It's perhaps the biggest, most controversial mystery in the cosmos. Did our Universe just come into being by random chance, or was it created by a God who nurtures and sustains all life? The latest science is showing that the four forces governing our universe are phenomenally finely tuned. So finely that it had led many to the conclusion that someone, or something, must have calibrated them. While skeptics hold that new findings are neither conclusive nor evidence of a divine creator, some cutting edge physicists are already positing who this God is: an alien gamester who's created our world as the ultimate SIM game for his own amusement. It's an answer as compelling as it is disconcerting.
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Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season1
#episode1
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#spacetime
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#space
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#isthereacreator
#morganfreeman
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LearningTranscript
00:00Colossal beauty, awe-inspiring intricacy, are the wonders of our universe a cosmic accident or the result of intelligent design?
00:14For centuries, religion and science were bitter foes.
00:19Now, science actively searches for our creator.
00:23Some physicists think he's hidden in the math. Neurologists think she might be in our brains.
00:31And computer coders believe God is one of them and that our world is nothing more than his simulation.
00:41Space. Time. Life itself.
00:51The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:57Every culture claims a God, an all-powerful entity that created the world and directs our fate.
01:12But why do we share this belief in a cosmic creator?
01:16Did we dream it up to serve a need in our psyche or culture?
01:21Is God really out there? Up there?
01:27This is a journey into the science of God.
01:31I promise you, it's quite a trip.
01:34Some of what we'll find almost defies belief.
01:40Sometime in the early 70s, I bought my daughter an ant farm.
01:46She soon got bored.
01:49But not me.
01:51I was mesmerized by this little menagerie squeezed between two panes of glass.
01:57And I wondered, what could they ever know about me?
02:01The one who built their world.
02:04What can we ever learn about who or what created us?
02:08Stranded as we are in this colony of humanity.
02:13For as long as scientists have struggled to understand our place in the universe,
02:17there have been those who've hoped to get a glimpse of God.
02:25400 years ago, the great astronomer Galileo Galilei had a groundbreaking insight.
02:32Nature's grand book is written in the language of mathematics.
02:36From that time to this, scientific geniuses like Newton and Einstein used math to dig deep into the workings of nature.
02:45To search for God through the equations that define the laws of physics.
02:51The latest mind hoping to join these illustrious ranks is Garrett Lisi.
02:57The universe can very successfully be described mathematically.
03:01You have to imagine how the world's working in a certain circumstance,
03:05and then use reason and mathematics to develop a description of how that might be happening.
03:11But it's imagination that breaks the trail before the reason enters.
03:16After earning his PhD, Garrett escaped the confines of academia in search of adventure and a space in which to think.
03:25Rather than go into a normal academic track job, I just split off for Maui.
03:31Became a surf bum and did the research I wanted to.
03:35Mostly spent time doing physics research and surfing.
03:42But all of our attempts to understand nature so far have been fragmentary.
03:47There's one set of rules for tiny atoms, another for giant objects like stars and galaxies.
03:53And the two sets of math don't fit together.
03:57What physicists like Lisi seek is a single overarching theory.
04:03A mathematical design that explains everything.
04:07Garrett thinks he may at last have found this theory of everything.
04:13And if he's right, God could be one heck of a mathematician.
04:18Garrett's work is at a leading edge of physics.
04:22Before we plunge into this mind-bending math, we first need to back up a bit.
04:30Because it's possible there's already evidence for a creator in the math.
04:36Andy Albrecht is a leading cosmologist.
04:42Hello, how are you?
04:44He's also a renowned chocoholic.
04:48I'll have the chocolate souffle and a latte.
04:52Just as a perfect chocolate souffle relies on a precise mixture of ingredients baked at a specific temperature for an exact time.
05:01So, our universe looks the way it does because of a precise balance between four fundamental forces.
05:09The four forces we know and love in the world around us are gravity, electromagnetism, those you've probably heard of.
