How Many Things Are There? 

0:18 blurr my face next time

you could ask Michael what 2+2 is and end up learning about quantum physics

This is impressive, he actually stays on the topic the entire video.

Michael:hey what time is it? Me:half ten Michael:(turns to the camera) or is it? 10 minutes later.and that’s how the universe started

That means if aliens were to come down and kill us and wanted to bury us, they could just dump all of our bodies in the Grand Canyon.

have you ever just thought: how many thoughts have i thought that no one has ever though before?

Imagine if you were his son and you needed help with your 3rd grade math homework but he can’t learn what a division is until he learn quantum physics.

Watched this 6 years after the first time I watched it in 2014, and it still blew my mind!

Me: How many fingers am I holding up? Vsauce: You might say, well, I know where my fingers are. I'm looking right at them. Or, I can touch them, I can feel them, they're right here and that's good. Your senses are a great way to learn things. In fact, we have way more than the usual five senses we talk about. For instance, your kinesthetic sense, proprioception. This is what the police evaluate during a field sobriety test. It allows you to tell where your fingers and arms and head and legs in your body is all in relation to each other without having to look or touch other things. We have way more than five senses, we have at least twice as many and then some. But they're not perfect. There are optical illusions, audio illusions, temperature sensation illusions, even tactile illusions. Can you turn your tongue upside down? If so, perfect. Try this. Run your finger along the outer edge of the tip of your upside down tongue. Your tongue will be able to feel your finger, but in the wrong place. Our brains never needed to develop an understanding of upside down tongue touch. So, when you touch the right side of your tongue when it's flipped over to your left side you perceive a sensation on the opposite side, where your tongue usually is but isn't when it's upside down. It's pretty freaky and cool and a little humbling, because it shows the limits of the accuracy of our senses, the only tools we have to get what's out there in here. The philosophy of knowledge, the study of knowing, is called epistemology. Plato famously said that the things we know are things that are true, that we believe and that we have justification for believing. those justifications might be irrational or they might be rational, they might be based on proof, but don't get too confident because proven is not a synonym for true. Luckily, there are things that we can know without needing proof, without needing to even leave the house, things that we can know as true by reason alone. These are things that we know a priori. An example would be the statement "all bachelors are unmarried." I don't have to go survey every bachelor on earth to know that that is true. All bachelors are unmarried because that's how we define the word bachelor. Of course, you have to know what the words bachelor and unmarried mean in the first place. Oh, you do? Okay. Perfect. That's great. But how do you know? This time I mean functionally, how do you know? Where is knowledge biologically in the brain? What are memories made out of? We are a long way from being able to answer that question completely but research has shown that memories don't exist in the brain in single locations. Instead, what we call a memory is likely made up of many different complex relationships all over the brain between lots of brain cells, neurons. A major cellular mechanism thought to underlie the formation of memories is long-term potentiation or LTP. When one neuron stimulates another neuron repeatedly that signal can be enhanced overtime LTP, wiring them more strongly together and that connection can last a long time, even an entire lifetime. A collection of different brain cells, neurons that fire together in a particular order over and over again frequently and repeatedly can achieve long-term potentiation, becoming more sensitive to each other and more ready to fire in the exact same way later on in the future. They're a physical thing in your brain, firing together more easily because you strengthen that pattern of firing. You memorized. This branching forest of firing friends looks messy, but look closer. It could be the memory of your first kiss. A living souvenir of the event. If I were to go into your brain and cut out