Original subtitles

Watch your head.

Nice.

This is beautiful.

We've gotten lucky here.

We've seen them before,

but they bloom only in certain conditions,

when the water level is very low.

So to have stumbled upon a bloom

of this exciting magnitude

is really... it's lucky.

So, I'm really excited.

It's kind of surprisingly hard to catch.

It's like you almost don't feel it.

These strange, squiggly slimes

form on the walls.

And these are really...

They're probably the most beautiful slime I've ever seen.

We don't understand how they form.

It's still a mystery,

but we know they're made by life.

This question of how much of the universe is understood

is very much a moving target.

Because as we are able to stand in a new place,

because we've learned something new,

we then see other wonders

that were not even visible to us before.

Wait, wait, wait...

Let us in.

That's forbidden.

Do I get points for pedestrians?

How can this be the right way?

-[horn honks] -Yeah, yeah.

He's late for lunch.

That's why he's impatient. He's late for lunch.

We are headed for physics lab

to talk to a physicist

in the physicist habitat,

which is always interesting to see, you know,

an organism in its natural habitat.

So, I'm a microbiologist

and I'm hoping that the physicist

will be able to communicate

what he does and why,

in terms that I can understand.

I'd like to keep an open mind about this.

[speaking Italian]

[Italian]

You need to fill in some forms.

-So the disclaimer... -I love forms. I love forms.

Okay, and then we can eat some lunch in the cafeteria.

Oh my God, look at him! He's awesome.

The hair.

Galileo, Newton...

D'Angelo.

[Davide] Okay, dark matter is something,

we do not know what it is.

We believe the dark matter is there,

but we have never detected it.

It's good, this cafeteria?

It's better than the average cafeterias, I would say.

Buongiorno. Ciao.

So I'm sorry, but you won't like this lunch much.

[Jennifer speaks Italian]

-What is dark matter? -Okay. We don't know.

[laughs] That's great. That's why it's called dark.

[Davide] Exactly.

Do you know we have dark matter

in microbiology too?

That's still the word.

What do you use it for?

Well, we...

We have some evidence that there are something like

35 trillion microbial species.

Mm-hmm.

And we've met about...

a million?

Mm-hmm.

So the rest is dark matter.

-Okay. -Yeah, we stole it.

I admit it.

Yeah. I think it makes sense,

because we...

What we call dark matter is

some kind of new particle

which we haven't discovered yet.

[Jennifer] So, the hypothesis is

that dark matter is out there

because it's consistent with all of our observations.

-[Davide] Exactly. -And so,

it might not be out there.

But we think it is,

-because of what we... -I think we detect it.

-We cannot say we are sure. -Uh-huh.

All observations point in that direction.

-This is very mysterious. -This is very mysterious, yes.

[Davide] Dark matter is one of the big unknowns

in particle physics.

Of all matter that should be out there,

about 85% of this is invisible.

These particles are moving through us,

through our bodies while we're talking

and most of them just go without any interaction.

So how are you going to find it?

How are you going to detect it?

So...

why are we here?

[chuckles] Why are we here?

We are here, under about

1,800 meters of rock.

We are deep underground because all the experiments here,

whether they look for dark matter or for neutrino

or for any other kind of rare event,

they need to be shielded from the cosmic radiation.

There are protons or ions

that heat the atmosphere.

They create a shower of particles

that hit us above ground.

And the mountain is a filter for this.

So if you go here, you have the so-called cosmic silence.

-Cosmic silence? -Cosmic silence.

We're here in the cosmic silence under the mountain.

I love that.

So, you can't hear the cosmic rays here.

I would love to see the new detector.

Okay.

-It's not ready yet. -Okay.

So this is your new experiment?

Yes. This is a prototype still.

It will prove the old detector concept.

Okay, so this dark matter that we think exists,

but we're not that sure...

The crystal that you're going to put inside here

is going to help you?

It's going to be the best possible detector

-that you know how to build? -Yes.

There's crystals inside there.

How do you see what the crystal is seeing?

How does the crystal talk to you on the outside?

It emits light, and then you have

two photomultipliers on each side.

Then you read the photomultipliers...

-They go out? -...that go out to here.

It's very simple.

[chuckles]

Yeah. See, the lights?

My friend, the dark matter physicist.

What's simpler than that?

[Jennifer] I keep having to, like, loosen my helmet,

'cause my head is getting bigger by the minute.

I...I'm...

I have to say that I was starting from

pretty much zero on dark matter.

So, this is what I understand about how it works.

We are rotating within a sea of dark matter particles.

There is a, uh...

container?

So we build a,

a detector, which is a...

which, whose core is a...

Special, very carefully grown crystal.

A sodium iodide crystal.

When the crystal gets hit

by this dark matter particle...

You see a tiny flash of light.

That light is going to be detected by these devices

that are sticking into the edge of the container.

And those devices then translate the light

into an electronic pulse that goes to a computer

that says, "Hey, dark matter particle.

I'm here."

So, if you just had to...

I know this is not what we do but,

if you just had to guess,

where are the...

where is the dark matter?

-Can you guess? -No.

-You would not... -Science is not about guessing.

I know, I know. It's not about guessing.

But I mean, sometimes I dream about a result that I might get.

I can tell you this. So here, you also see the models.

The models

foresee dark matter in this area here.

Extra dimensions models foresee

dark matter in this area here.

-These other guys, it's going to be here, so...

-So we have no idea.

Some other guys would place it here, so we have no idea.

In my field, I would say 10 years ago,

if you asked me

where would we be now today,

I would've had a very hard time answering.

Because we're really... We're not just...

We're not just... We're not just...

We're not just filling in the details.

We're looking into some dark abyss

where we just can't see very far in.

And depending on where the flashlight shines first,

we might go a different direction completely.

So, it's very hard when you're

right on the edge of this big unknown.

It's very hard to say where

the science is going to go next.

Is that where

dark matter physics is now, or is it...

Is there something analogous?

We are surely on the verge of something.

We don't know what it is.

[Davide] It's so unbelievable that there is

so much more matter in the universe

than we have realized so far.

We don't know what it is. I mean, it's a...

We need to find out if this is true.

If there's really dark matter out there,

if there is another explanation which we haven't thought about,

because science is also this.

Sometimes you spend

several years looking for something,

and then in the end, it's not there,

and you have to change

the way you were thinking of things.

Okay, I'm going to the toilet.

Do you want to shoot that too?

Oh, look at that.

You guys! This is incredible!

These are stalactites.

Do you see? It's a soda straw.

This place wasn't here 20 years ago.

-So it cannot be. -No, it can be.

-Can it? -I think, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I'd like to know what it's made out of.

It could be salt,

and then it can grow very fast.

