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What we know about life

This week, I read and watched things that made me think about life, why we are here, and what the universe is. I want to share it with you and summarize my learnings. Let’s make it easy and fun to read!

M-Theory

The theory of everything

M-Theory is a big idea in science. It comes from string theory , which says that everything in the universe—stars, planets, people, even light and gravity—is made of tiny, vibrating strings. Instead of very small points, the basic parts of the universe are tiny lines that move and shake in different ways. How the string vibrates decides what kind of particle it is.

At first, string theory was made to explain the strong force inside atoms. But later, scientists saw that it could explain much more, maybe even all the forces in nature, like gravity. We were trying to find the Theory of Everything.

However, early string theory had some problems. To fix these problems, scientists added a new idea called supersymmetry. This idea says that there is a special connection between two kinds of particles:

ones that make matter (like electrons);
ones that carry forces (like photons).

With supersymmetry, string theory became superstring theory, and it worked much better. But there was another surprise.

Scientists found not just one superstring theory, but five different versions. This was confusing. Why would there be five ways to describe the universe? In the 1990s, a scientist named Edward Witten and others had a new idea. They said that these five theories are really just different parts of one bigger theory. They called it M-Theory.

However, M-Theory says that the universe has 11 dimensions—not just the 4 we know (3 space and 1 time). It also talks about new shapes, like 2-dimensional surfaces called branes , not only strings.

You can think of the universe like a big guitar. The strings and branes vibrate in different ways to create all the things we see: matter, light, gravity, and more. M-Theory tries to explain everything in one simple model. But it is very hard to test, and scientists are still trying to understand it.

I personally find that so fascinating, trying to understand the universe and how it works. It’s like a puzzle that we’re all trying to solve together.

However, I would be a bad guy if I didn't mention competition. M-Theory is not the only theory out of there. There are other theories, like loop quantum gravity , that try to explain the universe differently. Some scientists think M-Theory is too complicated and not the best way to understand everything.

But my favorite is the M-Theory because the graviton is a particle that comes naturally from it. The graviton is a particle that carries the force of gravity, and it’s a big part of M-Theory. It’s like the glue that holds everything together in the universe.

Quantum Entanglement

Faster than light is possible

Quantum mechanics is the science of the very, very small. It’s how things like electrons and photons behave. But the strange part? They don’t follow the normal rules we see in everyday life. They play by their own weird, surprising rules.

One of the wildest ideas in quantum mechanics is entanglement. Here’s what happens: if you take two particles and entangle them, they become linked. No matter how far apart they are—even if one is on Earth and the other is on Mars—measuring one particle instantly tells you something about the other.

That’s crazy! I even have a little theory of my own—tell me if there’s anything out there about it. Since we can't directly explore black holes, what if we could use entanglement to study them? Imagine: one particle falls into a black hole, while its entangled partner stays outside. Maybe the particle that stays outside still holds some information about the one that got pulled in!

If that’s true, could we somehow study the outside particle to learn secrets about what’s happening inside the black hole? What kind of information could we find? I’m not sure, but in my opinion, it sounds like a really cool way to investigate something we usually can't even see.

Now, getting back on track. Entanglement is as if they are talking to each other faster than the speed of light. Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" because it sounded so impossible. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, nothing should go faster than light. But quantum entanglement doesn’t seem to care.

Scientists have tested this many times, and the spooky action seems very real. It’s not magic—it's just how the universe works at the quantum level. We don’t fully understand why yet, but we know it happens.

This leads to some crazy ideas:

Could we use entanglement to send information instantly across space?
Could it be the key to super-powerful quantum computers?
Could it even tell us something deep about how space and time are connected?

Some scientists think that entanglement might even be part of how space itself is stitched together, like a secret hidden code behind everything we see.

Just like with M-Theory, there’s still so much we don’t know. But that's what makes it exciting. Every time we learn something new about the quantum world, it feels like opening a new door to the universe.