those cells, could I make you forget your first kiss or could I make you forget where your fingers are? Only if I cut out a lot of your brain. Because memories aren't just stored in one relationship, they're stored all over the brain. The events leading up to your first kiss are stored in one network, the way it felt to the way it smelled in different networks, all added up together making what you call the memory of your first kiss. How many memories can you fit inside your head? What is the storage capacity of the human brain? The best we can do is a rough estimate, but given the number of neurons in the brain involved with memory and the number of different connections a single neuron can make Paul Reber at Northwestern University estimated that we can store the digital equivalent of about 2.5 petabytes of information. That's the equivalent of recording a TV channel continuously for 300 years. That's a lot of information. That is a lot of information about skills you can do and facts and people you've met, things in the real world. The world is real, right? How do you know? It's a difficult question, but it's not rocket science. Instead, it is asking whether or not rocket scientists even exist in the first place. The theory that the Sun moved around the earth worked great. It predicted that the Sun would rise every morning and it did. It wasn't until later that we realized what we thought was true might not be. So, do we or will we ever know true reality or are we stuck in a world where the best we can do is be approximately true? Discovering more and more useful theories every day but never actually reaching true objective actual reality. Can science or reason ever prove convincingly that your friends and RU-vid videos and your fingers actually exist beyond your mind? That you don't just live in the matrix? No. Your mind is all that you have, even if you use instruments, like a telescope or particle accelerators. The final stop for all of that information is ultimately you. You are alone in your own brain, which technically makes it impossible to prove that anything else exists. It's called the egocentric predicament. Everything you know about the world out there depends on and is created inside your brain. This mattered so much to Charles Sanders Peirce that he drew a line between reality, the way the universe truly is, and what he called the phaneron, the world as filtered through our senses and bodies, the only information we can get. If you want to speak with certainty you live in, that is you react to and remember and experience your phaneron, not reality. The belief that only you exist and everything else, food, the universe, your friends are all figments of your mind is called solipsism. There is no way to convince a solipsist that the outside world is real. And there is no way to convince someone who doubts that the universe wasn't created just three seconds ago along with all of our memories. It's a frightening realization that we don't always know how to deal with. There's even The Matrix defense. In 2002 Tonda Lynn Ansley shot and killed her landlady. She argued that she believed she was in the matrix, that her crimes weren't real. By using the matrix defense, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, because the opposite view is just way healthier and common. It's called realism. Realism is the belief that the outside world exists independently of your own phaneron. Rocks and stars and Thora Birch would continue to exist even if you weren't around to experience them. But you cannot know realism is true. All you can do is believe. Martin Gardner, a great source for math magic tricks, explained that he is not a solipsist because realism is just way more convenient and healthy and it works. As to whether it bothered him that he could never know realism was true, he wrote, "If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron, my answer is how should I know? I'm not dismayed by ultimate mysteries, I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph." Humble stuff. What strikes me is the cat. Cats do not understand keyboards, but they know the keyboards are a fun place to be. It's a great way to get the attention of a human, they're warm and exciting, surrounded by noises and flashing lights plus cats love to get their scent on whatever they can, a mark of their existence. We aren't that much different, except instead of keyboards we have the mysteries of the universe. We will never be able to understand all of them.

