What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole Page #4

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which cannot be ever

touched on or seen...

which bubbles into the

existence giving rise...

to our understanding of the world.

The tighter physics have tried

to grasp onto physical reality...

to understand what

it's really made of...

what are the core building blocks

of life at the basis of it all-

life, the universe, slips

through your fingers.

And you come up with something

that's increasingly abstract-

increasingly abstract till they come

to the realm of pure abstraction.

And that's what the unified field

is. It's pure abstract potential...

pure abstract being...

pure abstract self-aware

consciousness...

which rises in waves of vibration, to

give rise to the particles, the people...

everything we see in the vast universe.

What makes up things

are not more things...

but what makes up things are ideas...

concepts, information.

And like I said, it never touches.

Another strange fact is that objects

never really touch each other.

When I dribble this ball,

the atoms of the ball...

and the atoms of the

ground never actually meet.

So nobody touches nothing.

Come on. Put your stuff

down. Nobody's gonna take it.

Like I said, this is my

court. It's no problem.

Well, how long has it been?

- I'll be late.

The first inkling in physics that we got

that time ain't what it seemed to be...

uh, came with relativity.

That was the first inkling.

That time was not absolute.

It was not the absolute

ruler of the universe.

That God Almighty did not say, "One

second, one second, one second, one second.

One meter, one meter, one meter. "

You're in a gravitational field.

Your head is actually moving...

at a slightly faster

rate than your feet.

The second law of thermodynamics says

that things unwind and move forward.

So that gives an arrow of time.

But at the quantum world,

in the microworld...

the second law of thermodynamics

doesn't seem to hold.

And things can go

backwards or be timeless.

The fundamental equations of physics...

have a property which is referred

to as time reversal symmetry.

And what time reversal symmetry

means is that a set of laws...

which are time reversal symmetric...

are laws that have

the following feature.

For any process that's in

accord with those laws...

the same process going backwards is

exactly as much in accord with those laws.

Okay? That ought to mean that, um-

that milk jumps out of coffee as

often as it dissolves into it...

that people get younger-looking as

often as they get older-looking...

that we have the same kind of

access vis-a-vis knowledge...

to the future as we do to the past...

that by acting now we ought to

be able to influence the past...

just as much as we can

influence the future.

All of that is wrong.

All of that, that is, comes

into violent conflict...

with the way we psychologically

experience the world.

One of the most

unpalatable ideas still...

in spite of the fact that quantum

physics has been around a long time...

is the possibility or the notion...

that the future can have a

causative effect on the present.

We believe that the past can have

a causative effect on the present.

I hold a ball. I drop it. It falls.

Cause, effect, when it hits the ground.

But could the ground be the cause of

my dropping the ball in the first place?

It's only in conscious experience

that it seems we move forward in time.

In quantum theory you can

also go backwards in time.

And there's some suggestion

that processes in the brain...

related to consciousness

project backwards in time.

For example, in the late 197 Os...

a neurophysiologist at University

of California, San Francisco...

named Ben Libet did some

very famous experiments.

What Libet did was to study patients who

were having neurosurgery on their brains...

with their brains exposed

while they were awake.

They were given a local anesthetic to

numb the area of the skull and scalp...

to access their brains, and they were

awake, and Ben would talk to these people.

So, for example, what he did was...

he would stimulate

their little finger...

and look at the part of the sensory

cortex on the opposite side...

that was related to that,

record from it electrically...

and ask the patient when he or she

felt the stimulus on the little finger.

He would also stimulate at that

particular area of the cortex.

Now, what you would think, would be that

if you stimulate the little finger...

it takes a finite period of time to get

to the opposite side of the cortex...

so the patient would report it a fraction

of a second later after the stimulus.

And when you stimulate it directly,

the patient would report it immediately.

He found just the opposite.

When you stimulated the little finger,

the patient felt it immediately.

And when he stimulated directly

on the cortex, there was a delay.

After sorting through all the data

and repeating this over and over...

Libet came to the conclusion

that somehow the brain...

was projecting information

backwards in time.

So that it did take a finite amount

of time to get to the sensory cortex...

but the brain projected

it backwards in time...

so that the conscious

perception was that...

the stimulus was felt when

the pinch actually occurred.

There have been some studies which have

shown that when people are beginning...

to move a hand or beginning

to say something...

that there's actually activity in

certain nerve cells of the brain...

even before they become consciously

aware of what they're trying to do.

It seems to me I often do things and then decide

later what to do but I've already done them.

I'll be late.

- You can always go back in time.

What's the matter? Remember. It's empty.

How do you know this sh*t?

I read Dr. Quantum comics.

Everybody thinks it's just kid

stuff, but I know it's real.

It's how I do my magic on the court.

So, what they taught us in

school isn't really the way it is.

And that our senses are

playing tricks on us.

You just gotta wonder. What is this

reality that we find ourselves in?

Quantum physics says it's

all just waves of information.

Do I believe that? Ah, I hope so.

Yipes!

It's how I do my magic on the court.

Yeah. I always choose

the wonder boy first.

Dr. Quantum says everybody's

got it. Everybody's doing it.

And doing it constantly,

each and every time we look.

And here we are, the granddaddy

of all quantum weirdness:

the infamous double-slit experiment.

To understand this experiment, we

first need to see how particles...

or little balls of matter, act.

If we randomly shoot a small object,

say a marble, at the screen...

we see a pattern on the back wall where

they went through the slit and hit.

Now, if we add a second slit...

we would expect to see a second

band duplicated to the right.

Now, let's look at waves.

The waves hit the

slit and radiate out...

striking the back wall

with the most intensity...

directly in line with the slit.

The line of brightness on the

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