but what about before that? 430 00:39:38,300 --> 00:39:41,000 So we trace it back. Where did all of this stuff come from? 431 00:39:41,330 --> 00:39:50,570 And it turns out that actually Heisenberg's uncertainty principle might be the equation, which helps us to get something from nothing. 432 00:39:50,600 --> 00:39:55,010 This is one of the big unsolved questions why is there something rather than nothing? 433 00:39:55,640 --> 00:40:02,120 And actually, if you got two things that things get measurements get paired up, if that sort of matters, what order I do it in. 434 00:40:02,120 --> 00:40:08,000 So a measuring position and momentum, somehow it matches what order I do and they get combined in an uncertainty principle. 435 00:40:08,210 --> 00:40:11,660 But there's another uncertainty principle which combines energy and time. 436 00:40:11,870 --> 00:40:13,069 So this is expressed here. 437 00:40:13,070 --> 00:40:21,830 So any increase in the amount, if you want to narrow in on a little window of time, the energy within that window becomes more or less certain. 438 00:40:22,130 --> 00:40:26,510 So if you've got a region where there's nothing going on there, so you've got no energy. 439 00:40:26,600 --> 00:40:31,579 But actually if you decrease the window of time, that means that the energy uncertainty must increase. 440 00:40:31,580 --> 00:40:35,330 And so nothing might suddenly become a little bit of something, a little bit of error. 441 00:40:36,050 --> 00:40:40,100 And of course, Einstein said energy equals M.C. squared. 442 00:40:40,100 --> 00:40:43,460 Energy is equivalent to mass. So you've got mass inside here. 443 00:40:43,580 --> 00:40:48,350 So as we look in a little window, actually, we can suddenly get these what we call quantum fluctuations, 444 00:40:48,350 --> 00:40:56,930 where nothing can suddenly give rise to a matter. So and this is actually you may know what Stephen Hawking is famous for. 445 00:40:57,080 --> 00:41:02,360 He's famous for predicting that black holes, another place actually where we seem to lose information. 446 00:41:02,360 --> 00:41:10,520 If you go past the horizon of a black hole in, we seem to not be able to know what is going on inside a black hole because information can't get out. 447 00:41:11,210 --> 00:41:16,310 One theory has it, but Hawking thinks there may be a way things can get out, and it's because of the uncertainty. 448 00:41:16,310 --> 00:41:20,570 Principle at the horizon is that although there's nothing there, every now and again, 449 00:41:21,260 --> 00:41:26,270 this quantum fluctuation can cause a particle and an antiparticle to appear out of nothing. 450 00:41:26,450 --> 00:41:30,979 It's a bit like taking the equation zero equals one minus one so you can have nothing and 451 00:41:30,980 --> 00:41:34,550 then suddenly get one and minus one and the antiparticle gets sucked into the black hole, 452 00:41:34,700 --> 00:41:37,850 makes it a little bit smaller and the particle gets emitted out. 453 00:41:38,030 --> 00:41:43,339 So we believe in this thing hawking radiation. We haven't measured it yet, which is why he hasn't got a Nobel Prize yet. 454 00:41:43,340 --> 00:41:50,540 But when we do measure it, he will, because this is a way that black holes will actually kind of evaporate and may give back information. 455 00:41:50,540 --> 00:41:53,240 We we think that there's a something called the information paradox, 456 00:41:53,480 --> 00:41:58,880 that black holes may be somewhere where we lose information, but actually that's leaking according to this equation. 457 00:41:58,970 --> 00:42:06,890 Equation might be a way of us getting back information, but here is an equation which then gives us a way of getting uranium out of nothing. 458 00:42:07,250 --> 00:42:10,670 Now you might say, Well, yeah, but that isn't really nothing because you've got space there. 459 00:42:10,850 --> 00:42:14,959 Space just vacuum isn't nothing. It's a three dimensional space. 