Space And Time Might Just Be An Illusion, So Don't Worry Too Much About Anything Just Enjoy Yourself

It looks like The Wachowski Bros were right, reality is just an illusion. There's no word yet on whether we're going to be saved by a dude called Neo though. That's the subject of this PBS video by Gabe Perez-Giz, who looks at the idea of spacetime and WTF it all means.

It turns out your concept of what spacetime is might be completely wrong, if you even have a concept of what it is. Because, although time may appear pretty linear to you, to another observer, say a particle, time and space are doing all kinds of crazy sh*t. In fact, the past, present, and future aren't really separate at all, it's just they appear like that to us.

This is the mind-boggling world of contemporary science, which seems to get increasingly more mind-boggling with each passing year, as different, and seemingly more mind-melting, discoveries are made by experts and academics. For instance, the discovery earlier this year of something called the amplituhedron a "mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions."

What does that even mean? Well Quanta magazine, who know about this kind of thing, describe it thus:

The new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.

Confused? You should be. But it does make you wonder what kinds of insane things scientists will be discovering 50 years from now.