13:25 Chaos theory: Predicting the future 28:00 Quantum mechanics: Heisenberg uncertainty 39:14 Quantum cosmology: The origin of the universe 43:12 Quantum physics: The "smallest" particles 44:12 Astronomy: Seeing past the observable universe 45:36 Cosmology: Time and events before the Big Bang 46:44 Neuroscience: The origin and definition of consciousness If the "Theory of Everything" (M-Theory or similar) can ever be confirmed and completed (even if by indirect observation), then we may have insight into all of the above on some level. For example, Heisenberg uncertainty, quantum fluctuations/gravity/cosmology, the source of the fundamental particles, and even events before the Big Bang may all be more knowable from this unified theory. Chaos theory may also depend on quantum fluctuations. Even consciousness may arise from quantum effects since neurotransmitters are close to the de Broglie wavelength. Also, we could see past the observable universe if we could build a telescope with a warp drive. This is something that is theoretically possible, but is practically impossible due to the present inability to generate gravitational waves. However, a unified theory could help us understand more about gravity as well. While highly speculative, all the above may actually be potentially knowable, at least in part. I think it would have been interesting to discuss NP complexity as well as Gödel's incompleteness theorem that he references at 46:15. While more abstract, these two topics more conclusively show what cannot be known given a certain approach.
"Even consciousness may arise from quantum effects". Indeed, we need to understand that, all events are subject to the Natural/Neutral Quantum Mechanics. ( The Quanta, 01 I.S. fundamental.)
Not true at all about the de Broglie wavelength of neurotransmitters. Planck’s constant is exceedingly small. Site binding chemistry is complicated and has some quantum effects, but it’s effectively a stochastic, thermodynamic process where if something wanders close enough, it “clicks.” Proteins like neurotransmitters are simply enormous compared to effects like the Uncertainty Principle.
His role in "the code" was a perspective altering experience for me. Marcus's insights sparked my desire for mathematics and by extension my will to persist. For that, I'm grateful for his contributions.
That is beautiful. We NEED more like you, those that can get lost in an equation, and perhaps one of those mathematical operation could end up solving a particularly challenging problem, or otherwise greatly improve human life for generations to come, maybe revolutionize space exploration, or build the philosophical framework of the architecture for a brilliant new branch of physics that will ultimately unleash raw human technological prowess that may be possible for us as we are now, socially and psychosocially. I am glad you discovered mathematics my friend, be well and love life, it's hard but rewarding.
In the 1980's we knew that the universe was expanding. We knew that we did not know the rate at witch the expansion of the universe was slowing. We did not know that we did not know why the the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating. In the 1990's, in an effort to measure the rate at which the expansion of the universe was slowing we made the astonishing discovery that it was not slowing at all, it was accelerating. In an effort to discover something we knew we did not know, we discovered something we did not even know to ask about.
Sautoy says that time is a mystery. Not so. We needed a tool in order to compare one motion to another, and that tool is the clock. So time is not some fundamental property of the universe. We did not invent the clock to measure time, but to measure motion. Time is merely the term we use to refer to the measure of motion.
There is a theorom that answers this: If something can be known, then there must exist a series of questions that if asked and answered, can get you from what is currently known to what one wants to know. This is pretty significant because it means you just have to be able to: 1. Find and ask a question that will get you closer to the answer and can be answered in sufficient time with an affordable amount of resources. 2. Continue to perform step 1 Eventually, you will bridge the gap from what was originally known to what you started off wanting to know.
He's one step away from the asylum, preaching to drugged depressives. You know what they say about genius? A Genius takes the G out of god and makes everything seem so Odd! (har dee har) I'm heading to Amazon as we speak to download his book, this *KING* of Oxford!
One thing is known for sure, solving the riddle of the universe isn't easy! Even with the powerful tools we have today we still have a long way to go and new information is discovered every day. I think it's amazing that something that looks deceptingly natural and easy to understand (at first glance) have so deep complex roots!
4:55 -Rumsfeld, conveniently, forgot to add that there are things we know but don't know, that is to say we got it wrong.- Edit: Just notice the speaker pointed out the 4th missing alternative...
A known unknown: We can never know how many birds are in flight on the earth at any given moment, even though we know there is a quantitative, accurate answer.
For youtube, the videos from the RI are quiete long, but worth every second. I'm a huge fan of TED Talks, they are short and offer a brought variety of topics. But this here is jsut brilliant for what it is. Thank you very much for not following the trend of 15min-speeches. Your channel offers good edutainment for months, amybe even years. And some stuff might even bring the world a little bit further. So many thanks for sharing it with everyone :)
We do have a new podcast! This event hasn't been published there yet, but you can listen here, or search 'Ri Science Podcast' in your app of choice: soundcloud.com/royal-institution/sets/ri-science-podcast
around 41:50 he is wrong. It does not matter if it is a particle or antiparticle that falls into a black hole. The infalling particle always have negative energy. That is why the black holes shrinks by Hawking radiation.
+Tokaji Leo, this has always puzzled me. Why is this? It seems like equal amounts of particles and antiparticles should fall into the black hole which results in a net zero change in the mass of the black hole. Why would the energy always be negative? What is the difference between a particle and antiparticle both with negative energy? Is negative energy a different concept unrelated to matter and antimatter? What am I missing? How do black holes evaporate?
what falls into the black hole is not necessarily an antiparticle, but a particle with a negative energy. Antiparticles in real world have real mass and energy. but when virtual particles are created from the vacuum (zero sum energy) if one becomes real (part of the universe) it must have positive energy/mass therefore the infalling particle must have negative energy. the escaping positive energy particle is seen as evaporation of the black hole but it just seems an evaporation, the real particle is a consequence of a negativ energy infalling particle which decreases the black hole's mass.
OK, this is a distinction most explanations of Hawking radiation don't make clear. Or likely it's my mental block because I have always heard "negative energy" and "positive energy" particles and substituted "antimatter" and "matter" in my head for no good reason. My error should have been obvious because when matter and antimatter annihilate a positive release of energy is the result. They don't annihilate each others total existence including energy. Otherwise matter/antimatter interactions would not be dramatic. But now I still have a similar confusion about positive and negative energy particles. Isn't it just as likely in a virtual particle creation that the positive energy particle will be inside the event horizon while the negative energy particle escapes outside? I suppose this shows that I don't understand virtual particle creation or how negative energy particles are interpreted in interact with the real universe. Or don't they? Something seems asymmetric here. Why wouldn't a negative energy particle outside the event horizon decrease the mass of the universe outside the black hole (causing the black hole to increase in mass)? It sounds as if we are saying that virtual particle pairs where negative energy falls inside the event horizon and positive falls outside will yield some observable result (a less massive black hole), whereas if the positive energy particle in the pair falls in, but the negative escapes then this instance somehow doesn't count for anything. For some reason this results in nothing, or this condition can't come about for some reason.