With this comment, I’ve added a “thing” to the universe.

Vsauce videos might only be single, individual things, but they are.... Infinitely rewatchable.

I love how simple and unassuming 10^80 looks until you even start to do the math in your head

Vsauce saved RU-vid from becoming total cancer

You know shits about to go down when that ding sound happens

Everything summarised in this video is mind blowing, You can literally study all of his videos like lectures with the video discriptions as extra references.

0:18 how ‘pile-ons’ at school felt when you were on the bottom

"Hey Vsauce, Michael here! If you threw every single human alive today into the Grand Canyon.." :D "You would not fill it up." :|

Whoa, that's a lot of possible thoughts. We'd better hurry up on thinking them all.

There are an infinite amount of things. Something like a number is also a thing, so we can imagine and write down over 1.458 • 10^227 different numbers and there would still be all the other things left in the universe to count and even more numbers, other things etc

This is my favorite channel. Thank you for sharing your insights. You bring life to some of my grandest oddities in life. Keep it up Michael. Your a genius.

Michael in a courtroom Judge: He is guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Michael: Or is he? Judge: .......Oh my god he’s right

finally, some spit facts

Michael: How Many Things Are There? Michael 3 mins later: How many legs does a sheep have?

Average Vsauce video: "How big can you get?" 20 minutes later... "and thats why you're essentially immortal."

0:19 imagine being in the bottom of that pile

2021, and I still love watching random Vsauce

The last thing he said really made me smile from ear to ear.

SPIT FACTS

"How Many Things Are There?" is fun. "How Many Things Can There Be?" is terrifying.

Imagine somebody spending their entire life trying to count everything and Michael ruins it all with one video

This is arguably among the top 5 RU-vid videos of all time

There is not a word to describe my brain's state after this video

*Random person* : "How many feet in a mile ?" *Google* : "5280 feet." *Vsauce Michael* : "Or is it ?" _Vsauce omnious music_

I’ve rewatched each one of these videos maybe 12 times over some many more

I'm surprised nobody made a count down timer that displays the number of possible thoughts that could exist from now to the heat death of the universe based on this video

I know the 10^80 is a massive number, but I still am amazed that it represents every particle in the universe.

But what about Stuff?

Its my 6 binge of Vsauce Old videos

When the Vsauce music hits you know it's about to get DEEP

I learn more in a vsauce video than I do in a 6 hour day of school

I'm not high enough for this. Brb going to fix that.

How have I been watching Michael for so long and I’m still finding new videos 😂

Every single frame of this video is a new thing, and every single pixel, and every single second of audio This video is alot of things

I had my speakers muted, still heard him say "Hey Vsauce! Michael here!"

Finally, the question that fits the answer. 42.

Consciousness is the only thing

Dude. You're crazy but a lot of fun and mad clever. Love these videos.👍🏿

I can watch the same Vsauce video dozens of times without ever getting bored

"It's probably safe to say that the number of possible thots is indeed infinite." True, Micheal

Me:there is no way he's going to count everything 5:00 into the vid Me:how the hell

Micheal: thanks for watching. Me teary eyed: thanks for blowing my mind again.

This is really a glowing high point. If Michael didnt put out anything else in his entire lifetime, but just this video, that would cut it for me to see him as a highly admirable person.

I swear, every time i read the title on one of these videos i just think.."Damn, that's a good question.."

Video idea: How long is an instant?

Thanks, your videos always make me think a lot and I always get happy 👍

5:36 a quite remarkable philosophical argument that made me fall in love with this channel

He put a lot of "thought" into this one!

I can't be the only person to have an existential crisis after EVERY SINGLE VSAUCE VIDEO.

This is a thing.

The amount of thoughts is either infinite or not but either one is mind boggling

5:12 this is the moment in every vsauce video where michael starts going crazy

You lost me at "Micheal Here".

i think about this all time I never thought I'd find a video where someone talks about it.

I swear I could listen Michael talk about a generic stone for hours

*confuses things with thongs* ohh

1.458x10^227th possible thoughts, and the only one that counts . . . is Vsauce.

This is officially my favourite V sauce video and end quote ever. Fantastic

“How many legs does a sheep have if you call it’s tail a leg? 4. Just because you call a tail a leg doesn’t make it one” that has so much more relevance today than Lincoln could’ve imagined.

