1. Locate Pickles. Quantity: two.
2. Locate shelf.
3. Optionally, locate Bulgarian science juice,
for... s-sciencing.
ЕБАСИ МАЙКАТА! (Bulgarian: MOTHERFUCKER!)
4. Place pickle 1 on floor.
5. Place pickle 2 on high shelf.
Congratulations, you now own a time machine.
Ah, Turtle Boi has finally had his big December stroke, eh?
No – not yet, anyway.
It's called "General Relativity," and...
well, y'see...
Catching a flight recently, I noticed there was no Row 13 in front of me – clearly a superstition thing.
"Oh, that's great," I thought.
"They build planes based on magic these days, do they?
What keeps this one in the air?
Ectoplasm? Pixies under the wings?
If I visit the lavatory, shall I perchance encounter two unicorns engaged in frantic coitus?"
But, to be honest, science is just magic that works.
It's the reason why pickle 2 is really travelling in time.
Now, let's divide the world into "Magic 1" and "Magic 2".
Magic 1 is crazy stuff we believe, because it seems legit,
but we tested it, and it appeared to be bollocks.
Like "13 is bad luck for some reason",
or "you can cure diabetes by licking a squid".
Magic 2 is crazy stuff we believe because even though it's counter-intuitive,
all evidence and experimental data points in that direction.
Like "the universe probably began from a point of infinite density 14 billion years ago",
or "anything but full-fat milk in tea can eat my ass".
That pickle on the ground is travelling through time slower than the pickle on the shelf.
All thanks to Albert Einstein.
Matter and energy distort spacetime,
and we can actually prove all this using two atomic clocks and a mountain.
Since a mountain is further from the center of Earth's mass than my apartment, being higher up,
time should run slightly faster on the peak of the mountain than in my apartment.
And since I live near a mountain, and managed recently to get hold of two atomic clocks,
we're going to leave one atomic clock running on the ground in my apartment,
and take the other one up the mountain, and measure the difference in time,
and prove Einstein correct,
and try to convince you that magic does exist.
So, off we go on a cliche pop-science adventure!
Chop-chop!
(...you pricks...)
For most of history, we believed that time is uniform, moving at a constant rate for all observers.
We now know that's bollocks, thanks to this gentleman.
He played the violin,
he never wore socks,
his favorite pastime was rolling Nobel prizes up and smoking them.
By 1915, Einstein already knew that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames.
That means whatever your speed is, relative to light,
light will ALWAYS be travelling away from you at about 300 million meters per second.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
THE FUCK, IS GOD HIGH??
WHAT'S GOING ON?
This is called "Special Relativity."
If light travels at a constant speed, no matter your speed relative to it,
the universe compensates by increasing your mass and slowing time down for you as you accelerate.
Special Relativity is the reason why if you sent a baby off, going at 99% the speed of light,
it would come back to Earth eventually still a baby,
while its sibling, having stayed on Earth,
will be middle-aged.
Or old.
Or dead, hu-hyuk!
But that was just his first trick, because next he comes up with "General Relativity",
which applies to stuff that isn't necessarily moving,
like our time-travelling pickles.
And he realizes that it isn't just moving fast that messes with time and distance –
it's matter and energy themselves.
And a new door opened in reality.
The thing to remember here is that from your perspective,
if you feel something pulling your feetsies down to the ground, and you're blindfolded,
you can't tell the difference between whether you're going up in a lift wicked fast, or just being pulled down by a planet's mass –
gravity, in other words.
This is called the "Principle of Equivalence."
Acceleration and gravity feel like the same force subjectively, even though they're not,
because gravity is the curvature of spacetime,
making gravity a product of the geometry of spacetime.
Einstein then produced his field equations, which model the relationship between matter and the geometry of spacetime with this new curvature idea,
and when you apply this model to the universe, everything changes.
Just take GPS satellites, for example.
Since they're further from Earth's mass, time runs slightly faster for them than us,
thanks to General Relativity.
If engineers didn't correct for this, the GPS on your phone would probably be off by about 10 kilometers every day.
But the real changes came to cosmology.
From Einstein's work, we now know that mass and energy are manifestations of the same thing,
that because of time dilation, the Earth's core is probably about 2.5 years younger than its crust,
that light warps around stars and massive bodies in an effect called "gravitational lensing",
that sometimes stars collapse and produce black holes,
that our current universe probably began from a spacetime singularity billions of years prior,
that right now, the heavens are awash with invisible gravitational waves
that fall out of black hole collisions and kissing neutron stars
and perturbations in the oceans of the universe.
