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When we look at the universe around us, there is a certain elegance to what we find. Planets orbit stars. Stars orbit within galaxies. Galaxies make up great structures on the cosmic web. On this grand scale, the entire cosmos boils down to a few simple questions. Einstein himself once said that he had deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple. Yet, as soon as you consider special relativity or quantum mechanics, you realize Einstein was clearly misguided. At these levels of physics, the universe is not elegant or simple, but truly bizarre. Our day-to-day experience gives
us no intuition that we can apply to the quantum world. And our very perception of time itself is shown to be shoddy. So, what's really happening? Am I wrong about the simplicity of the universe? Or do we simply not understand the rules that make it all make sense? Over the years, I've learned a lot about the universe as I've made these videos. And I think I've stumbled upon a model that might be the answer. The strangeness of special relativity or the weirdness of quantum reality, our universe's speed limit, the problem of missing antimatter, the list goes on. And I think I can explain it all. This is a theory of everything or at least the foundation for one. And by the end of this video, your understanding of the
universe will be changed forever. I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching Astramm. Join me in this final video on my theory of everything as I offer a model that brings simplicity to all the confusion. Here I will discuss how I think spacetime works and I hope by the end of it you'll be inclined to agree with me. A theory of everything is the holy grail of physics and something we've not yet managed. It turns out that marrying the large scale universe mechanics with the quantum world is somewhat difficult. Yet here's an intriguing solution. This model has been developed by my brother John who is one of the main script writers here on Astramm. And so what this video is not going to be is a breakdown of the Einsteinian model of
special relativity. Instead, we're going to take the observations of special relativity and are going to come up with a new way of accounting for them. The one that does so simply while also answering a lot of the other mysteries that are plaguing science at the moment. Special relativity simple. Can such a thing be? I'll let you judge for yourself. Though I warn you now, we're going to be playing a little 4D chess with it. As a note, this is not the first part in my theory of everything series. If you haven't already, I'd recommend you take a look at my other videos on the topic, which you can check out here. I'd particularly recommend the one that covers some of the weird
phenomena of special relativity that I'll be trying to account for here as it does a good job of laying the groundwork. And yes, this theory does explain the barn pole thought experiment. All right, enough disclaimers. It's on to the theory. This theory started with an observation, one that longtime subscribers of the channel will recognize. Isn't it strange that the faster things go in space, the slower they go in time? The most concrete example of this is the Hellele Keating experiment where two scientists, Aelle and Keating, a twist I know, took atomic clocks on commercial airplanes and flew them around the world. They also left another set of
clocks at home. And when they returned, they compared the times on all the clocks. Fascinatingly, the clocks that traveled were reading an earlier time. They had ticked slower than the stationary clocks. This result is surprising, assuming you haven't already heard of special relativity, but it is actually a well-known and planned around phenomenon in the world we live in. Satellites have to have their internal clocks adjusted with this in mind, as due to their speed of travel along with the time warping effects of not being as much in Earth's gravity. Well, their times and ours would otherwise not be in
sync. Instinct tells us that time should flow the same for everybody. My now is the same as your now. But special relativity tells us that this is not the case. Even the concept of events happening in a particular order is up for debate. As just because I see two events happening in the same moment doesn't mean that you see things the same way. So why does this occur? The conventional wisdom is that this is because light must always go at the same speed in a vacuum. 299,792,458 m/s, no matter what your frame of reference is. Standing on a planet looking at the sun, that light is traveling towards you at 299,792,458 m/s. on a rocket ship flying towards the sun. That light is still traveling towards you at 299,792,458
m/s unaffected by your speed. Flying on a rocket ship going the opposite way. Once again, 299,792,458 m/s. This means that if you want to keep the speed of light consistent, the rest of time and space has to bend over backwards to accommodate quite literally stretching and contracting to make sure the numbers always add up. But why does light need to go at that speed? And why does the universe accommodate? Different people have different answers, but it seems that no one really knows. It's just what we observe to be the case. And scientists have done numerous experiments to prove that the universe really does work that way. But something definitely seemed odd about this to my brother.