05:17Then there's also the weak force and the strong force.
05:20They're a little bit more specialized but absolutely essential to make the world work the way it does.
05:28Gravity in many ways is the force we know first.
05:31We try to walk and we fall down.
05:33It's because of gravity.
05:34When you carry something a little too heavy and it falls, it's because of gravity.
05:40Electromagnetism tells us how the chemistry works.
05:43When you cook something, the energy you use is ultimately electromagnetic energy.
05:52Weak force is about a billion times less strong than electromagnetism.
05:58And it's responsible for radioactivity.
06:00The potassium in a banana is radioactive.
06:04If the rate were too high, it could destroy us.
06:09The sun is basically a nuclear reactor.
06:12The strong forces release energy in the nuclear reactions.
06:15One of the remarkable things is when you add it all up,
06:20all these forces have to be exactly the way they are for life as we know it to exist.
06:25Change any one of them, dial the parameters, and something will go wrong.
06:29The planet will disappear.
06:32The sun will shut down.
06:34The DNA will come unraveled.
06:38Some people call it the Goldilocks paradigm.
06:41Not too much, not too little.
06:42Everything's just right.
06:45Oh, that's perfect.
06:48Some physicists believe this precise calibration of forces is evidence of God.
06:54Dr. John Polkinghorne did pioneering work on the quark, a fundamental subatomic particle.
07:01He is also a knight commander of the British Empire, a sir.
07:07And after a lifetime of distinguished scientific inquiry, he was inspired to follow a new line of work, as a priest.
07:18I do indeed believe in God, yes indeed.
07:21Yes, in fact, I'm an Anglican priest, so it would be rather shocking if I didn't.
07:25Those four fundamental forces are the portfolio of things that bring about the physical processes of the world.
07:32And a very interesting fact about the world is that those forces, in the specific strengths that they have, have to be very close to what we actually observe if we were to be here to observe them.
07:45Because it turns out that only a world whose forces are very similar to the ones that we experience would be capable of producing carbon-based life.
07:54John finds it difficult to imagine that the fine-tuning of our universe has happened by accident, that there is no divine hand behind it.
08:05This fine-tuning makes it clear we don't live in any old world. We live in a very particular universe.
08:11And why is that? Why are we so lucky?
08:14Of course, religious belief offers you a very straightforward and attractive explanation.
08:20But scientists are split over whether this balance of forces is a sign of intelligent design.
08:29In fact, it could be nothing more than a roll of the cosmic dice.
08:35Dr. Alan Guth is a revered figure in cosmology.
08:39His theory of inflation is the accepted idea of how the early universe formed.
08:44Inflation says that right after the Big Bang, the universe expanded phenomenally fast, doubling in size 100,000 times in just a fraction of a second.
08:57Inflation helps explain how the world we know could have come into existence.
09:03But inflation has another head-spinning implication.
09:07There ought to be more than one universe.
09:09An important feature of this process of inflation is that when inflation stops, it doesn't stop all over at the same time.
09:20What tends to happen is it stops in some places and those then become universes.
09:24And elsewhere, in what we now call a multiverse, inflation would go on and only later more pocket universes would form.
09:31And there could be an infinite number of these pocket universes formed altogether by this process that we call eternal inflation.
09:41The point is that there really is a multiverse.
09:44We would be living in just one of these many pocket universes.
09:48That could be, for example, our universe right there.
09:51Each of these pocket universes could have different laws of physics.
09:54In our universe, the four forces are aligned in a perfect way.
10:02Together, they allow life to coalesce and flourish.
10:07But each pocket universe in Allen's multiverse could have a completely different balance of forces.
10:15Maybe electromagnetism is weaker.
10:17And perhaps gravity is way more powerful.
10:21The result?
10:23An entirely different universe with no chance of human life.
10:28To Allen, our universe is not carefully crafted by a divine being.
10:34It's just a lucky role in a cosmic crapshoot.
