- 6/19/2025
Morgan Freeman narrates that supersymmetry is the idea that "every particle has a mirror-image particle." Electrons should have supersymmetric selectrons, and quarks should have squarks. At the time of the airing of this episode, the LHC had seen no sign of supersymmetric particles.
Gerard 't Hooft believes in the conservation of information which states that nothing can be removed from the universe.
Katie Freese believes that dark matter does not have electric charge.
Gabriele Veneziano asserts a "dilaton field"―as opposed to a void―filled the universe before the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
Thanks for watcing. Follow for more videos.
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#throughthewormhole
#season3
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Gerard 't Hooft believes in the conservation of information which states that nothing can be removed from the universe.
Katie Freese believes that dark matter does not have electric charge.
Gabriele Veneziano asserts a "dilaton field"―as opposed to a void―filled the universe before the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
Thanks for watcing. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode5
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#whatisnothing
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Nothingness.
00:02It is the beginning and the end of all creation.
00:11But what is it?
00:14Is empty space really empty?
00:17Or is it filled with hidden forces?
00:21Forces that exploded our universe into existence?
00:25Or forces that could destroy reality as we know it?
00:29What is nothing?
00:37Space.
00:39Time.
00:40Life itself.
00:44The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:59The void.
01:05The Bible says it was the place from which God brought forth the heavens and the earth.
01:12Scientists now have their own version of that belief.
01:16They call it the Big Bang.
01:19But how can something come from what appears to be nothing?
01:24Understanding the true nature of nothingness is perhaps the deepest and most baffling conundrum in modern science.
01:32It could explain where the universe came from.
01:36And whether everything we know and love could turn into nothing once again.
01:42In the beginning, the earth was without form.
01:52When you were young, did you ever close your eyes and try to imagine floating in total darkness?
01:59To experience absolute nothing?
02:01I did.
02:02And I always failed.
02:06No matter what, I could not rid this void of the pulse of my heartbeat and the thoughts in my head.
02:14When I imagine, I can't help but imagine something, not nothing.
02:31Slava Turishev is a NASA physicist who has always dreamed of nothing and what nothing might be like to visit.
02:39The town I was born in was just under the trajectory of rockets launched from Baikonur.
02:52It's a Russian launch site.
02:54So that actually made a major impression on me.
02:58Slava spent his childhood building rockets and yearned to one day ride one into the emptiness of outer space.
03:07But fate had other plans.
03:20I wanted to be in a space flight.
03:23And at one of those times, I actually was training for the Russian space shuttle back in the late 90s, just before the program was cancelled.
03:33With no Russian shuttle, Slava lost his ticket to outer space.
03:38But as a physicist, he discovered that the same space that fills the heavens also exists everywhere on Earth.
03:47It's just not empty down here.
03:49And exploring the fundamental properties of space does not require a billion dollar rocket.
03:55In fact, all you need is a bucket of water.
04:01This is actually a very simple experiment.
04:03What I'll do, I'll put some water in the bucket.
04:06And this experiment actually was taught by Isaac Newton.
04:10The objective here, of course, to see what's going on with the water when we spin the bucket.
04:23So, let's spin it very, very nice.
04:30So, stable.
04:32You can observe that the water in the bucket is staying flat.
04:37And let's see what happens.
04:40Isaac Newton thought that the water ought to spin in lockstep with the bucket, just as we move with the spinning Earth.
04:47But the water does not move with the spinning bucket at first.
04:51Eventually, friction from the inner wall of the bucket drags the water upwards.
04:56So, you can see that the water is slowly going upwards in the bucket.
05:03But in the first moments after the bucket is set in motion, the water stays still.
05:09Newton realized there must be something gluing the water to the larger world around it.
05:16He thought that glue must be space itself, which exists all around, and inside the bucket.
05:25Indeed, we cannot assume that space is nothing.
05:29There is something, and that something influences how matter moves.
05:33Newton could not explain how the nothingness of space was somehow something.
05:39But in 1915, Albert Einstein's revolutionary theory of general relativity showed that Newton's idea was fundamentally right.
