Do you make your own luck, or does luck make you? Some scientists believe luck is strictly a matter of statistics and probabilities…but others believe unseen forces are at work, and randomness is built into every particle of the universe. We'll find luck, good and bad, in casinos, basketball courts, genetics labs and the subatomic world. How much does the genetic lottery rule your fate? Are lucky streaks and unfortunate accidents merely our own minds fooling us? It's a scientific journey that will radically revise your understanding of the laws of nature and the workings of the human brain. A basketball player who has a string of successes may be said to have hot hands.
A micromort is a small unit of death. The collapse of the wave function states that the location of an elementary particle is determined once we take measurements. As a result, when we take measurements, then the same particle can't be in two places at the same time!
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A micromort is a small unit of death. The collapse of the wave function states that the location of an elementary particle is determined once we take measurements. As a result, when we take measurements, then the same particle can't be in two places at the same time!
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season5
#episode2
#cosmology
#astronomy
#astrology
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#luck
#isluckreal
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:01Luck may be the most mysterious and capricious force in the universe.
00:08But what exactly is luck?
00:11Why do some of us win the lottery twice, while others have bad luck for no apparent reason?
00:18What's behind strange coincidences and incredible twists of fate?
00:24Does random chance decide our destiny?
00:27Or is every roll of the dice predetermined by physics?
00:32Scientists are trying to beat the odds to prove whether or not luck is real.
00:44Space. Time. Life itself.
00:51The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:57How did you get to where you are today?
01:12Maybe you struggled and worked hard.
01:15Or maybe you inherited a fortune and never worked a day in your life.
01:19Some things are beyond our control.
01:24Does the universe have a plan for us?
01:27Or is our fate the product of random chance?
01:31Do we make our own luck?
01:36Or does luck make us?
01:38When I was growing up, kids would carry a lucky rabbit's foot.
01:49For some reason we believed these severed paws granted their bearers good fortune.
01:57Did they work?
01:58Well, maybe.
01:59I lost that rabbit's foot long ago.
02:05And my belief in lucky charms.
02:08But perhaps my younger self was on to something.
02:13Go to a casino and you'll see any number of superstitious rituals performed by players hoping for good luck.
02:26Everyone has a strategy.
02:28First I do a dervomya, which is an Armenian prayer.
02:32And then I play my son's birth numbers.
02:34The chips all have to face up the same way.
02:39Rituals of good luck develop because we believe that something we do can influence chance.
02:54Sally Lincanaga, a lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, suspects believing you're lucky actually changes the way you play.
03:05She's conducting a series of experiments to test her hypothesis.
03:11So what we did is we recruited people who played golf on a regular basis.
03:16And we told half of them they were using a putter that had belonged to a famous golfer.
03:22So this is actually Ben Curtis' putter.
03:25He's a professional golfer who won the British Open in 2003.
03:29So I'm going to have you take 10 putts and we'll see how you do.
03:35The other golfers hear a different story.
03:40All right, so this is a really nice putter.
03:42I'd like you to use it to take about 10 putts and we'll see how you do.
03:47As you'd expect with any random group, some do better than others.
03:52But after dozens of trials, a pattern emerges.
03:55So once they started putting, the individuals that thought they were using Ben Curtis' putter made about a putt and a half more out of 10 putts than the group that thought they were just using a nice putter.
04:09The golf club isn't lucky.
04:13What's real is the player's belief in whether or not the club is lucky.
04:19Sally suspects this kind of superstition helps people cope with chaotic or stressful situations.
04:26There's kind of a sweet spot in terms of the amount of pressure that you need in order to perform a task most efficiently.
04:31If you have a small amount of pressure, it just means you really don't care, so you don't perform well.
04:37Too much pressure refrees up.
04:39So you want to have the perfect kind of a sweet spot amount of pressure.
04:43And when you're performing a task and people are watching you, people put a lot of pressure on themselves to play well.
04:48But that pressure is less debilitating when a player is holding a lucky putter.
04:55We think that when they're putting, they're offloading some of this pressure that they feel.
04:59This putter is going to do some of the work for them.
05:02It's not all on them.
05:04And that release and pressure kind of allows them to perform a bit better.
05:09Sally suspects a belief in luck does more than just boost confidence.