10:36This debate, foreign against an intelligently designed cosmos, has raised inside the world of physics for decades.
10:51And that's where Garrett Lisi comes in.
10:54A single mathematical theory to explain everything could bring science closer than ever to understanding our creation.
11:02And right now, it's all in the head of a beach bomb in Hawaii.
11:16One universe, four forces, billions of galaxies.
11:22The precision and complexity of our world is enough to make even the sanest cosmologists go just a little bit crazy.
11:30How does it all fit together?
11:34Is there a single overarching design to the cosmos?
11:38And if we find it, will we glimpse the mind of God?
11:45Scientists have spent decades and billions of dollars on this quest.
11:51They've built giant atom smashing machines to probe how the four fundamental forces actually work.
11:57They've found that down at the microscopic level, billions of times smaller than atoms, forces are actually caused by the movement of tiny particles.
12:09Electromagnetism is carried by photons.
12:14The strong force is carried by particles called gluons.
12:18The weak force by particles called the W and Z bosons.
12:25But they've never found the force carriers for gravity.
12:27The elusive gravitons.
12:31Gravitons.
12:34And that's where their efforts to unify the math of the universe are stuck.
12:39Treading water.
12:41But renegade physicist and compulsive surfer Garrett Lisi could be on the cusp of succeeding.
12:47Right after people got the idea that there were these electromagnetic weak and strong forces, which were towards the end of the 70s, almost immediately people saw how they fit together to make a grand unified theory unifying those three forces.
13:03Now, it's much trickier to try to bring gravity into the picture because it's slightly different.
13:13Tricky is an understatement.
13:15The greatest minds in physics have all but given up on unifying gravity and its unseen gravitons with the other three forces.
13:22But then, Garrett has a vision.
13:26A vision of twisted circles.
13:28I was working on just how this whole algebraic structure fit together of gravity and the other forces.
13:38And I started to wonder if this thing could be understood as a whole.
13:43If this entire structure could be described as part of some larger Lie group.
13:48A Lie group is a mathematical shape that is a collection of circles twisting around each other in a specific pattern.
13:59Now, the simplest Lie group is just a circle.
14:03Now, if you take a second circle and you wrap it around that inner circle, keeping it perpendicular, you get what's called a torus.
14:11It looks like the surface of a donut.
14:12But if you take a third circle and keep that perpendicular to the other two and you twist it around the inner circle as you wrap it around,
14:22you can get all three of those circles to twist around each other to form a three-dimensional shape.
14:26But this is only the beginning.
14:30Garrett kept on twisting circles around one another until he'd done it 248 times.
14:36The end result is a shape so complex that it can't even be fully appreciated in three dimensions.
14:44It's called the E8 Lie group.
14:49To us, it's just a mind-bending pattern.
14:52But Garrett Lease realized the way the circles twisted around one another looked just like the way various fundamental particles interact.
15:01In physics, each one of these circles can be associated with a different kind of elementary particle.
15:06One circle could correspond to electrons.
15:09The other circles could correspond to the force particles, such as photons, or weak force particles, or strong force particles, the gluons.
15:19For months, Garrett turned this kaleidoscope over and over in his mind.
15:25And then it hit him.
15:26He found a set of circles that seemed to act like the never-yet-seen graviton.
15:32And for the first time in the history of physics, a mere mortal saw how gravity might fit in with all the other forces and particles.
15:40You know, seeing how gravity could be combined with these other Lie groups during this unification was one of the greatest moments of my life.
15:49Dr. Lee Smolin is a world-renowned physicist.
16:00He is watching with keen interest as Lease struggles with his attempt to put all the forces of nature into a single mathematical framework.
16:08Dr. My view of Garrett Lisi's work is that he's doing something which is very high risk, high payoff.
16:19If he's right, or if even something in the direction that he's going down is right, it's very important because it's a kind of hypothesis that most of us have given up working for.
