One of these pictures is the human brain and one is the universe can you tell the
difference there are a lot of mind-bending theories about our universe how it came to
be and what it's made of what shape it is whether it's the only one we all know about the big bang
but what other explanations have physicists and astronomers come up with welcome back
to Factnomenal today we're exploring some of the wildest theories about the nature of the universe
what if we're living inside the brain of some other being and before we get too far
no this isn't just some mushroom trip inspired speculation thought up while
lying on the ground gazing at the stars some scientists really think this could be the case
there are quite a few similarities between our brains and the universe
both the brain and the universe are made up of complex webs of filaments and notes that link up
at certain points they both contain trillions of galaxies and trillions of neural connections about
70 of the universe is dark matter about 70 of our brain is water some research has been done that
found that the two networks behave in strikingly similar ways just on vastly different scales
trillions of neural connections web and spark through our brains clustering in different areas
in different ways that we don't fully understand trillions of stars pop into and out of existence
clustering into different galaxies in different places in ways we also don't fully understand
if the universe really is a brain and specifically a human brain it leads to another question how
did this happen one answer theorizes that as the universe becomes more complex in certain localized
regions matter shifts from chaotic entropy into self-similar organization could our human brains
be the result of the universe becoming more and more self-aware as we evolved from single-celled
organisms to fish to primates to human in this sense the reason we can think abstractly and
even conceptualize and ponder the universe at all is because our brains are models of the universe
the next question is if the universe is a brain does it have a consciousness this is a tough
one to answer because we really don't know what consciousness is in the first place alan turing
once said that if you could have a conversation with an ai that was indistinguishable from a
conversation with a human it would mean the ai was conscious but what is consciousness is it
self-awareness do we have the free will to think what we want or are our thoughts just products
of finely tuned super complex neurological and chemical interactions within our brains and bodies
there are too many theories on consciousness to get into here but let's focus on one
pan-psychism proponents of pan-psychism see the universe itself as conscious
however they define consciousness more in terms of experience rather than self-awareness
humans have a very complex experience fish less so single-celled organisms even less so
in this sense consciousness in some form pervades all matter in the universe down
to the atomic level another theory called orchestrated objective reduction or orc
or theorizes that consciousness actually originates at a quantum level with a neurons
rather than as a result of connections between neurons if this is true then we can extrapolate
and say that the fundamental building blocks of reality itself are in a sense conscious scattered
throughout the universe and have somehow clustered incredibly within our own brains
if the universe is a brain and it's conscious what might it be thinking
m theory is a unification of different string theories that many physicists and
mathematicians think could be the answer to one of physics most nagging questions
how can we unify the quantum model and general relativity
m theory could very well be what scientists call the theory of everything
the problem with this gap in our knowledge is that gravity isn't part of the tiny quantum world
it's just left out of stuff that goes on the tiniest scales because its force is so weak
compared to other forces like electromagnetism and nuclear forces m theory supposes a theoretical
particle called the graviton the force carrier for gravity gravitons and all other particles
that make up our universe don't exist at single points but rather as tiny quantum ribbons or
strings that vibrate in different ways these strings are coiled up in a space less than 10
to the power of negative 33 centimeters wide and need 11 dimensions for the math to work
and theory is pure math the scales are so tiny that we may never be able to physically observe
what's going on but the equations are elegant and lots of really smart people including the
late great stephen hawking think it could be the answer to life the universe and everything
of course because of this gravity problem some scientists have suggested that we've
got gravity all wrong do newton's laws need a revamp if gravitons don't exist
then what the hell is going on based on what we know now there's around 70 percent of the stuff
in the universe that we just call dark matter because we can't figure out what it is gravity
is the weakest force in the universe that we know of but it affects things on the largest scales
but there are things going on in the universe that seem to defy the laws of gravity as it interacts
with the matter that we know exists stars moving faster than they should or galaxies being held
together in ways that can't be explained not wanting to mess with gravity scientists said hey
there must be some other stuff here that's causing things to act this way and named it dark matter
but there are some who think that maybe newton's laws of gravity is wrong in the 80s an israeli
physicist named mordechai milgram proposed that it should be replaced by something called modified
newtonian dynamics or monde so far the idea hasn't stuck but it hasn't been proven wrong yet either
