A Cosmic Conversation with J. Richard Gott III

Summary

StarTalk Radio – Episode Summary: A Cosmic Conversation with J. Richard Gott III

Release Date: November 5, 2024

In this enlightening episode of StarTalk Radio, host Neil deGrasse Tyson engages in a profound conversation with his longtime friend and esteemed astrophysicist, J. Richard Gott III. Their dialogue weaves through Gott’s illustrious career, intricate scientific theories, and insightful perspectives on pop culture portrayals of genius. Below is a detailed summary capturing the essence of their discussion.

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1. Early Life and Academic Journey

[01:50] J. Richard Gott III opens the conversation by reflecting on his formative years in Kentucky, highlighting his achievements in high school science fairs.

J. Richard Gott III: "I won second place in the Westinghouse science talent series."
Timestamp: [02:34]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson praises Gott's accomplishments, mentioning their shared history at Princeton University where their friendship blossomed.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Rich. Got you. You're a close friend... we probably met earlier, but we didn't become close friends until Princeton University."
Timestamp: [01:57]

Gott recounts winning first place in math at the National Science Fair International, an experience that even led to an encounter with President Johnson.

J. Richard Gott III: "I won first place in math in the National Science Fair International. Got a trip to Japan now to... meet President Johnson."
Timestamp: [02:45]

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2. Contributions to Chess Theory

The conversation delves into Gott’s passion for chess, where he discusses his work on calculating the upper limits of possible chess games—a topic not widely explored before his research.

J. Richard Gott III: "I found a setup... and multiplied together, that was over 16,000 combinations on that. And I figured that's pretty much maximal."
Timestamp: [06:53]

He elaborates on the complexities of determining the maximum number of chess games, highlighting the intricate rules that prevent infinitely long matches.

J. Richard Gott III: "They don't want you to wander around forever. So that's the rules."
Timestamp: [07:26]

Neil deGrasse Tyson commends Gott for his meticulous calculation, acknowledging the depth of his analysis.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "You did the calculation properly."
Timestamp: [12:06]

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3. Exploring the Fermi Paradox through the Copernican Principle

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the Fermi Paradox, which questions why, given the vastness of the galaxy and the potential for extraterrestrial civilizations, we have yet to encounter any signs of alien life.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Given the size of the galaxy and the fact that the galaxy has been around a long time... So where are they? What's the latest?"
Timestamp: [22:04]

J. Richard Gott III introduces his 1993 paper, "Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects," which posits that our location in the universe is likely not special and that a significant fraction of intelligent observers remain on their home planets.

J. Richard Gott III: "A significant fraction of all the extraterrestrial and intelligent observers must still be sitting on their home planet, or else you'd be special."
Timestamp: [28:25]

He draws analogies to human colonization, emphasizing that if civilizations were spreading across the galaxy, we should also be colonizers rather than remaining on Earth.

J. Richard Gott III: "If there's a giant galactic empire out there... If most of the intelligent observers in the universe are not living on their home planet, then we should not be living on our own planet."
Timestamp: [32:03]

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4. Theoretical Insights: Time Travel and Tachyons

Gott shares his early theoretical work on tachyons—hypothetical particles that travel faster than light—and their implications for time travel within the framework of general relativity.

J. Richard Gott III: "I found a very interesting general relativity solution for this... It had a Cherenkov cone of radiation trailing behind it like a sonic boom."
Timestamp: [44:05]

He discusses the challenges and limitations of his model, acknowledging that while it was a groundbreaking idea, subsequent theories like inflation provided more robust explanations for cosmological phenomena.

J. Richard Gott III: "Inflation does a better job of this, frankly."
Timestamp: [43:32]

The duo also touches upon Gott’s concept of the Gin Particle, a theoretical construct inspired by time loops and circular world lines, illustrating Gott's inventive approach to tackling complex scientific questions.