See, all these stains?

They're all all light-harvesting microbes.

All of them.

The red color is one kind.

The dark color is another kind,

The green one is another one.

[Davide] So you have flavors, like neutrinos?

-Flavors of microbes? -Yes.

-We have flavors of microbes. -About how many do you have?

We have 35 trillion flavors.

Okay, that's more than... than the three flavors we have.

-Yeah. -I guess.

Yours are sterile or not?

-Ours are not sterile. -Not sterile?

No, we don't know any sterile flavors yet.

That could be, that would be...

Oh, that's an interesting question.

There's this problem in... in biology

where... we think all the life,

all of the 30 trillion species

have descended from a common ancestor.

But... and that means

it's easy for us to see them,

because we know what to look for.

But if there were another ancestor...

we wouldn't be able to see it

'cause we don't know what to look for.

[Jennifer] How long have we been looking for this stuff?

This dark matter?

How long have we been looking for it?

[Davide] At least 20 years.

From the research, many more.

Okay, so that's... Yeah.

Of course, if you see dark matter, you win

the Nobel Prize.

But if you don't, you're going to make

-a good publication anyhow. -You'll still feel good.

So what makes you different?

What makes you willing to search after something

-that we don't even really know exists?

-It must be there. Come on.

Where do you get that, though?

[Davide] Science is a journey

to take you somewhere where you've not been before.

Some people prefer to concentrate on life sciences.

Some others prefer to understand

how the universe was built.

I mean, I've studied only physics, so I don't know

what my mind would be if I had studied a different subject.

I feel absurd.

Those two days in Gran Sasso

weren't enough to get used to this.

[man] Where are we going now?

You mean today?

I don't have the faintest idea.

I want to be shocked.

-Hey. -Hi! Davide.

-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you, yeah.

-So you're Davide? -Yeah.

-You know I'm a psychologist? -Yeah, I know.

But I don't know what you do to study.

So, I really have no idea.

I can imagine something like the Ghostbusters scene

where you show me cards and I have to guess which one...

Yeah, no. Don't worry.

[Axel] My main research interest is consciousness.

How and why the biological activity of the brain

produces conscious experience.

So, Professor...

No, I'm not going to psychoanalyze you.

We work mostly on consciousness.

Consciousness has been described

as one of the most significant problems

of the 21st century,

on a par with the origins of the universe

and the origins of life and these super big questions.

It really remains a sort of mystery

to figure out how the biological activity of the brain

produces minds, basically mental states.

One of the difficulties with studying consciousness

is that it is a private phenomenon.

I know I'm conscious.

I think you are conscious, because you behave in ways

because you behave in ways that I...

expect to be associated with consciousness,

even though I cannot really define it.

But, the point is I do not have access

to your own mental states, right?

So, we have two experiments planned.

You're not going to stick pins through my head, no?

No, but... But if you're willing,

we're going to put electrodes around your head.

Oh yeah. Why not?

See if you can make a...

robotic hand move by your thoughts.

Ready?

I always thought I would've donated my brain to science.

[Axel] What we're trying to do here, through learning

what thoughts to imagine

so that the hand will move,

what the distinction is between thinking that

and thinking something else where it doesn't move,

and so on and so forth.

The argument, the crucial argument,

is that this is not built in.

During your development, you have to learn.

Your brain has to learn to interact with your body.

Agency is part of what it means to be conscious.

Each three seconds,

you will see a red arrow, pointing to the right,

appearing on the screen.

And when you see this red arrow,

you have to imagine a movement.

Given that this is a right robotic hand,

it's better if you imagine movement of the right hand.

[motor whirring]

This one is intentional.

This one is intentional.

This one, not.

-Is that okay? -Yeah.

I would like to spend here a week and master this thing.

Yeah, there's lots of interesting physics

questions to be asked.

I'd like to explore all the different movements.

Do you now feel you have some control over that hand?

-Partial. -Yeah?

Partial.

So that's about sense of agency reading.

-But there's also... -If I can really focus,

in a sense of... excluding any noise,

Then, I get like...

four of five movements right.

But then, when I start thinking about what's going on...

-Yeah. It's fragile. -It's fragile, then I lose it.

But, so the idea is that it gets less and less fragile,

or more and more robust.

That's true. Even in these ten minutes...

As expertise goes on.

Until the point where...

you don't have to do anything special.

Basically, your...

All this effortful thinking

that you're doing just goes away,

and you just will the finger to move and it moves.

And that's what happens.

That is what happens with natural bodies,

with our own bodies.

It's important in this context to remember that

consciousness is not one thing, right?

It's different kinds of mechanisms

which together characterize

the adult human mind,

which we know is a conscious mind.

If you're an empirically-oriented scientist,

like I am,

you want to do experiments.

So, the challenge is to figure out

how we can explore

more mental states from a scientific perspective.

All that happens in our mental life,

it all comes from the biological activity of the brain.

And the brain is this incredibly complex organ

composed of about 88 billion neurons.

Each neuron has a connection with about

10,000 other neurons.

How do you design experiments

that will help us understand

this relationship between the mind and the body?

You are trying to solve this problem, like,

"How do I design the algorithm?

-Or you know, do one?" -It's creative. Yes.

Yeah, it's really creative.

But, I wake up at night thinking about it.

There's almost nothing else.

You can't go to sleep if you have that.

Exactly.

So you're a nerd too? Yeah!

100 percent.

I think this laboratory

is doing really interesting things.

It's going through very basic questions

about what actually is the definition of consciousness,

of self-awareness.

I never knew that there was somebody

tackling these questions

from a... with a real experimental point.

So this is far more

experimental than I expected.

I said, "Okay, these guys are psychologists.

They're going to talk all the time. That will be it."

That's not the case.

They have... They perform measurements.

They discuss data.

I think we're on the same page with Axel.

I mean, really.

[Axel] So dark matter has mass?

Dark matter must have mass. Yes, must be massive.

So mass you can detect, right?

Yes.

-Yes, yes, yes. -That's all we know it is.

That's how we know it's there.

But...so where is it?

It's going through us.

This is the hypothesis.

-Okay. -So, the...

So this place is full of dark matter?

Yeah, it's like neutrinos in a way.

-Cheers. -Cheers!

We're the only ones drinking.

[Davide] Well, what I'm afraid of, of course,

is that there is no dark matter out there.

-Because it's... -How is that even a possibility?

If there is no dark matter out there,

we need to think really hard

what's the other explanation.

-But... -And your career is over.

No! I mean...

-It's never over. -No, no. It's never over.

-You throw something down... -Of course! That's the thing.

-That's the thing. -When it violates expectations.

Well, that is what makes science really exciting.

Right? Whatever happens happens.