Here's another oddity. We talked about how the faster you go, the slower you go. But this has an interesting parallel. You may have heard that the universe is expanding. Everything is heading away from us in all directions. You have also likely heard, if you're the kind of person who would click on a video about a new theory of everything, that things travel away from us faster the further from us they are. Objects at the edge of the observable universe are traveling away from us so quickly, they are approaching the speed of light. Objects beyond the observable universe are traveling away from us even faster than that. so fast the light from them is never going to get to us at all. But
did you know that at those extreme locations, time also seemingly tick slower for those objects? As in, if we got the James Webb Space Telescope and super enhanced its resolution and somehow were able to see a man waving at us on a distant planet out at the edge of the universe, we'd see him moving really slowly. This might make him a little difficult to communicate with, even if somehow you could trade messages with him instantly. Thankfully, pictures speak a thousand words and can showcase what a person is about. A fact that is well understood by Displate, the sponsor of today's video. With the right display metal poster, I might tell our distant alien instantly about my love of
space with this Pillars of Creation poster. But you could also demonstrate your love of gaming, sports, or pop culture. This plate has a collection of over two million designs available made by independent artists and big official licenses such as Star Wars, Marvel, One Piece, and more. And you might not be able to show The Alien because of the time dilation, but putting up and swapping out posters is really fast and easy. They've even launched a new product, their Shards Limited Drop. These smaller collectible display plates have the same premium quality as classic disc plates but come in a variety of different rarity levels and finishes and even their own licenses. Dn D, Cyberpunk, Harry Potter and more.
Perfect for someone trying to build up a wall worthy collection. So whether it's a great gift for another or just for you, why not scan my QR code or follow my link in the description below. Astramm has a display collection you can check out. And people who use the code Astramm at checkout can get 22% off one display plate, 27% off two, or 33% off three when you purchase most display plates. Now, back to time dilation. Scientists discovered that this was the case back in 2023, not with distant men, but with quazars. They looked at 190 of them, some out at extreme distances, some much closer to home. They compared the flickers in each and found that the
distant quaars were flickering five times slower than they should have been. Time was ticking more slowly for them. Of course, time wasn't actually ticking slower for those quazars. If you were by them, they'd be ticking at a normal rate. Is more a trick of the light, so to speak, caused by the expansion of the universe. If you imagine the stream of photons released from those quazars 1 billion years after the big bang to be like a film reel, as that reel travels through space towards us, the universe they are traveling through is expanding. This has the effect of stretching the wavelengths of those photons, causing red shift, another phenomenon you've likely heard of, effectively pulling at
both ends of the film reel. By the time it arrives at us and starts playing, the reel is five times longer than it used to be and takes five times longer to play at a normal speed. The time interval between the two consecutive events, the flickers of Aquazar is stretched. But there's an interesting parallel there. Once again, we have objects that are traveling faster, seemingly experiencing slower time to us. And while the expansion of the universe is a good explanation for how distant pulsars are seemingly moving slower, the same explanation does not work on the rapidly moving atomic clocks. There's not enough space between us and them for the expansion of the universe to have that much effect.
