[Jason] What was the butterfly
you were telling me about yesterday, Richard?
Downloaded from YTS.MX
A blue tiger butterfly.
I see them way out the sea coming in from the ocean.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
And I've known of this for many years.
I've told other fishermen about them and-
[Beverly] We all know about blue tigers.
- We all now because blue tiger butter butterflies
because they come from the ocean.
But I kind of think we are the only ones who know that.
- [Beverly] Well, all of our family knows now.
Oh yes, yes.
And where they come from?
[Jason] Storyteller.
Yes.
[Jason] Yeah, what can you tell me
about his stories?
He seems to be a man of like a trillion stories.
Yes, he likes to tell stories.
[Jason] Are they true?
Oh, yes, I'm sure they're all true.
- [Jason] Some say that fishermen exaggerate things.
What do you think?
- Oh, well, all fishermen would exaggerate, I would say,
about the size of their fish and what have you.
But no, he's pretty, doesn't tell fibs.
(inhaling)
(gentle ethereal music)
(exhaling)
(inhaling)
(gentle ethereal music continues)
Good morning.
Just in Hawaii on my layover to Australia.
Taking up some shots of some old volcanoes.
Pressure and time.
That's all it takes.
My name is Jason Wade Hammonds.
I'm a former New York Times producer
turned independent filmmaker.
And if you'll permit me,
I'd like to take you on a little journey around the world
that may shed new light
on how the universe may have been created.
In just 400 years, the realm of physics
has undergone remarkable transformations,
reshaping our understanding of the world.
Now let's get to Australia.
Get to the heart of our story.
From a flat earth dogma enforced by the church,
to a multidimensional reality affirmed
by Einstein's relativity,
the interplay of ideas reveals the dynamic nature
of knowledge and discovery.
And so we find ourselves at the precipice of possibility
on the Sunshine Coast of Eastern Australia
where I meet Mr. Freeman for the first time.
And it didn't take long for him to start telling stories.
A fisherman and a physicist.
Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea."
I was telling Jason about Mandy
winning that big prize for the biggest bream.
[Beverly] Oh, what's your word?
[Richard] Yeah.
- [Beverly] I thought this was about your universe.
- [Richard] It is about anything you want, I think
[Jason] It's about...
It's about people.
He was telling me how you met,
and I'd like to hear that story
from your point of view, actually.
I met him over the back fence.
That's true.
[Jason] What does that mean?
Well, he lived next door.
He lived next door.
- [Jason] And one day you saw him out there
and you saw this handsome guy running around?
That's right.
I'm playing the game.
Yes.
- Would we better start again so I can talk?
[Jason] Sure, let's start again.
Why don't you introduce yourself then.
My name is Beverly Freeman,
married to Richard Freeman.
[Jason] For how long?
38 years.
[Jason] You call those good years?
There's been some really good years.
(bright music)
Yeah, I'm Richard Freeman
and we are at (indistinct),
my home near the beach.
When I started catching spanner crabs,
nobody was catching spanner crabs here
and selling for the market.
I actually made some dillies up
to catch a feed of blue swimmer crab.
When I went to pull 'em up,
and it came up just a big round ball of orange
just hanging off every edge of the dilly was spanner crabs.
I thought, "Gee, you know, there must be a market
for these jolly things."
So that's how I commenced spanner crabbing.
I'll keep going for a couple more years, I think.
What are we gonna talk about?
- [Jason] Well, let's start at the beginning.
How did life...
In your model, how did life begin?
- Well, are we talking about how did the universe begin
or life itself begin?
[Jason] Well, if the universe is life,
how did it begin?
- My model deals with more how the universe of matter began.
I like to think my model, it's a natural universe
which follows the indulgence of Mother Nature.
A problem for scientists is,
how did these supermassive black holes
form at the very beginning of the universe?
Scientists are very clever,
but the theory has a lot of problems.
Nothing tells us where the Big Bang came from.
What caused the Big Bang?
- Astronomers have made an unexpected discovery
using the James Webb Space Telescope.
It spotted six massive galaxies
that existed between 500 million
and 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Well, that's the problem.
The James Webb Space Telescope is upsetting the apple cart.
All of a sudden we realize
that we may have to rewrite all the textbooks
about the beginning of the universe.
