Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. There's a famous way to seemingly create chocolate out of nothing.

Maybe you've seen it before. This chocolate bar is 4 squares by 8 squares, but if you cut it like this
and then like this and finally like this you can rearrange the pieces like so and wind up with the same
4 by 8 bar but with a leftover piece, apparently created out of thin air. There's a popular animation
of this illusion as well. I call it an illusion because it's just that. Fake. In reality, the final bar is a bit
smaller. It contains this much less chocolate. Each square along the cut is shorter than it was in the
original, but the cut makes it difficult to notice right away. The animation is extra misleading,
because it tries to cover up its deception. The lost height of each square is surreptitiously added in
while the piece moves to make it hard to notice. I mean, come on, obviously you cannot cut up a
chocolate bar and rearrange the pieces into more than you started with. Or can you? 

One of the strangest theorems in modern mathematics is the Banach-Tarski paradox. It proves that
there is, in fact, a way to take an object and separate it into 5 different pieces. And then, with those
five pieces, simply rearrange them. No stretching required into two exact copies of the original item.
Same density, same size, same everything. Seriously. To dive into the mind blow that it is and the
way it fundamentally questions math and ourselves, we have to start by asking a few questions. 

First, what is infinity? A number? I mean, it's nowhere on the number line, but we often say things
like there's an infinite "number" of blah-blah-blah. And as far as we know, infinity could be real. The
universe may be infinite in size and flat, extending out for ever and ever without end, beyond even
the part we can observe or ever hope to observe. That's exactly what infinity is. Not a number per
se, but rather a size. The size of something that doesn't end. Infinity is not the biggest number,
instead, it is how many numbers there are. But there are different sizes of infinity. The smallest type
of infinity is countable infinity. The number of hours in forever. It's also the number of whole
numbers that there are, natural number, the numbers we use when counting things, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6 and so on. Sets like these are unending, but they are countable. 

Countable means that you can count them from one element to any other in a finite amount of time,
even if that finite amount of time is longer than you will live or the universe will exist for, it's still
finite. 

Uncountable infinity, on the other hand, is literally bigger. Too big to even count. The number of real
numbers that there are, not just whole numbers, but all numbers is uncountably infinite. You literally
cannot count even from 0 to 1 in a finite amount of time by naming every real number in between. I
mean, where do you even start? Zero, okay. But what comes next? 0.000000... Eventually, we would
imagine a 1 going somewhere at the end, but there is no end. We could always add another 0.
Uncountability makes this set so much larger than the set of all whole numbers that even between 0
and 1, there are more numbers than there are whole numbers on the entire endless number line. 
Georg Cantor's famous diagonal argument helps illustrate this. Imagine listing every number
between zero and one. Since they are uncountable and can't be listed in order, let's imagine
randomly generating them forever with no repeats. Each number regenerate can be paired with a
whole number. If there's a one to one correspondence between the two, that is if we can match one
whole number to each real number on our list, that would mean that countable and uncountable
sets are the same size. But we can't do that, even though this list goes on forever. Forever isn't
enough. Watch this. 

If we go diagonally down our endless list of real numbers and take the first decimal of the first
number and the second of the second number, the third of the third and so on and add one to each,
subtracting one if it happens to be a nine, we can generate a new real number that is obviously
between 0 and 1, but since we've defined it to be different from every number on our endless list
and at least one place it's clearly not contained in the list. In other words, we've used up every single
whole number, the entire infinity of them and yet we can still come up with more real numbers.
Here's something else that is true but counter-intuitive. There are the same number of even
numbers as there are even and odd numbers. At first, that sounds ridiculous. Clearly, there are only
half as many even numbers as all whole numbers, but that intuition is wrong. The set of all whole
numbers is denser but every even number can be matched with a whole number. You will never run
out of members either set, so this one to one correspondence shows that both sets are the same
size. In other words, infinity divided by two is still infinity. Infinity plus one is also infinity. 

A good illustration of this is Hilbert's paradox up the Grand Hotel. Imagine a hotel with a countably
infinite number of rooms. But now, imagine that there is a person booked into every single room.
Seemingly, it's fully booked, right? No. Infinite sets go against common sense. You see, if a new guest
shows up and wants a room, all the hotel has to do is move the guest in room number 1 to room
number 2. And a guest in room 2 to room 3 and 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 and so on. Because the number of
rooms is never ending we cannot run out of rooms. Infinity -1 is also infinity again. If one guest
leaves the hotel, we can shift every guest the other way. Guest 2 goes to room 1, 3 to 2, 4 to 3 and
so on, because we have an infinite amount of guests. That is a never ending supply of them. No
room will be left empty. As it turns out, you can subtract any finite number from infinity and still be
left with infinity. It doesn't care. It's unending. 

Banach-Tarski hasn't left our sights yet. All of this is related. We are now ready to move on to
shapes. 