460 00:42:14,960 --> 00:42:18,260 And so that is something still. And as a mathematician, I certainly believe. 461 00:42:18,770 --> 00:42:25,460 It isn't something, so that isn't really nothing. So where did that something where did that empty space, where do the empty geometry come from? 462 00:42:26,030 --> 00:42:31,639 But even now, as we push, kind of one of the big mysteries is how to equate relativity and quantum physics. 463 00:42:31,640 --> 00:42:35,870 And the idea of quantum gravity and fluctuations in quantum gravity mean that 464 00:42:35,870 --> 00:42:40,759 even space itself might emerge as a fluctuation out of genuinely something, 465 00:42:40,760 --> 00:42:50,360 which is nothing. So. So actually it might be that the desire for some creator is well, actually the creator is just mathematics. 466 00:42:50,570 --> 00:42:54,290 Mathematics is outside of time. It's been there forever, will be there forever. 467 00:42:54,770 --> 00:42:59,870 And this is a way of just blowing something into those equations and then you get something out of nothing. 468 00:42:59,870 --> 00:43:05,900 So often they say, God is a mathematician. I would reverse that and say, No, no, mathematics is the God which started all of this. 469 00:43:06,920 --> 00:43:14,630 So that's a couple of the unknowns. So let me just give you a little going through a couple more and then I'll show you one of my, uh, 470 00:43:14,840 --> 00:43:20,930 so let's see, we, one of the other ones is I dig down into my uranium and ask, you know, how far can you go? 471 00:43:20,930 --> 00:43:26,059 Can you infinitely divide uranium if you go inside it? That atom is made out of electrons and quarks. 472 00:43:26,060 --> 00:43:28,639 We think that's the bottom layer. But how do we know that? 473 00:43:28,640 --> 00:43:36,080 And will maybe now we throw atoms with the bottom layer, so so that ones, you know, we might keep on dividing space, 474 00:43:36,290 --> 00:43:39,770 although we think there's a little quantised space beyond which you can't divide anything. 475 00:43:39,950 --> 00:43:44,090 What about going out? Is the universe infinite? If it is, could we ever know that? 476 00:43:44,540 --> 00:43:47,749 So that's one of my other edges. Time. 477 00:43:47,750 --> 00:43:54,020 What about time itself? So, you know, we think time had a beginning, the big bang. 478 00:43:54,890 --> 00:43:57,170 But can we talk about what happened before the Big Bang? 479 00:43:57,890 --> 00:44:05,330 Now, I was brought up in this department on the kind of idea you can't you guys, it doesn't make sense because you need time to say it before. 480 00:44:05,600 --> 00:44:10,190 And so if there wasn't any time, you can't say before I thought that's a really clever. 481 00:44:10,190 --> 00:44:14,600 Yeah, I like that. And they would always go, yes, you don't say what's north of the North Pole? 482 00:44:14,900 --> 00:44:17,300 And you go, Yeah, yeah, I get that. And it's nothing there. Yeah. 483 00:44:17,510 --> 00:44:21,770 But actually people are beginning to wonder that no, maybe you can talk about time before the big bang. 484 00:44:21,950 --> 00:44:25,550 The weird thing is that time is time infinite? 485 00:44:25,880 --> 00:44:31,820 Is it going to go on forever when it turns out that it may also run out at the other end as well, which is kind of frightening. 486 00:44:31,820 --> 00:44:37,490 So time, time may, you know, we know we're all finite, but what if the universe is finite? 487 00:44:37,490 --> 00:44:42,290 That's pretty frightening. And it turns out that everything is kind of decaying, like these black holes. 488 00:44:42,290 --> 00:44:47,510 And all we'd be left with is photons and gravitons. And photons and gravitons have no sense of time. 489 00:44:47,750 --> 00:44:52,670 And so time will disappear. They won't be able to measure things. But actually this is deeply depressing. 