I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy.
Because you may notice that what's actually happening
is that the egg is unscrambling itself.
And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated.
And now they're going to be poured back into the egg.
And we all know in our heart of hearts
that this is not the way the universe works.
A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush.
An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing
that can create even more sophisticated things,
And we know in our heart of hearts
that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity.
is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics,
the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.
is that the general tendency of the universe
is to move from order and structure
to lack of order, lack of structure --
And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us.
What we see around us is staggering complexity.
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone,
there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded.
That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth.
And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals,
who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet
into a global system of stupendous complexity.
in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics,
to generate the sort of complexity I've described,
the sort of complexity represented by you and me
the universe can create complexity,
there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier,
calls "Goldilocks conditions" --
just right for the creation of complexity.
And slightly more complex things appear.
And where you have slightly more complex things,
you can get slightly more complex things.
And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage.
because it creates the impression of something utterly new
appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe.
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments.
And at each threshold, the going gets tougher.
The complex things get more fragile,
the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent,
and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures,
desperately need to know this story
of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law,
and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.
And that's the story that we tell in big history.
But to do it, you have do something
that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible.
You have to survey the whole history of the universe.
(Laughter)
Let's begin by winding the timeline back
There's not even time or space.
Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can
and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are.
bang!
A universe appears, an entire universe.
And we've crossed our first threshold.
The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom.
It contains everything that's in today's universe,
so you can imagine, it's busting.
And it's expanding at incredible speed.
And at first, it's just a blur,
but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur.
energy itself shatters into distinct forces
including electromagnetism and gravity.
And energy does something else quite magical:
quarks that will create protons
and leptons that include electrons.
And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years.
That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet.
And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium.
Now I want to pause for a moment,
380,000 years after the origins of the universe,
because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage.
We know above all that it was extremely simple.
It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms,
They're really a sort of cosmic mush.
But that's not completely true.
by satellites such as the WMAP satellite
there are just tiny differences in that background.
the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler
but it was enough for the universe to move on
to the next stage of building complexity.
Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff.
So where you get slightly denser areas,
gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms.
So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds.
gravity gets more powerful as density increases,
the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud,
the temperature crosses the threshold temperature
there's a huge release of energy,
and --
bam!
From about 200 million years after the Big Bang,
stars begin to appear all through the universe,
And the universe is now significantly more interesting
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions
for crossing two new thresholds.
they create temperatures so high
that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations,
to form all the elements of the periodic table.
If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring,
it was forged in a supernova explosion.
So now the universe is chemically more complex.
And in a chemically more complex universe,
it's possible to make more things.
And what starts happening is that, around young suns,
all these elements combine, they swirl around,
the energy of the star stirs them around,
they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes,
they form rocks, they form asteroids,
and eventually, they form planets and moons.
And that is how our solar system was formed,
four and a half billion years ago.
Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars
because they contain a much greater diversity of materials.
So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile,
significantly more vulnerable,
but they're also much more creative
and much more capable of generating further complexity.
I'm talking, of course, about living organisms.
Living organisms are created by chemistry.
We are huge packages of chemicals.
So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force.
That operates over smaller scales than gravity,
which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets.
Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry?
What are the Goldilocks conditions?
In the center of a star, there's so much energy
that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again.
there's so little energy that atoms can't combine.
What you want is just the right amount,
and planets, it turns out, are just right,
because they're close to stars, but not too close.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements,
and you need liquids, such as water.
Why?
Well, in gases, atoms move past each other so fast
atoms are stuck together, they can't move.
and link up to form molecules.
Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions?
and our early Earth was almost perfect.
It was just the right distance from its star
to contain huge oceans of liquid water.
And deep beneath those oceans,
at cracks in the Earth's crust,
you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth,
and you've got a great diversity of elements.
So at those deep oceanic vents,
fantastic chemistry began to happen,
and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry.
How do you stabilize those huge molecules
Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick.
You don't stabilize the individual;
the thing that carries information,
and you allow the template to copy itself.
And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule
that contains that information.
You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA.
Each rung contains information.
So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms.
and scatters the templates through the ocean.
Notice that information has become part of our story.
The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections.
As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs,
And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning.
It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms
because some of those errors work.
and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity.
And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth,
living organisms have been relatively simple --
But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity.
Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago,
multi-celled organisms appear.
you get amphibia, you get reptiles,
and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs.
And occasionally, there are disasters.
creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war,
and the dinosaurs were wiped out.
Terrible news for the dinosaurs,
but great news for our mammalian ancestors,
in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs.
And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse
that began 65 million years ago
with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago.
And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story.
We've seen that DNA learns in a sense,
DNA accumulates information through random errors,
some of which just happen to work.
But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning:
it had produced organisms with brains,
and those organisms can learn in real time.
They accumulate information, they learn.
The sad thing is, when they die,
the information dies with them.
Now what makes humans different is human language.
We are blessed with a language, a system of communication,
that we can share what we've learned with such precision
that it can accumulate in the collective memory.
it can outlast the individuals who learned that information,
and it can accumulate from generation to generation.
And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful,
and that's why we have a history.
We seem to be the only species in four billion years
I call this ability collective learning.
We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history.
We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa,
but then you see humans migrating into new environments,
into desert lands, into jungles,
into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia --
tough, tough environment --
into the Americas, into Australasia.
Each migration involved learning --
learning new ways of exploiting the environment,
new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
exploiting a sudden change in global climate
with the end of the last ice age,
Farming was an energy bonanza.
And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied.
Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected.
And then from about 500 years ago,
humans began to link up globally
through shipping, through trains,
through telegraph, through the Internet,
until now we seem to form a single global brain
of almost seven billion individuals.
And that brain is learning at warp speed.
And in the last 200 years, something else has happened.
We've stumbled on another energy bonanza
So fossil fuels and collective learning together
explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
So --
back at the convention center.
We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years.
I hope you agree this is a powerful story.
And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role.
But it also contains warnings.
Collective learning is a very, very powerful force,
and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it.
I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England,
living through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a few days, the entire biosphere
seemed to be on the verge of destruction.
And the same weapons are still here,
If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.
We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate
that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions
that made it possible for human civilizations
to flourish over the last 10,000 years.
is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility
but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
and his friends and his generation,
to know the story of big history,
that they understand both the challenges that face us
and the opportunities that face us.
are building a free, online syllabus
for high-school students throughout the world.
will be a vital intellectual tool for them,
and also the huge opportunities
ahead of them at this threshold moment
in the history of our beautiful planet.
I thank you for your attention.
(Applause)