I took a break from politics, current affairs, and ceaseless news programs last night (isn’t everyone just a little fed up with it at the moment?) and instead watched this excellent BBC4 documentary about the atom.
This is the final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s series about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself, discovers how there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that “empty” space isn’t empty at all. I’ve heard this theory many times before but it became a more vivid concept when it was described by Dawkins in one of his lectures discussing quantum physics and cosmology.
Al-Khalili shows how the world we think we know turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder universe than which we could have conceived.
I can’t say that you’ll come away from this with any more knowledge than when you started, but it does perhaps pose some interesting new questions.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 
Try to listen to this atom stuff, but find myself just spacing out …
Snerd
p.s. Oh Yah! … First!
Oooo, good one.
It is an amazing concept though.
I can really get wrapped up in stuff like this. I just love it… Makes me wish I’d applied myself more in math and science. Unfortunately, the philosophical aspects of it were totally lost on me in school. Since then I’ve tried to become a little more “enlightened” about such things — although sadly no more capable. Quantum physics completely mystifies me.
Yes I was the same way about science and math … and french … and english …
I too thought I should upgrade and I thought to myself, There’s no time like the present. Then a friend of mine showed me how Quantum Physics proved there is no present …. and that was the end of that postulation.
Snerd
When I was around 12 I didn’t like reading of popular science or new scientist although I sometimes felt compelled to.
Parallel universes and all that. The idea that what we thought we were living was a complete illusion wigged me out. I spent more than a few weeks secretly freaked out about inflation theory.
Perhaps I am delusional but I’ve come to believe even if we are delusional infintesimal specks in the vast cosmos, the reality we think we are living is REAL in it’s own right with it’s own rules and consequences.
I hope that’s not just changing the definition of reality or denying the foundation of these matters to suit myself but it’s helped me get to where I find cosmology very interesting.
“… When I was around 12 I didn’t like reading of popular science or new scientist although I sometimes felt compelled to …. I spent more than a few weeks secretly freaked out about inflation theory.”
SG: Yah! You had to wait years, with ‘great interest’, for Wilson and Mulroney to prove it true …
Snerd
What do Wilson and Mulroney have to do with anything here?
… You brought up inflation theory … I just responded to it ‘with interest’ … 😉
Snerd
Groan.
psssst. This thread isn’t supposed to be about grubby, mundane things like politics…
It’s about the illusion of substance, isn’t it …
Snerd
Okhropir — There’s no that the world as we perceive it is “real” within the conventional paradigm of our existential experience, but there’s no denying that there are other “realities” that both beyond our ability to fully grasp them — both at the very smallest and most basic or elemental level as well as the most infinite and complex. I think that’s a very difficult and highly discomforting concept for many people to come to terms with.
Snerd — Ha. Well, you’ve got me there, I have to admit. Yes, “politics” is definitely an illusion over substance in most cases.
Rhetoric v. Reality.
okhropir rumiani: “… What do Wilson and Mulroney have to do with anything here?”
SG: Parallel universes, intersecting …?
Snerd