490 00:44:52,670 --> 00:44:58,159 So I went and talked to Roger Penrose, who is Mike sort of journeyman on this journey into time. 491 00:44:58,160 --> 00:45:01,309 And and he came he's come up with a lovely, positive way of doing this, 492 00:45:01,310 --> 00:45:05,900 that then you can rescale the universe because you've got less loss of sense of time. 493 00:45:06,020 --> 00:45:09,169 And that will be the beginning of a new aeon and a new big bang. 494 00:45:09,170 --> 00:45:14,030 So. So it was more hopeful. And I love Roger. It's kind of I know I love Roger as well because he changed his mind. 495 00:45:14,030 --> 00:45:18,920 He was one of these people I was brought up on who said, you can't talk about time before the Big Bang. 496 00:45:19,100 --> 00:45:24,980 And now he's changed his mind. I love that I'm a scientist, Atom. So I'm going to take you actually into a journey. 497 00:45:26,300 --> 00:45:32,360 We've got to I don't know. I'll talk for another hour until quarter two because I wasn't allowed to start his, if that's okay. 498 00:45:33,290 --> 00:45:37,160 Because I do want to take you into this age, because this one really pushed me outside my comfort zone, 499 00:45:38,120 --> 00:45:42,680 which is the question about what's happening inside your head. 500 00:45:43,130 --> 00:45:45,080 It's called the hard problem of consciousness. 501 00:45:45,440 --> 00:45:51,469 You're all sitting there and you're all doing most of you doing a pretty good impression of a conscious being. 502 00:45:51,470 --> 00:45:55,430 I can see some of you thought I was barren up. It's very sunny. 503 00:45:55,430 --> 00:46:00,650 And but, you know, I do believe that most of you are, you know, having a conscious experience. 504 00:46:00,860 --> 00:46:04,340 But is that conscious experience anything like the conscious experience I'm having? 505 00:46:05,030 --> 00:46:12,370 How can I ever know that you really are conscious or whether you maybe you've just sent an avatar down here and you know that, 506 00:46:12,560 --> 00:46:22,130 you know, you're doing such a good impression. And so actually the the object I took on my journey into the whole problem of consciousness is in fact, 507 00:46:23,030 --> 00:46:26,420 well, it's a chat bot app that I downloaded onto my smartphone. 508 00:46:26,570 --> 00:46:33,130 So I think it's a really interesting question. When will my smartphone become conscious and could I ever know that maybe it already is, 509 00:46:33,500 --> 00:46:39,020 you know, so, so and it's perfectly encapsulated in this kind of Turing question. 510 00:46:39,020 --> 00:46:47,030 You know, the the the problem of talking to a machine and determining at what point do you say no, okay, this thing is conscious. 511 00:46:47,420 --> 00:46:50,209 So I actually did a little experiment with this. It's called Cleverbot. 512 00:46:50,210 --> 00:46:55,250 You can download it for free and you have a conversation with it and you sort of try 513 00:46:55,280 --> 00:46:58,340 to think whether is it somebody on the other end typing these things in or not. 514 00:46:58,520 --> 00:47:02,749 So here's a little exercise for you. I did. I asked a few questions. 515 00:47:02,750 --> 00:47:06,530 I asked questions of Cleverbot. And I also I did this a bit earlier on. 516 00:47:06,530 --> 00:47:09,920 I ask some questions of my son and my son's doing physics in Bristol at the moment. 517 00:47:10,340 --> 00:47:12,290 He's 20 years old, just to give you some context. 518 00:47:12,770 --> 00:47:18,140 So I asked them both questions and I want you to listen to the questions and and think, you know, can you work out which one is the. 519 00:47:18,210 --> 00:47:21,420 Machine. And which one is my son? So we kicked off with. 520 00:47:22,140 --> 00:47:25,860 Do you have a girlfriend? So response eight came back. 521 00:47:25,950 --> 00:47:29,700 Do you want me to have a girlfriend? Response B came back. 522 00:47:29,880 --> 00:47:34,200 Mind your own business. Okay. So is that the machine? 