Now, it takes many billions of years to create a galaxy,
like the Milky Way galaxy,
but the James Webb telescope has identified six galaxies
that exist half a billion years after the Big Bang
that are up to 10 times bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.
Something is wrong.
We may have to revise our theory
of the creation of the universe.
- All right, so now let's tune the telescope in
to galaxies being born.
And, oh my gosh, who ordered this?
We're finding galaxies in the dark ages.
And I'm told the lead researcher was so shocked by this
he spit out his coffee when he realized
what kind of data he had on his hands.
If tomorrow you have a new idea
about how the universe works, it's gonna enclose
everything we've been talking about up to that moment
that has been experimentally and observationally verified.
- [Jason] With these new results and observations,
scientists now confirm the Big Bang cannot explain
what's being observed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
And while that's confounding to many,
it's a breath of fresh air
to those who have smelled something fishy for decades.
I'm looking at a chart here
of the mass and energy of the entire universe.
This is a NASA pie chart.
You can see there,
over 71% of the mass and energy in the universe
is in a form of dark energy.
What is dark energy?
It's actually a hypothetical form of energy
inserted by scientists
to account for galaxies accelerating away.
Next big slice of the pie is dark matter, 24%.
And do scientists know today what dark matter is?
No.
Probably around the year 2000 I created this image,
or book I was beginning to write.
This is my original idea,
and I'll call this the symbol of classical reality.
That little symbol,
that's my whole model.
That's how simple the basic model is.
Whether it is dark matter,
how regular matter was created,
how the dimensions of space were made,
the source of gravity or the source of mass,
and it all comes back to the simplicity of that.
To understand it, just concentrate on that symbol.
It's amazing.
(gentle music)
I'll grab my hat out of the car.
There's a tree up here,
it just may have some owls in it.
Two owls.
We'll have a look for the owls.
No owls.
They could be there,
I just can't see them.
(gentle bright music)
[Jason] At this point in the adventure,
I'm starting to get a feel for Richard's personality.
He reminds me of the wise old owl or the tortoise,
sure in his direction,
sensible about his footing.
But what does his character say about his ability
to potentially change a paradigm of the universe?
- The surfers out there all looks idyllic this morning.
Beautiful ocean.
If I was still working, this would be a work day.
Now I'd be 60 kilometers or so out the sea
and I would already be pulling my gear.
- [Jason] How many years ago did you start fishing?
- Probably obtained my commercial fishing license
around 50 years ago.
When I was line fishing,
I spent many night out the sea.
And I did two, three-day trips and long nights.
If there's a bit of moon up, I sometimes fish all night.
But I got more and more interested in cosmology.
Always have been.
Especially out the sea there alone,
one thing that kept going round in my head was gravity.
I couldn't believe that something that's so accessible,
it's all around us,
but scientists today do not have a source for gravity.
And scientists would also say that space-time
flows into black holes,
just like water flowing over waterfall.
And so I kept going back to that thought.
And this went on for several years.
And one day I thought,
"Well, what if there was a time before the universe began,
when there was no dimensional space or time?
Absolute nothingness, just absolute nothingness."
If you could supply a tiny piece of nothingness,
complete nothingness to matter,
then space would flow into that,
and that would be the source of gravity.
They're very clever, these scientists.
They're the gurus.
They're just magnificent.
But the very beginning, the source of that,
where that energy came from is unknown.
I believe that before I died,
scientists would know these answers.
But as I grew older, there were no answers.
It seems the only thing the Big Bang really explains
is the universe is expanding.
- [Jason] And quite frankly, it can't even do that.
Scientists have observed that the universe expansion
is accelerating beyond the calculations
that the standard model can predict.
Another nail in the coffin for the Big Bang.
But perhaps a modern physicist's nightmare
is another fisherman's dream.
So I tried to develop my own.
If I could find a way to put this tiny,
tiny bit of pure nothingness into matter,
then that would be the traction part of gravity.
I remember when they announced that they had discovered
that black holes were real.
These are real things in the universe.
So one day floating around on the ocean out there,
on the day I was so far out that you couldn't see land,
by myself, I started thinking about,
why would the dimensions of space,
like with the black hole, flow in the matter?
It seemed if you could work that out,
you would know the source of gravity.
It wasn't like I so much wanted to be able to explain
how the universe began,
but it annoyed me that I didn't understand gravity.
I don't why, but it just annoyed me.