There's always something to think about,

or theorize about, or understand.

So, if there is no dark matter indeed...

You know, that's what it is.

Well, I'm not worried that there's no consciousness.

Right? That's a problem I don't have.

-Yeah. -Right?

I know there is consciousness.

If there's one worry, it's that...

You know, we're not making

sufficiently fast progress

to truly understand how it works.

But what is defining how

fast enough is fast enough?

I don't know. In my lifetime, maybe?

You know?

That's sort of worrying.

I don't know. Sometimes I feel

that we're sort of really far off.

As an individual, you've done that for 10 or 15 years.

You feel, "Okay, We're getting there.

We're getting there!" We're not. You know?

I know exactly what you mean.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure.

[Axel] Of course, everybody's dream is to make,

as a scientist,

is to make a big discovery, you know?

And to... To truly advance the field.

I don't think it's going to be me. I mean, you know? But...

There's something exciting about, as an individual

feeling connected to these really big issues.

This is what we want to do.

We want to try to solve the hardest problems.

Why would we be here if not to do that?

[man] Is there gonna be a text?

That says "Dr. Luke McKay, Astrobiologist,"

at the bottom of the screen?

[man] Is that what you'd like? What would you have it say?

[Luke] I mean...

What keeps me up at night is...

are we alone?

The microbes that I study in hot springs

clearly defining the boundary conditions

of life on Earth,

is kind of paramount to understanding

where life could be in space.

You know the term shotgun?

No. Well, I know what a shotgun is.

Well, that's from the olden days

when people would ride horse and wagon.

-And you would be out... -There was a guy with a shotgun?

We'd be on the frontier,

and the guy riding shotgun would be ready for the bandits.

-All right. -So you ride next to the driver.

This is how you would get to Burning Man...

I'm told. I've never been.

And now you're too old.

And now I'm too old.

So the Earth's crust sort of is this

crust layer on top of everything,

and then wherever there's kind of a puncture

or a crack, a hole in that...

-You get this. -Is where you get this.

This whole...

This whole region is geo-thermally active.

But you can see in this entire area,

its connection to the subsurface world.

-That sounds spooky. -Yeah.

Connection to the subsurface world.

So this is it? There's fumes coming out of it.

Oh yeah. Look at that!

Just quickly, we'll give you a spiel

about safety around hot springs.

When a lot of people hear the word "hot spring,"

they think of something that you can get in

and have a nice time in.

But, the hot springs that we

typically associate with and study

are way too hot for that.

-And... -And you could go in once.

-But only once. -And you'll never come out.

You won't come out the same.

[Axel] Is there anything to like about this place?

I mean there's snakes, fumes...

danger, temperature...

-That's exactly the question. -That's exactly...

What is there to like about this place?

-We love this place. -Yeah.

-This kind of place. -Yeah.

So the extremophiles are you guys?

Yeah. We both are. Wherever there's something.

We're the extremophile of philes.

So, this is a little bit wet here.

It's getting more wet.

-Are you guys okay? -I'm okay.

All right, let's just do it.

It's going to get wet, a little wetter here.

You just turn that on, I'll drop the end of it in

and let me know what that says.

I'm interested in what the microbial community is here.

So the first thing I want to do is figure out

what's the temperature range and what's the Ph.

-It's hot enough. -Hot enough!

Great. Now, that should slowly climb.

But you let me know when...

-It turns pretty quickly. -...it maxes out.

The temperature is 72.2 Celsius.

We can start collecting.

It's really quiet. You can feel it complaining.

Yeah, so there they are. Our friends.

At this point, I don't know who lives here.

These are sediment samples

taken from the edge of this hot spring.

We'll take these back on dry ice, to the lab

and we'll perform what we call a DNA extraction

to see what sort of novel, unknown

microorganisms might live in this environment.

While I feel strongly that life exists in outer space,

it is technically an unknown.

This is probably what links my work

to Axel's in a way.

What would it be?

What would their equivalent of a brain be?

What would their equivalent of consciousness be?

There you go! Nice.

-All right. Cool. -Nice.

Yeah, okay. Now finish everything else.

Yeah.

Now you just kind of unravel them.

They'll kind of tell you what they want to do.

Do you think the universe is knowable?

I don't know. That's a question...

-for a physicist, I guess. -Yeah.

-Dark matter is a great example. -Yeah.

This very concept that does not interact with light...

We have no way of perceiving it,

that feels really weird to me, you know?

That there's... That there's, I don't know.

Matter around here, maybe? That...

Yeah, yeah.

We have no way of perceiving.

In a way, we sort of forget

that we're always limited by our own senses, right?

Right here... Human beings.

-[Axel] Okay. -Okay. That's a human.

So, if you had to guess

where on this tree of life would be a palm tree,

where would you point?

Well, here. No?

-Right here? -Yeah. Right there.

-A palm tree? -Yeah.

Why? Why would it be there?

Because I didn't draw every branch of the tree of life.

-Okay. Yeah. -Right?

So, there's more than... What is this, 50 branches?

There's more than that many organisms on earth, right?

I'm drawing these major groups, okay?

So if you had a guess

where a fungus would be...

Well...here?

Now you know, now you know.

Yeast would be here, or maybe back here.

Insects, flowers...

When we think of the diversity of life,

we don't think anywhere close

to the total diversity of life.

-This is a domain. -Point well taken.

This is a domain called eukarya.

Okay.

And that's our domain, Eukaryotes.

And then, this... is archaea,

actually...

which is what I'm very interested in.

-Okay. -And this...

is bacteria.

Wow. You know what?

You just, you sort of just drew a brain.

I can't believe it. We're back to brains, you know?

Can you show me where the hippocampus is?

Oh, it would be here.

It would be here in the blue.

But, the point is amazing. You know?

The point you're making about diversity

and how we think about it.

-Yeah, exactly. -And all this unknown bit,

that nobody sees, in fact.

The point that I want to make

is that even microbiologists

know very little about bacteria and archaea.

Historically, our knowledge of microbiology

is based on this sliver of the total diversity of life.

And it wasn't until DNA sequencing

that we started to discover all of this

enormous majority of life that's unknown.

Let me get this started,

then I'm going to let you do the fun part.

Why don't you put two scoops in?

Come here.

There's a very dark, tiny bit that I'm interested in.

-We're going to shake it. -Okay.

Those beads are going to shear the cells,

and that's going to spill the DNA.

And... We put them inside here.

It's a centrifuge, so it spins things very quickly.

But it's an ultra centrifuge.

So it spins things really, really fast.

[Axel] You want to be really sober

when you're looking at this.

-Start to feel a little wobbly? -It's like fireworks. Yeah.

No, no, no. But I mean, it's...

so colorful and so...

literally full of life.