16:31That is a unique unification within a beautiful mathematical structure.
16:37Garrett calls this dizzying geometrical relationship between all the particles and forces in the universe an exceptionally simple theory of everything.
16:48It predicts several as yet undiscovered particles.
16:53And scientists across the world are on the hunt for those right now.
16:57One is the most sought-after particle in all of physics, the Higgs boson.
17:04There are some parts that are in this larger group that are not clearly these elementary particle forces, but what they are is exactly what you need to describe the Higgs field.
17:15And the Higgs field is this geometric particle field that gives masses to all known elementary particles.
17:22And it's exactly the missing puzzle piece you need to tie everything together.
17:25The center of the action in the Higgs hunt is halfway around the world from Garrett's beaches.
17:34In the cooler but no less scenic city of Geneva, Switzerland, researchers are peering through the most advanced scientific microscope in human history, the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider.
17:49They are throwing everything they have at finding the Higgs boson, the particle that is supposed to give everything mass.
17:59But they should also be able to detect some of those new particles predicted by Garrett Leasing.
18:04If they do exist, the exceptionally simple theory of everything could finally offer a blueprint of the entire universe.
18:15This dizzying geometry might also be divine geometry.
18:20A unified mass that created you, me, the sun, the stars, everything in the known universe.
18:30It would be another important factor showing us that we live in a world of wonderful order.
18:39And that is highly suggestive that that is because it is a creation with a divine mind behind it.
18:44The irony is that the man who is taking us so close to the creator is not himself a believer.
18:54It is much more satisfying to me that this bit of geometry could have come into existence than to imagine some complicated creator with some sort of personality and complex structure brought this simple thing into existence.
19:10Garret's mind-bending search could be getting closer, or it could all be a bust.
19:20There is a process of give and take, of construction and criticism that makes science work.
19:25And it depends on courage and audacity to get started.
19:29And a thing that I admire about is that Lisi has that courage and audacity, which doesn't mean I think he is right.
19:35But I think that people have to propose ideas of the ambition of this idea if we are ever to solve these big problems.
19:46Garret Lisi may be the first man to discover the mathematics of creation, succeeding where great minds like Einstein failed.
19:56But what if he is wrong?
19:57Or worse, what if there is no math that unifies the universe?
20:04Well, that wouldn't trouble this man, because he believes that the creator is not out there in the cosmos.
20:11He believes God exists inside our minds, and that he might be able to summon him by throwing a switch.
20:18For thousands of years, we have meditated, fasted, and communed.
20:29We have prayed and chanted to make contact with the divine.
20:34But what if all you need is a magnet on the right hemisphere of your brain to see God?
20:40This is Dominica. She's a nursing student in Sudbury, Ontario.
20:50She's about to experience God.
20:55Dominica is not a visionary, or a priest, or a nun, or even particularly religious.
21:03I do believe in God. However, I don't believe that you have to go into church to talk to him, because he's everywhere.
21:08Dominica has agreed to participate in what she has been told is a simple relaxation experiment.
21:17And this is the man who's going to lead Dominica into the light, Dr. Michael Persinclair.
21:26He runs the Mind Consciousness Lab in the basement of the Science Building at Laurentian University.
21:33Our primary research is involved with understanding the relationship between brain structure and function,
21:38and experience. And more specifically, is there a biological and brain basis to some of the concepts that are called the God-belief and the God-experience.
21:47Dr. Persinclair is a neuroscientist. He believes that God resides in our brains. In fact, he even thinks he knows in which part of the brain.
21:58Dr. One of the things we were really excited about was, what's the brain basis of the sense of self? After all, that's the great human definition, who we are.
22:08And we knew it was tied to language and left hemispheric processes. But then we asked the question, what's the right hemisphere equivalent?
22:14So we have this second sense in the right hemisphere. And when you experience it, it's called the sense presence. And we think that's the prototype of the God-experience.