J. Richard Gott III: "The Gin Particle has a circular world line. It has no one created it. No one destroyed it."
Timestamp: [57:56]

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5. Pop Culture: Genius in Film and Media

Transitioning to a lighter topic, Neil deGrasse Tyson and J. Richard Gott III embark on ranking films that portray genius behavior. They assess various movies, evaluating how accurately and effectively they depict the complexities of intelligence.

a. Good Will Hunting

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'd give 'Good Will Hunting' an A because... it fully explores what genius could be."
Timestamp: [80:05]

Gott praises the film for its deep character development, particularly highlighting the performance that captures the essence of intellectual brilliance.

J. Richard Gott III: "That's an A. With some reservations."
Timestamp: [85:00]

b. The Imitation Game

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'd give 'The Imitation Game' a B."
Timestamp: [86:17]

While acknowledging the film's portrayal of Alan Turing's brilliance and contributions to cryptography, Gott notes areas where the film could have delved deeper into the nuances of Turing's thought processes.

c. A Beautiful Mind

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'd give 'A Beautiful Mind' an A."
Timestamp: [84:25]

Both hosts commend the movie for its insightful depiction of John Nash's mathematical genius and the personal struggles accompanying his brilliance.

d. Amadeus

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'd give 'Amadeus' an S—superior."
Timestamp: [93:28]

They laud the film for its exceptional portrayal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's genius and the intricate dynamics between him and his contemporaries.

e. Queen's Gambit (Miniseries)

J. Richard Gott III: "I would actually give 'Queen's Gambit' an excellent or superior mark..."
Timestamp: [87:22]

Queen's Gambit garners high praise for its authentic representation of chess strategy and the mental acuity of its protagonist, enhanced by meticulous research and consultation with chess experts.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "And it was rich in exploring what that meant around people who don't understand you..."
Timestamp: [88:27]

f. Phenomenon

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I'd give 'Phenomenon' a B."
Timestamp: [88:57]

The film is appreciated for its engaging narrative and John Travolta's charismatic performance, though it receives a slightly lower rating due to its fantastical elements that diverge from realistic portrayals of genius.

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6. Reflections on Education and Talent Recognition

Towards the episode's conclusion, Neil deGrasse Tyson and J. Richard Gott III engage in a candid discussion about the education system's approach to identifying and nurturing gifted individuals. Tyson expresses his reservations about labeling students as "Gifted and Talented," advocating for a more inclusive system that recognizes hard work and dedication over innate ability.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I have a visceral objection to it... if you're not branded as gifted, you can say, let me just try harder."
Timestamp: [72:02]

Gott concurs, emphasizing the importance of allowing individuals to pursue their passions without being confined by early labels or societal expectations.

J. Richard Gott III: "Give the kid love and a good support and let them do what they're interested in."
Timestamp: [67:15]

Their dialogue underscores the need for educational frameworks that celebrate perseverance and personal growth alongside, or even above, traditional measures of intelligence.

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Conclusion

This episode of StarTalk Radio offers listeners a captivating blend of scientific discourse and cultural critique. Through his conversation with J. Richard Gott III, Neil deGrasse Tyson not only explores deep astrophysical theories but also bridges the gap between complex scientific ideas and their representations in popular media. The discussion serves as a reminder of the intricate ways in which our understanding of the universe intertwines with societal perceptions of genius and intellect.

Key Takeaways:

• J. Richard Gott III's contributions to chess theory and cosmology highlight the vast potential of intellectual exploration.
• The Copernican Principle offers profound insights into the Fermi Paradox, suggesting that intelligent life likely remains localized to home planets.
• Pop culture often takes creative liberties in portraying genius, balancing between authenticity and imaginative embellishment.
• Educational systems benefit from fostering environments that prioritize effort and passion over rigid categorizations of talent.

Stay tuned to StarTalk for more engaging conversations at the intersection of science, culture, and humor.

Transcript

[J. Richard Gott III]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[J. Richard Gott III]

Hi, Neil. I think that's about the best compliment I ever got.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Best compliment.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's just about the best.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Rich. Got you. You're a close friend. You're probably my closest colleague friend that I have. Oh, we've spent a lot of time together in conversations and dining with family and we probably met earlier, but we didn't become close friends until Princeton University. I did my postdoc there many moons ago. And you spent almost your whole life on the faculty at Princeton University. So let me just put some of your professional background on the table. You born and raised in Kentucky, right? In high school, did you win some science fairs and things?

