Seven Questions

This article is absolutely fascinating. It addresses the main question of this course, "What is reality, really?" And six other doozies.

What is reality really?

The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. "Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions," he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Origins of the Universe

In this YouTube video, a professor of physics from Barnard College describes the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. My favourite part about this video is how she postulates that the Big Bang was not just an explosion of dense matter, but in fact the genesis of all matter, energy, space and time. Our universe has been expanding for 14 billion years! Who knows how many times it has expanded and crunched. Indeed, the most compelling of all the ideas expressed is that ours may not be the only universe. Of course, we have no way of knowing, but contemplating the possibilities is reward enough!