we are made from very small things and

we live in a very very big universe and

the small things are so small and the
big things are so big that you might
think we have no hope of ever
understanding them but I'm going to
argue that in fact we already understand
them quite well it's the world in
between the big and the small the world
we live in that we don't understand and
in fact that world is becoming harder
and harder to understand because we keep
discovering more complexity and creating
more complexity and that's something we
have to face if we want to solve our
biggest challenges but let's start in
the beginning I want to tell you how we
came to understand the big that's my
background I studied physics and
cosmology and it also has to do with
where I grew up I grew up in a town
called Olivia's got in Finland where you
get about four hours of daylight during
the day so whenever I walked home from
school it would be dark and I would look
at the stars and it's the stars that
really tell you how big the universe is
stars are very big as bigger bigger as
our Sun only very very far away and
there are so many of them even with the
naked eye you can see ten thousand stars
now ten thousand is a big number but
it's still a comprehensible number if
each star was a grain of sand ten
thousand would be about three teaspoons
of sand so that's not so bad but of
course we don't look at the stars with
the naked eye anymore we use telescopes
and already a hundred years ago around
1900 astronomers had good telescopes and
they could see over a million stars now
a million stars is a lot but it's still
a comprehensible number it's about a
bucket of sand and in fact those
astronomers were pretty sure that that
was it that there were about a million
stars in the universe except for these
funny smudges they had seen in their
photographs and they called them spiral
nebulae and nobody knew what those we're
and it took
a computer to figure out what are those
actually we're a human computer called
Henriette leavitt because back then a
computer was what you called a woman
doing calculations for scientists now
leave it was paid ten dollars a week to
analyze photographs of stars and she was
deaf but she had a very very good eye
and she spotted a pattern in the
brightness of stars that gave her a new
way to actually figure out how far away
stars we're and he died of cancer very
young but I was able to publish her
finding but couldn't see it applied and
it was Edwin Hubble who later said that
leave it should have really won the
Nobel Prize who used her method to look
at those spiral nebulae and what he
found was that they were much much much
further away millions of times further
away than anyone had ever thought in
fact they were galaxies galaxies just
like our Milky Way systems of hundreds
of billions of stars
and we now know that the visible
universe has hundreds of billions of
galaxies so it's not just a bucket of
sand it's not a million stars it's seven
times 10 to the power of 22 stars now
again if each star was a grain of sand
that would be all the sand in all the
desert sand beaches and sand boxes on
earth times ten thousand ten thousand
wells of sand so in less than a hundred
years that's how much our understanding
of the universe has grown from three
teaspoons to ten thousand Wells of sand
and actually it's even worse because
Hubble showed that the universe is
getting bigger and bigger all those
galaxies are moving away from each other
at tremendous speed so you may wonder
how could we ever figure out what was
going on and what what what where all
those stars came from now fortunately
Einstein came along and Einstein came up
with a theory of relativity that says
that space is really just distances
between points and those distances
change depending on what you have
between those points he came up with
equations that tell us how space itself
changes when matter and energy move
around in it and his equations work
extremely well so well that's all the
phones
in your phones use GPS which is based on
Einstein's equations an Einstein's
equations predicted an expanding
universe and at first we thought he'd
made a mistake but then he found out
about Hubble's discovery and we now know
that the universe has been expanding for
13.8 billion years that means it
actually started out very very small
smaller than an atom and we call the
moment the expansion started the Big
Bang now we still don't know exactly
what happened at the very instant of the
Big Bang but thanks to Einstein we do
know how the universe got to be so big
and we know that little ripples tiny
little ripples in that early universe
grew with the universe into seeds that
became stars and galaxies so we do know
where stars came from now one of
Einstein's equations had really big
implications not just for big things but
also for small things and that's his
most famous equation Z equals MC squared
what does it mean well e means energy M
is mass and C squared is speed of light
squared light travels very very fast so
C squared is an enormous number almost
as big as the number of all the grains
of sand in the world and that means that
even the tiniest amount of matter even
an atom has a tremendous amount of
energy so let's talk about atoms and
let's talk about small things how small
are atoms now if you remember that
tremendous number of stars in the
universe we have the same number of
atoms in just three drops of water so
it's quite amazing that we can
understand in all and for a long time we
thought atoms where the smallest thing
there was but in 1898 Marie Curie
discovered an element called
radium and radium was constantly
radiating so much energy that it
couldn't possibly come from reactions
between atoms and people could really
excited about radium science fiction
writer HT wells thought that it could be
a source of infinite power for a utopian
society some people got maybe a little
bit too excited and too carried away and
started putting radium in products like
chocolate and face cream and and other
things something we now know wouldn't
would it be a good idea now Mary Curie I
did something a bit better she was able
to use radium to treat cancer so if he
pioneered radiation therapy but she
herself got exposed
so much radiation that she eventually
died of anemia and even her cookbook to
this day is harmful radioactive but he
lived long enough to see what was really
going on with radium and she suspected
that there might be something going on
inside atoms something that was
converting matter into energy like
Einsteins equation implied and he was