05:49Space, or as he reformulated it, space-time, is a bendable fabric into which all the matter in the universe is woven.
06:00The space that fills every corner of our universe plays a constant game of tug-of-war with all the things in it,
06:15be they planets, water in a bucket, or a stack of papers.
06:20So, if empty space is not nothing, then what is it?
06:25Frank Close is a particle physicist.
06:28He's learned that the power of empty space should never be underestimated.
06:35Hi, Andrew. Hi, Frank.
06:37So, it's a metal drum, and you can make it collapse by doing nothing?
06:44That's right, yeah. We're going to use the power of nothing.
06:46So, this is pretty dramatic. I better put this on, right?
06:50I guess we had, yeah.
06:51Uh-huh. And what else do I do?
06:53So, if you just switch on the pump for me.
06:54OK.
06:58Whoa.
06:59Wow.
07:00The power of nothing. We took all of the air out of the inside of this drum. The atmosphere on the outside was making a ten tons every square meter force on that drum, far too strong for the metal to resist collapse.
07:26So, nothing on the inside, ten or twenty tons on the outside, bingo.
07:33In his quest to understand the fundamental forces of nature, Frank has discovered that empty space can do far more than cause solid matter to implode.
07:42He thinks it is interfering with everything matter does.
07:46In the 19th century, they thought if you take all the air out, what you're left with is a genuinely empty vacuum. And that is how it could have stayed, except that we then discovered the idea of quantum theory.
07:59And one of the great mysteries underlying quantum theory is that at an instant in time, you cannot be absolutely sure how much energy there is. Energy can be borrowed or exchanged around on very short time scales.
08:13So, in modern quantum theory, the vacuum is a very violent place, even though you and I, day to day, aren't aware of that fact.
08:22Empty space is a froth of bubbling energy, like molten metal. And Frank and his fellow particle physicists now have proof that this energy shields us from seeing the true strength of the fundamental forces of the universe.
08:38Forces like the electrical repulsion between charged particles.
08:42So, we imagine an electron sitting here, spreading out its electrical tentacles through space, and I've got another electron here that I will use, and I'll measure the force between them.
08:53And the closer it gets, the force will rise more and more.
08:57But we now know, because of the quantum theory, is that that little electron sitting there is actually not isolated.
09:05It is surrounded by the quantum vacuum.
09:09So, it's an electron in a shroud.
09:12And that shroud reduces the full impact of its electrical force.
09:17Of course, the same thing is true of this other electron.
09:20Frank believes that all historical measurements of the electrical force are inaccurate because of these energy shrouds.
09:28But now, atom smashes, like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, can tell the full story.
09:35Here, subatomic particles collide at more than 670 million miles per hour.
09:42They get so close to one another that they finally pierce the shroud.
09:48But eventually, the clouds get inside each other.
09:54And that's when it gets interesting.
09:56And the clouds then are so dispersed around, we at last see the bare electron acting on the other bare electron.
10:04And that's when we discover that the force is much more dramatic than we'd thought before.
10:09Just like protective eyewear that shields are welded from dangerously intense light, Frank believes that empty space itself is insulating the universe from the true intensity of the forces of nature.
10:25If it was possible to turn off that cloak around the electron, you'd have turned off all of the effects of the vacuum.
10:32And you would actually at the same time have destroyed the universe.
10:36Because all structure, the existence of atoms and molecules, could not be if it wasn't for the quantum theory.
10:44Without the dampening energy buzzing around in the vacuum, the fundamental forces of nature would run out of control.
10:52Our entire universe would break apart.
10:57But that is only one side of the story.
11:00Because locked inside this dampening shroud, there should be enough energy to trigger an explosion deadlier than anything we have ever known.
11:10Empty space might be a powder keg waiting to explode.
11:16It might surprise you to know that our best theory of how the universe works down at the microscopic level, the theory of quantum mechanics, also predicts empty space has enough energy to boil the universe out of existence.
11:39But it doesn't.
11:42Something must be keeping nothing in check.