Yeah, "antimatter" is less a negative and more just an opposite "spin", with "spin" also not being totally what we'd normally associate with rotation. :P
Noah Spurrier I do gotta say though, that is surprising to hear that you have always thought negative energy means antimatter and positive is matter. Usually people mistake antimatter/antiparticles and dark matter to being the same thing when they are two distinct things as well. And another misconception is when people think/link Dark Matter and Dark Energy being related to one another because of the word Dark. Really dark was just a word scientist used because of how unknown everything was about them besides the fact that they knew that they had to exist within our universe.
3 years to late. Love these RI videos. Thanks Marcus, appreciate his regular appearances on BBC podcasts & have Music of the Primes book, which is just amazing. Mind you, somewhat worried when he took out the uranium. Jedburgh in Edge of Darkness (BBC series not remake). A scene you'll never forget.
It is obvious that we cannot know everything. If we start from there with an optimistic sense of adventure we can rejoice in the journey to learn more. Chaitan gives strong support to the idea that shoving off from the shore is likely to be fruitful for some and catastrophic for others.
'He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish.' - Ecclesiastes 3:11
Dear Sir, Thank you for a very interesting video. May I please have your take on a completely different subject than your brilliant presentation about what we cannot know? In a documentary about Sir Issac Newton, it said he became the director of a very prestigious post - like the director of the science academy. He apparently burned all of a certain Mr Schock’s ( I am mispronouncing his name ) notes. Strangely, this colleague claimed that he was the author of some of the things Newton claimed that he himself had discovered. I am asking this because everyone points to Newton as the father of so many astounding discoveries, but could it be that he ‘borrowed’ some of the ideas of his colleague who had the misfortune to die before Newton? Why would Newton burn all of his notebooks? I say all of this because people are people and when you read Newton had something like 17 portrait artists paint his portrait, it points to the fact or shows that he knew he was going to be known as a genius. Does it also show a psychological pattern of someone who would perhaps do anything to be in the spotlight?
In my kindergarten class 63 years ago, the was a Marcus with mental disability. Now the best math professor on youtube is my second Marcus with a sense of humor.
From that point of view I rather mathematician (which by any means I'm not!), and need to formalize this "everything" to get something as result. Otherwise, we have "result" as an answer. So this "problem of everything" is not a problem of science, that's why I was a bit surpised to see it here, on Ri, and from Marcus... And I doubt that science answer anything. It rather talk to those who can hear. "God problem" is much much easier than what science do, all you have to do is follow ))) There may be variants, of course...
18:20 My favorite part lol. I mean, it really is interesting. Makes me think of irrational numbers. Look at the digits of the square root of 2. Then look at the digits of the square root of 1.9999990. Just that tiny change by 10^-6 causes 88% of all digits after the decimal to change (assuming these irrational numbers are normal numbers). Marcus dropped the double pendulum from positions very close to each other three times, and each of which produced radically different results. It's just like the irrational numbers... What do they have in common? Or, how is it that these two phenomena appear to us to have similar outcomes? EDIT: Okay, it turns out that shortly after that part he went onto explaining how minute changes in such parameters can yield drastically different results. I just related this to irrational numbers instead of magnets.
It's worth noting that the last loopholes were closed in Bell Inequality violations a short while prior to this talk, which nails the door shut on anything controlling the decay of a uranium atom. There are no hidden variables, local or otherwise. The paper was published in the October 2015 edition of Nature.
Actually according to thermodynamics it's fundamentally impossible to know everything by default as you'd have to measure everything everywhere and keep track of energies used and measured, but you can't measure what you use to measure to an exact amount. Not even in the sense of knowing just factual data we could never know everything, not just because of what I just mentioned, but because we also always have to assume there is something we don't know.
Describing the fractal for unknowability seems like a great way for people to comprehend this as I kind of got it based on that where as I didn't get it at all before.
I wondered about that red/blue/yellow magnet ending point plot: He said it is an infinite complexity, but if space itself is quantizied, there are discrete starting spots, a finite number of starting spots. So why cant you just increase the resolution to that planck length and definitely predict for EACH spot of space where it will end?
@fynes leigh you think yourself so awfully clever, don't you? Yet fail to comprehend Gödel's theorem, what it means and why it's true. Just watch the video even, untill you understand atleast what's beign said.
@fynes leigh Are you high or are you trying to sound intellectual? "We" is here meant to refer to the mathematical society. "I" am a mathematician, therefore an ounce of "we". The mathematical society at large can collectively know a lot of things. Gödel's incompleteness is a mathematical theorem that ultimately means that in any system of mathematics you can think of there will be true statements which can't be proven.
It's pretty straight forward. He used mathematical paradoxes to prove his theorems. "This statement is false." _If_ the statement _"This statement is false."_ was *true* -then it would necessarily be _false._ _If_ the statement _"This statement is false."_ was *false* then it would necessarily be _true._ Therefore the nature of this statement is a paradox. That means it's not a valid proposition because it's conclusion is senseless, illogical and unacceptable. It's neither true or false because it can't be either one and it can't be both. It's self-contradicting and inconsistent. It's nonsense. That's just reason. So consider this: "This statement is unprovable." _If_ you could prove it, you would be proving something that is false, which is impossible by the laws of logic. Reason and logic govern math. Therefore, the statement must be unprovable... and thus, also proven to be true. This was Gödel's point. You can't prove something which is false, but this _can_ prove that something which is true is unprovable. He just used equations instead of words to *prove* it. Smart guy!
We cannot know what we are totally unaware of. We do not know what we are totally unaware of. We are becoming aware of so much data today we don't even know how to organize it.
In the Harry Potter stories, Ron Weasley's mother has something to say about your iPhone and other AI type intelligences: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you cannot see where it keeps its brain." Great lecture. Thanks.
16:55 i think I know how to create conditions to have similar results in several pendules simultaneously.(need testing) So is possible to get the same motion multiple time?