right in 1911
Ernest Rutherford took some radium fired
some of radium's radiation at a gold
leaf very thin gold leaf and saw
something really weird the atoms were
behaving like there was something much
smaller inside something compared to the
size of the atom like a grain of sand in
the middle of a football field and he
had discovered the nucleus the nucleus
of an atom is made out of particles
called protons and neutrons orbited by a
cloud of electrons and to explain his
structure of the atom scientists had to
come up with a new theory called quantum
mechanics and quantum mechanics predicts
that if you split the atom if you split
the nucleus some matter will be
converted into energy and that's what
was going on with radium but Rutherford
himself didn't think that atomic energy
would be of any practical use he
famously said that anyone who looks for
a soft source of power inside an atom is
talking absolute moonshine so of course
there was a very stubborn Hungarian who
decided that it had to be made to work
and he was called Leo Szilard and he was
born right here in Budapest
as a young man he did a lot of work with
Einstein and they became close friends
what did they work on quantum mechanics
thermodynamics theoretical physics and
they also invented a new type of fridge
old-fashioned fridges used very
poisonous gases and a family in Berlin
died of Hume scumming coming from those
gases an Einstein got really upset about
it and he was certain that they had beer
had to be a better way to build fridges
so he asked sea lard for help - to
invent a better one so they did it was a
genius design obviously but too
expensive and too noisy to be actually
practical but in the end they made some
money by selling their patents to
Electrolux but sea lard kept inventing
and his next invention was something
much much bigger
in 1933 one morning in London he was
crossing the street at this spot and
just the moment when the traffic light
changed in a flash he had a really
beautiful and a really terrible idea
and he called it the chain reaction if
you could split just one atom that would
release neutrons that would split more
atoms that release more neutrons that
would split more atoms and so on and so
on you could make atomic power work and
you could also make a really terrible
weapon and that's exactly what happened
in hiroshima and nagasaki 12 years later
and szilárd himself was horrified he
spent the rest of his life campaigning
against nuclear weapons and he switched
fields from physics to biology and the
atomic bomb is a terrible thing it shows
that there is a dark side to our
understanding of the big in the small
but actually that same understanding
triggered an even bigger explosion
that's still going on today and the
trigger for that explosion was this this
is the first transistor it's a device
about this big it was built by a team
led by William Shockley in Bell Labs in
1947 and what it is is the simplest
building block of a digital computer it
can store a 0 or a 1 and like the atomic
bomb it's based on quantum mechanics in
fact on equations worked out by another
hand garyun called Eugene Wigner who is
one of szilard's friends as well and we
can I showed that there are some
materials that can be made to sometimes
conduct electricity and sometimes not so
that gives you the 1 and 0 and one of
those materials is silicon and silicon
is basically sand so we make transistors
out of sand and we are now very very
very very very good at it here's a
modern transistor it's about 20
nanometers in size and to give you an
idea how small that is
all the 2 billion transistors in an
iPhone 6 can be made from just two
grains of sand so in 1947 there was just
one transistor today there are 3 times
10 to the power of 21 transistors
that's thousand times all the sand
grains in the world and in just in ten
years there will be more transistors
than there are stars in the known
universe
so we really have started another big
band now think about that for a minute
that's a number that applies not to
atoms but machines that we have made
what does it mean it means we can see
things that we could never see before
the Henry at the levites of today don't
have to do it all by hand computers are
storing data and analyzing it for us and
just like telescope
revealed a much much much bigger
universe computers are revealing a world
that is much more complex than we
thought and that world is around us and
inside us let me give you an example
this is a human skin cell so it looks
pretty complicated but thanks to
computers we can now read the code that
runs it we can read its DNA for a long
time scientists thought that only about
2% of that DNA did anything useful and
the rest was junk but recently we got
much better at reading DNA and now we
know that that 98% is actually the
control system for the cell so in just a
few years we found out that the cell is
actually at least 50 times more complex
than we thought now to give you an idea
of what how big a leaf that is let's
think about in terms of computer
programs a small iPhone app like like
candy crush is about 50,000 lines of
code so what 50 times more code give you
it would give you the control system for
CERN's Large Hadron Collider the most
complicated science instrument in the
world so basically we thought a cell was
like candy crush but it turns out to be
more like the Large Hadron Collider in
terms of complexity so that means it's
much harder to fix if something goes
wrong so it's no wonder that we are
really far still from curing cancer and
maybe that's because we've been looking
at that 2% we thought we understood and
to fix that we really need to tackle the
cells full complexity it's not just that
we are just using transistors to
discover complexity we're using them to
build complexity we're putting them in
every single device we build and connect
them all together now look at the
Internet in 1977 and then look at it in
2007 it's like a chain reaction the more
complex things we built the more complex
things they allow us to build and now
our transport networks our financial
systems our energy systems are much much
more complex than ever before and
there's a problem with that because very
complex systems can become fragile and
adding a single grain of sand to a sand
pile can trigger an avalanche and those
avalanches are happening faster and
faster we're all familiar with 2008
financial crisis but in 2010 competing
trading algorithms got locked into a
feedback loop that created a trillion
dollar stock market crash in 45 seconds
what's called the flash crash of 2:45
p.m.
