Thursday, December 1, 2016

What is Real?

am I even real?
Met the wonderful Lucy Hawking at TEDxSalford by chance (Science and Storytelling, The Consciousness of Reality). This led to an amazing opportunity allowing me to contribute a science essay to her newest children's book:

George and the Blue Moon
Lucy and Stephen Hawking
Penguin, 2016

Staying true to my little hobby, it was called:

What is Reality?

And it started like this:
Every day you wake up. Returning from the wonderful adventures you may have been having in your dreams, you become you again. The memories of who you are and what you have been up to in your life come back. And you also realize that there is a world that lies outside of yourself, simply called reality. Then you get up.

This all seems very ordinary and not very exciting. However, all of this is linked to the hardest question that humans have ever asked themselves: What exactly is reality? What is this thing, made up of space, time and objects, we live in?

And ended like this:
But for the moment we can comfort ourselves with two answers to the question, ‘What is reality?’

One is that reality is a much bigger, richer and more complex thing than we ever dared to dream.

Or a short answer could be, ‘I create my reality!’

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