05:14It changes perception.
05:19In her lab, Sally asks the golfers to draw the size of the hole.
05:25So this is the actual size of the golf hole.
05:27All the golfers think that the hole looks smaller than it actually is.
05:32However, individuals who were using Ben Curtis's putter thought the golf hole looked larger.
05:37On average, the golfers with an ordinary club see the hole as being 11% smaller and harder to hit than the golfers with the so-called lucky putter.
05:48Is luck all in the mind?
05:58Confidence is a big part of succeeding and thinking anything that you do.
06:02And it is possible that using this club made people more confident in their playing.
06:07I wouldn't necessarily call that luck.
06:09I would call it handling our emotions and handling our anxiety and the pressure that we feel when we are performing these actions in a way that's manageable for us.
06:18But one man thinks believing you are lucky will only get you so far.
06:31A professor of law at Northwestern University and a master statistician, Jay Kohler sees everything as variations on the mean.
06:45The mean is another word for the average.
06:50A star athlete has good days and bad, but it evens out.
06:54For example, a basketball player might be a 33% three-point shooter.
06:59If he's very good, he might be a 45% three-point shooter.
07:03But any given day, the player might be shooting more like 50% or might be more like 35%.
07:10Nothing unusual is going on. The player is just bouncing around his mean.
07:17But what's happening when a player appears to have a hot hand?
07:21A spectacularly good run of play.
07:24Is something supernatural going on?
07:29The hot hand is a phenomenon that temporarily elevates his level of play following a string of successes.
07:36You might have a player who makes seven three-point shots in a row.
07:41And so an observer, and maybe the player himself, might say, he's hot.
07:47But the question is, is anything extraordinary really going on?
07:50Is he now a 70 or 80 or even 90% three-point shooter?
07:55And the answer is no.
07:57Jay ran the numbers on the NBA's best three-point shooters looking for proof of the hot hand.
08:04What we found was that the number of streaks that we observed, three, four, five, six, seven shots in a row, was pretty much what you'd expect by chance alone.
08:17Overall, and we didn't see any evidence of hotness or coldness.
08:21Championship athletes, like these two Northwestern stars, play at a much higher level than ordinary people, and they consistently perform near the peak of their abilities.
08:37Luck isn't much of a factor.
08:41On average, a 50% shooter will make about half of his shots.
08:47To Jay, this is proof that hot streaks are illusions.
08:53Other statisticians have run similar studies on other games and found the same result.
08:58If a player shoots about 50% of his free throws overall, then for him, sinking a free throw is like flipping a coin.
09:09To illustrate some of the points we'd like to make, we're going to perform a little coin tossing experiment.
09:15Reggie is flipping the coin a hundred times, and Austin is recording the outcodes.
09:22The flipping seems pretty random, but then Reggie flips seven heads in a row.
09:28What are the odds of that?
09:31Seven heads in a row sounds incredible.
09:34But remember, the seven heads in a row occurred in a larger context, the context of a hundred coin flips.
09:40The more you flip, the better the odds of a hot streak.
09:43If we only flip the coin ten times, the chance of getting seven heads in a row would be somewhere around 2%.
09:51But we flip the coin a hundred times, and the chance of getting seven heads in a row out of a hundred flips is somewhere between 31 and 32%.
10:02It sounds completely counterintuitive, but lucky streaks are not lucky.
10:08They are statistically likely.
10:10We notice patterns that seem unusual.
10:14For instance, a star player making four shots in a row.
10:18But we fail to notice, he misses the fifth shot, makes the sixth, misses the seventh, makes the eighth, and ninth.
10:26These likely streaks can be seen in every performance-based field, from sports to sales to stock trading.
10:36If last year was great, next year may stink.
10:40What appears to be a lucky streak is only a failure to take a big enough sample.
10:47And this, Jay says, is why you shouldn't feel too pleased with your successes, or terrible about your failures.
10:57So even when something is likely to occur, chance may intervene and may cause the opposite to occur.
11:06What's important, Jay thinks, is to keep trying.
11:12One factor that is under our control is how many attempts we make, how many times we try to do something, how many times we take a shot, how many times we ask the girl out.
11:25We have to be willing to risk failure in order to succeed.
11:30But sometimes, no matter what we do, the universe seems to have other plans.
