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Maybe you’ve had a moment, most of us have, when a door opens in your mind, and for a
few minutes you ponder the meaning of existence.
What’s it all about?
What are we making down here?
What’s the point?
Suddenly you are all too aware that you are spinning on a rock inside a possibly infinite
universe.
This can sometimes be a weight off your mind, because hey, your small problems don’t seem
to matter too much right now, but you are also perplexed at the sheer massiveness of
what you don’t know.
You could take a leaf out of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s book, and know that
just being nice to others and creating things gives us some meaning.
But really, what are we doing here floating in space?
There’s a thought experiment in line with philosophical skepticism that asks what if
we are not really what we think we are.
What if we are just a brain in a box, suspended in some kind of life-giving liquid, our neurons
connected with wires, and those wires connected to some kind of super computer.
In this scenario what we perceive of the universe is only what we are programmed to perceive.
There was an Irish philosopher called George Berkeley who coined the Latin phrase, “esse
est percipi” which translates as “to be is to be perceived.”
That kinda means nothing exists outside of your mind, or at least what you see only exists
subjectively.
If you are a brain in box, if we are all brains in boxes, then maybe the universe we see is
only what we’ve been programmed to believe.
We are sure you’ve all seen the movie the Matrix, and that was written with this theory
in mind.
Ok, so this is a leftfield intro for why is there a universe, but we felt it had to be
said.
And even if some alien civilization has concocted us and this is some kind of experiment for
them, then they still exist inside something, just maybe it’s not a universe like the
one we know.
Ok, back to planet Earth.
So, science thinks it knows how the universe began.
We are going to simplify this beginning with a movie quote.
It’s from a British film called “Naked”, and a woman asks a man how he got here.
She means to the house, but he sarcastically answers, “Well, basically, there was this
little dot, right?
And the dot went bang and the bang expanded.
Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish
to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man.”
So, there you go, there was some kind of cosmic cataclysm.
i.e. big bang.
That little dot was very little, about one million billion billionth the size of an atom.
About 13.7 billion years ago it expanded, it burst open and in about one hundredth of
a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, a short time indeed, there was
this big burst known as inflation.
It grew and grew and then started to cool down as it became less dense, and then as
the guy in the movie said, when it cooled enough, matter started to form.
Over billions of years the planets got themselves in order; eventually on Earth things crawled
out of the primordial swamp and grow legs, and then in 2005 YouTube was founded, and
that’s why you are here.
Well, to some extent.
We should ask, though, what on Earth is nothing, because nothing has to be something, doesn’t
it?
And if there was once nothing, why, oh why, oh why, did something come along?
Is this where scientists start scratching their heads and shuffling papers, wondering
if it’s time to try out some DMT and look for answers there?
Cosmologists, or physicists, or philosophers, or part-time psychonaughts, or our mothers,
haven’t been able to give us a fast answer as to why there is anything.
But science has taken a stab at nothingness.
Some scientists tell us you can have a nothing that isn’t exactly something.
Here we have to look at the field of quantum mechanics, which basically is the science
of incredibly small things.
In this field you cannot just have totally, immutably empty space, even a vacuum is filled
with small particles and something called antiparticles and these it’s said come into
being and then disappear.
You can’t see them, but scientists know they are there because they have an effect
when they do appear.
It’s like when you know someone’s been in your room because your shoes have moved.
This goes against “to be is to be perceived”, because something “is” but no one can
see it.
By that rationale, there can be a nothing, but with something.
Scientists say ‘nothing’ is unstable, and so we got something: that something is
the universe.
Bear with us, we know this is confusing.
If we didn’t explain that well, this is what the BBC says about it, “Quantum mechanics
tells us that ‘nothing’ is inherently unstable, so the initial leap from nothing
to something may have been inevitable.
Then the resulting tiny bubble of space-time could have burgeoned into a massive, busy
universe, thanks to inflation.”
A scientist in that same article said that it is definitely “plausible that our universe
arose from nothing - no space, no time, no particles, nothing that we now know of.”
There are things we cannot see, and so they don’t exist, but they do exist.
So, maybe that’s where existence sprang out of.
There was nothing, but nothing didn’t like being nothing, and so something came and that
something got busy.
Billions of years later and you are looking at your phone watching the Infographics Show.
On top of that, the universe keeps inflating, and some scientists believe universes outside
our universe keep inflating, too.
This goes on forever, which is a strange word as it’s hard to really understand what forever
means.
We cannot grasp that, and we just usually call it infinity.
The thing is, those other universes, if they exist, might have different dimensions than
ours and be made out of different matter.
That’s if they exist, science isn’t really sure.
One man working at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany told The New
Scientist that it’s actually “embarrassing” that we don’t know exactly why there is
existence.
In that article it said we shouldn’t exist at all, as antimatter and matter should have
cancelled each other out, but like a good Hollywood superhero movie, matter won and
we all lived happily, and occasionally sadly, ever after.
According to science, matter overcame its nemesis, and that’s why we are here.
Yet antimatter could very well have overcome matter, and even then we’d have an antimatter
universe, not really different in any way from our present universe- until it came in
contact with regular matter.
In which case the two would annihilate themselves and leave nothing behind.
Yet that didn’t happen, and the initial imbalance between matter and antimatter that
led to the infant universe not annihilating itself is what has scientists puzzled.
To date there is no answer as to why an imbalance existed, and thus prevented total annihilation.
As for the more existential question we pondered at the beginning of the show as to why we
exist, well, science would have you believe that we are just part and parcel of particles
having that great big infinite party in space.
We just are, for no other reason than we happened.
Perhaps we are making a great big omelet and there is something around the corner, after
of course we have smashed lots of eggs.
We just don’t know, but philosophers have written a lot about this omelet making.
Maybe there is a finishing line, ultimate progress, and we just have to keep plugging
away.
In philosophy you might call this teleology, which simply means everything has a function
and there is a goal, a finality.
Maybe we all have a destiny and have a part to play in the big human drama, a la Game
of Thrones, and there are some things our small brains just cannot fathom.
Is life futile?
Hell no, if everything suddenly seems pointless you know there is someone out there you could
hold a hand out to and put a smile on their face, you know you can create for other people,
just as we are doing now.
There may not be a reason for existing, but there are plenty of ways to exist.
That’s all that matters.
And who knows, as we don’t fully understand consciousness, maybe we are connected to each
other and the universe in ways we still haven’t figured out yet.
We exist for reasons we are not quite sure of, but ain't that just the right reason to
be ever curious, to celebrate existence, and if for a while, remember we are spinning on
this rock in an ever-expanding universe and be enthralled by that.
For as long as you can anyway, until that door closes in your mind and you have work
to do, bills to pay, a leaky faucet to fix.
We know we didn’t include any religious or more far out theories in this show, but
there are just so many religions and pseudo-religions, that we thought we’d listen to what you
have to say in the comments.
We tackled some pretty big and complicated questions here.
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What do you think?
Tell us your theory.
Also, don’t forget to watch our other video What happens when you die.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.