Morgan Freeman discusses if humans can become omnipotent as "God" is defined in Christianity, for example.
If we stipulate a god as being omniscient, then some people such as Tom Rokicki stated that the best way to solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle is "God's algorithm." Rokicki found that the minimum number of turns to solve a Rubik's Cube is 20.
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If we stipulate a god as being omniscient, then some people such as Tom Rokicki stated that the best way to solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle is "God's algorithm." Rokicki found that the minimum number of turns to solve a Rubik's Cube is 20.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season5
#episode8
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#God
#willwebecomeGod
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Since the dawn of our species, humanity has never stopped moving forward.
00:10First, we mastered fire.
00:14Today, we play with the fabric of space and time.
00:19Now, technology is about to advance beyond our wildest dreams.
00:26We may soon know the future.
00:30And learn to move matter at the speed of light.
00:36Could we mortals ever gain power over the entire universe?
00:42Will we become God?
00:50Space.
00:52Time.
00:53Life itself.
00:54The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:00The Bible says that God is the master of all things in heaven and on earth.
01:10That God created us and guides the world we live in.
01:11But a total mastery of the universe may not be just a divine power.
01:20It could be our destiny.
01:21It could be our destiny.
01:22Will we someday not only play God, but be God?
01:30And what will we do with our omnipotence?
01:31I played cowboys when I was a kid.
01:40The sneak attack was my trademark move.
01:41In the world I created, bullets couldn't harm me.
01:42I was invincible.
01:43I could do anything I wanted.
01:44I could do anything I wanted.
01:45I was invincible.
01:46I could do anything I wanted.
01:48Could these God-like powers one day be a reality?
01:49Could these God-like powers one day be a reality?
01:50I could do anything I wanted.
01:51Could these God-like powers one day be a reality?
01:52I could do anything I wanted.
01:53I could do anything I wanted.
02:00I could do anything I wanted.
02:06In the world I created, bullets couldn't harm me.
02:08I was invincible.
02:11I could do anything I wanted.
02:14Could these God-like powers one day be a reality in the real world?
02:19real world?
02:27UC Berkeley bioengineer Adam Arkin believes we are very close to one divine
02:32ability,
02:34creating new forms of life.
02:37Want evidence?
02:39He's sitting right on top of it.
02:42Well these very organic looking pieces of furniture are actually formed out of a
02:46fast-blowing fungus.
02:48The artist's name is Philip Ross.
02:50He calls this type of work mycotexture because the study of fungi is mycology and so they're
02:58like architecture of fungus.
03:01The artist crafted these tools by feeding wood chips to mushrooms.
03:07As the mushrooms feast, they grow fibers that interlock, forming a substance that is stronger
03:14than concrete.
03:16We are learning how to shape life to fit our needs.
03:20But Adam wants to take this idea a step further, to have living objects shape themselves according
03:26to our design.
03:28Just as the Bible says, God shaped Eve from Adam's rib.
03:33What we would like to do as engineers is to program the cells to self-organize into shapes
03:40like this or into more complicated articulated shapes than even this is.
03:44Adam's dream is to create living organisms that can sense their surroundings and change
03:50their shape on demand.
03:52Instead of a mushroom chair always being a chair, it would know when Adam got tired and then organically
04:02morph itself into a mushroom bed.
04:06To do this, he needs to learn how to control the movement of molecules inside living cells.
04:17Imagine the dancer is a molecule that's going inside her cell.
04:27Those are what make the cell act.
04:29They bounce into each other, they bind, they pull, they stretch, and in doing so make the
04:34cell do all these amazing acrobatics, all of which we can exploit for our own needs.
04:42Every movement a cell makes stems from instructions in its DNA code.
04:47Adam has been subtly altering this code to change how the molecules in a cell are programmed to perform.
04:56As cytoengineers, what we're able to do these days is to take DNA, engineer it, and put it back
05:02inside cells so it can direct the dance you're seeing here.
