Great, now I can add the fundamental constants of the universe changing and altering the chemistry and physics that hold my body together to my list of existential terrors.
Right. Even IF we free ourselves from the personifications of the deadly sin of greed (our elite overlords), create a sustainable existence, and defeat climate change thus avoiding the near extinction of the entire human species minus our elite overlords who will certainly retreat to their breakaway civilization most likely within Cheyenne Mountain Complex or possibly even off world entirely then we've got this to worry about. Except humans being able to change universal constants is FIRMLY within the realm of science fiction, and theres not even a theory to make it otherwise. Yay...
We can do that 💪 I am Jester Moon The Wizard of Silly, here in Calgary 64 and so much more time to people watching in Calgary Untruedauxland Stay Silly Stay Safe and Stay Free 🌐
At the end of every episode, I'm just sitting there, waiting for it... 11:03 "We may one day find that our sacred laws of physics..." - Is he gonna say it? "...and their underlying constants..." - He is gonna say it! "...aren't so constant afterall..." - Here it is! "...beyond our little patch..." - OF SPACETIME! OF SPACETIME! "...of spacetime." :-D
Todays science needs to come back down to earth ...this video series show some really interesting things about the constants of nature. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1PD3uxHyhuY.html
Ellen Degenerate but maybe its the otherway around maybe casting a spell in morrowind sounds like light being emitted instead of the otherway around like you said
@@josephbrandenburg4373 lol you're not a billionaire. Sucker. I get the government to pay me millions and millions of dollars in taxes while building infrastructure for my businesses for free.
I've been struggling with online explanations of the fine structure constant. As a lay person, I'm so grateful to have an explanation I can actually understand!
I have a thought about this: maybe it's not changing, but oscillating, going back and forth, always in between a specific range which would allow the fundamental laws of physics remain stable enough tough space-time.
It's more a thought than a theory... it is based on a real example, and that's quantum mechanics... I know it's kind of a stretch, but bear with me... in the quantum realm, physics kind of break, and that's due to the scale: it's really small... and with small comes this kind of fluctuation, which we found it to be more like a wave than a fixed number or scalar... and so is this constant... it's really small, and it's changing, but in a very slow pace... Now, as a disclaimer, I'm just a computer engineer, not a PhD in physics, so I'm kind of going with my thoughts with this... so in a way, what do I know? cheers!
Mathematicians = omg, new math Physicists = I may unlock a new part of reality Chemists = we will wait on the physics Engineers = what i have is good enough Geologists (my field) = aww, stop messing with my results...
never was a truer statement uttered regarding engineers lol. To add some reasoning to that though: the variance or uncertainty in our material properties (due to small variations in physical structure due to imperfect manufacturing) generally makes any precision beyond classical unnecessary to consider. You have no idea which direction that error will be in any given moment so you just run a likelihood calculation and slap an appropriate factor of safety on it to rate it for X years. However, as things become smaller (such as nano-scale processor architecture) sometimes new physics becomes relevant. I couldn't verify, but I've heard quantum considerations are given now in the design of processors to enable miniaturization beyond a certain point.
No. If you were to dig through the center of the Earth from Chile, you'd end in China. The antipodal point of Australia is in the Atlantic Ocean to the east from Cuba. :-)
If space is expanding, doesn't that imply that time is expanding? And if so, can the acceleration of space expansion be explained away by the non-linearity of time itself?
Or the fundamental particles are shrinking and that makes space look like it is expanding. With a particular momentum of change tendency for all the fund. forces we might not know the difference. Or it could be a mix of both
3:05 “In fact it may be impossible to interpret changes in any physical constant that has units.” Why? If the speed of light, for example, were defined in units _not_ dependant on its value, then what’s the problem?
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure the fact that the speed of light tends to govern the speed of interaction in the universe might mean that it's impossible to have something not dependant on the speed of light.
beri hmm that’s an interesting point. But then again a second is defined by a certain number of hyperfrequency oscellations of a cesium atom. Nothing to do with light. So I don’t know how to reconcile the two.