11:46Question is, what?
11:48Neil Weiner is a theoretical physicist at New York University.
11:58He studies the showers of subatomic particles produced by atom smashes like the LHC in Geneva and the Tervitron in Chicago.
12:09So, suppose that you take these two rocks and you think of them as protons.
12:14You collide them together from opposite directions.
12:17And when you do that, you have enough energy in the collision that you can actually make particles that you would never think of as being part of the individual protons.
12:25My job is to try to make sense of what they find when they've collided these particles together.
12:32But to understand the shrapnel flying out of these subatomic explosions, Neil must look at the universe in a way that seems strange.
12:41He must see the smallest building blocks of solid matter as not solid at all.
12:47In the quantum realm, if you create particles, you're creating them in a state that looks more like a wave than it does like a particle.
12:56Just like we have in the fountain, where you have water coming down and sourcing waves that then spread out from a central point.
13:02In quantum mechanics, when you source a particle, you have a wave that spreads out from a central point rather than a particular particle going in any given direction.
13:10Just like the ripples on the surface of a pond, a particle wave will spread itself over the entire ocean of space.
13:19And that means that at every point in the universe, there exists ripples from trillions upon trillions of particle waves.
13:29There is no such thing as empty space. And the energy contained in that great rippling ocean is causing the universe to expand.
13:41When you look at the expansion of the universe, you see galaxies, galaxy clusters all expanding away, everything flying away from each other.
13:49And it turns out that the universe is not slowing down. The universe is actually speeding up its expansion. The universe is accelerating.
13:56So the only way that we know how to explain this is if there's something like an energy density that is pervasive in space itself.
14:06If you have that, that's going to cause the universe to accelerate.
14:11Physicists call this dark energy. From the rate of expansion of the universe, they can measure how much of an empty space contains.
14:21But when they tally that number against how much energy empty space ought to have from all the particle waves filling the universe, there is a staggering mismatch.
14:32When you calculate the amount of energy that there should be in empty space from quantum effects, you get a number which is 10 to the 120 times larger than the number that we actually observe from the expansion and the acceleration of the universe.
14:45And this enormous number. According to their calculations, there should be enough energy in space itself to boil the universe away.
14:57But we are still here. Neil and many of his colleagues think they might know why such a big mismatch exists between theory and observation.
15:07It could be that most particle waves are canceling each other out.
15:14The cancellation of waves is a pretty easy phenomenon to understand.
15:18You just simply imagine that you have one wave which has peaks and troughs, and then you have another wave that has peaks and troughs.
15:24And when those waves combine, if the peaks and troughs are in the same place, if I have two peaks in the same place, they add together.
15:30If I have one peak and one trough, they cancel out and I'm left with nothing.
15:38And so this interference, this phenomenon of how waves can cancel carries over to particles.
15:44Neil thinks there is a whole other set of as yet undetected particles out in the universe, each creating waves which cancel out the waves from the particles we know.
15:54It's an idea known as supersymmetry. Every particle has a mirror image partner.
16:04The fact that my universe allows electrons means that I should have the possibility of creating electrons.
16:10And if I have quarks, I should have squarks.
16:13And Neil's supersymmetric partner should be Sneal.
16:17If you're in New York, you're either a lawyer, you're in finance, or you're an actor. And I can't act.
16:26But finding Sneal, or any other supersymmetric particle wave, is a frustrating task.
16:33You can look for them directly, you can look for them indirectly. I have all sorts of ways to look for supersymmetry.
16:38But up to this point, it's done an excellent job of hiding from us.
16:43So, either we're about to find it, or I think a lot of us are going to say it's just not there.
16:51The LHC has so far seen no sign of supersymmetric particles.
16:55If they do not exist, scientists will be left with a baffling predicament.
17:02Explaining why the energy of empty space is not tearing our universe to shreds.
17:08But other scientists believe a cataclysmic explosion of nothing is inevitable.
17:15And one has worked out when it might happen.
17:19Empty space fills our cosmos like a great ocean of nothingness.
17:33But the still waters of the universe may not be tranquil for long.