05:05And so we can, on a computer, program what we expect to see happen, make that into DNA,
05:11put it into the cells, and then watch to see if they follow our instructions.
05:16If Adam can control the behavior of one cell, imagine what he can do with many.
05:25He could program cells to grow into whatever he wants.
05:29He could create an apple, a tree, or maybe something even God never considered, like a living bicycle.
05:40In the case of the bicycle, each part has to work together.
05:43There's gears and wheels and steering and the like.
05:46And so each cell has to be aware of its surrounds and work with other cells, each one different, each one with its own job.
05:53And part of our instruction set is to make that happen.
05:56Adam's work could be the foundation for creating a modern Garden of Eden, where we, not God, get to decide what kind of life grows inside of it.
06:08I think humans want to feel the control of their world.
06:14We are animals that build things and control things and change things.
06:18And I think it's part and process with who we are.
06:22The Bible says, God's ultimate creations were man and woman, beings with their own free will.
06:32We have already crafted new life forms, but could our creations ever have conscious souls?
06:39Most scientists consider conscious experience to be an elusive property that may never be fully understood, much less artificially created.
06:50But neuroscientist Melanie Boley, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, doesn't think it's so mysterious.
06:59In fact, she thinks it can be boiled down to a single number.
07:04What we try to do in our work is to quantify consciousness.
07:10By the quantity we say how much understanding there is, how much consciousness there is in a system.
07:21One way to understand consciousness is to observe what happens when it fails.
07:26Different brain injuries have dramatically different consequences.
07:30We learn from neurology that there are some brain lesions that make her unconscious and some that don't.
07:39When damage occurs in the cerebral cortex, body organs like the heart and lungs may continue to function.
07:46However, a patient won't show any awareness of his or her environment.
07:51But a person with injuries only to the cerebellum could still be perfectly awake and alert.
07:58Even though the cerebellum has many more neurons than the cortex, it doesn't play a vital role in consciousness.
08:07So when you look at what makes the difference between the cortex and the cerebellum,
08:13you will see that the difference is not in the number of neurons.
08:17What is making the difference is the way the different brain areas talk to each other.
08:23Imagine that each neuron throughout the brain is a light bulb.
08:33What would happen if every single one had its own switch?
08:38So if I turn this light on, it won't make any difference to the rest of the system.
08:45Melanie believes that consciousness arises in the cortex because the neurons it stems from are not isolated bulbs.
08:55They form an interconnected network that communicates.
09:00If we had a set of lamps that are connected to each other, then actually turning the lamp on or off would make a lot of difference to the rest of the system.
09:10And then we would say that the information is shared or integrated.
09:14Now the lights are talking.
09:17When one turns on, it signals another to turn off.
09:20When one turns off, it signals another to turn on and so on.
09:24Together they create a dynamic symphony of thoughts and emotions leading to the feeling of being alive.
09:31So this interconnectedness is thought to be important for consciousness to arise in the brain.
09:40This idea led Melanie to develop a formula that will allow us to measure consciousness.
09:47It calculates the degree of interconnectedness of neurons in any system.
09:53The answer is a number represented by the Greek letter phi.
10:01The more conscious something is, the greater its value of phi.
10:06The human brain with trillions of neural connections has a large value of phi.
10:12An earthworm's phi is exponentially smaller, but it's still not zero.
10:19So one of the implications of the theory is that consciousness is not necessarily only in humans.
10:25We could use phi as a way to measure the level of consciousness in a lot of different cases, being living beings or computers.
10:35If Melanie and her colleagues have found a way to measure consciousness, how long could it be before we design and build systems that are self-aware?
10:45Just as God populated earth with sentient beings.
10:50In the Bible, God solved the consciousness equation in one day.
10:56This puzzle master thinks he can solve any equation and any problem.
11:02If he's right, divine wisdom could be right at our fingertips.
11:08If you're a salesman, or maybe an actor, and you have to travel to 15 cities around the world, what's the shortest route you could take to visit each one only once?
11:27Well, there are an awful lot of possibilities.
11:3287 billion, in fact.
