The Fundamentals of Reality

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Ince, and this is the infinite monkey cage and today we are talking about reality there are those who say that life is an illusion and that reality is but a figment of the imagination is there such a thing as a real underlying reality or does everyone's opinion have equal validity as is clearly stated in twitter's terms of service for instance

brian might say equals mc squared and i might say yeah yeah well that's just your opinion

To which you might reply.

It's not an opinion.

It's not an opinion.

The equation follows: if you accept the laws of physics should be expressible as coordinate-independent and reference-frame-independent relationships between geometrical objects representing physical quantities or entities, and that the appropriate geometrical arena is Minkowski spacetime, and that the energy-momentum four-vector is one such geometrical object.

And I would then reply, fake physics.

I don't even believe that energy and matter actually exist.

I think they're merely something used by the Illuminati and other snake-headed scientists.

And then this would continue for 28 hours until one or other was destroyed by a lack of logic.

Anyway, today to debate the nature of reality, we're joined by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, an expert on black holes, a globe-trotting comedian, and the lead reporter for Rutland Weekend Television.

And AR.

I'm Frank Wilcek.

I'm a professor at MIT.

I won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004.

I've written a book that's just coming out called Fundamentals that Can Bring You Joy and Expand Your Mind.

So go get it.

And the thing I find most difficult to understand about reality is how I'm part of it.

I'm Janet Levin, and I'm an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, and an author most recently of Black Hole Survival Guide.

I think the aspect of reality I find hardest to fathom is that we can fathom reality at all, especially the aspects beyond our immediate senses.

And I think that's unusual enough that it impels us to search for other life out there with similar capacities.

My name's Sarah Pascoe.

I'm a comedian, which is a bit of a drop in achievements.

And

the part of reality that I find difficult to fathom is that I can't trust any of it.

I'm being gaslit by the entire world, including my own senses.

Hi, my name is Eric Idle.

I'm a comedy writer, and I believe reality is overrated.

So let's start off with a definition.

And we always would like to do definitions, but this one might be a tougher one and might actually cover the whole of the show.

And that is, what is the definition of reality?

What is reality?

Frank, starting with you.

Well, reality is several things.

But maybe

the two most important versions of reality, I think, for most people, are as babies, we're...

suddenly exposed to a sensory universe that needs to be organized so that we can survive and get around.

And so we invent rules of thumb that there are objects in three-dimensional space that have more or less predictable properties, and we construct a world on that basis.

Then, if we become curious adults, we realize that there are many other ways to interrogate the physical world with telescopes and microscopes and spectrometers and magnetometers and all kinds of other instruments, and to think about it in more logical, critical, organized ways.

And we find a different version of reality that is also coherent, that also describes huge aspects of our experience that are uncovered if we use those instruments and use all our mind.

And those, to me, are the two most interesting versions of reality: sort of everyday reality and physical reality.

Jenna, how would you define reality?

Well, there's many levels of reality.

Like I can say this is my hand, and that's real and true, but it's also made up of atoms and it's changing every second, and it's

losing some and absorbing some.

So is it still my hand?

I mean, we could get lost there forever.

And so I think I've become more and more a follow-the-math kind of person.

I want to know that there's some correlation between the structures in our minds mathematically and some external experiences.

And as Frank said, this can come on many levels and be probed from from telescopes to accelerators.

So they're all, you know, pieces in this complex mosaic that creates reality.

Sarah, really.

I was really hoping you weren't going to come to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think it.

I don't think you trust reality, right?

Yeah,

I think it was my hand.

I didn't think I'd ever doubt it was my hand.

But then, after John,

I think, as a non-scientific person, reality to me is all kind of perception.

And while I'm aware that isn't pure, purely real, as in verifiable, I go about my day and take thousands, hundreds of things for granted, including my own emotional responses, as being correct and real and right.

So the only thing about reality that I do know is that when I dream, I definitely know that's not real.

And isn't it crazy that we spend so much of our time in our brain asleep, and then we wake up and go, that's all completely fictional.

I know that didn't happen, happen but the rest of it this is definitely happening then so do you find that you that you do sometimes that you make that division in your head where you can say this is my reality and this is a reality that is is a reality you know a common reality to all because that level of perception seems to be that is as you said one of the problematic things that once you realize there are these two things you know running in tandem I think getting bad reviews and that kind of thing really helped me in comedy because someone else would say, what a terrible gig from an awful comedian.

