WEBVTT 00:00:13.742 --> 00:00:21.725 (Music) 00:00:21.725 --> 00:00:25.008 [Ted N' Ed's Carnival; open daily - all day long; Yew Chube Common - Entrance off the Google highway] 00:00:25.008 --> 00:00:39.141 [John Lloyd's Inventory of the Invisible] 00:00:39.141 --> 00:00:40.691 [Adapted from a TEDTalk given by John Lloyd in 2009] 00:00:40.691 --> 00:00:44.274 Now our next speaker has spent his whole career eliciting that sense of wonder. 00:00:44.274 --> 00:00:47.813 Please welcome John Lloyd. (Applause) 00:00:47.813 --> 00:00:52.692 Question is: what is invisible? 00:00:52.692 --> 00:00:55.791 There's more of it than you think, actually. 00:00:55.791 --> 00:00:58.525 Everything, I would say -- everything that matters -- 00:00:58.525 --> 00:01:02.793 Except every thing, and except matter. 00:01:02.793 --> 00:01:04.091 We can see matter 00:01:04.091 --> 00:01:06.742 but we can't see what's the matter. 00:01:06.742 --> 00:01:11.874 We can see the stars and the planets but we can't see what holds them apart, 00:01:11.874 --> 00:01:14.191 or what draws them together. 00:01:14.191 --> 00:01:16.831 With matter as with people, we see only the skin of things, 00:01:16.831 --> 00:01:20.830 we can't see into the engine room, we can't see what makes people tick, 00:01:20.830 --> 00:01:22.299 at least not without difficulty, 00:01:22.299 --> 00:01:24.515 and the closer we look at anything, 00:01:24.515 --> 00:01:26.248 the more it disappears. 00:01:26.248 --> 00:01:30.815 In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, 00:01:30.815 --> 00:01:35.148 there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. 00:01:35.148 --> 00:01:39.265 One of the interesting things about invisibility is the things that we can's see, 00:01:39.265 --> 00:01:41.065 we also can't understand. 00:01:41.065 --> 00:01:44.868 Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand. 00:01:44.868 --> 00:01:47.698 It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, 00:01:47.698 --> 00:01:51.364 and the weakest, and nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. 00:01:51.364 --> 00:01:54.565 For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, 00:01:54.565 --> 00:01:59.399 he thought Jesus came to earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. 00:01:59.399 --> 00:02:01.147 That's what he thought he was there for. 00:02:01.147 --> 00:02:05.082 So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know. (Laughter) 00:02:05.082 --> 00:02:09.782 Consciousness. I see all your faces; I've no idea what any of you are thinking. 00:02:09.782 --> 00:02:12.998 Isn't that amazing? Isn't it incredible that we can't read each other's minds, 00:02:12.998 --> 00:02:18.948 when we can touch each other, taste each other, perhaps, if we get close enough, but we can't read each other's minds. 00:02:18.948 --> 00:02:20.968 I find that quite astonishing. 00:02:20.968 --> 00:02:26.081 In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion which some claim is the root of all religions, 00:02:26.081 --> 00:02:31.364 Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say, 00:02:31.364 --> 00:02:37.698 but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist. 00:02:37.698 --> 00:02:41.915 So that's why we don't think it exists; the Sufi masters working on us. 00:02:41.915 --> 00:02:45.848 In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, 00:02:45.848 --> 00:02:48.448 artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, 00:02:48.448 --> 00:02:51.032 gotten nowhere, we have no idea how consciousness works. 00:02:51.032 --> 00:02:53.681 Not only have they not created artificial intelligence, 00:02:53.681 --> 00:02:58.349 they haven't yet created artificial stupidity. 00:02:58.349 --> 00:03:02.315 The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful. 00:03:02.315 --> 00:03:04.481 Remind you of anyone? 00:03:04.481 --> 00:03:08.599 Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. 00:03:08.599 --> 00:03:13.466 And I find a very useful new word -- ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic, [God?] 00:03:13.466 --> 00:03:16.133 I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists 00:03:16.133 --> 00:03:18.632 until somebody properly defines the terms. 00:03:18.632 --> 00:03:21.281 Another thing we can't see is the human genome. 00:03:21.281 --> 00:03:26.299 And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago 00:03:26.299 --> 00:03:29.972 when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain 00:03:29.972 --> 00:03:32.614 around 100 thousand genes. Every year since, 00:03:32.614 --> 00:03:38.315 it's been revised downwards. We now think there are likely to be just over 20 thousand genes 00:03:38.315 --> 00:03:40.181 in the human genome. 00:03:40.181 --> 00:03:42.833 This is extraordinary, because rice -- get this -- 00:03:42.833 --> 00:03:45.799 rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. 00:03:45.799 --> 00:03:50.148 Potatoes -- potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, 00:03:50.148 --> 00:03:55.365 and the same as a gorilla. (Laughter) 00:03:55.365 --> 00:03:58.365 You can't see these things, but they are very strange. 00:03:58.365 --> 00:04:01.082 The stars by day, I always think that's fascinating. 00:04:01.082 --> 00:04:05.432 The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see. 00:04:05.432 --> 00:04:08.598 Time. Nobody can see time. 00:04:08.598 --> 00:04:12.598 I don't know if you know this. Modern physicists -- there's a big movement in modern physics 00:04:12.598 --> 00:04:16.697 to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures. 00:04:16.697 --> 00:04:18.864 It's much easier if it's not really there. 