11:35Of course, God would know the answer instantly.
11:39Mathematicians have wrestled with this type of logistical problem for centuries.
11:44If we could discover the answer, we would know the perfect way to do almost anything.
11:57Computer scientist Tom Rokiki has been on a lifelong quest for divine wisdom, at least when it comes to puzzles.
12:06Well, I got a cube when I was in high school, and I just could not solve it.
12:11It was the first puzzle that I just could not solve.
12:14And I eventually realized I had to, like, keep notes.
12:17I had to write, oh, this move does this, and this move does this, and I built up a notebook that helped me figure out how to solve it.
12:24Merely solving the Rubik's Cube is not enough for Tom.
12:27He wants to conquer it entirely.
12:30He sought the underlying principle that would allow him to crack the cube in the fewest possible moves from any starting position.
12:40Mathematicians call this step-by-step code God's algorithm.
12:46So God's algorithm is the ability to solve a random position as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible.
12:54If you just had infinite knowledge, you could always know what the next move was to take you closer to a solution.
13:01In his journey to crack this little puzzle, he may have stumbled across the secret to cracking really big ones,
13:09problems that have dogged humanity for centuries.
13:13Solving the Rubik's Cube won't by itself make the world a better place.
13:20But the method Tom uses to find the quickest solution from any of the 43 quintillion starting positions might work for much larger puzzles.
13:30Tom quickly realized that even an army of highly skilled Rubik's Cube solvers
13:37wouldn't be enough for him to find answers to every possible scrambled configuration.
13:42The fastest cube solvers can solve the cube in about 10 seconds.
13:47Now, if you took all 7 billion people in the world and trained them all to solve the cube that fast,
13:5324 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it would take them more than a thousand years to explore this many different positions.
14:04And even the fastest hands and minds sometimes take a wrong turn on their way to reaching the final arrangement.
14:13Tom needed an unprecedented amount of power.
14:16He needed a super brain.
14:19I've always been fascinated with the ability of computers to expand what you can figure out.
14:27With computers you can actually set up experiments and play with math.
14:30So, you know, if I can sit there and by hand figure out that if I make this move and then this move and then this move,
14:37that it changes this cube in a particular way, the sequences get too long, I can't think, I can't remember all that stuff.
14:43And the computer is very good at enabling me to answer questions like that.
14:49Even the most powerful computer in the world is not powerful enough to calculate God's algorithm.
14:57So Tom decided to break up the cube into small chunks.
15:02But we were able to figure out a way to use a mathematical concept called group theory and cosets
15:08to actually partition the problem into 2 billion other problems that were smaller
15:15and then solve each of those problems on separate computers.
15:18So that let me take advantage of parallel processing and solve the entire problem with a lot of computers.
15:27Each of these cubos is like a separate computer.
15:30Each is trying to figure out the series of moves needed to get from a random scrambled position
15:36to another less scrambled position.
15:40After about 1 billion seconds of computing time, Tom finally discovered God's algorithm.
15:47The minimum number of moves to solve the Rubik's Cube is 20.
15:52Ultimately, I was able to prove that every single position of the Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less,
15:59no matter how much you scramble it, there's always a 20-move sequence that takes you back to solved.
16:05That's what God would do. God would always be able to solve this cube in the minimum number of moves.
16:09Tom has cracked God's code for the Rubik's Cube.
16:14In the process, he's shown that if a puzzle has a final solution, there's a right answer for each step of the way.
16:24So could we solve any problem that has interconnected parts?
16:28Imagine being able to eradicate world hunger by optimizing food distribution to billions of people,
16:35or instantly curing diseases in the body just by knowing the right sequence of procedures to target pathogens.
16:43If a solution exists, Tom believes he can find it.
16:49Done. The ability to actually solve this problem really tells us that computer power plus a couple of good ideas
16:56can take us much further than we would have thought.
16:59So I think there's a lot of optimism to solve other more difficult problems like car accidents and poverty or economic issues.
17:08There's a lot of opportunity for that, I believe.