523 00:47:35,010 --> 00:47:37,799 And the machine, of course, learns is an example of machine learning, 524 00:47:37,800 --> 00:47:43,140 because every conversation we have you have with it is banked and becomes a conversation it will have with somebody else. 525 00:47:43,410 --> 00:47:47,790 Okay, the next one. What is your dream? So response was my dream is to become a famous poet. 526 00:47:48,540 --> 00:47:53,400 Response be to make lots of money. He was going to want to do that one. 527 00:47:53,640 --> 00:47:59,510 Yes. My son was born in the Thatcherite age. Just give me a hint. Question three Are you conscious now? 528 00:47:59,520 --> 00:48:02,820 Both of these responses are intriguing because they played on this idea of Descartes, 529 00:48:03,570 --> 00:48:10,500 his I think therefore I am so response was if I wasn't, I don't think I was quite convoluted, kind of. 530 00:48:10,770 --> 00:48:14,910 But this one is Descartes response, since the only thing I can be certain of, 531 00:48:15,570 --> 00:48:20,250 and this goes one of the topics of this book is a sort of, you know, how can you do anything? 532 00:48:20,400 --> 00:48:23,430 And Descartes said, The only thing I can be sure of is who I am. 533 00:48:23,430 --> 00:48:30,930 So it's the only thing I'm sure of is that I am conscious. So anyway, you know, which one of those is a machine and which one is my son? 534 00:48:31,080 --> 00:48:34,650 And if we got the machine better, how could we ever know whether it was having a conscious world? 535 00:48:34,860 --> 00:48:38,250 Of course, some of you may be synaesthetic anyone synaesthetic here. 536 00:48:39,630 --> 00:48:42,930 Uh, yes. There's a finger going up at the back there. And my. 537 00:48:42,970 --> 00:48:46,250 What do you synaesthetic with? Numbers and colours. 538 00:48:46,270 --> 00:48:50,290 My wife is a similarly synaesthetic like this and so they are having a genuinely 539 00:48:50,290 --> 00:48:54,370 different conscious experience because when they see a number it gets coloured up. 540 00:48:54,970 --> 00:48:59,920 I did some wonderful work with a piece of missing messing on with synaesthetic, with sound and colour. 541 00:49:00,370 --> 00:49:04,060 And so when he listened to music, his music, it was full of colour. 542 00:49:04,240 --> 00:49:10,720 So we know that people do have genuinely different responses, conscious experiences, but you know, how can you tell? 543 00:49:10,750 --> 00:49:14,980 I mean, one of the things I do as a mathematician very often, if I'm trying to understand something, 544 00:49:15,100 --> 00:49:19,390 is to understand when something isn't that it's a very good way to sort of flip the question. 545 00:49:19,570 --> 00:49:25,420 So what will an animal take an animal? Which of these animals around us, which species are actually conscious? 546 00:49:25,630 --> 00:49:33,130 How many of these animals, if you stick them in front of the mirror, a cat, a dog, a rabbit would know that what they're looking at is themselves. 547 00:49:33,580 --> 00:49:41,800 So here's the chimpanzee looking. And, you know, is that is he just admiring himself or doing a few kind of like funky moves? 548 00:49:43,900 --> 00:49:47,920 Now, here's a test that Gordon Gallup came up with an animal behaviourists. 549 00:49:47,920 --> 00:49:52,329 He said, okay, if you put a mark on somebody's forehead and if you look in the mirror and you see something, 550 00:49:52,330 --> 00:49:55,990 oh, that's a bit weird, you put your hand up to your forehead. So he was interested. 551 00:49:56,080 --> 00:50:00,280 Okay, what animals will have this similar response once you've got them used to what a mirror does. 552 00:50:00,490 --> 00:50:04,150 So here's the orang-utan who's been marked looking at himself in the mirror. 553 00:50:04,750 --> 00:50:10,360 And so what is his response to suddenly seeing, Oh, what's that weird thing I've got on my forehead? 