Hedonic Treadmill

The pursuit of happiness

The hedonic treadmill is a powerful idea in psychology. It says that when something good happens—like getting a raise, buying a new car, or winning a prize—we feel a boost of happiness... but not for long. After a while, we get used to the new thing, and our happiness slides back to where it was before. It's like running on a treadmill: no matter how fast you run, you stay in the same place.

Scientists like Donald T. Campbell introduced this idea back in 1971. Their research even showed that people who won the lottery were only a little happier than before—and sometimes even less happy after some time passed!

This shows something really important: material things (phones, clothes, cars) give us a short-term high, but they don’t change our deep level of happiness. Experiences like building friendships, learning something new, helping others, or even growing through challenges tend to bring longer, more lasting happiness.

It made me wonder: if we’re always chasing the next "good thing" but staying stuck in the same place emotionally, maybe the real breakthroughs aren’t about getting more stuff at all—but about understanding deeper truths about ourselves and the universe.

That’s actually why I switched to a more minimalist lifestyle about three years ago—a version of minimalism that really fits me. I’m genuinely happy with what I have now. I don’t chase after more. Instead, I focus on small habits that make me proud of myself every day.

For example, it’s been over a year now that I’ve been doing around 100 push-ups a day and reading at least 5 pages of a book daily. It might not sound like much at first, but if you do the quick math, that’s 36,500 push-ups and 1,825 pages read in just one year.

I’m really proud of that. I’m not saying you should do exactly the same, but I truly believe it’s important to find what works for you—what makes you feel proud and builds real happiness over time. More than just being happy, it’s about doing little things that push you out of your comfort zone every day, even if it’s just by a tiny bit.

In the end, it’s all about the mentality.

The Universe as a Simulation

Are we in a game?

Some scientists and philosophers seriously wonder if our universe might be a simulation —basically, that we’re living inside a giant computer program, like characters in a super-advanced version of The Sims or The Matrix.

This idea became really popular after philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper in 2003. He suggested that if a civilization became advanced enough, it might create many simulated worlds full of conscious beings. If that’s possible, and if there are millions of simulations for every real universe, then the odds that we are in the one “real” universe seem pretty low.

In other words: if smart aliens or future humans made tons of realistic simulations, chances are... we might just be part of the code.

There’s no hard proof (yet!) that we’re living inside a simulation. But weird things in physics sometimes make people wonder.

For example, quantum mechanics says particles don’t seem to “decide” how to behave until someone observes them—almost like a video game loading new areas only when the player gets close. Some scientists have even proposed experiments to try and spot tiny glitches in space-time, like pixelation in a video game, although nothing conclusive has been found so far.

I find it really funny (and a little freaky): are we real, or are we just incredibly detailed programs following someone else's rules? Would we even be able to tell the difference?

At the end, I don't really care. Knowing the answer would make me happy but I wouldn't change my life, just take life as it is and go with it.

Holographic Principle

Is the universe flat?

Let's move on. The holographic principle is one of the wildest ideas in physics. It says that everything we experience in our 3D world—stars, people, even space itself—might actually be stored as information on a flat, 2D surface, kind of like a hologram.

A hologram is a flat image that tricks our eyes into seeing 3D depth. Think about a politician like Jean-Luc Mélenchon appearing as a 3D hologram during a speech—he looks like he's standing there in full form, but really, it's just a clever projection from flat data. The holographic principle suggests that the entire universe might work the same way: what we see as "volume" and "depth" could just be a 3D illusion created by 2D information written on the edges of the universe.

This idea actually comes from studying black holes . Physicists like Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking discovered that the amount of information needed to describe a black hole is proportional not to its volume, but to the surface area of its event horizon. Later, Leonard Susskind helped develop the full holographic principle, suggesting that maybe everything in the universe works the same way.

If this is true, it would totally change how we think about space, matter, and even reality itself. It would mean that what feels solid and real might actually be a kind of cosmic projection.

Personally, I find this both mind-blowing and oddly comforting. It means that reality could be more connected, more deeply structured, and more mysterious than we ever imagined. And once again, it shows that at the deepest level, the universe might be playing by rules we are just starting to guess at.

