Name: 【TED】David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes (The history of our world in 18 minutes | David Christian)
Uploaded: 2015-11-29T06:57:11.000Z
Duration: 17 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy.

Because you may notice that what's actually happening

And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated.

And now they're going to be poured back into the egg.

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,

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

And that's why that video feels a bit strange.

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

there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier,

just right for the creation of complexity.

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 Goldilocks conditions get more stringent,

and it's more difficult to create complexity.

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.

that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible.

You have to survey the whole history of the universe.

Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can

and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are.

The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom.

It contains everything that's in today's universe,

but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur.

energy itself shatters into distinct forces

And energy does something else quite magical:

And all of that happens in the first second.

That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet.

And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium.

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【TED】David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes (The history of our world in 18 minutes | David Christian)

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