Each of these brightly fluorescing squiggles

is a different type of bacteria,

or maybe the same.

Then, if we change it...

to green, now we're looking at the archaea again,

and you see in the same hot spring,

the same sediments from the banks of a hot spring.

This is many more archaea in that same hot spring.

Yeah, it's a whole universe in a single drop.

Exactly.

And it looks strangely similar to the universe.

Well, you know, I wasn't going to say that, but...

-I'll stop with the analogies. -Exactly.

Yes, it is. It does.

[Luke] It's really cool to have that perspective of

peering down so closely

and focusing on microbial life.

At the same time, you have this

visual connection to outer space.

[woman] I am an observer of forming stars.

I'll be looking at clouds of gas,

trying to understand these mysteries of planet formation.

This is the origin question of how we got here.

-Hey. I'm Luke McKay. -I'm Rachel Smith.

I don't even know what you look like.

I didn't know who you were.

Yeah. Well, here I am.

[Rachel] Hey, look at that!

-Some real cows they brought in. -Real cows.

-They might be robots. -Some Hollywood cows.

You never know, or holograms?

I don't believe it.

Who manages their cows that way?

I love going to the summit.

It's one of my favorite places on Earth.

Scientists all over the world want to get time on these

telescopes.

It's one of the best observing locations in the world.

The altitude can affect people in different ways

-that aren't always predictable. -How high is the summit?

[Rachel] It's about... almost 14,000 feet.

You sure this isn't a motor smell?

-Or gas pedal smell? -I think it's just dust.

-We're really ascending now. -Yeah.

[Luke] Whoa, look how high we are! Oh my God.

-We're like, above everything! -We're above everything.

I feel like a little kid on Christmas.

I feel like myself on Christmas, because I really love Christmas.

That's the altitude, but okay.

The happiness is the lack of oxygen.

Whoa!

[Rachel] You don't appreciate how big they are

until you get here.

Oh, my God.

So cool.

It's back! Yay! Oh, it's our instrument.

-C'mon! Let's get a photo. -Wow.

[Luke chuckles] This is so cool!

The primary mirror is what we're looking at right now.

And you can see our individual segments.

There are 36 segments.

-Right. -Hexagonal in shape.

It makes up that ten meter surface.

The point of the mirrors is to capture

and concentrate the light.

-Yes! -Everything comes in, boom!

-Mirrors send it to an instrument.

-Send it to a single point.

Okay, I got it.

So this is a tool, this giant mirror

with its 36 segments,

on this high location on the planet

to explore towards the center of the galaxy, essentially.

That's the coolest sentence I've ever heard, I think.

We're going to point this at the galactic center.

Yeah! We're going to get light

from this center of the galaxy.

We're going to be looking at some forming stars.

This is like a spaceship, in a way.

But instead of bringing us to space,

it brings space to us.

[Luke] There are very many analogues

between what she's doing and what I'm doing.

And the way she takes a sample

as she's capturing light from these distant places

in the galaxy,

and using different machines, basically,

to look at that light in different ways.

Something about the light can actually tell us

something about the chemistry of that zone

of star formation.

And we're going to stay up all night

'cause night is when all the good stuff happens.

[Rachel] We work hard to get this telescope time.

Writing the proposals... and it's a privilege.

One night we had bad weather, and that was it.

You could come all this way,

and we could have fog, and they close the dome.

[Luke] To be perfectly honest,

I didn't really get the whole thing of not looking into

a telescope.

I didn't understand that the telescope

is way up there, on top of the volcano,

and we're going to be down here in town

looking at computers.

Which in hindsight, makes tons of sense to me.

But I guess when I heard that I'd be doing this,

I was like, "Oh! Sweet!

We're going to be up all night,

peering through the lenses of this telescope."

And that's in fact not at all what's happening.

There's the filter to do the telescope focus.

Okay.

Those webcams look great.

It's going to be a great night.

Layer of relative humidity is quite low.

We're ready to go.

[Luke] Is this a filter wheel?

-It's exactly like a microscope. -Mm-hmm.

A microscope is a little telescope.

-Yeah. -For the tiny things.

It's a telescope for the tiny things.

It's cool. You can see it moving.

-And the stars become lines. -There it is.

That big, bright light is your first star?

[Rachel] And this is showing

how much of the light is coming through.

There's a nice bright star

without a lot of sky.

You know how we saw all that noise in some of the data?

This is really perfect.

Look at it, it's like a painting.

It's like what... we'd love this all night.

[Luke] So, we've been here for...

seven, maybe eight hours?

Wandering through the Milky Way

with the Keck telescope.

Rachel's signature of choice

is carbon monoxide.

And...

that is... that can tell you a lot.

That molecule can tell you a lot

about star formation.

And this is clearly where

my understanding breaks down.

Cue, Rachel.

[Rachel] The cloud of gas around a forming star

is made up of lots of molecules,

one of which is carbon monoxide.

Carbon monoxide is the exhaust

that comes out of your car, and it's toxic.

You don't want to breathe that stuff.

But it's actually a really important molecule

to study in our galaxy.

Carbon is a key element

to understanding how planets form

and understanding

how molecules we need for life are formed.

We don't have that full picture well understood.

The data we get from the telescope

open up a window

into something that might be going on.

How can I, as a small person,

answer a question about the causes?

You have a puzzle with a million or a billion pieces,

and we've got one piece.

Star Log...

Chapter 24, Part three.

The film crew is gone.

It's just us.

I'll do a perspective shot, like this.

-All right, but don't touch it yet.

-I'm not touching anything.

It's almost 5:15 AM, in the morning.

We're getting the last bit of data possible,

before the sun comes and ruins everything.

[Rachel] So, have you ever seen flowing lava before?

[Luke] No.

-Oh, my God! -Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

This is so cool!

-Oh, my God. -Oh, my God.

[Rachel] It's like the same thing.

We can't go to space,

but we can use telescopes and we can come here.

-It feels like... -It's like bringing space to us.

It's bringing space to us.

And this process makes me feel the same way it felt like

on Mauna Kea at Keck.

In a way, it's like looking at origins

in space, and this is an origin of our planet.

[Rachel] I would love the experience of going to space.

Seeing out a window,

being surrounded by the darkness of space,

really going off into a capsule, kind of looking out,

and just being part of the cosmos that way...

Do you want some water? Do you want some water?

I'll get you some water.

I have coconuts, pina colada.

♪ Pina colada! ♪

Yeah! Want rum?

No, coconut. We're working, right? Yeah.

If he starts licking his balls, you know...

maybe cut it there.

Hi sweetie. Are you a girl?

You might be a girl. Awwww!

From what I understand, we're going to a methane seep.