And if you'll forgive me for belaboring this point, there is something a little torturous in our explanation for the expansion of the universe too because scientists have had to invent a something that is the force that is driving the expansion. They labeled that something dark energy because it is so hard to see. We have only detected it based on the fact that we see the universe expanding. But we aren't exactly clear on what dark energy is. There is considerable debate in the scientific community about dark energy, whether it's getting stronger, weaker, or remaining the same strength over time. But whatever the case, any explanations that rely on this energy are a little uncomfortable as they all
rely on an everinccreasing amount of dark energy to fill the gaps created by the universal expansion. And while some scientists talk of vacuum energy, an energy inherent in every patch of the universe itself as an explanation, it feels a little contradictory to how things normally work, that more and more energy can just spring out of literally nowhere. It certainly defies our intuition. Energy doesn't normally do that, even if there are explanations for why it does so. In this case, if there was an explanation that didn't need dark energy, that would be very convenient. If there was an explanation that gave the same reason for the slower time on the moving clocks as it did on the
moving pulsars, that would be more elegant. If there was an explanation for why light always seemed to move at the same speed no matter the viewpoint, that might help my brain stop hurting so much when I think about it. And that's the model that my brother believes he has made. So let's see if he's right. The first key to understanding my brother's model is understanding that time and space are the same thing. This is hardly revolutionary. Einstein and Manovski were talking about the idea of spacetime back in the first decade of the 1900s. But seeing as we're much more comfortable with a 3D universe than a 4D one, let's just go over what spacetime means. A 1D universe is one where there
is only one axis of direction. Let's say forwards and backwards. A 2D universe is one where we gain an additional axis of direction. Let's say up and down. Note this axis is perpendicular to the first axis. A 3D universe is one where we gain an additional axis on top of that. Now we have left and right and this universe looks the same as the one we live in. Once again, this new axis is perpendicular to the dimensions we already have. Spacetime is the idea that we live in a 4D universe where time is another axis of direction to add to the space directions. Ideally, it should be perpendicular to the other three axes, which makes it a little difficult to draw or even imagine with our 3D brains. But the idea is that objects in our
universe are not static, but are moving in the direction of time even as they move or stay still within 3D space. And of course, this is where all the relativity bits come in, as objects don't have to travel the same rate through time. But how can you draw this? Well, my brother found out it's surprisingly easy and can even be done using just two dimensions. But we need to make a few assumptions first. First, we need to imagine that at the beginning of the universe, everything occupied a single point in our four dimensions. And then that everything expanded outward from that point in all directions. If only we had some kind of already existing idea for this, some kind of big
explosion or a big bang. It's pretty controversial, I know. However, crucially, this is not just a 3D expansion, but a 4D one, which means the explosion is happening into time as well as into space. Speaking of time, what direction is time in this space? What direction is left and right, up and down? Well, technically speaking, there isn't a set time direction any more than there's a set universal forward direction in the 3D world. Forward here is simply the direction you are facing. Turn 90° and there's a new forward. And the same can be said about time, too. Time is simply the direction you are facing. All other directions are space. That's the second assumption, and we'll explore it later.
The third assumption is more of a realization really because time is a direction. We only experience the passage of time by moving in that direction. We can see the universe thanks to photons moving out across space from various objects to our eyeballs. And the exact photons that we intercept are dependent on the exact combinations of time and space we travel through. The photons hitting me here are different to the photons that would be hitting me if I were to take a step to the left. The photons that are hitting me now are different to the ones that hit me a second ago or the ones that will hit me a second from now. For every space on the 4D map of the universe, there are a different array of photons
that arrive at that exact point in space and time. And those photons and the forces and energies imparted by other particles traveling to us are really the only way we can experience the universe or the passage of time. If we draw out the entirety of the universe and all its history into this space, which we need to as a 4D space contains all the events that happen across all of time, the only way we can experience it is by moving our finger along one of these arrows and seeing what photons we bump into one after another. In some way, this is what each of us is doing. Speaking of photons, there is one last assumption to add before we can understand this space properly. And it goes like this. Light
does not have a speed limit. It travels instantly in its frame of view. It just looks like it has a speed limit from other people's point of view. Now, this idea of my brothers is a controversial one. What is he thinking? Well, let's explore. Normally, it's conventional in 4D graphs to draw light as moving at a 45° angle. This reflects the fact that as light travels through space, it also travels through time. And people drawing this out usually assign both those distances to be the same value on a 4D map. However, this idea that light always travels through space and time does not quite bear scrutiny for two reasons. The first is we don't actually know how fast light travels in a vacuum. Don't get me
wrong, we know how fast it travels on a round trip. But much like sending your kid out to school and seeing when they get back again at the end of the day, you don't entirely know what they were getting up to in the meantime. You don't know if they dragged their feet on the way to the classroom and ran back home again once school was done. All you have are the start time and the end time. Simply dividing that by two might not give you an accurate description of your child or light's real movement. But wait, surely there's some way to test light's real speed. Do we really not know this? Surely you could meet a
friend, synchronize your watches, move apart, and then shine a light at them. If you both know you'll shine the light after 5 minutes, surely they could then just time the difference between 5 minutes and the arrival of the light to get a value for oneway light speed. No, this doesn't work either because as soon as your friend leaves, they are now in motion. Remember our example of the moving clocks experiment earlier? Once a clock is in motion, it desynchronizes from the clock at rest. And the amount of that desynchronization is tied to the warping of space and time, which is directly tied to, you guessed it, the speed of light, the very thing you are trying to test. And obviously you can't
have a test for the speed of light that presupposes the speed of light in any other part of the test. So in this way all tests that rely on two things moving apart from each other struggle with this problem. And obviously you can't synchronize at a distance because you signaling to your friend that you're ready to synchronize watches depends on that information traveling to them at the speed of light. And you don't know how long that takes one way. only the round trip when you see them wave back that they have done it. This has been a bit of a puzzler for all scientists all the way back to Einstein. To date, there has been no experiment that has successfully measured a one-way speed of
light. The solution to this was to simply divide two-way trips of light by two, which is where we get the 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum value from. But to be clear, this was always a choice made because it was convenient. Light traveling at different speeds is harder. So, we just decided it wasn't doing that. But there has always been a second reason to question this consistent speed idea, and that is the fact that light always travels at the same speed in all reference frames, or at least all reference frames, but one, that of the light itself. Speed is simple to calculate. It's distance divided by time. And every person tracking the speed of light finds the answer to be 299,792,458 m/s.