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. If you threw every single human alive today into the Grand Canyon, 0:07 we would not fill it up. 0:11 We could make a pile about this big 0:15 That's it. That's all of us. All 7.159 billion of us 0:20 in one place. A species 0:24 portrait. It kinda puts humanity into perspective 0:27 and you. So does this. Everyday you produce about one to two litres 0:32 of spit, which means, in your entire lifetime 0:36 altogether, you will not produce enough spit 0:40 to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. 0:44 So far, 560 billion Lego parts 0:48 have been manufactured and the total number of grains 0:51 of sand on Earth is estimated to be 7.5 times 10 0:56 to the 18th. But here's the thing: 1:00 how many things are there... total? 1:06 Well, how do you define a thing? Well, let's say it's a thing 1:10 if you can think about it or talk about it. If you can call it a thing, 1:14 it's a thing. This is going to be a lot of things. 1:18 Things can be real, imaginary, 1:21 impossible, ideas are things, things can be looked forward to and things can be in the past 1:27 or yellow or concrete or abstract things can 1:31 happen and some thing's probably won't. 1:34 Making a video about how many things there are. 1:38 That's a thing... that I'm doing right now. 1:41 Let's count everything. 1:44 Right away, the answer seems obvious. The word 1:47 'thing' is so vague, the answer is clearly infinite... 1:52 possibly... not. 1:55 All we have to do is take the maximum number of physical things, 1:59 things out there in the real world, beyond our minds we could 2:02 in theory measure and add to that the total number of things we 2:07 could imagine. The total number of thoughts possible. 2:11 For the purposes of this video let's assume that numbers and math 2:15 and the laws of physics exist as part of the way 2:18 our universe is. But the names and representations they've been given 2:23 are the products of thinking minds and those things 2:27 are, well, things that we can count. 2:30 And there's no reason to double count. All of the indivisible 2:34 pieces that make up me, particles or strings or whatever 2:38 are the same as the thing that has been named me. 2:42 Abraham Lincoln has a great quote about this. 2:45 "How many legs does a sheep have if you call 2:48 its tail a leg?" 2:51 Four. 2:52 Because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one. 2:55 Okay, let's begin. When counting the number of 2:59 physical things in the universe we hit an unknown. 3:03 How big is the universe? 3:06 The entire universe could be infinite 3:09 or it could be finite, but edgeless for a variety of reasons. There could also be 3:13 other universes. But it's unclear whether we'll ever be able to actually see all these 3:19 things. Instead, what we are stuck with, and what we usually mean when we say 3:24 'the universe', is the observable universe 3:28 whose future visibility limit has been estimated to be only 62 3:32 billion light-years in any direction. 3:36 That's it. This is likely the only inventoryable space we'll ever need 3:42 to worry about. And it contains roughly, 3:45 on average, ten to the eighty elementary particles. Particles with no 3:49 further internal parts as far as we currently now. 3:52 So that's our answer, right? There are ten to the eighty 3:56 physical things that exist out there, beyond our own minds. 3:59 Any other physical thing - water, dogs, planets, 4:03 saxophones - are just names given to particular arrangements of those same 4:08 ten to the eighty particles. But wait, what if, 4:11 in the future, we discover that what we call elementary particles today 4:16 are actually just made out of smaller things we should have counted 4:19 instead? Well, to cover ourselves let's count 4:23 the maximum possible number of the smallest measurable thing. 4:28 Something the size of a Planck volume. 4:31 10 to the power of 183 4:34 things that small could fit within our observable universe. 4:38 I like this number, 10 to the power of 183. 4:44 You couldn't easily argue there were more things than that 4:47 in the physical, real-world. But you could imagine. 4:51 A Planck length, a Planck volume. That's just 4:54 the smallest measurable amount of space, not the smallest 4:58 possible. You could imagine a 5:02 half Planck volume, a 10,000th of a Planck volume. 5:05 But, that would just be a thought and only ever 5:09 a thought. So, how many possible thoughts 5:12 are there? It's probably safe to say that the number of possible 5:17 thoughts is, indeed, infinite. For example, 5:20 numbers. You can't say there's a limit to the biggest number we can imagine. 5:24 But, unlike physical things that exist whether or not we have 5:29 discovered them, do unthought thoughts 5:32 already exist? It seems more like the pool of possible 5:38 thoughts is really just one thing an actual elements from that set don't 5:43 become things by themselves until we thing them 5:47 that is we or some other mind thinks about them 5:50 or talks about them and there's a limit to how many things 5:53 we or anything else could ever thing 5:57 our observable universe is only so big and it will contain usable energy 6:01 for only so long. After about 1 trillion to a hundred trillion years 6:07 the supply of gas needed to form new stars will be 6:11 exhausted and the lights will start going out 6:14 one-star at a time. After a 6:17 Google years the amount of usable energy left in the universe will be 6:22 0 and nothing will be able to happen 6:27 to calculate the maximum number up thoughts that could be 6:30 thought inside our observable universe let's take 6:33 all of its mass and turn it into human brains 6:37 that just think new and random thoughts from the beginning of time 6:41 until the universe runs out of usable energy, a Google years 6:44 of thinking. But wait, what if there are 6:48 alien brains or for all we know Earthling brains that 6:51 think faster than we can okay well to be safe 6:54 let's not turn all of that mass into human brains let's use it to build a 6:58 giant hypothetical machine that computes at the fastest speed possible given the 7:03 speed of light 7:04 in the uncertainty principle; Bremermann's Limit 7:07 its 1.36 times ten to the fifty bits per second per kilogram 7:12 of material, now a high-end estimate for the total mass of the observable universe 7:17 is 3.4 times ten to the the 60 kilograms 7:21 which used exclusively for the best possible computing machine could altogether process 4.624 times ten to the 110 7:30 bits per second. Now with 3.154 times 10 to the 116 7:36 seconds available from the beginning of time to the heat death of the universe 7:40 and an assumption that the average thought takes about a sentance worth 7:44 of information to describe 7:45 say about 800 bits we get a total 7:49 of 1.458 times 7:52 ten to the 227 things that could 7:55 ever be thought or imagined. That number 7:59 is huge. In the observable universe 8:04 the universe as we will ever know it the number of thoughts that can be thought 8:08 is so much larger than the number of physical things there can be with out 8:12 imagination and if you were to combine the two totals 8:16 the number of physical things would barely 8:19 make a difference. So, funny enough 8:23 when it comes to every thing in the universe 8:26 it really is the thought that counts. 8:29 And as always, 8:31 thanks for watching. 7:26