I thought, "How can it be something that's so common
that is all around us,
and you could start it with any instrument
you could ever invent because it's so accessible.
You don't have to go light years into space or anything.
It's just everywhere.
Absolutely everywhere.
Einstein's general relative explains
how gravity is delivered but with no source.
So I dug deeper and deeper.
What if before all the universe began,
there's a realm of complete nothingness?
Just a timeless dimensionless nothingness.
And now I had to figure out
how to get this tiny bit of nothingness into matter.
It seemed like it just,
something went off in my head.
It was like, "This is the answer."
This tiny bit of complete nothingness can explain gravity.
Nothing can exist without gravity.
And so gradually my idea was evolving.
- [Neil] Science can describe how gravity works,
but can they describe why it works?
So this is the how, why duality here.
And in science, if we can describe how something works
and predict its future behavior,
we claim to understand it and we move on.
You can ask deeper question about, why is there gravity?
What is the meaning?
What is the purpose?
And go ahead,
but I'm good with what I've done
and I can land a spacecraft on Mars inside of a crater
in a hole in one using my understanding of gravity,
so I'm pretty good with it.
So I'm not distracted
by the more philosophical side of that,
why does it work?
[Jason] He's right.
We have harnessed the power of gravity in many ways
and can land probes and vehicles on objects in space
to an intricate level of precision,
but to those of us who want to know why it works,
there's more to the story.
And Richard's natural model,
the source of gravity is turned on its head
from the typical mass accretion idea of Galileo.
In fact, gravity is split into two forces
called inner and outer.
The key lies in the tiny piece of nothingness,
or the minuscule black hole if you want to call it that,
at the center of each atom.
Space-time flows inward to this nothingness,
creating gravity as its source.
So the flow of water over the waterfall, if you will,
shows us why gravity is delivered,
not only how it can be used.
This tiny piece of nothingness gives gravity a source
and a reason why gravity exists altogether.
Einstein's general relativity says mass
warps the curvature of space-time and delivers gravity.
So we begin our universe in this dimensionless void,
which for all intents of purpose, just goes on forever.
Because there's zero mass energy in this void,
it's just nothingness.
We have to maintain that sum total zero mass energy
when building a universe.
How do you do that?
Old book, "A Brief History of Time,"
Stephen Hawking on page, it must be 136,
he tells how gravity attraction,
which in my model is this bit here,
the energy of gravitational attraction
is considered to be negative energy.
And positive energy of all the matter up here
which sits above the ground state of space,
it cancels out the negative energy
of gravitational attraction.
Which means once we have a universe made of matter,
the sum total of the universe,
the sum total of its mass and energy,
because one cancels out the other, maintains zero.
So you begin with zero total mass energy.
And even after you create all your mass energy,
the sum total is still zero.
I read about these quantum fluctuations.
[Jason] I take a moment here
to insert some of the findings
from the scientists at the University of Konstanz
because it does provide the most relevant proof
of Richard's theory.
The observation of a quantum vacuum fluctuation,
which in Richard's model is the beginning.
- Gravitational attraction and the source of mass
cancels out all the positive energy of all matter.
It's a tiny bit of nothingness,
tiny fluctuating, minuscule black hole of virtual mass.
Tiny bit of complete nothingness.
When the source of gravity
is that tiny bit of complete nothingness,
and the universe is growing
and it is expanding into nothingness.
[Jason] And so from nothing,
an orchard beneath the dark mulch of mystery,
a dense black seed splits at the sea,
the uncaused energy begets the undreamed dream.
Dormant light stairs with shed slumber.
A morning stretch, a new dawn,
first sound wave, ancient yawn.
Within the changeless topsoil,
the great tree of light takes root.
Old growth shadows, newborn fruit.
Across the cosmos, the enjoyer strides
to pluck ripe constellations from their branches.
(waves crashing)
Let there be lights.
Let there be second chances.
This is a crab dilly.
To catch spanner crabs,
you use these flat dillies.
They lie on the ground flat.
That's a bait bag.
The bait goes in there.
They come outta the sand, crawl across there.
And then when they try to bury in here,
they get their toes caught.
Their dactyls caught.
It only catches spanner crab.
Other crab's legs come down to a point
so they don't get caught.
To catch myself a feed of fish,
I have different rods and reel combinations.
And for whining bream.
