00:00you fall asleep in your own bed you wake up floating your car hovers outside the window
00:06trees tear loose from the earth for seven seconds gravity disappears then it comes back
00:12anyone not holding on simply plummets to their death that's the opening of a top secret document
00:18that leaked online in late 2015. codenamed the anti-gravity project it claimed governments had
00:23known the exact second gravity would fail august 12 2016 14 33 universal time coordinated probability
00:3094.7 estimated global deaths 800 to 900 million it even said world leaders have been secretly
00:38expanding underground bunkers since 2020. it went viral millions believed it and here's the
00:44uncomfortable truth at its core no physicist on earth can actually tell you what gravity is
00:49we rely on it every single day it holds us to the ground it lets us breathe yet we can't
00:55explain
00:56why it exists at all so how can we guarantee it'll still be there tomorrow let's sit on that question
01:02first let's look at gravity itself 300 years ago isaac newton stared at the moon and asked a simple
01:08question why doesn't it fall apples fall rocks fall so why not the moon he spent his whole life working
01:16it out and he produced a formula so perfect it predicted orbits planetary motion the tides but
01:21at the end of his notes he wrote something strange this force why it exists i do not know i'll
01:27leave it to
01:27future generations that was over 200 years of silence until einstein stepped in in 1915 einstein said
01:35something that shattered everyone's understanding gravity isn't a force nothing is pulling you down you
01:41fall because the earth is so massive it bends the space and time around it creating a dent you're
01:46not being pulled you're sliding along curved spacetime it sounds like philosophy but it can save your life
01:53the gps in your phone runs on einstein's equations atomic clocks on gps satellites run 38 microseconds
02:00fast every day without correcting for that difference your location would drift 11 kilometers every day
02:06einstein explained how gravity works but what gravity actually is he couldn't answer that either
02:12here's the real problem nature has four fundamental forces the other three each have a carrier particle
02:18the photon the gluon the w and z bosons gravity should have one too physicists even named it the graviton
02:27it has never been found not once physicist freeman dyson once calculated to build a detector
02:33sensitive enough to catch a single graviton the machine would be so massive it would collapse into
02:37a black hole before you could measure anything it's not about money the laws of physics themselves
02:42are telling you don't even try and gravity isn't just mysterious it's weak ridiculously weak of the
02:50four forces it's the weakest by far weaker than electromagnetism by a factor of 10 to the 40.
02:55here's a simple test take a fridge magnet hold it over a paper clip on the table
03:01it lifts what you just saw is a thumbnail sized magnet beating the gravity of an entire planet
03:07the whole earth lost to a piece of metal physicists call this the hierarchy problem
03:12even gravity isn't stable or uniform in canada's hudson bay gravity measures slightly lower than the
03:18global average left over from a three kilometer ice sheet that weighed down the land in the indian
03:22ocean there's a spot where the sea surface dips about 105 meters caused by dense rock deep below
03:27pulling the surface down can gravity be artificially controlled people have tried and then things got
03:34strange before 1956 anti-gravity research was completely public douglas aircraft general electric bell
03:41aircraft nearly every aerospace giant was involved then suddenly everything went quiet papers vanished
03:49conferences stopped one key figure thomas townsend brown
03:53at 16 he discovered that certain materials move when you apply high voltage no fuel no exhaust no
04:00visible propulsion in 1952 the u.s navy's office of naval research investigated his device
04:06by 1956 his work went into classified reports his public research ended
04:11he worked under classified contracts until he died in 1985 his results were never published in 1992
04:19russian physicist podkotnov claimed a rapidly spinning superconducting disk could reduce the weight of
04:23objects above it by up to 0.3 percent the paper was retracted he lost his job nobody could reproduce
04:31it
04:32yet his equipment did produce data nobody could explain then there's ning lee in 2011 the u.s department of
04:38defense awarded a physicist 440 870 dollars for anti-gravity research she ran experiments reported
04:45unusual results in 2003 and then stopped publishing stopped attending conferences stopped answering calls
04:53she vanished from academia entirely 70 years not a single anti-gravity experiment has been accepted by the
05:00scientific community if these studies found nothing why classify them nothing worth hiding isn't hidden
05:06so back to the opening question is the anti-gravity project real no it's fake nasa issued a public
05:15statement earth will not lose its gravity the data predicted august 12 2016 did have an eclipse a well-known
05:22doomsaying trope that's thousands of years old the physics in the document didn't add up either
05:27gravity waves can't cancel earth's field but the hoax worked so well because it stepped on a real crack
05:32we genuinely don't know what gravity is on september 14 2015 ligo detected something extraordinary
05:39two black holes 136 solar masses 129 collided 1.3 billion light years away the energy rippled
05:47across the universe as gravitational waves by the time it reached earth it stretched the distance
05:52between two mirrors by less than a ten thousandth of a proton's width ligo caught it in 2017 they won
05:59the
05:59nobel prize humanity learned to hear gravity's voice but what gravity itself is still no answer
06:06this might feel distant graviton the hierarchy problem lab experiments but right now your body
06:14is soaking in gravity every second since the day you were born it has been molding you your bone density
06:20the way your blood flows astronauts on the space station lose up to two percent of their bone density in
06:25six
06:26months muscles shrink eyes distort that's not a side effect of space that's the consequence of no
06:32gravity a force nobody can explain has sculpted your entire body newton said leave it to future
06:38generations three centuries later they still haven't answered maybe gravity isn't a force at all just a
06:44property of spacetime maybe it doesn't exist and it's only a shadow of some deeper rule
06:49maybe the answer has already been found sitting in a laboratory under a classified stem
06:54we don't know but right now it's pressing you into your chair can you feel it
07:48in a saucy side of the geometry you want to do it you want to do it with the rest