However, we have already noticed that clocks experience less time the faster they travel. And it is a well-known idea in science and science fiction that the more you speed up your motion, the greater this time drag becomes. If you could increase your speed to the fastest possible speed, light speed, funnily enough, your time would completely stop. So based on this logic, how fast does a photon think it covers a 10 m distance? Well, a photon is presumably going to experience zero personal time and will cover that distance instantly. So either we call that 10 m over 0 seconds which is impossible to mathematically calculate as you can't divide by 0 but
would be somewhere in the ballpark of infinity as that's what dividing by increasingly in small numbers trends towards or we remember that length contraction exists and we can track that 10 m down to 0 m and then we have 0 m over 0 seconds. But that's still impossible to calculate because you can't divide by zero. Either way, notice neither of these answers gives us 299,792,458 m/s. With maths breaking down, when we consider things from the photons perspective, it suggests that we are going wrong somewhere here. So, what's my brother's alternative? Well, it's simple. In this 4D space, allow light to travel infinitely fast from its point of view. It will still look like 299,792,458 m/s from everyone else's. Let me show
you with an example. Here we have two arrows expanding outwards from our central Big Bang moment. These arrows can represent two people standing in a field. Let's call them Tom and Alice. Note, due to the nature of the initial universal expansion of the Big Bang, the arrows for Tom and Alice are pointing slightly away from each other. Hey, look at that. We have the expansion of the universe baked into this without the need for dark energy at all. Things are just naturally drifting apart due to Newton's objects in motion remain in motion rule. To be specific, this lines up with the expansion remains constant model of the universe rather than the
models that see it getting stronger. We'll have to wait and see if that's what our universe proves to be doing. And no, I'm not yet considering gravity's effect on all this. That'll inevitably slow that constant motion down. But let's ignore that for now. Let's keep it to one principle at a time. Back to the point at hand. Let's have Tom at some point on his timeline of existence send out a photon at infinitely far speed from his point of view towards Alice. In other words, the photon goes from Tom's line to Alice's line in zero of Tom's time. Tom's time is our current frame of reference and is the direction of time for the photon 2.
The photon travels the distance to Alice. But unlike Tom, who sees it arrive instantly, Alice does not. Here is where Tom released the photon on Alice's timeline. Here is where it arrives. As you can see from Alice's perspective, the photon took a while to get to her, even when it thought it was traveling infinitely fast. Alice, upon receiving the photon, sends one back to Tom. But now we're in Alice's reference frame. So we send it out based on Alice's direction of time rather than Tom's. And once again, when we flip back to Tom's point of view, we see the photon as taking time to get to him. Tom knows the distance of the trip times how long it takes for Alice's photon to arrive back at him and erroneously divides the intervening time
by two, which gives him the value for the speed of light of 299,792,458 m/s. Even though in this model it was actually faster on the way out and slower on the way back in, the photons themselves never had any personal progression of time at either stage of the trip due to reorienting their perspective in each new reference frame. This all matches what we see play out in real life. Canya observers will notice that in this model the photon on the return trip is actually traveling a longer distance than the photon on the way out. But this is also what we see in real life. We just attribute that to the expansion of the universe. Space has expanded a bit by the time the photon makes the return journey. So it has a
longer distance to travel. So this works. But now based on this definition, things like red shift and time dilation take on a whole new meaning. Let's look at a different arrow in our 4D universe, one from a very far away star. If photons leave their stars at perpendicular angles, a foundational assumption of this model, then we can intuit it a few things immediately here. One is that while close arrows can send photons to us from moments in their timelines roughly comparable to ours, making them roughly seem like they share our now, only photons sent from very early on in the timeline of more distant arrows can intersect our line. Their angles are otherwise too steep. And once an arrow points equal to or more than
90° away from us, we will never intersect its photon line at all. In this way, the observable universe is only the arrows on the half of the model that are within 90° from us. The other half of the universe is forever beyond our reach. We'll talk more about that later. Conveniently, distant arrows will also undergo red shift and time dilation. again without the need for any dark energy expanding the universe. Look at how these distant photons intersect our timeline. Arrows from this distant star may have been sent out once every second from the distant stars point of view, but due to their angle of travel, we have to travel much more than a second down our personal timeline to see
them arrive. Obviously, for photons that are not particles, but rather a continuous wave, this has the effect of stretching out the photon's wavelength, simultaneously turning it redder because color is influenced by wavelength and making the information in it appear to be much more drawn out. A distant quazar would indeed appear to be flickering five times slower from our point of view, provided it sent its light from the right angle. On top of that, when we measure the distance the photons travel, a thing we are able to do thanks to tricks like trigonometry, we will see that very farway objects seem to be moving away from us really fast, while nearby objects are moving away from us much slower. Converting a 4D universe down
into a 3D one is a little bit tricky, but strangely enough, the distances we see here in the photon lines do seem to carry over into the 3D world. And this effect happens for everyone. This explains why no matter where you are in the universe, things appear to move slower in time the further they are from you, and they are all traveling outward from you, the expanded universe accounted for. Okay, while this seems all well and good for objects standing still and sending photons at each other, can this way of thinking about the universe really explain other aspects of special relativity like length contraction and
time dilation experienced by objects in motion? Actually, yes, using the same rules. To demonstrate this, let's use our old friend, the barn hall thought experiment. I go into this in further detail in my last video, but the basic gist of the sort experiment is this. Can a 40 m pole fit into a 20 m barn? According to relativity and length contraction, yes. By accelerating the pole fast enough, it will undergo a length contraction, shrinking down to a 20 m pole, which can then enter and exit the barn, assuming the barn has doors open on both ends. Technically allowing it to exist completely inside the barn, if just for a moment. Theoretically, if you were fast enough, you could even
close both doors of the barn at once, fully holding the pole inside the barn. The tricky thing about this thought experiment is what happens if you view those exact same events from the pole's perspective. Because according to the pole, it is equally accurate to see the barn moving towards it. But in that case, it is the barn that undergoes length contraction, which means that when the pole enters the barn and the barn tries to shut its doors, it shouldn't work. The pole shouldn't be contained. The answer to this paradox is that time is weird and simultaneity is a lie. What the barn sees as concurrent events, the doors both closing at once, are not what the pole sees. The pole sees both doors shutting at two separate
moments in time. First the back door, and only later, once the pole has entered the barn, does the front door close, too. The reasons for this are weird, but they actually are quite straightforward in my brother's model. Here is our pole, which we will accelerate towards the barn. While the pole is one continuous object, it's actually more accurate to describe it as a long line of little objects, atoms. So, for this, let's track the path of two of those atoms, one at the front of the pole and one at the back. At the start of our journey, the barn sees the pole as 40 m in length. These are the photons it sees, and it can see that the pole shouldn't fit into the narrower
barn. But then, let's start the pole moving. According to the pole's initial time reference frame, both atoms are going to move the same distance in the same amount of time. That will look something like this. It's not quite light speed, but it's pretty close. The two arrows move a little into the future and cover a lot of distance. But now look at what happens from the barn's perspective. Due to the differing angle of the poles and the barn's timelines, a result of everything being on slightly diverging trajectories from that initial big bang moment. The pole's arrival looks like this. If we take a snapshot at the exact moment the back of the pole finishes its journey and arrives at the
front of the barn, we can see that the cross-section of space that the pole is taking up is much shorter than its original length. It now fits inside the barn just as length contraction would predict. The barn then closes its doors. Of course, the front of the pole will want to do some more moving in the seconds after our snapshot, so the barn had better open its doors again quite soon. But the back of the pole has completed the journey its initial trajectory set on, so it is now free to pursue a new path should it desire to. This is a reflection of the fact that the pole is a little out of sync from the barn's perspective with the back of the pole having experienced more time than the front at the moment of traveling through the barn.