And over here, I have my tailor gear
to catch tailor.
Homemade spinner.
I cast out off the headland,
off the rocks to a little sunken reef
where there's white water breaking,
and the fish hang in that white water.
[Jason] What are you thinking about
when you're out there fishing?
Well, when I'm fishing over there,
I'm mostly facing a nature reserve,
so it's like I'm in the middle of nowhere.
And when the fish is not biting, I look up the stars.
One of my favorite things to look at,
I don't know why, but is finding the center
of the Milky Way galaxy
because I know there's a supermassive black hole there.
And according to my model,
that's where matter was created.
But the beauty of my model, these gravitational scaffolds
of the supermassive black hole at the center
and outer halo of dark matter,
they must be created first
before you can create a galaxy of matter.
- [Jason] In 2015, scientists from the Harvard
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
found a mysterious but tight correlation
between the dark matter halo
surrounding a galaxy supermassive black hole
and its relative mass.
This is a pivotal proof
for the linear creation of dark matter scaffolding,
black hole formation,
and then matter created and ejected
from the poles of the black hole
to create the entire galaxy over time.
When it is ejected from those pole areas
by the magnetic fields,
the magnetic fields are first closed,
anti-matter travel in different directions
inside of these magnetic fields.
So the newly created protons, they're trying to escape.
And the pressure builds up and builds up and builds up
until the magnetic fields can't hold.
And this is all known to happen,
except that it's not known to happen
with newly created matter.
And it needs to be explosively released with great force
to escape the massive gravity of a supermassive black hole.
[Jason] One additional note
on matter formation from black holes
regarding a discovery in 2016
that identified the temperature of quasars,
which are the most powerful light beams in the universe
emitted from supermassive black holes,
temperatures that have measured
at an astounding 10 trillion degrees Kelvin,
which is at least 10 times hotter than our sun.
It was said before that once electrons
reached a hundred billion degrees,
they would emit gamma and X-rays
and immediately begin to cool down.
But this discovery and subsequent recent studies
are showing how the standard model,
again, cannot predict the behavior of matter.
In Richard's model,
the 10 trillion Kelvin temperature is actually predicted
as a requirement for the release of matter plumes
from the black hole poles.
This also confirms the ability of supermassive black holes
and supermassive galaxies to form
in the period known as the dark ages.
- But they're going to have to stop discovering things
so he can finish this book.
Yeah, the new discoveries align
exactly with what I theorized.
So I say to Beverly,
"Well, the book wasn't nearly finished
but now they've discovered this part is true."
There is now observational evidence
of this part of my theory,
and then I feel compelled to add that real evidence
to my file before I publish it.
[Jason] So some of this universe stuff
may be true, you think?
- Oh, well, I'm sure he is got the facts right
because most people now take for granted the Big Bang
without thinking about it.
That's just the way it is.
And to try to change that around is enormous.
So, I don't know how we'll go,
but he's dedicated to it.
- [Jason] So what does the Big Bang truly signify?
Scientists proclaim that all matter and energy
were born in a single moment at the dawn of the universe
some 13.4 billion years ago.
They claim that everything we perceived today
arose from that singular event.
But there are many problems with this theory.
You see, the standard model only accounts
for about five or 6% of the known universe.
Richard's model, however, revolutionizes this paradigm.
He proposes that the universe
did not explode from a single point,
rather it began gradually,
sparked by a fluctuation in nothingness.
This primordial breath eventually gave rise
to the fabric of space-time,
creating a scaffold of dark matter.
Over eons, the accumulated dark matter eventually collapses,
imploding into a supermassive black hole.
And from its poles,
matter is expelled through superheated quasars,
thus giving birth to matter and galaxies.
Now you may wonder, "What does this mean for me?"
Well, consider the similarities
between the macrocosm of the universe
and your personal existence.
Consider the act of breathing to sustain life.
Your diaphragm contracts to draw in air.
(inhales)
And when you exhale, it relaxes.
The diaphragm remains unchanged.
It merely fluctuates.
(exhales)
At the heart of Richard's model
lies a tiny speck of nothingness.
And when it fluctuates,
(inhales)
things come to life.
(exhales)
This is one of my favorite sites.
You can sort of see the wind,
there's kind of a (indistinct) blow coming.
So if that was early morning
and this blow was gonna continue and be enforced,
something like that, I'd say,
"Well, I'll go back to bed."
