What The Bleep Do We Know Page #4

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in the direction of how a life can go...

that are contingent upon

small-level quantum effects...

not being washed out.

First of all, let's talk

about the subatomic world...

and then we'll talk about what

it's telling us about reality.

The first thing I wanna tell you

about the subatomic world...

is it's totally a fantasy created by

mad physicists trying to figure out...

what the heck is goin' on

when they do these little experiments.

By little experiments, I mean big energy

in little spaces in little pieces of time.

It gets pretty nutty

at that realm of things...

and so subatomic physics was invented

to try to figure that all out.

We need a new science down there,

and it's called quantum physics...

and it is subject to a whole

range of debatable hypotheses...

thoughts, feelings, intuitions

as to what the heck is really going on.

Matter is not what we have

long thought it to be.

Uh-- To the scientists, matter has always

been thought of as sort of the ultimate...

in that which is static

and predictable.

Within all the atoms and molecules,

all the space within them...

the particles take up

an insignificant amount of the--

of the volume of an atom or molecule,

the fundamental particles.

The rest of it is vacuum.

What seems to happen is that particles

appear and disappear all the time.

So where do they go

when they're not here?

Now, that question is tricky.

I'm gonna give you two answers--

Answer number one:

They go into

an alternative universe...

where the people in that universe

are asking the same question...

about those particles when

they come into our universe.

They say, ''Where do they go?''

[ Chuckles ]

[ Man ] There's a great mystery called

the mystery of the direction of time.

There's a certain sense in which the

fundamental laws of physics that we have...

don't make any interesting distinctions,

say, between past and future.

Um, for example, it's a puzzle from the standpoint

of the fundamental laws of physics...

why we should be able to...

um, remember the past, um...

and not have the same kind

of epistemic access to the future.

It's a puzzle from the standpoint

of these laws...

why we should think something like

by acting now...

we can affect the future

but not the past.

These things-- that we have a different kind

of epistemic access to the past and future...

that we have a different kind

of control by acting now...

over the future

than we do over the past...

these things are so fundamental

to the way we experience the world...

that, um-- um--

that it seems to me,

not to be curious about them is to be...

you know, three-quarters

of the way to being dead.

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