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If you just keep cutting in half,
And a really, really sharp knife.
You take the knife in your hand and with a flourish you slice the apple into two neat pieces.
The apple halves become quarters, then the quarters become eighths. In front of you are smaller and smaller pieces of pulpy white apple.
But by your fourteenth cut, a regular rectangular pattern emerges and you realize the smooth apple flesh is built out of an array of plant cells.
You keep on cutting, chopping the cells into smaller and smaller pieces,
Another 8 cuts reduces the cells into complex molecules of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
And with a few more cuts, what was once the apple is now 10 to the power of 27 individual atoms.
Is this it? Can you cut no more?
But your knife is incredibly sharp.
And you begin to chop into the atom.
Peeling away the cloud of electrons, you reveal the seeming nothingness within.
Almost nothingness, for at the center sits the tiny atomic nucleus, a hundred trillion times smaller than the apple that you started with.
But again you are undaunted and again you continue chopping.
The nucleus splits into protons and neutrons, the protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons, and you find yourself in the ethereal world of the subatomic.
A world governed by fuzzy probabilities, the apple now nothing but an ethereal wave upon a sea of fields.
It feels like you have finally reached the limit.
The fundamental pieces of the universe.
After more than a hundred cuts, point-like quarks and electrons might be revealed to be waving strings, barely a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter across, vibrating across extra dimensions.
Down here, maybe even space and time are chunky, fundamental blocks that can be cut no more.
Or maybe any semblance of reality will melt away as we find that our universe is truly a simulated cosmos churning away on some super-dimensional computer.
Or that our three-dimensional existence is nothing but an illusion and everything we know and love is shown to be a hologram.
Is true and how can we be sure
To understand reality, the true nature of reality, and how humans over thousands of years have struggled to unravel it,
We are going to have to dissect the cosmos.
And ask some very difficult questions.
You can hold it, smell it, taste it. You can see the greenness of its skin in the sunlight.
But what does it mean to be real?
Isaac newton used to bookmark the pages in his books in a very specific way. He would turn the corner of the page down onto the phrase or even the word he wanted to remember.
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To our truly ancient ancestors, reality must have been obvious.
From the plains of africa to those wandering the snowy wastes of northern europe,
Reality was what you sensed with your eyes and ears
The snap of a twig in a forest might tell them that their next meal is at hand,
Or warn them that they might be on the menu for a beast with bigger teeth and sharper claws.
Sensing reality was a matter of life
Perhaps therefore, in their day-to-day struggles, these truly distant ancestors had little time to wander.
Little time to think deeply about the world that surrounded them.
But as the human mind developed and thoughts expanded,
The nature of reality surely changed.
We know humans began to bury their dead almost 100,000 years ago.
Quite what they were thinking as they bid farewell to their loved ones, we'll never know.
But perhaps they were thinking of a world beyond our reality.
An afterlife. These ceremonies provide insight into human thought and that there was more to reality than meets the eye.
Ideas around spirits and gods and invisible yet powerful influences began to emerge
Along with questions of meaning and purpose.
And of course, the gods also gave us the apple.
Providing delicious fruit for us to eat.
There was no need to question the reality of the apple beyond this.
The answer was simply beyond the ponderings of the human mind.
Only found in the thoughts of the gods.
Plato was one of the greatest philosophers of the ancient world.
Living in athens in the 4th century bc, his real name was aristocles, with plato being just a nickname, a nickname that meant broad and apparently referred to his stocky build.
Where do objects get their material properties?
Be it the greenness of the apple skin or the fact that dogs have four legs.
Our world, plato contended, was not the real world.
And to understand this, we will have to explore his famous allegory.
In this cave, a group of prisoners are kept chained, staring at a wall.
The prisoners have always been there, chained in the cave, and have never been outside and experienced the real world.
All the prisoners can see is the wall in the cave in front of them.
But on the wall they see shadows.
These are formed by sunlight streaming into the cave entrance as people go about their daily business at the mouth of the cave.
What are they to make of this external reality?
One that they can barely see.
What if they are not really seeing shadows of reality from beyond the mouth of the cave?
What if, instead, some mischievous people have blocked off the cave entrance and are illuminating the prisoner's wall with a bright fire?
With this light, these people can now play mind games with the prisoners.
Using shadow puppets to play out stories on the wall.
No longer are the prisoners simply seeing people wander by the cave entrance.
Now they can see stories of monsters and battles.
What are the prisoners to make of this new reality?
Is it any less real than before?
To them, this image on the wall is their reality, there is nothing else.
And so, these exciting new tales are as real as the previous shadow people milling about.
To them, the monsters and battles.
Plato then asks us to consider that we are like the prisoners.
And the reality we experience every moment of the day is a projection. A projection of a place where true reality plays out
With our imperfect world being a shimmering image
To plato, our experiences are just shadows of a true reality.
But for the story of reality, this was just the beginning.
For to reveal the secrets of the universe, to unveil the ultimate truth of the nature of the cosmos,
The answers did not lie in the hands of the gods or ancient philosophy.
Instead, we would have to delve deep into the fundamental makeup of matter, time and space.
We would have to turn to the insights into reality provided by scientific exploration.
And when we did, things quickly.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line.
In the first few months of 1821, the poet john keats died in rome.
He was young, only 25, but his body was wracked by the scourge of tuberculosis.
In his short time, he was prodigious, writing on the natural beauty of the world around us,
And like many before and after,
He was only truly recognized after his death.
Keats was born almost 70 years after the death of isaac newton.
It was the time of the industrial revolution, a revolution driven by newton's insights into the natural world.
The scientific revolution of newton and his contemporaries had sought to peel back reality.
And reveal it as nothing more than a manifestation of physical law in action.
And finally, it had been newton who had realised that the white light of the sun contained all the colours of the rainbow.