By this time, I woken Beverly up
and I don't think Beverly would be thrilled at me
not going to work and going back to bed Instead.
- He'd get up at one o'clock and he'd get out the back
talking to one of the other fellows.
And they'd say, "Will we go?
Won't we go?
I'll just check the weather."
Well, I'll go and have another look,
and it'd be four o'clock in the morning,
and they'd say, "No, we'll go tomorrow."
And they'd go back to bed.
And there I am wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
That happened quite a lot towards the end.
- [Jason] Now did you ever worry about 'em out in the water?
- No, because they're always fairly close contact
with each other all of the time.
Once the radio stopped, they got onto their phones
and they pretty much knew
where each other were all the time.
- [Jason] And you don't recall any instances
where you might have...
[Jason] No, he was never in...
A couple of his friends might have gone overboard,
but he never did.
- You trusted his judgment? - Yes.
- [Jason] It's dangerous out there, you know that?
Yes.
- [Richard] Did you ever go out on the water with him?
[Beverly] No.
[Jason] You've never gone on the boat?
No, I don't like the water.
I don't like the waves.
I don't like the up and down of the ocean.
- [Jason] Having sold his 30-foot Shark Cat fishing boat,
Richard was now the owner of this 16-foot dinghy.
We couldn't get out in the big water,
but it was enough to get us
to one of his favorite thinking spots.
(indistinct)
(gentle suspenseful music)
When my daughter Mandy was born,
I decided I wanted to be home at night.
And I changed into full-time spanner crabbing
because spanner crabbing for me,
they were only day trips.
So then I wasn't staying out for like three days on end.
Some people seem to make it at fishing, but many don't.
I've seen so many come and go,
but occasionally, you get that person who,
I don't know, you gotta push.
It's like you've gotta push past the limit all the time,
push past the limit.
He who goes the furthest and sticks his neck out the most
is the most likely to secede.
(gentle ethereal music)
There's a belief by old sailors that these albatross,
particularly the wanderer albatross,
carry the souls of lost sailors.
And I was fishing crabbing
like 20 miles east of Mooloolooba one day
and I see this boat working to the north of me.
Couldn't quite make out who it was.
Early afternoon, the boat disappeared
and I thought, "Oh, he is gone home."
But I found out later it was a fellow spanner crabber,
and his boat went home without him.
And they never found him.
Anyway, the weather turned bad,
and a couple of weeks later,
I tried to had put that out of my mind,
but I thought I'd just carry on to the north
where I finished off the last trip,
kind of thing you often do.
So I went out there,
and there was a fair bit of swell that day.
These wandering albatross,
I might only see one every two, three years.
I've only seen a few of them.
There are other types of albatross,
but the wanderer up here in this area is really rare.
Anyway, on this very next trip out after losing Gordon,
and you think about you've lost a mate.
And I looked down the south
and I could see this albatross coming.
Never flapped a wing.
Because they're so big, you can see them way away.
And you could see him sort of looking at me.
And then he wheeled around back to the southeast,
back towards the direction of the great Southern Ocean.
And it was like, he said,
"Do not worry Richard.
I've got your mate."
I still don't believe it, but I'll feel it.
Why that bird showed up on that day.
He showed up right on cue.
[Jason] What made you think
that the creation was brought about not by Big Bang?
Because the Big Bang
has so many things that can't explain.
Okay, an Australian physicist, Paul Davies,
he's done research in light of quasars.
So time went a lot faster back then,
and now they measure the age of the universe
in today's a lot slower time.
So if you wanna accept the laws of physics,
the theories and numerous,
and now very clever experiments,
there could never have been a Big Bang.
[Jason] It was fun to see Richard
get into conversations with the public.
It seemed everywhere we went, he knew somebody,
and would always wind up talking about physics.
And people were interested, genuinely.
He reminded me of a sidewalk preacher
that didn't know a stranger and carried the gospel truth.
Back in the harbor,
we met up with an old fishing buddy of Richard's
to deliver his daily haul of spanner crabs to market.
I wanted to see that process
to understand his daily life routine.
Being on a boat with Richard struck me rather ironically,
posing the question.
- They're all alive. - Yeah?
[Jason] How does a man
who doesn't even have a college education
and who basically lived on the tide for over 40 years,
no gravity, a little more than most?