@@g07denslicer When you say "hyperfrequency oscellations" what do you mean? If you're talking about oscillations in the electromagnetic force, then these are effected by the speed of light.
Phil P I just saw the video. Well yeah, I never said anything about superscripts o subscripts, that's just a typo... I'll write another comment on that video, but whatever. Thank you for pointing that out!
I just realized that when Matt first replaced the first guy, the enthusiastic one, I really didn't like Matt and wanted the other guy back... but now? I can't imagine the show without him
Isaac Hatch in my comment I meant that if Matt had love relationship with Kelsey their kids would be very smart and cute. Just some possibilities, you know.
I can't believe you questioned constants, :D it's one of the things that most intrigues me, as why is a constant that number , how ? and can we alter them?. I was glad to know scientists question this instead of accpetting them cuz they are proven. Love this SPACETIME ! Keep it up
I've long postulated that the Universe expanding will cause the fine structure constant (or Planck's constant which is used to derive the fine structure constant) to change over cosmological time due to a changing zero point energy density, which is only a 0 vacuum expectation value because it's in equilibrium (composed of phase conjugate waves that overlap and destructively interfere).
FarawayWayfarer Physics is weird, but language is even more so. People often talk about "constant growth" and similar stuff, when they mean "continuous growth" or "monotonic growth". Maybe the meaning of "constant" changes even more? Let's see when physicists talk about the "strength of the lightspeed field".
Samuel a I could see that. A constant that doesn't change given a stable area, but the area around it could redefine the limits of the constant if they were subjected to change
Your discussion of fine structure was actually the physics leading to hyperfine structure. Fine structure is what was used for the alpha variation experiments - and fine structure is due to spin-orbit coupling. BTW, I was a co-author on the first paper you mentioned! Nice presentation. I love your channel.
Even if the fundamental constants aren't changing, it's still no surprise that we find ourselves in a universe where those constants create favorable conditions through which an intelligent species can observe them. This is the whole point of the Anthropic Principle.
But this is why multiverse theory exists. All those universes that came to be that couldn't form intelligent life just die out. Those that can, have intelligent life questioning the existence they're in. We can't appear in a universe and go "man, this isn't perfect for us at all" because we could never get to that point. So simply because it is "perfect" for us, which it isn't because its very deadly and kills us off in many ways - doesn't imply anything if you believe in the multiverse theory. I think its simply a simulated reality. Look at World of Warcraft the game, bones, galaxies, history, mountains, etc implying its been around for billions of years.. yet the game was made in 2004. Easy to create a reality with a history.
It is surprising since the anthropic principle rests on there being a 'choice'. It works for Earth being habitable because there's a lot of 'not Earth' to experience all the possible variation. Our universe then either must have its values for a reason or be part of larger varying whole. (That variance could be, at least partly, life itself; lots of living systems must be possible, suited for a range of constants.)
Yes, but it's not really that real is it? Death is far less permanent, it seems to lack an underlying simple physics (Its code is massively more complex than our standard model.) Any thinking being within it would quickly come to realize that it is a construct. I don't see us going for really real simulations, they're no fun.
The Anthropic Principle doesn't help the problem because it doesn't address the relevant kind of probability. Given that we know we and other living organisms exist, it isn't surprising (i.e. improbable) that life exists, but that isn't the relevant "given" for the problem of fine tuning because it doesn't provide any kind of explanation. Given a belief that the universe just exists with the values for the constants it happens to have, but it could have existed with constants with values having any of an infinite number of other possible values, it is highly improbable that life could exist. The only explanations on the market right now that don't make the possibility of life highly improbable are theism and multi-verse theory. Even cosmological theories that posit something like a white hole as the origin of the big bang don't help with fine-tuning, though it might help that the constants can/are changing, but probably not.
the episodes keep getting crazier, and my understanding of reality is expanded each time. sometimes its hard to follow, but i love every minute. i look foward to these episodes each week :)
I have thought about the CMB having the appearance of the inside of a sphere, and that everywhere we looked was looking back in time toward the big bang, is constant no matter what way we look in the sky. Thinking about the changes in fundamental constants made me question if the CMB is a sphere and that being able to measure small changes in the constant might be a way to map when/where various objects in space are and our place in it. Could a changing Alpha show us that one direction in the universe is older than another or reveal more on its shape? Feel free to clear up any ignorance I may have.