17:39As one scientist sees it, a storm may be brewing.
17:43Max Tegmark is a cosmologist at MIT.
17:50Do not let his relaxed charm fool you.
17:54He is deeply troubled.
17:57What is on his mind is nothing other than the future of empty space.
18:03Space itself seems just eminently stable and permanent, just like these golf balls here.
18:10Been hitting these around for quite a while now and they always look the same afterwards.
18:17But how can I be really, really sure that stuff is stable?
18:21Just like the golf ball changed its state into a cloud of dust, could space itself somehow change its state into something else?
18:41A rapid decay of space into a different state may sound highly unlikely.
18:47But it is not without precedent.
18:5213.7 billion years ago, the universe shifted its fundamental properties and its temperature plummeted.
19:00Physicists call this the Big Bang.
19:04And through Max's eyes, there was something fishy about it.
19:08I pretend I'm a fish.
19:14I've spent my whole life in the ocean, and I think of water as just empty space, because that's all I know.
19:22And then one day I realized that this emptiness is actually a substance.
19:26And I'm interested and curious fish, so I figure out, in addition to the liquid water, which I'm in, there is this solid phase, ice, and there's steam.
19:37And then I would start worrying about whether one day, you know, my water might freeze and I might die.
19:42And in exactly the same way, we've looked at our space, realized that it too seems to be able to freeze and kill us all.
19:47Max thinks the Big Bang was not the last cosmic freeze our universe will experience.
20:01And his proof lies in the mind-bending science of quantum mechanics, where nothing is fixed and nothing can last forever.
20:09Quantum mechanics tells you that a particle can never be perfectly still in a known position.
20:17And quantum mechanics tells you that not just about little things like atoms, but also about big things that are made of atoms, like this golf ball.
20:25Which means nothing is completely stable.
20:29This quantum jiggling of things will eventually, if I were to stand here long enough, cause the golf ball to just randomly go up.
20:39And then fall down into a lower energy state.
20:43Left alone on the tee, there is a very slight chance this golf ball will tunnel through space and materialize closer to the ground, where its energy is lower.
20:54When an object tunnels through space, it can end up practically anywhere, as long as its energy is lower.
21:01It could even tunnel into the tin cup, a perfect hole in one, without even swinging.
21:09But this phenomenon could be bad news for the universe.
21:12We physicists have found pretty good evidence that space itself can be in several different energy states, lower, medium, higher.
21:23And we also have good reason to believe that our space used to be in a much higher energy state in the early universe.
21:29In which even the kinds of particles that could exist were different.
21:36Now this early universe, which gave us our big bang, was unstable and very quickly decayed into a lower energy state that we inhabit today.
21:45With this peaceful, very nice and inhabitable space, which contains our kinds of particles that we're made of.
21:53But, we've also measured that there must be an even lower state, because our empty space, as we call it, isn't empty.
22:01It has mass, and as such, should be able to decay into an even lower energy state, where our kinds of particles aren't allowed to exist.
22:14And since I'm made out of that kind of particles, that would be a bit of a bummer for me.
22:19When this sudden decay in the energy of empty space happens, a blast of destructive nothingness will spread through the universe at the speed of light.
22:27We will have no way to see it coming.
22:34It's inevitable.
22:36What's very unclear, though, is how long it's going to last.
22:41Some things are a lot more stable than others, you know.
22:45A uranium atom will last for billions and billions of years.
22:49Whereas, say, a cesium-137 atom that leaked out of a nuclear reactor is going to fall apart much quicker, making it more dangerous.
23:00And in this universe we're in, you know, we've been here for almost 14 billion years, but that doesn't mean it's going to be around forever.
23:08On the conservative side, Max thinks we could have 20 billion years left.
23:17But that depends on supersymmetric particles actually existing.
23:21The same particles Neil Weiner is hoping to see, and the LHC has so far failed to find.
23:28Without supersymmetry to stabilize empty space, it could all end in just one billion years.
23:36The blink of a cosmic eye.
23:38I'm just laughing because...