And it's cold down there, and that's all I know.

I don't know how deep it is.

I was curious and I don't know exactly what they're studying.

But I imagine it's some kind of cool community of creatures.

[woman] There's something very magical about

being down there, looking out the viewport,

seeing things that

maybe no other human has ever seen on the seafloor.

-Rachel, nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.

-How was your trip? -It was wonderful.

Really amazing.

-How was your trip out here? -Great. So far, amazing.

-Super amazing. -Great.

How many dives have you been on?

I'd been trying to figure this out the other day.

I think I have... maybe 17 dives?

It's kind of cool. When you're diving tomorrow,

just watch during the descent

and you'll see all these crazy animals.

Can you get pictures of those as you go down?

-I didn't get...yeah. -Oh, you weren't?

We weren't able to get...

Unless you go down too fast to get a picture, right?

Yeah. Usually, you're just so caught up...

In doing the actual work, right?

Yeah.

We could go into the juice bag business.

They remind me of juice boxes.

But no, you wouldn't want to drink this juice.

Well, you know. If you're a microbe...

-Unless you're a microbe. -That's good for now.

We're going to leave a little corner open so we can

-add the chemicals. -Okay.

Science made delicious.

These are all archaea?

They're not all archaea. So, it's...

It's both archaea and bacteria.

We're interested in the organisms that

eat methane and are living in the rocks.

So, people ask me this question a lot

about why I'm doing what I'm doing and stuff, so...

Is there a bigger-picture answer

that understanding the carbon usage

in the microorganisms tells you?

Yeah, well.. So methane is a really

very potent greenhouse gas, right?

We have huge stores of methane

locked up in the deep sea, all along the continental margins.

And most of that methane doesn't get into the atmosphere

because of these microorganisms

that eat it before

it's released into the water column

and up into the atmosphere.

When you dive in Alvin, do you...

And when you dive in Alvin...

-Do I get to dive for sure? -Tomorrow, it's you and me.

Oh, yes! See? Confirmation on film.

-It's you and me tomorrow. -Yes!

-It's on the schedule. -Oh, I'm so excited!

I was saying it's like going to another planet.

Yeah, it is.

It feels like another planet sometimes.

We haven't set up the ping pong table yet,

but that is a high priority for today.

-Is it really? All right. -Yes. Yes.

This is the main lab.

[Rachel] When you're down there, Victoria,

did you ever feel something like, this void?

-Or not so much? -I... No.

I feel totally at calm down there.

Yeah. I would stay, stay down there.

What would you say is the most

amazing thing about diving down?

It's one of the largest habitats,

if you want to call it that,

or environments on our planet.

We've barely begun to scratch the surface.

You said, like it's this... empty barren plane.

But when we see that, we both

see an amazing diversity.

They're tiny and they live in the mud,

and you can't see them.

And most of them are unknown, right?

And haven't been described, but they're there.

It's one of the most diverse places on Earth.

So the other thing you're going to want to do is...

the day you dive, we request that you take a shower

-before you come in the sub. -Okay.

And that you wear clean clothes

as clean as you can possibly stay.

-Is it because of how I look now?

-No, no.

We just always say that.

This is where we're going.

This is everything on the basket.

At the end, when we're running out of batteries,

that's what really defines...

-how long the dive is. -Okay.

As long as nothing else goes wrong.

Right.

Which it won't, because you said many times...

-nothing will go wrong. -Right.

-Yeah. I guarantee it. -You guarantee?

-It's your personal guarantee? -Right?

[buzzer sounds]

So because it's cold in this sub, I brought...

Everything has to be a natural fiber.

Appropriately selected long sleeve shirt.

How are you feeling today as opposed to yesterday,

about the dive?

Just excited about it. Yeah.

Why?

Do I seem nervous about it?

Should I be?

-Bon voyage! -Thank you, thank you.

All right!

[ship's horn sounds]

Oh my gosh!

[man over radio] Copy, we have a match.

Alvin, top lab...

Your launch altitude is 1,000 meters.

By type, you're clear to dive soon as we're cleared.

Copy. 1,000 meters by type,

standing by for swimsuits.

Alvin in one, Swimmers are cleared.

[man 2] Copy. Swimmers are cleared. Alvin diving.

Oh, wow! It's green.

Yeah, it's really green.

Is this the light?

No, we're in the middle of a big plankton bloom.

Am I seeing the bottom?

This is the coolest capsule. It is like being in space.

It feels more spacious, the more time we spend in it.

We have enough peanut butter sandwiches

to last at least another 30 minutes...

the rate we're eating.

Oh my! Oh, look at these mussel beds!

Wow! This is nice.

When they turn the lights on,

you see these bright red shrimp.

Which is striking, considering

the muted colors otherwise.

There's kind of a drabby color environment.

Everything just seems slower

'cause you're at such high pressure.

The connection between

the seeps and global warming is really interesting.

I hadn't thought much about that

until talking to Victoria and Erik about it.

[Victoria] Methane is a greenhouse gas

much more powerful than carbon dioxide,

in terms of its potential

to warm the planet.

And it turns out these microorganisms that we study

are using this gas

to support their life,

and also support other animals

that are found in that environment.

[Rachel] You get to the methane seep,

you see these really cool creatures.

You see the yeti crabs eat the bacteria.

The base of this food chain is

the bacteria and the methane.

[Victoria] Even though they're very small in size

and we can't see them with our naked eyes,

these microorganisms that we study

are basically the methane gatekeepers.

Hi, Rachel. This is Victoria. We were curious

how your experience has been so far.

I've been taking video of what's out my window.

And they've been getting samples,

Erik and Mike have been getting samples.

It's been really, really interesting.

It's awesome down here.

Well, bring back good samples.

Give my best to Erik.

[Erik] We're taking rocks that are right in the middle

of this flow of gas,

and we're moving them different distances away to see

if they change, depending on

how far away from the seep they are.

We're trying to learn how

this methane input

affects the entire ocean.

[Rachel] When you move past the methane seep,

the amount of life kind of vanishes pretty quickly.

You end up being in this void...

relatively fast.

I really like looking out and seeing nothing.

It's like being in a spaceship.

Welcome back.

You know, I sympathize with astronauts

who haven't walked on firm ground.

We were only there for six hours.

What was your favorite part?

I liked being inside the orb.

Like, you just imagine we're in a metal sphere in the ocean.

It's kind of a little trippy inside,

with all the red buttons.

We could be anywhere in the universe.

[Victoria] I really love looking at the samples

when they come up the seashore.

Kind of like every Alvin dive is Christmas morning.

You know? The samples come up,

and we get to go and look

at what people collected.

My hope is that eventually, one day

we'll be able to really understand

how microbial ecosystems tick.

