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What We Cannot Know – with Marcus du Sautoy



The Royal Institution

Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human comprehension? Marcus du Sautoy investigates.
Watch the Q&A that followed this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS4WfJeGP2s
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Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human comprehension? Former Christmas Lecturer Marcus du Sautoy will lead us on a thought-provoking expedition to the furthest reaches of modern science.

Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician and popular science writer and speaker. He delivered the 2006 CHRISTMAS LECTURES on mathematics, titled THE NUM8ER MY5TERIES. He is currently the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the Oxford University.

This talk and Q&A was filmed at the Ri on 13 October 2016.

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23 thoughts on “What We Cannot Know – with Marcus du Sautoy
  1. I loved this lecture. if only he could have stopped talking so fast. i am a simple american forced to feel as such do to who my countryman (not really, it was our archaic electoral college ) put in the WH. my apologies to my European friends.

  2. To believe in God is NOT to assert there are unanswerable questions. It's simply to acknowledge the universe is temporal. It had a beginning in the Big Bang and will have an end in heat death.. It will eventually disintegrate into nothing as ALL temporal things do… So if the universe is temporal what then created the universe? … What then is eternal? … If we're honest we know the answer.

  3. It seems to me that we are trying to measure the position of the electron which is obviously, from the fact of entaglement and that they pop photons in and out of existence, multidimentonal so we are trying to measure it to a three dementonal spot; wouldn't it be like measuring an irational number with only whole numbers? And as we calculate each decimal and hone in on placement or speed photons entangled with it's electron pop back and forth and since we are holding it in the whole number slot we think it's in all of those energy changes are applying to the other end of the equation increasing our uncertainty of what that has become.

  4. "Why something rather than nothing?" "Because 0 = 1 – 1." I like that! I guess you could then ask where the laws themselves came from, but then you could say they're abstract and so that question doesn't apply

  5. Albert Einstein got quite agitated when he said, “God doesn't play dice!” To which Niels Bohr replied, “You can't tell God what to do!” And they drew up an experiment that would show who was right. Unfortunately the experiment was technically impossible at the time, as it required the ability to emit just one photon. So it wasn't until long after they both died that the experiment was made, which of course proved that Niels Bohr was right.

  6. A very funny and enjoyable talk on very interesting subjects such as chaos theory, quantum physics or even the nature of consciousness.
    He looks so energetic and crazy, but definitely engaging.

  7. The big problem with mathematics, is that we are trying to know the core of something continuous with a tool that is fundamentally discrete. The great problem with physics is that it only reach as far as our own nature allows it. We need new mathematics based in new abstract concepts other than the ancient discrete "numbers", new operations and a new "world of the ideas" based in continuous. Similarly, the only way to stop chasing ghosts like dark energy or dark matter, is a new concept of physics based in a new approach to experiment, to get and to analyze the continuous and not just discrete events.

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