It's a possibility; if the change in alpha relates to a change in light speed or time in some way it may indicate that there is some sort of gradient over the universe. How this changes things is tricky, time moves slower on Earth than in space, in that sense Earth is a 'younger direction'. Having one side of the universe be younger than the other is similar to having a universe-wide gravity field or bulk motion. It may or may not tweak our understanding a great deal.
Okay, this will definitely sound dumb. Since I'm no physicist :D But, is it possible that the acceleration of expansion of the Universe might be due to the time dilation? Since expansion is accelerating (and happening) in the Void and the Void contains no mass, doesn't that mean the time is faster compared to the regions of the Universe with mass (both matter and dark matter) like galaxies and other clusters? You know sort of gravitational time dilation?
Thank you so much for your fantastic ability to convey these thoughts and ideas to the masses. It is to me so necessary to understand the importance of science, and the scientific method to the masses. Keep it up, please!
I am only a casual student of the topics in these and other like channel's videos. Learning for fun just to get myself more education that I have for no real use. That said, the theories in this video are intuitive to me, making good sense easily, which doesn't happen all that often for me outside of the basic stuff like relativity.
There are infinately many ways of defining fundamental constants. As long as you're just writing the same thing in a different way there's not much point in doing so.
As it is they've been made decidedly LESS arbitrary. The meter was once a division of an Earth-based measurement, a glorified ruler, the second based on our solar day. Now both are related to physical processes that could, at least in theory, be assembled without a 'master reference'. The kilogram is the exception to this, still being based on a lump of metal in Paris. It's hard to make the standards less arbitrary because everything is, in the end, a comparison. You cannot make a ruler somehow independent of length or a clock independent of time. At their core you will have to pick some process and say 'We set this as 1.'
What if space is a function of the relationship between the quantum world and the macroscale. As the macroscale universe expands, the ratio changes, eventually turning the entire universe into a single infinitely small point, and bam, the big bang repeats.
@@2019inuyasha haha I like your twist on that quote. The main point is of distance being a function of the relationship between scales. As a conceptual analogy, imaging the inside of black hole, where things are at very close spatial distance, but functionally infinitely far apart because movement away from center is impossible. I could imagine the universe's loop being the inverse of this. Where particles are spatially distant, but because of changes at a lower scale, the velocity of particles becomes magnitudes larger allowing for them to interact again. Perhaps there's a 'reset' moment like the big bang, or perhaps it's a gradual process and the 'death' of the last universe looks to us like an explosion because relative to our universe's functional distances, the previous universe's entire functional distance is infinitesimally small.
Fine tuning doesn't mean shit. If we weren't in a universe that eventually resulted in us existing then we wouldn't have existed to complain about not existing.
Its not a coincidence, it's a consequence. Also who's to say some form of "life" couldn't exist with different constants, there is no way for us to know. Its not physics but philosophy and therfore has no place on this channel.
I noticed several comments concerning his statement of "Life as we know it". I believe that while our Universe is fine- tuned to produce vast numbers of hydrocarbon-based lifeforms, it is reasonable to assume that many other NON-hydrocarbon based lifeforms exist as well, perhaps 20% of total lifeforms in the Universe. I know this is a 'guesstimate', but it's the first estimate of it I've ever seen postulated. Where do I pick up my Nobel prize? LoL
As someone majoring in Physics at the moment, I just want to applaud you for the work you have done on this channel. My course material is intriguing, but your ability to take advanced concepts and make them approachable really help keep me motivated in my study. I hope to learn about the secrets of the universe one day and work toward a theory of everything. From right now when I am just scratching the surface of electromagnetic theory all the way to (hopefully) my PhD thesis, I will always make the time to watch PBS Space Time.
Nice ending. Playing ED right now, and just dropped out of supercruse to pick up a suvery data cache when you talked about the Thargoids. Hope i dont run into one before i get back with my exploration data. Still 4000LY to go.
