What is reality

[Laughter]

[Music]

[Applause]

hello

anyone there

i need a bit of advice

oh there you are how convenient

you see in three months from now

i will become a father for the first

time

panic so what is

in your opinion the most important

quality that i could possibly take to

that child

anyone be bold

to be nice

to be good wow

this is deep i gotta take notes

to be good did you all get it get a pen

and paper

to be good

you just made me a good father did you

know that oh

and my apologies for forgetting to

introduce myself in all this hassle

my name has been david norman

and i currently teach astronomy at the

university of stavanger where i also did

my phd

in mathematical cosmology plain language

i’m a scientist trying to understand the

universe at large

through mathematics now the dominating

theory in my field

today is the so-called big bang theory

what you may have heard though

i reckon did you know however

that this theory was first proposed by a

priest

le matra and for that reason

i mean come on a priest suggesting a

universe as a beginning

sounds almost like the bible even

einstein had

troubles accepting that new paradigm at

first

but science proved the prehistoric

today we have come to accept that indeed

the universe does

seem to have a beginning now

modern cosmology cosmologists like cows

and hawking and others will call this

beginning nothing share nothingness

but that’s as absurd as it sounds of

course nothing comes from nothing

so scientifically speaking it as a

vacuum now

an enormous event 14 billion years ago

transformed this vacuum into time and

space

and energy then stars and and galaxies

and then the black holes

and whatnot and according to the

biologists eventually

life humans us

humanity from vacuum

so from vacuum then void to any personal

characteristics whatsoever

comes everything that i so and we all so

highly esteem

today and value today like like love and

purpose and worth

and more importantly ketchup

and humor morals

your peace with voice

my son from vacuum

there’s a this is me as a child anyway

and if i were to sum any child’s facial

expression up in one word

i would choose the word or

we were all born crying chunks of meat

tears and dappers

but with an enormous potential for

discovering

reality from that first sound registered

in my brain

was still in my mother’s womb to the

overwhelming chaos of colors and objects

as i open my eyes to gaze at reality for

the first time

that first grip of my fingers around my

mother’s

i begin discovering that i am

a person what is this place

the mystery language as i mumble mama ma

for the first time when the world

responds to me

through laughter smiles

then i learned to walk i learned to talk

i learned to lie

and eventually you went off to school

and at some point the very first kiss

that made you feel like nothing at all

that happened in the universe up until

that point

do you all remember you

discovering reality

or we still had

or but then

something may have happened to all

adulthood

for instance and that may look very

nasty

as in this scientific paper where

science has happened to all

and this has become that a mere

definition

oh it’s an emotional response to

perceptual investimulu that transcend

current frames of reference

i hardly understand what that means but

i know one thing that’s not all

this is all besides

the paper concludes that all essentially

makes you

a better person yeah

did we keep it the awe

we grew up didn’t we we got it all

figured out

we ceased to ask that why question

radiating from every child’s face

what is reality

we cease to ask yeah do we know the

answer

pilate once that’s jesus what is reality

was he put it

000 years ago what is truth now he

didn’t ask in order to find out

he asked in order to hide his own

ignorance and to justify it

but why be content with ignorance if

reality is out there

to be found shouldn’t we constantly

revise our own ideas and paradigms to

see

if there is something that we have

possibly missed out there

what is reality to be afraid of must we

never kill

the inner child of ours baby in cradle

how fragile is existence on the

inhabitable surface of the earth

thin as the skin on an apple there it

plays with his rattle

there it is being loved glowing hot

plasma on his feet and freezing empty

space above it

how delicate the balance needed to

sustain life

made possible only because of earth’s

perfect positioning

in his orbit around the giant fireball

the sun and the sun is just one out of

our staggering hundred billion

stars in the milky way galaxy and that

galaxy is just one

out of an estimated 2 000 billion

galaxies

in the visible universe what are the

invisible

and the vesicle with invisible together

comprises