[J. Richard Gott III]

I won second place in the Westinghouse science talent series.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the big one.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's the big one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And now it's called the. That'd be called the intro.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Regeneron. Now it's Regeneron.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Now it's Regeneron.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And I won first place in math in the National Science Fair International. Got a trip to Japan now to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Come in second place in Westinghouse. Did you get to meet the president?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, we met President Johnson. That was that far ago.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Johnson. Which Johnson was that?

[J. Richard Gott III]

And then I was. They asked me to be head judge of that contest for later on. 14 years later. Yeah, later.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Who's the most famous person you judged.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That'D be Natalie Portman.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Natalie Portman, yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And I remember her paper.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

She was in the Science Talent Search.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. She was in the top 300.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

But what she doesn't know is she was also in the top 120. I saw her paper. I liked it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's why I remembered it. I especially liked it even before she was famous. I had no idea who this was.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Her paper was judged entirely on its scientific merit. I had no idea who she was. It was about an enzyme to digest waste paper, make hydrogen fuel. I really like the project. So.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And in the movie Thor, she plays a scientist.

[J. Richard Gott III]

She does.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

She plays an astrophysicist.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Someone thought to tap into that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So you go off to college and you're in the same graduating class as Al Gore.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You're like Forrest Gump. Every time, every place you turn, there's some famous thing that spawns off of the moment that you've had in life.

[J. Richard Gott III]

At the time, people said, well, his father was a senator, you know, so people said, man, he's maybe president one day, you know, but if you watch someone come from the bottom up, it's a long way up. And so he did extremely extraordinarily.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, there's a lot of people who you think might become president that never get remembered.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's a torturous way up, rather than getting the result at the end and looking back.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right. And Tommy Lee Jones was also in your class.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. No, they're saying that you're in their class.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, that'd be nice. That's good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So after college, you went to graduate school. Princeton at Prince, got your PhD there.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Then I went to Caltech, ran away.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

For a little bit, and then I went to Cambridge University of Cambridge, England.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And then I came back. I joined the faculty.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you've been there. Been there ever since.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Been there ever since.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm delighted that you were there while I.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And likewise that you were there when you first appeared at Princeton. I said, this is somebody I gotta get to know. So we were friends there and we co.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Taught a class.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We did, yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And we wrote a textbook.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With a third, the Three Tenors.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Someone called Michael Strauss.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Michael Strauss, right. Welcome to the universe. It's a highly readable textbook of the course we taught.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So when you look at this, you don't think, oh, I need to take a class with it. This. You just sit down and read this. This is like a readable coffee table book. One of My chapters in here is why Pluto is not a planet, Chapter nine. I didn't notice that. Did you know that was true?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, I get it now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Look, I'm only just now realizing that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Now I get it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Right. But in there, was it one of your chapters? We're talking about big numbers. No, it's one of my chapters, but you helped me with one of the numbers.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, I'm trying to find what are some of the biggest numbers we can possibly think of. And you can. So how many people on Earth, okay, how many stars in the galaxy? How many galaxies in the universe? And then you realize you can say, well, how many atoms are in a star in the universe? You add that up, and then you realize you run out of things to count when there are no more particles left. There's not. So how would you ever need a number bigger than that? And then you get big numbers by asking about combinations of things, how many outcomes, how many scenarios. And the number one on that list was how many chess games you can play. And you ran off and gave me that number.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How did you. What did you do? And you're a fan of chess from way back?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. Yes. So, okay, so here's how I did that. People have calculated how many moves there are in a chess game. Maximum number. There's a rule that says that you can only go 50 moves without moving a pawn or capturing a capture, or at that point, either player can declare a draw. And let's make sure that they do. You don't want to go beyond that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so that would mean it's an end game and you're just wandering around the board.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They don't let you wander around forever.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They don't want you to.