You miss fishing?
No. (chuckles)
No.
There's things I miss.
I miss Dolly.
I guess you miss the money a bit too.
(gentle music)
Well, I haven't been here for over two years
and done this little bit.
So being here and helping Peter unload is like,
yeah, I do miss it.
I call Dolly my pet dolphin.
And I name her Dolly.
Other fishermen have seen her around
and we all call her Dolly now.
And hopefully she's still out there going strong.
One time she had a baby and she brought her baby to me
and she pushed the baby between me and the boat.
So she pushed the baby dolphin towards me
just to show off her baby.
And I thought that was very special.
If she was about
and a big snapper will suddenly fell off my hook
and float it away in the current,
she would go down and bring it back to me.
It might be nearly a hundred yards away.
She doesn't carry it in her mouth.
She would push it on the forehead,
on the forehead, all the way back to the boat
and give me the fish back.
Sometimes I walk in the beach and I say,
at night, and I'm looking at the ocean,
I say, "Hello, Dolly."
And it'd be nice to believe she knows I'm there.
Yeah, there were special moments out there.
- [Jason] Stories abounded in Richard's world at sea.
His award-winning photographs
and natural model of the universe,
his reward for hundreds of thousands of hours on the water.
The ocean is a mystery.
- [Richard] I've never ever seen it like that.
[Jason] As grand as the cosmos.
No water.
All the years I've been here,
I've never seen it like that.
I know what to do, Jason.
We have garlic chicken for bait.
Fresh.
If we don't catch anything,
we can go home and cook it up.
Thank you.
- Very good. - Cheers.
Yeah, long time since I've had a beer.
I dunno what the point is,
but I'll tell you the story.
Amazing, but true.
Okay.
I was fishing from 50 fathoms of water,
probably about 24 miles
or something like that off Caloundra.
And I was catching these bar cod on pretty thick lines.
At this time, I had one on about 35 pounds.
Anyway, I could see this white pointer chasing him.
I didn't have time to grab the gas.
I had gloves on so I just lent down and gild him in my hand.
The same incident I did that,
the shark grabbed the other half of the fish.
Well, I was not gonna let go.
I wasn't gonna let that shark have my cod.
And you know what?
This shark, he wasn't gonna let go either.
Well, he got his half and I got my half.
People seem to like shark's stories, I don't know why.
But that big white pointer I saw that day,
my mind just wouldn't accept that a shark could be that big.
And then one day I was reading about the megalodon,
and I thought to myself,
what I saw that day, I know it wasn't a real megalodon,
but I saw a megalodon that day.
(gentle ethereal music)
[Jason] No fish, but good fish stories.
Well, this is the end of the road.
Yeah, we haven't really covered time.
What is time?
Now, my model, I refer to time a lot.
I say, because everything's wrapped in together,
if we talk about gravity, gravity slows time.
If we talk about velocity, speed slows time.
Now, in my model, these tiny gravitational waves,
which are expanding from every atom
or every nucleus of every atom,
one wave is one planck length.
Planck length is a distance
which light travels in planck time.
So because a gravitational wave provides planck length,
the distance across the wave,
and planck time, the passing of the wave,
it allows light to always travel
the distance of planck length in planck time,
regardless if the gravitational wave
is stretched by, say, gravity.
So now we have four dimensions,
length, width, depth and the passing of time,
all derived from the one dimension.
And they're all entangled with your own atoms,
so your own dimensional reality comes from within yourself.
Your own passing of time comes from within yourself.
That's just what my model says.
- [Jason] Upon fingertips and tips of tongues,
we climb Jacob's ladder rung by rung.
Across inconceivable spans, starlights is racing.
Since the dawn across the void, it has been racing.
Racing to meet the light in you.
Time moves at the speed of bliss.
Count the petals on the lotus flower.
At the speed of bliss, time moves.
Well, it's winter now and I'm back in New York.
Reaching out to physicists
to try to get them to take a look at Richard's work.
It's been a real struggle.
First was with my old editor.
Her husband is a theoretical physicist at Columbia.
Colleagues with Brian Greene, the TV scientist, author.
And then we reached out to Dr. Leitenstorfer,
and he responded very positively at first.
Said that he would do an interview
and sent me his latest paper,
which I could show you here.
