THE TRUTH Behind Dr. Manhattan's LIMITLESS Power!

[Music] tighten a mainspring and it has to unwind when you start to release the tension the barrel then transfers that energy to the watch's various gears through an array of interlocking cogs built into each of them eventually moving the balance wheel the escapement mechanism keeps the balance wheel vibrating and allows the watch's gears to advance by a set amount with each swing thus the balance wheel oscillates back and forth with each motion taking precisely the same amount of time things work the way they do because they have two water flows downhill push a swing it returns if everything is in the right place then the world will always move exactly how we expect it to because it can't not do that but what if you had the ability to reach into our universe and rearrange the various cogs and wheels of existence maybe even add new ones stop certain gears or start others early what if you could control the very mainspring escapement mechanism and balance wheel of reality then you just might be one of the most powerful entities in all of creation hello I'm Tyler this is the imaginary axis and one of the most popular pastimes on this channel involves exploring exactly how powerful certain comic book characters are mathematically scientifically and I'm not gonna lie it can get a little overwhelming I often feel like there's a certain expectation to outdo myself and each time I tackle a video like this I purposefully try to find a character who makes the last character look unimpressive by comparison which of course gets harder and harder but recently there's been a newcomer in the DC Universe who keeps getting hyped up as one of the greatest threats in all of comic book history and ever since the last big multiverse shattering event he's been sitting in the background moving some of our favorite heroes and villains around like chess pieces there's this mysterious era of dread around him and is unclear motivations as he's repeatedly painted as a force beyond the Justice League beyond a dark side and even beyond this guy who is actually pulling different versions of Superman from every reality in the multiverse just to drain their powers into himself out of the hopes he would eventually be able to face off against this unstoppable invader from outside of everything the verdict well Superman stopped him but even if he had succeeded in draining every single one of them he still wouldn't have stood a chance against this impending doom now none of the characters really know who this guy is and he's done his best to stay a looming shadowy figure but most of us who have been paying attention are pretty sure that the DC multiverse is encountering dr. Manhattan if you've never heard that name before don't worry I'd say you have to be a solid three layers deep in the comic book fandom to really understand him despite his being a lead character and the best-selling graphic novel of all time but the point is there's been a lot of discussion lately both in universe and out about exactly how powerful he really is it's unclear I think I might have come to something of a definite conclusion after really looking into him but it's complicated so I'm going to politely ask everyone to bear with me as I take some time to talk about what dr. Manhattan is where his powers come from and what that says about is overall abilities I think you'll be pleasantly satisfied with the answer but first things first you have to ask if you find yourself attractive the answer is yes as a matter of fact you find everything attractive because of gravity even if you're sitting on the exact opposite side of the earth from me right now provided you have average weight I'm attracting you with roughly this much force but close-up it's a lot stronger and your molecules are also attracted to each other that they're holding you together like some of the universe's best brand of duct tape but gravity isn't the only thing doing the job the electromagnetic force responsible for pulling positives and negatives together keeps your molecules bonded and stops electrons from flying off of your body the strong nuclear force fights against electromagnetism repulsive properties and keeps your nuclei together and the weak nuclear force stabilizes your atoms through radioactive decay together these four fundamental forces can explain every interaction in the universe as far as we know and they're what keeps you you of course depending on your exact shape and size everyone's personal field of attraction energy is a little different but Tyler I can hear you typing what does any of this have to do with dr.

Manhattan well a lot actually you see dr. Manhattan wasn't always a glowing blue muscle man who likes to feel the breeze between his knees and you can't stop him there was actually at back in 1959 when the good doctor was just a regular doctor named Jon Osterman who was working on nuclear research with the United States government at the height of their cold war with the Soviet Union and as is typical when researching how to rip atoms apart and blow up your enemies dr. Osterman x' lab had a particular interest in manipulating the four fundamental forces of nature specifically they built something called an intrinsic field subtractor which would sort of delete all the forces holding an object together so the scientists can take notes on the different effects this had and dr.

Osterman was unlucky enough to accidentally get himself trapped in one of their testing chambers right before the next scheduled experiment he was annihilated it's actually important to everybody understand exactly what's going on here if you had the four fundamental forces ripped from your body your intrinsic field just deleted you wouldn't die you wouldn't even be destroyed ooh no you would be literally unmade the things that hold together the things that hold together your atoms would be gone you are wiped from the face of the universe there's nothing to bury there isn't even a shadow or a smoldering pile of ash you are nothing which is why the first thing dr. Manhattan ever did would automatically set him up as the most powerful thing in the history of humanity he came back oh sure it took a few months he had to find all the right pieces and slowly learn how to control them but dr. Osterman was a watchmaker before he was a physicist he knew he could put himself back together he just had to make sure all the right pieces were in the right places this is the core of what dr.