23:47At the end of Life of Brian, one of my favorite Monty Python movies, they say...
23:54We come from nothing, we go back to nothing. What have we lost? Nothing!
23:59Nothing could be the beginning and the end of the universe.
24:07But there's another way of looking at nothing.
24:11The universe could be a giant bubble.
24:15Everything that is something fits on the surface.
24:21And the inside is just a waste of space.
24:25When we look at the twinkling starlight in the night sky,
24:33it's hard to understand the vast distances that separate us from those stars.
24:39The trillions upon trillions of miles of emptiness.
24:43But that's not the way the ancients saw it.
24:46To them, the stars were just points of light on a black shell that surrounded the Earth.
24:53Outer space did not exist.
24:57Now, some bold thinkers are embracing the spirit of this idea again.
25:03A thousand years after the idea was abandoned.
25:10Herard de Hooft won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999 for his work in establishing the Standard Model,
25:16the basic foundation of particle physics today.
25:21You could call him one of the kings of modern physics.
25:26But you could also call him High Lord of Nothing.
25:31Well, almost nothing.
25:34Because this barren rock is his own private asteroid floating 100 million miles from Earth.
25:41The International Astronomical Union had decided to name the asteroid 94 and 91 a Toft.
25:51I was, of course, very flattered and honored by the event.
25:55But one little thing struck me, and it was that they changed the spelling of my last name.
26:00It now became Toft with a capital T and an H-O-O-F-T just spelled right after it, without apostrophe.
26:10I decided that the asteroid would require a constitution, and one of the first items in the constitution is that all the future inhabitants of this asteroid would have to live without apostrophes.
26:34Anyone entering the territorial zone of the asteroid with a laptop, for instance, that carries a key with an apostrophe in it, that key of the laptop would have to be removed.
26:49As king of his asteroid, Herard is free to ban apostrophes.
26:55But as a Nobel laureate, he knows they still exist.
26:58In fact, Herard believes that anything that is something can never truly be removed from the universe.
27:08It's a principle called the conservation of information.
27:13You might think that the information you put in the documents is completely lost once it's like this.
27:19But actually, that's not true.
27:21I could dig it up, and I tried to put all the pieces together.
27:24The information is still in it.
27:26Physicists like Herard believe anything in the universe can be described by a series of bits, or ones and zeros.
27:37Whether it is a piece of paper, a planet, or a star.
27:42But there is one place in the cosmos where this theory seems to fall apart.
27:47Black holes.
27:49Capacious voids that pull in everything that gets too close.
27:53The black hole is much better than any of these shredders here.
27:58In a black hole, the information is not only shredded, it completely disappears.
28:04In the 1970s, legendary cosmologist Stephen Hawking argued that black holes entirely remove objects from our visible universe.
28:15And the information they swallow is gone forever.
28:18It was a notion that deeply troubled Herard.
28:23And I said, well, that doesn't fit with the view we have about physics.
28:28From the point of view of what we know about the atoms and what's inside an atom, information doesn't go away.
28:35It can't. It would be against the laws of physics that we know.
28:38Hawking stood his ground, and the two debated for years.
28:45Until a brilliant insight turned the tide.
28:49Herard realized that if 9491 proof ever fell into a black hole, it would not disappear without a trace.
28:58It would ever so slightly change the black hole.
29:01The black hole would go into a different state.
29:05So the black hole would not be the same black hole as it was before it ate my asteroid.
29:11It would be a different black hole.
29:13When a black hole feeds on its prey, it grows.
29:18And so its surface area gets slightly larger.
29:21And when Herard calculated exactly how much extra information could fit onto this larger surface,
29:28he discovered it was just enough to fit all the information contained in the black hole's dinner.
29:35The amount of information you can put in a black hole is very precisely defined and is proportional to its surface area.
29:44It's not what's inside the surface. It simply doesn't count.
29:50It's the surface area that counts, not the volume.
29:55This means that the entire information content of Herard's doomed asteroid and everything else devoured by the black hole is imprinted across its surface area.