I go, Well, that's your reality.

In my reality, I was a genius, and everyone loved it.

Eric, you're not getting out of this one.

Your definition of reality.

Well, I think it's very interesting for me because I do two things which impinge on that.

One is being a writer, and the other is being an actor.

And in both of those, we try and fake reality to convince people that they're watching what reality is.

And I think all writers create their own reality.

I mean, Dickens is a reality, it's different from D.H.

Lawrence or T.E.

Lawrence.

But

I think that what we're trying to do is recreate reality.

So we're actually second-generation people anyway.

We don't really have any reality as actors and writers.

I wanted to pick up on something that you all said, and particularly, I think, Frank, you said that there are these two realities that you think of.

Jana mentioned it as well.

There's the obvious reality, a three-dimensional reality that we experienced as children.

And then there's another level.

Part of the question is actually whether I should call it a deeper reality, but as Jana said, a mathematical

reality that we discover through our observations.

Just a bit of history.

When does that distinction emerge in human thought?

The idea that there is something deeper, and specifically that that can be described by mathematics?

Well, I don't know who thought of it first, but in our tradition and our Western tradition, certainly an early and striking version of this was Democritus, who said, in opinion you have tastes and colors and hot and cold, but in reality it's just atoms in the void.

So that captured some of this idea that there's a sort of working reality that we get around in, and then there's under the hood there's something quite different going on.

These different versions of reality don't conflict with each other.

They're all describing the same world.

And it's actually a great adventure to try to connect them up.

That's why I said the hardest thing about reality for me to understand is how I'm part of it.

When I look at the equations, the fundamental equations of physics and the concepts of quantum theory and so forth, it's very difficult to recognize myself in those equations.

And it's really fun to try to connect.

these very profound, beautiful, sort of sparse equations with the rich reality we actually experience.

Janet, that thing of what is reality, I know that you started off as an undergraduate studying philosophy, and you felt that it didn't tell you enough about reality.

And then you heard a lecture about quantum physics, and suddenly you go, oh, finally, something solid, a universe of probability, which to me is a really fascinating entrance to reality.

Yeah, I think it was incredibly compelling for me to realize that there was a set of mathematical structures that did go beyond our perceptions and yet taught us predictable things that we could confirm with experiment, and that was true in Bangladesh, and it was true in a different galaxy.

And coming as a philosophy student, where people were still trying to argue, you know, like, what did Descartes mean?

And nobody's doing that with quantum physics or Einstein.

And we understand quantum physics isn't complete, but with Einstein, we know it's perfectly transferable to the next generation.

Nobody's going, what did Einstein mean when he said equals mc squared?

Once you learn it, it's exactly what Brian said in the end.

In Minkowski space, it's a four vector that when you contract it, okay, whatever.

So that was very powerful for me to walk away and have all of this kind of rhetoric get real quiet in the room and everyone felt very deferential to the math and the science.

And that impressed me tremendously.

I think that's the point about...

I'm sorry, Brian.

Correct.

Well, I was going to ask, I know that you

read a great deal of science.

And science has always been part of your work.

I I mean, we go back to the galaxy song, but it was those sketches, those Python sketches that dealt with science tended to be yours in the main.

Do you see that?

Do you feel that disconnect, as Frank described it, between

the reality of your existence, just being a human being, and then this very strange world that we see, quantum mechanics and relativity and so on, that seems to underpin the reality that we perceive?

Well, quite simply, no.

But that is mainly because I don't understand quantum physics, so I can't possibly comment on that.

But

I find the thing that I found interesting, why science appealed to me, was it replaced religion.

And religion is an attempt to describe the universe from way back in the past, 2,000, 3,000 years ago, and science has now updated it.

And that's all it is.

It's not a difference of kind.

It's a difference of degree, not really a difference of kind.

And so I'm always very kind to people who still have belief systems and think they're going to meet up with their relatives afterwards.

You know, I don't think there is a green room afterwards, but I'm happy for people to think that.

You know, I think whatever makes people happy is actually the only thing that really counts on this bleeding planet.

Well, that's it.