Manhattan does he's a matter manipulator a reality bender he takes the tiniest parts of the universe the cogs and gears required to make things work and he puts them where he wants them suddenly he can crush tanks construct castles and he only gets better at it over time need proof well that same accident that ripped his atoms apart the first time was tried on him again a few years later and the body that originally took him months to create was put back together in a matter of seconds in the original Watchmen story it was suggested that he couldn't fully stop a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union but lately he's been seen manipulating infinite timelines threatening all of existence and even destroying this character who we know is powerful enough to single-handedly defeat seven monsters who could all easily destroy the multiverse in one shot see this is part of what makes gauging dr. Manhattan's power so hard he's not like most muscley heroes who could theoretically only take so much force before they collapse he controls the force he can lift and punch and shoot and fly as hard and fast as he wants so our real questions are how much force can you control at once how much authority does he have over it and while we're at it how do you recreate your body from nothing well the path to answering all of these questions can actually be found in a book written by an old colleague of dr. Osterman professor Milton glass titled dr.

Manhattan superpowers and the superpowers in the introduction to his bestseller professor glass recaps the events of Manhattan's creation in an accident that was certainly unplanned and just as certainly unrepeatable a young American man was completely disintegrated at least in a physical sense despite the absence of a body a form of electromagnetic pattern resembling consciousness survived and was able to in time rebuild an approximation of the body it had lost now all of you psychologists philosophers and neuroscientists out there are probably wondering the same thing I did when first reading that what a form of electromagnetic pattern resembling consciousness that can't be right at present moment in our understanding of the human mind we don't really know what consciousness is despite the billions of dollars we've spent researching the subject we haven't found a consciousness section of the brain and we don't have any solid evidence that it's some sort of collective effort either the truth is none of us understand why we seem to be the only things in the universe definitively capable of acknowledging our own existence and having thoughts about it so where does Professor Glass get off saying he found a form of electromagnetic pattern resembling consciousness after John's apparent death well obviously I can't speak for the writer or the professor but if you break that sentence down with neuroscience and philosophy in mind I actually think it might be trying to say two things one after dr. Osterman was destroyed we detected a form of electromagnetic pattern in the area that resembled neural functions it looked like something was thinking despite there being no body present - looking back on the situation this pattern was likely generated by the embodied consciousness of dr. Osterman and that consciousnesses would eventually rebuilt his body it's standard when studying neuroscience to approach your research from the assumption that everything the brain does can ultimately be traced back to another physical factor even if we don't know what that factor is yet everything is material because that's how science works it's the study of the natural the physical we have to assume the consciousness is something in the brain caused by these patterns but what if it isn't what if your consciousness exists outside of the brain in some immaterial State untouched by science and it influences the patterns this is a concept called mind-body dualism that proposes your body isn't actually you you are some force outside your body tied down to it manipulating it like a puppet and somewhere at the very beginning of this chain of events that leads to you thinking and eventually moving is an immaterial push from the real you that gets it all started and I believe that both I and professor Milton glass have determined that's what dr.

Manhattan is it's the only way to explain him returning from Total Annihilation there had to be a non-physical component to his existence some of you might find that a little crazy or hard to follow after all we know we can affect a person's personality memories and thoughts to some degree by just poking around in the brain shouldn't that prove consciousnesses inside well think of it like an old school television set if you found one of these things and had no idea what it was so you took off the back and started messing around with the wires you probably eventually notice you could alter the color picture and sound pretty drastically in fact if you had really precise measurements and tools you can probably get it to display and voice whatever you want it so it might seem perfectly sensible to come to the conclusion that these pictures and sounds can be entirely explained by the components of the television set but that's wrong the TV is also receiving input from an invisible wave of energy being broadcast through the sky by a television station far away and you'll never know about it because you have no way of interacting with either of those things there are also some philosophical arguments in support of mind-body dualism take the fact that we all seem confident we endure over time if you compare the current u2 the you when you were a baby there are almost no similarities you look different have different properties and are made up of completely different atoms but you still recognize that as you why it could be because your memory or personality injurers but there's a problem with that theoretically we can get rid of those things but you'll still recognize you as you in fact we can even duplicate those things if I cloned you and gave that clone an identical personality and memories would you be okay with me shooting you because there are two use now so you'll be fine probably not we seem to recognize that there's some you distinct from the body but whether you believe in mind-body dualism or not there is one thing we all seem to agree on when you're dead you are gone if my body dualism is wrong then no duh your brain stopped functioning and that was you you're dead but if mind-body dualism is right then death at the very least seems to destroy that connection your consciousness had with your body either killing both of them or sending the consciousness off somewhere else dr. Manhattan comes from a universe where mind-body dualism was accidentally proven true by an experiment that annihilated his physical form somehow in that test chamber the energy they hid dr. Osterman with the conditions of the experiment for the first time ever allowed humanity to reach out and interfere with the immaterial connection between a man's mind and a man's body and when Osterman was killed his consciousness didn't disconnect like it was supposed to it did the exact opposite it connected to everything imagine for a moment that when you think your thoughts are being kick-started by your consciousness it isn't doing much maybe it's collapsing a wavefunction or gently shifting a tiny subatomic particle and it's restricted to your brain now imagine if it was freed and it could move any particles it liked anywhere it wanted connected to everything everywhere unlimited control this thing we call dr.