Jan-Robert Nergård careful, mysterious stuff has been happening around that distance, people getting ripped out of supercruise due to some mysterious substance being detected.
One could argue that "constant" is just another unit of measurement humans created to try and understand long-term persistence of observed behavior. For example: "Moore's Law" changing as a result of increased understanding. We are trying to understand things bigger than us but define them from an impatient point of view. THANK YOU FOR AN AMAZING VIDEO! Keep up the great work!!!
This is the first video of yours I am watching (right now I am) and I have already subscribed to your channel.. Proves you are good. Keep up the good work.
Could the different measurements to the fine constant (based on different direction of observation) be like red shift based on the direction and speed at which we are expanding in the universe relative to the parts of space we are observing to make the measurements?
noja83 this is what i was thinking as they are in different hemispheres. Perhaps thats the reason for the measurements flipping from smaller to larger/larger to smaller. Definitely interesting.
Pro Rs, I also remember being taught that change of direction is acceleration and warping of space towards massive objects is also acceleration (also what we measure as gravity. Right?) . So as light is pulled in different directions as it travels through warped space, is it changing speed? If we (and our measuring stick) are curved in space along with the light traveling through it, would the speed of light seem unchanged to us but different to a very distant observer?
Oddly enough no, the warping of space and time is bound by the laws of relativity which ensure that light appears to move at c to all observers in all reference frames. When your ruler gets bent time warps to make sure everything works out.
Fine-tuning reminds me of quote by Douglas Adams: “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'" Yes, if the constants were different, life and the universe as we know them would be different. Indeed, perhaps there'd be no discernible universe (composed of separate discrete objects such as planets and stars). Or maybe there would be some other form of universe with some other form of life.
John D. Barrow, one of the authors of the study, wrote a really excellent popsci book about this called The Constants of Nature. Definitely check it out! So many goodies in it.
It doesn't imply that they "do" change over time, but it does allow the possibility that they "may" change over time. The real answer will be when the "why" behind the change is discovered. It's like finding out that since one friend has a new address, maybe all friends do. If you discover the underlying reason (the friend moved) this it becomes easy to predict which friends will have variable addresses and which won't.
If you measure distance traveled from the stationary reference frame (as you see them from earth) and time traveled from the moving reference frame (as you experience it on board of your spaceship) then there is no c limit at all. You can accelerate forever given infinite energy, and that will result in shorter travel time each time. Another problem is the residual matter of the vacuum that will be bombarding you at such speed.
Always slower than c relative to your local gravity. But if you can figure out how to change gravity, then you might be FTL relative to c elsewhere. (Given things like black holes, we're probably FTL in regards to those regions of space. Stuff really does seem funky when you consider time dilation with strong gravitational fields.) Now whether this can be exploited in a useful way? Who knows? As far as I know, no working warp drive just yet.
Good question, guaranteed headache potential because everything is relative to everything else and it was shown that we live in a limited state of observables, which means a selected pocket of this composition of quantum information "locally". Ie this bit has evolved from..., everything else and the constants are a "steady state" if the Big Bang is a regular oscillation in the greater context. (Good job sorting it out, a worthy challenge for science)
"The Fine Structure Constant is strength of the Electromagnetic Force! The Electromagnetic Field's relationship with the Charged Electron Field." -Morty's Mind Blowers
That's why without constant nothing can be.... They are getting wrong about almost everything in science. WE CREATE OUR REALITY. but for this, a constant is needed... And it is EM force, the smallest power of life.
the fine tunning problem is not a problem. It states that it is unlikely that a random universe would host life. But if the universe didnt host life we wouldnt be here to verify it, so it doesnt matter any universe we observe must be able to host life, otherwise we wouldnt be observing it. Therefore we dont live in a random universe
Then why are we observing it as we are ad not in some other configuration of matter? Are we the only life that can exist? Why couldn't the universe be different and the life within it different? And what is the reason behind us 'not being random'? We know nothing about it as yet, which simply moves the problem up a level.