[J. Richard Gott III]

When either player is able to declare a draw, let's assume that they do. So that's the rules. Okay? So the maximum number of moves is 5,900, given that rule. So, you know, you go along and then 50 moves, and then you capture a piece, and then you go on another 50 moves. You try to make it last as long as possible. See? See, that's the longest number, the maximum number. Okay?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You just. You just move around not capturing pieces until you have to capture a piece.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That makes the longest game. And so then you want to promote all your pawns to queens. And to do that, you have to have four pawns capture a piece or something. So you get. You get them lined up in rows of two each. The knight pawn captures something that's in front of the rook pawn, and the Black does the same thing. And then you can slide them past each other and promote all the pawns.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All eight pawns go by each other?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. That's the longest.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So my pawns take out four of your pawns.

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, we don't try to capture any of the pawns. You try to capture the pieces first.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Get some other piece.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Some other piece.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Got it? Got it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Your pawn gets to capture his knight. And then you got your two pawns lined up and they can slide by the other pawns. You want them to all make queens at the end. So you want to make the game last as long as possible. Now, if you want to know how many moves are on the first move of chess, that's 20. You can move each of the pawns one or two spaces. You can move the knights out. So there's 20 different moves for white, there are 20 replies for black. So the number of combinations on move one is 420 squared 20 times 20. You got to keep multiplying by the number of combinations. Okay. You want to find a chess position that has the most possible combinations of moves. And I worked on this to find a position that I thought was, had.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Anyone else done this before?

[J. Richard Gott III]

What people had done was they said, what's the most moves white could make? Okay, 218. Some guy figured that out. But the other king, the king was kind of stalemated. So they decided like one move. I resigned.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They hadn't really thought as deeply about this problem as you have.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, as to my knowledge, no one calculated the maximum number combination.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

So I found a setup where there were 133 moves for white and 124 replies for black. Okay? And multiplied together, that was over 16,000 combinations on that. And I figured that's pretty much maximal. Each player had eight queens on the board, not nine. And I had a knight there. You don't want all your pieces there. They start blocking each other, you know. And so if you put the rooks and everything on there, you get less, you get less combinations. So this may not be the maximum combination was, but it's hard to imagine that this number is not enough because it's better than most of them combinations. Okay, I'm trying to get upper limit here. So you'd have to take this number 16,000 and something, the product of those two numbers, and you have to take that to the 5,900th power, multiply that out, it's 10 to the 25,000 to the power 25,000. So that's a one with 25,000 zeros after it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Possible games.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Upper limit. Upper limit on the possible games you can knock off about knowing how many there are at the beginning and how many they'd have to be when there are only a queen and two kings left. You can knock this down to like 23,725 or something, but. But I wouldn't bother doing that. What's a few. What's a thousand orders of magnitude between people anyway? Between friends?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

1,000 orders of magnitude.

[J. Richard Gott III]

25,000. 10 to the 25,000. It's bigger than a Google by far. 10 to the hundred.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And sometimes, you see people say there's a number of chess games, 10 to 120 power. No, that's. It's much bigger than that. Okay, but that's my upper limit.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so your upper limit includes completely ridiculous games.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Of course. Of course you can play ridiculous games.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you did the calculation properly.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a proper upper limit. I'm safely below that. We put that in the book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I put that in the book.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Put that right in the book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because there was a chapter, one of the opening chapters, just to get people warmed up.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You had the number of quantum states.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The size and scale of the universe, just trying to warm people up.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah, Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there's just nothing but big numbers. Just band aid about here. Yeah. So that was our attempt. I taught the first third of the course.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Michael Strauss, our colleague, the middle third. And you were the final, taking us into cosmology and the like. So do you follow chess tournaments today? I took you to the. Was it the International Chess Championship.

[J. Richard Gott III]

This was to see Carlson defend his chest.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Magnus Carlson.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And you got us a family pass. So I got to be a member of your family for one day.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And this is at South Street Seaport in Manhattan. They had the World championship there.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The most heartwarming thing to me about that day was that how the chess people loved you. They wanted to take selfies with you. They were so pleased that you, as an astrophysicist, took an interest in their thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I wasn't as good as any of them there. I mean, I had an interest. Cause my son was interested.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We played on a chessboard. He beat me easy. And then because of you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But he was like 15 or something at the time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, he won.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I thought you were good.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's what somebody told me to swim meet once. But anyway, Travis, because of you, he took you backstage. You'll say, why, and you got to give my number on the broadcast to the world oh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To tell the world how many possibilities.