Black holes are hard drives

Thus, one approach is to think that black holes might store information like a computer hard drive. The holographic principle says when something falls into a black hole, its info—like a book’s words—stays on the black hole’s surface. For example, if you drop your phone in, its data might not be gone but saved on the edge. This could mean the universe keeps track of everything.

This made me think: for what reason? Why the universe would want to keep track of everything?

Hawking Radiation

Black holes are not (completely) black

Now, Hawking Radiation is one of the most fascinating discoveries about black holes, made by the famous physicist Stephen Hawking in 1974. Before that, everyone thought black holes were completely black: once something fell in, it was gone forever, and nothing—not even light—could escape.

But Hawking showed that black holes aren’t totally black after all. Thanks to quantum effects near the event horizon (the "point of no return" around a black hole), black holes can slowly leak tiny amounts of energy. This leaked energy is what we call Hawking Radiation.

You can picture it like a huge balloon with a tiny, slow leak. Over an incredibly long time, the black hole would lose more and more mass through this radiation, until it eventually shrinks and disappears completely.

This was a huge deal because it suggested that black holes aren’t just one-way traps. They might actually evaporate over time—and maybe, just maybe, they don’t hide information forever the way we once thought.

Scientists are still debating what happens to the information that falls into a black hole (this is called the black hole information paradox ), but Hawking Radiation opened the door to seeing black holes as dynamic, evolving things, not just cosmic dead ends.

I recommended this french video (🇫🇷) that explains this Information Paradox, my inspiration comes from it.

Well-Ordering Theorem

The universe is ordered but we dont' know how (yet)

This one is interesting in another way, it's more about maths here. The well-ordering theorem is a big idea in mathematics. It says that no matter how messy or complicated a set of things is, you can always arrange them in some order—like sorting numbers from smallest to biggest.

Imagine you walk into a room where there’s a huge, chaotic pile of books. They’re thrown everywhere, no clear pattern at all. The well-ordering theorem says that, in theory, there is always a way to sort them—maybe by title from A to Z, maybe by size, maybe by some hidden rule you haven't thought of yet. But order is always possible.

At first, this might not sound very exciting. But it’s actually super deep: it suggests that even in total randomness, some form of structure can exist. That might mean that the universe, even in its most chaotic forms (like quantum foam or black hole entropy), still follows strict, hidden mathematical rules underneath.

Some people even wonder if principles like this could be related to the possibility of cloning or perfectly reconstructing objects at the smallest scales—because if everything can be ordered and described mathematically, maybe, just maybe, it could also be rebuilt.

If you want to dive deeper into this (and see some really cool examples), I highly recommend checking out this great Veritasium video on the topic. It really brings the beauty and the craziness of these abstract concepts to life!

Fermi Paradox

Where are the aliens?

The Fermi Paradox is one of the biggest and weirdest questions we can ask: if the universe is so big—with billions of stars and even more planets—then where is everybody?

It was first seriously asked by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. He pointed out that if intelligent life were common, and if even a few civilizations developed advanced space travel, they should have had enough time to spread across the galaxy. In theory, the galaxy should be buzzing with alien signals, ships, and evidence. But... it’s not. Space seems silent and empty.

There are a lot of possible answers to the paradox:

Life might be extremely rare, and Earth could be a crazy, lucky exception.
Civilizations might destroy themselves before they get far (like with wars or environmental disasters).
Aliens might be too far away for us to reach, even at the speed of light.
They might not want to contact us—maybe they’re watching silently (sometimes called the "zoo hypothesis").
Or maybe, we're just not looking the right way, and their signals are hiding in forms we don’t even understand yet.

It’s kind of like throwing a message in a bottle into the vast ocean and hoping someone, somewhere, finds it. Maybe there’s nobody else. Maybe the ocean is just too big. Or maybe we haven’t even figured out what the real "message" looks like.