30:07And Herard discovered that this principle applies to more than just black holes.
30:12In fact, the information contained inside any three-dimensional volume of space must fit onto that volume's surface area.
30:23You see that the box is covered by a grid.
30:28And the amount of information no longer can be counted by looking at the volume of the box,
30:34but by looking at the surface of the box.
30:36On every side of this grid there's one bit of information.
30:42Think of a box the size of the entire universe.
30:46All of the information contained inside fits neatly on a grid on the surface.
30:52The total information content of everything that ever was can be counted there.
30:57Compared with how much space for information exists inside the box, it is practically nothing at all.
31:05In principle, yes, you can, it should be possible to describe everything happening in this universe by concentrating on a surface surrounding it.
31:20If he is correct, and most physicists now think he is, the universe is mostly a waste of space.
31:31Because where there is no information, there is really nothing.
31:35But this woman has taken the concept of nothing one step further.
31:41In fact, she may have found another universe inside our own, made of absolutely nothing.
31:50If I close my eyes, and nothing makes a sound, how can I be sure the world is really there?
32:04Or, if you can't see or hear me, how do you know I really exist?
32:12The difference between something and nothing could be a matter of perception.
32:29Katie Fries is an astrophysicist with a competitive spirit.
32:34I think this stems from my childhood, because we lived on the corner of two blocks.
32:43And all the kids came over to my house to play baseball and basketball or whatever.
32:49Except it was all boys.
32:51So I was always playing with the boys.
32:53And as a physicist, I'm still doing that.
32:56And so I think that's where I developed this sense of competition and thinking that it's fun.
33:01When she's not on the courts, Katie peers into the heart of matter and tries to understand what makes it solid.
33:11When we look at the world around us, it seems to be really solid.
33:17It looks solid, it feels solid, but it's not.
33:21This tennis ball feels solid, but when I cut it open, it's empty.
33:28Just like most of matter.
33:34So if we think about one grain of the sugar that's on my fingertip, and if that were equivalent to the nucleus, then it would take this entire big tennis court to make up the atom.
33:45And in between the sugar, the single grain that makes the nucleus, and this entire tennis court, there's absolutely nothing. It's empty.
33:54The solid world around us is merely an illusion.
34:01What makes things feel solid is nothing more than the repulsion of electrons that exist on the outer shells of atoms.
34:08And if you did not feel this force, you could pass right through solid matter.
34:15In the past two decades, astronomers have discovered light bending around gargantuan invisible masses surrounding every galaxy.
34:27They believe these masses are made of dark matter.
34:30They call it dark because we cannot see it, feel it, or touch it.
34:37It passes right through our solid world as if it was not there at all.
34:42As far as dark matter goes, we know that it does not have electric charge.
34:46We would know. I mean, these things would be bombarding you, and you'd know.
34:49There are probably billions of dark matter particles passing through our bodies every second.
34:55Katie believes that dark matter is made up of particles just as heavy as regular matter,
35:00but they are only affected by what scientists call the weak force.
35:06A force so puny, its effect is barely detectable by our most sophisticated equipment.
35:13In my right hand, I have a tennis racket, and in my left hand, I have a glass of sugar.
35:17And we're going to use these as props to explain weak interactions.
35:23The strings are representing regular matter with a lot of space in between them,
35:28so when the grains of sugar go through, most of them just pass right on by without having any interaction whatsoever.
35:34Katie believes that in one day, of the few billion particles of dark matter that pass through your body,
35:42only two or three of them will ever interact with the atoms inside you.
35:45And when they do, it is only through the weak force.
35:51Highly sensitive experiments around the world have been trying to detect these rare interactions for over a decade,
35:58but the experiments do not agree with one another.
36:01One of the experiments has been seeing a signal for ten years, and it's a statistically very significant result.
36:08But the problem is that some of the other experiments are in disagreement because they're not seeing anything.
36:15The question is, what's going on?
36:17As a scientist competing in one of the biggest theoretical games in physics, Katie is beginning to worry about an emerging possibility.
36:25Dark matter may not even feel the weak force.