I don't think this is

even a ten-year achievable goal.

It's been almost like this,

this long-term obsession.

The projects that I work on

are a multi-year investment.

Maybe many people

who aren't in the sciences...

A lot of times, you just see a finished product

of a nice publication.

And we rarely write in the publication,

"We spent three years doing

all of these other things before this finally worked."

-[man] Hi. -Hello, Jun!

-Victoria. Welcome to Boulder. -Very nice to meet you.

-Thank you. -Very nice meeting you.

So you live in California? You're based in California?

Yeah, I'm at Cal Tech.

-Cal Tech? -In Pasadena, yes.

Oh, I didn't know!

You didn't tell me they're from Cal Tech.

[Jun] As we know, time and space

is fundamentally connected.

We are really exploring the frontiers

of quantum physics and quantum technology.

Have you watched the movie called Interstellar?

-I haven't seen Interstellar. -It was a great movie.

These astronauts went in near the black hole.

When he came back,

the daughter was much older than him.

Yeah.

You'll see some of that in our lab tomorrow.

-Great! -It's not science fiction.

You'll actually see clocks slow down

as you get closer to the center of the earth.

No kidding?

So, that's...

It's the relativity effect that Einstein

postulated a hundred years ago.

It's called general relativity,

that time is all relative,

and when you have heavy mass,

it's going to warp the space-time around you.

-Yeah. -And time is going

to be different.

And we can test that. If you raise your watch

by a couple of centimeters, the time speeds up...

at a very small level. Only modern atomic clocks

now can detect those.

Okay, so you're saying if you move your watch a few...

centimeters distance...

-You can tell the difference. Yeah.

-You detect change?

And at what level... Like, how many...

How many decimal points

do we need to go out?

-It's 10 to the 18th. -Okay.

Yeah.

The clock is already a quantum sensor.

I actually like to call it a sensor.

It's something we use to measure.

Thanks everybody for showing up.

I would like to introduce you to Victoria.

She's a professor at Cal Tech.

The thing that impressed me most is that she dived down

5,000 meters to the bottom of the ocean

and studied ecosystems.

I'm part of the Geological and Planetary Science

division at Cal Tech.

But, today... I think we

I think we want to give her a treat.

To kind of participate in a group discussion

that's very technical on the physics side of

making clocks and understanding strontium atoms.

Go easy with the descriptions.

When things get really, really cold,

The quantum mechanics mayor

the fact that an atom is on a particle.

But a wave begins to matter.

We want a very particular frequency.

We want that to be as precise as possible.

For this upcoming clock comparison, we're going to

compare

one of these strontium optical lattice blocks

to the terbium optical lattice blocks.

This is a boring image, and that's good.

We want these images to be as boring as possible.

So hundreds of terahertz as opposed to

tens of gigahertz frequencies.

Just to make sure I understand...

So you have your ground state,

then you shine... light at a certain frequency,

and then you look at it again?

-Yes. -And then, you're seeing,

how many of those atoms then are at the excited state

and what's their spatial distribution?

Isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing?

She totally understood the clock measurements.

Welcome to our lab.

It'll be different from the ocean field.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, it will look a bit random

with lots of ancient things.

But believe me, all the cables there...

There is a purpose for all these cables.

I'll take you right into

this particular system right here.

If you look just to the right side of this lens,

into the vacuum chamber,

do you see that little ball of blue light?

-Yes! -These are 10 million atoms

of strontium fluorescing under this light.

And you can see, it's stationary.

There's nothing else in there.

It's a vacuum chamber and a light.

Those atoms provide this swing

of the pendulum when you open a grandfather clock,

that's the first thing you see,

that there's something swinging back and forth, a pendulum.

That's your pendulum right there.

The blue ball, which is oscillating

at about a million billion cycles per second.

This is actually the world's

most accurate atomic clock that's ever built.

It's called a strontium optical lattice clock.

What it means, over the entire age of the universe,

it would lose less than one second of the time.

The fact that we have this open right now

and we are filming it...

The clock won't work very well right now

because we are all here.

We are warm bodies.

We have a lot of temperature gradient.

It's probably changing these mirrors by

just such a small, tiny amount

that can cause a little bit of a misalignment.

[Victoria] The fact that they can control atoms

under super-cooled conditions, but we're looking at it

like it's just hanging like a magic ball

of light, it's wild.

So Chris and I are academic brothers.

Yes, we've known each other for

more than 20... about 25 years, I guess.

So this laboratory has one of our

optical atomic clocks in it.

Atomic clocks play, actually, a very important role,

even in driving your car in the sense that

the whole GPS constellation is full of atomic clocks.

How many people hit...

and just use a data server

to synchronize their clock?

We get something like 20 billion hits a day.

-20 billion? -Billion! Which is...

I mean, Google, I think, gets something like 7 billion hits.

Now granted, Google's requests are a little more complicated

than "What time is it?"

Computers all around the world are constantly hitting

this to re-clock, asking for what time it is.

So what we have here is

the calcium thermal beam clock.

By far the best part is when the light

is hitting the atoms, and the atoms are telling you stuff.

-Communicating. -This process just...

It really is infectious.

You can tell Chris is very passionate.

He's talking about atoms and humanizing them.

He's talking about he and she, and she is communicating back.

Once you get into this very intimate game of

getting information, you do feel like you're talking to something

almost intelligent, but... But, it's...

It's just something you can't help because you get

such an intimate working relationship with them.

Some people say, what do you need

another digit on your atomic clock for?

I get asked that question all the time.

And the answer is that time, sort of paradoxically,

is a quantity that we don't understand

philosophically very well at all. I mean...

no one really has a great sense of what time really is.

But we can measure it,

5,6,7 orders of magnitude better

than any other physical quantity.

We have not really seen any fundamental limits

-to...to clocks. -What you can't do yet, yeah.

-Right, exactly. -You can't just say, "Oh!

We'll never get better than that."

We haven't really seen that.

[Jun] To build the very best clock,

if you say, I raise my clock

from the ground up,

and the time speeds up a little bit.

As you move towards the mountain,

time will slow down.

[Victoria] Just like going to the center of the earth.

You're moving towards a bigger mass.

Exactly! It's the big mass that matters.

Could you by following how much time

slows back out the mass?

-That it's? -Yes.

Say we place a clock around Yellowstone National Park,

and see whether there will be a danger,

where there's too much mass starting to amass underneath.

Eventually, it's going to erupt.

It would be great to have that warning.

The clock will tell you that.

Measurement really is at the heart of modern science.

Everything is based on measurement.

There's still certainly many mysteries out there.

Science has always gone this way...

You use what you have understood.

You build better instrumentation and you go out there.