[J. Richard Gott III]

So this is my contribution to t.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Have to say here, because all these people are. They live this game, and I just. I'm an interloper. But, yes, I did tap that content.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And Travis and I got to play a few moves on the actual championship board.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And I noticed that when I picked up a piece, they had a little electronic thing in the base. It was wired. It was a beautiful walnut chess set, but it was wired so that when they made the move, it'd show up.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

On the big board for everybody outside.

[J. Richard Gott III]

For everybody outside.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's an acoustically insulated space.

[J. Richard Gott III]

There was, like, one way glass. We were looking into the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it was.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It was wonderful.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I got to make Magnus Carlsen's first move.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That was special. The next day. You got to make the move.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. I guess they give celebrity status to that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It points to the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, I didn't choose what his move would be.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You could have started him off bad.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To bring the night out real first. No. So I didn't know I would have this privilege. Right. And so he pointed to the pawn that I would then move, and then I did that, and the press was there and the like, and then we exited this hermetically sealed space. But I invited you because I knew you had some interest in background in chess. Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, the big thing in chess now is the AI, you know, because the computers can play now much better than humans can play.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They tell you, the first time I beat a computer, I was in college, and I was playing and the computer was good. But I feel bad how I beat it. Should I have emotions about this or not?

[J. Richard Gott III]

You pulled a fast one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I noticed that if I didn't move a chess piece, that was highly expected of me, and I instead moved a different piece. It stumped its strategy because it kept thinking, he's going to move this other piece because that's going to give him an advantage. And it organized its strategies around that expectation. So when I started moving other pieces, it got flummoxed, and I found it would make mistakes at that point, and I just went in for the kill, and I was able to beat it three out of four times when, before I realized this, I was 0 for 6 or something. But I feel bad. That's not right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, similar things happen in chess today. I mean, first of all, you have to understand that it knows the rules of chess, so it just wants to win. It's happy to win by a little get to a pawn endgame. It can Win. It's happy. They trained it on Go. They had a program called AlphaGo. They played it against Lee Sedal, who was a terrific champion that they had. And he won only one game out of five. But that was an amazing game. Cause he had this amazing move where he joined two areas and the computer didn't see this move coming. So that's the best move ever played in the sport ever against the computer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is Go. This is the territorial game with black and white stones. I mean, that's what they are, right? They flip.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. You try to conquer territory and surround territory.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Way more challenging than chess, is it not?

[J. Richard Gott III]

They say, yeah. Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

But anyway, the thing was, you might consider a really stupendous program for Go would just conquer, you know, like three quarters of the field, you know, that kind of thing. But no, wants to win by just one stone, just one extra square, and wants to win the easiest way possible. So the games, it's not quite what you think you want to spend.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And in chess, the computer doesn't have testosterone. It just wants to win, win even by a little bit.

[J. Richard Gott III]

But that's better, that's quicker.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It doesn't want to just conquer and slay you.

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, it doesn't want to chase your king around the board. And it just wants to win. Some of the games are a little dull. There'd be a lot of fireworks in these computer versus computer games. Sacrifices and everything. Then it wins by one bond. So the players today, they are, I would say, machine assisted. They train on the computer, they memorize the openings. They remember Carlson can look at a chess Magnus Carlsen. Yeah, Magnus, he say, oh, that was, you know, so and so versus so and so, 1934, you know, I mean, he can memorize all those openings and then they play with all those openings. But now they know the other players are doing that too. So what you have to do is make a suboptimal move at some point. Drives that person, your opponent off onto the territory. They don't know. And you've practiced that variant. So it's weird because you'd think the best strategy is just to make the best move all the time. But they have to get the human opponent off track.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're doing what I did to my computer opponent.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They've learned what you learned yourself long ago. You figured it out first.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, because my moves were not optimal. They were just distracting to its strategy.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And they're doing that today.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Commercial Speaker]