11:36How do we explain the unexplainable?
11:40The astonishing coincidences and incredible bits of luck?
11:44Is some hidden force guiding our lives?
11:47Greek mythology tells of the three fates.
11:54One God spins the thread of life, another measures it, and the third cuts it short.
12:01Maybe that's as good a way as any to explain the twists of fate and random coincidence that rule our lives.
12:09We have to seek meaning, or else live by the doctrine, hey, stuff happens.
12:20On a summer day in 2001, 10-year-old Laura Buxton wrote her name and address on a balloon and let it go in her front garden.
12:32The balloon blew 140 miles across England before it landed.
12:36A farmer found it and was surprised to read on it the name of his next-door neighbor, another girl named Laura Buxton.
12:47A lucky coincidence, or was it meant to be?
12:54Professor Tom Griffiths is the director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at UC Berkeley.
13:01To Tom, the Laura Buxton story illustrates the natural strengths and weaknesses of human reason.
13:09If you ask somebody how likely is it that something happens, that's something that they're not very good at answering.
13:15People are better at solving problems where you've got some data and you have to make a leap that goes beyond those data.
13:21You have to figure it out based on the information that you've got.
13:22Humans are good at hearing a few details about an event and building a story around them.
13:30We are less adept at guessing probabilities, the odds of how likely it is an event will occur.
13:38For example, what are the odds of two people having the same birthday?
13:43There are 365 possible birthdays. Half of 365 is about 183.
13:53So you might think you need 183 people in a room before you have a 50-50 chance that two will have the same birthday.
14:01In fact, you need just 23. It's a matter of pairs. With five people, you get 10 possible pairs. With 10, you get 45 pairs. With 15, you get 105 pairs.
14:20By the time you get 23 people in a room, there are 253 different ways of pairing two people together, giving you better than even odds, two of them will share the same birthday.
14:36Still confused? You're not alone.
14:40There's some psychological research on the birthday problem that suggests that for these kinds of problems, people don't recognize the combinatorial structure.
14:46This idea that the number of pairs increases in a way that's nonlinear.
14:51So people seem to intuitively expect that that relationship increases linearly, that the number of pairs goes as something like the number of people.
14:59And so as a consequence, we're surprised because there are many more opportunities for something to happen than we realize.
15:04Humans see meaningful connections everywhere, but we are the ones who give them meaning.
15:11Given the fact that there are seven billion people on Earth, it is inevitable many people will experience weird and uncanny coincidences every day.
15:23With a large enough sample size, just about any possible coincidence will happen.
15:29One definition of a coincidence is a thing that happens with a one in a million probability.
15:34So if you say an event can happen every second, we're awake for about eight hours a day, and it suggests that you probably get about one coincidence every month.
15:42By that definition, the fact that Laura Buxton's balloon found its way across Britain to a second Laura Buxton is a coincidence.
15:54But it's not magic.
16:01Our brains look for patterns and coincidences to form theories about how the world works.
16:09Sometimes we draw the wrong conclusions.
16:12But other times, seeing patterns in coincidences opens up whole new ways of thinking.
16:18That sensitivity to patterns not only sometimes leads us astray when we're trying to think about the consequences of, you know, what could explain how a child could release a balloon in one place and a child with the same name could catch it in another.
16:34But the kinds of coincidences that we get excited about are often things that are not just unlikely, but also suggest that there may be some other kind of force of synchronicity at work that's producing those events in the world.
16:44The world is filled with the unknown and the uncertain.
16:49Our brains are built to try to make sense of it.
16:53Some things make sense, some don't.
16:57But of all the mysteries we face, one looms above them all.
17:03When will our luck run out?
17:06This man says we can harness our growing understanding of luck and probability and use it to beat back the specter of death.
17:14If we choose to believe in luck, then we must also accept its dark side.
17:24Any one of us could be seconds away from death.
17:28Most want to postpone that moment as long as possible.
17:31We may try to eat better, exercise and avoid risk.
17:37But does it make a difference?
17:39Or are we all at the mercy of bad luck?
17:48David Spiegelhalter is a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
17:53He is a guru of statistics, or you might say, a prince of probability.
18:01Probability is a really tricky subject.
18:03People find it unintuitive and difficult, and that's because I think it is unintuitive and difficult.
