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We are experiencing a reality based on a thin vaneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart. Bill Hicks
Everything we call real is made of things we cannot call real. Niels Bohr
The measurement problem ... An atom only appears in a particular place if you measure it. In other words an atom is spread out all over the place until a conscious observer decides to look at it. So the act of measurement or observation creates the entire universe. Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Illusion of Reality, BBC 2008
It’s about Reality at the very furthest reaches of human perception. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Nothing, BBC 2011
In the 1920s physicist Niels Bohr found that Newton’s Laws break down at the atomic level. The replacement Quantum Theory ... showed that the electron orbiting the atomic nucleus doesn’t look like this at all. It’s more smudged out, more like a ripple or a wave. Horizon: The Anthropic Principle, BBC 1987
We have to record some kind of measurement to know where an electron is. In fact, until we decide to find out where the electron is by doing an experiment to observe it the electron as a material entity cannot be really said to exist. ibid.
That by our acts of observation we bring things into existence, at least in the realm of the very small, is supported by scientific experiment. ibid.
If we bring the tiny world of the Quantum to existence by our observations, do we need any other mechanism to account for the whole of reality? ibid.
A new generation of Cosmologists are questioning our basic understanding of the universe. They are beginning to wonder if there is a greater reality. Could it be that everything we think we know about our universe is wrong? Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? BBC 2010
Welcome to the weird world of quantum reality: where nothing is quite what is seems ... A remarkable experiment that puts the very existence of reality into question: known to physicists as the Double Slit experiment it’s remarkable because it reveals two astonishing paradoxes about the nature of reality no-one can fully explain. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2010
Single photons ... What you get is something completely different: even though only single photons of light are being fired through the slits they don’t create two lines, they mysteriously create three. ibid.
According to this theory the photon of light faces two slits; it doesn’t split in two – it splits the world in two. Every photon in the double slit experiment creates a new parallel world. ibid.
If you put detectors by the slits, the mysterious behaviour stops. The photons behave just like bullets. Take the detectors away – the multiple stripes mysteriously re-appear. So what is going on? Rather astonishingly it seems we can change the way reality behaves just by looking at it. But this means reality has a secret life of its own. ibid.
So reality turns out to be stranger that we ever imagined. Everything has the power to be in two places at once. But we will never see it. It is all very peculiar. ibid.
The most important particle of all – the Higgs Boson ... The Higgs is now Fermilab’s Number One priority. But they aren’t the only ones looking for it. They have competition. From the biggest particle accelerator of them all – the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. It is more than three times as powerful. ibid.
The quantumness of reality is apparently very sensitive. ibid.
What goes on beneath these fields in the Tevitron are some of the most violent collisions in the universe. Deep underground in a four-mile vacuum pipe, encased by superconducting magnets, they smash together two sub-atomic particles at close to the speed of life. ibid.
Working out which of these are elementary is a problem that has defined particle physics for over sixty years ... When experimenters first broke into them [atoms] they discovered ever smaller bits inside. ibid.
The particle zoo – a whole new level of reality had been discovered. ibid.
With the discovery of the Top Quark, physicists are close to understanding one of the greatest mysteries of reality: what it’s all made of. ibid.
The Holographic Principle: which says that all three-dimensional objects can be encoded in only two dimensions. ibid.
But Lenny [Susskind] didn’t stop there. He and other physicists made a truly shocking leap of the imagination: they asked what if the whole of reality is a hologram, projected from our own Event Horizon, the far edges of the universe. ibid.
It seems utterly bizarre that the ultimate nature of reality might be holographic. That at the edge of our universe there might be a shimmering sheet of information that describes the entire universe within ... We are about to put this theory to the test. ibid.
If Max [Tegmark] is right, maths isn’t a language we’ve invented, but a deep structure we are gradually uncovering like archaeologists. An abstract unchanging entity that has no beginning and no end. As we peel back the layers we are discovering the code. Strange as it seems it’s a comforting theory because if the reality is a mathematical object, understanding it might be within our reach. ibid.
These two grand visions of Reality – the mathematical structure and the cosmic hologram represent theoretical thinking at its most imaginative and beautiful. ibid.
It may be that we are standing on the verge of a new version of Reality. Physicists have redefined Reality by close measurement and observation of the material world. They have drilled down to the bottom layer. Discovered that we can change Reality just by looking at it. And begun to sense that information encoded at the edge of our universe could be more important than matter. But in the end Reality is best defined as an intelligent conversation with the Universe. ibid.
Technologies that may be realized in centuries or millennium include: warp drive, travelling faster than the speed of light, parallel universes; are there other parallel dimensions and parallel realities? Michio Kaku
I’m going to show you how to create a world where reality collides with mind-bending technology. One room where you can do anything and be anyone. Michio Kaku, Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible s2e11: Holodeck, Science 2010
In the presence of this Court, the patient looked at her feet and refused to recognise the obvious fact that the flesh was dead, black, shrivelled, rotting and stinking. The record also discloses that the patient refuses to consider the eventuality of death which is or ought to be obvious in the face of such dire bodily deterioration. Judge Todd, State of Tennessee v Northern (1978) 563 SW 2d 197 (Tenn Ct App)
Rather than adapt to evidence, many of us it seems remain trapped in ways of thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors. Irrational belief, from dowsing to psychic clairvoyance, has roots in early mankind’s habit of attributing spirit and intention to natural phenomena such as water, the sun, a rock or the sea ... Even in the twenty-first century, despite all science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe, the human mind remains a wanton story-teller creating intention in the randomness of reality. Richard Dawkins, Enemies of Reason: Slaves to Superstition, Channel 4 2007
Isn’t it better to embrace reality, bleak as it sometimes may be, than to avoid it and live a lie? ... Like Darwin, I find the reality thrilling. Richard Dawkins, The Genius of Charles Darwin e3, Channel 4 2003
What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data – a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
The poetry of reality is science. Richard Dawkins, The Unbelievers, with Lawrence Krauss, 2013
We’re in a lot of trouble ... because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than 3% of you people read books. Because less than 15% of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over of this tube. Right now there is a whole – an entire – generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel! The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome god-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people ... And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome god-damned propaganda for us in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be paid to the truth on this network! So you listen to me. Listen to me. Television is not the truth ...