Perhaps this is easier to see if we shift perspectives again. Let's look at the pole's movement again, but now let's include the barn shutting its doors. We're back in the pole's reference frame, which it remains in until it ever accelerates or decelerates. But from its perspective, the closing of the barn doors is now the one out of sync. According to its timeline, the back door of the barn closing happens first and only later does the front door close. Just like what is predicted by the barn pole thought experiment.
Just for thoroughess's sake, here's what a round trip would look like. Once the pole has arrived at its destination, it decelerates. The act of accelerating or decelerating after a move changes one's reference frame. That's another assumption my brother is using here. Note that while the pole initially thought that it arrived at its new destination all at once, after it decelerates, the back half needs to stay where it is for a little while so the front half can finish its journey. Then once both parts have arrived and we're oriented in the new time frame, we can make another move heading back like so. Whether the pole is coming in or going out, the barn will see it as experiencing some amount of length contraction. Once it is at rest, that
length contraction vanishes. Furthermore, objects in motion experience the passage of time differently compared to other objects at rest. By looking at the poles reference frames, it's possible to see that it experience less overall time than the barn thanks to its moving around, just like in real life. In other words, my brother has come across something very interesting here. By thinking of a universe like this, we immediately and quite simply can explain a number of the natural phenomena that exist around us in special relativity. Time dilation, red shift, lens contraction, why light has a speed limit that's the same for everyone except itself. Dark energy, an expanding universe. Let's go even
further. Let's solve antimatter while we're at it. It's one of the great mysteries of science that our universe is missing a whole load of antimatter. From what we know, the universe should really have produced an exactly equal amount of antimatter to matter. But were that to happen, then all the antimatter would annihilate all the matter, and our universe would have never gotten started in the first place. For some currently unexplained but quite beneficial reason, our observed universe made more matter than antimatter. And we don't know why. But scientists have theorized that antimatter can be described as matter with its time reversed. And it turns out that all the arrows pointing away from us by more
than 90° in this model can be considered to be time reversed for us. After all, if time slows down more and more the closer a model gets to that 90° angle from us, what happens when it goes past zero? Well, it goes into negative values. So, here is the missing antimatter. It's simply the other half of the universe. Unobservable, unreachable, and forever cut off from us, which is probably for the best, as if we could go there, we'd apparently explode. And now we have this geometric model. We can add in my brother's previous unified theory ideas from my other videos and describe all this as lines of vibrating strings. And suddenly we can include all the quantum elements as well.