17:12God's algorithm only works for problems that have a definite solution.
17:17But real life isn't as simple as a brain teaser.
17:20We can't be sure which puzzles are actually solvable.
17:25So how do we know what to tackle?
17:28One scientist is using numbers to look into the future to give us mortals a helping hand.
17:38Imagine if you could take a look at someone and instantly know everything.
17:44Where they were born, where they live, and what will happen to them in the future.
17:50If you were God, you could.
17:53And in this age of digital data collection, humans are getting closer to achieving this power.
18:00Will we become omniscient?
18:03Richard Janikowski is not a god.
18:09He's a former statistics professor at the University of Memphis.
18:14But sometimes, he seems to be all-knowing.
18:18Hi, Allison. How are you doing today?
18:22Good.
18:23Our analysis shows you're going to want to spend about $7.10.
18:27So one of the first things you're going to want is a salad.
18:31And Allison, you've always been a big fan of beets.
18:34So have some beets for lunch.
18:36How do you know this?
18:37And now, since payday was yesterday, you can treat yourself to some pumpkin pie.
18:42My gosh.
18:43This is amazing.
18:44And our prediction is that either you or one of your children will spill something.
18:49So here's some extra napkins.
18:51I can't believe it.
18:52You know everything.
18:53Richard's uncanny predictions don't come from divine insight.
19:02They come from collecting data.
19:04Lots and lots of data.
19:06And then finding patterns hidden in the numbers.
19:10Can I have some water motion, please, sir?
19:12If you were attempting to predict what customers would order in a restaurant like the Piccadilly,
19:18if you began observing customer patterns, how many people, what hours of the day, what days of the week,
19:27then you can begin looking at what they order in terms of coffee or green beans or chicken fried steak.
19:36If you also collect then data on their individual demographics, you can begin connecting that data.
19:45Richard's data patterns can read the tea leaves of any restaurant patron.
19:51But he has an even greater power.
19:54He can use data to see evil in the hearts of men.
19:59In 2005, Richard joined a groundbreaking crime prediction center in Memphis.
20:07It's called Blue Crush.
20:10Blue Crush takes in video surveillance from cameras distributed throughout the city
20:15and centralizes data gathered by numerous agencies.
20:20At the heart of the operation lies a program designed by Richard to comb through all the data.
20:27The idea is to stop crime before it happens.
20:32What we integrated was both arrested data and incident data.
20:37And then we used the theory that has evolved from research on offenders
20:43to look for certain types of patterns of behavior.
20:46Because the past really is the best predictor of the future.
20:50The data show that some types of crime concentrate in certain areas and at certain times.
20:59Richard learned that home burglaries tend to take place during business hours
21:04when most people are away from home.
21:06Businesses, on the other hand, usually suffer break-ins after hours.
21:11It's guiding principle really is that if you effectively deploy police resources in the right place,
21:20on the right day, at the right time, you're going to be able to reduce crime.
21:26Out on the street, patrol officers in Memphis now work with central command to anticipate and stop crime before it starts.
21:34You actually can figure out where there's going to be concentration of robbers.
21:39Actually, the research shows that burglars tend to operate in a doughnut around their house.
21:46They don't want to be too close to the house because then people know them.
21:51But they don't want to be too far away from the house either because they don't know the territory.
21:56The data channeling through BlueQuest's predictive computers has made Memphis a safer place.
22:04From 2006 to 2010, violent crimes fell by about 25 percent
22:11and burglaries declined five times faster than the national average.
22:16Today, rigid methodology can predict hot spots of criminal activity throughout an entire city.
22:23But what about predicting the behavior of a single individual?
22:28The explosion of social media, market trackers and surveillance cameras are converting our lives into data.
22:38With enough number crunching, could the criminal justice system achieve an all-knowing presence?
22:45Could that ability tempt governments or corporations down a dark path toward a world where Big Brother watches our every move?
22:57Technology could soon grant us the ability to know what our neighbors will do tomorrow.
23:06But we have to do more than that to be God-like.