That's not the issue as life's existence obviously doesn't explain why the fundamental constants have their values. That would be like a scientist observing Brownian motion and saying "Well of course the little particles are moving all random-like. I'm observing them so-moving so obviously there are favorable conditions for them to move like that. No mystery here." But that is one of the central observations that helped confirm atomic theory because atomic theory could EXPLAIN Brownian motion. The issue is what underlying view would explain how our universe is one that makes life possible given that there are so many more possible universes in which life isn't possible. So far as I know, there are only two current views: infinite multi-verse or theism.
That's true, IF you believe in a multiverse, but we ARE here, and that IS an extraordinary thing if you don't get to fall back on a multiverse then, which there is no evidence for. You're assuming there are an infinite number of alternate universes that we could potentially have found ourselves to live in. It is a valid point that that may be extremely unlikely if that is not the case. It is only correct to then apply the anthropic principle if you knew there actually WERE an infinite number of alternate universes, then it would not be weird that one which is conducive for life happens to be the one we find ourselves in. But if there's only one universe, or if they all have the same constants of nature because there's some fundamental reason why those constants could only be one thing (like in no alternate universe, is pi equal to 7, because it is a constant that is determined purely by numbers) then it may indeed by a VERY odd coincidence that it had parameters which allowed for life. You may be able to throw a bunch of puzzle pieces into the air and have them land in an assembled puzzle 1 time out of 10^5000 throws, and if there were an infinite number of times the puzzle was thrown into the air that would be one thing, but suppose the puzzle was only thrown in the air ONE time and yet it STILL landed in the assembled puzzle? That would be quite extraordinary, would it not? It's the difference between 20 monkeys in a room typing on typewriters for all time eventually coming up with Shakespeare's complete works, and 20 monkeys in a room typing for one day coming up with Shakespeare's complete works.
That sound effect at 6:06 for the emitted photon sounds just like the sound effect in Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time when Link casts his line at the fishing pond.
What a blessing that mankind has been successful enough. To spend our days trying to notice a one part in ten to the fifteenth difference in how electrons behave a billion light years away. We can never know if reality isn’t ultimately determined at a level far below or far above our greatest ability to measure, not by science alone.
+Breath and a Scream I think it would be unfair to call it "just a limit on measurement." I think it affects the emission of blackbody radiation as well, for instance.
No. It's not "just a limit on measurement". You have some serious misunderstanding of the uncertainty principle. Plank constant has unit, it's not dimensionless, so it doesn't really make sense to ask whether it changes. The fine structure constant "alpha" actually involves the Plank constant.
Be careful, Planck's CONSTANT is something important in a range of physical phenomena. The Planck SCALE, in certain contexts is where the uncertainty in even a perfect measurement becomes larger than the measurement itself, rendering sensible measurement impossible. The first is a constant that would affect various things such as the fine structure constant if it changed. The second is a limit due to uncertainty inherent in the nature of matter and were that to change the balance between classical and quantum processes would also shift.
We don't know. Some hope to find a 'theory of everything' that connects everything into one basic equation, potentially linking all constants somehow. But the universe doesn't have to obey our whims.
The fine structure constant and the hyperfine structure is what we exploit in the nuclear world to do laser isotope enrichment! Still mostly experimental at this point, hard to industrialize. But using light to separate isotope is such a rad thing!
I know this may seem like an amateur question but I'm also an amateur at physics and astronomy... I understand that light passing through a medium or gas or dust or something of that nature causes certain light bands... resulting in us being able to tell which elements are present... but what I don't understand is exactly how, so what I mean is what determines how the photons are being absorbed by these certain elements?
Mark & Recall: Fast Travel before it was cool. Beats having to walk through that sodding canyon twice and get abused by every bloody Cliff Racer on Vvardenfell just to see Nibani.
Short answer, because the meter was defined first as 1/40,000,000 of the Earth's circumference (making the earth a nice round 40k km ), and no one wanted to start fiddling with the length of a meter since every other unit under the sun would be affected. I found this: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9314/why-is-the-speed-of-light-defined-as-299792458-m-s if you want some more detail.