brain world is another model created to help unify the quantum realm and general relativity
and helps solve the gravity problem according to the theory our universe is a spatially
three-dimensional membrane or brain that exists within a spatially four-dimensional bulk or
hyperspace it's possible that there are tons of other brains floating around nearly bumping
elbows with ours yet because there's this extra dimension we don't know that they're there brain
world is based on string theory and physicists and mathematicians think it can help explain a lot
of the stuff we're struggling with now like dark matter and gravity the existence of other nearby
brains can impact the physics of what's going on in our own these brains expand and they could also
theoretically fold leading to some pretty wild implications for where stuff in our universe
actually is what's more gravitons those proposed carrier particles of gravity could possibly move
between dimensions if we were near a different brain with a higher energy that exists in our own
gravitons might be more attracted to our neighbor and prefer to stay over there the two brains would
be very close so the gravitons might bounce back and forth between them in the sense gravity is
actually a lot stronger than we think but it's just dissipated into extra dimensions
then there's the acpyrotic theory instead of one big bang there have been and will be an
infinite number of big bounces a big bounce is what happens when we take brain world and see
what happens when two brains collide as they move through that hypothesized bulk 4d space
if this is true then there is never any singularity what we understand now about
our own universe is that it is expanding and eventually will become a cold empty space devoid
of all matter but eventually our brain universe will collide with another brain this will trigger
an energy transfer that could hypothetically create another universe or brain that would have
all the characteristics of the big bang and the subsequent expansion of the universe just without
the initial assumption that it all came from a singular infinitely tiny concentrated hot point
another theory connected to brain world has to do with white holes
white holes are entirely theoretical mathematical concepts as the name implies they pretty much
function in the opposite way as black holes instead of attracting matter into an infinitely
dense singularity due to immense gravity it pushes out matter and light preventing anything from
re-entering past its event horizon in 2013 a group of physicists proposed that our universe could
have been created after the supernova of some kind of 4d star and its subsequent collapse into
a black hole in four-dimensional hyperspace which created a white hole that spewed out matter from
the higher dimension into our three-dimensional space to create the universe as we know it
in this sense the universe is like a hologram projected from a higher dimension this hologram
theory works the other way too there is a similar theory that works the other way it posits
that some two-dimensional world has all the coding and data necessary for our universe
and is projected to appear in three dimensions much like a holographic
projector takes code and digital information and projects it into three-dimensional space
then there are theories about the shape of our universe these fall under a field called cosmic
topology basically topology is the mathematical study of how different shapes can bend and stretch
without any cutting or gluing or filling in of holes things like mobius strips and klein bottles
are famous examples in topology when it comes to the topology of the universe physicists have
three main theories it could either be positively curved or closed negatively curved or open or flat
imagining these shapes requires a bit of creativity because with space-time we're dealing
with four dimensions if it's positively curved it will resemble a four-dimensional sphere if it's
negatively curved it resembles a four-dimensional saddle with a curvature that folds back on itself
if it's flat then it's flat in a three-dimensional sense which is an equally mind-numbing idea to
contemplate you can think of the whole idea like this two rockets flying parallel to each other in
a flat universe would forever be flying parallel to each other in a positively curved universe the
rockets would move apart and then eventually join back together in a negatively curved universe the
rockets would diverge and never join physicists currently like the flat topology of the universe
they based it on measurements of temperatures of cosmic background radiation old old remnants of
the time in our early universe when dark clouds of hydrogen lifted in a process called ionization
and allowed light to travel through space however there's been other research that suggests it may
be positively curved based on observations of that same cosmic microwave background radiation
also these models are all based on general relativity and the assumption that newton's
laws of gravity are true which as we've seen is complicated maybe the universe is
a four-dimensional donut or mobius strip or some other wild shape that we can imagine because of
this unaddressed split between quantum physics and general relativity there's a lot we don't
know about our universe some of these theories are pretty wild they're based on complex math
and require some mind-bending mental gymnastics to even begin to comprehend
maybe we'll eventually figure it out maybe we won't but it's definitely fun to think about
there are tons of other wild theories that we didn't have time to describe what's your
favorite thanks for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe for more deep space content
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