I'm going to say, Tara, in both your books, you look, particularly from a psychological and evolutionary perspective, about human behaviour.

It's not just good enough to say, well, that's what people do.

You actually go to the roots of why we do certain things.

How much has that changed your attitude towards the reality of being human?

To go, oh, well, actually, this wasn't conscious.

And this was, you know.

Yeah, it's very interesting you asked that because the difference between

evolutionary science and psychology and what these guys are talking about in terms of reality is that there's still a narrative attached.

Of course, there is evidence and there are studies where people are trying to find evidence, but also there are gaps where people suppose.

And I think why that attracts me is I'm a words person.

I don't understand the numbers, so I decided they don't matter.

I can get around a Sainsbury.

I've got all of the information that I need about reality, actually.

And so, not that it's a competition between me and him.

Yeah.

That's the good thing now.

You don't even need to take any money with me.

Just a little plastic

and don't even have to count.

But yeah, so and I've realised that

the parts of science that I that attract me are the ones that make sense to me, and it's because they're stories.

They're always told.

And evolution is a story about where we come from and the bits.

And we can then go, oh, I reflect on myself and I see that that could be true of me, or oh, that makes sense in terms of how I've experienced human beings.

And it's the exact opposite of this is a force that works.

And like you say, it works like that in Bangladesh, and it'll work like that in 200 years.

But you can make stories out of it.

Really?

You really can.

You really can.

If you use your imagination, you don't necessarily have to master the equations in detail.

If you're willing to trust people a little bit, you can make stories out of a great deal of it, and the stories can really enrich your experience of the world.

It's interesting, though, that underpinning this discussion already seems to be

an implicit

idea that the deepest description will be mathematical.

When you said that you don't necessarily need to understand the maths, that there can be stories told about it.

I wanted to explore that assumption or indeed ask the question, is that an assumption?

I don't think it is an assumption because

whatever we find will be necessary to understand things, we call it mathematics.

The mathematical tools that we use in modern physics bear very little resemblance to the geometry of the Greeks or the methods that Newton used.

They have a different character.

They really have linear algebra and technically very different.

And in some ways,

they become simpler.

When we get down to the most basic laws, they have a strange simplicity that we developed precise ways of thinking that we call mathematic to deal with this strange reality.

reality.

But whatever it was, we would have called it mathematics.

I think

mathematics is just

logical thinking carried to the extreme.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Suppose telekinesis was possible and I could telekinetically move my cup.

Presumably I could do it every time in the same way.

Otherwise, it would just be an uncorrelated phenomenon.

It wouldn't be telekinesis unless I could intend to do it and do it.

And then if that, therefore, just even that idea of a causal relationship implies that there's a mathematical structure to be uncovered.

And so it's, you know,

I don't think it's short-sightedness to say this is how we conceive of the world.

We inherited these structures through evolution,

logical systems that obey the laws of physics.

And so the good fortune that it's encoded in the way we think is really not magic.

Even the fact that we can invent math as a result of the way our neurons are configured, which is laid down by forces that led to evolution.

So, I mean, and I do agree with Frank about those stories.

We tell a very compelling story about the origin of the universe and the evolution of the universe and the fate of the universe.

And I could do something different with my time.

I could count atoms in my room, but like we don't think that's a good story.

So as scientists,

we don't fund those kinds of projects.

And I'm sure it is a really good story, but I don't know if you ever heard the ancient Egyptian one, but it was about like a massive ejaculation and it made the world.

Is it as good as that?

Frank?

Well, it's a matter of taste, I guess, whatever terms you want.

One thing, to be a little bit serious, one thing that I want to share is my very strong feeling that you don't have to give up the stories you love in order to adopt the scientific stories as well.

You can view the same thing in different ways.

In fact, this is itself a principle of science called complementarity: that to answer different questions, to get insights

about a situation or an object, very different points of view may be appropriate and may be necessary and maybe certainly could be a good thing.

Well, Eric, I mean, I suppose this has been brought on by Frank and Sarah there, the great debate of equation or ejaculation.

And so, in terms of 2021.

I say equation and ejaculation.

Well, let's pull the whole thing off anyway.

I was going to say that's having your cake and eating it.

That's been discredited in the UK, but.

But Eric, I do think it's an interesting point, isn't it?