Challenge:Take a shot when you hear "things"

Me: This food tastes so good! Michael: Or does it?

5:05 half the girls on twich

7 things maybe 8

Do a video on why time feels slower or faster at certain times!

I love how he says plunk instead of plank

4:39 wouldn’t it be 10^183 factorial to count the amount of things that could be arranged?

There are at least 6 things.

I would kinda like to see a video on what Earth would be like if it was the size of Jupiter and had the same living conditions as Earth does. Like what would be different, would would be the same, the weather patterns, would we have explored it entirely by now, any new species, or have as many wars since there would be so much more living space, and so on. I would find that extremely interesting and would love to see something like that. Also, like always, great video!

I think this video is the epitome of Vsauce, just a random incomprehensible question leading into an insane discussion

Everything in the universe can be divided into "cheese" and "not cheese"

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

F%#k school , time to Vsauce

He brings up questions I've never thought about but now bothered by

Bro answered every question we had as kids which our parents couldnt answer

Enjoyed this one a lot. even though its a large number, its weird to see a finite amount of thoughts and things

8:13 His concluding phrases of every video are so memorable.

“.........Water, dogs, planets, saxophones.......”

Happy Thanksgiving Mike

at 7:59, I had to pause and clap for this man. Vsauce, you've done it again.

If you threw 7 billion people into the grand canyon then you would have a lot of blood on your hands.

Michael really talked about everything there is in the universe so this video is everything, every single thing possible is here. So if in a million years in the future something is going to be invented Michael already talked about it

Micheal’s wife : i do! Micheal : i do… *Not*

Would my thoughts still count if my mind's just been blown?

Guy: Hey how big is the sun? Vsause: In order to answer that question we have to look back at the birth of the sun. It is made up of particles. Particles are smaller than you think. In the end of this period, there are ______ particles. If each particle on the earth was a grain of sand, it would not yet be the Sahara desert. Deserts are very hot. But what makes things hot?

I feel like founding gold after seeing this Vsauce video that I have never seem before

This is one of my favourite videos to fall asleep to

Throwing people into the Grand Canyon .....why??

i'm gonna say it... take a shot every time he says "thing"

The word thing is literally the most broad description of everything in the universe

7:10 that's where I completely lost my mind... At the end did he say: THINGS for watching??