Eduard Ferenc: That was the state of Indiana in the late 1800's. Some amateur mathematician thought he had proved that you could 'square the circle' (long known to be impossible since the Greeks, look it up). Naturally some moron congressman took the bait and proposed a law to make the resulting (wrong) value of Pi official, probably to make himself look smart. The legislation was poorly understood and might have passed if a visiting Uni Prof hadn't been around to ridicule it and save the state from eternal embarrassment.
I've been watching your show since almost the beginning, and I think this might actually be my favorite episode thus far, I love all of it! Yay Science!!!
Love the show, been watching for a while now. But I felt compelled to drop a comment pointing out how uncomfortable I get looking at someone wearing a tee shirt with the collar all stretched the hell out like this. I'm not talking about that nice, well-branded PBS SpaceTime shirt at the end of the video; no, that shirt was completely normal. I'm talking about the other 95% of the shows where I'm looking at a shirt that was used to pull a semi truck out of a ditch by its collar. I mean, who does the wardrobe on this show? Does your mother watch this without asking if every day is laundry day? Honestly, how can you look your mother in the eye and tell her that not only is it not laundry day, but that fugly collar is actually intended to look like that. I have so many questions, none of which can be answered by theoretical physics.
Fine-tuning problem is not a problem, just a bad argument. It is based on the false premise that these constants are inputs for the physics. They might be an input in our calculations, but it the real world, they are just consequences, observations, not something which can be changed. Saying the universe would fall apart in case of different values of these constants is analogous to saying the concept of circle would fall apart in case of different values of Pi.
The question remains though why exactly they are that way. Circles are math, change pi and you have... something. Maybe it's a circle if you use a broad enough definition. But 'the universe' isn't math, if its physics is different then its results are too. 'a universe' (might) always exist in some form, but 'our universe' is not a done deal. Why is the universe habitable? If the values were different what we know does fall apart; atoms aren't some guaranteed ethereal concept that will exist under any laws of physics, remove the Higgs field and they become impossible. So,, why ARE they possible?
Gareth Dean The point is that the values cannot be different. The underlying physics could be different, which would result in different values. Therefore there are no parallel universes for each possible values. There might be parallel universes with different physics, but that doesn't mean these can be mapped to all possible values. For example there might be no such parallel universe where Pi=4.05, or C=200k km/sec. Also it is not a low probability coincidence that we have these exact values, because this is the only possible value. People like to use this argument to prove the existence of some higher power, but it is a false argument.
I don't see how your argument follows; WE are limited to roughly the values we see because of how we function, but we have no proof that other life is not possible with other constants, which would negate the anthropic principle until we find such evidence. There MAY not be other possible 'parallel' universes but that's conjecture, not a solution. And secondly it's a dead end similar to 'God did it' If someone punches me in the face and I demand to know why they can answer 'It has to be this way or you wouldn't have asked the question.' And that's true, but it leaves aside all other possible reasons.
Given that some physicists think the values actually are changing, why do you think the values CANNOT be different? G is equal to 6.67408 x 10 to the -11, and according to you it isn't possible that it could have had a value of 6.674080001 x 10 to the -11 or something more radical. Why? Seems completely and obviously arbitrary on your part. Also, there's an obvious reason why Pi cannot be different. It's a certain kind of ratio. Mathematical facts are often necessary but there's no reason why gravity HAS to be 6.67408 x 10 to the -11. Of course it could have been different for all we know.
philosopherhobbs The only different between Pi and G, is that Pi is simple, so it is obvious for you, while many other constants are not so obvious. But the other constants are also certain "kind of ratio", only they are not fully understood yet. We have full understanding of Pi, a fair understanding about C, and we are trying to understand the rest as well.
Thank you for raising the bar on collective wisdom. I am indebted to PBS Space Time. Indeed, all of us are in your debt. Please keep on raising eyebrows everywhere around the wonderful world. Much Love!
That would be really cool if the solution to the fine tuning argument could be that it changes over space and time. Can't wait to see what the future says about it
Fascinating episode - well explained. I learnt a lot. Since doing undergrad physics in the '80s I have thought that changing fundamental constants was likely.
