Do Cause and Effect Really Exist? (Big Picture Ep. 2/5) 

So the cat DID light the house on fire :D

You know nothing about 42. Please do your research before making these ridiculous claims.

so... the thing I got from this is... cats are jerks

So... the answer is "no, but yes, but not really, but absolutely, but it's not important"?

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this video totally skip over quantum mechanics? Not every event in the future can be predicted by looking at what happened in the past.

Yeah, we shouldn't prosecute criminal because it's just the law of physic that cause it

is it just me or is this a new voice .>

Minute Physics is playing semantic games to dish up cheap "mind-blow" feels.

I think this only shows that the integer 42 is, in fact, the cause of life, the universe, and everything.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ANY OF THIS MEANS BUT I LIKE THE VOICE AND THE CUTE LIL STICK FIGURES

The Big Picture is an awesome book! It touches on every fundamental thing I've ever thought about! With a dose of philosophy of science thrown in. Henry and Sean is an exciting collaboration.

I learned nothing from this video except that I may be retarded.

0:13 I love how the philosopher is just asking "Why?" xD

Not a fan of not having Henry narrate.

This video seems more minutephilosophical rather than minutephysical. 😂 Hit like if you agree.

Brilliant, as always. This should be made into a course for primary schools. My 8 year old daughter finds this format pretty easy to digest with a little Q&A afterwards.

This series is great, really really impressed by how enjoyable, easy to understand and well illustrated it is!

A couple of take-aways here... Cats are Arsonists, and Minute Physics is clearly lost on the greatness that is the number 42. It's literally the answer to everything.

But even physics can't explain why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch...

I love Sean Carroll for spreading actual science and so interesting information to the rest of us.

42 because that's the answer to all these questions?

You are one of the most concise and easy to watch RU-vidrs I have ever seen.

Sooo, what exactly was the point of the video?

Such an interesting video, the relation between philosophy and physics is fascinating as hell. (:

but will it blend?

This is some God level physics with children's animation. - Random dude who dropped the idea of being a physicist.

You have to agree, seeing a reverse explosion creating a small spark at the end in real life would be freaking hilarious.

Hold on, on the quantum level you can NOT know the position and momentum of a particle because there is always a degree of error in both. So you can only say where a particle was probably in the past with ever increasing probability the further back you go. That also means you can't run something backwards and get the initial conditions because of the inherent randomness in the universe.

word jugglery at its finest.

I see so many comments complaining about the purpose of the video and that it is hard to understand. I'm not special at all and I understand, I just make some effort and repeat some parts and I get amazed by the knowledge. Let's try harder folks, it's completely understandable and logic

But then there's the fact that humans are made of those particles and our perception is the result of neural activity and connections from which perception emerges. Therefore, wouldn't everything just be a result, rather than an effect or cause? Our behaviors and thoughts are the necessary result of the neural activity in our brains. Then this leads into determinism, cognitive and behavioral psychology, and eventually you realize that we are just big bags of chemicals behaving the way chemicals must behave according to the laws of physics. Still cause and effect? Or just the necessary result of matter following the laws of physics? Everything we think and do is the necessary result of past events in our lives because we, after all, are made up of matter. No one behaves based on events that never happened to them - that would make us random.

I love thinking about determinism in this way, it really plays with my idea of what I am and my place in this large chain reaction. Great video and well illustrated.

I knew it ! I knew it was the cat that set the house on fire !!!

So on the microscopic scale we can't talk about cause and effect, but only in patterns. And on the macroscopic way we CAN talk about cause and effect, because it's what rises from a low entropy state of the universe that what's to get to a higher entropy state. So the universe wanting to go from one state to another makes 'time'. This results in a lot of questions, one of which: is there a boundary or a grey area somewhere between the microscopic and the macroscopic scale where cause and effect become patterns and where patterns become cause and effect?

"I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing near you" :P

This is your best video to date. You, sir, just earned my patreon subscription.

But with quantum mechanics in play, the determinalism of "it follows this pattern" doesn't really work. Observing a particle affects it's path in a big way. Like with the double slit experiment, if you put a sensor on one slit that detects if light goes through that slit, the waveform pattern, apparently, does not appear, and two rectangles show up.

I saw that the video was trending, clicked on the link and the video began playing. Cause and effect. Only physics nerds really care about things beyond that level.

so nukes make pencils..got it

This video is BS. Laws of physics are not considered deterministic. You cannot predict the future nor the past from the current state (due to Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, truly random spontaneous decay of radioactive atom, probabilistic collapse of wave function etc). On quantum level there are no 100% guaranteed patterns. So future and destiny are not determined until you make the final action. In fact, our free will (or random) choices are the true cause for the future even. There is cause and effect. Another argument: If there is no cause and effect that means that no information can flow between 2 points in the universe (because new information changes outcome). That is incorrect according to information theory and quantum mechanics. I downvoted the video...