00:04:18.864 --> 00:04:21.247 You can't see the future, obviously, 00:04:21.247 --> 00:04:24.114 and you can't see the past, except in your memory. 00:04:24.114 --> 00:04:27.582 One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see -- 00:04:27.582 --> 00:04:31.383 my son asked me this the other day, he said Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two? 00:04:31.383 --> 00:04:33.465 And I said yes. He said, why can't I? 00:04:33.465 --> 00:04:39.048 Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three. 00:04:39.048 --> 00:04:42.915 Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job. 00:04:42.915 --> 00:04:48.432 Because that's where all the stuff happens [laughter] 00:04:48.432 --> 00:04:51.665 that makes you who you are. 00:04:51.665 --> 00:04:54.498 Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang. 00:04:54.498 --> 00:04:58.448 This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. 00:04:58.448 --> 00:05:01.915 Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff -- 00:05:01.915 --> 00:05:05.048 but every cell in your body is replaced at some point. 00:05:05.048 --> 00:05:07.515 Taste buds, every 10 days or so. 00:05:07.515 --> 00:05:10.282 Livers and internal organs take a bit longer. 00:05:10.282 --> 00:05:11.932 Spine takes several years. 00:05:11.932 --> 00:05:15.815 But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body 00:05:15.815 --> 00:05:18.299 remains from what was there seven years ago. 00:05:18.299 --> 00:05:23.147 The question is: who then are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on? 00:05:23.147 --> 00:05:25.482 That is actually us? 00:05:25.482 --> 00:05:30.265 Atoms, can't see them. Nobody ever will. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. 00:05:30.265 --> 00:05:33.650 Gas, can't see that. Interesting, somebody mentioned 1600 recently. 00:05:33.650 --> 00:05:38.448 Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont. 00:05:38.448 --> 00:05:44.513 It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. 00:05:44.513 --> 00:05:49.364 Quite good. He also invented a word called blas, meaning astral radiation. 00:05:49.364 --> 00:05:52.698 Didn't catch on, unfortunately. (Laughter) 00:05:52.698 --> 00:05:55.848 But well done, Him. Light -- you can't see light. 00:05:55.848 --> 00:06:01.696 When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. 00:06:01.696 --> 00:06:05.864 Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, 00:06:05.864 --> 00:06:08.133 you can only see what it hits. 00:06:08.133 --> 00:06:13.049 Electricity, can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity, they don't. 00:06:13.049 --> 00:06:18.498 Nobody knows what it is. (Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously 00:06:18.498 --> 00:06:21.133 down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light, when you turn the light on. 00:06:21.133 --> 00:06:27.133 They don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. 00:06:27.133 --> 00:06:30.948 Galaxies -- hundred billion of them, estimated in the universe. Hundred billion. 00:06:30.948 --> 00:06:36.065 How many can we see? Five. Five, out of a hundred billion galaxies, with the naked eye. 00:06:36.065 --> 00:06:39.916 And one of them's quite difficult to see, unless you've got very good eyesight. 00:06:39.916 --> 00:06:43.498 Radio waves. There's another thing. Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, 00:06:43.498 --> 00:06:46.682 in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. 00:06:46.682 --> 00:06:51.432 Somebody said to him, well what's the point of these, Heinrich? What's the point of these radio waves 00:06:51.432 --> 00:06:56.698 that you've found? And he said, well I've no idea, but I guess somebody'll find a use for them someday. 00:06:56.698 --> 00:07:00.181 The biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know. 00:07:00.181 --> 00:07:02.998 It is incredible how little we know. 00:07:02.998 --> 00:07:08.948 Thomas Edison once said we don't know one percent of one millionth about anything. 00:07:08.948 --> 00:07:12.114 And I've come to the conclusion -- 00:07:12.114 --> 00:07:14.914 because you ask this other question: what's another thing we can't see? 00:07:14.914 --> 00:07:17.581 The point, most of us. What's the point? 00:07:17.581 --> 00:07:21.633 The point -- what I've got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking. 00:07:21.633 --> 00:07:25.699 Why we're here, and what should we do about it while we are? 00:07:25.699 --> 00:07:29.467 To help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, 00:07:29.467 --> 00:07:31.949 perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century. 00:07:31.949 --> 00:07:35.633 One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet. 00:07:35.633 --> 00:07:39.348 The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, 00:07:39.348 --> 00:07:45.232 I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves. 00:07:45.232 --> 00:07:48.732 He was a cheerful bastard, wasn't he? (Laughter) 00:07:48.732 --> 00:07:54.114 And secondly, and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets 00:07:54.114 --> 00:08:01.608 who said, We are here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea. 00:08:07.298 --> 00:08:25.698 [Get your souvenir photo here! Continue your journey into the unknown!]