Vsauce!
Kevin here, and this briefcase contains the entire universe and everything that makes
humanity human.
That’s it… this is it?
Paper, dollar, pencil, sugar cube, playing card, Rubik’s cube?
Let me explain.
FOLD A PIECE OF PAPER.
Again… and again… a sheet of paper is about 4-thousandths of an inch, and to get
the number of layers after folding we make 2 to the power of folds.
We start with 1, then every fold raises that power one more.
My folding is not going well!
The world record for paper folding is only 12 folds.
If we could fold it 30 times, it’d be thick enough to reach space.
42 gets us to the moon.
At 103 folds, the thickness of this paper would be around 93 billion light years, so…
basically the diameter of our entire observable universe.
A piece of paper is the size of the universe.
And you’re inside this sugar cube.
In fact, we all are, or COULD be.
Atoms are tiny, and their fundamental particles are even smaller.
A proton is like… a femtometer, one quadrillionth of a meter.
The simple way to think of our body’s makeup is that atoms are a collection of particles
with a fair amount of empty space between them.
Quantum physics shows us that’s not actually true, and that a lot is happening in what
appears to be 99.99999% empty space.
That space matters.
But if we compressed the atoms of the human race into a tight ball and ignored what’s
in-between them, all nearly-8 billion of us would fit inside this sugar cube.
This is us.
7.8 billion of us inside here, we can’t all be unique, right?
RIGHT!
NO!
WRONG!
About 108 billion humans have been born throughout history.
If you’re 1 in a million like my mom told me I am, that still means there have been
108,000 humans exactly like you.
THAT’S NOT GOOD.
How can anybody possibly stand out?
I KNOW.
Just do something no human has ever done before… like what?
Shuffle a deck of cards.
Okay people have done that but not the same!
Michael mentioned this in his Math Magic video it goes like this: You’ve got 52 cards in
a deck.
The number of possible combinations is 52 factorial, so 52 x 51 x 50 x 49… yeah yeah
yeah, all the way down to one.
That’s ehhhhhhh that number different orders of a shuffled deck.
Every time you shuffle and deal, you’ve just created something that’s virtually
guaranteed to never have been done before -- and seriously unlikely to ever be done
again.
So ignore your 108,000 clones, opportunities to be unique are actually everywhere.
And there’s no limit to what you can do, because you, my friend, you you you watchin’
this video, you’re a supercomputer.
This Rubik’s Cube has 6 sides of a 3 by 3 grid, and each square is one of 6 colors.
The question is: How many permutations exist?
That’s a good question, I think of it often.
The answer is this: 43 quintillion, 252 quadrillion, 3 trillion, 274 billion, 489 million, 856
thousand.
That’s it.
And every single possible state of the cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.
That’s called “God’s number,” and it took Google 36 CPU-years of computing power
to determine.
Du Yusheng solved the classic 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube in…
3.47 seconds.
Maybe it takes you longer -- but you are mentally capable of processing any one version of 43
quintillion problems and solving it in a surprisingly low number of steps.
You solve problems in the world and if you’re like me you go outside once a month to get
more peanut butter and you notice HEY there are other people around.
THIS helps connect us, but you’ve got to think about it the right way.
This doesn’t actually have intrinsic value, money isn’t actually worth anything -- it’s
paper.
But it does represent a way for everyone to exchange what they’ve got -- a thing, a
talent, whatever -- for what someone else has.
The Aztecs used cocoa beans and the ancient Chinese used cowry shells.
I’ve got a Playstation, I like making videos, and I want a pygmy goat.
It’s a lot easier for me to use something that allows me to transfer my old Playstation
and my video production skills, and then use that to buy a pygmy goat, than it is to find
a pygmy goat farmer who needs a PS1 and a paradox video.
We have a system that converts what we’ve got into what we want, and gives someone else
a way to get what they want with what they’ve got.
And it’s not just about money, currencies like love and trust and loyalty spend nicely,
too.
You can be you… with others.
That’s why we’re capable of making incredible things.
Such as a #2 pencil.
It’s like Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” -- it shows the sheer insanity of human cooperation
that results in making something as basic as a pencil.
Someone farmed the Incense cedar.
Someone built the tractors for that farm.
Someone made the wheels for the tractor.
Someone mined the graphite and clay for the lead, others mined the metal for the ferrule.
No one planned this.
We just all… did our little piece, and others combine those pieces with our needs and desires
to make a thing everyone uses, but no individual person could ever make themselves.
We can’t even comprehend what’s happening in this sugar cube because it’s too complex.
WHERE’S MY UNIVERSE PAPER?
We do all this because we know what 0 is.
It’s not even just nothing.
It’s the absence of value, value that exists somewhere, just not where 0 is.
If infinity is so impossibly large that we can’t even really understand it, 0 is an
impossibly-deep void we process mostly by what it isn’t.
We do understand the power of something that’s a placeholder to make and identify greater
things, but that on its own is… sort of a terrifying lack of meaning.
Zero makes the pencils happen, and it’s the absence of pencils.
It’s never getting what we want, it’s never solving a Rubik’s Cube, it’s the
inability to be unique, it’s inaction, it’s an empty sugar cube -- it’s being in this
unfathomably large paper universe and fighting against the prospect of being and meaning
nothing.
You know what it is, but you’re everything because you’re not zero.
The world is big, the universe is complex.
And you can visualize, conceptualize, and appreciate some of the most complicated elements
of life by studying, and researching, and experimenting -- but also by messin’ around
with some of the junk lying around your bedroom.
OR STORED IN YOUR EXTREMELY COOL BRIEFCASE.
And as always, thanks for watching.