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[J. Richard Gott III]

Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's the latest on the Fermi paradox.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The Fermi paradox.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is there emergent thinking on this? Well, just let me set the stage here. Enrico Fermi famously declared, where are they? Given the size of the galaxy and the fact that the galaxy has been around a long time, that there's plenty of time for a civilization to rise up, send out a mission to multiple planets, pitch tent, use local resources to build more rockets and go to two planets. 4, 8, 16. You can do this in hundreds of millions of years easily.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Without even warp drives or anything. Right. 1/10 the velocity of light, 1/10 the speed of light. Very modest for any modern civilization. Yes. Still not us. We're not in that category yet. And if that's the case, the galaxy could and should be teeming with alien civilizations. So where are they? What's the latest?

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's what he said. Where are they?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay. I wrote a paper this in 1993. It was called Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And astronomers love the Copernican principle. It says, your location is not likely to be special. We live around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary supercluster. We're used to this idea. It's been used by Huygens to calculate the distance to Sirius, arguing that why should the sun be the brightest thing in the universe? These other things are stars and they're just like the sun. And so what if they were? Knowing how dim it was, he got the distance to serious, accurate to factor of 20, which was extraordinary.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I didn't know he did this calculation. Brilliant step to make Christian Huygens a Dutch polymath. Yes, And I own one of his books, a charming book, A Celestial World Discovered. He just speculates on what life would be like on all the planets. So he looked at the sky and said, maybe if the sun is ordinary, so are these other stars. Is that right?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is just like the sun, how far away would it have to be to be as dim as we see it? Given how bright the sun is in front of us today, to even have.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That thought, that thought is brilliant. Really? Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

But the most spectacular success of this was when Hubble discovered that all the galaxies were fleeing from us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Edwin Hubble, the man, not the telescope.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Not the tele they named it after.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Anyway, they're all fleeing from us. And the further away, the faster it's a homogeneous expansion away from us. We did not go fall for the we're not going to say we're at the center anymore. We're not going to fall for that again. After Copernicus, we're going to say why would we be in the one special galaxy for which all the others are fleeing? No, no. If it looks that way to us, it must look that way to everyone. You live on any galaxy, you've got to think that you're the center and you've got to see it all expanding away from you. Then you get a homogeneous expansion like pennies on an expanding balloon. Each penny sees all the others moving away from it and it thinks it's at the center. And then you get the homogeneous models of general relativity, Big Bang models. And Gaumow and his students Herman and Alpha then calculated that there would be hot in the early universe and that we could see the microwave background radiation left over from that today.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All of that based on this assumption.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That you're not special. And you get all of that. And then this prediction was that there be microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang of five degrees. And I worked with Pensis and Wilson in graduate school, did a project with them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I observed on the telescope for that first measurement.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They discovered the microwave background 2.7 degrees. This is like predicting that a flying saucer 50ft across is going to land on the White house lawn and one 27ft across actually shows up. This is the most extraordinary prediction in astronomy, and it shows how powerful the Copernican Principle is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can I slip in a quick story there?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I was on the NSF panel to advise the President on who should get the Presidential Medal of Science.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is under Bush and George Gamma came up as someone who could earn this. And I'm there on a panel with biologists and geologists. They don't know this prediction. They don't. And so I strongly made the case for George Gamow's prediction, given how fundamental it was to all of cosmology. And I think he was still alive and not doing well. And I'm proud of myself for succeeding at this. And he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Science. Wow. And I think his relatives came to pick it up. In part inspired by our conversation. Just about how much of a brilliant extrapolation of very basic information about our universe that that was.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He invited me to dinner once. My mother knew a friend of hers that knew his wife. And when I was in Colorado working one summer, I to go over to his student.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

As a student.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He picked me up in his Rolls Royce What? You know, and he loved Rolls Royces because once the axle broke and Rolls Royce sent out a team to fix it, and he said, well, how much will that be? And they said, rolls Royce axles do not break.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No fee.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So when I visited Cornell, I was picked up by Carl Sagan and his Porsche.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He had a Porsche?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, he had a Porsche.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, they had that in common.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's my. Who picked me up in what kind.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Of car story you got an equally good one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So sorry I interrupted. So where were you?