23:10We need to be able to control the world with the power of thought.
23:20In the Bible, God said,
23:26Let there be light.
23:29And there was light.
23:31Now what if you could use your mind to make things do whatever you wanted?
23:37Could we control the universe with our thoughts?
23:43We might soon achieve the power of mind over matter, thanks to the work of Brazilian neurobiologist Miguel Nicolales at Duke University.
23:54For the past two decades, he has been discovering ways for the brain to control its surroundings using only its thoughts.
24:03Miguel Miguel believes the brain's potential can be understood by looking at his country's most beloved sport, soccer.
24:13Well, you know, in a field like that, when the players start, you know, passing the ball, when we score a goal in a soccer game,
24:20the equivalent is any behavior that the brain produces.
24:23It results from this interplay of many players, the neurons, interacting with one another.
24:30Figuring out how neurons produce a behavior is like understanding how a team of soccer players scores a goal.
24:41One way is to track every single movement from each of the players separately.
24:47But there are many thousands of separate movements that lead to a goal.
24:52Miguel has a simpler idea.
24:56If he has a seat in the nosebleeds, where he can barely see the players and can't even see the ball,
25:04he still knows when a goal has been scored because he can see when all the players end up near the goal,
25:11and half of them start celebrating.
25:17When neurons achieve a behavior, they also create a noise that Miguel can actually hear and record.
25:26He calls them brainstorms.
25:30Well, this is the true sound of a brainstorm, a real brainstorm.
25:34So all the electrical signals of a few neurons have been combined to produce this popcorn-like sound
25:40that basically reflect when the neurons start firing.
25:46By analyzing a brainstorm, Miguel can see as well as hear neurons in the act of producing a behavior.
25:55Miguel wondered if he could replicate one of these brainstorm patterns digitally,
26:01and, in this way, harness thoughts to controlled devices.
26:08Miguel set up a trial with Risa's monkeys.
26:13He first recorded the brainstorms of a monkey watching an avatar moving its arms.
26:20Brainstorm patterns made by observing an action are similar to those arising from either performing or imagining one.
26:28Miguel digitized the monkey's brainstorms into a program that a computer could execute.
26:35So whenever the monkey even thought about moving the avatar's arms,
26:39the computer recognized the brainstorm.
26:42The result?
26:44Monkey see, computer do.
26:47The power of thought successfully moved the avatar.
26:51Miguel's experiment points to a future where any person's wish instantly becomes a godlike physical command.
27:04So you can get your mind now controlling devices that are next to you,
27:08or in a different part of the planet, or even outside Earth.
27:12We haven't done that one, but we have this dream of one day sitting here on Earth and controlling a robot on the moon or in Mars just by thinking.
27:21If it's possible for our brains to control objects without thoughts,
27:26perhaps we can control the actions of living beings.
27:29What if we could see inside the minds of others and know their most intimate thoughts?
27:35Just like God.
27:42Miguel set up another experiment.
27:45He implanted brain activity monitors into a pair of rats.
27:52The rats hardly noticed because brain tissue does not have pain receptors.
27:57It is a very thin hair-like filament that we use to create sensors that can be implanted in the brain like a pacemaker is implanted in the heart to record the signals.
28:07He wired the rats so that neural activity, the brainstorms, could travel from one rat to another.
28:14He then placed the rats into individual cages.
28:20In the cage of the first rat, one of two hatches, either on the left or the right, opens.
28:30The encoder, the first rat, this guy is getting the information from the environment.
28:35And his job is to use its brain to encode that information.
28:39And the brain activity that we're recording from this animal is being broadcasted to a second animal.
28:44In the cage of the second rat, two hatches open.
28:49This rat now has to pick the hatch on the same side as the one that opened for the first rat.
28:56If he gets it right, both rats get a reward.
29:02And it turns out that about 70% of the time, this guy got it right.
29:07So random chance would be 50%.
29:09So just if he's trying to guess, it would be 50%, but he got it 70%.
29:15It was not perfect, but the experiment showed that information could flow from one brain to the other.
