Why Is The Universe Out Of Balance?

the laws of reality as we know them

fundamentally rely on the principle

of balance

energy can neither be created nor

destroyed

what goes in

must come out

to the 17th century italian physician

santorio santorio exploring this balance

within the human body led to a

decades-long period of

self-experimentation

for 30 years he weighed every liquid and

solid that went into his body and every

liquid and solid

that came out

he weighed his body before and after a

variety of physical exertions

day in

day out

matter in

mata out

confusingly for him his excretions

failed to measure up to the mass of his

food and drink it was as if a campfire

had been burnt to ashes the wood used as

fuel weighing far greater than the grey

flecks left in its place

but santorio believed the missing matter

had to have gone somewhere it could not

just

cease to exist

and by the end of the 18th century

natural philosophers would definitively

demonstrate santori's base assumption

was true the total amount of mass before

and after a chemical reaction was equal

whether it was the human metabolism

breaking down food into smaller

molecular units of fats proteins and

sugars or the woody fibers in a

campfire's fuel releasing carbon dioxide

and water as it burns

each chemical equation is balanced an

equal number of each kind of atom at the

start of reaction and at the end they

merely rearrange themselves into new

substances

but the very light of day showed us this

kind of balance is not always true

in the 20th century when scientists

unlocked the nuclear power of the atom

it was revealed that the total amount of

mass could indeed change

deep within the core of our sun hydrogen

becomes helium but the total mass

involved in creating this helium is

greater than the mass of the helium

itself and no other matter exists on the

end side of the equation

it appeared

unbalanced

but her famous equivalents put forth by

a young swiss patent clerk showed that

mass only needed to be reconsidered as

part of the total energy of a system the

difference in mass is converted into

energy a photon

sunshine

balance restored

but

what would happen

if there were

an inherent imbalance

to the universe

our bodies

our world

entire galaxies billions of light years

beyond the milky way nearly everything

we can reach out and touch consists

of matter

however there is another kind of matter

out there a near identical twin

we call it antimatter and there is

almost none of it left

an obvious enormous imbalance stretching

out across the cosmos

yet without this imbalance

we would not

and could not

exist

at all not a single person not a single

planet

not a single star

where did this imbalance

come from

how is the observable universe packed so

densely with mata with its partner

almost entirely absent

and why did the vast cosmos seem so

perfectly balanced at its inception

yet just not

quite

[Music]

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[Music]

the most famous relationship in all of

physics is often cited to be the one

between mass

and energy

e equals m c

squared c is representative of the

ultimate speed limit for anything

traveling through space and equal to

that of light if it is travelling

unencumbered through pure nothingness

as simple as it appears to be this

equation provided a fundamental basis

upon which einstein's laws of relativity

could stand

in the early years of the 20th century

the world was being ushered into a new

understanding of reality where strange

things happened at speeds and scales

unfathomable to the human mind albert

einstein was merely one of many

brilliant minds revealing how the

extremities of our universe defied

common perception

and so just a few years before einstein

rewrote the laws of nature paul durack

was born in bristol

first a student of engineering he

transitioned into mathematics earning a

phd from cambridge in 1926.

incredibly precise both in thought and

word tales of him sleeping during

lectures would end with his waking to

offer a quick and clever retort to the

speaker his advice to fellow physicist

niels bohr known for his plentiful

drafts of papers was that

you should never start a sentence

without knowing the end of it

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and from his postgraduate years and

beyond dirac's research obsession lay in

a brand new area of physics

in 1925 quantum mechanics had rewritten

our perspective of the subatomic world

particles though the only ones known at

the time with a proton and electron

could simultaneously exist and be

described mathematically

as waves

by 1926 erwin schrodinger had published

his keystone equation from quantum

reality but dirac noticed it was

incomplete

it didn't account for the effects of

einstein's relativity

someone needed to tackle this problem

diving into the math direct soon

discovered an incredible secret hiding

within the relationship between energy

and mass

e

equals m c squared

was wrong

or rather like schrodinger's quantum

model it was incomplete

merely reflective of one specific

situation when a massive particle is not

moving relative to its observer this

difference is only significant at

extreme speeds yet these speeds are

reached at the imperceptibly tiny scales

of electrons orbiting their atomic