554 00:50:10,890 --> 00:50:17,170 So that would be, you know, if you put yourself in front of the mirror and you didn't know that somebody put some yellow stuff on your forehead, 555 00:50:17,170 --> 00:50:20,170 you would immediately go like this. You wouldn't go like this on the mirror. 556 00:50:20,560 --> 00:50:25,810 So you can see, you know, he's really pissed off that this person put this great big yellow dog in front of it. 557 00:50:28,180 --> 00:50:31,570 And so it turns out, you know, how many animals pass this test? 558 00:50:31,720 --> 00:50:36,700 Very few humans do. Chimpanzees as chimpanzees do and orang-utans do. 559 00:50:36,700 --> 00:50:43,740 But gorillas do not. They don't have any response to this. It's very few species that pass this test, and that's a very crude test for consciousness, 560 00:50:43,900 --> 00:50:47,380 but it is a measure of them realising that that is themselves. 561 00:50:47,770 --> 00:50:54,729 So what about children? You know, if you've got a foetus, a foetus isn't conscious. 562 00:50:54,730 --> 00:50:59,320 But so here's a picture of me as a baby. I don't think I was conscious, didn't have a sense of self then. 563 00:50:59,470 --> 00:51:02,590 But what points in my evolution, you know, as I grew older, 564 00:51:03,160 --> 00:51:08,290 did I suddenly start to pass that mirror self-recognition test and realise yeah, I am a conscious being. 565 00:51:08,440 --> 00:51:14,980 There must have been a moment when my brain did something which changed and then I had a sense of consciousness. 566 00:51:15,130 --> 00:51:19,060 It probably wasn't here, but with experiments that we've done, 567 00:51:19,150 --> 00:51:25,209 we've seen that actually it's there's a transitionary moment in the brain around 18 to 24 months. 568 00:51:25,210 --> 00:51:30,940 If you put a 16 month old in front of the mirror with a little mark, generally they don't react. 569 00:51:31,330 --> 00:51:35,860 They might perhaps do something to the mirror, but a 20 month year old will immediately do this. 570 00:51:36,070 --> 00:51:40,540 So something has happened in the brain that has changed, that has created this consciousness. 571 00:51:40,780 --> 00:51:46,840 And actually you can ask the same question of the universe, the universe that the Big Bang wasn't any consciousness then. 572 00:51:47,350 --> 00:51:50,410 Well, so what at what point did consciousness actually emerge? 573 00:51:51,130 --> 00:51:53,440 And actually, Julien James has a psychologist. 574 00:51:53,710 --> 00:51:59,830 He has an interesting theory that that moment when we suddenly started hearing a voice in our heads must have been pretty frightening. 575 00:52:00,280 --> 00:52:03,610 And that might have been the spark for something like an idea of a god. 576 00:52:03,910 --> 00:52:07,600 Maybe that's what sparked off the thought. There's something else going on inside here. 577 00:52:08,650 --> 00:52:11,410 Okay, so this idea of a negative. So let me take you to this one. 578 00:52:11,500 --> 00:52:16,550 At the time, when we all lose consciousness every day, or rather every night is when we sleep. 579 00:52:16,750 --> 00:52:24,290 So what happens in the brain every night that changes that we could see maybe what a quality of the brain that makes us conscious now. 580 00:52:24,430 --> 00:52:28,270 So here's what's an awake brain and you do something good. 581 00:52:28,270 --> 00:52:32,470 TMS It's transcranial magnetic stimulation where you switch on some neurones. 582 00:52:32,720 --> 00:52:39,160 So this is like a little computer gets though switching on some of these neurones cause a cascade across the brain and a feedback. 583 00:52:39,340 --> 00:52:46,450 The integrated network is actually talking to lots of other bits of the brain feeding back to the original source of the stimulation. 584 00:52:46,720 --> 00:52:54,970 This is a sleeping brain stimulated in exactly the same area with the same TMS in deep stage for sleep where you have no conscious experience. 