What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole Page #3

---

for why a worldview change is important.

Let's talk about the subatomic world.

And then we'll talk about what

it's telling us about reality.

The first thing I want to tell

you about the subatomic world...

is it's totally a fantasy

created by mad physicists...

trying to figure out what the heck is going

on when they do these little experiments.

By little experiments, I mean big energy

in little spaces and little pieces of time.

It gets pretty nutty

at that realm of things.

And so subatomic physics was invented

to try to figure that all out.

We need a new science down there.

It's called quantum physics, and

it is subject to a whole range...

of debatable hypotheses,

thoughts, feelings, intuitions...

as to what the heck is really going on.

So, on the one hand, you had a theory...

which from the conceptual

standpoint, was profoundly puzzling...

and on the other hand, from

the practical standpoint...

was vastly more successful than

anything we had ever seen before.

This is the kind of situation

that produces the tension...

that all of the investigations of

- foundations of quantum mechanics...

are feeding off of since then.

Because on the one hand, this is a-

this is an acutely

paradoxical, puzzling...

conceptually confusing theory.

On the other hand, we have

no option along the lines...

of throwing it out or neglecting it...

because it is the most

powerful proven tool...

for predicting the behaviors of physical

systems that we have ever had in our hands.

The universe is very strange. There seem to

be two sets of laws that govern the universe.

In our everyday classical world, meaning

roughly our size and timescales...

things are described by

Newton's laws of motion...

set down hundreds and

hundreds of years ago.

And they work very well for billiard

balls and cannonballs and gravity.

However, when we get

down to a small scale...

when we get down to,

say, the level of atoms...

a different set of laws take over.

These are the quantum laws,

quantum theory, quantum mechanics.

And at that level...

particles may be in multiple

places at the same time.

They may behave as waves smeared

out spatially and temporally.

They may be interconnected

over great distances.

They may, um...

be unified into one quantum state

- into one state...

governed by one wave function.

And the borderline, the threshold...

this curtain between the quantum

world and the classical world...

is really mysterious.

It's called sometimes the

collapse of the wave function...

because at the quantum world, everything is

in superposition and multiple possibilities.

And in the classical world,

these multiple possibilities...

seem to collapse to

particular, definite choices.

So, everything is in

one particular place.

Quantum mechanics is really the

play and display of information...

the play and display of potentiality...

waves of information,

waves of potential electron.

And it's important,

the word "potential. "

This isn't the world of electrons.

It's the world of potential electrons.

But you have to ask the

question, "Waves of what really?"

What is the field that is

waving? Is it the ocean?

No. It's a universal ocean.

An ocean of pure potentiality.

An ocean of abstract,

potential existence.

We call it the "unified field,

" or "superstring field. "

And that's what we're made of.

Connectivity among all things...

is a basic constituent

of the fabric of reality.

It's very difficult to

wrap your mind around that.

But Erwin Schrodinger said - He's one

of the founders of quantum mechanics-

that entanglement, which is

this idea of this connectivity...

is not just a property of quantum

mechanics, it's the property.

It's the property of quantum mechanics

that makes it very, very strange.

And it doesn't seem to fit

in with our ordinary world-

our ordinary experience, but,

in fact, it actually does.

Wanna shoot some hoops?

Now, you don't have to be like that.

Come on and play.

Look, he likes you. Don't you

have time for a little one-on-one?

How long has it been since you played?

Come on. You got the ball. Take a shot.

No, no, no, milady. Not from

there. It's out-of-bounds.

You gotta be on the court to be in play.

Welcome to Duke Reginald's court...

of unending possibilities.

Court rules. You gotta

sink the last one.

That hurt.

- It never touched you.

Right.

- And... it's not solid.

This ball. It's mostly empty.

We were all taught in school

that the world is made of stuff...

of matter, of mass, of atoms.

Atoms make up molecules. Molecules make up

materials. And everything is made of that.

But atoms actually are mostly empty.

For example, if this ball

were the nucleus of an atom...

a proton in a hydrogen

atom, for example...

then the electron circling this...

which would describe the

outer limits of that atom...

would be out by that mountain

over there, roughly 20 miles away.

And everything in between is empty.

In fact, the universe is mostly empty.

However, when we go down in

scale, in the emptiness...

we eventually come to a level...

the fundamental level

of space-time geometry.

The fine basement

level of the universe...

where there's information,

there's a pattern.

It's called the Planck scale.

And it's the fabric of the universe.

And at that level, there's information

that's been there since the big bang.

So most of the universe, even

of matter, is actually empty.

Most people think that

the vacuum is empty.

But for internal self-consistency...

of quantum mechanics

and relativity theory...

there is required to

be the equivalent...

of 10 to the 94 grams of mass energy.

Each gram being E = mc^2 kind of energy.

Now, that's a huge number. But

what does it mean practically?

Practically, if I can assume

that the universe is flat-

and more and more astronomical data...

is showing it's pretty darn flat -

if I can assume that,

then if I take the volume-

or take the vacuum within

a single hydrogen atom...

that's about 10 to the

minus 23 cubic centimeters.

If I take that amount of vacuum and

I take the latent energy in that...

there is a trillion

times more energy there...

than in all of the mass

of all of the stars...

and all of the planets out

to 20 billion light-years.

That's big. That's big.

And if consciousness allows you to

control even a small fraction of that...

creating a big bang is no problem.

Organizations like NASA,

British Aerospace...

are all trying to tap into this

incredible, unimaginably large energy sea.

And they feel if they can tap this,

we can travel to different galaxies.

So they understand that in empty space,

there is this unbelievable energy.

The major basic idea that

quantum physics implies...

which makes us understand this or

even think about this new paradigm...

the thing which is that

there's this underground-

There's gotta be a realm of existence...

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes