Through the Wormhole (2010–2017): Season 1, Episode 1 - Is There a Creator? - full transcript
This program examines some recent scientific theories of the universe and conceptions about God they may suggest.
Colossal beauty.
Awe-inspiring intricacy.
Are the wonders of our
universe a cosmic accident
or the result of intelligent design?
For centuries, religion and
science were bitter foes.
Now science actively
searches for our creator.
Some physicists think
he's hidden in the math.
Neurologists think she
might be in our brains.
And computer coders
believe God is one of them
and that our world is nothing
more than his simulation.
Space.
Time.
Life itself.
The secrets of the cosmos
lie through the wormhole.
every culture claims a God,
an all-powerful entity
that created the world
and directs our fate.
But why do we share this
belief in a cosmic creator?
Did we dream it up to serve a
need in our psyche or culture?
Is God really
out there --
up there?
This is a journey into
the science of God.
I promise you it's quite a trip.
Some of what we'll find
almost defies belief.
Sometime in the early '70s,
I bought my daughter an ant farm.
She soon got bored, but not me.
I was memorized by this little menagerie
squeezed between two panes of glass.
And I wondered, what could
they ever know about me,
the one who built their world?
What can we ever learn
about who or what created us,
stranded as we are in
this colony of humanity?
For as long as scientists
have struggled to understand
our place in the universe,
there have been those who've
hoped to get a glimpse of God.
400 years ago, the great
astronomer Galileo Galilei
had a ground-breaking insight.
Nature's grand book is written
in the language of mathematics.
From that time to this,
scientific geniuses
like Newton and Einstein
used math to dig deep into
the workings of nature,
to search for God
through the equations that
defined the laws of physics.
The latest mind hoping to
join these illustrious ranks
is Garrett Lisi.
The universe
can very successfully be
described mathematically.
You have to imagine
how the world's working
in a certain circumstance
and then use reason and mathematics
to develop a description of
how that might be happening.
But it's imagination
that breaks the trail
before reason enters.
After earning his Phd,
Garrett escaped the confines of academia
in search of adventure and
a space in which to think.
Rather than go into a
normal academic-track job,
I just split off for
Maui, became a surf bum,
and did the research
I wanted to --
mostly spent time doing
physics research and surfing.
But all of our attempts
to understand nature
so far have been fragmentary.
There's one set of rules for tiny atoms,
another for giant objects
like stars and galaxies.
And the two sets of
math don't fit together.
What physicists like Lisi seek
is a single, overarching theory,
a mathematical design
that explains everything.
Garrett thinks he may at last have found
this theory of everything.
And if he's right, God could
be one heck of a mathematician.
Garrett's work is at a
leading edge of physics.
Before we plunge into
this mind-bending math,
we first need to back up a bit,
because it's possible
there's already evidence
for a creator in the math.
Andy Albrecht is a leading cosmologist.
Hello, how are you?
He's also a renowned chocoholic.
I'll have the chocolate
soufflé and a latte.
Just as a perfect chocolate soufflé
relies on a precise
mixture of ingredients
baked at a specific
temperature for an exact time,
so our universe looks the way it does
because of a precise balance
between four fundamental forces.
The four forces we know and love
in the world around us
are gravity,
electromagnetism --
those you've probably heard of.
Then there's also the weak
force and the strong force.
They're a little bit more specialized
but absolutely essential
to make the world work the way it does.
Gravity, in many ways,
is the force we know first.
We try to walk, and we fall down.
That's because of gravity.
When you carry something a
little too heavy and it falls,
it's because of gravity.
Electromagnetism tells us
how the chemistry works.
When you cook something,
the energy you use
is ultimately electromagnetic energy.
Weak force is about a
billion times less strong
than electromagnetism,
and it's responsible for radioactivity.
The potassium in a
banana is radioactive.
If the rate were too
high, it could destroy us.
The sun is basically a nuclear reactor.
The strong forces release
energy in the nuclear reactions.
One of the remarkable things
is, when you add it all up,
all these forces have to
be exactly the way they are
for life as we know it to exist.
Change any one of them,
dial the parameters,
and something
will go wrong --
the planet will disappear,
the sun will shut down,
the DNA will come unraveled.
Some people call it the
Goldilocks paradigm --
not too much, not too little,
everything's just right.
Oh, that's perfect.
Some physicists believe
this precise calibration of
forces is evidence of God.
Dr. John Polkinghorne did
pioneering work on the quark,
a fundamental subatomic particle.
He is also a knight commander
of the British Empire, a Sir.
And after a lifetime
of distinguished scientific inquiry,
he was inspired to follow
a new line of work...
As a priest.
I do indeed believe in God, yes, indeed.
Yes, in fact, I'm an Anglican priest,
so it would be rather
shocking if I didn't.
Those four fundamental forces
are the portfolio of things
that bring about the physical
processes of the world.
And a very interesting
fact about the world
is that those forces,
in their specific
strengths that they have,
have to be very close to
what we actually observe
if we were to be here to observe them,
because it turns out that only a world
whose forces are very similar
to the ones that we experience
would be capable of
producing carbon-based life.
John finds it difficult to imagine
that the fine-tuning of our universe
has happened by accident,
that there is no divine hand behind it.
This fine-tuning makes it clear
we don't live in any old world.
We live in a very particular universe.
And why is that? Why are we so lucky?
Of course, religious belief offers you
a very straightforward
and attractive explanation.
But scientists are split
over whether this balance of forces
is a sign of intelligent design.
In fact, it could be nothing more
than a roll of the cosmic dice.
Dr. Alan Guth is a revered
figure in cosmology.
His theory of inflation
is the accepted idea of how
the early universe formed.
Inflation says that
right after the big bang,
the universe expanded phenomenally fast,
doubling in size 100,000 times
in just a fraction of a second.
Inflation helps explain
how the world we know could
have come into existence.
But inflation has another
head-spinning implication --
there ought to be
more than one universe.
An important feature of
this process of inflation
is that when inflation stops,
it doesn't stop all
over at the same time.
What tends to happen is
it stops in some places,
and those then become universes.
And elsewhere, in what
we now call a multiverse,
inflation would go on,
and only later, more
pocket universes would form.
And there can be an infinite
number of these pocket universes
formed altogether by this process
that we call eternal inflation.
The point is that if there
really is a multiverse,
we would be living in just one
of these many pocket universes.
That could be, for example,
our universe right there.
Each of these pocket universes
could have different laws of physics.
In our universe,
the four forces are
aligned in a perfect way.
Together, they allow life
to coalesce and flourish.
But each pocket universe
in Alan's multiverse
could have a completely
different balance of forces.
Maybe electromagnetism is weaker,
and perhaps gravity
is way more powerful.
The
result --
an entirely different universe
with no chance of human life.
To Alan, our universe
is not carefully crafted
by a divine being.
It's just a lucky roll
in a cosmic crap shoot.
This debate for and against an
intelligently designed cosmos
has raged inside the world
of physics for decades.
And that's where Garrett Lisi comes in.
A single mathematical
theory to explain everything
could bring science closer than ever
to understanding our creation.
And right now, it's all in the head
of a beach bum in Hawaii.
One universe.
Four forces.
Billions of galaxies.
The precision and
complexity of our world
is enough to make even
the sanest cosmologist
go just a little bit crazy.
How does it all fit together?
Is there a single, overarching
design to the cosmos?
And if we find it,
will we glimpse the mind of God?
Scientists have spent decades
and billions of dollars
on this quest.
They've build giant
atom-smashing machines to probe
how the four fundamental
forces actually work.
They've found that down
at the microscopic level,
billions of times smaller than atoms,
forces are actually caused
by the movement of tiny particles.
Electromagnetism is carried by photons.
The strong force is carried
by particles called gluons,
the weak force by particles
called the "w" and "z" bosons.
But they've never found the
force carriers for gravity,
the elusive gravitons.
And that's where their efforts
to unify the math of the universe
are stuck treading water.
But renegade physicist and
compulsive surfer Garrett Lisi
could be on the cusp of succeeding.
Right after people got the idea
that there were these electromagnetic,
weak, and strong forces,
which was toward the end of the '70s,
almost immediately people
saw how they fit together
to make a grand unified theory
unifying those three forces.
Now, it's much trickier
to try to bring gravity into the picture
because it's slightly different.
Tricky is an understatement.
The greatest minds in
physics have all but given up
on unifying gravity
and its unseen gravitons
with the other three forces.
But then Garrett had a vision,
a vision of twisted circles.
I was working on just how
this whole algebraic structure
fit together, of gravity
and the other forces,
and I started to wonder if this thing
could be understood as a whole,
if this entire structure
could be described
as part of some larger lie group.
A lie group is a mathematical shape
that is a collection of circles
twisting around each other
in a specific pattern.
Now, the simplest lie
group is just a circle.
Now, if you take a second circle
and you wrap it around
that inner circle,
keeping it perpendicular,
you get what's called a torus.
It looks like the surface of a doughnut.
But if you take a third circle
and keep that perpendicular
to the other two,
and you Twist it around the inner circle
as you wrap it around,
you can get all three of those circles
to Twist around each other
to form a three-dimensional shape.
But this is only the beginning.
Garrett kept on twisting
circles around one another
until he'd done it 248 times.
The end result is a shape so complex
that it can't even be fully appreciated
in three dimensions.
It's called the e8 lie group.
To us, it's just a
mind-bending pattern.
But Garrett Lisi realized
the way the circles
twisted around one another
looked just like the way various
fundamental particles interact.
In physics, each one of these
circles can be associated
with a different kind
of elementary particle.
One circle could
correspond to electrons.
The other circles could correspond
to the force particles,
such as photons or weak-force particles
or strong-force particles, the gluons.
For months,
Garrett turned this kaleidoscope
over and over in his mind.
And then it hit him.
He found a set of circles
that seemed to act like
the never-yet-seen graviton.
And for the first time
in the history of physics,
a mere mortal saw how
gravity might fit in
with all the other forces and particles.
You know, seeing how
gravity could be combined
with these other lie groups
during this unification
was one of the greatest
moments of my life.
Dr. Lee Smolin is a
world-renowned physicist.
He's watching with keen interest
as Lisi struggles with his attempt
to put all the forces of nature
into a single mathematical framework.
My view of Garrett Lisi's work
is that he's doing something
which is very high risk, high payoff.
If he's right or if even something
in the direction that
he's going down is right,
it's very important
because it's a kind of hypothesis
that most of us have
given up working for --
that is, a unique unification
within a beautiful
mathematical structure.
Garrett calls
this dizzying geometrical relationship
between all the particles
and forces in the universe
an exceptionally simple
theory of everything.
It predicts several as
yet undiscovered particles.
And scientists across the world
are on the hunt for those right now.
One is the most sought-after
particle in all of physics,
the Higgs Boson.
There are some parts that
are in this larger group
that are not clearly these
elementary particle forces.
But what they are is
exactly what you need
to describe the higgs field.
And the Higgs field is this
geometric particle field
that gives mass to all
known elementary particles.
And it's exactly the
missing puzzle piece you need
to tie everything together.
The center of the
action in the Higgs hunt
is halfway around the world
from Garrett's beaches.
In the cooler but no less scenic
city of Geneva, Switzerland,
researchers are peering
through the most advanced
scientific microscope
in human
history --
the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider.
They're throwing everything they
have at finding the Higgs Boson,
the particle that is supposed
to give everything mass.
But they should also be able to detect
some of those new particles
predicted by Garrett Lisi.
If they do exist,
the exceptionally simple
theory of everything
could finally offer a blueprint
of the entire universe.
This dizzying geometry might
also be divine geometry,
a unified math that created you, me,
the sun, the stars,
everything in the known universe.
It would be another
important factor showing us
that we live in a world
of wonderful order,
and that is highly suggestive
that that is because it is
a creation with a divine mind behind it.
The irony is
that the man who's taking
us so close to the creator
is not himself a believer.
It's much more satisfying to
me that this bit of geometry
could have come into existence
than to imagine some complicated creator
with some sort of personality
and complex structure
brought this simple
thing into existence.
Garrett's mind-bending search
could be getting closer,
or it could all be a bust.
There's a process of give and take,
of construction and criticism,
that makes science work.
And it depends on courage
and audacity to get started.
And a thing that I admire about
is that Lisi has that
courage and audacity,
which doesn't mean I
think he's right, okay?
But I think that people
have to propose ideas
of the ambition of this idea
if we are ever to solve
these big problems.
Garrett Lisi may be the first man
to discover the mathematics of creation,
succeeding where great
minds like Einstein failed.
But what if he's wrong?
Or, worse, what if there is no
math that unifies the universe?
Well, that wouldn't trouble this man,
because he believes that the creator
is not out there in the cosmos.
He believes God exists inside our minds
and that he might be able to summon him
by throwing a switch.
For thousands of years,
we have meditated, fasted, and communed.
We have prayed and chanted
to make contact with the divine.
But what if all you need
is a magnet on the right
hemisphere of your brain
to see God?
This is Dominica.
She's a nursing student
in Sudbury, Ontario.
She's about to experience God.
Dominica is not a visionary
or a priest or a nun
or even particularly religious.
I do believe in God.
However, I don't believe
that you have to go into
church to talk to him
'cause he's everywhere.
Dominica has agreed to participate
in what she has been told is
a simple relaxation experiment.
And this is the man
who's going to lead
Dominica into the light,
Dr. Michael Persinger.
He runs the mind consciousness lab
in the basement of the science building
at Laurentian University.
Our primary research is involved
with understanding the relationship
between brain structure
and function and experience.
And more specifically, is there
a biological and brain basis
to some of the concepts that are called
the God belief and the God experience?
Dr. Persinger is a neuroscientist.
He believes that God
resides in our brains.
In fact, he even thinks he
knows in which part of the brain.
One of the things we were
really excited about was
what's the brain basis sense of self?
After all, that's the great
human definition -- who we are.
And we knew it was tied
to language and
left-hemispheric processes.
But then we asked the question
what's the right-hemisphere equivalent?
So we have this second sense
in the right hemisphere.
And when you experience it,
it's called the sense presence.
And we think that's the
prototype of the God experience.
All he has to do to
create this God experience
is place this yellow helmet
on his subject's head.
He calls it the God helmet.
Okay, so we're gonna put on the helmet.
Our approach was
very simple --
if you want to study the brain,
then let's look at the brain
in the laboratory with an experiment.
Just follow the experience
and let it come to you, all right?
Okay.
After putting Dominica
into a sealed chamber with no light,
the research team will
monitor her brain-wave activity
for one hour.
In a few minutes, Dominica's brain waves
start to order themselves
into a relaxed pattern.
Then Dr. Persinger
activates a magnetic coil
sitting over the right
side of her brain.
It's no more powerful than a hair dryer,
but it's designed to focus its energy
on a small set of brain cells
in the right temporal lobe.
Those cells, he believes,
will stimulate in Dominica
a sense that someone
or something is present.
We hypothesize
that, as the human being
developed the ability
to forecast their own self-dissolution,
their own death,
which is tremendously
anxiety-generating,
that another concept emerged
which allowed that
anxiety to be reduced.
And whatever that concept
was, it had certain parameters.
It had to be infinite and
forever and everywhere.
Otherwise it would have an end.
If you have an end,
then you have anxiety.
So there had to be a concept
inculcated within the brain itself
that there is something out
there that goes on forever.
And if you somehow relate to
it and can be a part of it,
the idea of anxiety becomes a nonevent.
Dr. Persinger believes
the efforts of our
brains' right temporal lobe
to relieve the anxiety of death
is what we sense when we think
we are sensing the divine.
And he's designed his God helmet
to produce that sense on demand.
Dominica?
Yes?
Okay, I'm about ready
to come in. Just relax.
For one hour,
Dominica has been
shut inside the chamber
without light or sound,
alone with her thoughts...
And perhaps also with God?
You said you felt the
presence of something.
Yeah, there's, like,
other things around me.
Okay, can you describe them?
Not -- there were
just bodies of nothing,
not doing anything, just chilling.
How many were just chilling?
Um...
She actually counted them.
You see her move her hand? Yeah.
She was actually recreating it. Yeah.
More than 80% of Dr.
Persinger's subjects,
whether they are
religious believers or not,
sense a presence from the God helmet.
When the right hemisphere
is being stimulated,
she felt a presence
of things around her,
five entities that were faceless.
I can see, like, down my body was,
like, up more so I could
only see, like, above.
How --
above?
Yeah. Okay.
She had these marked, intense feelings
of visual sensations in the --
always the upper visual field.
Did you notice that?
That's typical of the
temporal lobe being activated.
I see you checked here that,
"the experiences did not
come from my own mind."
Can you describe that?
I was, like, watching myself.
So it wasn't me
feeling like --
I was watching myself lying on the road.
I didn't feel like my
head was attached to me.
You felt like what? My
head wasn't attached.
Okay, so you felt like your
head was attached somewhere else?
Yeah. Okay.
Now, also it says you saw
vivid images this time.
Yeah, there's, like,
heat coming up, like
fire coming up around.
Which one did you like the best,
the first or the second? The first one.
You liked the first one? Okay.
I want to float again. That was cool.
Okay, well.
I'm not too much liking the
fire part, the second one,
but I don't know.
The first one was awesome.
She had a classic experience
that takes place in the chamber.
Now imagine what that would be
if she was sitting in a church pew
or a synagogue or a mosque
or, for that matter,
laying by herself at night
in the middle of her
bed, and this happened.
Can you imagine how she would label it
and the impact it would
have on her entire life?
There we go.
Dr. Persinger's work
raises the extraordinary possibility
not just that spiritual
experiences can be induced,
but that some
of the most intense and
influential religious visions
in history may have their root
in nothing more than the
wiring of the human brain.
Abraham,
Moses,
native American
shamans --
almost all religious
leaders and spiritual guides
have attested that they were struck
by vivid and thunderous messages
from the creator himself.
In the history of religious experience,
many of the great religious thinkers
have had electrical ability
in the temporal lobe.
Luther, as you know, who started
Lutheranism, was struck by lightning.
These are brief events that
have a powerful impact on people
during those critical
times of their life.
And, really, the great
challenge to science --
and this is the
exciting part --
is not so much the fact
that the brain's generating
the experiences --
is what are the stimuli?
You've seen a few examples
of the crude stimuli,
when we apply magnetic Fields.
But what about natural stimuli?
What about stimuli
that are manufactured or
manipulated by societies?
What about intrinsic chemical changes?
And what about all those
stimuli we don't know yet
that can produce the
most powerful experience
in the history of humankind,
the God experience?
For thousands of years,
billions of humans
have built their lives
around the cherished idea
that a creator is out
there looking down on them,
caring for them,
a God who is both creator and protector.
Dr. Persinger's God helmet
forces us to consider
a radical reimagining
of human experience.
God may not have created us.
He may not be protecting us.
God may simply be in our minds.
Will we find him hidden in the
deepest recesses of our brain?
Or can we uncover the creator
in a mathematical theory?
Let's take a closer look
at perhaps the strangest
possibility of all.
We'll start here.
Will Wright is a creator...
Of one universe, at least.
In the blockbuster hit
video game "The Sims,"
this software genius created a world
filled with digital people not
too different from you and me.
Well, the Sims inside the computer
really are digital recreations.
They're simulations of humans.
And so we basically have
to describe to the computer
all the kind of overall aspects
that we think, you
know, encompass humanity.
I think humans are very good
at displacing our identity into others.
We call that empathy.
And so a lot of the game is based
around the empathy that
you're feeling with the Sims
so that what they
experience basically is
what you're experiencing
at one level removed.
But consider this.
How much empathy do you think
you could feel with this SIM...
And how much with this one?
The rate of increase in computing power
that we've seen in the past few decades
shows no sign of abating.
And the level of realism
of computer simulations
is bound to keep pace with that.
When our Sims look as
real as our friends,
won't the lines
separating our real lives
from our virtual lives
begin to blur?
Computers and games and simulations
are kind of on this path
of increased reality.
You can see this in
computer graphics and movies.
As we experience these things
at these very granular levels of detail,
again, these experiences, I think,
are starting to blur the line
between real experiences
and virtual experiences.
One scientist
from the Jet Propulsion
Lab in Pasadena, California,
believes we might be
and that the evidence
could be all around us.
Rich Terrile has helped
design missions to Mars,
discovered four new moons around
Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus,
and taken pictures of
a distant solar system.
He has a logical mind
and a love for technology.
Now he's bringing that
logic to a bigger question --
who or what is the creator?
For a god-centered
universe, one has to think,
well, first, what are
the requirements for God?
God is an interdimensional being
connected with everything
in the universe,
a creator responsible for the universe,
and, in some way,
can change the laws of
physics if he wanted to.
I think those are
pretty good requirements
for what God ought to be.
Terrile thinks those
requirements for God,
making the laws of the universe
and changing things at will,
sound an awful lot
like what programmers do
when they create simulated environments.
And then he started thinking
about how much computing
power it would take
to create our world, our planet,
all its life, and all of our brains.
Moore's law is that computational power
tends to double about every
two years or 18 months.
Actually, in the last 18 years,
it's been doubling every 13 months.
Right now, the fastest
computers on the planet
are now comparable or even exceeding
the computational ability of the
human brain as we estimate it.
That's about one million
billion operations per second.
Where it's taking us is that in
the next year, that'll double.
In the next decade,
that'll increase by a factor of 500.
So a decade from now,
our supercomputers will be
about 500 times faster
than the human brain.
Rich is sure that
computers a decade from now
will be able to create
a photoreal simulation
of all that we see around us.
But can a computer ever
populate a simulated world
with thinking beings like us?
The answer is inside this box.
Suppose I have a box.
And in the box I've got,
you know, a human brain,
which is the mind, or a person,
and I've got a laptop computer.
The human brain and a laptop computer
are about the same weight.
They're about the same volume.
And they take about the
same amount of power.
Yet the human brain is about
100,000 times more powerful
than a current-day laptop.
Well, suppose this is a laptop
computer from 50 years from now,
and I have them both in the box,
and I start asking them questions,
and I don't know which one is answering.
If I can't tell the difference
between a human being
answering questions
and a computer answering questions,
then, qualitatively, they're equivalent.
And if I believe that the human
is conscious and self-aware,
I must also believe that the
machine has the same qualities.
Once computers have the power
to simulate artificially
intelligent beings
inside a photorealistic
representation of planet earth,
the ramifications are truly profound.
Suppose we have an enormous simulation
and we're simulating
artificial intelligence.
We created this universe.
We're able to change
the laws of physics.
We're able to do all the things,
all of those requirements
that we put on God.
We're on the brink of creating worlds
inside the computers,
filling them with sentient beings,
and becoming their gods.
But this is not where Rich
Terrile's quest for the creator ends.
The next step is truly mind-bending.
He believes that if
science shows God can exist,
than maybe he already does.
Maybe we are the Sims
and our creator is sitting at
the controls of a supercomputer.
The rise of the machines
is close at hand.
Already, computers are taking over many
of the day-to-day
functions in our world.
Are they already in charge?
Is our creator some kind
of cosmic computer genius?
Rich Terrile thinks we might be living
in some kind of giant simulation,
that our creator might be using
a supercomputer with godlike powers.
And he thinks he's found
evidence for it in nature.
There is one surefire way to tell
if you're looking at
a computer simulation.
Zoom in.
Every computer-generated
image, no matter how realistic,
breaks down into pixels
when you get close enough.
You might think this doesn't
happen in the real world,
but you'd be wrong.
In the past century,
physicists have discovered
that matter really is made
of tiny, little pixels,
fundamental, indivisible particles
billions of times smaller than an atom.
The theory that explains
all this, quantum mechanics,
applies not just to matter,
but to the entire universe.
Look at the way the universe behaves.
It's quantized. It's made of pixels.
And it's made of individual atoms.
Space is quantized. Time is quantized.
Energy is quantized.
Everything is made of individual pixels,
which means the universe has
a finite number of components,
which means it has a
finite number of states,
which means it's computable.
Quantum mechanics means
it's possible everything we see
could really be produced
by lines of code inside
a powerful computer.
But are there any signs
the universe is actually being computed?
In the physics lab at Caltech,
an experiment that's
now almost 100 years old
offers a vital clue.
We're in a small room at
the physics lab at Caltech,
looking at an experiment that
was originally done in 1928.
This experiment takes an electron beam
and transmits it through
a piece of graphite.
And what we're looking
at is the electrons
kind of going through the graphite
and forming this kind of diffuse blob.
Now, an interesting thing is,
when we focus the beam on the graphite,
we find a very, very
interesting pattern.
The experiment consists of a gun
which fires electrons at
a target of graphite atoms
and a collecting screen
to record how they ricocheted off it.
If this apparatus was
scaled up a billion times
and the gun fired real bullets,
the pattern on the collecting screen
would just be a random
smear of bullet holes.
But in the scaled-down subatomic world,
the electron ricochets are not random.
The pattern on the screen
reflects the pattern
of atoms in the target.
Each electron seems to sense
where every atom in the graphite is,
even though the target
is much bigger than it.
It's as if the electrons
are not dots, but spread out.
The electrons somehow know
where all the atoms are,
and they form this diffraction pattern.
The experiment shows something
really rather extraordinary,
and that is that matter,
even though it behaves
when you're looking at it,
when you're measuring it,
as individual particles,
when you're not measuring
it, matter is diffuse.
It spreads out.
It doesn't have a finite
form in the universe.
These basic rules of quantum mechanics
apply to all tiny subatomic particles.
When we look at them,
they are just dots.
When we look away, they
lose their physical form.
A different way of
looking at that is to say,
well, how parallel is this behavior
with what I see in my playstation 3
when I'm playing a video game?
In a playstation 3, an
example of that is "Simcity."
It's an enormous city.
I can navigate my way
through every bit of it
because the playstation, the video game,
gives me the frame that I
need when I'm looking there.
If I look somewhere else,
it'll create that frame.
Well, oddly enough, the universe
behaves that way in reality.
The universe gives you
what you're looking at
when you're looking at it.
When you're not looking at
it, it's not necessarily there.
Our world is pixilated
and only assumes definite
form when observed,
the very same way our
computer simulations behave.
Rich Terrile has tried to
work out the probability
that we might be living in a simulation
to quantify the possibility
that there is a God.
The question is how likely is
something like that to happen?
And how likely is it
that it has already
happened in our universe?
Now, let's step back from
that a little bit and say,
well, you know, the universe
is 13.7 billion years old,
and here I am 50 years
from basically being
able to manufacture God.
What's the probability
that I would be so
close to that threshold
and not be across the other side?
It's one chance in 300 million
that I would be that close.
It's an extraordinary coincidence.
And, perhaps, more likely than not,
maybe we are a simulation on
the other side of that threshold
and the deities that exist
are our future selves.
Our world bears all the hallmarks
of one that is smiulated.
And Rich's logic continues.
Who would be more likely to simulate
humans than humans from the future.
Our descendants.
God-like beings with the power
to create their own universes.
It's a very radical idea of the Creator.
But for Rich, it's not
without spirituality.
One can ask, "what
are you really saying?"
Are you saying the
world was a simulation
and we're just entities in
some Playstation 12 game,
or something like that.
I'm not saying that, I actually, uh
think this is a very,
very wonderful phenonom
I take great solice in this.
It shows that somewhere along the
line we have evloved from nothing
into self-awareness.
And that self-awareness
has reached the stage now
where we, our future
selves have become Gods.
This is a wonderful. Uh, to
me a very, very spirtual thing
And that's where my
spirtuality comes from.
in seeing things like that.
To me that's a religion.
It's been said that God fills
in the cracks in our knowledge.
Some see these cracks getting smaller.
We see that constantly in physics
that we start out with something
that looks complex and
as we look at it's parts
it's parts are simplier.
Now, if you imagine some sort of
Creator, that assumes that there's
more complicated than the
thing that got created.
So to me that's a step backwards
in explaining a philosophically
satisfying model.
For others the expansion
of scientific knowledge
will never fill in all the cracks.
There always will be room for faith.
Be it in a Creator with our descendant
or in the Gods of our ancestors.
I think that the questions
that arise from science
they give us some sort of
notion that Jesus is a God.
But they leave many other
questions about God unresolved.
And we also, I think are bound
to recognize that we finite beings
will never totally understand God
The human instinct that
drives our scientific curiosity
won't stop us from
searching for answers.
Perhaps one day soon,
science will provide us with
to look up and out through
the cosmic pane of glass
that separates us from the
true Creator of our World.
If there is one?
Awe-inspiring intricacy.
Are the wonders of our
universe a cosmic accident
or the result of intelligent design?
For centuries, religion and
science were bitter foes.
Now science actively
searches for our creator.
Some physicists think
he's hidden in the math.
Neurologists think she
might be in our brains.
And computer coders
believe God is one of them
and that our world is nothing
more than his simulation.
Space.
Time.
Life itself.
The secrets of the cosmos
lie through the wormhole.
every culture claims a God,
an all-powerful entity
that created the world
and directs our fate.
But why do we share this
belief in a cosmic creator?
Did we dream it up to serve a
need in our psyche or culture?
Is God really
out there --
up there?
This is a journey into
the science of God.
I promise you it's quite a trip.
Some of what we'll find
almost defies belief.
Sometime in the early '70s,
I bought my daughter an ant farm.
She soon got bored, but not me.
I was memorized by this little menagerie
squeezed between two panes of glass.
And I wondered, what could
they ever know about me,
the one who built their world?
What can we ever learn
about who or what created us,
stranded as we are in
this colony of humanity?
For as long as scientists
have struggled to understand
our place in the universe,
there have been those who've
hoped to get a glimpse of God.
400 years ago, the great
astronomer Galileo Galilei
had a ground-breaking insight.
Nature's grand book is written
in the language of mathematics.
From that time to this,
scientific geniuses
like Newton and Einstein
used math to dig deep into
the workings of nature,
to search for God
through the equations that
defined the laws of physics.
The latest mind hoping to
join these illustrious ranks
is Garrett Lisi.
The universe
can very successfully be
described mathematically.
You have to imagine
how the world's working
in a certain circumstance
and then use reason and mathematics
to develop a description of
how that might be happening.
But it's imagination
that breaks the trail
before reason enters.
After earning his Phd,
Garrett escaped the confines of academia
in search of adventure and
a space in which to think.
Rather than go into a
normal academic-track job,
I just split off for
Maui, became a surf bum,
and did the research
I wanted to --
mostly spent time doing
physics research and surfing.
But all of our attempts
to understand nature
so far have been fragmentary.
There's one set of rules for tiny atoms,
another for giant objects
like stars and galaxies.
And the two sets of
math don't fit together.
What physicists like Lisi seek
is a single, overarching theory,
a mathematical design
that explains everything.
Garrett thinks he may at last have found
this theory of everything.
And if he's right, God could
be one heck of a mathematician.
Garrett's work is at a
leading edge of physics.
Before we plunge into
this mind-bending math,
we first need to back up a bit,
because it's possible
there's already evidence
for a creator in the math.
Andy Albrecht is a leading cosmologist.
Hello, how are you?
He's also a renowned chocoholic.
I'll have the chocolate
soufflé and a latte.
Just as a perfect chocolate soufflé
relies on a precise
mixture of ingredients
baked at a specific
temperature for an exact time,
so our universe looks the way it does
because of a precise balance
between four fundamental forces.
The four forces we know and love
in the world around us
are gravity,
electromagnetism --
those you've probably heard of.
Then there's also the weak
force and the strong force.
They're a little bit more specialized
but absolutely essential
to make the world work the way it does.
Gravity, in many ways,
is the force we know first.
We try to walk, and we fall down.
That's because of gravity.
When you carry something a
little too heavy and it falls,
it's because of gravity.
Electromagnetism tells us
how the chemistry works.
When you cook something,
the energy you use
is ultimately electromagnetic energy.
Weak force is about a
billion times less strong
than electromagnetism,
and it's responsible for radioactivity.
The potassium in a
banana is radioactive.
If the rate were too
high, it could destroy us.
The sun is basically a nuclear reactor.
The strong forces release
energy in the nuclear reactions.
One of the remarkable things
is, when you add it all up,
all these forces have to
be exactly the way they are
for life as we know it to exist.
Change any one of them,
dial the parameters,
and something
will go wrong --
the planet will disappear,
the sun will shut down,
the DNA will come unraveled.
Some people call it the
Goldilocks paradigm --
not too much, not too little,
everything's just right.
Oh, that's perfect.
Some physicists believe
this precise calibration of
forces is evidence of God.
Dr. John Polkinghorne did
pioneering work on the quark,
a fundamental subatomic particle.
He is also a knight commander
of the British Empire, a Sir.
And after a lifetime
of distinguished scientific inquiry,
he was inspired to follow
a new line of work...
As a priest.
I do indeed believe in God, yes, indeed.
Yes, in fact, I'm an Anglican priest,
so it would be rather
shocking if I didn't.
Those four fundamental forces
are the portfolio of things
that bring about the physical
processes of the world.
And a very interesting
fact about the world
is that those forces,
in their specific
strengths that they have,
have to be very close to
what we actually observe
if we were to be here to observe them,
because it turns out that only a world
whose forces are very similar
to the ones that we experience
would be capable of
producing carbon-based life.
John finds it difficult to imagine
that the fine-tuning of our universe
has happened by accident,
that there is no divine hand behind it.
This fine-tuning makes it clear
we don't live in any old world.
We live in a very particular universe.
And why is that? Why are we so lucky?
Of course, religious belief offers you
a very straightforward
and attractive explanation.
But scientists are split
over whether this balance of forces
is a sign of intelligent design.
In fact, it could be nothing more
than a roll of the cosmic dice.
Dr. Alan Guth is a revered
figure in cosmology.
His theory of inflation
is the accepted idea of how
the early universe formed.
Inflation says that
right after the big bang,
the universe expanded phenomenally fast,
doubling in size 100,000 times
in just a fraction of a second.
Inflation helps explain
how the world we know could
have come into existence.
But inflation has another
head-spinning implication --
there ought to be
more than one universe.
An important feature of
this process of inflation
is that when inflation stops,
it doesn't stop all
over at the same time.
What tends to happen is
it stops in some places,
and those then become universes.
And elsewhere, in what
we now call a multiverse,
inflation would go on,
and only later, more
pocket universes would form.
And there can be an infinite
number of these pocket universes
formed altogether by this process
that we call eternal inflation.
The point is that if there
really is a multiverse,
we would be living in just one
of these many pocket universes.
That could be, for example,
our universe right there.
Each of these pocket universes
could have different laws of physics.
In our universe,
the four forces are
aligned in a perfect way.
Together, they allow life
to coalesce and flourish.
But each pocket universe
in Alan's multiverse
could have a completely
different balance of forces.
Maybe electromagnetism is weaker,
and perhaps gravity
is way more powerful.
The
result --
an entirely different universe
with no chance of human life.
To Alan, our universe
is not carefully crafted
by a divine being.
It's just a lucky roll
in a cosmic crap shoot.
This debate for and against an
intelligently designed cosmos
has raged inside the world
of physics for decades.
And that's where Garrett Lisi comes in.
A single mathematical
theory to explain everything
could bring science closer than ever
to understanding our creation.
And right now, it's all in the head
of a beach bum in Hawaii.
One universe.
Four forces.
Billions of galaxies.
The precision and
complexity of our world
is enough to make even
the sanest cosmologist
go just a little bit crazy.
How does it all fit together?
Is there a single, overarching
design to the cosmos?
And if we find it,
will we glimpse the mind of God?
Scientists have spent decades
and billions of dollars
on this quest.
They've build giant
atom-smashing machines to probe
how the four fundamental
forces actually work.
They've found that down
at the microscopic level,
billions of times smaller than atoms,
forces are actually caused
by the movement of tiny particles.
Electromagnetism is carried by photons.
The strong force is carried
by particles called gluons,
the weak force by particles
called the "w" and "z" bosons.
But they've never found the
force carriers for gravity,
the elusive gravitons.
And that's where their efforts
to unify the math of the universe
are stuck treading water.
But renegade physicist and
compulsive surfer Garrett Lisi
could be on the cusp of succeeding.
Right after people got the idea
that there were these electromagnetic,
weak, and strong forces,
which was toward the end of the '70s,
almost immediately people
saw how they fit together
to make a grand unified theory
unifying those three forces.
Now, it's much trickier
to try to bring gravity into the picture
because it's slightly different.
Tricky is an understatement.
The greatest minds in
physics have all but given up
on unifying gravity
and its unseen gravitons
with the other three forces.
But then Garrett had a vision,
a vision of twisted circles.
I was working on just how
this whole algebraic structure
fit together, of gravity
and the other forces,
and I started to wonder if this thing
could be understood as a whole,
if this entire structure
could be described
as part of some larger lie group.
A lie group is a mathematical shape
that is a collection of circles
twisting around each other
in a specific pattern.
Now, the simplest lie
group is just a circle.
Now, if you take a second circle
and you wrap it around
that inner circle,
keeping it perpendicular,
you get what's called a torus.
It looks like the surface of a doughnut.
But if you take a third circle
and keep that perpendicular
to the other two,
and you Twist it around the inner circle
as you wrap it around,
you can get all three of those circles
to Twist around each other
to form a three-dimensional shape.
But this is only the beginning.
Garrett kept on twisting
circles around one another
until he'd done it 248 times.
The end result is a shape so complex
that it can't even be fully appreciated
in three dimensions.
It's called the e8 lie group.
To us, it's just a
mind-bending pattern.
But Garrett Lisi realized
the way the circles
twisted around one another
looked just like the way various
fundamental particles interact.
In physics, each one of these
circles can be associated
with a different kind
of elementary particle.
One circle could
correspond to electrons.
The other circles could correspond
to the force particles,
such as photons or weak-force particles
or strong-force particles, the gluons.
For months,
Garrett turned this kaleidoscope
over and over in his mind.
And then it hit him.
He found a set of circles
that seemed to act like
the never-yet-seen graviton.
And for the first time
in the history of physics,
a mere mortal saw how
gravity might fit in
with all the other forces and particles.
You know, seeing how
gravity could be combined
with these other lie groups
during this unification
was one of the greatest
moments of my life.
Dr. Lee Smolin is a
world-renowned physicist.
He's watching with keen interest
as Lisi struggles with his attempt
to put all the forces of nature
into a single mathematical framework.
My view of Garrett Lisi's work
is that he's doing something
which is very high risk, high payoff.
If he's right or if even something
in the direction that
he's going down is right,
it's very important
because it's a kind of hypothesis
that most of us have
given up working for --
that is, a unique unification
within a beautiful
mathematical structure.
Garrett calls
this dizzying geometrical relationship
between all the particles
and forces in the universe
an exceptionally simple
theory of everything.
It predicts several as
yet undiscovered particles.
And scientists across the world
are on the hunt for those right now.
One is the most sought-after
particle in all of physics,
the Higgs Boson.
There are some parts that
are in this larger group
that are not clearly these
elementary particle forces.
But what they are is
exactly what you need
to describe the higgs field.
And the Higgs field is this
geometric particle field
that gives mass to all
known elementary particles.
And it's exactly the
missing puzzle piece you need
to tie everything together.
The center of the
action in the Higgs hunt
is halfway around the world
from Garrett's beaches.
In the cooler but no less scenic
city of Geneva, Switzerland,
researchers are peering
through the most advanced
scientific microscope
in human
history --
the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider.
They're throwing everything they
have at finding the Higgs Boson,
the particle that is supposed
to give everything mass.
But they should also be able to detect
some of those new particles
predicted by Garrett Lisi.
If they do exist,
the exceptionally simple
theory of everything
could finally offer a blueprint
of the entire universe.
This dizzying geometry might
also be divine geometry,
a unified math that created you, me,
the sun, the stars,
everything in the known universe.
It would be another
important factor showing us
that we live in a world
of wonderful order,
and that is highly suggestive
that that is because it is
a creation with a divine mind behind it.
The irony is
that the man who's taking
us so close to the creator
is not himself a believer.
It's much more satisfying to
me that this bit of geometry
could have come into existence
than to imagine some complicated creator
with some sort of personality
and complex structure
brought this simple
thing into existence.
Garrett's mind-bending search
could be getting closer,
or it could all be a bust.
There's a process of give and take,
of construction and criticism,
that makes science work.
And it depends on courage
and audacity to get started.
And a thing that I admire about
is that Lisi has that
courage and audacity,
which doesn't mean I
think he's right, okay?
But I think that people
have to propose ideas
of the ambition of this idea
if we are ever to solve
these big problems.
Garrett Lisi may be the first man
to discover the mathematics of creation,
succeeding where great
minds like Einstein failed.
But what if he's wrong?
Or, worse, what if there is no
math that unifies the universe?
Well, that wouldn't trouble this man,
because he believes that the creator
is not out there in the cosmos.
He believes God exists inside our minds
and that he might be able to summon him
by throwing a switch.
For thousands of years,
we have meditated, fasted, and communed.
We have prayed and chanted
to make contact with the divine.
But what if all you need
is a magnet on the right
hemisphere of your brain
to see God?
This is Dominica.
She's a nursing student
in Sudbury, Ontario.
She's about to experience God.
Dominica is not a visionary
or a priest or a nun
or even particularly religious.
I do believe in God.
However, I don't believe
that you have to go into
church to talk to him
'cause he's everywhere.
Dominica has agreed to participate
in what she has been told is
a simple relaxation experiment.
And this is the man
who's going to lead
Dominica into the light,
Dr. Michael Persinger.
He runs the mind consciousness lab
in the basement of the science building
at Laurentian University.
Our primary research is involved
with understanding the relationship
between brain structure
and function and experience.
And more specifically, is there
a biological and brain basis
to some of the concepts that are called
the God belief and the God experience?
Dr. Persinger is a neuroscientist.
He believes that God
resides in our brains.
In fact, he even thinks he
knows in which part of the brain.
One of the things we were
really excited about was
what's the brain basis sense of self?
After all, that's the great
human definition -- who we are.
And we knew it was tied
to language and
left-hemispheric processes.
But then we asked the question
what's the right-hemisphere equivalent?
So we have this second sense
in the right hemisphere.
And when you experience it,
it's called the sense presence.
And we think that's the
prototype of the God experience.
All he has to do to
create this God experience
is place this yellow helmet
on his subject's head.
He calls it the God helmet.
Okay, so we're gonna put on the helmet.
Our approach was
very simple --
if you want to study the brain,
then let's look at the brain
in the laboratory with an experiment.
Just follow the experience
and let it come to you, all right?
Okay.
After putting Dominica
into a sealed chamber with no light,
the research team will
monitor her brain-wave activity
for one hour.
In a few minutes, Dominica's brain waves
start to order themselves
into a relaxed pattern.
Then Dr. Persinger
activates a magnetic coil
sitting over the right
side of her brain.
It's no more powerful than a hair dryer,
but it's designed to focus its energy
on a small set of brain cells
in the right temporal lobe.
Those cells, he believes,
will stimulate in Dominica
a sense that someone
or something is present.
We hypothesize
that, as the human being
developed the ability
to forecast their own self-dissolution,
their own death,
which is tremendously
anxiety-generating,
that another concept emerged
which allowed that
anxiety to be reduced.
And whatever that concept
was, it had certain parameters.
It had to be infinite and
forever and everywhere.
Otherwise it would have an end.
If you have an end,
then you have anxiety.
So there had to be a concept
inculcated within the brain itself
that there is something out
there that goes on forever.
And if you somehow relate to
it and can be a part of it,
the idea of anxiety becomes a nonevent.
Dr. Persinger believes
the efforts of our
brains' right temporal lobe
to relieve the anxiety of death
is what we sense when we think
we are sensing the divine.
And he's designed his God helmet
to produce that sense on demand.
Dominica?
Yes?
Okay, I'm about ready
to come in. Just relax.
For one hour,
Dominica has been
shut inside the chamber
without light or sound,
alone with her thoughts...
And perhaps also with God?
You said you felt the
presence of something.
Yeah, there's, like,
other things around me.
Okay, can you describe them?
Not -- there were
just bodies of nothing,
not doing anything, just chilling.
How many were just chilling?
Um...
She actually counted them.
You see her move her hand? Yeah.
She was actually recreating it. Yeah.
More than 80% of Dr.
Persinger's subjects,
whether they are
religious believers or not,
sense a presence from the God helmet.
When the right hemisphere
is being stimulated,
she felt a presence
of things around her,
five entities that were faceless.
I can see, like, down my body was,
like, up more so I could
only see, like, above.
How --
above?
Yeah. Okay.
She had these marked, intense feelings
of visual sensations in the --
always the upper visual field.
Did you notice that?
That's typical of the
temporal lobe being activated.
I see you checked here that,
"the experiences did not
come from my own mind."
Can you describe that?
I was, like, watching myself.
So it wasn't me
feeling like --
I was watching myself lying on the road.
I didn't feel like my
head was attached to me.
You felt like what? My
head wasn't attached.
Okay, so you felt like your
head was attached somewhere else?
Yeah. Okay.
Now, also it says you saw
vivid images this time.
Yeah, there's, like,
heat coming up, like
fire coming up around.
Which one did you like the best,
the first or the second? The first one.
You liked the first one? Okay.
I want to float again. That was cool.
Okay, well.
I'm not too much liking the
fire part, the second one,
but I don't know.
The first one was awesome.
She had a classic experience
that takes place in the chamber.
Now imagine what that would be
if she was sitting in a church pew
or a synagogue or a mosque
or, for that matter,
laying by herself at night
in the middle of her
bed, and this happened.
Can you imagine how she would label it
and the impact it would
have on her entire life?
There we go.
Dr. Persinger's work
raises the extraordinary possibility
not just that spiritual
experiences can be induced,
but that some
of the most intense and
influential religious visions
in history may have their root
in nothing more than the
wiring of the human brain.
Abraham,
Moses,
native American
shamans --
almost all religious
leaders and spiritual guides
have attested that they were struck
by vivid and thunderous messages
from the creator himself.
In the history of religious experience,
many of the great religious thinkers
have had electrical ability
in the temporal lobe.
Luther, as you know, who started
Lutheranism, was struck by lightning.
These are brief events that
have a powerful impact on people
during those critical
times of their life.
And, really, the great
challenge to science --
and this is the
exciting part --
is not so much the fact
that the brain's generating
the experiences --
is what are the stimuli?
You've seen a few examples
of the crude stimuli,
when we apply magnetic Fields.
But what about natural stimuli?
What about stimuli
that are manufactured or
manipulated by societies?
What about intrinsic chemical changes?
And what about all those
stimuli we don't know yet
that can produce the
most powerful experience
in the history of humankind,
the God experience?
For thousands of years,
billions of humans
have built their lives
around the cherished idea
that a creator is out
there looking down on them,
caring for them,
a God who is both creator and protector.
Dr. Persinger's God helmet
forces us to consider
a radical reimagining
of human experience.
God may not have created us.
He may not be protecting us.
God may simply be in our minds.
Will we find him hidden in the
deepest recesses of our brain?
Or can we uncover the creator
in a mathematical theory?
Let's take a closer look
at perhaps the strangest
possibility of all.
We'll start here.
Will Wright is a creator...
Of one universe, at least.
In the blockbuster hit
video game "The Sims,"
this software genius created a world
filled with digital people not
too different from you and me.
Well, the Sims inside the computer
really are digital recreations.
They're simulations of humans.
And so we basically have
to describe to the computer
all the kind of overall aspects
that we think, you
know, encompass humanity.
I think humans are very good
at displacing our identity into others.
We call that empathy.
And so a lot of the game is based
around the empathy that
you're feeling with the Sims
so that what they
experience basically is
what you're experiencing
at one level removed.
But consider this.
How much empathy do you think
you could feel with this SIM...
And how much with this one?
The rate of increase in computing power
that we've seen in the past few decades
shows no sign of abating.
And the level of realism
of computer simulations
is bound to keep pace with that.
When our Sims look as
real as our friends,
won't the lines
separating our real lives
from our virtual lives
begin to blur?
Computers and games and simulations
are kind of on this path
of increased reality.
You can see this in
computer graphics and movies.
As we experience these things
at these very granular levels of detail,
again, these experiences, I think,
are starting to blur the line
between real experiences
and virtual experiences.
One scientist
from the Jet Propulsion
Lab in Pasadena, California,
believes we might be
and that the evidence
could be all around us.
Rich Terrile has helped
design missions to Mars,
discovered four new moons around
Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus,
and taken pictures of
a distant solar system.
He has a logical mind
and a love for technology.
Now he's bringing that
logic to a bigger question --
who or what is the creator?
For a god-centered
universe, one has to think,
well, first, what are
the requirements for God?
God is an interdimensional being
connected with everything
in the universe,
a creator responsible for the universe,
and, in some way,
can change the laws of
physics if he wanted to.
I think those are
pretty good requirements
for what God ought to be.
Terrile thinks those
requirements for God,
making the laws of the universe
and changing things at will,
sound an awful lot
like what programmers do
when they create simulated environments.
And then he started thinking
about how much computing
power it would take
to create our world, our planet,
all its life, and all of our brains.
Moore's law is that computational power
tends to double about every
two years or 18 months.
Actually, in the last 18 years,
it's been doubling every 13 months.
Right now, the fastest
computers on the planet
are now comparable or even exceeding
the computational ability of the
human brain as we estimate it.
That's about one million
billion operations per second.
Where it's taking us is that in
the next year, that'll double.
In the next decade,
that'll increase by a factor of 500.
So a decade from now,
our supercomputers will be
about 500 times faster
than the human brain.