585 00:52:55,210 --> 00:52:59,170 Everything is very localised. There's no communication going on across the brain. 586 00:52:59,860 --> 00:53:03,460 It's as if the tide has come up and all of these the network has gone down. 587 00:53:04,090 --> 00:53:09,190 So there's now a belief that that we can somehow measure the quality of a network. 588 00:53:09,730 --> 00:53:16,980 And this guy, Julio Tanzanie, who's come up with the way a network actually feeds back and forth between each other, 589 00:53:17,080 --> 00:53:25,120 the nature of those logic gates may have something to do with giving a network, a feeling of what it's like to be itself. 590 00:53:25,690 --> 00:53:32,320 And so, Jorge, Julio, Toni has come up with this extraordinary equation, a coefficient of consciousness. 591 00:53:32,680 --> 00:53:36,370 Now, you know, I've got to love this. You know, what makes me me is now an equation. 592 00:53:36,370 --> 00:53:40,239 So and the varying quality of this equation as we go through the day, 593 00:53:40,240 --> 00:53:44,880 in the night or we go into a coma, that this can measure something about your conscious. 594 00:53:44,900 --> 00:53:48,680 This experience to extends interestingly that you can create a zombie, 595 00:53:49,100 --> 00:53:54,980 you can create a zombie is something that has no conscious experience but behaves exactly as as a human would do. 596 00:53:55,520 --> 00:53:59,540 So here are two networks. They have eight neurones. They wind up in different ways. 597 00:53:59,540 --> 00:54:04,339 The input output. That put behaviour of both of these networks is exactly the same. 598 00:54:04,340 --> 00:54:08,120 So if you interacted with it, you would not have any difference between the two. 599 00:54:08,390 --> 00:54:12,920 Yet one of them has a lot of feedback in it and has a high level of consciousness with this coefficient. 600 00:54:13,190 --> 00:54:19,220 But the one on the right has no feedback and it has a zero consciousness according to this equation. 601 00:54:19,340 --> 00:54:26,120 And so this will be an example of a zombie network. Now, of course, I'm going to skip Frankenstein. 602 00:54:26,120 --> 00:54:30,469 Sorry, you actually I will tell you about Crystal. 603 00:54:30,470 --> 00:54:34,730 Crystal is one of the people who got very interested in this equation and I talked to him. 604 00:54:34,730 --> 00:54:41,930 He's my I Skype Tim so I was never quite sure whether actually my conversation with with an avatar or something whether he was really there. 605 00:54:42,170 --> 00:54:46,910 But he got very frustrated with me trying to push him on whether we could ever answer this problem of consciousness. 606 00:54:47,150 --> 00:54:51,740 And eventually I said, What sort of research project is it, Marcus? Will you throw up your hands and say, Forget about it? 607 00:54:51,860 --> 00:55:00,380 I can't understand it ever. It's hopeless. That's defeatism. And I think we have a very schizophrenic relationship with this idea of the unknown that, 608 00:55:00,740 --> 00:55:04,580 you know, in one sense, you know, the unknown is what drives us as scientists. 609 00:55:04,760 --> 00:55:10,650 You know, the known things are great, but what we spend our life trying to understand are the things that we don't know. 610 00:55:10,670 --> 00:55:17,450 So in one way, the things we don't know are our lifeblood, but the things that will remain forever unknown. 611 00:55:17,960 --> 00:55:22,940 Those are the kind of nemesis of the scientists. And so it is a belief, I think most of us kind of feel like, no. 612 00:55:22,940 --> 00:55:27,080 Do you have an arrogance that, yeah, we are a species that could know everything. 613 00:55:27,260 --> 00:55:31,430 And I think that's really what drives me when I, you know, I throw of the dice. Why do I keep on looking? 614 00:55:31,550 --> 00:55:35,510 It's my desire that I want to know how this is going to end. A one. 615 00:55:35,900 --> 00:55:36,290 Thank you.