(Circus music) [Ted N' Ed's Carnival] [John Lloyd's Inventory of the Invisible] [Adapted from a TEDTalk given by John Lloyd in 2009] June Cohen: Our next speaker has spent his whole career eliciting that sense of wonder.
Please welcome John Lloyd.
(Applause) [Hall of Mirrors] The question is, "What is invisible?"
There's more of it than you think, actually.
Everything, I would say -- everything that matters -- Except every thing, and except matter.
We can see matter 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, or what draws them together.
With matter as with people, we see only the skin of things, we can't see into the engine room, we can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty, and the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears.
In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there.
Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy.
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.
For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity.
That's what he thought he was there for.
So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know.
(Laughter) 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.
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.
So that's why we don't think it exists; the Sufi masters working on us.
In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, 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.
(Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all powerful.
Remind you of anyone?
Interesting.
I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist.
And I've found a very useful new word -- ignostic.
Okay?
I'm an ignostic.
[God?]
I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists until somebody properly defines the terms.
Another thing we can't see is the human genome.
And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100 thousand genes.
Every year since, it's been revised downwards.
We now think there are likely to be just over 20 thousand genes in the human genome.
This is extraordinary, because rice -- get this -- rice is known to have 38 thousand genes.
Potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, and the same as a gorilla.
(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.
There's a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures.
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, "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.
Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job.
Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are.
Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang.
This is fascinating.
You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed.
Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff -- but every cell in your body is replaced at some point.
Taste buds, every ten days or so.
Livers and internal organs take a bit longer.
Spine takes several years.
But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago.
The question is: who then are we?
What are we?
What is this thing that we hang on?
That is actually us?
Atoms, can't see them.
Nobody ever will.
They're smaller than the wavelength of light.
Gas, can't see that.
Interesting, somebody mentioned 1600 recently.
Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called van Helmont.
It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual.
Quite good.
He also invented a word called "blas," meaning astral radiation.
Didn't catch on, unfortunately.
(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.
Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this.
But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits.
Electricity, can't see that.
Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity, they don't.
Nobody knows what it is.
(Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light, when you turn the light on, they don't.
Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say.
Galaxies -- hundred billion of them, estimated in the universe.
Hundred billion.
How many can we see?
Five.
Five, out of a hundred billion galaxies, with the naked eye.
And one of them is quite difficult to see, unless you've got very good eyesight.
Radio waves.
There's another thing.
Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated.
Somebody said to him, "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 will find a use for them someday.
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."
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 are we 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, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century.
One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet.
The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, "I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."
(Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard, wasn't he?
(Laughter) And secondly, and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on Earth to help others.
What the others are here for, I've no idea."
(Laughter) (Applause) (Circus music) [Get your souvenir photo here!]
[Continue your journey into the unknown!]
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During a long day spent roaming the forest in search of edible grains and herbs, the weary divine farmer Shennong accidentally poisoned himself 72 times.
But before the poisons could end his life, a leaf drifted into his mouth.
He chewed on it and it revived him, and that is how we discovered tea.
Or so an ancient legend housetimothy@example.com.
Tea doesn't actually cure poisonings, but the story of Shennong, the mythical Chinese inventor of agriculture, highlights tea's importance to ancient China.
Archaeological evidence suggests tea was first cultivated there as early as 6,000 years ago, or 1,500 years before the pharaohs built the Great Pyramids of Giza.
That original Chinese tea plant is the same type that's grown around the world today, yet it was originally consumed very differently.
It was eaten as a vegetable or cooked with grain porridge.
Tea only shifted from food to drink 1,500 years ago when people realized that a combination of heat and moisture could create a complex and varied taste out of the leafy green.
After hundreds of years of variations to the preparation method, the standard became to heat tea, pack it into portable cakes, grind it into powder, mix with hot water, and create a beverage called muo cha, or matcha.
Matcha became so popular that a distinct Chinese tea culture emerged.
Tea was the subject of books and poetry, the favorite drink of emperors, and a medium for artists.
They would draw extravagant pictures in the foam of the tea, very much like the espresso art you might see in coffee shops today.