29:22Miguel's research might lead us to a future where thoughts can be shared as easily as words.
29:30Imagine receiving feedback instantaneously from millions of people that you can decide which ones you want to listen to or eventually collaborating.
29:41We are probably for the first time in our evolutionary history influencing directly our own evolution.
29:48Evolution will continue to unfold in unpredictable ways.
29:52Will linking our brains help humanity achieve infinite wisdom?
29:58And if our brains can be in so many places at once, what will happen to our bodies?
30:05God is not only omniscient, but also omnipresent.
30:10One scientist prophesies the same for mankind, the ability to be anywhere and everywhere.
30:23Believers in God say they feel his divine presence no matter where they are.
30:30With all the billions of faithful in the world, God must be everywhere at the same time.
30:37Quantum physicists know that tiny particles already have this God-like ability.
30:43And we are made of these subatomic particles.
30:47So why can't we be omnipresent like God?
30:52Anton Zeilinger is a pioneer of quantum information theory.
31:04He studies the strange laws that govern how tiny particles communicate with one another.
31:10But every now and then, he likes to communicate with his peers the old-fashioned way.
31:17In any communication today, we use classical methods.
31:21Take this letter here.
31:23I'm sending it now to my friend in China.
31:26So it means that it follows a path.
31:28It goes to the post office, the post office brings it to the airplane.
31:32The airplane flies to China, and so on and so on.
31:35It's a very defined trajectory, and I can follow it.
31:39When a letter goes through the mail, the information inside follows a physical trail.
31:45But in the quantum world, the rules are entirely different.
31:52In quantum communication, the information disappears here and reappears at another place.
32:00It does not follow a path.
32:02You cannot track it.
32:03You cannot follow it.
32:05In the quantum world, information is carried by tiny particles in what scientists call quantum states.
32:14A state tells us which features a particle can show if I measure it.
32:21You can think of particles like glowing balls of light that are constantly changing colors.
32:27If one is in a sealed box and Anton never opens it, the particle will forever exist in a changing state of red and blue.
32:36However, when he opens the box and observes the particle, it will take on one of those colors.
32:46But the rules of quantum information get even stranger than this.
32:50If you take two boxes and two particles, you can connect them through a bizarre process called entanglement.
33:01Two entangled particles can be connected in such a way that if you do a measurement on one, it influences the state of the other one no matter how far away, instantly.
33:13Anton realized that this strange property can be used to teleport information.
33:19Imagine Anton entangles the glowing balls of light in these two boxes.
33:25These two particles will remain entangled no matter how far they are separated.
33:31So I will now send this box off to a friend far away.
33:41Anton is sending one box of light miles and miles away.
33:45When he unseals his own box, the light turns blue, which means the distant entangled partner instantly becomes red.
33:59This is what Anton is doing with real particles, and in the process, achieving something fantastic.
34:06Quantum teleportation.
34:09He's sending tiny particle messages from one island in the Canary Islands to another in a literal flash.
34:19That we can keep one of the two entangled particles locally, and then you do measurements on the two, and you see that they are still entangled.
34:30Having teleported information across a short distance, Anton's next goal is to do it between Earth and space, using satellites.
34:43In the satellite experiment, there is a satellite in orbit which sends down to the Earth two entangled particles.
34:53And then you do measurements on them and show that they are still entangled.
34:58Using quantum teleportation, we may be able to send and receive information to and from anywhere in the cosmos.
35:08But could we teleport enough information to transport physical objects?
35:13Perhaps even ourselves?
35:16There is nothing in the laws of quantum mechanics which says that it would not be possible to teleport the state of a system as big as a living person.
35:32But it takes a lot of ingenuity and many generations to come up with how to do it, if it can be done.
35:41Some day in the far, far future, we may have the power to be anywhere instantly.
35:50It appears that science may eventually give us both omniscience and omnipotence.
35:58But are we fooling ourselves?
36:01Does mankind really have what it takes to become God?
