What's invisible? More than you think - John Lloyd ¿Qué es invisible? Más de lo que crees - John Lloyd 目に見えないものとは？あなたが思っている以上に - ジョン・ロイド Co jest niewidzialne? Więcej niż myślisz - John Lloyd O que é invisível? Mais do que pensas - John Lloyd 什么看不见？比你想象的还要多 - 约翰·劳埃德

(Music)

[Ted N' Ed’s Carnival; open daily - all day long; Yew Chube Common - Entrance off the Google highway]

[John Lloyd’s Inventory of the Invisible] |劳埃德||||

[Adapted from a TEDTalk given by John Lloyd in 2009] |||TED演讲|||||

Now our next speaker has spent his whole career eliciting that sense of wonder.

Please welcome John Lloyd. |||劳埃德

(Applause) Question is: what is invisible?

There’s more of it than you think, actually.

Everything, I would say -- everything that matters -- Todo, diría yo... todo lo que importa...

Except every thing, and except matter. Excepto cada cosa, y excepto la materia.

We can see matter |||materia Podemos ver la materia

but we can’t see what’s the matter.

We can see the stars and the planets but we can’t see what holds them apart, |||||||||||||sostiene|| Podemos ver las estrellas y los planetas, pero no lo que los separa,

or what draws them together. o lo que les une.

With matter as with people, we see only the skin of things, Con la materia, como con las personas, sólo vemos la piel de las cosas,

we can’t see into the engine room, we can’t see what makes people tick, no podemos ver la sala de máquinas, no podemos ver lo que mueve a la gente,

at least not without difficulty, al menos no sin dificultad,

and the closer we look at anything, y cuanto más nos fijamos en cualquier cosa,

the more it disappears.

In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, De hecho, si nos fijamos bien en las cosas, si nos fijamos en la subestructura básica de la materia,

there isn’t anything there. no hay nada allí.

Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. Los electrones desaparecen en una especie de pelusa y sólo queda energía. One of the interesting things about invisibility is the things that we can’s see,

we also can’t understand.

Gravity is one thing that we can’t see, and which we don’t understand.

It’s the least understood of all the four fundamental forces,

and the weakest, and nobody really knows what it is or why it’s there. y el más débil, y nadie sabe realmente qué es ni por qué está ahí.

For what it’s worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, Por si sirve de algo, Sir Isaac Newton, el mayor científico que ha existido,

he thought Jesus came to earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. pensó que Jesús vino a la tierra específicamente para accionar las palancas de la gravedad.

That’s what he thought he was there for. Para eso creía que estaba allí.

So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don’t know. Así que, chico brillante, podría estar equivocado en eso, no lo sé.

(Laughter) (Risas) Consciousness.

I see all your faces; I’ve no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn’t that amazing?

Isn’t it incredible that we can’t read each other’s minds, when we can touch each other, taste each other, perhaps, if we get close enough, but we can’t read each other’s minds.

I find that quite astonishing. ||||asombroso

In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion which some claim is the root of all religions,

Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say,

but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn’t exist. pero su principal ejercicio de telepatía es enviar poderosas señales al resto de nosotros de que no existe.

So that’s why we don’t think it exists; the Sufi masters working on us. Por eso creemos que no existe; los maestros sufíes trabajan en nosotros.

In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, En la cuestión de la conciencia y la inteligencia artificial,

artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness,

gotten nowhere, we have no idea how consciousness works.

Not only have they not created artificial intelligence,

they haven’t yet created artificial stupidity. |||||estupidez

The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful. |||física||eternas|||

Remind you of anyone? recuerdas||| ¿Te recuerda a alguien?

Interesting.

I’m, as you can guess, not a materialist, I’m an immaterialist. |||||||materialista|||inmaterialista And I find a very useful new word -- ignostic. ||||||||ignóstico Y encuentro una nueva palabra muy útil: ignóstico.

Okay? I’m an ignostic, [God? I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists |me niego|||||||||| Me niego a ser arrastrado en la cuestión de si Dios existe

until somebody properly defines the terms. ||correctamente|define||

Another thing we can’t see is the human genome. ||||||||genoma

And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago ||||peculiar||||

when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain |||indagando||||||||| cuando empezaron a profundizar en el genoma, pensaron que probablemente contendría

around 100 thousand genes. ||genes

Every year since, it’s been revised downwards. ||revisada| se ha revisado a la baja.

We now think there are likely to be just over 20 thousand genes Ahora pensamos que es probable que haya algo más de 20.000 genes in the human genome.

This is extraordinary, because rice -- get this -- ||||arroz||

rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. arroz|||||| Se sabe que el arroz tiene 38.000 genes.

Potatoes -- potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, |las patatas||cromosomas||||

and the same as a gorilla. |||||gorila

(Laughter) You can’t see these things, but they are very strange.

The stars by day, I always think that’s fascinating.

The universe disappears.

The more light there is, the less you can see. Time.