Between that there is, I think there is a point where you can find that the story of the beginning of the universe, when told mathematically, there is still, as Frank has said, there's a point where the two can meet, where the level of art and the level of science, where objectivity and subjectivity,

something can still grow out of that, that it does not merely create, oh, here's a set of numbers, and it was 480 quadrillion, and they all lived happily ever after.

Well, that's true, but I think we learn everything through stories.

We teach each other.

We tell each other everything through stories we always have, since Homer,

and we began to change our way we think about ourselves through the Elizabethan drama world and the 19th century novel.

Now we look at ourselves through television.

We see ourselves, people check themselves out in shop windows.

We're aware of ourselves outside of ourselves, which has changed our nature of how we think about reality, I think.

But I do actually like the idea that there is a science creation myth, and I think that's coming along quite nicely.

Because actually,

science tells us that 96% of the universe is dark matter.

So 40%, only 4% of the universe is visible, so God is clearly hiding in the other 96%.

There's something I wanted to get Jana to disagree with Einstein, which is going to be.

Okay.

In the sense that

I got a sense from what you said.

We were talking about the fact that the universe is comprehensible,

and that mathematics is the label we give, I suppose, in a sense, to our comprehension.

So whatever logical structure we choose, we'll call it mathematics.

I mean, Einstein famously said

the fact that the universe is comprehensible is a miracle.

But is it not the case that we have to live in a structured universe?

You kind of referred to it in a way, a universe of cause and effect.

It's an anthropic effect.

It's the fact that ordered structures like human brains must look out onto a universe that's ordered.

Oh, I think that's reverse direction because how do you get an ordered brain?

So

it's sort of a reverse to presume that we just materialized

in this world and then there's and then our surprise that we're projecting structures on the world.

It strikes me as the first mistake.

So,

I mean, again, evolution comes into how the structures are inherited in our brain, and we haven't evolved presumably all the way that we can.

And we look at other animals that have some comprehension of an external reality, but not quite a meta-level.

So, it isn't about human beings at all, I don't think.

I think the entire paradigm of physics is basically the premise that we can predict the future from the past and the past from the future.

And this includes quantum mechanics when we talk about things like the wave function of the universe.

That wave function, that probability, is deterministic.

We predict its future from its past and its past from its future.

And that's just the paradigm of physics.

If that turns out not to be the case, I mean, then we are in trouble when we try to pour hot coffee in the morning, right?

Because

the world is not the way we presume it is

if there isn't that connection.

And so the fact that we believe in physics is because that's our experience of this external reality, as filtered as it is by consciousness, as filtered as it is by the limitations of our senses, it is still, I am still receiving photons from the early universe, you know, and they are hitting me.

And that's just happening.

So,

yeah, so maybe that was a loopy way of basically saying I think it's an observation, not a construction.

And in terms of silence.

But I agree with Einstein.

I think it is a miracle that the universe is comprehensible at the level of depth and

coherence of structure that fundamental science has achieved.

You can do thought experiments and make universes in which that's not true.

For instance, specifically, we're getting to the point, I think, soon, when we can construct worlds within computers and intelligences within computers that are not necessarily going to have the same relationships to what we call the external physical world that we do.

Their sensoria will not be photons coming out of the external universe, but electrical signals within the computers.

And the programmers could make any old programs that they want, any old rules.

that could be as horribly complicated as Word or DOS,

if you're old enough to remember these nightmarish operating systems that are not terribly coherent, not terribly coherent and

kind of constructed not with a view of elegance, but the fundamental understanding of the universe as we actually find it, what we call physical reality, turns out to be remarkably beautiful and comprehensible.

And

its detailed study really rewards the effort.

Can I also recommend to Sarah and Eric that all three of us should more often start sentences with, I agree with Einstein.

I think

it would impress a lot of people,

but I think it's best we stop there.

Whereas Frank can then continue after that.

I think we just say, I agree with Einstein and then move on to another volume.

I agree with Einstein.

Just to follow up before it might be slightly off topic, I just wanted to follow up on that, Frank.

So if you make the argument that there can be

the universe could have been different,

what really

what how do you how do you reconcile that with the quest?

You may not think this is a sensible quest, but a quest for a theory of everything in the sense that there's only one logically consistent way the universe can be, and we may have access to that?