connections also mean that problems
spread very very quickly three billion
people fly every year and that means
that the next pandemic we're going to
have is going to be truly global in a
very complex system you can also get
cascading failures one thing failing off
to another this is the electricity grid
of India and in 2012 just one power line
being overloaded crash the entire grid
left 600 million people without power
for three days and sometimes connections
can be very very hard to see
imagine a forest fire in Russia what
does that have to do with the Arab
Spring
well forest fires in Russia led to the
grain export ban which caused massive
financial speculation on food prices
which caused feud riots in North Africa
and ultimately to people deciding they
finally had enough our most difficult
problems like climate change involve
both the complexity of nature and the
complexity we regret creating to fix
climate change we need to understand
finance we need to understand energy we
need to understand soil and biology and
the atmosphere and and the oceans and
quantum mechanics carbon and light all
of those things at the same time so we
live in a world where most of what we
think we know is wrong small things
breaking means that big things break and
when things break they break very
quickly everything is connected and we
can't see those connections and to
understand anything you have to
understand everything so that's a little
bit scary but there's no reason to panic
it's actually also quite exciting from
for me looking at all these complexities
to like looking at those stars again and
that's why I did what CLR did and
switched from physics to biology there
are amazing new opportunities if we can
learn to live with complexity and I
think we can actually we now have the
means to make a lot of things much
simpler a lot of our systems like
finance and energy are fragile because
they have central nodes like banks and
power plants that are connected to
everything else so what if we took those
away think about technologies like solar
power or Tesla's power wall again both
powered by transistors maybe we can have
power systems that are much less
centralized and much more resilient we
might be able to do the same thing for
finance Bitcoin is an example of a
platform that allows to have trusted
transactions without a central authority
like a bank that verifies them but what
about the complexity of nature now
cancer and climate change are soda
problems that they might be too much
even for an Einstein but what about a
million Einsteins
all working together where could we find
those Einsteins well the chances are
that a lot of those Einsteins are now
playing computer games and just all the
hours spent on playing Angry Birds
actually would translate into twelve
Wikipedia's every year and actually the
best way to find a shape of a biological
molecule is already a computer game
called Foldit with 15 million players
there are other platforms like that like
Zooniverse that mean that anyone can now
try to find cancer mutations or new
kinds of galaxies in huge sets of data
and we might even be able to apply that
approach to politics iceland recently
tried to crowdsource the drafting of the
Constitution by social media and now you
might think that was a terrible idea but
actually worked out quite well so there
there are ways to make democracy more
transparent and have more brains working
on problems that no single politician
could ever understand it may be that we
have to give up some ideas about systems
that we have like the fact that we may
not need to be able to understand the
nature of all systems without
understanding them that my company heals
Nano we're trying to build molecular
machines that make writing genetic code
easier using machines that we've evolved
in a test tube and not designed so in a
As
way we can tackle complexity by
accepting it and embracing it and maybe
ultimately the systems we build will
merge with the systems of nature until
we can no longer tell where one ends and
one begins
Einstein said that things should be as
simple as possible but no simpler and
that's a good rule for us to follow both
as a species and in our lives so let's
embrace complexity where we must but
find simplicity where we can and this is
thought I'd like to leave you with
there's a name for the time in our lives
where everything we think we know turns
out to be wrong where everything is too
complex everything is too overwhelming
and we don't know what to do and it's
called growing up and that's when our
adventures really begin thank you very
much