In the 9th century during the Tang Dynasty, a Japanese monk brought the first tea plant to Japan.
The Japanese eventually developed their own unique rituals around tea, leading to the creation of the Japanese tea ceremony.
And in the 14th century during the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese emperor shifted the standard from tea pressed into cakes to loose leaf tea.
At that point, China still held a virtual monopoly on the world's tea trees, making tea one of three essential Chinese export goods, along with porcelain and silk.
This gave China a great deal of power and economic influence as tea drinking spread around the world.
That spread began in earnest around the early 1600s when Dutch traders brought tea to Europe in large quantities.
Many credit Queen Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese noble woman, for making tea popular with the English aristocracy when she married King Charles II in 1661.
At the time, Great Britain was in the midst of expanding its colonial influence and becoming the new dominant world power.
And as Great Britain grew, interest in tea spread around the world.
By 1700, tea in Europe sold for ten times the price of coffee and the plant was still only grown in China.
The tea trade was so lucrative that the world's fastest sailboat, the clipper ship, was born out of intense competition between Western trading companies.
All were racing to bring their tea back to Europe first to maximize their profits.
At first, Britain paid for all this Chinese tea with silver.
When that proved too expensive, they suggested trading tea for another substance, opium.
This triggered a public health problem within China as people became addicted to the drug.
Then in 1839, a Chinese official ordered his men to destroy massive British shipments of opium as a statement against Britain's influence over China.
This act triggered the First Opium War between the two nations.
Fighting raged up and down the Chinese coast until 1842 when the defeated Qing Dynasty ceded the port of Hong Kong to the British and resumed trading on unfavorable terms.
The war weakened China's global standing for over a century.
The British East India company also wanted to be able to grow tea themselves and further control the market.
So they commissioned botanist Robert Fortune to steal tea from China in a covert operation.
He disguised himself and took a perilous journey through China's mountainous tea regions, eventually smuggling tea trees and experienced tea workers into Darjeeling, India.
From there, the plant spread further still, helping drive tea's rapid growth as an everyday commodity.
Today, tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water, and from sugary Turkish Rize tea, to salty Tibetan butter tea, there are almost as many ways of preparing the beverage as there are cultures on the globe.
As I have been recently hearing about disturbing sad news, I often think about the idea of loving yourself.
We have been taught to love other people as an important value, but I think loving our own selves hasn't been considered to be an issue worth talking about.
Why?
It may be because it's too obvious, that we love ourselves, to take up the issue and stress the importance.
All of us can't avoid being egoistic, sometimes.
We want to have things our own way.
If everything in our life is going well, can we love ourselves?
Not necessarily so.
The reason why it's hard to discuss "self-love" may be that it has a kind of a narcissistic whiff and sounds a little icky to people.
If we saw somebody looking in the mirror, saying, "How I love myself!
Don't bother me!"...
I am not talking about myself!
We would want to say, "Suit yourself!
Keep looking in the mirror."
I want to say it doesn't have to be like that, to love ourselves.
Life isn't always easy.
It would be, of course, nice if we were happy all our life.
But in our life, many people might say, "I hate you," or "I wish you would disappear from this world."
Going through the agony, we ultimately reach the realization that we have to love ourselves in the sense of taking responsibility for ourselves and looking after ourselves.
If, when people tell us, "I hate you," we respond to it by saying, "Yes, I hate myself, too," the moment we said so, I'm sure we would lose our desire to go on living.
I've felt the need for that kind of attitude more than once myself.
Since we don't know what will happen in the future, the kind of situation in which we have to love ourselves might arise again, in the sense of needing to take care of ourselves.
It would be wonderful if you could live a trouble-free life.
For a quite long time, I couldn't figure out what kind of person I was.
When I did something good for others, people showed appreciation to me, and then I thought I was basically a pretty good person.
Like that, I had occasions that made me feel relieved.
On the other hand, when I would really hurt someone, I was very disappointed in myself, feeling like I was fundamentally a cruel person.
To love ourselves actually may be harder than to love any other person, because we know ourselves thoroughly, through and through.