18:08But it's really worth struggling to try to work out the approximate, the rough odds for things that might happen in the future.
18:15David feels modern society overreacts to bad luck.
18:21Unusual events will get a great deal of media coverage, which can make people believe riding a bicycle will kill you.
18:29I think the problem is that when we read the newspapers or turn on the television, we hear about these terrible things to happen to people.
18:36But of course we don't hear about the times it didn't happen, all the people it didn't happen to, because that would make a very boring story.
18:42You know, a million kids went to school today and nobody got hurt.
18:46So, you know, you can't put that on the front page of the newspaper.
18:50Unusual deaths make the news because our fates seem so unpredictable.
18:56However, by looking at average life spans, David can make a pretty good guess about when you're going to die.
19:04When I was born in the early 50s, I think I could have expected to live, you know, maybe into my 70s.
19:10But now, you know, because of the increases in safety, improvements in healthcare, you know, I can expect to live on average until I'm about 82.
19:19As you get older, your life expectancy increases by about three months every year.
19:23It's quite incredible.
19:25Every year, life expectancy goes up on average by three months, and it's been happening like that for decades.
19:30Of course, how I live my life will affect whether I'm going to get beyond the 82 or not make the 82.
19:41If I smoke, there's, you know, there's a very good chance I won't make it that long.
19:45Two cigarettes will cost you half an hour of life.
19:50The average smoker goes through 20 a day.
19:54So they lose five hours every day, or 1,825 hours a year.
20:02Of course, you can do things to extend your life.
20:08Each regular run of half an hour will help you gain half an hour of life.
20:15But you will have spent those half hours running.
20:19Lifestyle will affect how long we live.
20:22But it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of statistics are taken out of context.
20:30Eating a bacon sandwich every day of your life is supposed to increase your risk of bowel cancer by 20%.
20:36But around five in 100 people will get bowel cancer anyway in their lifetime.
20:41So that means that if all those 100 people ate a bacon sandwich every day, that five would go up to six.
20:47So that's only one in 100 extra. That doesn't seem quite so bad.
20:50So I think I'm going to have an occasional bacon sandwich.
20:54Living right improves your odds of survival.
20:59But there is no guarantee you won't die tomorrow.
21:07With every passing year, David's risk of dying grows.
21:12So how should he live his life, knowing random chance could end it at any moment?
21:17Should he live for today or seal himself off from every possible danger?
21:26David grapples with this problem using a measurement called the micromort.
21:31Literally meaning a small unit of death.
21:34One micromort equals a one in a million chance of dying.
21:37You know, over my lifetime, I've got about a micromort risk of an asteroid killing me.
21:44But it's about my daily quantity of risk, just from all causes.
21:49You know, from falling off a ladder or getting run over or something like that.
21:52David calculates the chance of dying if you ride a horse is half a micromort.
22:01Hang gliding is eight micromorts.
22:04Climbing a mountain above 23,000 feet is 43,000 micromorts.
22:10So, at what point is it worth the risk?
22:16It may depend on how old you are.
22:20The average 18-year-old has a 500 micromort chance of dying in the next 12 months.
22:26But David's odds of dying are 14 times higher.
22:30Therefore, he might as well take more risks.
22:36Whether you take wild chances or carefully calculate your every move,
22:41you are always at the mercy of bad luck.
22:47Just driving puts you at a 40-micromort risk every year.
22:52We can't predict what's going to happen.
22:54And so, in a sense, we're open to chance, things that we just don't know.
22:58We can't escape it.
23:00But we can try to live with it.
23:01In fact, I think we quite enjoy it.
23:03We don't want to know exactly what's going to happen in the future.
23:05That would be pretty miserable.
23:10Luck.
23:12It plays a crucial role in the course of our lives.
23:16But it could run deeper than we think.
23:19We may literally be made from it.
23:23Perhaps, luck is built into our DNA.
23:28Every living thing is made of cells that follow genetic programs.
23:38Those programs tell cells how to make things like trees, arms, legs.
23:44This is the miracle of life.
23:47From tiny bits of DNA emerges the elegance, order, and beauty of the natural world.
23:53But inside of all living things, there is an element of chaos.
23:59A twist of luck that makes life itself possible.