22:27All he has to do to create this God-experience is place this yellow helmet on his subject's head. He calls it the God-helmet.
22:37Okay, so we're going to put on the helmet. Our approach was very simple. If you want to study the brain, then let's look at the brain in the laboratory with an experiment.
22:50Just follow the experience and let it come to you, all right?
22:56After putting Dominica into a sealed chamber with no light, the research team will monitor her brainwave activity for one hour.
23:05In a few minutes, Dominica's brainwaves start to order themselves into a relaxed pattern.
23:12Then Dr. Persinger activates a magnetic coil sitting over the right side of her brain.
23:19It's no more powerful than a hair dryer, but it's designed to focus its energy on a small set of brain cells in the right temporal lobe.
23:28Those cells, he believes, will stimulate in Dominica a sense that someone or something is present.
23:39We hypothesize that as the human being developed the ability to forecast their own self-dissolution, their own death, which is tremendously anxiety-generating,
23:49that another concept emerged, which allowed that anxiety to be reduced.
23:54And whatever that concept was, it had certain parameters. It had to be infinite and forever and everywhere.
24:01Otherwise, it would have an end. If you have an end, then you have anxiety.
24:05So there had to be a concept inculcated within the brain itself that there is something out there that goes on forever.
24:11And if you somehow relate to it and can be a part of it, the idea of anxiety becomes a non-event.
24:18Dr. Persinger believes the efforts of our brain's right temporal lobe to relieve the anxiety of death is what we sense when we think we are sensing the divine.
24:29And he's designed his God helmet to produce that sense on demand.
24:37Dominica?
24:39Yes?
24:41Okay, I'm about ready to come in. Just relax.
24:44For one hour, Dominica has been shut inside the chamber without light or sound, alone with her thoughts.
24:52And perhaps also with God?
25:01And it says you felt the presence of something.
25:04Yeah, there's other things around me.
25:07Okay, can you describe them?
25:09No, they're just bodies of nothing.
25:14Not doing anything. Just chilling.
25:18How many were just chilling?
25:19She actually counted, did you see her move her hand?
25:24Yeah.
25:25She was actually recreating it.
25:26Yeah.
25:28More than 80% of Dr. Persinger's subjects, whether they are religious believers or not, sense a presence from the God helmet.
25:37When the right hemisphere was being stimulated, she felt the presence of things around her.
25:41Five entities that were faceless.
25:44I don't know, I couldn't see, like, down. My body was, like, up more.
25:50Okay.
25:51So I could only see, like, above.
25:53Oh, above. Above.
25:54Yeah.
25:55Okay. Okay.
25:56She had these marked, intense feelings of visual sensations in the, always the upper visual field. Did you notice that?
26:02That's typical of the temporal lobe being activated.
26:04I see you checked here that the experiences did not come from my own mind. Can you describe that?
26:12I was, like, watching myself. So it wasn't me feeling, like, I was watching myself lying on the road.
26:21I felt like my head was attached to me.
26:24You felt like what?
26:25My head wasn't attached.
26:26So you felt like your head was detached and somewhere else?
26:28Yeah.
26:29Okay.
26:30Now, also it says you saw vivid images this time.
26:33Yeah, there's, like, heat coming up. Like, I keep, like, fire coming up around.
26:39Okay.
26:40Which one did you like the best? The first or the second?
26:44The first one.
26:45You like the first one? Okay.
26:46I want to float again. That was cool.
26:49Okay, well...
26:50Not too much like in the fire part of the second one, but...
26:54I don't know. The first one was awesome.
26:58And she had a classic experience that takes place in the chamber.
27:02Now, imagine what that would be if she was sitting in a church pew, or a synagogue, or a mosque,
27:09or, for that matter, laying by herself at night in the middle of her bed, and this happened.
27:13Can you imagine how she would label it, and the impact it would have on her entire life?
27:19There he goes.
27:21There he goes.