No, I think it's a great question, which I ask myself all the time.

In recent years, I've kind of backed away from studying the universe as a whole and studying the universes, sub-universes, that are realized in physical bodies.

So

a solid, a substance can be thought of as a universe on its own.

And different possibilities arise when you consider materials as worlds in their own.

For instance, you, well, to get a little bit technical, for a long time people thought that all particles had to be of two types.

There were two kingdoms called fermions and bosons.

By fantasizing about alternative universes in two dimensions, I realized there was another possibility, Eneons, and it was a great joy a few months ago when people finally actually observed it.

So thinking about how the world could be different is sort of what I do for a living.

I try to get different descriptions, different possibilities, improve the equations,

not be satisfied with the equations or the platforms we have.

What was your question again?

It It was whether

physics.

Some physics.

Oh, whether there's a theory of everything.

Well, I hate that phrase.

I really do.

I think it's horrible, because it promises much more than physics can ever deliver.

Physics will never be able to answer questions about what you should do, what's morally correct.

So that's one aspect.

And the other aspect is that much more down to earth, if you have even if you have the fundamental equations, that leaves you with the task of finding yourself or more down to earth, finding animals and finding the description of more complex objects using intermediate concepts.

You know, knowing that a person is made out of quarks and gluons and photons and electrons doesn't really help you very much in understanding that person.

So a so-called theory of everything would not be a theory of much of anything, really.

Sarah,

Frank's previous book, A Beautiful Question, which looked at the beauty of science, do you find that as we find out more about an an underlying reality, something which is not necessarily something that we can observe on a day-to-day basis,

do you find that that makes reality more beautiful?

I agree with Einstein that reality

is very,

very good looking,

very beautiful and we're very

I think on a human level, to be just one lady alive now,

since I was a child, any talk about science made me feel so lucky to be alive.

There's something about talking about whether it's consciousness or gravity or you know, black holes and planets, every single thing,

I guess for me, and probably not to scientists, but everything seems so miraculous that it all comes back to, isn't it amazing not only that it's happening, but that I got here to see it?

Like, and that's why I think I was drawn to biology, was the

chances of any of us existing in terms of I'm not going to say the E-word again, but all of the potential in our

fathers and

all of it.

Yeah, and everything's always made me feel very lucky to be alive.

And that's where the beauty comes from on a personal level, is it actually reminds you, I'm here and I'm glad to be learning about it.

That's great, by the way.

The way you've said that is very much if a physicist had written The Joy of Sex.

At this point, the man has a great deal of potentiality.

And sadly, the man no longer has potentiality.

Yeah, it's not, it's not E equals M C squared, it's E equals

Eric.

How do you,

how do you, again, as someone who's become so much more intrigued about understanding reality at a more fundamental level, do you find that's changed your that certainly to me, it feels it removes the mundanity of almost everything.

That once you start engaging with its complexity, nothing is mundane.

Well,

I think the basic thing is that because we're human, that the thing that makes us human is we die.

And that the death is the most important about science because you have to get it in this small space of time.

It's what Sarah's saying about the wonderful thing about being alive in these bodies in this time is you can see all this going on.

We can actually have a Nobel scientist trying to explain to us about reality.

This is an extraordinary time and an extraordinary, you know, to be here.

So

I forget the question too, but I agree with Einstein.

There is a book, you know, called The Joy of X,

just so you know, written by a mathematician.

Is it about divorce?

It's about the variable X.

I thought you were going to say it was John Cleese's latest book.

The problem that we have as human beings to some extent, which is, as you said, the mathematics.

Once you have the mathematics, and we've heard this before, that beautiful thing, which is if the maths works, it means it exists even though we haven't found it yet.

That's a question that's hard to answer.

I mean, we know irrational numbers exist, numbers that have an infinite list of unpredictable digits, but we've never seen one in reality, because eventually your measurement ends at some finite list of digits.

So

it's a curious thing.

Like, does every mathematical concept exist?

And we could say, oh, I can imagine irrational numbers actually exist and it's a limitation of our experimental apparatus.

But it's not, I mean, does, and I, and I love Playing Devil's Advocate on this.

Sometimes I believe every conceivable mathematical structure will find a manifestation in reality.

Maybe that'll just happen.