24:03Michael Elowitz is a professor of biology, bioengineering, and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology.
24:17So our bodies are composed of trillions of individual living cells.
24:20Normally we think of those cells as little machines that sense what's around them and respond at the right way at the right time.
24:30But what if cells don't operate like that?
24:33What if they're not like mechanical devices that always operate in a predictable way?
24:37What if what cells are really doing is effectively rolling the dice to figure out how they're going to respond to any particular situation?
24:42Cells contain genes, and genes regulate the production of proteins.
24:52Proteins are what make cells function and behave in different ways.
24:57Only recently has anyone been able to see how this process works.
25:01For that, we can thank a jellyfish.
25:06Jellyfish contain fluorescent protein genes.
25:10Genes that light up.
25:12Michael and his team have been taking these fluorescent genes out of jellyfish and putting them into other cells in the lab.
25:20Now he can watch the genes turn on and off.
25:23What this microscope does is it goes from place to place and it takes pictures of these cells.
25:29It takes a picture of the blue protein, the red protein, the green protein at each place.
25:33And what we do is we keep taking these images over and over again as each cell grows and divides forming little microcolonies.
25:40We take all these images at the end and we stitch them together into time-lapse movies.
25:44And in those movies we can follow when each of these genes is being turned on and off and on and off again and again and again.
25:49The cells Michael creates are clones.
25:56They should all behave in exactly the same way at the same time.
26:02So these cells should all change color in unison.
26:08But they don't.
26:10Michael and his team are conducting hundreds of experiments to find out why.
26:14They are studying the inner workings of many different types of cells.
26:19We built a strain of E. coli that had two colors in it.
26:24Both of these colored proteins are expressed from very similar genes.
26:28The cell can't really tell the difference.
26:30If it's going to turn one on, it ought to turn the other one on as well.
26:33Here's a picture where you can see how much of one of those two proteins was expressed.
26:37And here's a picture showing you how much of the other protein was expressed.
26:41And what was really striking is that if you flip back and forth between these pictures,
26:46you can see that some cells are making a lot more of one protein than the other.
26:51When the red and green channels are combined, you get this.
26:56Randomness.
26:57Even though the green and red genes are controlled the exact same way,
27:02they express themselves at different times, randomly.
27:09Michael discovered the inner workings of cells are not orderly, precise, and machine-like.
27:16In fact, it's a matter of luck.
27:18These proteins don't trickle out at a constant rate when the cell turns on a gene.
27:23They come out in big bursts.
27:25You get tons of proteins being produced at once and then nothing.
27:29Silence for a long time.
27:31These bursts are random.
27:32They come out at unpredictable times.
27:34Even the cell itself can't control exactly when proteins are being produced.
27:39This messiness is seen in cells from all sorts of creatures.
27:42It seems to be a fundamental part of how DNA functions.
27:48The color of your eyes or whether you get a certain deadly disease
27:52may come down to heredity plus randomness.
28:00Michael believes this cellular unpredictability exists for the most basic of reasons.
28:07Survival.
28:09For cells, these are life or death problems.
28:10If they choose to express the wrong set of genes, they're going to die.
28:15What's important for them is to survive at least as a population.
28:18As a population, they can guarantee that they're going to survive
28:20by having some cells do one thing and some cells do something else,
28:23and hoping that at least part of the population does the right thing at the right time.
28:28So any strategy in which all the cells do the same thing is very, very risky.
28:32It's a little bit like going to the horse races and saying you're going to put all your money on one horse.
28:36It may pay off very well, but it also could have a very big downside and wipe you out.
28:40So it can be much more advantageous to spread the risk across many different strategies.
28:45It seems life is not just following the logical instructions of its genetic software.
28:53Randomness is built into nature's program.
28:55Luck and chance are not just real. Life as we know it really wouldn't function without them.
29:01Luck is part of our biology, but random chance may run even deeper than that.
29:08Genetic molecules are made up of atoms, and subatomic particles undergo countless interactions every nanosecond.
29:17The true face of luck may be hidden deep down in the mysterious quantum world.
29:26The subatomic world is a world of uncertainty.
29:31Quantum objects like electrons can be in many places at once until we measure them.
29:40Our entire universe is constructed from quantum particles.