Nice topic. What would be a great addition to this video is to include the directions we are talking about in this paper super imposed on a map of the CMB and also include pointers to the direction of the dark flow and the locations of the largest known super-voids.
Wow!! A few things: tbh, if you ask me it makes sense that constants would change overtime. But also considering ho w hard red shift is to account for ???? Is all I have to say on that. However, I don't think I understand why you can't measure changes in constants with units. Using light for example, if a meter is defined as how far light travels in a certain amount of time make a stick that's that's long or whatever, and then if over time of repeated measuring the sticks start to get longer or shorter, then you know something's up. This is so interesting and thank you for great content!!!
Actually it may make it easier. Currently the constants we know of are 'free', seemingly unrelated to anything. Variation might give clues that they are in fact tied to some more fundamental physics, a smaller handful of actual fundamental constants or maybe the result of a single, elegant expression.
This discussion has caused me to envision a science-fiction concept wherein an intergalactic spacecraft wanders into a region of the universe where the universal constants don't allow for chemistry and the ill-fated ship and crew dissolve into their constituent elements, and presumably a flash of leftover bond energy.
Oops! The captions at 09:15 say “This uranium deposit underwent a natural *fusion* event” [emphasis added]. An easy mistake to make! ^_^ (But alas‡, fusion of nuclei with more protons† than iron is no longer exothermic, and would not be likely to sustain itself under naturally occurring conditions. Methinks *fission* would be the nuclear reaction with uranium.) ‡And alack, for those who dream of driving machines with fusion reactors using fuel so much heavier than the deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen. †Or at least, more _total mass_ (protons+neutrons, and to a much lesser extent, electrons)
3:06 Assuming velocities can be compared, you can detarmain the ratio of the speed of light in two different places or times, and you don't even need to bring out units.
I think that testing differences in the speed of light in a vacuum is absolutely testable. One just needs to know where to test and accept that even then most places we can practically reach would have a barely detectable change.
At 5:58 I'm fairly certain that the circled magnet was actually not aligned with the field. Not sure if I'm on the same page here, but magnetic field lines typically go from N to S.
The fine tuning problem is only a problem if you assume the amount of the reality we can observe a good portion of all there is. Without this assumption, the anthropic principle easily explains fine tuning, especially when you consider the possibility of causally disconnected and independent universes.
We could give solar lens telescopes orbital trajectories rather than stationary positions and have multiple ones, some in directions of confirmed exoplanets and some at statistically promising angles. I imagine the right filters will be necessary. I also wonder if useful hybrids of the various previously mentioned approaches could be developed. Also, it would be interesting to look at the same exoplanets using all of the different approaches and see what we find.
Read Brainwave by Poul Anderson, written in the 1950s.. When the earth moves into a new region of space with different physical rules, ordinary people get smarter, smart people become geniuses and geniuses become too smart for this planet so they build interstellar spaceships and leave. Even dogs learn to talk.
We also have to take into account Energy is being transformed from matter into an alternative Energy, thus Entropy leading to the 3rd law of Thermodynamics.
At 1:10 onwards, Matt mentioned how QM cannot explain the mass or parameters of any of the fundamental particles in nature. That should tell you a lot about QM, and it's lack of basis in physical reality. He mentions that there must be a more fundamental theory, a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that can explain the nature of the cosmos. Unfortunately, most people don't realise that a GUT was developed throughout the late 80's & 90's (long ago!) that predicts in closed-form solutions all the fundamental constants and masses in nature, to within measure-able precision. Refreshingly, the theory is based on classical postulates, and correctly predicts all natural phenomenon normally attributed through a QM interpretation. The theory predicted the accelerating expansion of the universe PRIOR to the observations in the late 90's. It also provides a beautifully elegant explanation of the nature of Dark Matter. The theory is described in the book The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, and is freely available from brilliantlightpower(dot)com as a large pdf document. Working my way through the book has been an absolute revelation, and has reinvigorated my love for physics. BTW: The nature of the fine-structure constant is also explained in the book.
This reminds me of vacuum decay by In A Nutshell where they hinted that different parts of the universe (those that have undergone theoretical vacuum decay) have different physics than other parts of the universe.