And black holes are an example of that, something that we thought nature would forbid, but math allowed.

And then nature figures out a way to make some.

Oh my God, that sounds like an amazing film, doesn't it?

Like

a sub for

those two forces against each other.

Nature said no, but math said,

watch this.

See, the opening will be you going to Sainsbury's and going, oh no, the aisle numbers are irrational.

I'll never get on the mind of things now.

This is worse than when Waitrose had those aisles using imaginary numbers.

This is very problematic.

When we talk about the universe, we have to think about what we mean.

I mean, each of us is a universe in a way.

We experience things in different ways.

Our Earth is a universe in a way.

And if we ask, did the Earth have to have the precise properties that it does?

Could it have been a little further from the Sun or a little closer?

We find that now when we study the distant objects, that many stars have planetary systems with all kinds of different properties.

So for most purposes, those are universes.

We have to work very hard to get signals from other places that are very far away.

And they can be quite different.

So yes, at that level, you can certainly have a multiverse.

If things had been slightly different, the dinosaurs might still be around, and this discussion would be quite different.

So yes, I like the idea of a multiverse.

What the debate in fundamental physics now is whether there are really, really, really distant parts of the universe, very, very, very, very difficult to observe, that have even laws that appear to be quite fundamental different.

Like they could, for instance, in those parts of the universe, instead of having three dimensions of space, you could have four or two or six or something else.

And that's entirely possible and is very much in line with my attitude, which is that every material defines a universe.

And materials can have submaterials.

You can have layers within computers that define two-dimensional worlds.

So I love the idea of not just one universe, but many universes.

And I think to do justice to reality, you have to have that idea.

Eric, I was just wondering, again, in terms of these, as you discover more, as Frank was briefly talking there about the ideas of multiverse, et cetera, as a writer, your work is what-ifs.

And have you found that in terms of finding out this level of reality

and the fact that the what-ifs increase, does that actually become an inspiration in terms of where you can take the worlds that you're creating?

Well, I don't think so with respect.

I think because we write about people and we write about their emotions and going shopping at Sainsbury's and

you know, I think

that's what we are more in the day-to-day.

We're not really looking at the something, you know, underneath fundamental what makes their bodies, you know,

energizes their bodies to go and buy more food to eat so they can carry on shopping.

We don't really deal with that.

We tend to deal with what we call emotions, which are nasty, unpleasant, sticky things which shouldn't be involved, shouldn't be mentioned in society, really.

Well, that's always what Brian says.

Once the universe moved to a point, once it moved to a point of chemistry, everything started to go downhill.

When Eric does write about specifics, and I'm thinking now of the galaxy song, then I correct him.

I'm always looking over here.

You correct him, but you've been correcting me for so long that they've changed again.

So then you have to start correcting you.

And if any of you want to know how Eric feels about this correction, you might have seen the O2 show, in which Eric wrote a piece where Stephen Hawking eventually runs over Brian Fat lands on top of you I think and runs him over yeah Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair runs over Brian Cox and I wrote that joke and Brian filmed it bless him so we did

but it was dealing with a lot of Freudian issues

but Stephen did of course

if you remember Eric add Lib the line that's in the Python show because when I explained that the galaxy song is wrong and the universe is not I don't know what your age of the universe was when you wrote it 12 billion years, and now it's 13.8 billion because of new measurements.

And he said, I think you're being pedantic.

Accuracy.

See, he's a theoretical cosmologist.

But

we were rolling sounds, so we actually have Stephen Hawking thing.

Way too pedantic.

We cut that up and put it in the show.

So exactly.

As Brian gets run over by Stephen Hawking, he says, Way too pedantic at it.

Alas, Frank, Frank's got a Nobel Prize, is demanding accuracy, is it pedantic?

I don't think that's pedantic.

Well,

it can be.

Depends what you're after.

Well, this is annoying.

We're nearly at the end, and we've got to question three of 18, which is good.

So I think we've got a lot,

which seems to be...

What we haven't really dealt with, when we're talking about sometimes what you might consider to be the shortcomings of our senses, And then we have, you know, especially we see in the 20th century and into the 21st century, the ability

to

build machines, but find technology that allows us to become aware of a fundamental reality.

It's a wonderful thing that as we learn that there's much more of the universe that we don't naturally experience, we can also devise tools to expand our minds.