I don't trust this new guy

Does cause and effect really exist?*

No. On any level, microscopic or macroscopic, if a particle hits another particle it causes the other particle to move, it is the cause. If it misses, the other particle doesnt move. This video is philosophy, not physics. I want physics, not philosophy.

What about random fluctuations? We can't know whether a radioactive atom will decay, but we can know if it did.

That just fucking blew my mind... THANKS A BUNCH, DNEWS. NOW I GOTTA GO MOP UP ALL THOSE BRAINS!

0:35, but Heisenberg says that you cannot know both of these things.

That's right, the question "why" pretty much sums up all of philosophy right there. (0:14)

henry is better than this guy isn't he

oh! That actually cleared up a huge gap in understanding I had. Especially the number line analogy.

Physics and philosophy meet. I like it.

One of the best videos I have ever seen.

Physics doesn't answer the "why?". Physics can only answer to "how?". There is no "why" or "meaning" in reality/physics.

This has nothing to do with the video but this channel is about science so... the advertising before this video was the one about Rosetta story, the ESA's probe for the study of comets that last weeks lifecycle came to an end.It's the first time I noticed you cannot comment, like or rewind ads... normally it wouldn't make any sense, but this one was very beautiful.

But if on a fundamental level there is no cause & effect but on a large scale one it exists, how and at which level do you draw the line? Because there has to be one if size is a continuous 'thing'.

I love it whenever I watch these videos, think I understand what they're talking about and then realise I didn't understand a thing.

2 vsauce videos and now this damn some day

Wonderfully increased my understanding of cause and effect - thank you!

I want nuclear pencils :(

I hope this is the end of the annoying solo bass music for good. I've been waiting. This music is great.

Now this one really didn't make any sense to me. Was it just about all quantum processes being reversible? Because there are results in the google saying they are not. I'm not qualified to tell if any of them are legit though.

Sean Carroll! I downloaded a pirated copy of your book "The Big Picture" just yesterday! I also got a nice legal copy on Audible but they don't have an app on the Roku so I just stream the pirated copy on my media server to listen over my TV and use my Roku remote at night.

how can cause and effect be real of our eyes aren't real

I am devastated. This was way longer than a minute.

The science here is not as settled as the speaker (Sean Carroll, a very respected physicist) makes it sound. There is much dispute about the nature of time, fundamental laws, particles/fields, and almost everything this video touches on (which is why it sounds more philosophical and scientific).

I've always thought about this, and never got an answer. You said that only in the macroscopic scale we can notice an arrow of time, but i think there's sort of an arrow of time microsopically. Basically, in our physics equations we put in all of the parameters and then we can figure out the future and also the past. For example, if a rock is in midair and you know its direction and velocity at that time, and you insert a bigger value of the time into the equations, you get where it is in the future. If the value you insert is smaller you get what happened in the past. But is it possible to create a different set of equations that if you insert a bigger value of the time you get what happened in the past, and if a smaller value you get what happens in the future? As far as i know, it's impossible, and that can mean that in the most fundemental level there's an arrow of time pointing to the future.

Holy shit I finally understand something

This is what you call over-thinking, or over-sciencing.

if we knew exactly what would happen in the future would we call it remembering? how would knowing the future feel different from knowing the past? I cant decide if this is profound or not.

I was listening to this and thought "That sounds like Sean Carroll". Always enjoy his stuff!

Thank you, Captain Obvious! You make my day.

This video is not science; this video is philosophy. Yes, there is cause and effect. It's an elementary scientific principle. Boom. Done. That's it

Give me my henry back

No, this is BS. He's just getting confused over *his* definition of "cause" and "effect" and the definition we use in everyday speech. Put it simply, if I throw a glass at a brick wall, it will break. That, by my definition at least, was the cause (glass being throw at a brick wall) and the effect (glass smashing into pieces).

"beCAUSE of the direction of time" 🙄😂

I'm going to provide a rebuttal to his argument. Please feel free to reply to mine. I think he is ignoring the fact that the time and perspective at/from which he chooses to observe these scenarios is skewing his results. The carbon in the pencil is an effect caused by the atomic bombs. The fact that your viewing that from the time/perspective of the pencil doesn't change that. Cause and effect can't go backwards in time because the definition we gave those words are intertwined with our concept of time in the first place. Records/Memories ARE effects. Further (if you care to read), about the position and momentum of the particles ( 0:35 ), The present position at which you are observing that particle is both the effect of it's previous position, and the cause of future position. Applying the concept of cause and effect to a chained sequence of events becomes broken logic when you negate the fact that a single event can be both the cause of a prior event, and the effect of a following event at the same time. And for numbers ( 0:49 ) , 42 does cause 43 to be 43. Not the actual name of the number, but the value we assign to that number is the effect of the number before it. Without 42, 43 would hold the numeric value of 42. That is why infinity works. The idea that any number can be a catalyst to a larger number. That is cause and effect.