First, thinking about the Fermi Paradox always reminds me how small, mysterious, and exciting our place in the universe really is. Secondly, I'm almost sure that we are not alone. I think at least one another life form exists out there, maybe beyond our what we can imagine yet, but I'm betting on it, like 3 bitcoins? That's a big bet for me since I value my bitcoins a lot. Anyway, let's continue.

Time Travel

How to go back in time?

Time travel is one of the most mind-bending concepts out there. While we can't travel through time just yet, there are some ideas in physics that could hint at it being possible—at least theoretically.

One of the coolest concepts is tachyons, which are hypothetical particles that could travel faster than light. If they exist, it might be possible to use them to send messages to the past. Imagine you could text your younger self 10 years ago to say, “Don’t skip that class!” The idea is that if we could move faster than light, maybe we could send information backward in time, altering the past with our future knowledge.

But, here’s where it gets tricky: the idea of time travel raises paradoxes. The most famous one is the grandfather paradox—where you go back in time and stop your grandfather from meeting your grandmother. If you succeed, then you’d never have been born, meaning you couldn’t have traveled back to stop them from meeting in the first place. It’s a loop that doesn’t make sense!

However, some physicists think there might be ways to avoid this. Let’s imagine the following scenarios to break it down:

Self-consistency: This idea suggests that any actions you take while traveling to the past must be consistent with the timeline. If you try to change something that would create a paradox (like telling your past self to not send a message), then something will happen to stop that change. Maybe you’ll accidentally forget to send the message or something in the universe will make sure you never actually make that change, keeping the timeline intact.
Multiple timelines: What if, instead of one timeline, there are multiple branching timelines? If you travel back and change something in the past, you don’t erase your own future—you create a new version of the timeline where events unfold differently. Your past self gets the message, but your timeline still exists as it was. In other words, you're not disrupting your own history; you're just creating a new branch of the multiverse.
The Bootstrap Paradox: Here’s where things get a bit trippy. Imagine your past self receives a message from your future self, and then your future self receives the same message from your past self, and so on. It's like a never-ending loop where the information exists in a kind of closed loop. In this case, the message has no real "origin" because it’s always been passed from future to past. Some scientists believe this might be how things could work—events are consistent and looped without a true beginning.
Time-loop consistency: Let’s say you travel back to the past and stop your younger self from sending that message. What if, by doing so, you create a series of events that lead your younger self to find a different way to send the same message? In other words, you still get the message, but through different actions. The timeline could "fix itself," avoiding the paradox while keeping the essence of the past intact.

While none of this has been proven, these ideas show how time travel could theoretically work without breaking reality. Of course, tachyons and faster-than-light travel are still just theories, and most scientists think going faster than light isn’t physically possible. But thinking about these paradoxes and the possible solutions makes time travel a fascinating, if not frustrating, subject.

So for now, time travel remains in the world of dreams, movies, and mind experiments. But who knows? The universe has surprised us before—it might just surprise us again.

Free will vs determinism

Do we really take decisions?

Finally, this is one of the latest idea for this post. One of the biggest questions in philosophy and science is whether we truly have free will or if everything we do is already determined by the laws of the universe.

Some ideas suggest that the universe follows strict, predictable rules of physics—everything, from the way particles move to the way our brains work, might be part of a giant, cosmic cause-and-effect chain. So, the question is: are our choices really ours to make, or are they already written in the fabric of reality?

Imagine this: when you’re standing in front of an ice cream shop and you decide to get the chocolate over the vanilla cake, it feels like you’re making a decision. But what if your brain already made that choice for you before you even realized it? It seems some studies highlighted that our brains can show signs of making decisions before we consciously think about them.

From the perspective of determinism, everything that happens, including your decisions, is the result of past events, physical laws, and your brain’s biology. In other words, all your choices were “decided” long before you even thought about them.

This brings us to the idea of determinism: the belief that every event, including human action, is determined by preceding events in accordance with the natural laws. It suggests that free will is an illusion, and that the universe is like a giant clockwork machine, running on preset gears and levers.