[J. Richard Gott III]

So my paper, 1993, which people should remember, you know, here's its answer to the Fermi question. It's real simple.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, you're purely invoking the Copernican principle to arrive at this conclusion?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not fundamentally differently the way Gamow invoked the Copernican principle layered onto the data available to him at the time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay, and Huygens.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And Huygens, yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. So here's the answer from the Copernican principle, and it's very simple. A significant fraction of all the extraterrestrial and intelligent observers must still be sitting on their home planet, or else you'd be special. If there's a giant galactic empire out there that we don't know about, they've conquered the whole galaxy and they're just hiding, you know, they don't want the likes of us to know we're in a little experiment for them, you know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That would make us special.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Because if you're an intelligent observer, you should be one of the people in the big. The big one, okay? In fact, you can say, if you're a person on the world today, you should likely be born in one of the countries that's above the median. Half the countries in the world had, when I looked at this, a population less than 7 million. You're born in America. That's one of the, like, three big countries. You don't have to be in the biggest country. I mentioned this to Stephen Hawking once. He said I should. According to this principle, I should be from China. I said, no, that's a minority of the people on the Earth. You should be above the median, which is 97% of the people living on the Earth live in countries above the median. Little bitty countries with small populations. You're not likely to be from there. You're likely to be from a random place.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And what did he then say?

[J. Richard Gott III]

He smiled at me. That's the way Stephen Hawking was. He gave me his characteristic smile.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One time. I Had dinner with him, and I asked him a question. And it takes time. I mean, plus, he's eating but has to spit it out because his throat doesn't work. But he tastes the food, and he's typing out replies with his eyes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

On his. On his device.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I said, how come Isaac Newton didn't figure out how to stabilize the solar system? And he needed Laplace to figure out perturbation theory to show that every time a planet goes around, it's not tugged out of its orbit by Jupiter? Because Newton was upset about. He didn't know. He didn't have an answer. In fact, he credited God for coming in and fixing things every now and then. So I posed that question to him, and then 15 minutes later, out comes the answer. It's. You can't think of everything.

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, I know. That's crazy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That was a dew drop of wisdom. And then he went on to say Einstein didn't think of black holes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I can't think of everything.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

People got Nobel prizes off of black holes that he didn't predict off of his own theory. He predicted gravity waves that got Nobel prizes, too.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Crumbs off his plate.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He didn't even get it for general relativity.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I know.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's crazy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so let me restate what I think I understand. Is your point with the Copernican principle as published in 1993 in Nature.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So powerful is this idea that we're not special.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In a statistically large enough sample of things that if all the aliens were colonizing all the planets, we'd be one of those aliens colonizing the planets.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You would be. You should ask yourself, why am I not a space colonist? You and I are continental colonists. Africa was the home.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, you were the colonist.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You were colonist. You were born in New York. We didn't colonize.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't bring my skin color into this colony.

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, no, no, no. I'm talking about. We're living in a colony from Africa.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay. Trace born. Yeah. And the majority of the people on Earth today are. I'll call them colonists because they came from.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The majority of people on Earth were.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Not from the whole.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Their lineage is not from that location.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They arrived there ultimately.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With Africa as the point of origin.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We didn't colonize them. We are colonists living in the colonies established by the continent of Africa.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Africa.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's our home planet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, now you see? So you analogize the galaxy to the surface of the Earth?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Africa is the home planet. The home planet. And all these satellite places humans are living would be all the planets across the galaxy.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Copernican principle says we are most likely living in one of these places.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. Because so many more people do.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because so many.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You see, there's so many non special places for intelligent observers to be and only a few special places by definition that you're likely to be in one of the many non special places, one of the tiny number of special places. It's just that clear.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Now, for example, you're saying all the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Aliens out there are just like us.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They don't have to be just like us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No. Just in terms of statistically their home bodies on their home planet.