Looking back at all we have done in the past, and remembering: "Boy, I did such things as this and that..."
And not only the good things we've done, but unpleasant things we've done also come housetimothy@example.com.
Can we love ourselves with knowing all those sides of us?
At this point, I thought, in our thought process, there must be something fundamentally wrong.
Then, I started by doing this to change it: First, I honestly looked back at myself, seeing a pretty good person, or one not so good.
And for the time being, I accepted all my "selves," good or bad.
Instead of being judgmental about myself, thinking "I may be a nice guy at heart," or "I may be basically a cruel person," "Which one is really me?"
I decided to accept all my "selves" as parts of myself, and thought about why I had so many varied "selves" in this one person.
To sum it up, it's in response to different people and different situations.
When I talk to my grandmother, I am very relaxed.
When I talk to people at work, I may sound serious, putting on a serious look, talking about difficult things.
When I talk to somebody who rubs me the wrong way, you can bet the tone of my voice can't be this calm.
I try not to come into contact with such a person in the first place.
In any case, each "self" of mine has its own uniqueness.
To love each "self" of mine equally in order to love myself may be very difficult, but I can say, "I love my 'self' when I am with this person.
I become somebody whom I even abhor when I am with that person.
But I like my 'self' pretty well when I am with this particular person.
I am not too bad."
In fact, to love ourselves may not be that hard after all.
Take romance.
Suppose there are two girls, and I have feelings toward both of them.
One day I have a date with one of them, and have dinner with her.
I enjoy being with her, talking a lot, frequently interjecting jokes, smiling at each other, and we interact with each other very well.
Then suddenly I notice it's the time for the last train.
I rush to the train station to catch the last one.
And at home, I'm happy with myself.
As for the other girl, I also like her, but during our date, I can't talk or joke that much...
And we often get awkward silences.
I feel like a miserable loser.
I don't feel like going on with her, so after having dinner, we say goodbye to each other.
After the two dates, if I were asked which one I would rather see again, I would choose the first one without hesitation.
There's no doubt I like her, but rather because I like my "self" when I am with her.
I enjoy my "self" when I am with her, and find life worth living in the life of that "self" of mine.
The definition of "love" may be to love somebody else, this surely is not wrong, but what I would like to add to it is: Rather, to love means, with the help of the person we love, for us to be able to love ourselves.
That's what I'd like to think.
"I can reveal my inner self as I wish without any difficulties, being true to myself, when I am with that person, and it will never happen with anybody else."
Unfortunately, some of our relationships come to end.
Some end out of disputes.
Others end due to death.
When we grieve over losing our loved ones, we miss the voice and hug of the person, and many other things, but I wonder if we may rather be grieving over losing the life of our "self" who lived with that person, thinking: "Only with them could I talk freely like that.
Only with them could I be honest with myself.
Only with them could I be silly like that.
But that person is gone now, and I can't live the life of that 'self' of mine I love any longer."
I wonder if that is what we really grieve over.
And, of course, vice versa.
If somebody says to me, "I love you," I will be euphoric, yelling, "Yes!"
But if I were told, "Thanks to you, I come to love myself," or "I love myself when I'm with you more than when I am with anybody else," that would be something which strikes my heart more.
That my existence validates one person's existence that way moves me with a deep joy, something poignant.
Each time when we find one "self" we love, we may be finding our foothold we need to go on living.
In our life, we feel like we need to be loved by many people, a certain percentage of people in our groups, in our class, our workplace.
But not that many of those "selves" we love may be necessary.
If we find two or three of our "selves" we love in ourselves, we can go on with those as our foothold.
Five or six may be more than enough.
You may think you only have 3 friends in your class at school or you may think three that many friends who help you like yourself.
All depends on how you take it.
To love ourselves doesn't mean saying: "I am crazy about myself," looking into a mirror, but, instead, it means, with the help of or via somebody else, for us to come to love ourselves.
It's probably where we start really loving ourselves.
And that is why, as we feel the need, we love others as indispensable individuals.
That's all I want to say.
Thank you.
(Applause)