WEBVTT

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Thank you very much.
It's wonderful to be back in Brussels.

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I have been given the challenge
of discussing with you

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the next 50 years of physics,

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in a dark room without windows,
an hour after lunch.

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So, I already see some of you
recoiling in horror

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at the prospect of equations
and tensor calculus.

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I'm not going to do that.

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I've called my presentation
"A theory of everything (else)."

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Professional physicists today

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are developing
various theories of everything

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to try to reconcile the two major
successful theories of physics today:

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general relativity and quantum mechanics.

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There are a couple of dirty little secrets
in there that they are not telling you.

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The first one is that these two theories,

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which each of which
works very well in its own domain,

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are in violent contradiction
in most of our world every day,

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especially with gravity.

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Therefore, the idea is to try
to develop theories of everything

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that would reconcile somehow -
like string theory and others -

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would reconcile these two
dominant views of physics.

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The other dirty little secret 
is that in all that,

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we have left out a missing child.

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The missing child
is the little sister of physics.

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It's the physics of information,

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and that's what I would like
to talk about this afternoon.

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The physics they teach us
in college and in universities

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is the physics of energy.

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It has to do with lasers
and colors and particles and mass

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and fields - whatever the field is -

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and acceleration and inertia

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and all these things
that you've been exposed to

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in high school or college or university.

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The problem is that they also teach us


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that information and energy
are two sides of the same coin,

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but they never bothered
to teach us the physics of information;

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they continue to teach us
the physics of energy.

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Now, going back to the 19th century,

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James Maxwell,

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discussing thermodynamics,

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took a very simple idea

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that if you pour hot liquid
into a cold liquid,

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there will be an average
temperature of the liquid

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between these two components.

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The only way to stop that
would be for a little demon,

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Maxwell's demon,

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to be there and to separate
these molecules.

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But absent this demon,

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the law of thermodynamics
will say the two liquids will mix,

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and will reach
an average tepid temperature.

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Leo Szilard, who was
a colleague of Einstein, in 1929,

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went one step further and said
for the demon to be able to do this,

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the demon needs information

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about which molecules are hot
and which molecules are cold.

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If the demon knows that,

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then the demon can, in fact,
keep the two liquids separated,

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and, well, they will never reach
an average temperature.

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But that means that there is
just as much information

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as there is energy in the system,

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and that information and energy are,
in fact, the two sides of the same coin.

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So, where's the missing sister of physics?

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Physics of energy has to do, again,

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with particles and atoms
and fundamental forces

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and mass and entropy and fields

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and space dimensions - X, Y and Z -

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and T - for time -

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and momentum and inertia
and speed and so on ...

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But we never talk about similar concepts
on the side of the physics of information,

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and my argument is that
in the next 50 years, we will.

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I should disclose to you -

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I'm in a field where everybody
works on full disclosure -

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so I may as well confess to you
that I dropped out of physics.

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I have an advanced degree in physics 
only because I was good in math,

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so I could work out the equations
and get the answer.

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But then, I dropped out of it
for a couple of reasons.

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First, I could never understand
what they meant

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when they said time was a dimension.

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They say, "Okay, there is X, Y and Z,
so I get that from common experience.

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And they say, "Think of time
in the same way; only in the equation,

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you put a little "I" in front of "T"
for square root of minus 1 -

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but don't think about that -

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and then you treat it the same way,
and everything works fine."

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That's in general relativity
and other areas of physics -

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that's what you do.

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I could never get that because in X,
I can go this way or I can go that way.

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In time, I cannot -
I'm not allowed to do that.

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So, we're very good at talking
about how time passes;

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we don't know why time passes.

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Similarly, we're very good
at talking about how things fall down;

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we don't know why they fall down.

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And again, this is not something
you've been taught in physics in college.

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They never said that they
couldn't explain those two things.

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The third thing that disgusted
me was particles.

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You know, we have particles
inside the atoms,

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and then, we have particles
inside the particles;

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we have particles inside electrons
and photons and everything else.

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And then, since it still
doesn't quite work very well,

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we have particles of sub-particles.

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And that reminds me of something

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that happened to astronomy
in the Middle Ages,

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when they had cycles and epicycles,
and epicycles of epicycles.

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If you keep doing that,
everything works fine,

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except that that's not
the way reality works.

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So I thought they should go on doing this;

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they should go on
with the physics of energy.

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We achieve wonderful things
with that science,

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but that's not what I really want to do.

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So I went back looking
for the missing little sister of physics,

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and it turns out it's asking
fundamental questions

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about the nature of time

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and also about some
of the things that happen in our lives,

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like coincidences.

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On July 20, 1996,

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we had a house in the country,
north of San Francisco,

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a wonderful area full redwoods,

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and we had some friends
over on an evening, for dinner.

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One of our friends was a woman

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who said she was going
to be in a play, in Mendocino County,

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and in the play, she was going
to read something in French.

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She had not practiced French for a while,

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so she asked us
if we had a book in French,

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and we had a bookshelf
with English and French books.

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So my wife pulled out a novel,

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which was this novel by René Barjavel,
"La peau de César,"

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and she gave it to me,
and I opened it at a random page.

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I read a passage at random, which was

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"I was in the Boeing that blew up
after take-off at Kennedy Airport,

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a bomb in the hold, 132 dead, remember?"

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Well, this was three days after a Boeing
took off from Kennedy Airport

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and blew up over the Atlantic,

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and we were shocked by this.

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If you talk about this kind
of coincidence with your friends,

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you'll find that many people have,
in fact, had that kind of experience.

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This was not precognition;

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this was three days
after the TWA 800 accident.

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But it shook us up and then we forgot it.

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This is the kind of thing that you
sort of brush out of your awareness.

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Some scientists have thought
deeply about this.

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Going back to the Middle Ages,
Facius Cardan, in the 15th century,

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writes in his diary
that he had performed some rites

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to make the elementals of the air
appear in his laboratory.

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This was a very fashionable thing
to do in the 15th century,

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and these creatures appeared before him.

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There were seven sylphs,
the creatures of the air.


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Two of them were the chiefs,
and they came forward,

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and he asked them what they knew
about the nature of the universe.

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It turned out the two sylphs disagreed.

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One of them said,

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"Well, God created the universe
once and for all, and here we are."

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The other one said, "No. God created
the universe from moment to moment,

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and if He should stop for a minute,
everything would disappear."

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So this clicker is not the clicker
that I was given earlier.

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It's another occasion,
another instance of the same clicker,

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but these clickers are being generated
by something in a higher plane,

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which as a software engineer,
I understand perfectly; this makes sense.

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It makes no sense in terms
of the physics of energy;

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it makes perfect sense
in the physics of information,

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and here you have
the two models of the world.

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You have the classic physical model,
and you have quantum mechanics.

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A number of people
have more recently been looking

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for the little sister of physics,

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starting with Wolfgang Pauli,
one of the founders of quantum mechanics,

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Carl Jung - and there is extensive
correspondence between Pauli and Jung -

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Paul Kammerer, Arthur Koestler,
David Bohm, Max Velmans,

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Philippe Guillemant in France, Landauer
and Seth Lloyd and many others.

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Carl Jung argued with Pauli,

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and Carl Jung compiled a catalog
of coincidences that had happened to him.

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In one case, he was
at a conference in another city,


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and in the middle of the night,

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he woke up with a feeling
there was somebody in the room.

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He actually got up and checked,
and there was nobody in the vicinity,

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but he had the feeling
of something hitting his forehead

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and something hitting
the back of his head.

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He went back to sleep,
and the next day he got a telegram

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that one of his patients
had committed suicide

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by shooting himself in the forehead,

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and the bullet had lodged itself
in the back of the head.


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Carl Jung, in his books, mentions
a number of these remarkable coincidences.

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I had another occasion like this.

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In the 70's, I was concerned
about the number of cults

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growing up in California
but also in France and elsewhere

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around the idea of extraterrestrials.

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Some of these groups call themselves
the Melchizedek cult.

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They use as inspiration
the biblical figure of Melchizedek.

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This is a representation of Melchizedek
at Chartres Cathedral,

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which is very beautiful.

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Melchizedek is a very
interesting, very mystical,

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very mysterious figure in the Bible.

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He is a very powerful figure
because he initiated Abraham

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and actually was the origin
of all three religions of the book:

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the Islamist, the Jewish
and the Christian religion.

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I was going to an interview
in Los Angeles,

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took a taxi at random
from the flow of traffic,

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got to my interview.

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When I got home, I looked
at the receipt from the driver,

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and the receipt was signed Melchizedek.

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Now, that got me

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on a strange series of thoughts.

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At the time,

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there was research going on
at Stanford Research Institute,

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on parapsychology.

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I was part of that program,
the program of remote viewing.

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Uri Geller was there.

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Uri Geller thought that he could
communicate with extraterrestrials

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on board a platform called "Hoover,"

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and that he was getting
communications from them,

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which enabled him to do what
he was performing in our laboratory.

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I thought, "Well, this seems
to be the same kind of communication.

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Something is communicating with me."

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Over the next several weeks,
I did a number of experiments,

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and I convinced myself
that these coincidences,

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some of them mean
something powerful, as Jung said.

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Others mean absolutely nothing.

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It's just the way the world is organized.

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So let's go back and do
a little bit of software thinking.

00:13:35.839 --> 00:13:37.519
If you have a small library ...

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This is the Library of Congress,
33 million books.

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Thirty-three million books is nothing.

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I mean, that's what Facebook
does in one afternoon.

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Today, Google is getting
35 hours of video per minute

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uploaded to the YouTube site.

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So, if you have a small library,
you can still work with coordinates.

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You have shelves,
and you have vertical stacks,

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and so you have X, Y and Z,
and that works fine.

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If somebody sends you 10,000 books,

00:14:07.160 --> 00:14:10.750
you can push the existing books
a little to insert the new books.

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If you have enough staff people
at your disposal, it works fine.

00:14:15.264 --> 00:14:18.599
If you have a modern library
which looks like this -

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this is Google, Facebook, Twitter -

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you can't do that anymore, 
you can't use dimensions.

00:14:25.865 --> 00:14:29.645
You sprinkle the information
that comes in, statistically,

00:14:29.645 --> 00:14:32.839
in virtual memory,
in an infinite virtual memory.

00:14:32.839 --> 00:14:36.679
Then you have a hashing code

00:14:36.679 --> 00:14:42.499
that enables you to get it back when
somebody asks a question out to Google.

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The result is statistical.

00:14:44.865 --> 00:14:49.115
Some of it means something;
some of it means nothing.

00:14:50.290 --> 00:14:53.759
This is now starting
to be mainstream physics.


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Dr. Guillemant in France
is a CNRS physicist,

00:14:58.574 --> 00:15:02.359
and in his latest book, "La route
du temps" - "The Road of Time" -

00:15:02.359 --> 00:15:06.600
he argues that synchronicities
are caused by a double causality:

00:15:06.600 --> 00:15:09.780
our intentions cause effects in the future

00:15:09.780 --> 00:15:13.650
that become the future causes
of present effects.

00:15:13.650 --> 00:15:16.939
Again, this is now becoming
mainstream physics.

00:15:16.939 --> 00:15:23.339
To conclude, there are four requirements
for the new physics of 2061.

00:15:23.739 --> 00:15:26.720
First, we should recognize the universe


00:15:26.720 --> 00:15:30.830
as a sub-system of a mental reality
of information structures.

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It's all information structure,
and it's all simultaneous.

00:15:35.430 --> 00:15:37.080
I don't mean it's a database.

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I don't mean to use analogs
with current, crude technology.

00:15:41.680 --> 00:15:46.770
It's something obviously much bigger,
much more complex, but you get the idea.

00:15:47.039 --> 00:15:50.370
We should recognize dimensions
as a cultural artifact.

00:15:50.370 --> 00:15:52.315
We create dimensions


00:15:52.315 --> 00:15:56.130
because we have small libraries 
and we need X, Y and Z.

00:15:56.130 --> 00:15:58.600
But we don't need them in physics,

00:15:58.600 --> 00:16:02.445
so we should do away
with the concept of dimensions

00:16:02.445 --> 00:16:04.590
in the physics of the future.

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The present is over-determined.

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As Guillemant says,

00:16:08.694 --> 00:16:12.644
it is determined from the past
and it is determined from the future.

00:16:12.964 --> 00:16:18.479
And finally, consciousness is generating
the impression of space and time.

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That's what space-time is.

00:16:20.519 --> 00:16:25.230
It is consciousness traversing
associations in this world of information

00:16:25.230 --> 00:16:28.570
and creating the illusion
of space and time.

00:16:29.245 --> 00:16:31.850
So, my proposal to you

00:16:31.850 --> 00:16:35.840
is that we let physicists
continue with the physics of energy.

00:16:35.840 --> 00:16:38.920
They do that very well
and will eventually have a way

00:16:38.920 --> 00:16:42.430
of reconciling relativity
with quantum mechanics.

00:16:42.430 --> 00:16:45.380
Let's go on and look
for the missing sister.

00:16:45.490 --> 00:16:47.019
Thank you very much.

00:16:47.019 --> 00:16:49.369
(Applause)