William Blake said that if the doors of perception were cleansed,

a man would see the world as it is, infinite, and I think we're living that, and it's a very exciting time to be alive.

Sarah, I wanted to ask you about those moments every now and again where you go, this bit of reality is really hard to accept, and really when you start to, what for you have been the most difficult ideas when you first,

and then that kind of satisfaction when you go, okay, I I can I can accept that.

Do you know what?

There's something that links a lot of the when you've been talking, all of you, about physics, um it's actually been reminding me of chemistry at school.

And when we were told that the people who were discovering elements um they knew from what they discovered that there were other ones and we were shown these gaps and they said, we know we will find them one day.

And that's actually quite a huge thing

to tell a teenager who's maybe not listening properly, because what you're saying is

here's some evidence, evidence that you will never see in Romford, you'll never see it at Sainsbury's or the ice skating rink, but just trust us.

And again, it's fundamental, isn't it?

The elements, they're the smallest things, nothing smaller.

And because we've found him, him, and her, we'll also one day meet these ones in the corner.

And

actually,

I think it's something that's affecting society in general at the moment in terms of trusting scientists, is that you do, it's about replication and understanding certain rules, and you do have to sometimes trust just because I, it doesn't make sense to me yet.

I really have to listen to the people who say this is how the world works.

Yeah, and sometimes we predict things in advance that are quite surprising and turn out to be true.

And of course, the products of our understanding are the technology that allows us to have a show like this and talk with each other at great distances and see the images is all based on quantum mechanics and and using it to understand matter and make it do wonderful tricks.

Wonderful tricks is great.

That just says, What is the universe?

It is a wonderful trick.

And inside that trick,

it's such a beautiful thing.

We also always ask the audience a question as well, just in case we feel that

our panel haven't entirely fulfilled the remit.

We always throw out a question to our audience.

And today we asked if you could change one thing about the physical reality of the universe, what would it be and why?

What have you got, Brian?

They're quite surreal.

So, Joe Butler says, anytime a neutrino interacts with another particle, comma, so that's very sensible,

that turns the objects into raspberry jelly.

That's what Joe would change about the laws of nature.

Will Goring says Planck's constant, so we can actually measure the time between government U-turns on COVID policy.

Eleanor Turner is more just less ambitious than the Raspberry Jelly or the Flanks Constant.

She says, honestly, I just want more crisps in the crisp packet.

We are definitely discovering that our audience is hungry today, aren't they?

They are very hungry.

We have a few more.

Shona says, I'd like to close the wormhole that steals all my socks, please.

Here's the last one.

This is my favourite one.

I haven't read it all, so I don't know where it's going.

It's quite long.

But it says, Schrodinger left that poor cat outside the box to have a bowl of milk and to live a long and happy life now it's stuck inside there forever undead but dead we would have a nicer universe if the cat was free free the cat that's what I say

free the cat

thank you very much to all our online audience uh for uh those um answers and uh thank you very much to uh our fantastic panel to go frank will check channel 11 sarah pasco and eric idle next week uh which will be the final episode of this series, I believe, we are going to do the history of rock, which of course was Brian's request that we do the history of rock.

But unlike lazy, lazy BBC4, we're not just going to go back to Tommy Steele and Skiffle.

We're going back 4.28 billion years to the faux amphibolites.

That's right, we're going to deal with faux amphibolites.

And if you have ever been looking for a band's name from a 1994 John Peel session, faux amphibolites is undoubtedly.

I think that was a lot better than Sandy Sediment, actually, who

I think just seems to kind of drift away over the years.

So there we are.

So, history of Rock Next Week.

Thank you.

I hope you now can accept or reject reality with greater ease.

Goodbye.

Hi, I'm Zand Van Talliken.

And I'm Kimberly Wilson.

And just before you go, we wanted to quickly tell you about our podcast, Made of Stronger Stuff from BBC Radio 4.

I'm a psychologist, and Zand is a medical doctor.

And we're bringing together our specialties to take a tour of the human body.

Each week, we hone in on a specific body part from the eyes and lungs to the appendix or the vagus nerve.

We ask how we can understand it better, ourselves more, and combine the body and mind to produce positive change.

So, subscribe to Made of Stronger Stuff on BBC Sounds.