Now, here’s the thing. This idea can be kind of uncomfortable for some people, especially when you start thinking that everything is already decided. It can make us feel like we’re just following a script, like characters in a play. And when I talk with others about this, many people don’t want to consider this idea. I guess it’s because if everything is determined, then the sense of freedom and meaning in their life might change. If our choices aren’t truly ours to make, what does that say about our purpose? Do our actions still matter?

For me, though, this concept is actually really interesting and it's one of my favorite here. The idea that we might not have absolute free will is both humbling and freeing. It suggests that the universe and our actions are intricately connected—like everything is happening according to a larger plan, even if we don’t fully understand it. But at the same time, living as though we have free will is still important. We act, we choose, and those choices matter to us, even if they were always going to happen in some way.

In fact, the feeling of free will might be essential for us to live meaningful lives. Without that sense of autonomy, would we still have motivation or purpose? Maybe it’s less about whether we can change the future and more about how we experience our existence in the present. Regardless of whether everything is preordained or we’re truly free to choose, we live as if we can choose, and that gives life its richness.

My thoughts

I think the universe plays hide and seek

These ideas make me think the universe might hide its secrets. I would be more than happy to get answers to big questions (I've even made songs about it here ):

What is the universe?
Why do we live?
Who made the universe?
Is there a God?

Some things show the universe is good for life. For example, the gravitational constant is perfect for the creation of planets. Also, Earth is just the right distance from the Sun—not too hot like Venus, not too cold like Mars. But other things make answers hard to find. Black holes might hide information, and space is so big we can’t explore it all.

We humans think we’re super important, but maybe we’re just a small part of something huge. I like what Albert Camus said: life might have no big purpose, and that’s fine. If we find our own purpose—like loving family or making art—that’s enough.

Mean Value Theorem

My definition of perfect

The Mean Value Theorem is a concept in math that says if you travel a certain distance over a period of time, at some point during your journey, you must have been traveling at the average speed. For example, if you drive 100 km in 2 hours, there’s a moment when your speed was exactly 50 km/h—your average speed for the trip.

But for me, this simple mathematical idea carries a deeper philosophical meaning when applied to life. It reflects how, even with the ups and downs—good moments and bad moments—there’s a sort of balance we can find. In the grand scheme of things, we don't need everything to be perfect to be happy.

Just like the Mean Value Theorem shows that your average speed is possible at some point during your journey, life’s challenges and joys might balance out over time, giving us a sense of harmony even if we don’t see it right away.

Now, when I think about perfection, I imagine it as something that is deeply connected to balance—not just in one aspect of life, but across many different dimensions. I think perfection is about finding a perfect equilibrium in multiple aspects of existence. Here’s how I see it:

Imagine a person who is 50% kind and 50% bad. If we only look at this one dimension, the person seems perfectly balanced, right? Neither all good nor all bad. But let's expand this idea further. What if we add more dimensions? Picture a person who is 50% beautiful and 50% ugly. We can keep expanding this idea: 50% intelligent and 50% ignorant, 50% creative and 50% conventional, and so on. The more dimensions we add—each balancing out between opposites—the more this person seems perfectly balanced.

Here’s the abstract part of my intuition: I tend to think that if the number of dimensions in which we measure a person or an idea keeps increasing toward infinity, then this balance begins to converge toward true perfection. It’s as if perfection is not about being extreme in any one dimension, but about being completely balanced across all possible dimensions. The more perspectives we take into account, the more perfect the balance becomes.

This might be hard to explain clearly because it’s a bit abstract, but to me, perfection is not a single point of being “best” at one thing. Instead, it’s about the harmony that comes when everything is balanced across infinite dimensions, where nothing is too much or too little—each quality, no matter how opposite, finds its place in a bigger picture of completeness.

In a way, this mirrors the Mean Value Theorem: even if we have moments of extremes (good and bad), if we find balance across enough dimensions, we can approach something that feels like perfection. It’s the balance that makes it perfect, not the individual parts.

And now we understand this, it makes sense when you hear people say that "nobody is perfect". Or in another way, when you hear stoic people say that suffering is part of life. It’s all about balance, and that’s what makes life beautiful.