Its so cool when you get the universe, and can ask questions like these. My personal 'Solution' takes it all in and describes it beautifully. However, My vision of the universe Requires a God, and is so easy to understand. As soon as I heard the introduction, faith, God, etc. All would have to be constant unknowns. We may push the stage back, by our discoveries, but the curtain is still pulled down. Almost makes you think of 'What are the unknowns that we SHOULD not know"; 'To look at the face of God' And I'm not religious.
Consciousness is certainly not one of the 'unknowable' things. Firstly, it's not a 'thing' at all. It is a property. And we understand more about it all the time. Most of the confusion around it is because we do not have good words with precise definitions for many of the things we wish to ask. When someone says "is the red you see the same as the red I see?" they can't actually explain what they are asking. They generally can not even answer why they make the baseless leap in thinking that after being unconscious for a night they are the 'same person' when they awake. They could not tell you what makes the self of the past and the self of the present the 'same person'. They can't explain what a 'person' is at all really. Our knowledge is meager thus far, but there is no reason to think that it can't advance quite far. Unlike certain questions, we can at least imagine what an answer would look like. We can know, right now, for instance, that a body in an environment similar to the environment we inhabit is absolutely required to give rise to a consciousness that would be recognizably "like us." We can know with great certainty that no machine-based consciousness, absent a body (though a simulated one might do), will be anything like a human consciousness. We know this because cutting off sensory input from our environment to a human conscious brain results in extremely rapid total dissolution of consciousness. Extreme sensory deprivation, along with mountains of evidence showing profound changes in a persons subjective conscious experience of the world and themselves due to changes in the body such as traumatic injury, is informative. Everywhere there is an alteration to consciousness, or a cessation of it, or the emergence of it, are opportunities to learn. And, mostly, to develop precise language to discuss the topic which is a very large part of the journey. You can't talk about subatomic particles if you've not even conjectured atoms yet and think of objects in the world only through a lens of intuitive essentialism.
But when the air smells of fresh flour tortillas being hand made, and the sounds are therewith consistent, in a small wooden house. Can you wonder about your ability to know that tortillas are being made. If yes, then that vitiates against your postulation.
Bravo Mssr. Sautoy! Very interesting; well received. My first response was a bit Clement: "The problem isn't the things we don't know; it's the things we do know, that aren't true." I've never been troubled by the fact that some things aren't knowable. As the Doctor said, "All knowledge has its limits. Ours reaches this far and no further..." (Proving my sci-fi addiction has some uses!) But I've never been inclined to make things up to fill in the gaps. Any idea can be interesting. How can we test it? We can't. Then that's where we leave it. That includes a lot of non-scientific questions and a good number of scientific ones as well. But I think some questions beyond material physics, some questions in ethics and politics and aesthetics and philosophy actually can be answered and known in a reasonable way... which makes me bad company for the pure materialists!...
Kai Henningsen That's a self-reflexive epistemology: All cars are red Fords. How do I know? 'Cause if they're not Fords painted red then they are not cars...
Double pendulum - plenty of patterns for each starting position and energy level. Same starting position and energy level should allow us to predict probable states for each.
I liked the presentation, but I should tell that even it is not trivial, consciousness is just an illusion arising from our evolution. If you look at other humans, you can just say they are programmed robots by the evolution. Even you can program a robot to do similar things and behave similar. We can easily accept that there is no such thing as consciousness and it is made up, as the distinction between living and non living things. But when we turn to ourselves, we find feelings and talking voice in our heads, which we call consciousness, but we just saw it is just irrelevant. I think it is caused by feed back loops in the brain where different parts of the brain interacts. Such as, your word processing unit sends words to your speaking center, then you speak, the feed back loop goes from ear back to the word processing center where the data should be updated because you heard the word. And other parts of the brain recognizes the patterns and say this happened before, this is your voice and the new word you hear is actually coming from your part of the brain. So those parts of the brain have to be in extremely complex interaction, which I suspect that the consciousness arises. We may call it a phenomenon. As actually everything we know is a phenomenon, so why get surprised about that :) Again, the universe is so amazingly beautiful, it just created with the evolution phenomenon a machine that will get surprised by itself. Of course this surprise is expected just because we are the learners, the universe is what it is. And who put those phenomena into existence? Well, probably the question "who" is irrelevant. "How it came into existence?" is a much better question to ask. And, as our little machines try to understand, I'm sure the results (if we would be able to have any) would be quite surprising :)
I think an important issue that need to be included in the equation of truth searching is discovered through the neural network of our nervous system which is no matter how complex limited!
I think the end was a little telling. Its fine to have an ambitious attitude as a scientist, but should a scientist resort to throwing up his hands just because someone questions the inherent limits underlying their work? Should a leading pioneer in a scientific field such as Christof Koch really be so angered for having to consider the inherent unknowables which his field is based on? What if years of research can saved by taking a step back, making room in your background assumptions for the possibility of implicit limitations, and moving forward as a more integrally-informed researcher? Christof Koch implied his choice as a scientist was to either keep blinders on to nagging doubts or throw his hands up in the air in frustration. And then Marcus kind of endorsed the idea that knowing you can't know something is somehow cause for despair, and to fight this hopeless despair you must push doubts aside and slightly delude yourself into expecting that everything should be knowable just to get on with your day. Just saying I don't think scientists need to kid themselves or be afraid of inherent unknowables.
Neutral Criticism Sure, that's healthy ambition, I'm just concerned they will be missing those breakthroughs and epiphanies that come from stepping back and reassessing.
Kai Henningsen There is no evidence that there will ever be a physical correlate to measure "amount" of consciousness. You can measure electricity output, but it might be a mentally challenged person with a lot of stray firing. Christof Koch and others are assuming that the property or feature of matter which enables the emergence of subjectivity is entirely supervenient on macro-physical interactions. It might not be supervenient, like the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism. Aka mind and matter are like shape and color - you can't reduce one to the other.
In the intro when he reference what some have thought to be entirely unknowable to science, I was eagerly awaiting a reference to Immanuel Kant's famous quote, "There will never be an Issac Newton for a blade of grass," Charles Darwin obviously being that Issac Newton. But, alas, such a reference newer came.
And nothing. I simply thought the quote from Immanuel Kant, who is regarded as one of, if not the most influential philosopher of the modern era, well represented the possibility for even great minds to make drastically inaccurate predictions about the future of science.
In Kant's day, there was no such categorical distinction. However, even if that is the case, in the contemporary sense of the terms, is not the nature of the knowable in contrast to the unknowable a distinction to be made by philosophers, not sceintists?
There is something we cannot know. We cannot know, with certainty, that we have come to know all the knowable things, even if we have. Or, conversely, we cannot know that there is definitely not some other thing out there to know, of which we remain unaware.
To me it makes sense. Unknowns are questions you can ask about. Unknown unknowns are questions you don't know to ask about. Probably a scientific way to say that. Maybe the 2nd derivative of understanding. Don't know ... doesn't matter.
Well, of cource one cannot know evertyhing, but if one does not know what telomeres are, one actually lacs real scientific curiosity. Evertbody with that genuine curiosity knows what it is. Telomeres are strings of dna at the end of each cromosome, and these are necessaru for cell division. They tend to shorten for ecah division, and eventually they are so short that the cells do not divide any more. This shortening process is an important component in aging. But this is not the whole story. The cells has mechanisms to build them up again, and thiese mechanisms are more or less efficient depending on cell type, species and individuals, which means that aging is not something absolute as people usually think,
My reaction to the telomere thing was simpler. Journalist cannot be bothered to look at Wikipedia. (Or Google, just as often.) Explains the state of journalism.
The most imporant articles in Wikipedia are heavily policed by authorities that ensure the articles propagate the politically correct information, which is not necessarily the most truthful information.
+Knut, what does that have to do with -- and how does it contradict -- what I wrote? (Also ignores that journalists are the ones who maintain the PC culture.)
In addition to the butterfly effect is the fact that the equations of dynamics are themselves not perfectly true - all equations in physics are in some degree approximations because they are derived from models which idealise and simplify reality.
13:25 Chaos theory: Predicting the future
28:00 Quantum mechanics: Heisenberg uncertainty
39:14 Quantum cosmology: The origin of the universe
43:12 Quantum physics: The "smallest" particles
44:12 Astronomy: Seeing past the observable universe
45:36 Cosmology: Time and events before the Big Bang
46:44 Neuroscience: The origin and definition of consciousness
If the "Theory of Everything" (M-Theory or similar) can ever be confirmed and completed (even if by indirect observation), then we may have insight into all of the above on some level. For example, Heisenberg uncertainty, quantum fluctuations/gravity/cosmology, the source of the fundamental particles, and even events before the Big Bang may all be more knowable from this unified theory. Chaos theory may also depend on quantum fluctuations. Even consciousness may arise from quantum effects since neurotransmitters are close to the de Broglie wavelength.
Also, we could see past the observable universe if we could build a telescope with a warp drive. This is something that is theoretically possible, but is practically impossible due to the present inability to generate gravitational waves. However, a unified theory could help us understand more about gravity as well.
While highly speculative, all the above may actually be potentially knowable, at least in part. I think it would have been interesting to discuss NP complexity as well as Gödel's incompleteness theorem that he references at 46:15. While more abstract, these two topics more conclusively show what cannot be known given a certain approach.
"Even consciousness may arise from quantum effects". Indeed, we need to understand that, all events are subject to the Natural/Neutral Quantum Mechanics. ( The Quanta, 01 I.S. fundamental.)
David McCoul Thank You. Interesting read.
thanks dave
Not true at all about the de Broglie wavelength of neurotransmitters. Planck’s constant is exceedingly small. Site binding chemistry is complicated and has some quantum effects, but it’s effectively a stochastic, thermodynamic process where if something wanders close enough, it “clicks.” Proteins like neurotransmitters are simply enormous compared to effects like the Uncertainty Principle.
Alternate solution: QD Theory
I absolutely love this guy. The pendulum example was an event on itself
Yllgjg
He's also great at replying to email if your 4 year old asks big maths questions you don't have a clue about. Top guy. (Shame he's a gooner!)
18:18
"Ah... so *-wooooooooooooAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOwww!* I mean where did that come from?! _Unbelievable!"_
-Pure joy.
he's my favourite on the stand-up science circuit!
Does infinite amounts of coffee give infinite amounts of energy? Marcus seems to have tried to test this theory...
Like a true scientist.
@@johnjames-hq3ye 'A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,' Alfréd Rényi, often attributed to Paul Erdös.
@@muttleycrew why are you telling me this?
@@johnjames-hq3ye Because I assumed you were intelligent enough to appreciate the genius of it.
@@muttleycrew are you kidding? the only word i didn't have to look up was coffee. lol.
i love the way he is excited about science thanks man you are inspiration to me
His role in "the code" was a perspective altering experience for me. Marcus's insights sparked my desire for mathematics and by extension my will to persist. For that, I'm grateful for his contributions.
That is beautiful. We NEED more like you, those that can get lost in an equation, and perhaps one of those mathematical operation could end up solving a particularly challenging problem, or otherwise greatly improve human life for generations to come, maybe revolutionize space exploration, or build the philosophical framework of the architecture for a brilliant new branch of physics that will ultimately unleash raw human technological prowess that may be possible for us as we are now, socially and psychosocially. I am glad you discovered mathematics my friend, be well and love life, it's hard but rewarding.
form is emptiness ~ emptiness is form ♡ love all these videos, makes me so glad I am a Buddhist, so grateful for l this life ♢
In the 1980's we knew that the universe was expanding. We knew that we did not know the rate at witch the expansion of the universe was slowing. We did not know that we did not know why the the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.
In the 1990's, in an effort to measure the rate at which the expansion of the universe was slowing we made the astonishing discovery that it was not slowing at all, it was accelerating.
In an effort to discover something we knew we did not know, we discovered something we did not even know to ask about.
Always good to see Marcus giving a lecture. Never ever disappointing.
I love listenignto the ri lectures used to watch them when very young now 48 not a scientist and still enjoythem. ;-)
Sautoy says that time is a mystery. Not so. We needed a tool in order to compare
one motion to another, and that tool is the clock. So time is not some fundamental
property of the universe. We did not invent the clock to measure time, but to measure
motion. Time is merely the term we use to refer to the measure of motion.
This guy is a hoot. He is funny. He knows his science. He talks about things you have not heard a thousand times before.
Highly recommended!
What a compilation of idea. Amazing work prof. Thanks for the talk.
There is a theorom that answers this: If something can be known, then there must exist a series of questions that if asked and answered, can get you from what is currently known to what one wants to know.
This is pretty significant because it means you just have to be able to:
1. Find and ask a question that will get you closer to the answer and can be answered in sufficient time with an affordable amount of resources.
2. Continue to perform step 1
Eventually, you will bridge the gap from what was originally known to what you started off wanting to know.
Watch with 0.75x speed to sound normal!
Wtfffff
@@heinrichfoot4921 w
@@heinrichfoot4921 2
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@@heinrichfoot4921 w6w
What better way to explain chaos than to have a seriously chaotic person to present it.
By the end of this video I expect either him or me to have a seizure.
A seizure or a nerdgasm.
That's the idea. This way you cannot know anything, Here is a video that contains pure logic.
ruclips.net/video/eQVm8RokoBA/видео.html
He's one step away from the asylum, preaching to drugged depressives. You know what they say about genius? A Genius takes the G out of god and makes everything seem so Odd! (har dee har) I'm heading to Amazon as we speak to download his book, this *KING* of Oxford!
He gives Clifford Stoll some serious competition.
It is 'turtles all the way down'...
+Thomas Smith
Discworld?
+wong history
+Джонатан Свифт
Ignorant.
wong How so?
*crickets chirping*
lul, noob
The human experience is that we can imagine. So much of what we know came from trying to explain what we observe.
that was a brilliant lecture. i need to learn and think more
I loved when he was explaining how we might know which side the dice would show and it unexpectedly flew right off the desk.
This video holds the record of "largest number of words spoken in under an hour" on youtube
You haven't met my mother, you would withdraw that statement if you did!
I like this guy, I'm not sure about the arsenal thing, but this chap is cool.
That's the best part. I hope he has discovered why they aren't doing well and there is a science to rectify that!
"Holding on to hope when everything is dark, is the greatest test of faith"
I work in a casino. If my boss sees that pendulum it will be the newest Roulette game.
Not predictable enough to skew the odds.
Marcus du Sautoy is actually a Stand-up Physicist... I love this guy...
Pretty sure he's a mathematician and not a physicist but the distinction can look pretty small and petty sometimes.
I've now watched the same lecture nine months later and......it's still fascinating!
One thing is known for sure, solving the riddle of the universe isn't easy! Even with the powerful tools we have today we still have a long way to go and new information is discovered every day. I think it's amazing that something that looks deceptingly natural and easy to understand (at first glance) have so deep complex roots!
4:55 -Rumsfeld, conveniently, forgot to add that there are things we know but don't know, that is to say we got it wrong.-
Edit: Just notice the speaker pointed out the 4th missing alternative...
When in doubt, please refer to the old Chinese proverb:
"You can have anything, but, you can't have everything."
You can have everything. You just can't have all of it. (old Newfie saying)
No one is Omniscient
@@123ScamHunter that makes no sense.
I prefer the Terry Pratchett version: "You can't have everything; where would you put it?"
@@123ScamHunter that makes no sense. maybe trying to be smart ain't your thing.
I love Marcus - Hes such a wonderful speaker!
I hope he sold lots of copies of his book. An inspiration, and brilliant communicator. Will look out for more.
A known unknown: We can never know how many birds are in flight on the earth at any given moment, even though we know there is a quantitative, accurate answer.
Assuming we have the technical ability to count them.. the uncertainty lies within the edge cases
y wud god want 2 noe anything
You will never know what is currently in my pocket.
No. That is a known unknown. You know the question, but not the answer.
@@mrandersson2009 the One Ring…
"Iphone think therefore iphone am" - last communication with the machines before skynet.
@Chaz Byrne You know it man.
Iphone therefore I text.
He is amazing with an excellent explaining quality and an ability to hold the listeners..
I love knowledge... It makes me feel smart !
hi, my name is knowledge, how are you? lol
I always tell people I gave up organized religion for Lent one year and never looked back.
Wonderful!
rimshot
.. for that to happen the entire U.S. army would have to be disbanded.
Awesome. Perfectly fine. An observation of faith, without oppression and destruction. Good on you. Doing the same myself.
also my favorite....all religious persons are atheist. I just take my belief one religion further.
For youtube, the videos from the RI are quiete long, but worth every second.
I'm a huge fan of TED Talks, they are short and offer a brought variety of topics.
But this here is jsut brilliant for what it is. Thank you very much for not following the trend of 15min-speeches. Your channel offers good edutainment for months, amybe even years. And some stuff might even bring the world a little bit further. So many thanks for sharing it with everyone :)
quite long,entertainment,and maybe even years
Does RI have a podcast? I'd love to listen to this in the car!
We do have a new podcast! This event hasn't been published there yet, but you can listen here, or search 'Ri Science Podcast' in your app of choice: soundcloud.com/royal-institution/sets/ri-science-podcast
Thanks! Added now! Keep up the great work!
The Royal Institution added!! Thank you! Xx
The Royal Institution cannot download in Hong Kong though
JULIE MORE Hong Kong +1
Every new discovery brings up new questions. That process will continue for as long as we do.
around 41:50 he is wrong. It does not matter if it is a particle or antiparticle that falls into a black hole. The infalling particle always have negative energy. That is why the black holes shrinks by Hawking radiation.
+Tokaji Leo, this has always puzzled me. Why is this? It seems like equal amounts of particles and antiparticles should fall into the black hole which results in a net zero change in the mass of the black hole. Why would the energy always be negative? What is the difference between a particle and antiparticle both with negative energy? Is negative energy a different concept unrelated to matter and antimatter? What am I missing? How do black holes evaporate?
what falls into the black hole is not necessarily an antiparticle, but a particle with a negative energy. Antiparticles in real world have real mass and energy. but when virtual particles are created from the vacuum (zero sum energy) if one becomes real (part of the universe) it must have positive energy/mass therefore the infalling particle must have negative energy. the escaping positive energy particle is seen as evaporation of the black hole but it just seems an evaporation, the real particle is a consequence of a negativ energy infalling particle which decreases the black hole's mass.
OK, this is a distinction most explanations of Hawking radiation don't make clear. Or likely it's my mental block because I have always heard "negative energy" and "positive energy" particles and substituted "antimatter" and "matter" in my head for no good reason. My error should have been obvious because when matter and antimatter annihilate a positive release of energy is the result. They don't annihilate each others total existence including energy. Otherwise matter/antimatter interactions would not be dramatic. But now I still have a similar confusion about positive and negative energy particles. Isn't it just as likely in a virtual particle creation that the positive energy particle will be inside the event horizon while the negative energy particle escapes outside? I suppose this shows that I don't understand virtual particle creation or how negative energy particles are interpreted in interact with the real universe. Or don't they? Something seems asymmetric here. Why wouldn't a negative energy particle outside the event horizon decrease the mass of the universe outside the black hole (causing the black hole to increase in mass)? It sounds as if we are saying that virtual particle pairs where negative energy falls inside the event horizon and positive falls outside will yield some observable result (a less massive black hole), whereas if the positive energy particle in the pair falls in, but the negative escapes then this instance somehow doesn't count for anything. For some reason this results in nothing, or this condition can't come about for some reason.
Yeah, "antimatter" is less a negative and more just an opposite "spin", with "spin" also not being totally what we'd normally associate with rotation. :P
Noah Spurrier I do gotta say though, that is surprising to hear that you have always thought negative energy means antimatter and positive is matter. Usually people mistake antimatter/antiparticles and dark matter to being the same thing when they are two distinct things as well.
And another misconception is when people think/link Dark Matter and Dark Energy being related to one another because of the word Dark. Really dark was just a word scientist used because of how unknown everything was about them besides the fact that they knew that they had to exist within our universe.
3 years to late. Love these RI videos. Thanks Marcus, appreciate his regular appearances on BBC podcasts & have Music of the Primes book, which is just amazing. Mind you, somewhat worried when he took out the uranium. Jedburgh in Edge of Darkness (BBC series not remake). A scene you'll never forget.
Thank you Marcus. Fascinating as always!
Sautoy's brain works at the speed of light as does his speech,but amasingly he is still easy to follow.
51 minutes without drawing breath! Is this a new world record?
What... You're joking right? The reason I had to watch this in 3 sittings was because of his constant breathing/slurping/whatever you want to call it.
It is obvious that we cannot know everything. If we start from there with an optimistic sense of adventure we can rejoice in the journey to learn more. Chaitan gives strong support to the idea that shoving off from the shore is likely to be fruitful for some and catastrophic for others.
"you've changed the result by measuring it!"
This is a Spectacular Talk by Marcus, his energy carries you along with him very well thankyou
Great Work!
Let's get more of this sort of material.
'He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish.' - Ecclesiastes 3:11
Dear Sir, Thank you for a very interesting video. May I please have your take on a completely different subject than your brilliant presentation about what we cannot know? In a documentary about Sir Issac Newton, it said he became the director of a very prestigious post - like the director of the science academy. He apparently burned all of a certain Mr Schock’s ( I am mispronouncing his name ) notes. Strangely, this colleague claimed that he was the author of some of the things Newton claimed that he himself had discovered. I am asking this because everyone points to Newton as the father of so many astounding discoveries, but could it be that he ‘borrowed’ some of the ideas of his colleague who had the misfortune to die before Newton? Why would Newton burn all of his notebooks? I say all of this because people are people and when you read Newton had something like 17 portrait artists paint his portrait, it points to the fact or shows that he knew he was going to be known as a genius. Does it also show a psychological pattern of someone who would perhaps do anything to be in the spotlight?
In my kindergarten class 63 years ago, the was a Marcus with mental disability.
Now the best math professor on youtube is my second Marcus with a sense of humor.
1956? Were you in Miss Murphy's class...I seem to remember an intellectual clown!
I wonder what is "everything"...
ytrnjdikzgt It is a short representation of things that we currently know, will know, don't know, and won't ever know. Maybe. I'm not sure either.
From that point of view I rather mathematician (which by any means I'm not!), and need to formalize this "everything" to get something as result. Otherwise, we have "result" as an answer. So this "problem of everything" is not a problem of science, that's why I was a bit surpised to see it here, on Ri, and from Marcus...
And I doubt that science answer anything. It rather talk to those who can hear. "God problem" is much much easier than what science do, all you have to do is follow ))) There may be variants, of course...
It's a contraction.
It means "every thing."
"Every thing" and "eveything" there is huge difference: first one can be counted, second one is not.
+ThePeaceableKingdom
"It means "every thing."
Someone with common sense appears. Thank you.
This gentleman gets an award for the longest book plug in history. I was highly interesting and thoughtful though.
This video has a really interesting talk. ☺️👍
Really enjoyed this lecture.
18:20 My favorite part lol. I mean, it really is interesting. Makes me think of irrational numbers. Look at the digits of the square root of 2. Then look at the digits of the square root of 1.9999990. Just that tiny change by 10^-6 causes 88% of all digits after the decimal to change (assuming these irrational numbers are normal numbers). Marcus dropped the double pendulum from positions very close to each other three times, and each of which produced radically different results. It's just like the irrational numbers... What do they have in common? Or, how is it that these two phenomena appear to us to have similar outcomes?
EDIT: Okay, it turns out that shortly after that part he went onto explaining how minute changes in such parameters can yield drastically different results. I just related this to irrational numbers instead of magnets.
It's worth noting that the last loopholes were closed in Bell Inequality violations a short while prior to this talk, which nails the door shut on anything controlling the decay of a uranium atom. There are no hidden variables, local or otherwise. The paper was published in the October 2015 edition of Nature.
I won't lie, I watched the double pendulum bit twice! (erm and applauded it!! :D )
Actually according to thermodynamics it's fundamentally impossible to know everything by default as you'd have to measure everything everywhere and keep track of energies used and measured, but you can't measure what you use to measure to an exact amount.
Not even in the sense of knowing just factual data we could never know everything, not just because of what I just mentioned, but because we also always have to assume there is something we don't know.
"Heisenberg was here....or somewhere thereabouts."
Schrodinger was here. Probably.
Describing the fractal for unknowability seems like a great way for people to comprehend this as I kind of got it based on that where as I didn't get it at all before.
We are always on the event horizon of the unknown.
Ironically for a lecture on chaos I found Marcus's lecture clear and engaging
thats the indian philosophy: "know everything there is to know" indeed before the bhakti movement made all indians forget their religion was science
Thanks a lot for understanding this
I wondered about that red/blue/yellow magnet ending point plot: He said it is an infinite complexity, but if space itself is quantizied, there are discrete starting spots, a finite number of starting spots. So why cant you just increase the resolution to that planck length and definitely predict for EACH spot of space where it will end?
starts at 13:25
Btw he is getting me energized. No sleep inducement here!
"We've have proven there are things that are true that we can not prove are true." Gödel, the ultimate troll.
His decisive approach to undecidability never gets tired.
@fynes leigh you think yourself so awfully clever, don't you? Yet fail to comprehend Gödel's theorem, what it means and why it's true. Just watch the video even, untill you understand atleast what's beign said.
@fynes leigh Are you high or are you trying to sound intellectual? "We" is here meant to refer to the mathematical society. "I" am a mathematician, therefore an ounce of "we".
The mathematical society at large can collectively know a lot of things. Gödel's incompleteness is a mathematical theorem that ultimately means that in any system of mathematics you can think of there will be true statements which can't be proven.
It's pretty straight forward.
He used mathematical paradoxes to prove his theorems.
"This statement is false."
_If_ the statement _"This statement is false."_ was *true* -then it would necessarily be _false._
_If_ the statement _"This statement is false."_ was *false* then it would necessarily be _true._
Therefore the nature of this statement is a paradox.
That means it's not a valid proposition because it's conclusion is senseless, illogical and unacceptable.
It's neither true or false because it can't be either one and it can't be both.
It's self-contradicting and inconsistent.
It's nonsense.
That's just reason.
So consider this:
"This statement is unprovable."
_If_ you could prove it, you would be proving something that is false, which is impossible by the laws of logic.
Reason and logic govern math.
Therefore, the statement must be unprovable... and thus, also proven to be true.
This was Gödel's point.
You can't prove something which is false, but this _can_ prove that something which is true is unprovable.
He just used equations instead of words to *prove* it.
Smart guy!
Thank you. Some things will always be unknowable.
how do you know
HA! 😅
The ultimate point of knowledge is to know we don't know everything..
When I forget what I forgot I am cured...lol. שלום
Exactly the lecture the RI should produce.
What about Gödel's Theorem?
lol, the exact same guy talks about this at numberphile
he talks about this at 46.35
I've been working on the Gödel-Heisenberg theorem - I'm just not sure it's complete yet....
@@DavidAndrewsPEC I wonder if, a year later, it's still in a superposition of incomplete and inconsistent :)
@@rhesarozendaal6551
There are ideas but I cannot tell how sure I am of them. Or not. :p
We cannot know what we are totally unaware of. We do not know what we are totally unaware of. We are becoming aware of so much data today we don't even know how to organize it.
In the Harry Potter stories, Ron Weasley's mother has something to say about your iPhone and other AI type intelligences: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you cannot see where it keeps its brain." Great lecture. Thanks.
16:55 i think I know how to create conditions to have similar results in several pendules simultaneously.(need testing) So is possible to get the same motion multiple time?
his reaction from the third pendulum swing was awesome lol
Someone else had a similar pendulum with an led in the tip which was easier to see.
Really good talk. I was hoping that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem got some attention, but the other subjects were very interesting.
Ah... Because of your interest in the other subjects, you were NOT left feeling incomplete. Good one. 🙂
The universe is constantly moving.
Relative to what?
@@mentalmelt Relative to the other 1s and 0s in the simulation.
Its so cool when you get the universe, and can ask questions like these. My personal 'Solution' takes it all in and describes it beautifully. However, My vision of the universe Requires a God, and is so easy to understand. As soon as I heard the introduction, faith, God, etc. All would have to be constant unknowns. We may push the stage back, by our discoveries, but the curtain is still pulled down. Almost makes you think of 'What are the unknowns that we SHOULD not know"; 'To look at the face of God' And I'm not religious.
I think Marcus should be the new Dr Who
mixolydian2010
He takes his RISK seriously
Royal Institute Scientific Knowledge...
Maho Matsubayashi - lame attempt at humour
Marcus is very good to explain only I can not match the speed he talks
Consciousness is certainly not one of the 'unknowable' things. Firstly, it's not a 'thing' at all. It is a property. And we understand more about it all the time. Most of the confusion around it is because we do not have good words with precise definitions for many of the things we wish to ask. When someone says "is the red you see the same as the red I see?" they can't actually explain what they are asking. They generally can not even answer why they make the baseless leap in thinking that after being unconscious for a night they are the 'same person' when they awake. They could not tell you what makes the self of the past and the self of the present the 'same person'. They can't explain what a 'person' is at all really.
Our knowledge is meager thus far, but there is no reason to think that it can't advance quite far. Unlike certain questions, we can at least imagine what an answer would look like. We can know, right now, for instance, that a body in an environment similar to the environment we inhabit is absolutely required to give rise to a consciousness that would be recognizably "like us." We can know with great certainty that no machine-based consciousness, absent a body (though a simulated one might do), will be anything like a human consciousness. We know this because cutting off sensory input from our environment to a human conscious brain results in extremely rapid total dissolution of consciousness. Extreme sensory deprivation, along with mountains of evidence showing profound changes in a persons subjective conscious experience of the world and themselves due to changes in the body such as traumatic injury, is informative. Everywhere there is an alteration to consciousness, or a cessation of it, or the emergence of it, are opportunities to learn. And, mostly, to develop precise language to discuss the topic which is a very large part of the journey. You can't talk about subatomic particles if you've not even conjectured atoms yet and think of objects in the world only through a lens of intuitive essentialism.
But when the air smells of fresh flour tortillas being hand made, and the sounds are therewith consistent, in a small wooden house. Can you wonder about your ability to know that tortillas are being made. If yes, then that vitiates against your postulation.
A property is a thing, but not every thing is a property.
Bravo Mssr. Sautoy!
Very interesting; well received.
My first response was a bit Clement: "The problem isn't the things we don't know; it's the things we do know, that aren't true."
I've never been troubled by the fact that some things aren't knowable. As the Doctor said, "All knowledge has its limits. Ours reaches this far and no further..." (Proving my sci-fi addiction has some uses!)
But I've never been inclined to make things up to fill in the gaps.
Any idea can be interesting. How can we test it? We can't. Then that's where we leave it. That includes a lot of non-scientific questions and a good number of scientific ones as well.
But I think some questions beyond material physics, some questions in ethics and politics and aesthetics and philosophy actually can be answered and known in a reasonable way... which makes me bad company for the pure materialists!...
Either the answers to those questions *are* reachable by science at least in principle, or they are not knowledge.
Kai Henningsen
That's a self-reflexive epistemology: All cars are red Fords. How do I know? 'Cause if they're not Fords painted red then they are not cars...
skip the boring verbose intro, the thing starts at 13:30
manu de hanoi Thanks a lot 👍
Thanks!
i like the "boring" verbose
OMG, I read this at 13:19, seriously
Pay attention to the stuff before 13:30. The stuff Manu de Hanoi doesn't understand. And therefore doesn't want you to hear.
Double pendulum - plenty of patterns for each starting position and energy level. Same starting position and energy level should allow us to predict probable states for each.
