Brain Pickings has an intriguing post with a video titled “Why Everything is Connected to Everything Else, Explained in 100 Seconds.” The speaker is “rockstar physicist” Brian Cox.

While the clip was intriguing, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical at first. You can hear some pretty bizarre claims related to quantum physics; I feel some people can get carried away with the quantum mystical stuff. I wondered at first if this was one of those cases. (How seriously should we take a “rockstar physicist”?) But apparently Cox has some serious credentials.

As for what he’s talking about with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, I guess I’ll have to take his word for it. Reading about it here it sounds like the rule is “no two electrons in an atom can be identical.” I didn’t see anything saying that no two atoms in the universe could be identical. Then again, it’s all pretty technical – and I’m no physicist.

His talk reminded me a little of entanglement – which even Einstein thought was so weird that he called it “spooky action at a distance.” I don’t know if there’s a tie-in, but entanglement really does demonstrate a mysterious form of non-local connectedness.

Interesting stuff, this quantum physics…