You measure, you find things

which is different from what you predict.

You have heard the terms of

dark matter, dark energy.

There's something beyond.

We don't know yet what that is.

There are explosions happening when the black holes merge.

There's gravitational waves being emitted

throughout the universe.

Maybe we can even hear the echo

of the Big Bang

coming back from the edge of the universe.

As you build the clock to the 19s, 20s digits,

what are we going to see?

[man] I guess I was always interested in the brain.

It still, at the end of the day, might prove to be

this mystery that we can't understand.

-Hi. Jun. Nice to meet you. -Anil Seth. Very nice

to meet you.

Thank you for coming to meet both of us.

Welcome to the beautiful Sussex countryside.

This is incredible. I've never been here.

The ocean's right here. Anil, what do you do?

I'm a neuroscientist.

Actually, my background is quite varied.

I was trained in physics, actually.

-To begin with, or I started. -I'm a physicist.

That's what I've been told. Looking forward to...

I'm just learning about you right now, as we speak.

I'm a physicist. I build instrumentations.

That's why I'm curious about

how you interface with the brain.

I think what's frustrating is

we recognize how poorly we're able to measure things.

There's always this analogy

that the current brain imaging methods that we have,

it's a little bit like having a microphone like this,

500 kilometers in the sky, and you're trying to listen

to a whole bunch of people shouting

different things in a field below.

We may still just lack

the sufficient technology, yeah.

-And it's... -You hit a resonance there

when you said it's all about measurement in science.

I have colleagues who build magnetometers,

which can be implemented.

-Oh really? -Around brains to

do brain imaging.

So, we develop instrumentation

that hopefully can be useful for you guys.

Excellent! Bring any with you?

No, I didn't.

That's the other important part...

-Welcome to the UK, of course. -Thank you very much, yeah.

See some countryside, have a drink.

And a...

-Do you just want... -Just a glass of water.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm interested about our experience

of what you might call psychological time.

-Speeding up as we get older. -It can be very subjective.

Part of the puzzle is that

we don't have time detectors

in in our brains.

I think it's one of the longstanding...

challenges

is to figure out

how the brain constructs the experience of time

given that it's got no time sensors.

What's it based on?

I'll be very interested to see what you think of this.

-And this is... -Warrick Roseboom.

Hi, I'm Jun. Nice to meet you.

He really knows much more about time than I do.

This will be the first time

we've run a person as subject

on this particular experiment.

What's going to happen is he's going to watch this video.

That will go for some duration.

If you look through the, through the magnet ball.

-Yes. -At the back, there's a screen.

It's showing the same thing you see here.

And then after that video finishes, this will come up.

You just move the joystick

until the number on the scale represents

-how long you felt it went for. -Okay.

[Anil] We are going to be recording

what his brain is doing.

The reason we're doing this is...

It's obviously nice to see inside somebody's brain

but we are trying to see

how well our model of time perception

matches to what Jun's brain is doing.

[machine beeping]

Quite loud.

Is that okay if we start the experiment now, Jun?

-Are you ready? -Yes, I'm ready.

Okay.

So now, we're waiting for the first video to come up.

Pretty stable scene. There's not much going on.

This is one of our office spaces

in the other building.

It's just lots of people thinking very hard,

not much actual visual stuff happening.

Good, you can see he's making a response.

Let's see how long he thought that was.

How well did you think you did?

I felt...

I felt I was doing well.

We think you may not have done quite so well.

Okay, that's good. Yeah.

The first few videos, it seemed that...

-I was way off? -You were.

It looked like you were overestimating.

-Okay. -Quite, quite a lot.

Which is interesting, for somebody who's built

the world's most accurate clock.

That is my brain, huh?

That. That's your brain.

Do you recognize any bits of your brain there?

I don't.

This is my first time looking at my brain.

-I've never done this scan before.

-Okay.

[Anil] We don't have time sensors in the brain.

Time has to be a construction.

One idea is that our experience

of time comes about through

how things change in our visual perception.

There's lots of change, and maybe

our durations will seem longer.

If nothing changes,

our experience of time will be really impoverished.

We're trying to close the loop and come up with

a unified explanation of human time perception.

But it goes deeper than that.

If you want to understand

the relationship between brains and consciousness,

in my lab we've got mathematicians

and physicists and virtual reality engineers.

[Jun] Oh, now it looks very strange!

For a second, this didn't turn into animals.

I've never seen things like that before.

[Anil] One of the things that I've

really tried to cultivate

is a very interdisciplinary approach

to get at this problem, this basic problem,

of how consciousness happens.

What a beautiful place.

There's this perspective,

I think it's a pretty poor argument,

but it's called Mysterianism.

So there's the idea that

even if we have arbitrarily fast computers

and all the technology that we want,

there will still be some things

that will forever defy our understanding,

because we humans are

cognitively limited in some way.

However much we magnify our cognitive abilities

through technology, there must be things

that we cannot understand

however much help we have.

In the same way that if you're a frog,

however much help you give the frog,

it's not going to understand quantum mechanics.

It's still a frog.

So there might be an equivalent for us.

On the other hand, the history of science

has been quite astounding.

There have been things that people would've thought

completely beyond our understanding.

We can and we have.

[Jun] Though I have only known Anil for two days,

I feel he's a... a true scientist.

It's really appealing to me that

we can speak from, coming from

very different scientific disciplines.

And yet, we speak a common language.

It's been a really pleasure to spend time with Jun.

He's a... such a nice man,

in addition to being a brilliant scientist.

And you never know where...

where these conversations go. [Jun] Step by step, we can ask

deeper, deeper questions,

so we know we are making progress.

But how long it's going to get there?

If you asked me that question,

I couldn't really make that prediction

because discovery itself is a very uncertain process.

It's actually exciting that there remains to be

very many mysteries out there

that are waiting for us to discover.

[Anil] The history of science is full of examples

where an understanding has been developed

for something that seemed previously entirely mysterious.

And the reason it can do that

is because it's a cumulative enterprise.

You don't start from scratch.

Every time in science, you're building on

a whole tradition, not only of knowledge

but also of methods and techniques.

[woman] The mind is all the time processing all this stuff

that it shouldn't have the capacity to process.

One of these things is our experiences.

How do we make sense of an event?

Like you're, you're...

Folks are watching this movie, and at the end of this movie,

someone might be like, "Hey, how was The Most Unknown?

How was that film?" And people will have an answer.

How did they do that?

Is your mind keeping a running ticker

of how good the movie is?

They see the monkey parts,

that was really good and it goes up.

But, this physics... boring.

But, so it turns out that

when psychologists look at that, people simplify it.

So people only take into account two points:

the peak of how good it was and how it ended.

That's all we're taking into account,

which is kind of amazing.