27:22Dr. Prescott's work raises the extraordinary possibility not just that spiritual experiences can be induced,
27:33but that some of the most intense and influential religious visions in history
27:38may have their root in nothing more than the wiring of the human brain.
27:43Abraham,
27:46Moses,
27:48Native American shamans.
27:50Almost all religious leaders and spiritual guides have attested that they were struck by vivid and thunderous messages from the Creator himself.
28:00In the history of religious experience, many of the great religious thinkers have electrical lability in the temporal lobe.
28:15Luther, as you know, who started Lutheranism was struck by lightning.
28:18These are brief events that have powerful impact on people during those critical times of their life.
28:25And really the great challenge of the science, and this is the exciting part,
28:29is not so much the fact that the brain is generating the experiences,
28:32it's what are the stimuli.
28:34You've seen a few examples of the crude stimuli when we apply magnetic fields,
28:38but what about natural stimuli?
28:40What about stimuli that are manufactured or manipulated by societies?
28:44What about intrinsic chemical changes?
28:46And what about all those stimuli we don't know yet,
28:49that can produce the most powerful experience in the history of humankind,
28:53that God experienced?
28:55For thousands of years, billions of humans have built their lives around the cherished idea
29:08that a Creator was out there looking down on them, caring for them.
29:14A God who is both Creator and Protector.
29:18Dr. Persinger's God helmet forces us to consider a radical reimagining of human experience.
29:23God may not have created us.
29:26He may not be protecting us.
29:28God may simply be in our minds.
29:32Will we find Him hidden in the deepest recesses of our brain?
29:39Or can we uncover the Creator in a mathematical theory?
29:43Let's take a closer look at perhaps the strangest possibility of all.
29:48We'll start here.
29:50We'll start here.
29:52We'll write as a creator of one universe at least.
29:59In the blockbuster hit video game, The Sims,
30:02this software genius created a world filled with digital people not too different from you and me.
30:09Well, The Sims inside the computer really are digital recreations.
30:12They're simulations of humans.
30:14And so we basically have to describe to the computer all the kind of overall aspects that we think, you know, encompass humanity.
30:25I think humans are very good at displacing their identity into others.
30:28We call that empathy.
30:29And so a lot of the game is based around the empathy that you're feeling with The Sims so that what they experience basically is what you're experiencing at one level removed.
30:38But consider this.
30:40How much empathy do you think you could feel with this Sim?
30:45And how much with this one?
30:47The rate of increase in computing power that we've seen in the past few decades shows no sign of abating.
30:57And the level of realism of computer simulations is bound to keep pace with that.
31:03When our Sims look as real as our friends, won't the lines separating our real lives from our virtual lives begin to blur?
31:13Computers and games and simulations are kind of on this path of increased reality.
31:18You can see this in computer graphics and movies.
31:21As we experience these things at these very granular levels of detail, again, these experiences, I think, are starting to blur the line between real experiences and virtual experiences.
31:33One scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, believes we might be.
31:39And that the evidence could be all around us.
31:42Rich Terrell has helped design missions to Mars, discovered four new moons around Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, and taken pictures of a distant solar system.
31:55He has a logical mind and a love for technology.
32:00Now he's bringing that logic to a bigger question.
32:03Who, or what, is the creator?
32:07For a God-centered universe, one has to think, well, first, what are the requirements?
32:11For God?
32:12God is an interdimensional being, connected with everything in the universe, a creator, responsible for the universe, and in some way can change the laws of physics, if he wanted to.
32:25And I think those are pretty good requirements for what God ought to be.
32:28Terrell thinks those requirements for God, making the laws of the universe and changing things at will, sound an awful lot like what programmers do when they create simulated environments.
32:44And then he started thinking about how much computing power it would take to create our world, our planet, all its life, and all of our brains.
32:53Moore's law is that computational power tends to double about every two years or 18 months. Actually, in the last 18 years, it's been doubling every 13 months.
