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232 attoseconds

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Chinese scientists may have measured the frame rate of the universe

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Everyone thought quantum entanglement happens instantly

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Two particles

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no matter how far apart they are

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one of them changes

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and the other changes at the same instant

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Zero delay

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zero time

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like the whole universe did a synchronized refresh in the same frame

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Einstein called this spooky action at a distance

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meaning this thing is absurdly fast

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fast like magic

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but in October 2024

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scientists from Shenzhen University Peking University and TU Wien

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jointly published a paper

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in the top journal of physics

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Physical Review Letters

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They did something nobody had ever done before

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they timed the formation of quantum entanglement

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the result was 232 attoseconds

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Hello

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hi everyone

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I'm Wang Lijie

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What does 232 attoseconds even mean

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one attosecond equals a quintillionth of a second

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232 attoseconds

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is the time light takes to travel about 70 nanometers

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70 nanometers is about one thousandth the diameter of a human hair

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In our everyday world

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this time is so short it basically doesn't exist

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but in the world of quantum physics

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these 232 attoseconds

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may be the first time humans have touched the frame rate of the universe

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Let me first make clear what this experiment actually did

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To understand this experiment

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you need to know some background first

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the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists

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Pierre

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Agostini Ferenc

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Krausz and Anne L'Huillier

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their contribution was inventing the experimental method to produce attosecond light pulses

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Before them

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the shortest timescale humans could control was the femtosecond

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that is one quadrillionth of a second

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they pushed this limit down by three more orders of magnitude

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entering the attosecond era

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this is like giving physicists a super high speed camera

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fast enough to capture every frame of an electron's motion

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Shenzhen University's Jiang Weichao and his collaborators

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used this super high speed camera to film the birth of quantum entanglement

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They shone ultra short femtosecond laser pulses on helium atoms

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why helium

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because a helium atom has only two electrons

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it's the cleanest model for studying quantum entanglement

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Two electrons

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one system

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no extra noise or interference

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The laser knocks one of the electrons out of the atom

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the electron that flies away and the one that stays

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form a quantum entangled state

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their fates are locked together from then on

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measure one and you know the state of the other

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Here comes the key discovery

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the electron that flies away

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its birth time is not fixed

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if the electron left behind is in a lower energy state

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the flying electron is born about 232 attoseconds later

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In other words

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the establishment of entanglement is not a timeless jump

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but a process with a temporal structure

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which energy state the remaining electron ends up in

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in turn affects how early or late the flying electron is born

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these two things are not independent

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they are through a 232 attosecond time window

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tightly woven together

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What does this mean

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it means entanglement is not a switch like instant event

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it has a process

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it has a temporal structure

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when the universe creates the quantum correlation between two particles

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it takes a tiny bit of time to render that correlation

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You can imagine it like this

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you're playing an online multiplayer game

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your character makes a move

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and another player's character needs to respond in sync

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you think this sync happens instantly

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but if you had a precise enough timer

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you'd find the server needs a tiny amount of time to process this sync

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this processing time

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is 232 attoseconds

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Now here's the question

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does this prove the universe has a frame rate

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before I answer

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I need to clear up something a lot of people get confused about

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you may have heard of a concept called Planck time

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Planck time is the smallest unit of time derived from theoretical physics

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about ten to the minus forty three seconds

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I talked about this in an earlier video

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if the universe is a simulation

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Planck time is like the clock cycle of this computer

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the most fundamental hardware frame rate

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so what's the relationship between 232 attoseconds and Planck time

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232 attoseconds is ten to the minus sixteen seconds

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Planck time is ten to the minus forty three seconds

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the two differ by nearly twenty seven orders of magnitude

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roughly a factor of ten to the twenty seventh

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so 232 attoseconds is definitely not the most fundamental frame rate of the universe

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but it is something else

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it is the first thing humans have ever measured experimentally

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the render time of a quantum process

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here's an analogy

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if Planck time is your computer's CPU clock cycle

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say one clock cycle is a fraction of a nanosecond

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then 232 attoseconds is more like your graphics card

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the total time it takes to render one frame

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the CPU runs through many many clock cycles

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to finish rendering this one frame

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the render time of one frame is far longer than one clock cycle

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but it's exactly this render time

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that reveals a key fact

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the picture is not continuous

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it's pieced together frame by frame

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it's just that the frame rate is so high

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so high your eyes can't detect any flicker

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this is the truly revolutionary meaning of this paper

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before this

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physicists generally believed the formation of quantum entanglement was instantaneous

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costing no time

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but now the experiment says

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no

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the formation of entanglement takes time

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even though that time is as short as 232 attoseconds

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it is not zero

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if even quantum entanglement the process thought to be the most instantaneous

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is not truly instantaneous

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then is any physical process truly zero time

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if the answer is no

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then it means the timeline of the universe is not continuous

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it is discrete

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frame by frame

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this discovery reminds me of a concept that is central in Buddhism

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the kshana or instant

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in the Buddhist Abhidharma texts there is a precise time unit called kshana

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the Abhidharmakosha records

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that a single finger snap contains sixty five kshanas

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by modern estimates

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one kshana is about a dozen milliseconds

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of course this number is nowhere near the same order as 232 attoseconds

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off by more than ten orders of magnitude

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but the point is not the number itself

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the point is Buddhism made a core claim two thousand five hundred years ago

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time is not continuous

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all phenomena arise and perish instant by instant

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the you that you think exists continuously that table that planet

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are all constantly arising and perishing at extremely high speed

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in every instant

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the old you perishes

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a new you arises

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you are never the same you

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you can do an experiment right now

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close your eyes for three seconds

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think of nothing

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then open them

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you'll find

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you can't think of nothing

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in those three seconds

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thoughts fly by like a stream of comments

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each thought arises stays for an instant then vanishes

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the next thought immediately fills the gap

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your consciousness is not a smooth river

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but a dense string of dots

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it's just that the dots are packed too close together

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you mistake it for continuous

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ancient practitioners had no attosecond lasers

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but they had a more direct observation tool

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their own attention

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they sat down

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tuned their attention to the highest precision

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and watched thoughts arise and perish frame by frame

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in the end

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they reached a conclusion strikingly consistent with modern physics

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this is the real meaning of the emptiness of the five aggregates

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the five aggregates are form sensation perception mental formation and consciousness

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form is matter

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sensation is feeling

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perception is concept

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mental formation is volitional activity

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consciousness is awareness itself

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the Buddha said the five aggregates are empty

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not that these things don't exist

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but that they have no lasting unchanging substance

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each of them arises and perishes in an instant

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like the individual frames on a strip of film

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played at high speed creating the illusion of continuous motion

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you think your hand is solid

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that's because the atoms that make up your hand

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vibrate and reassemble in the quantum field at extremely high frequency

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the hand at each instant is not the hand of the previous instant

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you think your consciousness is coherent

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that's because your brain

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refreshes your conscious picture at gamma wave frequencies of tens of hertz

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the gaps between every two frames are seamlessly bridged

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the emptiness of the five aggregates is not about nothingness

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it says

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all the continuity you experience

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is the result of high frame rate rendering

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In 2016

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Musk said something very famous at a tech conference

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he said

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the odds that we are in base reality

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are only one in billions

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Musk's logic is simple

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if a civilization becomes advanced enough

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it can create simulations indistinguishable from reality

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then the number of simulations will far exceed base reality

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a random conscious being

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is most likely inside a simulation

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not in base reality

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this argument was first made by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom

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rigorously formulated in 2003

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but the simulation hypothesis always had a classic rebuttal

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if the universe is simulated

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it should have a resolution limit

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just like video games have a smallest pixel

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but our physics seems to allow infinite continuity

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you can divide a ruler infinitely small

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now

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this rebuttal is falling apart

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Planck length tells us

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space has a smallest pixel

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Planck time tells us

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time has a smallest frame rate

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and this 232 attosecond paper tells us

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even quantum entanglement the most supernatural looking phenomenon

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has a measurable render time

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the universe looks more and more like a program running on some substrate

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but I want to remind you

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I covered this in an earlier video

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the correspondence between the Planck scale and the Yogacara school

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you might think

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232 attoseconds is the experimental version of Planck time

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it's not

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232 attoseconds is nearly ten to the twenty seventh times larger than Planck time

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they are not the same thing

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the correct understanding is this

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Planck time is the CPU clock cycle of the universe as a computer

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232 attoseconds is this computer's

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processing time to render one instance of quantum entanglement

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just like your computer

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the CPU clock runs at 3 gigahertz

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each cycle is 0.3 nanoseconds

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but rendering one frame of a game might take 16 milliseconds

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the two differ by tens of millions of times

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but they both tell you the same thing

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this machine works frame by frame

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not flowing continuously

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this is what's truly exciting about this discovery

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232 attoseconds is not the underlying frame rate of the universe

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but it's the first time humans have caught experimental evidence of frames

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if you place this discovery in the context of the emptiness of the five aggregates

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you'll notice something very interesting

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the Buddha said all conditioned things are like a dream an illusion a bubble a shadow

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we've heard this line for two thousand five hundred years

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most people read it as a literary sigh like life is but a dream

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but if you reread this line from a physics perspective

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its precision will send a chill down your spine

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dream and illusion

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means reality is like the brain with no external input

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rendering images on its own

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bubble and shadow

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means all appearances are temporary with no lasting substance

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arising and perishing in every frame

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this is not literary rhetoric

275
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this is a precise description of a discrete universe

276
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have you ever thought about this question

277
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why have you never actually seen the present moment

278
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when light reflects off an object onto your retina

279
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the retina converts light signals into electrical signals

280
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the signals travel to the visual cortex and are processed into an image

281
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this whole process takes about 80 to 100 milliseconds

282
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in other words

283
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everything you see right now

284
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is actually the world of 80 milliseconds ago

285
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you always live in the past

286
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but you never feel this delay

287
00:12:10,033 --> 00:12:10,539
why

288
00:12:11,273 --> 00:12:13,680
because your brain is a prediction machine

289
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it doesn't passively receive reality

290
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it actively renders reality

291
00:12:19,393 --> 00:12:22,999
it predicts what the next frame should look like based on past data

292
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then presents the predicted image to you

293
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when the sensory data finally arrives

294
00:12:28,153 --> 00:12:29,919
if it doesn't match the prediction

295
00:12:29,993 --> 00:12:31,759
only then does the brain update the picture

296
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this works exactly like a game engine

297
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a game doesn't render every detail of every object in real time

298
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no graphics card could handle that

299
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it only renders the direction the player is looking

300
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the things within that distance range

301
00:12:46,976 --> 00:12:48,764
the rest just keeps the data

302
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without rendering the image

303
00:12:50,696 --> 00:12:53,255
and one of the strangest findings in quantum mechanics

304
00:12:53,257 --> 00:12:55,543
is that when a particle is not being observed

305
00:12:55,576 --> 00:12:57,183
it is not in a definite state

306
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only when you observe it

307
00:12:59,336 --> 00:13:02,303
does it collapse from a probability wave into a definite particle

308
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isn't this exactly rendering on demand

309
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where you're not looking

310
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the universe doesn't waste computing power rendering

311
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the emptiness in the emptiness of the five aggregates

312
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is not nothingness

313
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its precise meaning is

314
00:13:13,609 --> 00:13:17,776
there is no independent lasting observation independent substance

315
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and what quantum mechanics says

316
00:13:20,008 --> 00:13:21,296
is the very same statement

317
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at this point

318
00:13:22,513 --> 00:13:23,600
you might ask

319
00:13:23,673 --> 00:13:26,539
isn't the idea of rendering on demand too bold

320
00:13:26,992 --> 00:13:29,631
actually the physics community's discussion of this direction

321
00:13:29,633 --> 00:13:31,640
is far more serious than you'd think

322
00:13:31,992 --> 00:13:34,080
in 2024 a review published in Nature

323
00:13:34,112 --> 00:13:37,000
Reviews Physics pointed out

324
00:13:37,153 --> 00:13:40,919
attosecond science is revealing the role of entanglement in quantum processes

325
00:13:41,112 --> 00:13:44,480
effects that had long been overlooked

326
00:13:44,793 --> 00:13:45,460
in other words

327
00:13:45,752 --> 00:13:47,760
when we studied quantum mechanics before

328
00:13:47,832 --> 00:13:52,039
we always assumed measurement was instantaneous and entanglement formed instantly

329
00:13:52,192 --> 00:13:54,952
but once experimental precision entered the attosecond range

330
00:13:54,952 --> 00:13:57,120
these assumptions started showing cracks

331
00:13:57,832 --> 00:14:00,120
232 attoseconds is the first crack

332
00:14:00,832 --> 00:14:03,832
the significance of this crack is not how wide it is

333
00:14:03,832 --> 00:14:06,439
but that it proves cracks exist

334
00:14:06,673 --> 00:14:07,419
once there's a first

335
00:14:07,712 --> 00:14:08,880
there will be a second

336
00:14:09,377 --> 00:14:11,984
there's a deeper question worth thinking about

337
00:14:12,377 --> 00:14:15,383
we all know the speed of light is the universe's speed limit

338
00:14:15,777 --> 00:14:18,184
no information can travel faster than light

339
00:14:18,857 --> 00:14:20,143
but have you ever wondered

340
00:14:20,176 --> 00:14:21,804
why does the universe set this limit

341
00:14:22,737 --> 00:14:24,864
in a continuous infinite universe

342
00:14:24,976 --> 00:14:27,464
a speed limit is a strange thing to have

343
00:14:27,897 --> 00:14:30,095
why exactly three hundred thousand kilometers per second

344
00:14:30,096 --> 00:14:30,724
no more no less

345
00:14:31,737 --> 00:14:34,503
but if the universe is a rendering system with a frame rate

346
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the speed of light limit becomes very natural

347
00:14:37,537 --> 00:14:39,944
any simulation has a bandwidth limit

348
00:14:40,257 --> 00:14:42,375
the speed at which information propagates in the system

349
00:14:42,377 --> 00:14:45,023
cannot exceed the system's own processing speed

350
00:14:45,657 --> 00:14:50,503
the speed of light is the maximum data transfer rate of this cosmic computer

351
00:14:50,737 --> 00:14:53,656
it's not that physical law happened to pick this number

352
00:14:53,657 --> 00:14:57,064
it's that the underlying architecture makes it impossible to go faster

353
00:14:57,351 --> 00:14:57,699
of course

354
00:14:57,991 --> 00:14:59,918
I have to be honest with you all

355
00:15:00,152 --> 00:15:03,918
reading 232 attoseconds as evidence of the universe's frame rate

356
00:15:03,991 --> 00:15:05,678
is a reasonable conjecture

357
00:15:05,831 --> 00:15:08,438
but it is not yet a confirmed scientific conclusion

358
00:15:08,752 --> 00:15:12,278
the authors of the paper themselves made no such claim

359
00:15:12,632 --> 00:15:16,879
what they found was a delay in the electron's birth time during entanglement

360
00:15:16,991 --> 00:15:20,038
not a direct measurement of the universe's clock cycle

361
00:15:20,512 --> 00:15:22,798
but this is exactly what's exciting about science

362
00:15:23,111 --> 00:15:24,510
every new measurement

363
00:15:24,512 --> 00:15:26,959
tears open a gap in old understanding

364
00:15:27,311 --> 00:15:28,158
ten years ago

365
00:15:28,272 --> 00:15:30,879
no one thought quantum entanglement could be timed

366
00:15:31,071 --> 00:15:32,151
in 2023

367
00:15:32,152 --> 00:15:36,158
the three pioneers of attosecond laser technology won the Nobel Prize in Physics

368
00:15:36,831 --> 00:15:37,699
in 2024

369
00:15:38,032 --> 00:15:40,191
Chinese scientists used this technology

370
00:15:40,191 --> 00:15:43,798
to capture a 232 attosecond time window

371
00:15:44,124 --> 00:15:44,750
what's next

372
00:15:45,244 --> 00:15:47,490
here's an exciting timeline

373
00:15:47,803 --> 00:15:49,051
in 1987

374
00:15:49,083 --> 00:15:51,691
scientists first observed high harmonics

375
00:15:51,803 --> 00:15:54,530
planting the seeds for the birth of attosecond pulses

376
00:15:54,844 --> 00:15:55,971
in 2001

377
00:15:56,004 --> 00:15:59,571
humans first produced a 250 attosecond light pulse

378
00:15:59,884 --> 00:16:00,750
in 2023

379
00:16:01,043 --> 00:16:03,051
attosecond technology won the Nobel Prize

380
00:16:03,283 --> 00:16:04,362
in 2024

381
00:16:04,364 --> 00:16:07,490
we used it to measure the temporal structure of quantum entanglement

382
00:16:07,803 --> 00:16:10,091
the pace along this path is accelerating

383
00:16:10,283 --> 00:16:11,691
maybe in another twenty years

384
00:16:11,764 --> 00:16:14,370
experimental precision could advance ten more orders of magnitude

385
00:16:14,524 --> 00:16:15,523
maybe one day

386
00:16:15,524 --> 00:16:19,490
we really will directly reach the scale of Planck time in experiments

387
00:16:20,083 --> 00:16:20,711
on that day

388
00:16:21,124 --> 00:16:22,722
whether the universe is a simulation

389
00:16:22,724 --> 00:16:24,571
may no longer be a philosophical question

390
00:16:24,764 --> 00:16:28,691
but a physics question you can answer yes or no

391
00:16:29,235 --> 00:16:30,474
but before that

392
00:16:30,475 --> 00:16:31,922
I'd like to ask you a question

393
00:16:32,315 --> 00:16:35,195
if the universe really is rendered frame by frame

394
00:16:35,195 --> 00:16:37,075
then in the gap between two frames

395
00:16:37,075 --> 00:16:37,662
what is there

396
00:16:38,276 --> 00:16:40,522
the Buddha called that gap Nirvana

397
00:16:40,876 --> 00:16:42,882
physics has not yet given it a name

398
00:16:43,036 --> 00:16:45,035
if you have any thoughts on this question

399
00:16:45,036 --> 00:16:48,035
or if you think this 232 attosecond discovery

400
00:16:48,036 --> 00:16:50,002
has angles I didn't cover

401
00:16:50,036 --> 00:16:51,363
tell me in the comments

402
00:16:51,396 --> 00:16:52,022
I'm Wang Lijie

403
00:16:52,235 --> 00:16:52,941
see you next time