It means that the movie has to end really well.

So, I'm glad I get to be the last scientist.

We're here in Puerto Rico,

and in a few minutes, we're going to be going to

an even smaller island in the Caribbean,

which is an island that's just off the coast of Puerto Rico

called Cayo Santiago.

It's home to about 1,000 free-ranging monkeys.

Glasses fog up.

[gasps] Puppy!

I know! I know you don't these folks.

You want non-shiny glasses.

Non-shiny? So not these ones.

Yeah, they won't like that.

See? That's good advice. Yeah, I didn't...

They'll see themselves, and it'll be very threatening.

Ah, okay.

Hola!

It's prettier than the lab.

-This is a lot prettier. -It's an early wake-up call,

but it's really beautiful and you get to enjoy it.

[Anil] It's fantastic.

First question: What is the main motivation

for your research out here?

So, I... I am a psychologist,

a cognitive psychologist by training,

which means, I'm kind of interested in how humans think.

But I find it's really hard to test humans

by testing humans.

We have culture, we teach it.

To get, to kind of get down to human cognition

without all the extra stuff is hard.

And the beauty of the monkeys, as you'll see,

is they're just being monkeys.

You guys into Pokemon Go?

There's really good Pokemon on the docks.

I always try to catch the Pokemon.

No one can get these 'cause they're here.

However we're walking around the island,

find a path that's, like,

furthest from all monkeys.

Staring at them right in the face is like a threat.

If they get upset with you, you'll know about it.

They'll start threatening you like, "Ah!"

How close is this to

the natural habitat they might have come from?

Macaques are the most

ubiquitous primate, other than humans.

The lore is they treat us like walking trees.

If we almost stepped on them, they would move.

But we're just kind of part of their environment.

We're a slightly bigger group with the camera

than we normally would be, so some of them are like, "What?"

Our group does cognition work down here,

which means we're really setting up experiments.

We have to kind of stay in a compact spot

so we're not interfering with data.

We're going to also get a little poolside show.

Those are a bunch of kid monkeys.

Who's gonna go for it?

-Psych yourself up. -Great!

But, it's... It's so high, right?

[Anil] So they... are they having fun?

[Laurie] Yeah, this is playing.

Maybe, do you think the female on the rock?

-I was looking at her, yeah. -Yeah.

So what we're going to do is,

we're going show the monkeys a little show about what,

what information Casey has about where an object is.

So this one, she's going to do is the boring one.

So, this is one that

the monkeys shouldn't look for a very long time at all.

They see her, watch it go into that box...

and she reaches for it there.

What we're looking for is long they watch that.

You can see Shireen is behind her and she's filming

how long they watch it.

The expectation is the monkeys should lose interest

more quickly.

Is this something that works in controlled conditions,

that monkeys can do, or...

I think it would work under controlled conditions.

But, you don't often in captivity have

big enough sample sizes to do it.

So, now the monkey is going to have a different belief

than Casey.

They see Casey watch it go into one spot,

but then when Casey's not paying attention,

the monkey can see a switch.

Now...

You can see this monkey doesn't seem to fine anymore.

He's looking for a long time because it's unexpected.

We're interested in whether the monkeys know

that somebody has a different perspective than they do.

We're expecting other minds

to do these kind of jumps

that our own minds do.

It's not clear if they do the same thing.

There's been this real question about whether another animal

can think about what somebody else is thinking.

Can they think about what somebody else sees?

If monkeys know what other individuals see,

they should use that information in productive ways.

One productive way is in the concept of deception.

We've got to find a nail or a stick.

Most of monkey science happens with duct tape...

and foam board.

What are you making?

We're going to make a little platform

for them to steal grapes off of.

We give them the opportunity to steal stuff from humans.

The question is, do the monkeys steal more

when folks aren't paying attention?

This experiment is a first pass to see,

can they use any of the social abilities they have

to deceive us?

Are they sensitive to this simple thing

of what we can see, and what we can't see?

Take one step towards them, like this.

Then now, hold your platform horizontal, like this

and show him the grape.

Then place the grape down onto the shish kebab.

Good.

Now we're going to put the platform on the-- Hey! Wait!

No, buddy. You've got to wait.

Step back. Take your grape off.

Yeah, he's very forceful.

Nope, now you don't get to play 'cause you're being mean.

We could try again but let's do it from slightly further back

-So, we'll do it even from here. -Okay.

Hey... Monkey!

Okay, turn around.

All right, he's...

-I have no idea what's going on. -One sec.

-You can turn around and grab the grape.

-I can turn around?

And turn around.

Anything happening?

They're staring at the film crew a little bit.

Now he's threatening the film crew again.

I'm trying to just stare off into the distance

and pretend I'm not paying attention.

What's fascinating here, is we just tried this experiment

and it didn't really quite work.

Typically, when we run these studies

it's just two people, two grapes.

No one else is around.

Quite a large camera crew hanging around too...

[Laurie] It fits with our hypothesis, right?

The hypothesis of, monkeys see people are paying attention,

they just hold back, they don't steal from anyone.

And there's a lot of people here paying attention.

They're very worried about the surveillance

that you guys started on their core island.

[Laurie] Whatever we do down here, it's nice if

other folks are doing similar work in other places,

so we can triangulate what the animals really understand.

Even when we find things that don't work,

we replicate it, we try it again.

Part of our task is to put the pattern together

of what works and what doesn't.

To be a scientist, you have to deal with uncertainty

all the time.

But you're just thinking about other possibilities

in general.

What if the world was this way?

Science is all about holding multiple things in mind.

And ultimately it's probably using

these very same rudimentary capacities

that we're seeing in the monkeys.

Getting outside your own head

is a lot of what science is about.

That's what we're trying to do with the brains we have,

to understand our place in the universe.

You might think, watching scientists,

that we go through a lot of frustrating things

to do our science, like, why would we do it?

Functionally, what scientists are doing is that

we're trying to solve a really long mystery novel

all the time.

We get to the end of the chapter,

and we think we've made progress.

but then there's a new door and a new twist!

For us, that's fun, that there's more to go.

Are you Jen?

-Hi, I'm Jen! -It's good to meet you.

I'm going to give you a hug. I feel like I know you already.

I can't believe you made it here before I did.

I was so excited about the caves, I couldn't help myself.

So, let's see...

Suit.

All right, I've got to figure out how this hat works.

Is it, like...

See, there's a...

-a little button there. -Oh, yeah.

I think you gave me a broken one.

One thing I feel at a gut level

is that humans get smarter,

the more different things they experience.

We can't possibly imagine the things that

we might learn, that might be useful to us.

We're slowly creeping towards understanding.

But we're... We're sort of toward the beginning.