So the answer to the question is yes

I don't think it's accurate to suggest that a "cause" is the same as a "record", unless you want to suggest a completely static timeline, devoid of free will, where nothing is the result of anything except predetermination. In the example of the pencil, even if time moved backward, the pencil would show evidence of nuclear testing, but the testing wouldn't be the direct result of the pencil. The radioactive elements in the pencil are, however, the direct result of nuclear testing. This would be especially evident in instances where multiple potential causes could have just one effect, like a watermelon being destroyed sufficiently so that the specific "cause" can't be determined by the "effect".

3 minutes and the video's title is never actually answered...

When a minute is actually 3 minutes and 27 seconds to tell me something I learned in high school, of course I was the only one listening and the rest are working at McDonalds full time.

so if p then q, if not q then not p, not if not p then not q...

I don't get how that pencil holds leverage, just because it doesn't have that specific isotope doesn't mean it prevented the explosion.

Quantum entanglement would like to have a word with you....

With minutephysics, I start off understanding what they're saying, but somewhere in the middle, suddenly find myself completely lost. Damn it.

Wtf is going on?

The Big Picture should be required reading for all of humanity.

I love the internal joke with the cat :D it says "not me" at the beggining but it actually did it at the end XD

Dear Henry, your voice is still the best so far to narrate your awesome videos.

Those illustrated examples were fantastic

I do not agree with this video🤔

Thanks Sean. I listened to your previous explanation of "time" on other show and they seem confusing. This was the best explanation on our perception of "time." Thanks.

Oh, no! I'm in trouble. You'll never guess what I named my cats...Rocks and Flint.

This just means that cause and effect aren't part of our physical models. That doesn't mean they don't exist.

I only got 6 hours of sleep last night I don't need this existential shit right now

The abuse of the words "cause and effect" Just because you call it a "record" doesn't change the fact that it is the same idea as an effect. This is a bait and switch where they keep the idea of a word, use a different word, and then say the original is no longer valid because it's no longer used. But the meaning of the original word is still implicit (I would actually say very much explicit). To say that there are patterns is to admit there is cause and effect because it is from the relationship of cause and effect that the pattern "arises" so to speak. To say that classical mechanics of isolated parts doesn't distinguish past from future doesn't negate cause and effect but acknowledges their intimate relationship. It's precisely because of the nature of cause and effect that we can describe it so symmetrically. Further, this is a very narrow, modern view of cause and effect that is being claimed to be overturned (or at best being claimed to apply only to entropic macroscopic systems). Most forms of cause and effect don't even need to appeal to time at all. On a hypothetical beach in a completely eternal, static universe there is a boot. The boot has always been there and always will be and no grain of sand has ever moved or ever will move. The boot print in the sand had no temporal beginning but we can still say that it was caused by the weight of the boot pressed into the sand. Other examples: If every atom in my body was replaced with silicon I would cease to be a living human being. What I'm made of is a cause to the effect of me being human and alive. This cause/effect relationship doesn't appeal to time. Similarly, if you isolated all the material elements that make me and separated them into piles, yes, you would have all the material that makes a living human being but you still wouldn't have a living human being. The material needs to be arranged in a certain way to be a human being. This arrangement is a cause that doesn't depend on time. In order to be a living human being this arrangement of material needs to be engaged and interacting which is the only cause that requires time (and as we saw with the boot print above not all interaction type causes need to be temporal either). To be a cause all one has to be is a feature that, if missing or altered in some way, would alter whatever it is you're observing. A feature can be a physical object, an activity, an interaction, a motion, a relationship, etc. To be an effect all you have to be is contingent, dependent, on some feature. From this relationship regularities and patterns will arise (like, for example, what we call the laws of physics). That the relationship is time symmetrical or even completely atemporal in no way proves the relationship doesn't exist or is meaningless.

I thank my pencil for not causing an atomic blast over me.

I think you forgot to add the real variable that creates causes, which is choice and decisions. Particles do not have a decision, they move and react how they do. But by someone making a decision to introduce a spark into an area of hydrogen creates a cause/effect relationship.

Whether or not you accept this, cause and effect are present metaphysically. For example, in the form of premises and conclusions of a logical argument.

I love how you just make me doubt of the past 22 years of my life (yeah I am 22) and even the "cause" of it.

I just started reading Carroll's new book and it is incredible!

This is actually mindblowing and profound.