36:07Scientists are gradually giving us powers we once thought only a God could have.
36:16Will this progress come to an end?
36:19To become truly God-like, we need to go back to the beginning of time and figure out how the cosmos was created.
36:28Can our mortal minds ever grasp the Universal Master Plan?
36:34The physicist and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser has spent his career contemplating whether humans have what it takes to become God-like, both mentally and physically.
36:53So this is the Spartan race. It's an obstacle race. This one in particular is a very tough one. It's called the Beast.
36:59It goes up about Killington, about 14.3 miles, 25 obstacles, jumping walls, climbing ropes, under mud ponds, you name it.
37:09And, you know, they say the elites are going to do it in four hours. We're hoping to do it under eight. We'll see what happens.
37:16Marcelo competes in these grueling races for one main reason, to push his body to the limits and to find out what he's really made of.
37:26It has taught him that no matter how hard he trains, he can never reach the physical levels of a God.
37:34Our bodies impose limits on what we can do and what we cannot do.
37:38So even the most accomplished of athletes, the most perfect body is never exactly perfect.
37:44Marcelo believes that humans not only have physical limits that prevent us from becoming God-like, we also have mental limits.
37:54He sees evidence of this in science, as physicists have been competing in their own cosmic Spartan race.
38:04So it all started with Plato. You know, Plato loved geometry and he thought that to understand nature, find symmetry,
38:10find symmetry, find the most fundamental symmetry that exists, and then you unlock the secret of everything.
38:17Most physicists still use Plato's idea of symmetry to try to explain how the universe works.
38:24When one thing on one side is the same as on the other side, we call that a symmetry.
38:30So you look around yourself and the world has all these shapes, animals, butterflies, plants,
38:40and there is a natural drive of us humans to identify patterns in everything we see.
38:46Our desire to seek symmetry in the world has lured physicists into applying this rule to one of the greatest mysteries of all.
38:54First of all, how the universe began.
38:59Many physicists believe that just before the Big Bang, the universe was like a perfectly symmetric glass chandelier.
39:09And suddenly, the whole fixture shattered into billions of pieces.
39:18Scientists have been trying to put the pieces back together to know what the original structure looked like.
39:23Hmm.
39:24If we can understand how everything fits, then maybe humanity can take God's place in the celestial throne room.
39:32But Marcelo thinks physicists are trying to put together a puzzle that will never fit.
39:38Because when scientists do experiments, symmetry often falls apart.
39:45One of the most fascinating particles that exist in nature is called the neutrino.
39:50Now, it turns out that most particles, as most things in nature, they spin.
39:55They have a rotational motion.
39:57And you would expect that neutrinos, like everything else, could spin clockwise or counterclockwise.
40:03Perfect symmetry.
40:04But it turns out that in nature, you only find neutrinos that are what we call left-handed.
40:10They only spin in a certain way.
40:12Nature does not like right-handed neutrinos.
40:15So there is clear, right there, a very fundamental system of particles that interact where nature is not perfectly symmetric.
40:22So even at the level of our own bodies, our hearts are on the left, right, and our livers are on the right.
40:30Then in fact, if I would get my face, which you may think is symmetric, and I would superimpose my left side with my right side,
40:39I would definitely not look symmetric at all.
40:41Marcelo believes the asymmetries of nature tell us our theories are wrong.
40:48In fact, he suspects we will always be wrong.
40:53Finding one theory to explain everything may be erased with no finish.
41:00Everything that we know about nature depends on how we see nature.
41:04And it turns out that our tools are limited, that what we can infer from nature is limited.
41:10We cannot know everything.
41:12It's really about our urge to understand the world that is never final and never perfect.
41:19This notion that there is always something else, that there is always an imbalance in the way we perceive things,
41:25is what makes us human.
41:27The human drive to become all-powerful and all-knowing seems unstoppable.
41:36Science has given us tremendous power, but we have limitations that we may never overcome.
41:43But maybe our fallibilities are a gift.
41:47After all, they are what keep us striving to achieve what seems impossible.
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