A few last observations before we wrap this up. Can objects with mass ever travel at light speed? Seemingly not for reasons of momentum. If we as objects with mass are traveling outward along these time arrows, we retain some outward momentum no matter how much sideways momentum we add. It's like trying to invert a triangle by simply making one side longer. You can add as much length as you like, even infinite length, but you will never actually achieve a perfectly flat line. You'll definitely never be able to get your line to not progress into the future, and you'll end up getting diminishing returns on your eventual speed as seen by other people. Adding the same amount
of length to a triangle side does not add a similar increase in angle of travel. This lines up with what other theories of relativity predict. Objects with mass would need infinite energy to accelerate up to light speed and can't ever go faster. But this model gives a clearer reason why. After all, how can you go faster than infinite speed, which is what you think you're going at according to your frame of reference? And speaking of faster than infinity, is it possible to go back in time in this model? Well, while objects with that outward momentum to begin with seemingly can't, which is anything with mass, and while photons seemingly don't, as they always travel in this model at perfect
90° angles from their original timelines, it's not strictly impossible that some other particle could draw lines between objects at greater than 90° angles. Perhaps this explains some of the quantum weirdness that exists in the universe. how quantum effects can seemingly appear to influence the past or contact each other across any distance at once. This is of course speculative, but might offer a framework for building a better answer than what we currently have, which is preferable to no explanation at all. Now, here's a big one. Does free will exist in this model? Yes and no. Strictly speaking, this model is formed at inception. All the arrows and their pathways exist
immediately and send out their photons immediately. After all, we only have a sense of time in our 3D world because of an invisible fourth dimension that we can't see that is ticking us along. So, in a 4D model, everything that exists and will exist must already be mapped out in a single now. In that way, all paths are fully defined. That might make free will a little tricky. However, there is at least one part of this model that is not very well explained, and that might leave room for free will to still exist. While the model works best when it's all fully drawn out, it only plays out like we see
our universe do if we put our finger on an arrow and move along it, seeing what photons intercept us and seeing where everything thus appears to be moment by moment. But what is causing that sense of motion? Is this the influence of an even higher dimension? A time above time? My brother didn't want to rule it out. Though this gap is one of the most prominent in his model, in my opinion, if there is more beyond this that isn't mapped out yet, there's still a chance that free will could exist. Perhaps when the universe first sprang into being in this 4D space, free will is what influenced the exact shape it took. And now we are simply watching that choice play out like a movie that feels very
immersive. Perhaps that's one for the philosophers to work out. Either way, this model does an impressive job of laying out all the details of special relativity in the universe in a way that is actually quite intuitive once you get the idea. But there's one last element that we've skirted around this whole video. This works for special relativity. But what happens when we introduce gravity? Well, now that the universe can be laid out geometrically, we can turn to our old friend vibrating string to explain gravity and track its effects. Strings are what my brother thinks all mass is actually made of. We are nothing more
than vibrations on all these intersecting lines, wavelengths in 4D space. And where peaks form, these atoms are. We talked about this in my previous videos on this topic. But if this space and these various lines truly are a latis of strings, then that latice can potentially be pulled and tugged. After all, anytime that you take a flat string and vibrated, it pulls in from the sides. Once again, that's just simple geometry. Larger vibrations pull strings in more, shortening them and tugging on the entire lattice. Mass and energy are the same thing according to Einstein. If mass is energy in the form of vibrations on a string at a particular location, as my brother believes, then any mass in a
location will pull in the space-time latice around it. Those tugs will twist the paths of nearby arrows towards it, affecting the direction other vibrations are moving in as they head towards the future. Enough mass pulling sideways in the latice will shorten the distance between objects pulling them in. Enough mass pulling up or down in the lattice will shorten distances in time, reducing time experiences for those within the mass cluster. And this will be experienced to diminishing degrees by any other object that gets too close. In other words, mass tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move both in time and space. So there you have it. My brother has developed this theory over the course of
several years through making these videos and talking to people. And certainly I find it interesting. Interesting enough of an idea that it seems worth including in a video. Normally here at Astramm, we simply report on what scientists are saying. But you know what? Every now and then it's fun to get involved yourself. After all, who's to say where the next great scientific idea will come from? So, what do you think? Does this help relativity make a bit more sense? Do you see any flaws in this model? Leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts.
Science is about discovery at the end of the day. And by testing and exploring new ideas, we draw ever closer to the truth about our universe. So, even if this isn't right, if it helps us consider the universe a little more closely or provides some useful insights into the way the world works, then it's one step closer on the path to understanding everything. Thank you so much for watching all the way to the end of the video. And as a reward, I have a surprise for you. Some of you may remember the stunning Astron book we released a few years ago. Well, guess what? We have another limited run
back on sale now, but only for US audience, I'm afraid. Unfortunately, everywhere else they're all gone already. It's a spectacular journey through the solar system filled with not only the very best images, but explanations that will bring our cosmic backyard to life. There aren't many left, so click the link below to make sure you get your hands on one before they sell out.
