What Really Is Everything?

a barren stretch of desert is dimly lit

by the brightening sky

there are still 30 minutes before

sunrise but above the clouds the stars

have already faded and a deep blue

shadowless light suffuses the desert

floor

in the last few months the flat

featureless ground has been transformed

a 30 meter tall steel tower bearing a

terrible payload stands alone at the

foot of the ascora mountains surrounded

by little more than criss-crossing tyre

tracks leading three kilometers from a

now empty adobe ranch house

beyond situated to the north west and

south all at a deliberate nine kilometer

radius from the tower are three part

buried shelters each with their windows

turned towards their joint focus the

scientists and soldiers now encamped

within these shelters cannot see the

tower at the circle's epicenter

but they will soon see all too well the

effects of its fateful payload

not knowing what to expect they lie on

the ground feet pointed towards the

invisibly distant tower and listen to

the countdown as it crackles over the

public address system

at precisely 5 30 a.m on the 16th of

july

1945 an earth-shaking boom marked the

beginning of a new era of civilization

and the birth of a new branch of physics

the so-called gadget bomb which had been

hoisted to the top of the firing tower

imploded beginning a devastating nuclear

chain reaction within its plutonium core

the nuclear bomb exploded with a force

equivalent to 21 000 tons of tnt within

a fraction of a second the steel tower

was vaporized and the desert floor

melted to a green glass

dim dawn turned to bright day in an

instant as the blast ballooned and then

mushroomed into the now iconic symbol of

the nuclear age

this was the trinity test the first ever

full-scale detonation of a nuclear bomb

which would come to shape the course of

history and the field of science

the 1930s had seen monumental advances

in atomic science and radiation research

and the spectacular discovery of nuclear

fission in 1938 was overshadowed by the

outbreak of war just a year later but

physicists were quick to realize the

devastating potential of their new

discovery albert einstein co-signed a

letter to then-president roosevelt with

a warning it is conceivable that

extremely powerful bombs of a new type

may thus be constructed

so the u.s developed their own bomb

before any other nation could

the test was considered a great success

and just 21 days later the united states

dropped a similar atomic bomb the

so-called fat man on the city of

nagasaki japan

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if it had not been for the deadly

pressures of war nuclear science may

have followed a very different and

likely slower path

the exploration of the atom one of the

tiniest particles of matter had until

then been little more than a curiosity

the domain of at first philosophers and

then gentlemen's scholars small

improvements in experimental methods and

equipment brought small breakthroughs

until the fateful revelation that atoms

and their nuclei were indeed not the end

of the russian doll

a discovery that led directly to new

mexico and then japan

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as the glow from that first nuclear

explosion faded it left behind a new

thirst to understand what our universe

was actually made of

and how it came to be

that journey the quest to discover what

makes up everything would see scientists

delve ever deeper down a rabbit hole of

matter and mass of fields and particles

and even further back in time in a

century-long quest to answer the

immortal question

what is

at its most fundamental level everything

and perhaps even more importantly

is any of it

really real

at all

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this video is sponsored by magellan tv

the documentary streaming service

question how long does it take for a

black hole to die a 10 to the power of

67 years b google years or c it never

dies it just sort of lingers like a bad

smell

that's right it's 10 to the power of 67

years

ages and the fact they evaporate at all

is due to heisenberg's uncertainty

principle something you can find out

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it was ancient indian philosophers of

the 8th century bc who first asserted

that nothing we experience

is in fact

real

such an extreme reductionist philosophy

is simple enough to follow a cart can be

broken down to its component parts

wheels axles yoke those components can

too be broken down a wheel becomes a hub

rim and spokes each succession of

smaller parts can be broken down further

by hand and with specialist tools until

nothing remains but a collection of

minuscule specs each indistinguishable

from the next

what then are the objects of our

experience is everything if not piles of

such specks amassed and organized to

give the appearance of something greater

these looming existential puzzles were

visited again by ancient greek

philosophers some 400 years later

considering the same problem democritus

and lucipus came to the same conclusion

ultimately everything we can see and

touch can be broken down time and time

again until an impasse is reached of

tiny particles that can be divided no

further democritus gave these

hypothetical particles a name defining

them by their fundamentally indivisible

nature

at thomas meaning uncutable

today we know them

as atoms

and yet it wasn't until the 19th century

that science rather than philosophy

allowed researchers to probe the nature

of these mysterious uncuttable atoms

in the early 1800s english chemist john

dalton spent his summers in the

mountains of the lake district in

northwest england before the advent of

comprehensive maps of the region he was

an authority measuring their altitude

and distances through his own hiking

experience one can imagine his mind

wandering in these hills both measuring

and musing upon the remarkable theories

he was forming within his manchester

laboratory

for dalton spent the rest of his time

analyzing the nature of various chemical

compounds

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these compounds were as distinct as the

peaks he knew so well what was it about

their basic nature that made them behave

so differently

all of these chemicals he posited were

composed of simple indivisible building

blocks that related to the elements that

made them up so methane as a combination