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Is There a Creator? |
![]() One the most sought after particle in all of physics, the Higgs Boson ![]() An electron beam and transmits it through a piece of graphite ![]() Our creator may actually be a cosmic computer coder ![]() Every computer-generated image, no matter how realistic |
But what if he's wrong? Or, worse, what if there is no math that unifies the universe? Well, that wouldn't trouble this man, because he believes that the creator is not out there in the cosmos. Abraham, Moses, native American shamans, almost all religious leaders and spiritual guides have attested that they were struck by vivid and thunderous messages from the creator himself. For thousands of years, billions of humans have built their lives around the cherished idea that a creator is out there looking down on them, caring for them, a God who is both creator and protector. Dr. Persinger's God helmet forces us to consider a radical reimagining of human experience. God may not have created us. He may not be protecting us. God may simply be in our minds. But one scientist has an even more radical take on the creator, one that flips Dr. Persinger's theory on its head. This time, it's God that's real and we that are imaginary. Our creator may actually be a cosmic computer coder, and we might be nothing more than a simulation. The search for God continues. Will we find him hidden in the deepest recesses of our brain? Or can we uncover the creator in a mathematical theory? Let's take a closer look at perhaps the strangest possibility of all. We'll start here. Will Wright is a creator of one universe, at least. In the blockbuster hit video game "The Sims," this software genius created a world filled with digital people not too different from you and me. | Rich Terrile has helped design missions to Mars, discovered four new moons around Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, and taken pictures of a distant solar system. He has a logical mind and a love for technology. Now he's bringing that logic to a bigger question, who or what is the creator? For a god-centered universe, one has to think, well, first, what are the requirements for God? God is an interdimensional being connected with everything in the universe, a creator responsible for the universe, and, in some way, can change the laws of physics if he wanted to. We're on the brink of creating worlds inside the computers, filling them with sentient beings, and becoming their gods. But this is not where Rich Terrile's quest for the creator ends. The next step is truly mind-bending. He believes that if science shows God can exist, than maybe he already does. Maybe we are the Sims and our creator is sitting at the controls of a supercomputer. The rise of the machines is close at hand. Already, computers are taking over many of the day-to-day functions in our world. Are they already in charge? Is our creator some kind of cosmic computer genius? Rich Terrile thinks we might be living in some kind of giant simulation, that our creator might be using a supercomputer with godlike powers. And he thinks he's found evidence for it in nature. There is one surefire way to tell if you're looking at a computer simulation. |
List with pictures of the scientists, in order of their appearance in Through the Wormhole Is There a Creator? documentary, who share us their knowledges: |
![]() Garrett Lisi (theoretical physicist) |
![]() Andy Albrecht (cosmologist) |
![]() John Polkinghorne (physicist) |
![]() Alan Guth (cosmologist) |
![]() Lee Smolin (physicist) |
![]() Michael Persinger (neuroscientist) |
![]() Rich Terrile (Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California) |
But are there any signs the universe is actually being computed? In the physics lab at Caltech, an experiment that's now almost 100 years old offers a vital clue. We're in a small room at the physics lab at Caltech, looking at an experiment that was originally done in 1928. This experiment takes an electron beam and transmits it through a piece of graphite. And what we're looking at is the electrons kind of going through the graphite and forming this kind of diffuse blob. In a playstation 3, an example of that is "Simcity." It's an enormous city. I can navigate my way through every bit of it because the playstation, the video game, gives me the frame that I need when I'm looking there. If I look somewhere else, it'll create that frame. Well, oddly enough, the universe behaves that way in reality. The universe gives you what you're looking at when you're looking at it. When you're not looking at it, it's not necessarily there. Our world is pixilated and only assumes definite form when observed, the very same way our computer simulations behave. Rich Terrile has tried to work out the probability that we might be living in a simulation to quantify the possibility that there is a God. Our world bears all the hallmarks of one that is smiulated. And Rich's logic continues. Who would be more likely to simulate humans than humans from the future. Our descendants. God-like beings with the power to create their own universes. It's a very radical idea of the Creator. But for Rich, it's not without spirituality. One can ask, "what are you really saying?" Are you saying the world was a simulation and we're just entities in some Playstation 12 game, or something like that. I'm not saying that, I actually, uh think this is a very, very wonderful phenonom I take great solice in this. It shows that somewhere along the line we have evloved from nothing into self-awareness. And that self-awareness has reached the stage now where we, our future selves have become Gods. This is a wonderful. Uh, to me a very, very spirtual thing And that's where my spirtuality comes from. in seeing things like that. To me that's a religion. It's been said that God fills in the cracks in our knowledge. Some see these cracks getting smaller. We see that constantly in physics that we start out with something that looks complex and as we look at it's parts it's parts are simplier. Now, if you imagine some sort of Creator, that assumes that there's more complicated than the thing that got created. So to me that's a step backwards in explaining a philosophically satisfying model. For others the expansion of scientific knowledge will never fill in all the cracks. There always will be room for faith. Be it in a Creator with our descendant or in the Gods of our ancestors. I think that the questions that arise from science they give us some sort of notion that Jesus is a God. But they leave many other questions about God unresolved. And we also, I think are bound to recognize that we finite beings will never totally understand God The human instinct that drives our scientific curiosity won't stop us from searching for answers. Perhaps one day soon, science will provide us with to look up and out through the cosmic pane of glass that separates us from the true Creator of our World. If there is one?
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