Hilbert's hotel can be applied to a circle. Points around the circumference can be thought of as
guests. If we remove one point from the circle that point is gone, right? Infinity tells us it doesn't
matter. The circumference of a circle is irrational. It's the radius times 2Pi. So, if we mark off points
beginning from the whole, every radius length along the circumference going clockwise we will
never land on the same point twice, ever. We can count off each point we mark with a whole
number. So this set is never-ending, but countable, just like guests and rooms in Hilbert's hotel. And
like those guests, even though one has checked out, we can just shift the rest. Move them
counterclockwise and every room will be filled Point 1 moves to fill in the hole, point 2 fills in the
place where point 1 used to be, 3 fills in 2 and so on. Since we have a unending supply of numbered
points, no hole will be left unfilled. The missing point is forgotten. We apparently never needed it to
be complete. 

There's one last needo consequence of infinity we should discuss before tackling Banach-Tarski. Ian
Stewart famously proposed a brilliant dictionary. One that he called the Hyperwebster. The
Hyperwebster lists every single possible word of any length formed from the 26 letters in the English
alphabet. It begins with "a," followed by "aa," then "aaa," then "aaaa." And after an infinite number
of those, "ab," then "aba," then "abaa", "abaaa," and so on until "z, "za," "zaa," et cetera, et cetera,
until the final entry in infinite sequence of "z"s. Such a dictionary would contain every single word.
Every single thought, definition, description, truth, lie, name, story. What happened to Amelia
Earhart would be in that dictionary, as well as every single thing that didn't happened to Amelia
Earhart. Everything that could be said using our alphabet. Obviously, it would be huge, but the
company publishing it might realize that they could take a shortcut. If they put all the words that
begin with a in a volume titled "A," they wouldn't have to print the initial "a." Readers would know
to just add the "a," because it's the "a" volume. By removing the initial "a," the publisher is left with
every "a" word sans the first "a," which has surprisingly become every possible word. Just one of the
26 volumes has been decomposed into the entire thing. It is now that we're ready to investigate this
video's titular paradox. What if we turned an object, a 3D thing into a Hyperwebster? Could we
decompose pieces of it into the whole thing? Yes. 

The first thing we need to do is give every single point on the surface of the sphere one name and
one name only. A good way to do this is to name them after how they can be reached by a given
starting point. If we move this starting point across the surface of the sphere in steps that are just
the right length, no matter how many times or in what direction we rotate, so long as we never
backtrack, it will never wind up in the same place twice. We only need to rotate in four directions to
achieve this paradox. Up, down, left and right around two perpendicular axes. We are going to need
every single possible sequence that can be made of any finite length out of just these four rotations.
That means we will need lef, right, up and down as well as left left, left up, left down, but of course
not left right, because, well, that's backtracking. Going left and then right means you're the same as
you were before you did anything, so no left rights, no right lefts and no up downs and no down ups.
Also notice that I'm writing the rotations in order right to left, so the final rotation is the leftmost
letter. That will be important later on. Anyway. 

A list of all possible sequences of allowed rotations that are finite in lenght is, well, huge. Countably
infinite, in fact. But if we apply each one of them to a starting point in green here and then name the
point we land on after the sequence that brought us there, we can name a countably infinite set of
points on the surface. Let's look at how, say, these four strings on our list would work. Right up left.
Okay, rotating the starting point this way takes us here. Let's colour code the point based on the
final rotation in its string, in this case it's left and for that we will use purple. Next up down down.
That sequence takes us here. We name the point DD and color it blue, since we ended with a down
rotation. RDR, that will be this point's name, takes us here. And for a final right rotation, let's use
red. Finally, for a sequence that end with up, let's colour code the point orange. Now, if we imagine
completing this process for every single sequence, we will have a countably infinite number of points
named and color-coded. That's great, but not enough. 

There are an uncountably infinite number of points on a sphere's surface. But no worries, we can
just pick a point we missed. Any point and color it green, making it a new starting point and then run
every sequence from here. After doing this to an uncountably infinite number of starting point we
will have indeed named and colored every single point on the surface just once. With the exception
of poles. Every sequence has two poles of rotation. Locations on the sphere that come back to
exactly where they started. For any sequence of right or left rotations, the polls are the north and
south poles. The problem with poles like these is that more than one sequence can lead us to them.
They can be named more than once and be colored in more than one color. For example, if you
follow some other sequence to the north or south pole, any subsequent rights or lefts will be equally
valid names. In order to deal with this we're going to just count them out of the normal scheme and
color them all yellow. Every sequence has two, so there are a countably infinite amount of them.
Now, with every point on the sphere given just one name and just one of six colors, we are ready to
take the entire sphere apart. Every point on the surface corresponds to a unique line of points below
it all the way to the center point. And we will be dragging every point's line along with it. The lone
center point we will set aside. 

