The universe isn't just bigger than you think it is, it's bigger than you can think.

Max is just plain enjoyable to listen to and learn from.

Like listening to Max. A charismatic academic AND with a good haircut... A rare phenomenon!

That long pause and moment of deep silence between them at 13:07 is truly unnerving -- like they've reached the edge of everything and aren't sure what to make of it.

If the past is any indication of what the future holds, it would appear that we are destined to forever underestimate the size of our reality.

This man is so brilliant, I highly respect him. Max Tegmark is a brilliant man.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I love this conversation. Flowing, intelligent and enjoyable. Added to my favourites.

The excitement in this guy face as he speaks and explains things is something !!!!!👍

I really enjoy this entire series because the more questions are asked the further from the truth it seems to be going, which I think is great because it just shows how little we know.

Excellent interview, as always.

Such a great series. Am I smart enough to understand any of it? No. But I appreciate the challenge.

"Reflection is key to unlock celestial mysteries beyond the dark veil." -- Artemis 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨ "Before I start, I must see my end. Destination known, my mind’s journey now begins. Upon my chariot, heart and soul’s fate revealed. In time, all points converge, hope’s strength re-steeled. But to earn final peace at the universe’s endless refrain, We must see all in nothingness... before we start again." 🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨ --Diamond Dragons (series)

What we humans perceive as the observable universe is a very very small amount of what is out there.

A excellent interview! Max is one of my all time favorite Theoretical(?) Physicists! I ress as d , back in the early nineties, that there were understood, mathematical structures, that our multiverse used to ‘spec out’ the values of physics, called ‘Goeshe #s’; I’ve never seen that theory since. Would anyone else ever heard, or even know about theee ‘Goeshe #s’? 🖖✨

The moral of the story is that we're the only friends we have that can get to us in time to save us, so we should try being a little nicer to each other.

Max is amazing, I love the way he explains the things, so down to earth.

Could watch max tegmark all day he’s fascinating

When I first read "Our Mathematical Universe" I threw the book across the room. Then I picked it up, and read it again and again. It's one thing to say our universe is "described" by mathematics, but to state that it "IS a mathematical structure" .. that was a shock. How Tegmark made the leap was just as shocking. I am assuming that he using the premise that ""All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one. Anyway I really am proud that there are physicists like Tegmark, Everett, and yes even Witten who are willing to risk their reputations on what might be dead end theories. But as a plea to all scientists, please leave out the word "infinite" . It is a sign that you have given up.

Great talk !

When max proposed the black hole firewall and no infinity I became astonished. Began thinking of the edge of universe, a wall like structure at the end of our universe. But felt I dissolved to earlier. What will universe bring when we get there is just fascinating to me

Personally I see mathematics as a language. It's a medium for expressing ideas and relationships very precisely. So to me a 'physical law' expressed mathematically is just a very precise description of physical relationships and behaviour. So I'm not at all surprised that mathematics is so good at describing physics. Since mathematics is a very precise, rigorous and consistent language all that means is that the behaviour of physical systems is very consistent. Well, I hope the universe behaves consistently. If it doesn't we're in big trouble. That doesn't mean mathematics defines that behaviour though. The behaviour comes first. The problem is of course we don't know why we see this particular behaviour, or why the particles and constants in physics are the way they are. Maybe maths is fundamental, but I don't think that logically follows from mathematics being good at describing the universe.

I'm not sure what is the strangest thought: That the universe might be infinite, or that it might be finite. Both ideas seem to lead to absurdities.

Damn, Max really show us in this video you can be high as fuck and still give a pretty cool interview

It's only 1 square foot but everything in it is infinitely ♾️ small. 😶

Max is 56 years old so good genetics indeed.

Everything has to exist being supported by something other than itself. Therefore there cant be “ Nothing “ beyond the universe because the universe cannot support itself suspended by “nothing “. There has to be another dimension beyond the universe that is not of the universe or of what we call reality to support the reality of that we live in. Our universe is a bottle that has to be spun.

this is part of my everyday reflexions...😎🥶💫⚛

Its depends, best to think we are all an individual universe moving around one world. Job done

soo good thx

I’ve been searching for a globe like Max is using for years and can’t find one anywhere. I find it hard to imagine anyone that loves cosmology not wanting one.

Good stuff for Sci-Fi movies!!!

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence in that little chat

If a thought experiment could group beliefs or worldviews as tribes. Could its main characteristics be observed as expressions from a causal fixed body of time? Whereby the habits is a signature of working from a particular space time. But it might also be easier to say, they have mastered a stable algorithm. I would think it could cause one to be more attentive to the anomalies in regular time. Maybe...not sure.

That pause at 13:05.

Max, great scientist and philosopher.

The universe must be infinite. Only logical answer, though inconceivable. If not, it must be contained, so, how deep is the container, and what's after that?

Love this guy. Awesome mind.

Max Tegmark quotes many of the same things in the book by Päs, Heinrich. 2023. The One (Basic Books) Excellent read!

…and “before you know it”, the strange, quantum-reality branches recombine - and the whole world slips into madness… Well, when the base pointers are mixed up, one gets very strange “description space” (I just invented that term to counter Hilbert spaces and multidimensional manifolds and a bunch more). Don’t get me wrong: This is old material, and I like Max Tegmark (who’s, apparently, in the same QM camp Sean Carroll is - namely “Many Worlds”), but… 🙄 I guess big boys also have idols…

I wonder why i suck so bad at math, yet love science?

No human can remotely imagine the size of our own galaxy much less the whole enchilada

are the areas beyond observable universe / cosmos no longer causally connected?

If John Stamos was a space expert.

Tegmark seems like he’s got ants in his pants throughout this interview

So what happens when the earth is traveling through a ripple or wave in space? Can we get compressed and stretched since we exist in space? Would we be able to tell? Or would it not be noticed because everything would be undergoing the same effects and even our observations of far away things are extrapolated from what can be seen but what we see is as old as the light year distance.... so we can't see the ripples somehow because it would have already been a long time ago, or they're invisible? Idk

Very well spoken. I would argue math is only a way we have found to interpret the universe. It allows us to abstractly analyze the universe and understand things that would be difficult to understand otherwise.

I think the mathematical universe hypothesis is a nice idea, but it limits itself to regularities. The regularities in our observable universe might be just due to the anthropic principle.

is the universe /.cosmos beyond what can be seen in some way different than observable universe / cosmos?

7:02 Do you guys see how the universe is a series of dishes or bowls? See the impacts in space time? Empty black space is a liquid. It might not contain any atoms but it still has a value and a mode. It will act in a certain way.

I think, in a very simple language, space refers to vacuum. So when the expression, "space is expanding" is used, I wonder, "Expanding to where?" When something expands, it displaces something or occupies a space that was previously unoccupied. So what is the expanding space displacing or what was the state of the unoccupied condition (or let me say "space" to which space is expanding? I think it is accurate to say the universe (the totality of matter and energy) is expanding rather than saying space is expanding. Space is an infinity therefore it is not possible for it to expand.

Great talk. Can somebody expain - how can the universe be infinite if it was created at the big bang. At which time it was presumably finite. How big was the universe when it became infinite? How can anything that was once finite ever be infinite? Sorry if this is a dumb question but I would love an answer.

i just watched max on lex channel is this an old recording ? max looks so young in this interview

Bring your Dad to work day for Max's 4 year old; "Hi, I'm a Firefighter and I put out fires." "Hi, I'm a Police Officer and I arrest bad people." "Hi, I'm a Theoretical Physicist and we live in a multiverse." Kids, "Is it snack time yet?"

what i get stuck in is: if the universe has a shape, even a shape we cant comprehend, what is the place that the shape is existing on?

Yes. Space must go on forever...above and beyond the Cosmos.

is space itself static or does it move ?

There's something out there beyond what human can think. If there other universes then that implies divison so what's inbetween and what are they all contained in.

1. What was the function of the protein that was first coded by RNA or DNA from which a selection could be made? 2. If the fewest genes that a cell can have to sustain life is around 400 but it has to have additional DNA to have reproductive function how can RNA or DNA have primacy ? 3. If a flatworm can be multiploidy and maintain function and morphology how does DNA have primacy? 4. How is it that a cockroach and rats can reproduce, after nuclear radiation,with mutations such that they become multi ploidy in order to maintain morphology and function and RNA or DNA have primacy or a selective function? 5. Why are a dog and a dingo or completely different genetic plants nearly identical? To what are they “converging “? 6. There can be any number of ways that a thing in nature can be the shape of a sphere but how many possible ways are there that a thing in nature can be the shape of a Mandelbrot set? Why is the brain a Mandelbrot set? How is a Mandelbrot set selected for from an infinite number of fractal patterns?

Why do trailer tires require much higher PSI than the car tires?

How round is a circle?

OMG, Max, you're totally rocking that gangster look! 🤘😁

Perhaps reality is just infinite Tegmark's picking up example universe's in response to an interview question. This is why he has that signature smile, he knows that he is ultimate reality. At the Planck length he no longer has the ball because he is fundamental .

two thing can not be in one space at same time ?

I had first thought that Max Tegmark was totally out of his mind, but I am now changing my own mind, and am even surprised he didn’t double down on his last statement by highlighting this example: since Kantor first ventured into these treacherous waters, we now know that in mathematics there are different types of infinities and that there are infinities beyond infinities. Aleph-0, Aleph-1, Aleph-2,…, Aleph-Aleph-0, ad infinitum and beyond. At the same time, physicists are increasingly saying that the ultimate stuff that reality is made of is « information », aka math. So the next question must be: where does rationality, and thus math, come from? - remembering that « rational » comes from Latin « ratio » meaning calculation. Now that’s a question!! And what does it mean that we are able to have access to it? This echoes Einstein’s (was it he?) « What I find most incomprehensible is that reality is comprehensible ». That wonder-statement is perhaps the most baffling one I’ve ever heard. Thanks for this interview: I’d have liked to hear Max explain his views a bit more deeply.

Consider this: matter is a mental construct. Therefore, the only limit to the universe is determined by thought. As our thought expands, so does the universe.

So! When he really wants to understand all of reality his first question is "how big is it?" That is just so precious! 🤣

The cosmos are endless because we are ALL conscious energy that is connected to the cosmos which means if our consciousness is eternal than so is the cosmos

5:26 Wanna know how big the universe likely is? 1. You know when we backup off the Milky Way and we see that we are but one squiggle of space in a river of flowing galaxies that curve and head down a drain towards the great attractor? Well, back off the camera as far as the eye can see. You’ll likely see a bubble. Something like a 3 dimensional race track. A bubble expanding and contracting like a vibration. We are so small it probably looks like it’s expanding. Those could be minor fluctuations. 😂❤

Perhaps consciousness mirrors the universe and beyond, and maybe we should look inside for the answer.

Close your eyes, Go inside. Wittness your counsiousness. Where does it end? You are endless, same as existens it self😊

I'd love to meet someone from Shmearth

When we say "Reality, all there is", size is meaningless. Where there is one, thus incomparability, dimensionlessness must be admitted. Relative size cannot be characteristic of all.

Nobody has the courage to simply say "I don't know!" So we are inundated with infinite conjecture all backed up by reference to their God of Physics, Mr E=anything I make up under his name.

If the universe is infinite, then at what finite point in time since the big bang did it become infinite?

The problem here is you can’t understand how big it is because size is a reference. Infinity cannot be comprehended by the human mind, which is a finite organic organism.

Imagination - Process of Pure Creation The process of creation starts with thought - an idea, conception, visualization. Everything you see was once someone's idea. Nothing exists in your world that did not first exist as pure thought. This is true of the universe as well. Thought is the first level of creation. Next comes the word. Everything you say is a thought expressed. It is creative and sends forth creative energy into the universe. Words are more dynamic (thus, some might say more creative) than thought, because words are a different level of vibration from thought. They disrupt (change, alter, affect) the universe with greater impact. Words are the second level of creation. Next comes action. Actions are words moving. Words are thoughts expressed. Thoughts are ideas formed. Ideas are energies come together. Energies are forces released. Forces are elements existent. Elements are particles of God, portions of ALL, the stuff of everything. The beginning is God. The end is action. Action is God creating - or God experienced. Hang on. There's one thing more I have to tell you. You are always seeing what by your terms you would define as the "past," even when you are looking at what is right in front of you. I am? It is impossible to see The Present. The Present "happens," then turns into a burst of light, formed by energy dispersing, and that light reaches your receptors, your eyes, and it takes time for it to do that. All the while the light is reaching you, life is going on, moving forward. The next event is happening while the light from the last event is reaching you. The energy burst reaches your eyes, your receptors send that signal to your brain, which interprets the data and tells you what you are seeing. Yet that is not what is now in front of you at all. It is what you think you are seeing. That is, you are thinking about what you have seen, telling yourself what it is, and deciding what you are going to call it, while what is happening "now" is preceding your process, and awaiting it. To put this simply, I am always one step ahead of you. My God, this is unbelievable. Now listen. The more distance you place between your Self and the physical location of any event, the further into the "past" that event recedes. Place yourself a few light-years back, and what you are looking at happened very, very long ago, indeed. Yet it did not happen "long ago." It is merely physical distance which has created the illusion of "time," and allowed you to experience your Self as being both "here, now" all the while you are being "there, then"! One day you will see that what you call time and space are the same thing. Then you will see that everything is happening right here, right now. This is....this is....wild. I mean, I don't know what to make of all this. When you understand what I have told you, you will understand that nothing you see is real. You are seeing the image of what was once an event, yet even that image, that energy burst, is something you are interpreting. Your personal interpretation of that image is called your image-ination. And you can use your imagination to create anything. Because - and here is the greatest secret of all - your image-ination works both ways. Please? You not only interpret energy, you create it. Imagination is a function of your mind, which is one-third of your three-part being. In your mind you image something, and it begins to take physical form. The longer you image it (and the more OF you who image it), the more physical that form becomes, until the increasing energy you have given it literally bursts into light, flashing an image of itself into what you call your reality. You then "see" the image, and once again decide what it is. Thus, the cycle continues. This is what I have called The Process. This is what YOU ARE. You ARE this Process. This is what I have meant when I have said, you are both the Creator and the Created. I have now brought it all together for you. We are concluding this dialogue, and I have explained to you the mechanics of the universe, the secret of all life. Okay. Now as energy coalesced, it becomes, as I said, very concentrated. But the further one moves from the point of this concentration, the more dissipated the energy becomes. The "air becomes thinner." The aura fades. The energy never completely disappears, because it cannot. It is the stuff of which everything is made. It's All There Is. Yet it can become very, very thin, very subtle - almost "not there." Then, in another place (read that, another part of Itself) it can again coalesce, once more "clumping together" to form what you call matter, and what "looks like" a discreet unit. Now the two units appear separate from each other, and in truth there is no separation at all. This is, in very, very simple and elementary terms, the explanation behind the whole physical universe. Wow. But can it be true? How do I know I haven't just made this all up? Your scientists are already discovering that the building blocks of all of life are the same. They brought back rocks from the moon and found the same stuff they find in trees. They take apart a tree and find the same stuff they find in you. I tell you this: We are all the same stuff. (I and the Father are One Energy) We are the same energy, coalesced, compressed in different ways to create different forms and different matter. Nothing "matters" in and of itself. That is, nothing can become matter all by itself. Jesus said, "Without the Father, I am nothing." The Father of all is pure thought. This is the energy of life. This is what you have chosen to call Absolute Love. This is the God and the Goddess, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. It is the All-in-All, the Unmoved Mover, the Prime Source. It is that which you have sought to understand from the beginning of time. The Great Mystery, the Endless Enigma, the Eternal Truth. There is only One of Us, and so, it is THAT WHICH YOU ARE.

To describe the fundamental structure of the universe as only mathematics seems close to the idea that we are a simulation. However if we are not a simulation, mathematics doesn't offer an explanation to consciousness.

The size of the cosmos just blows the he'll out of my mind.......Years ago I figured our galaxy was huge beyond belief and maybe there were a few more out there, but now that we have the James Webb telescope operating it has opened our eyes and mind to the trillions of galaxies that exist in this universe..........I think about it everyday now, unlike my wife that lives in her world of shopping malls and soap operas and doesn't care about the cosmos..........

He has the Answers

Space is death and disease wrapped in darkness and silence. That is a great summary imho.

How come I always have to live in the universe where I never win the lottery?

I have this question, is there an another universe which is closest to ours, and is expanding exponentially like ours? if it is so, is it possible that some of those other galaxies would encounter our outer galaxies? Thank you.

Before you can tell the age of the universe you have to change your paradigm of what the living things are as stars and galaxies live and die.

The conundrums. I think many of us have asked that 4 year old' s question and tried to conceptualize the conundrums.

Did you know that there is no inherent illumination or luminosity in photons? “Light,” as such, cannot be found there. Photons are, perhaps, ‘packets’ of energy which have the properties of both spread-out waves and localized particles. Photons only take on the appearance of being luminous as they arise within consciousness, in our mind’s eye. It may be that photons are spread-out energy potentials that fill the immensity of space, and only take on the appearance of being a localized discrete particle of “light” when we become aware of them in consciousness, in this actualized awareness we call mind. Thus, you are the light of the kosmos. This “light” is only arising in us. The world outside of a mind is perfectly ‘dark,’ or empty, unactualized in any way. Of course, what else could it be? What would perceive it as illuminated, or as any “thing”? All of our thoughts are the activity of consciousness, modulations of that consciousness, incarnations within that pure consciousness, rays shining from inside that consciousness. We are agents of that consciousness, emerging from within that consciousness. All there is to experience is the knowing of it, and that knowing is God’s own Self in us, living in us, the source of our life, the energy of consciousness itself. We could say that God lives in us, since consciousness seems to have become localized in this particular body-mind. Or we could say that we live in God, since all that we perceive arises in that consciousness, including our body-mind. Thus, Jesus was right to say, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10-11, 20). Both are true, and they are true of us as well. We are arising within God, and God is arising within us as well. Sometimes this is called “mutual indwelling,” the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, also called perichoresis or co-inherence in Christian terminology. God is the field of consciousness in which all knowing occurs, in which all thoughts and perceptions and feelings and sensations arise, like waves in the ocean. Our body-mind and its thoughts are like localizations within that consciousness, temporary manifestations of that Ultimate Reality, expressions of that consciousness, that being, that One. God becomes veiled and hidden from our awareness when the thoughts that arise in and from consciousness believe they are something separate and discrete from the consciousness in which they are arising. The thoughts form a separate entity, a dualistic subjective ego, a separate self identity, an independent being, an “Adam/Eve,” which thinks it is apart from infinite nondual divine consciousness and Ultimate Reality. This seems to be the “Fall,” the beginning of duality and separateness and alienation from God’s Presence. But how could thoughts be separate from the consciousness in which they have arisen? They can’t, but that is exactly what our thoughts and our self-identification with them think they are. It is a kind of psychological illusion. The thoughts take on their own separate identity apart from pure nondual consciousness, forming a self, a person, an entity, seemingly cut off from its own source and essence. Once we look at it like this, it seems impossible, and that is because it is. Our ‘self’ is never actually separate from the source in which it arises, thoughts are never separate from the consciousness in which they emerge, the wave is not separate from the ocean. The thoughts that make up our ‘self’ are just finite actualizations or relative localizations of the infinite potential of absolute consciousness, or Divine Being, or Ultimate Reality. In Christian symbolism we call this the incarnation of God. In Buddhism it is the Dharmakaya that incarnates as the Nirmanakaya Buddha. In Hinduism it is Brahman that manifests itself as each Atman. God becomes incarnate in reality, in the flesh, embodied, in us and all things. There is no time, no space, nowhere we can go, nowhere we can be, that will be outside of this Presence of God, outside of this consciousness, beyond the borders of God, or the Ultimate Reality. God is always present, and is Presence itself, awareness itself, consciousness itself, the “spirit of life” within us, from which we derive all being, all knowing, all our substance, every thought, every sensation. It all arises in God. This is perhaps why, in order to pierce the veil and know God directly, contemplative practices such as meditation help train us to transcend thought, to go back to the source of thought itself, beyond all thoughts of self, to recognize that from which it all arises, this pure open vastness of nondual unitive at-one consciousness. Do you see why we cannot “think” God? Nothing that arises in consciousness as a thought will be that consciousness in which it is arising. No relative finite manifestation in consciousness can be the absolute pure infinite consciousness, even though every manifestation or relativization or actualization of that consciousness is made up of nothing other than that consciousness. God is Present even while we are trying to comprehend God, even in the midst of that very comprehension. God is what makes that attempt at comprehension even possible. God is the very field in which we are trying to know God. When we let go of the trying, the conceptualization, surrendering the thoughts that are trying to know themselves, and rest in the pure still silent open awareness of being, that is when the realization of God may dawn on us, as us.

The intro blur is way too short

So the esoteric 'sacred geometry' is real in a sense ^^

Why is light so slow, that it takes so long to get from there to here?

There's no reason to suppose in an infinite universe that nature hasn't tried every type of maths as a framework for a reality. I quite like the idea of evolutionary universes, each of which tries a particular framework of mathematics with an evolutionary tableau of natural 'constants', each in a dance between stability and dynamism

Its big, thats for sure.

I'll c the space when I'm the dust from my remains and the light shines upon them and my atoms flee my body and r devoured by the place they came from. Then I'll be renewed again as a spirit for then and now

If space is truly infinite than it would be impossible that we are alone.

The Earth isn’t even the equivalent of a grain of sand on the seashore,as opposed to the rest of the Universe. It’s mind boggling,to say the least.

Max has a similar sounding accent to Christopher Lambert from Highlander.

There’s lots of us that have been in the multi-verse. With a discovery of quantum entanglement the word universe does not apply anymore. It’s multi-verse.

space is being constructed at every point in it

Well, You better ask the Perspective-Principle, compare to What ?

I remember being 5 trying to comprehend the Universe. It scared me.

As usual on KZfaq, there’s Dunning-Kruger effect in some of these comments. There is no way Tegmark could develop these ideas in a 14-minute video. Before criticizing them, may I recommend Tegmark’s book, The Mathematical Universe? I was a skeptic when I started it, but finished it convinced: Our universe is probably math.