And all of this dreamt up by a sopless, violin-playing oddball working in the Swiss patent office over a century ago,
confirming mathematically that there is no master frame of reference in the whole of creation,
and time, the one thing we always assumed is as fundamental as it gets,
is really an entirely relative phenomenon.
And sure enough, if we measure our atomic clock on the ground, perhaps only a few hours have passed,
but up here on the mountain, thanks to time dilation, we in fact find that there's...
no difference whatsoever,
because I can't afford an atomic clock,
much less two atomic clocks.
Besides, the time discrepancy at this height would be minuscule.
It's there, people have measured it, paper below, but not me and not today.
Also, that isn't even me on the mountain – I just found the footage online,
because I couldn't be bothered walking up it today!
Because I'm... unmotivated.
But... you know what? YOU try turning 30.
Just waking up in the morning is a FUCKING MIRACLE!
Now, General Relativity is a Magic 2 story.
It sounds ridiculous, but it has been verified – most of it.
Space and time really are bendable, malleable things.
But there's another Magic 2 story that is arguably even more insane.
And, since you're still here, and clearly have shit taste in YouTube content,
let's take a quick jaunt into particle physics!
Firstly, please try to imagine the universe as fields on fields with fields on top.
Sometimes, there's an excitation in a field, and out pops a particle.
Particles come in two teams: Team Fermion, and Team Boson.
Why?
Who fucking knows.
Fermions make stuff. They build matter.
This includes stuff like the electron, neutrino, and the six flavors of quarks.
"Quarks? What are they?"
I'm glad you asked. They make up famously protons and neutrons – the nucleus of atoms.
Quarks are held together by the strong force, mediated by gluons (we'll get there shortly),
but really, atoms are essentially quarks and electrons.
Then there's Team Boson.
Bosons glue nature together... sort of?
Generally, they carry the fundamental forces of the universe.
The photon carries electromagnetism, for example.
The W and Z bosons carry the weak force,
and the Higgs boson carries mass.
Pedantic interlude!
Maybe you keep hearing people saying "The Higgs boson gives stuff mass in the universe."
Firstly, remember the Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs FIELD.
So it's the Higgs FIELD that gives stuff mass.
Imagine a big sticky pool of honey that the other particles are trying to move through.
BUT!
The Higgs field doesn't give EVERYTHING mass. In fact, most of the mass in the universe doesn't come from the Higgs field.
Anyway, moving on.
So, ultimately, this is the standard-
NO, FUCK IT, THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Remember, protons and neutrons are made of quarks,
and quarks do interact with the Higgs field... a bit?
But the rest of the mass of the proton and neutron come from quarks interacting with the carriers of the strong force, gluons,
turning energy into mass from the interaction,
and as we know from this guy, you can make a lot of energy from a little bit of mass.
It's not important, but just...
the Higgs doesn't give everything mass,
and... Han shot first,
and... punk's not dead,
and semi-skim milk in tea can eat my ass!
This is the standard model of particle physics as it stands today.
These are the ingredients of the world.
Six quarks, six leptons, four gauge bosons, and a cheeky little Higgs boson.
But wait, there's more! ;)
Because as we discussed, the universe is really the result of fields,
and these, as far as we know, are the basic quantum fields of nature,
which we eventually end up calling humans, and La Sagrada Familia,
and that green shit you find in your eyes in the morning.
(It's called rheum, by the way – fun fact for you...)
This is the bedrock of nature as we know currently.
These are the underlying quantum fields.
They represent the three generations of particles.
Throw in the four interactions, or forces of nature, that we discussed,
and you have a universe.
Now, the obvious question is, "Sorry, what the hell?! Why set nature up like this?"
And, "Is there something more fundamental than quantum fields?"
DO YOU KNOW about stuffing?
It is a traditional Christmas food back in my landmass of origin,
and perhaps it's popular in your country, too. I don't know.
But my grandfather made, oo-wee, the finest stuffing around,
and we asked him every Christmas, "Hey, what's in this?"
And he always replied, "I'll tell you on my deathbed."
And, well, eventually he ended up on his deathbed, and a rather astute member of my family said,
"Obviously, sorry about all this... dying business, but what's in your famous stuffing?"