Nobody can see time. I don’t know if you know this.

Modern physicists -- there’s a big movement in modern physics |físicos||||||| to decide that time doesn’t really exist, because it’s too inconvenient for the figures. decidir que el tiempo no existe realmente, porque es demasiado inconveniente para las cifras.

It’s much easier if it’s not really there.

You can’t see the future, obviously,

and you can’t see the past, except in your memory.

One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can’t see --

my son asked me this the other day, he said Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two?

And I said yes.

He said, why can’t I? Isn’t that extraordinary?

You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three. No puede recordar lo que le ocurrió antes de los dos o tres años. Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they’d be out of a job. |||||los psicoanalistas||de otra manera||||||

Because that’s where all the stuff happens [laughter] Porque ahí es donde pasan todas las cosas [risas].

that makes you who you are.

Another thing you can’t see is the grid on which we hang. |||||||estructura|||| Otra cosa que no se ve es la rejilla de la que colgamos.

This is fascinating.

You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. ||||||||||renovadas Probablemente saben, algunos de ustedes, que las células se renuevan continuamente. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff -- |escamas||||uñas|||| La piel se desprenden, crecen vellos, uñas, ese tipo de cosas --

but every cell in your body is replaced at some point. |||||||reemplazada||| pero cada célula en tu cuerpo es reemplazada en algún momento.

Taste buds, every 10 days or so. |papilas|||| Papilas gustativas, cada 10 días aproximadamente.

Livers and internal organs take a bit longer. hígados||||||| Los hígados y órganos internos tardan un poco más.

Spine takes several years. Columna vertebral||| La columna toma varios años.

But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body

remains from what was there seven years ago. restos de lo que había hace siete años.

The question is: who then are we? La pregunta es: ¿quiénes somos entonces?

What are we? What is this thing that we hang on? That is actually us?

Atoms, can’t see them. átomos|||

Nobody ever will. They’re smaller than the wavelength of light. ||||longitud de onda|| Gas, can’t see that. gas|||

Interesting, somebody mentioned 1600 recently. Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont. |||||||químico|||Helmont

It’s said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. ||||||||invención||||||| Se dice que es la invención de una palabra más exitosa jamás realizada por un individuo conocido.

Quite good.

He also invented a word called blas, meaning astral radiation. ||||||blas||astral| Didn’t catch on, unfortunately. Desgraciadamente, no se puso de moda.

(Laughter) But well done, Him.

Light -- you can’t see light. When it’s dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won’t see it. |||||||||emite||rayo|||directamente||||||| Cuando está oscuro, en el vacío, si una persona te dirige un haz de luz directamente a los ojos, no lo verás.

Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. |||||discrepan||

But it’s odd that you can’t see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. ||||||golpea

Electricity, can’t see that. electricidad|||

Don’t let anyone tell you they understand electricity, they don’t. |||||||electricidad|| Nobody knows what it is.

(Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously |||||||||cable||instantáneamente down a wire, don’t you, at the speed of light, when you turn the light on. |||||||velocidad||||||||

They don’t.

Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. ||||cable|||||miel que se esparce|miel|| Dicen que los electrones bajan por el cable a la velocidad de la miel. Galaxies -- hundred billion of them, estimated in the universe. galaxias|||||estimadas|||

Hundred billion. How many can we see?

Five. Five, out of a hundred billion galaxies, with the naked eye. |||||||||desnuda| And one of them’s quite difficult to see, unless you’ve got very good eyesight. |||ellas||||||||||vista

Radio waves.

There’s another thing. Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, Heinrich|||||| in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. ||||||||radiaban

Somebody said to him, well what’s the point of these, Heinrich?

What’s the point of these radio waves that you’ve found?

And he said, well I’ve no idea, but I guess somebody’ll find a use for them someday. ||||||||||alguien|||||| The biggest thing that’s invisible to us is what we don’t know.

It is incredible how little we know.

Thomas Edison once said we don’t know one percent of one millionth about anything. |Edison||||||||||un millonésimo||

And I’ve come to the conclusion --

because you ask this other question: what’s another thing we can’t see?

The point, most of us.

What’s the point? The point -- what I’ve got it down to is there are only two questions really worth asking.

Why we’re here, and what should we do about it while we are?

To help you, I’ve got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, ||||||||||||||filósofos

perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century.

One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet. |||||||||poeta

The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, ||||Wittgenstein||

I don’t know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it’s not in order to enjoy ourselves. No sé por qué estamos aquí, pero estoy bastante seguro de que no es para divertirnos.

He was a cheerful bastard, wasn’t he? ||||bastardo|| Era un cabrón alegre, ¿verdad?

(Laughter) And secondly, and lastly, W.H. |||por último|W(1)|

Auden, one of my favorite poets Auden|||||poetas who said, We are here on earth to help others.

What the others are here for, I’ve no idea. Para qué están aquí los otros, no tengo ni idea. [Get your souvenir photo here! ||recuerdo|foto|

Continue your journey into the unknown!