29:44So does reality depend on something as fickle as when we happen to look at it?
29:55What if you knew how every flip of a coin was going to turn out?
30:00It would remove the element of luck.
30:03You would always be certain of every outcome.
30:06But according to Andreas Albrecht, the chairman of the physics department at UC Davis, nature will not permit that.
30:16Andreas is one of the founders of inflation theory, which explains the origin of the universe.
30:24But though he thinks big, he believes all problems can be reduced to the tiny size of a quantum particle.
30:31From a physicist's point of view, luck is very real.
30:36It's real because underlying everything around us is quantum mechanics.
30:41Randomness is part of how every atom, how every molecule operates.
30:46You know, I think, oh, if I just know the position exactly, if I just know enough, then nothing is random and everything can be determined.
30:55But quantum theory says no.
30:57For example, that coin flip.
31:01Imagine you knew the position of every molecule in the air and in your body.
31:06Every physical detail that might affect the outcome of the toss.
31:11A coin flip, there's a lot of different things coordinating your motion of your hand, motion of your thumb, your reflexes and your neurons.
31:18You zoom into those neurons and you find your reflexes in the neurons depend on polypeptides that are bumping around within the water in your neuron.
31:29Now they're bumping around with all this water. Some bump in, some bump out.
31:34And the origin of that randomness is quantum physics.
31:36In a back-of-the-envelope calculation that estimates coin size, speed and neurotransmitter uncertainty, Andreas can show this quantum sequence of events can give the same probability of throwing a head or a tail as the conventional calculation.
31:57One half. You can never be certain which way it will fall.
32:04Down there with the molecules is quantum uncertainty that you'll never get rid of, no matter how much you know.
32:10And that's leading to the flip of the coin and that's leading to your luck.
32:13Quantum uncertainty is built into everything, including you, me and all the fish in the sea.
32:23But for physicists, this is a big problem, a universe-sized problem.
32:29Quantum uncertainty just doesn't agree with our understanding of the large-scale universe.
32:34Inflation theory, the theory Andreas helped invent, runs face-first into a quantum wall.
32:43Cosmic inflation theory is the idea that, at early times, the universe underwent extraordinarily rapid expansion.
32:52On the other hand, by making the most simple assumptions about how inflation works, you wind up predicting not just one universe that we see, but infinitely many others.
33:07Inflation tells us our universe is one of many, spread across a vast cosmic sea.
33:14These self-contained universes sit side by side, unseen to each other.
33:19For this goldfish, the fishbowl is its universe. It's everything it knows.
33:26We think we know the entire universe. We see distant stars and galaxies.
33:31But modern theories of the cosmos suggest that everything we see could just be our goldfish bowl.
33:38And there's many other pocket universes, maybe infinitely more, out there in the cosmos.
33:43But because there are a finite number of ways particles can be arranged in space and time, there may be other pocket universes far, far away that look like ours, but are slightly different.
33:58The problem, Andreas says, is that if there are infinite universes, the laws of probability don't add up.
34:10Quantum measurements estimate the probabilities of particles having certain properties.
34:16If there are infinite universes, every possible outcome of a measurement is definitely going to happen somewhere.
34:24This leads to a mathematical meltdown.
34:29Once you have a theory with pocket universes, you no longer are able to use quantum probabilities the way we do in our normal theories.
34:37So, which theory, pocket universes or quantum mechanics, is more likely to be correct?
34:47Andreas says quantum theory is probably the deeper truth.
34:51We can't see other universes, but we can see luck.
34:56So the quantum probabilities in the microscopic nature is the source of all our luck and all our uncertainty and all our randomness in the world.
35:05We really do need to prepare ourselves for anything.
35:09But there is another possibility.
35:12A possibility that will change the way you look at the world.
35:17According to this man, there are countless other versions of you with many different fates.
35:23Have you ever wondered how your life would have turned out if things had happened just a little differently?
35:35One or two small twists of fate could have resulted in your following a very different path.
35:41What if you actually followed all of those paths in parallel worlds?
35:48There may be many other versions of you out there living very different lives.
35:55Max Tegmark is a cosmology professor at MIT.
36:05He strongly believes luck does not determine the course of our lives.
36:10The proof, he says, lies in the strange ability of quantum objects to exist in many places at once.
