Every aspect of our lives is based on a series of layers, from shopping to daily activities around the home to studying at college to making a telephone call - the list is endless.

The supermarket shopper isn't concerned with 'layers' such as: growing and harvesting, processing and packaging, transportation, storage and shelf-stacking; research, testing and production; stock control, accounting, trend analysis - or layers of financial systems that make it so easy for you to part with your money with a quick flip of a plastic card. We just shop'n'go.

Similar stories could be told about life at home: water supply; electricity; or the telephone service with its truly awesome infrastructure that most of us know almost nothing about.

Even a student simply turning up for a seminar is benefiting from a raft of activities that the student never sees and needn't be concerned with.

But you don't need to be told all this. You could think of a dozen more examples yourself of daily activities where most of what's going on is under the surface, totally hidden from us. Which brings us neatly to the talk.

Quantum physics is telling us that the day-to-day reality that we live in and relate to is itself just the top layer on a whole 'stack of realities' - just the icing on the cake.  Listen or read on . . .

Download a free MP3 of the talk.(19.5 mins, 6.7MB).
Download a pdf transcript of the talk.

[The top level in the picture on the left represents the reality that we experience. Below it is an image of a Bose-Einstein Condensate - a state of matter in which quantum effects show up on a macroscopic scale. Lower layers represent deeper levels of reality.]