36:29What a horrible thought. Nobody said the dark matter had to weakly interact.
36:35So, then we really have a problem. Then I don't know how we're ever going to detect it. How can we discover it?
36:42That would be really discouraging. Let's hope not.
36:46If this is the case, our universe is divided into two worlds, one of matter and one of dark matter.
36:58And they will always be nothing to each other.
37:17Like a tennis game where the rackets have no strings.
37:20The most important contribution to the mass in the universe could really, basically, be nothingness.
37:39So nothingness would rule.
37:42But is there or was there ever such a thing as absolute nothing?
37:47No energy, no matter, no time, or space.
37:52The answer to this question might reveal the ultimate origin of our cosmos.
37:58And this scientific pioneer thinks he has found it.
38:03Bring someone back from the dead?
38:06Through the Wormhole, Wednesday, July 11th at 10, on Science, Question Everything.
38:11Only a decade ago, astronomers confirmed what to many seemed utterly impossible.
38:20Go back 13.7 billion years, and there was only darkness.
38:27Then, our universe exploded into existence.
38:31How could everything come from nothing?
38:38Gabriele Veneziano is the father of string theory, which has become one of the most important scientific ideas in modern physics.
38:49But his latest big idea challenges the mainstream.
38:52He believes the Big Bang could not have been the beginning of everything.
38:59The conclusion that there was nothing, I think it was too fast a conclusion, so I don't want to repeat the same mistake.
39:08Gabriele believes that there was something before the Big Bang.
39:12But, like a city at daybreak, most of this pre-universe was fast asleep.
39:20There were things propagating in space, like waves, particles, but the energy was very diluted.
39:30And furthermore, these waves of this particle interacted very, very weakly.
39:35That would be like having very few people walking in the street, and furthermore, not interacting with each other.
39:46They may not talk to each other.
39:48They may not feel each other.
39:53Gabriele believes that the same fundamental forces of nature we know today existed in the pre-universe,
40:01but their strengths were much lower.
40:02The strength of all these forces was given in terms of what we call the dilaton field.
40:11This dilaton field filled the entire pre-universe and controlled the strength of all the forces.
40:19As it gradually dialed them all up, things started to happen.
40:24As time goes on, the density of people is increasing.
40:27As a result, the interactions are getting stronger and stronger.
40:32So you see people getting together, talking together, making clusters of people together.
40:41The ever-growing pressure increases, and the interactions intensify until things blow up.
40:50For Gabriele, the Big Bang was not a sudden beginning, but rather a tipping point.
41:04If he is right, he will have dispensed with its most puzzling paradox.
41:08Getting something from nothing.
41:12Proving there was never nothing in the universe may not be as difficult as you think.
41:18Because if space and matter have always existed, the Big Bang should have sent colossal gravitational waves rippling through them.
41:26And the aftershock of those waves may still be detectable today.
41:36If we could see gravitational waves, we could go back much, much earlier, really very, very close to the Big Bang.
41:46Or if there was something before the Big Bang, we can even go back to looking at the universe before the Big Bang.
41:53If gravitational waves left over from the pre-universe exist, they should be ever so slightly stretching and squashing the spaces around us.
42:04Engineers from around the world are submitting designs for new spacecraft sensitive enough to detect these distortions.
42:13The important thing is that there are experimental ways to talk about these things.
42:19I mean, they're not just pure science fiction.
42:22I mean, you can put these models to a test.
42:26Gabriele's mission to prove that nothing does not exist, and never did, may be on the verge of success.
42:36The ancient Greeks thought of nothing as a logical impossibility.
42:41The moment you think about nothing, it becomes something.
42:45Modern scientists have spent centuries thinking about nothing.
42:51And what they've learned proved the Greeks were right.
42:55There may be enough energy rippling through nothingness to destroy us.
43:00Entire universes may be made of it.
43:03And it is most definitely not nothing.
43:07Nothing.
43:08Nothing.
43:11equivalently
43:24funktioniert
43:29or war
43:30lights
43:31mould
43:32maal
43:33mos