And he paused, and he said,
"Pffft, I dunno, I just throw in whatever's left in the fridge that year!"
We really like finding beauty in nature.
It is the engine of mathematical and scientific discovery,
and we usually assume if a theory is beautiful, it must be correct.
But really, the question is: down at the bedrock, at the bottom of everything,
why WOULD nature be beautiful?
Not to forget, beauty appears fairly relative to the time and culture you grow up in.
But whatever the case, it will be wonderful if there is some elegant, underlying, integral beauty to the world.
But what a bummer it would be, if actually, fundamentally,
nature is just... whatever was left in the fridge.
But either way, we will endeavor to find out.
And thanks to the development of the scientific method,
we now know how to.
Ahhh yes! We've done the introductory jokes,
the recycled pop-science bit,
time for the pseudointellectual absurdist outro, is it?
Cattington! Fetch me my shouting socks!
From Indonesia to Australia to Russia,
we find caves decorated in strange hunting scenes,
many of them twenty, thirty, forty thousand years old.
We don't know what the ancients were doing,
but some theories suggest that maybe these paintings were an attempt at magic, probably to make hunting more successful –
the first evidence we have of humans trying to utilize a science to control the world around them.
How far we've come since our early attempts of magic.
And what beautiful things we found along the way.
Turns out time isn't an absolute,
and reality is made of fields and interactions,
and who knows what else?
Nature is bigger than we ever could have imagined,
and more elaborate than we ever could have imagined.
And despite the successes of our theories of reality, we are once again lost in the forest.
Quantum mechanics still won't hold hands with General Relativity yet.
On top of that, there's a large percentage of the universe that's either invisible,
or there's something wrong with our conception of gravity.
We have no idea what particles are doing, or ARE, before we observe them.
We have no idea why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
But you know what?
If we make it that long, in 500 years many of these questions will be answered.
And though we can't guess at what those answers will be yet,
it seems very unlikely they will be Magic 1 explanations,
because none of them have been so far.
Do the planets really affect human destiny?
Who knows. But it's unlikely Saturn's current position is the reason your dog pooped on the carpet this morning.
Are aliens here already?
Who can say. But it's rather hard to believe they mastered interstellar travel,
and traversed the galaxy, in faster-than-light star ships, to come to this planet
to look specifically up YOUR ARSE.
It does rather seem sometimes like the less our species knows about a thing, the more certain we are of it.
We're totally unique biologically on this planet-
Oh, no, we're not.
Well, at least the Sun goes around our planet-
No, it doesn't.
Well, at least we're at the center of everything cosmically, then-
Sorry, no, we live in a galactic suburb.
You know, should we just start a religion?
Oh, come on: rampant egomania, thinly veiled behind British self-deprecation –
you knew this was coming.
And anyone can join this religion, and everyone gets a free cat.
And there's no rules except for one, which is,
if you find yourself in conversation with another human,
who is boldly making declarations about things that are still totally unknown,
as if we got to this point by just making things up and being confident about them,
"Ahhhh, consciousness is so simple! How haven't scientists worked it out?" etc., etc.,
You just reply,
"NOFKYO."
A little acronym – a mantra, if you will.
And it stands for, in short,
"NO ONE FUCKING KNOWS YET, OKAY?!"
How long have we been wrong about almost everything?
And look at what we got when we accepted we probably were –
black holes, quantum fields, time dilation, antibiotics,
those umbrella hat things.
We didn't kill magic, we just learned to use it properly and carefully,
and it is very much alive and well in the form of the scientific method.
And the pictures we have now of the world, subatomically and galactically,
are more insane than ANY story we could have come up with.
And even better – as far as we've tested, they're accurate!
THIS is the true age of magic!
Now! Right now!
We didn't get dragons, but you can take a big silver bird across the ocean if you want, and they'll serve you wine as you're fucking doing it!
And we got here by checking our intuitions against the world, and if they didn't work, we discarded them.
And if they did work, we took the next step on the road to finding out what this fishbowl we're living in really is.
All truth is one.
In this light, may science and religion
endeavor together for the steady evolution of Mankind.
From darkness to light,
from narrowness to broadmindedness,
from prejudice to tolerance.
It is the voice of life that calls to us to come and learn.
Blessings of NOFKYOlogy upon you.
Have a very merry Christmas,
and, if I may,
a happy fucking New Year also.
Bai.