33:07Right now, the fastest computers on the planet are now comparable or even exceeding the computational ability of the human brain, as we estimated.
33:15That's about one million billion operations per second. Where it's taking us is that in the next year, that'll double.
33:22In the next decade, that'll increase by a factor of 500. So a decade from now, our supercomputers will be about 500 times faster than the human brain.
33:32Rich is sure that computers a decade from now will be able to create a photoreal simulation of all that we see around us.
33:41But can a computer ever populate a simulated world with thinking beings like us?
33:47The answer is inside this box.
33:54Suppose I have a box, and in the box I've got, you know, a human brain, which is the mind or a person, and I've got a laptop computer.
34:02The human brain and a laptop computer are about the same weight, they're about the same volume, and they take about the same amount of power.
34:10Yet the human brain is about 100,000 times more powerful than a current-day laptop.
34:14Well, suppose this is a laptop computer from 50 years from now, and I have them both in the box, and I start asking them questions, and I don't know which one is answering.
34:24If I can't tell the difference between a human being answering questions and a computer answering questions, then qualitatively, they're equivalent.
34:33And if I believe that the human is conscious and self-aware, I must also believe that the machine has the same qualities.
34:47Once computers have the power to simulate artificially intelligent beings inside a photorealistic representation of planet Earth, the ramifications are truly profound.
34:57Suppose we have an enormous simulation, and we're simulating artificial intelligence.
35:03We created this universe, we're able to change the laws of physics, we're able to do all the things, all of those requirements that we put on God.
35:10We're on the brink of creating worlds inside the computers, filling them with sentient beings and becoming their gods.
35:24But this is not where Rich Terrell's quest for the Creator ends.
35:28The next step is truly mind-bending.
35:31He believes that if science shows God can exist, then maybe he already does.
35:39Maybe we are the Sims, and our Creator is sitting at the controls of a supercomputer.
35:46The rise of the machines is close at hand.
35:57Already, computers are taking over many of the day-to-day functions in our world.
36:02Are they already in charge?
36:05Is our Creator some kind of cosmic computer genius?
36:10Rich Terrell thinks we might be living in some kind of giant simulation.
36:17That our Creator might be using a supercomputer with God-like powers.
36:22And he thinks he's found evidence for it in nature.
36:27There is one sure-fire way to tell if you're looking at a computer simulation.
36:32Zoom in.
36:33Every computer-generated image, no matter how realistic, breaks down into pixels when you get close enough.
36:41You might think this doesn't happen in the real world.
36:44But you'd be wrong.
36:47In the past century, physicists have discovered that matter really is made of tiny little pixels.
36:54Fundamental, indivisible particles billions of times smaller than an atom.
36:59The theory that explains all this, quantum mechanics, applies not just to matter, but to the entire universe.
37:08Look at the way the universe behaves.
37:10It's quantized.
37:12It's made of pixels.
37:14It's made of individual atoms.
37:15Space is quantized.
37:16Time is quantized.
37:17Energy is quantized.
37:19Everything is made of individual pixels.
37:21Which means the universe has a finite number of components.
37:24Which means it has a finite number of states.
37:26Which means it's computable.
37:27Quantum mechanics means it's possible everything we see could really be produced by lines of code inside a powerful computer.
37:38But are there any signs the universe is actually being computed?
37:43In the physics lab at Caltech, an experiment that's now almost a hundred years old offers a vital clue.
37:50We're in a small room at the physics lab at Caltech looking at an experiment that was originally done in 1928.
37:59This experiment takes an electron beam and transmits it through a piece of graphite.
38:04And what we're looking at is the electrons kind of going through the graphite and forming this kind of diffuse blob.
38:08Now, an interesting thing is when we focus the beam on the graphite, we find a very, very interesting pattern.
38:15The experiment consists of a gun which fires electrons at a target of graphite atoms and a collecting screen to record how they ricocheted off.