Manhattan isn't even really dr. Manhattan it's just a bunch of atoms and particles he pulled together to give you something to look at and talk to even if you found a way to catch him off guard and destroy it he'd just put it back together again because the real him is a consciousness you can't see or touch so where is he then well my imaginary friends not only do I think I know the answer but I think it provides us the last bit of evidence we need to understand exactly how powerful dr. Manhattan truly is because I'm almost positive that his true form is located in a higher spatial dimension now I've talked about higher spatial dimensions before and a lot more detail than I have time to go into today but to make a long story short just because we experience reality in three dimensions doesn't mean there are only three dimensions out there in fact theoretical physics suggests there could be a lot more than just as a tiny two-dimensional flatlander would have no way of interacting with you because you're in a direction it can't comprehend we would have no way of interacting with anything that existed in more than three spatial dimensions making it the perfect place for an immaterial consciousness to exist but if that isn't enough evidence to convince you that this is where the real dr.

Manhattan hangs out as he plays with our atoms the same way we play with drawings I also did some looking into one of his most frequently used superpowers teleportation now there are a lot of ways for someone to teleport theoretically but I have a hunch that dr. Manhattan is specifically warping the space around him to pull himself into and out of a higher dimension how do I know that well firstly because dr. Manhattan himself has said I warp space around me so that I don't move space moves which I honestly could still mean a lot of things but most of them are destructive while simply warping into a higher dimension isn't and neither is whatever warped Manhattan is using and secondly when Ozymandias secare achter from the original Watchmen story tried to recreate dr.

Manhattan's teleportation ability he founded and funded two research organizations to get the job done dimensional developments and the Institute for extra spatial studies during his research period he could even be found musing on the fact that dr. Manhattan lives in all universes simultaneously a feat only possible if he existed on a plane beyond them so where does this leave us dr. Manhattan is the disembodied consciousness of dr.

Osterman cut loose from his physical form by the intrinsic field subtractor and left to wander the higher dimension all consciousness resides in slowly learning more and more about what he is and what his powers are capable of in DC at least having more dimensions than something else essentially makes you infinitely more powerful than it is just like we have infinite power over a sketch or a line this is why fifth dimensional characters like mixes fiddle it can destroy infinite universes without even trying but even mixes piddling has admitted that dr. Manhattan is far more powerful than he is apparently existing even higher up the ladder so how powerful is dr. Manhattan well he's far more powerful than a thing that's infinitely more powerful than a thing that's infinitely more powerful than infinite power at least so this might all seem like it should have been a much simpler answer but the kicker actually lies in the one dimension we haven't discussed yet time you may have heard time described as the fourth dimension before and while that's kind of true it's also kind of not because time is a temporal dimension it doesn't necessarily exist immediately above the three spatial dimensions were most familiar with it's just the only other dimension 99% of us will ever talk about at their core dimensions might best be described as directions and while yes it's possible there are tons of directions we don't know about and can't comprehend because physics time itself is also in many ways a direction if I'm going to meet with you in an office building you not only need to know that buildings latitude longitude and what floor I'm on but you also need to know what time I'm going to be there existing in a space with four directions instead of three doesn't immediately make time irrelevant to the equation it is however irrelevant to dr.

Manhattan somewhere among the flurry of other dimensions he resides in dr. Manhattan exists outside of time he's said to experience every second in the universe simultaneously he sees no difference between the past present and future because to him everything just is and as a result in his original story he grew distant from humanity unable to do anything consider what it must be like to exist outside of time where nothing happens because nothing can happen and to watch the events of the universe play out you included in the same way they've always played out in the same way they always will play out like looking at a static picture forever because of your power is this power but recently dr. Manhattan's been doing all kinds of things ever since arriving in the DC Multiverse he's stolen time rewritten histories split Superman and hath reconstructed the cosmos shattered the Microverse created new realities he even fought a supervillain and if I had to guess why I'd say it's because in DC people can change time people can run through it swim in it jump in and out of it heck the multiverse has been twisted and broken and retcon so many times there are timelines about how timelines of other timelines have changed DC has more than one temporal dimension and dr.

Manhattan actually has something to do here because he doesn't transcend all of them trust me I've seen what it looks like a bear and this limitation finally forced upon dr. Manhattan by entering a bigger multiverse with bigger fish is what allows him to occasionally lose to people like Superman or the flash for the first time since he was dr. Osterman he's not sitting on the outside as the only person who can see and spin the gears of reality the thing that proves dr.