Predestination? Fate? The idea is both comforting and frightening at the same time. Most people, even atheists are familiar with the spiritual idea of predestination. It's often a trope in movies, television and literature. However most are not aware of the physical one, but the Newtonian physics we were all taught back in school demands predestination.
In 1935 an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger, proposed a thought experiment that, at least according to an, at the time, new theory, a cat could both be dead and alive at the same time. He didn't propose the thought experiment because he believed the theory, he proposed it because he didn't believe the theory and he was attempting to point out the absurd possibilities if it was correct.
This video is the second video in a two parter. In these videos I'm making the claim that it's possible, according to our current understanding of physics, for something to be dead and alive at the same time. If you didn't see my previous video please go do that now. You'll probably be totally lost without it. I put the link in the description.
I've seen a lot of discussions about time travel. Usually someone watched a movie or something like that and they ask a question on one of those question and answer websites. Then they get responses from a bunch of people so rigid and up tight they can't open their mouths wide enough to drink through a straw. Well they need to loosen those lips a bit.
If you watched my 10th video, on time travel, which really isn't needed to understand this one, I mentioned you can't travel back in time, but you can change things in the past that haven't been determined yet. This was done through an experiment known as the delayed-choice quantum eraser. A lot of people like to call this changing the past!
The title of the video gives it a way a little, but have you ever wondered what happens when you fall into a black hole? I've seen lots of possible explanations. The first thing everyone suggests is spot on, you die. You get stretched out into a skinny noodle in a process called spaghettification before you even get to the black hole most of the time. That really isn't the interesting part. So I tried to think about it from the perspective of being a spectator, like spectator mode in a game. What I came up with may indicate our whole universe is stuck in a black hole. Let me explain why!
You've probably heard, especially if you watched my video on time dilation, that the faster you go the slower time goes. According to Einstein anyway. Well Einstein also said everything is relative. Which means when you go really fast it's not like you're going fast it's like everything else is. So it's not your clock is going slow, it's like everyone else's clock is going slow. So if you traveled at near the speed of light to the next nearest star and back wouldn't it seem to you like time barely passed on earth rather than the other way around? No! Let me explain why!
In different conversations I've had with people I've occasionally found people who don't believe the speed of light is actually the real speed limit of things in the universe. These aren't people who are necessarily anti-science, they just can't imagine how there could be some kind of speed limit. And when you try to explain it to them it only makes it seem even more ridiculous. One of the ways I've found to help make something easier to understand is to rescale it to human scales. So what would happen if the speed of light was only ten miles an hour? Let me Explain!
Those of us, who studied Einstein's theory of relativity, or had it rammed down their throats by others, have probably heard of the idea that the faster something goes the heavier it gets, until all the pushing in the world does nothing but make it more massive and so that is why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Well that's not quite true. Let me explain why!