Bertie Wooster - the "same starting position" has to be accurate to within a Planck Length
I liked the presentation, but I should tell that even it is not trivial, consciousness is just an illusion arising from our evolution. If you look at other humans, you can just say they are programmed robots by the evolution. Even you can program a robot to do similar things and behave similar. We can easily accept that there is no such thing as consciousness and it is made up, as the distinction between living and non living things. But when we turn to ourselves, we find feelings and talking voice in our heads, which we call consciousness, but we just saw it is just irrelevant. I think it is caused by feed back loops in the brain where different parts of the brain interacts. Such as, your word processing unit sends words to your speaking center, then you speak, the feed back loop goes from ear back to the word processing center where the data should be updated because you heard the word. And other parts of the brain recognizes the patterns and say this happened before, this is your voice and the new word you hear is actually coming from your part of the brain. So those parts of the brain have to be in extremely complex interaction, which I suspect that the consciousness arises. We may call it a phenomenon. As actually everything we know is a phenomenon, so why get surprised about that :) Again, the universe is so amazingly beautiful, it just created with the evolution phenomenon a machine that will get surprised by itself. Of course this surprise is expected just because we are the learners, the universe is what it is. And who put those phenomena into existence? Well, probably the question "who" is irrelevant. "How it came into existence?" is a much better question to ask. And, as our little machines try to understand, I'm sure the results (if we would be able to have any) would be quite surprising :)
The evolution god....yes.
Consciousness is real. Just shut up, just, just shut up
I think an important issue that need to be included in the equation of truth searching is discovered through the neural network of our nervous system which is no matter how complex limited!
I think the end was a little telling. Its fine to have an ambitious attitude as a scientist, but should a scientist resort to throwing up his hands just because someone questions the inherent limits underlying their work? Should a leading pioneer in a scientific field such as Christof Koch really be so angered for having to consider the inherent unknowables which his field is based on? What if years of research can saved by taking a step back, making room in your background assumptions for the possibility of implicit limitations, and moving forward as a more integrally-informed researcher? Christof Koch implied his choice as a scientist was to either keep blinders on to nagging doubts or throw his hands up in the air in frustration. And then Marcus kind of endorsed the idea that knowing you can't know something is somehow cause for despair, and to fight this hopeless despair you must push doubts aside and slightly delude yourself into expecting that everything should be knowable just to get on with your day. Just saying I don't think scientists need to kid themselves or be afraid of inherent unknowables.
But then many groundbreaking discoveries were due to the people who were trying to do the unthinkables.
Neutral Criticism Sure, that's healthy ambition, I'm just concerned they will be missing those breakthroughs and epiphanies that come from stepping back and reassessing.
Agreed. Pursuit of knowledge is not an easy process. That much we know for sure.
_the inherent unknowables which his field is based on_
I don't think I've ever heard of unknowables forming part of the *_basis_* of a field.
Kai Henningsen There is no evidence that there will ever be a physical correlate to measure "amount" of consciousness. You can measure electricity output, but it might be a mentally challenged person with a lot of stray firing. Christof Koch and others are assuming that the property or feature of matter which enables the emergence of subjectivity is entirely supervenient on macro-physical interactions. It might not be supervenient, like the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism. Aka mind and matter are like shape and color - you can't reduce one to the other.
The guy never spits...his mouth is sheer talking power, remarkable
I’ve got a Ph.D. in General Knowledge.
;)
wow, I loved that, thanxxx!
In the intro when he reference what some have thought to be entirely unknowable to science, I was eagerly awaiting a reference to Immanuel Kant's famous quote, "There will never be an Issac Newton for a blade of grass," Charles Darwin obviously being that Issac Newton. But, alas, such a reference newer came.
And?
And nothing. I simply thought the quote from Immanuel Kant, who is regarded as one of, if not the most influential philosopher of the modern era, well represented the possibility for even great minds to make drastically inaccurate predictions about the future of science.
In Kant's day, there was no such categorical distinction. However, even if that is the case, in the contemporary sense of the terms, is not the nature of the knowable in contrast to the unknowable a distinction to be made by philosophers, not sceintists?
But it's not definitive, it's like Schrodinger's cat, depends who you are and what you know, and when you asked the question
@@williamgoode9114 Sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean.
this guy is fantastic. great video!
Degree of certainty through experimentation is how we decide the probability of the existence of gods and there is no evidence for that.
You'll find God in Time. Justifiably, the primordial Jews had Yahweh (Time -- in Hebrew) as their God of all gods.
And just to think after the Poincare Recurrence time I get to watch this lecture all over again is exciting!!!!
little hole; Information does NOT travel at the speed of like; Entanglement is gonna be big in the next few decades. Closing in on the prize !!!
There is something we cannot know. We cannot know, with certainty, that we have come to know all the knowable things, even if we have. Or, conversely, we cannot know that there is definitely not some other thing out there to know, of which we remain unaware.
44:10 TLDR: Turtles all the way down!
To me it makes sense. Unknowns are questions you can ask about. Unknown unknowns are questions you don't know to ask about. Probably a scientific way to say that. Maybe the 2nd derivative of understanding. Don't know ... doesn't matter.
Well, of cource one cannot know evertyhing, but if one does not know what telomeres are, one actually lacs real scientific curiosity. Evertbody with that genuine curiosity knows what it is. Telomeres are strings of dna at the end of each cromosome, and these are necessaru for cell division. They tend to shorten for ecah division, and eventually they are so short that the cells do not divide any more. This shortening process is an important component in aging. But this is not the whole story. The cells has mechanisms to build them up again, and thiese mechanisms are more or less efficient depending on cell type, species and individuals, which means that aging is not something absolute as people usually think,
My reaction to the telomere thing was simpler.
Journalist cannot be bothered to look at Wikipedia. (Or Google, just as often.) Explains the state of journalism.
They've been taught (a) "from birth" to get quotes from experts, and (b) that Wikipedia is -- to it's core -- unreliable.
The most imporant articles in Wikipedia are heavily policed by authorities that ensure the articles propagate the politically correct information, which is not necessarily the most truthful information.
+Knut, what does that have to do with -- and how does it contradict -- what I wrote? (Also ignores that journalists are the ones who maintain the PC culture.)
It does not contradict, but tells about a main mechanism why you should be scheptical of what your read on Wikipedia.
In addition to the butterfly effect is the fact that the equations of dynamics are themselves not perfectly true - all equations in physics are in some degree approximations because they are derived from models which idealise and simplify reality.