Okay, first we cut out and extract all the yellow poles, the green starting points, the orange up
points, the blue down points and the red and purple left and right points. That's the entire sphere.
With just these pieces you could build the whole thing. But take a look at the left piece. It is defined
by being a piece composed of every point, accessed via a sequence ending with a left rotation. If we
rotate this piece right, that's the same as adding an "R" to every point's name. But left and then right
is a backtrack, they cancel each other out. And look what happens when you reduce them away. The
set becomes the same as a set of all points with names that end with L, but also U, D and every point
reached with no rotation. That's the full set of starting points. We have turned less than a quarter of
the sphere into nearly three-quarters just by rotating it. We added nothing. It's like the
Hyperwebster. If we had the right piece and the poles of rotation and the center point, well, we've
got the entire sphere again, but with stuff left over. 

To make a second copy, let's rotate the up piece down. The down ups cancel because, well, it's the
same as going nowhere and we're left with a set of all starting points, the entire up piece, the right
piece and the left piece, but there's a problem here. We don't need this extra set of starting points.
We still haven't used the original ones. No worries, let's just start over. We can just move everything
from the up piece that turns into a starting point when rotated down. That means every point whose
final rotation is up. Let's put them in the piece. Of course, after rotating points named UU will just
turn into points named U, and that would give us a copy here and here. So, as it turns out, we need
to move all points with any name that is just a string of Us. We will put them in the down piece and
rotate the up piece down, which makes it congruent to the up right and left pieces, add in the down
piece along with some up and the starting point piece and, well, we're almost done. The poles of
rotation and center are missing from this copy, but no worries. There's a countably infinite number
of holes, where the poles of rotations used to be, which means there is some pole around which we
can rotate this sphere such that every pole hole orbits around without hitting another. Well, this is
just a bunch of circles with one point missing. We fill them each like we did earlier. And we do the
same for the centerpoint. Imagine a circle that contains it inside the sphere and just fill in from
infinity and look what we've done. 

We have taken one sphere and turned it into two identical spheres without adding anything. One
plus one equals 1. That took a while to go through, but the implications are huge. And
mathematicians, scientists and philosophers are still debating them. Could such a process happen in
the real world? I mean, it can happen mathematically and math allows us to abstractly predict and
describe a lot of things in the real world with amazing accuracy, but does the Banach-Tarski paradox
take it too far? Is it a place where math and physics separate? 

We still don't know. History is full of examples of mathematical concepts developed in the abstract
that we did not think would ever apply to the real world for years, decades, centuries, until
eventually science caught up and realized they were totally applicable and useful. The Banach-Tarski
paradox could actually happen in our real-world, the only catch of course is that the five pieces you
cut your object into aren't simple shapes. They must be infinitely complex and detailed. That's not
possible to do in the real world, where measurements can only get so small and there's only a finite
amount of time to do anything, but math says it's theoretically valid and some scientists think it may
be physically valid too. There have been a number of papers published suggesting a link between by
Banach-Tarski and the way tiny tiny sub-atomic particles can collide at high energies and turn into
more particles than we began with. We are finite creatures. Our lives are small and can only
scientifically consider a small part of reality. What's common for us is just a sliver of what's available.
We can only see so much of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can only delve so deep into
extensions of space. Common sense applies to that which we can access. 

But common sense is just that. Common. If total sense is what we want, we should be prepared to
accept that we shouldn't call infinity weird or strange. The results we've arrived at by accepting it are
valid, true within the system we use to understand, measure, predict and order the universe.
Perhaps the system still needs perfecting, but at the end of day, history continues to show us that
the universe isn't strange. We are. And as always, thanks for watching. Finally, as always, the
description is full of links to learn more. There are also a number of books linked down there that
really helped me wrap my mind kinda around Banach-Tarski. 

First of all, Leonard Wapner's "The Pea and the Sun." This book is fantastic and it's full of lot of the
preliminaries needed to understand the proof that comes later. He also talks a lot about the
ramifications of what Banach-Tarski and their theorem might mean for mathematics. 

Also, if you wanna talk about math and whether it's discovered or invented, whether it really truly
will map onto the universe, Yanofsky's "The Outer Limits of Reason" is great. This is the favorite book
of mine that I've read this entire year. Another good one is E. Brian Davies' "Why Beliefs Matter."
This is actually Corn's favorite book, as you might be able to see there. It's delicious and full of lots of
great information about the limits of what we can know and what science is and what mathematics
is. 

If you love infinity and math, I cannot more highly recommend Matt Parker's "Things to Make and
Do in the Fourth Dimension." He's hilarious and this book is very very great at explaining some pretty
awesome things. So keep reading, and if you're looking for something to watch, I hope you've
already watched Kevin Lieber's film on Field Day. I already did a documentary about Whittier, Alaska
over there. Kevin's got a great short film about putting things out on the Internet and having people
react to them. There's a rumor that Jake Roper might be doing something on Field Day soon. So
check out mine, check out Kevin's and subscribe to Field Day for upcoming Jake Roper action, yeah?
He's actually in this room right now, say hi, Jake. [Jake:] Hi. Thanks for filming this, by the way. Guys,
I really appreciate who you all are. And as always, thanks for watching