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