Rich is sure that
computers a decade from now
will be able to create
a photoreal simulation
of all that we see around us.
But can a computer ever
populate a simulated world
with thinking beings like us?
The answer is inside this box.
Suppose I have a box.
And in the box I've got,
you know, a human brain,
which is the mind, or a person,
and I've got a laptop computer.
The human brain and a laptop computer
are about the same weight.
They're about the same volume.
And they take about the
same amount of power.
Yet the human brain is about
100,000 times more powerful
than a current-day laptop.
Well, suppose this is a laptop
computer from 50 years from now,
and I have them both in the box,
and I start asking them questions,
and I don't know which one is answering.
If I can't tell the difference
between a human being
answering questions
and a computer answering questions,
then, qualitatively, they're equivalent.
And if I believe that the human
is conscious and self-aware,
I must also believe that the
machine has the same qualities.
Once computers have the power
to simulate artificially
intelligent beings
inside a photorealistic
representation of planet earth,
the ramifications are truly profound.
Suppose we have an enormous simulation
and we're simulating
artificial intelligence.
We created this universe.
We're able to change
the laws of physics.
We're able to do all the things,
all of those requirements
that we put on God.
We're on the brink of creating worlds
inside the computers,
filling them with sentient beings,
and becoming their gods.
But this is not where Rich
Terrile's quest for the creator ends.
The next step is truly mind-bending.
He believes that if
science shows God can exist,
than maybe he already does.
Maybe we are the Sims
and our creator is sitting at
the controls of a supercomputer.
The rise of the machines
is close at hand.
Already, computers are taking over many
of the day-to-day
functions in our world.
Are they already in charge?
Is our creator some kind
of cosmic computer genius?
Rich Terrile thinks we might be living
in some kind of giant simulation,
that our creator might be using
a supercomputer with godlike powers.
And he thinks he's found
evidence for it in nature.
There is one surefire way to tell
if you're looking at
a computer simulation.
Zoom in.
Every computer-generated
image, no matter how realistic,
breaks down into pixels
when you get close enough.
You might think this doesn't
happen in the real world,
but you'd be wrong.
In the past century,
physicists have discovered
that matter really is made
of tiny, little pixels,
fundamental, indivisible particles
billions of times smaller than an atom.
The theory that explains
all this, quantum mechanics,
applies not just to matter,
but to the entire universe.
Look at the way the universe behaves.
It's quantized. It's made of pixels.
And it's made of individual atoms.
Space is quantized. Time is quantized.
Energy is quantized.
Everything is made of individual pixels,
which means the universe has
a finite number of components,
which means it has a
finite number of states,
which means it's computable.
Quantum mechanics means
it's possible everything we see
could really be produced
by lines of code inside
a powerful computer.
But are there any signs
the universe is actually being computed?
In the physics lab at Caltech,
an experiment that's
now almost 100 years old
offers a vital clue.
We're in a small room at
the physics lab at Caltech,
looking at an experiment that
was originally done in 1928.
This experiment takes an electron beam
and transmits it through
a piece of graphite.
And what we're looking
at is the electrons
kind of going through the graphite
and forming this kind of diffuse blob.
Now, an interesting thing is,
when we focus the beam on the graphite,
we find a very, very
interesting pattern.
The experiment consists of a gun
which fires electrons at
a target of graphite atoms
and a collecting screen
to record how they ricocheted off it.
If this apparatus was
scaled up a billion times
and the gun fired real bullets,
the pattern on the collecting screen
would just be a random
smear of bullet holes.
But in the scaled-down subatomic world,
the electron ricochets are not random.
The pattern on the screen
reflects the pattern
of atoms in the target.
Each electron seems to sense
where every atom in the graphite is,
even though the target
is much bigger than it.
It's as if the electrons
are not dots, but spread out.
The electrons somehow know
where all the atoms are,
and they form this diffraction pattern.
The experiment shows something
really rather extraordinary,
and that is that matter,
even though it behaves
when you're looking at it,
when you're measuring it,
as individual particles,
when you're not measuring
it, matter is diffuse.
It spreads out.
It doesn't have a finite
form in the universe.
These basic rules of quantum mechanics
apply to all tiny subatomic particles.
When we look at them,
they are just dots.
When we look away, they
lose their physical form.
A different way of
looking at that is to say,
well, how parallel is this behavior
with what I see in my playstation 3
when I'm playing a video game?
In a playstation 3, an
example of that is "Simcity."
It's an enormous city.
I can navigate my way
through every bit of it
because the playstation, the video game,
gives me the frame that I
need when I'm looking there.
If I look somewhere else,
it'll create that frame.
Well, oddly enough, the universe
behaves that way in reality.
The universe gives you
what you're looking at
when you're looking at it.
When you're not looking at
it, it's not necessarily there.
Our world is pixilated
and only assumes definite
form when observed,
the very same way our
computer simulations behave.
Rich Terrile has tried to
work out the probability
that we might be living in a simulation
to quantify the possibility
that there is a God.
The question is how likely is
something like that to happen?
And how likely is it
that it has already
happened in our universe?
Now, let's step back from
that a little bit and say,
well, you know, the universe
is 13.7 billion years old,
and here I am 50 years
from basically being
able to manufacture God.
What's the probability
that I would be so
close to that threshold
and not be across the other side?
It's one chance in 300 million
that I would be that close.
It's an extraordinary coincidence.
And, perhaps, more likely than not,
maybe we are a simulation on
the other side of that threshold
and the deities that exist
are our future selves.
Our world bears all the hallmarks
of one that is smiulated.
And Rich's logic continues.
Who would be more likely to simulate
humans than humans from the future.
Our descendants.
God-like beings with the power
to create their own universes.
It's a very radical idea of the Creator.
But for Rich, it's not
without spirituality.
One can ask, "what
are you really saying?"
Are you saying the
world was a simulation
and we're just entities in
some Playstation 12 game,
or something like that.
I'm not saying that, I actually, uh
think this is a very,
very wonderful phenonom
I take great solice in this.
It shows that somewhere along the
line we have evloved from nothing
into self-awareness.
And that self-awareness
has reached the stage now
where we, our future
selves have become Gods.
This is a wonderful. Uh, to
me a very, very spirtual thing
And that's where my
spirtuality comes from.
in seeing things like that.
To me that's a religion.
It's been said that God fills
in the cracks in our knowledge.
Some see these cracks getting smaller.
We see that constantly in physics
that we start out with something
that looks complex and
as we look at it's parts
it's parts are simplier.
Now, if you imagine some sort of
Creator, that assumes that there's
more complicated than the
thing that got created.
So to me that's a step backwards
in explaining a philosophically
satisfying model.
For others the expansion
of scientific knowledge
will never fill in all the cracks.
There always will be room for faith.
Be it in a Creator with our descendant
or in the Gods of our ancestors.
I think that the questions
that arise from science
they give us some sort of
notion that Jesus is a God.
But they leave many other
questions about God unresolved.
And we also, I think are bound
to recognize that we finite beings
will never totally understand God
The human instinct that
drives our scientific curiosity
won't stop us from
searching for answers.
Perhaps one day soon,
science will provide us with
to look up and out through
the cosmic pane of glass
that separates us from the
true Creator of our World.
If there is one?