36:18We know that elementary particles can be in two places at once, but I'm made out of elementary particles.
36:26So I should also be able to be in two places at once.
36:29Quantum objects occupy a range of possibilities.
36:33They look like waves until we measure them.
36:37Then they turn into particles.
36:38This means they are in many places simultaneously until they suddenly become fixed points in space.
36:47This strange behavior is called the collapse of the wave function.
36:53Max believes the wave function never really collapses.
36:58An electron may appear to be over here in our measurement, but every other outcome also occurs.
37:04In a series of parallel universes that branch off from ours.
37:11There are many processes, like when you make a snap decision, which might depend on just what one little particle ultimately did in your brain.
37:21So if that little particle was in two places at once, my life sort of branches out into multiple storylines.
37:29If the quantum wave never collapses, it means you have countless clones.
37:36They exist on top of each other in parallel universes.
37:41These are not the side-by-side universes Andreas Albrecht imagines.
37:47They are all the possible alternate versions of our own universe.
37:51So, for example, if you take any hundred Max's and any hundred parallel universes, the laws of probability tell us that some will live a hundred years and some are already dead.
38:09Max's fate all depends on which quantum reality he happens to live in.
38:14But here's the catch.
38:17He will never know what's happening to all those other Max's.
38:21Suppose you sedate me and make a perfect clone of me and leave one copy here on this bed and another copy in an identical room upstairs.
38:34You tell me all about this in advance and you ask me, where, Max, are you going to wake up?
38:40Well, if you were me, what would you say?
38:43There are going to be two Max Tegmarks waking up.
38:46They're both going to look the same. They're both going to feel the same.
38:49They're both going to have the same memories up until the sedation.
38:53Each of the me's is going to feel, huh, I have woken up in only one room whose number is going to seem like a random number to me when I go out and look at it.
39:02And there's no way for me to predict what that room number is going to say ahead of time.
39:09So I can never see those other Max clones.
39:14All I notice is this apparent randomness.
39:17Max believes our ignorance of the other realities creates the illusion we call luck.
39:24Luck and randomness aren't real.
39:27Some things feel random, but that's just how it subjectively feels whenever you get cloned.
39:33And you get cloned all the time.
39:37There are actually two copies of me, each experiencing one of the two outcomes.
39:42So if you win at the roulette wheel, there's a clone of you who lost.
39:47There is no luck. Just cloning.
39:49This idea may sound far-fetched and impossible to confirm.
39:57But Max thinks his odds are not zero.
40:01He has a one in a quintillion chance of proving the theory true.
40:05All he has to do is never die.
40:10Yeah!
40:12Let's say Max endures a series of catastrophes.
40:15Events that have a 50% chance of killing him one after the other.
40:19In one parallel universe, he dies.
40:23In another, he lives.
40:24If the wave function never collapses, then there will be two versions of me.
40:30One where I'm alive and another one where I'm flattened.
40:33But there will only be one Max having a conscious experience.
40:37As the catastrophes continue, the odds of a version of Max surviving drop from 25% to 12.5% to 6.25% and so on.
40:50In more and more parallel worlds, Max is dead.
40:55But in one, he survives.
40:58It's gonna feel subjectively to me, like I just keep surviving and surviving and surviving.
41:04Which would feel really, really weird.
41:07If a version of Max somehow survives 60 deadly events, there is only a one in quintillion chance the theory is wrong.
41:16Unfortunately, only one version of Max will know the truth.
41:22The other quintillion minus one will be dead.
41:29So, the reality or unreality of multiple Max tag marks may remain in doubt.
41:36This idea that reality is bigger than we thought and that whenever you lose a little wheel, there was another version of you that won, is a very weird sounding idea.
41:47But hey, who were we humans to tell the universe how to behave?
41:51You know, my job as a physicist isn't to try to impose my prejudices on reality, but to look carefully at reality and try to figure out how it actually behaves.
42:00And it seems to be what you might call weird.
42:09Whether there is just one universe or countless parallel ones, there's no way of knowing which path you will take through all your possible destinies.
42:19Your consciousness, your DNA, and the very atoms you are built from, are all on a wild and unpredictable ride.
42:30And every decision is a gamble.
42:34And every decision is a gamble.
42:37.
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