The worst thing about living in a 3D spacetime continuum is how boring the explanations are for it. Having taken almost a year to finish Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes – an experience that felt longer than the creation of the universe – I’ve always been on the lookout for scientists and cosmic experts who can give me an insight into what this thing we call “reality” actually is.
I hoped the internet would allow knowledge to travel at warp-speed, enabling my brain to consume information as easily as black holes do galaxies, but found myself confronting the snore-inducing perorations of science geeks who managed to extend their insights on string theory into infinity. Most video platforms allow their experts too much time to show off their intelligence, but that approach quickly drains my enthusiasm. Luckily if, like me, you like your science fast and fun, the video-sharing network TikTok can be an unexpected starburst of scientific know-how.
Using simple hashtags to search for the most useful user-generated videos, my learning began. “Everything is connected!” enthused @kerwinrae over stellar visuals, stating that quantum theory dictates that everything breaks down into “nothing but strings” that are laid down like a web over the entire universe. “Pluck a string on Mars,” he says, “and it’s going to vibrate on earth.” In less than a minute, I realised that God is simply a great guitarist, like an ethereal Jimi Hendrix ecstatically playing everything into being.
Over a slow Richard Rodgers jazz song, @physicsdude gave me a quick but very comforting chalkboard introduction to the four basic principles of physical reality – these four being the only reactions that cannot be broken down into simpler reactions. Now I know electromagnetism is the reason everything has a solid structure, while the strong force keeps those crazy quarks in order in the nucleus of an atom; the weak force, however, is responsible for all nuclear decay. Gravity, I came to understand, is simply “the curvature of spacetime” – but it could be a particle, though that hasn’t been observed yet.
The best thing about TikTok is how it captures the “gee-whizz!” enthusiasm that should accompany the understanding of the universe. Given that it’s the greatest creation of all time, you’d think people would discuss it with more excitement than the wearied waffling that is the usual online lecture. Giving users of Tiktok only 60 seconds to get their messages across really helps the material to be easily digested.
Another TikTok user, @weirdpioneer – who describes herself as a wife, mother and psychologist – conveys her awestruck fascination with the universe with a special-effects video of the epigeneticist Bruce H Lipton jiving on the structure of existence. Matter, he enthuses, “is just an illusion of energy and light … there is nothing physical”. Physicists, he argues, have broken down the atom to find that, at its fundamental core, “there is nothing material at all – it’s an energy vortex”. The existential implications of this were mind-blowing. “According to quantum physics,” Lipton says, we’re not physical but merely “energy vortices” – just a flicker of the cosmic light-switch, basically.
I was saved from the depression that might have accompanied this recognition of my irrelevance by science communicator Athena Brensberger. She makes sure she is easily comprehensible with short, joyous flashes of insight, such as into the “super position” taken by quarks – those particles that make up the particles that make up atoms.
While anything bigger than a quark has to have a fixed location in time and space, quarks can occupy two places at once – until, that is, you observe them, when, like naughty children on being discovered, they stop dead in one place. The fundamental cheekiness of reality – hedging its bets until forced to decide what it is by a grownup – is a bit like my romantic history, and made me relate to the universe a lot more. My commitment issues, I can explain to my next girlfriend, are just the underlying fickle nature of the cosmos playing out through human experience.
The universe is a big and complex place, and I’m just a small speck in one tiny corner of it. I could spend my whole life studying, but would only grasp the merest fragment of it.
In many ways, TikTok is the ideal platform for a layperson to tackle the big questions of existence, keeping me interested while never pretending to arrive at an answer. I might never entirely understand existence but I can always take joy in it, and TikTok seems to be the ideal platform for that.
Explore the world of TikTok and discover the joy of learning new things in shorter bursts. What will you #LearnOnTikTok?