one universe in a spectacular fabric

hypothesized to exist

the multiverse fabric despair fox

despair

emanating from a brood sense or loss

in value as we zoom out magnitude by

magnitude

until the universe and multiverse and

what not just becomes a spectacularly

overver minion size that the

infinitesimal child

totally disappears in the vastness lost

in space

we are brutally forced to consider

our own insignificance

how can we possibly matter clotted

vacuum

as we are our own science

laughs back at us screaming you’re

nothing

but clotted vacuum

my soul i lose him to the vastness of

space

my scientific knowledge causes me to

even before he’s born it’s nothing

yet i would

easily trade a billion universes for

that child

to me it only takes one child to give

the entire universe

significance how come why

the mind first of all because it is our

minds

somehow one kilogram of brain mass

facilitates awareness

not only of his father but over the

entire

and the vastness of the entire universe

and as such

the capacities of the human mind are

more

than the physical universe

it only takes one mind to give the

entire

multiverse significance a question

did we miss something in science

do you feel it i’m trying to give you

that all back you see

that must be my gift for the piece of

advice you’re providing me with in italy

but we tend to lose it the ore don’t we

as we grew up

as we acquire state of the paradigm

knowledge if we have come so far

we have understood so much we have as a

species

grown so old

so old indeed that modern cosmologists

will tell you

that we are on the wedge of discovering

nothing less

than a theory of everything

everything me i don’t even understand

the baby

and the multiverse i mean minds in mata

so i go

really everything

you see 400 years ago now when’s the

chain

swept over the human intellect causing

descartes and others to formulate

the mechanistic or if you like the

modern scientific

world view of today’s generation

now this idea had stunning success and

helped us clear the waters

murky as they were with all sorts of

superstition

and gods of the gaps resulting in in an

incredible crisp

understanding what we now know to be the

physical

universe but is it

thinkable that we have thrown the baby

out with a murky bathwater

that somehow the physical is not

sufficient

in for instance explaining the mind

i don’t care about the brain who can

teach me of the mind

that center where contemplation of the

vastness of the entire universe happens

awareness of the vacuum from which we

once were formed

the sea to love the center of the will

the mind you

do i think because the new ones fire in

my brain or or do new inspire my brain

because i think

we haven’t solved that puzzle have we we

just don’t address

it how could we it stretches outside our

paradigm

so we silence it

do i hear winds who change winds have

changed

gently breezing in the trees when’s the

chain so often opposed by the masters of

the current paradigms

you see the mesopotamian paradigm

astrology lasted for thousands of years

until it was eventually overtaken by

greek natural philosophy

lasting another millennium well above

that until copernicus came

and revolutionized science paving the

way for the mechanistic worldview

descartes

and the subsequent newtonian clockwork

paradigm

of classical physics later came einstein

and gave us a new understanding of space

and time

and then came quantum mechanics and

shattered the grounds

of classical mechanics

then the priests discovered the

beginning do you see

new ideas paradigm shifts all the way

down

people laugh they will resist

but in the end even a priest was proven

right

brilliant ideas are mostly wrong or at

least incomplete

but now finally at last here

are we on the wedge to discovering a

theory of

everything what a blessed to be alive

we are here yeah

and i think somebody is once again not

on the wedge or confusing current

paradigm with reality

thank you once again though for

providing me with

excellent advice suppose in ending that

my

son grows old enough to ask me a very

simple question dad

why why did you teach

me to do good oh that one

oh well because i was so advised at a

ted talk now where 15 years ago

but seriously from the naturalistic

world your today’s generation my answer

would be as simple

as it is unsatisfactory sun

i couldn’t derive that from the laws of

physics

should we do good

what a profoundly important question to

answer yet me

i couldn’t derive the answer from

science

so to where do we turn for answers to my

son

that my ladies and gentlemen was a brute

taste

for childhood a glimpse

of an ancient giant what is

reality i’ll leave you all with it

oh and remember my gift the all

you’ll need it thanks once again

[Applause]

you