And then in my follow-up email to schedule it,
when I mentioned Richard, he just ghosted me.
And that was it.
Disappointing. (clears throat)
And...
I dunno what to say about that.
(metal tinkling)
(gentle spirited music)
- Here's a question we should all be asking,
what went wrong,
not just with the pandemic, but with our civic life?
If everyone has an equal chance,
the winners deserve their winnings.
This is the heart of the meritocratic ideal.
- So your book, of course, is "The Tyranny of Merit,"
and it almost sounds a little bit counterintuitive.
If you're me sitting in, you know, class-ridden Britain,
you look at the United States and you think,
"Wow, it's not about class there, it's about merit.
And if you try hard, you can succeed."
But you are saying that that now is a false narrative.
So that's one problem,
but there's a deeper problem,
which is the meritocratic ideal,
that if you work hard, you can rise.
You can overcome the inequality we've experienced
in recent decades through individual mobility.
That ideal is flawed.
No, no.
I know.
And the kids would love it.
It's just perfect day here for swimming and everything.
Think outside of the box
because you're not trapped into that.
Can I put it like in an educated box?
One reason I haven't run to other physicists,
not that I'm a physicist, but with this model,
because I realized my model was different.
It wasn't different to their successful theories.
It actually showed how all those things worked.
But it was different to the ideas.
And my only attempt to talk to a physicist about it,
one head of that department,
astrophysics at a university here in Brisbane,
I contacted him on the phone once
and he would not even let me talk about my model.
Not like one sentence of my idea to him.
And he said, "Richard, go and learn about physics."
Einstein has a phase on this.
The only thing that inhibits me is my prescribed education.
- [Beverly] I helped Richard a lot when he was crabbing.
I used to make his nets,
and another crab's wife and I
used to cart his crabs to Brisbane, et cetera.
We did a lot of those things when he was working.
[Jason] You're like the first mate.
Yes.
Well, he says he misses it,
but at the end, he was very tired of it
and wasn't happy with a lot of things about it.
- Like what? - Like all the industries,
all the bureaucrats and that takeover,
and make new rules which makes it very hard for them.
It was also harder for me
because I was just a single operator.
I was competing when it came to (indistinct)
against big vessels who had a crew of fishermen.
Unfortunately, people who diversified in different fisheries
didn't build up the history in different fisheries
or to maintain a license.
And I don't really wanna use the word sour,
but it's just the way it was.
I persevered with the spanner crab
and I think, overall, fishing was good to us
because it supported myself and my family.
And I said to the bloke,
I said, "But mate," I said,
"I'm not gonna be spanner crabbing all my life."
"There might be a time
when I wanna go sand crabbing or mud crabbing,
and now look what you..."
60,000 for a license.
I know.
I used to diversify in it all.
You know, I've got enough fish
virtually with a handline to build my house.
Snapper and pearlies and that.
- Yeah. - Yeah, yeah.
And heaps of mackerel.
And they took all that because I didn't have history
- in the right years. - Yeah, exactly.
- Right? - History in the right years.
Because we had a smaller catch history,
- we were out. - Yeah.
Not much hope for the young ones
that want to get into it, is there?
[Richard] No, no, no.
- Young people (indistinct). - No, no.
Anyway.
I'll get off my soapbox.
[Fisherman] Yeah, yeah.
I'm gonna get these fish (indistinct).
[Richard] All right.
Take care.
See you later.
[Jason] I couldn't help but feel kinship
with Richard and his fishermen friends.
In my own surroundings,
the small businesses have mostly succumbeded
to the voracious jaws of corporate America.
(indistinct)
Ideally we'd have ocean water, but...
- [Jason] This phenomenon extends globally.
- I can't be bothered walking down and getting it
- [Jason] Where power converges at the apex,
leaving many bereft of even the most basic opportunities.
The only thing that's still alive
and nice and fresh.
- [Jason] My grandmother's words still echo.
"We all have our wagons to pull, Jason."
Fell off.
In this moment, I'll break this seal on the back.
Crab's dead.
Okay, now in the pot.
I boiled them for 18 minutes.
Cooling.
[Jason] Damn good crabs.
I'd never had any so fresh.
I know everyone has a hard time
with this dimensionless space,
but when you realize that Einstein's predicting the same
at the speed of light,
it's like, "Well, there's something to it."
Every place is in the same place.