38:28If this apparatus was scaled up a billion times and the gun fired real bullets, the pattern on the collecting screen would just be a random smear of bullet holes.
38:41In a scaled down subatomic world, the electron ricochets are not random.
38:47The pattern on the screen reflects the pattern of atoms in the target.
38:51Each electron seems to sense where every atom in the graphite is, even though the target is much bigger than it.
38:59It's as if the electrons are not dots, but spread out.
39:04The electrons somehow know where all the atoms are and they form this diffraction pattern.
39:08The experiment shows something really rather extraordinary, and that is that matter, even though it behaves when you're looking at it, when you're measuring it as individual particles, when you're not measuring it, matter is diffuse.
39:22It spreads out. It doesn't have a finite form in the universe.
39:27These basic rules of quantum mechanics apply to all tiny subatomic particles.
39:32When we look at them, they are just dots.
39:36When we look away, they lose their physical form.
39:40A different way of looking at that is to say, well, how parallel is this behavior with what I see in my PlayStation 3 when I'm playing a video game?
39:49In a PlayStation 3, an example of that is Sim City.
39:52It's an enormous city. I can navigate my way through every bit of it because the PlayStation, the video game, gives me the frame that I need when I'm looking there.
40:04If I look somewhere else, it'll create that frame.
40:07Well, oddly enough, the universe behaves that way in reality.
40:11The universe gives you what you're looking at when you're looking at it.
40:14When you're not looking at it, it's not necessarily there.
40:16Our world is pixelated and only assumes definite form when observed, the very same way our computer simulations behave.
40:27Rich Terrell has tried to work out the probability that we might be living in a simulation to quantify the possibility that there is a God.
40:38The question is, how likely is something like that to happen? And how likely is it that it has already happened in our universe?
40:48Now let's step back from that a little bit and say, well, you know, the universe is 13.7 billion years old and here I am 50 years from basically being able to manufacture God.
40:59What's the probability that I would be so close to that threshold and not be across the other side?
41:06It's one chance in 300 million that I would be that close.
41:10It's an extraordinary coincidence and perhaps, more likely than not, maybe we are a simulation on the other side of that threshold and the deities that exist are our future selves.
41:22Our world bears all the hallmarks of one that is simulated.
41:30And, Rich's logic continues, who would be more likely to simulate humans than humans from the future?
41:38Our descendants. God-like beings with the power to create their own universes.
41:44It's a very radical idea of the creator. But for Rich, it's not without spirituality.
41:55One can ask, what are you really saying? Are you saying that the world is a simulation and we're just entities in some PlayStation 12 game or something like that?
42:04I'm not saying that. I actually think this is a very, very wonderful phenomenon. I take great solace in this.
42:12It shows that somewhere along the line we have evolved from nothing into self-awareness and that self-awareness has reached the stage now where our future selves have become gods.
42:25This is a wonderful, to me that's a very, very spiritual thing and that's where my spirituality comes from in seeing things like that. To me that's a religion.
42:36It's been said that God fills in the cracks in our knowledge.
42:40Some see these cracks getting smaller.
42:44We see this constantly in physics, that we start out with something that looks complex and as we look at its parts, its parts are simpler.
42:51Now, if you imagine some sort of creator, that assumes that there's something more complicated than the thing that got created.
42:59So, to me that's a step backwards in explaining a philosophically satisfying model.
43:06For others, the expansion of scientific knowledge will never fill in all the cracks.
43:11There'll always be room for faith, be it in a creator who is our descendant or in the gods of our ancestors.
43:19I think that the questions that arise from science, they give us some sort of notion of the existence of God, but they leave many other questions about God unresolved.
43:31And we also, I think, are bound to recognize that we finite beings will never totally understand God.
43:37The human instinct that drives our scientific curiosity won't stop us from searching for answers.
43:48Perhaps one day soon, science will provide us with a new method to look up and out through the cosmic pane of glass that separates us from the true creator of our world.
43:59If there is one.