There are no dimensions
because these particles are not entangled with dimensions.
Now, this seems so weirded and impossible
because we only know a dimensional reality.
Oh, Jason, sometimes I think I'm probably just crazy.
It's relativity wrong?
Of course not.
It's brilliant.
Is (indistinct) theory wrong?
Of course not.
It's brilliant.
But no one's been able to put them together
and understand them both.
Well, when you realize these particles,
quantum particles reside within this dimensionless space,
everything comes together.
[Jason] In 2007, I came across a book
called "The Dancing Wu Li Masters."
Funny title.
In it, Gary Zukav, a Vietnam-vet-turned-author,
laid out the intersection of modern physics
and ancient religious ideas of creation.
Over a decade later,
am I seeing the reality of his forecast come to light?
Is nothingness, or as the mystics would say,
is emptiness the doorway to creation?
Oh, potential.
Oh, distilled infinite.
When given the choice to weaponize or to wonder,
I choose wonder.
Come, unhinge a little.
This is our lock.
Spin with me on the rotor of this great gyroscope.
We are verdant.
We are that which flares up, and fades.
Oh, what our feet touch.
Pumice and ash and silt and sand.
And beneath all this, the roots,
the roots are reaching.
Reaching for what we cannot know.
In the dark, they're reaching.
So we start with absolute nothing.
I mean, absolute nothing, not even space-time.
And we evolve of by, first, creating dark matter.
And then the tiny gravitational waves
expanding from dark matter,
if you wish to call it that.
They expand throughout space
and crisscross from trillions and trillions of (indistinct)
toward the fabric of dimensional space and time.
And then we create supermassive black holes
from all of this dark matter
which sets up the gravitational scaffolding
for the evolution of galaxies, like our Milky Way.
There doesn't have to be only
a once only creation of matter.
You can continue to create matter.
And you can sort of see this with my model.
Providing there is a supply of dark matter
around the supermassive black hole,
you can continue to create matter
because you're continually maintaining
the total sum zero mass energy universe.
(inhales)
(exhales)
[Jason] In 1916, Einstein unveiled
his groundbreaking theory of general relativity,
which faced skeptical peer reviews for years.
But in 1919,
Sir Arthur Eddington orchestrated expeditions
to Africa and Brazil simultaneously
to capture photographs of planetary orbits
during a solar eclipse.
Eddington's observations confirmed gravitational lensing,
thereby proving Einstein's theory and changing history.
100 years later, my big aha moment
came after filming "Wrapped!" in early 2022
when news of the James Webb Telescope discovery
of six supermassive galaxies in the dark ages happened.
Aha.
The hair on my spine literally stood straight up.
I'm not a physicist and it's not my place to say
whether Richard's model is right or wrong.
The real paradigm shift
is that we are the source of our own gravity.
Our own time and reality emanates from inside of us.
And his model, a tiny bit of nothingness,
that source of gravity inside of each one of us,
that makes us unique.
(inhales)
(exhales)
A beautiful morning.
The three planets up there,
the highest one in the sky is Saturn.
The middle, bright Venus, morning star.
The planet Venus.
And the bottom, I believe that could be Mars.
Beautiful.
I just saw a blue tiger fly pass.
A blue tiger butterfly.
Actually, he was flying the wrong way.
It was very strange.
But I see these blue tigers when I'm miles out the sea,
30 miles out the sea.
And about this time of year,
I come across the ocean.
I followed them in my boat.
And as soon as they hit the beach, they fly north.
They all fly north
and it's like a blue tiger butterfly highway.
They all go north.
They know where they're going.
One of those mysteries, I guess.
(gentle ethereal music)
- [Jason] Reflecting on my time with Richard
certainly been an enlightening experience.
I don't know if I've realized more
through his natural model of the universe
or through his fish stories.
- [Richard] If I was out to sea fishing now and crabbing,
sun's nearly two fingers above the horizon,
time to start the motors and pull up my first line.
- [Jason] Regardless of your scientific perspective
on Richard's natural model,
by now, a few things have become abundantly clear.
Mr. Freeman has lived a life of purpose
with the tenacity of a great white,
the mind of an owl,
the wings of an albatross,
and a heart as big as the whales.
- [Richard] My model doesn't write new physics.
It uses the predictions of existing physics,
the observations in results of experiments.
(gentle ethereal music)