[J. Richard Gott III]

If most of the intelligent observers in the universe are not living on their home planet, if we are an intelligent.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Observer, then we should not be living on our own planet.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There you go.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And the fact that we're still on the Earth tells us something. For example, what's the chance that we will colonize the whole galaxy? There's a billion habitable planets out there. The Copernican principle says the odds against us doing that in the future are a billion to one. Against. Why? Because if that's the truth, if that's what happens, what's the chance that you are living on the first planet out of a billion that people live on? A billion to one? Against. And let me make this a little. Give another example. I know that there's 11 people born in Antarctica. That's all. Are you born in Antarctica? No, they're born south of everyone else. So you're not likely to wake up and find out that you're the most southernmost persons ever born. You're not one of them. There's only 11 of them. There's 8 billion of people out there. You're not likely to be one of them. So this puts some constraints on our future prospects. Now, if you ask me, can we become a multi planet species like two planets like us and Mars? Well, if that happens, you're on planet one instead of planet two. There's a 50% chance we could do that. Let's do that. That might as much as improve our long term survival prospects of our species by a factor of two. Because we'd have two chances instead of one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, I was never a fan of that as an argument. I think we should be two planet species just because it's fun, not because for survival reasons.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, I gave a Talk on this. Yeah, Elon Musk was the other person giving the talk.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And I said my spiel, it's good for our survival. We have some lifeboats, you know, like a comet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Might be more than one basket.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You store your books, you don't store them all in this. All in the Alexandrian library. Don't burn down, protect. As well as the only copies we got of Sophocles plays are the ones that are stored elsewhere. Life has used this to help survive, spread out, multiply. You know, I gave my talk and he gave his talk. He said, well, I like those survival arguments, right? But I thought we could just go for fun. He said exactly that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He famously said, I don't want to die on Earth, I want to die on Mars.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Not on impact.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He said that. I missed the second half of that sentence.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's an important half, okay? But after that he said, I like that talk. You know, you can hear him on tape saying that. I like that previous talk. That was my talk. And since then he has definitely used the survival argument. In fact, Carl Sagan wrote me once, he said, I think you've come up with the best argument for going to Mars. Even though I wrote a book on it, gave 10 different reasons, this one seems really good. So these space colonies are a very good bargain because you can send like eight people, 30 people, and they can live there on indigenous materials and chemicals that you have there. Mars has an atmosphere and so forth. It's a great bargain because they do all the work. And it's not that you're going to send a billion people there. No, no, that's not happening. But you can send a small number of people there, they can grow doubling in population over the years. And so it's a great bargain and something we certainly should be doing for our survival.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's why I disagree. I disagree.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Rather just stay on Earth. Well, what happens if we have a really bad epidemic on Earth?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because it's. No, sorry, it's not that I disagree. It's not that I disagree. I'm a practical guy, okay? I'm a dreamer when circumstances justify it. Otherwise I just tell it like it is, okay, you want to pitch tent on Mars, grow a civilization there. So humans are on two planets. So if something bad happens on one planet, we have survivors on the other planet.

[J. Richard Gott III]

There we go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All I'm saying is everything bad we can think of that could possibly put life at risk here.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The effort to prevent that, to me it seems, is less than shipping a billion people to Mars.

[J. Richard Gott III]

No no, no. You don't ship a billion people. You slim a small number. You know, I made colonists, okay, so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You put some fertile people on Mars, A few fertile people on Mars, they start making babies, okay?

[J. Richard Gott III]

And leave them alone after that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, after 100 years, let's say there's a colony of 1,000 people.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Let's say wait 600 years. Wait a thousand years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A thousand years?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right. How long will it take for them to get billions? We'll have 10 billion by then.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We don't necessarily need billions. All I'm saying is over there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All I'm saying is you have two planets now. Something bad is going to happen. On one planet is the other planet. Just say, oh, we planned against this. You all just die and we will carry forth the genome. That's not how this is going to play out. You're trying to protect the species in case something bad happens on one planet.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You should do everything to do that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If you have the power to live on two planets, you're not going to allow the other planet to die. You're going to ship them over or fix the problem in your bio laboratory or deflect the asteroid. If you have the power to ship people to Mars and terraform it, you have the power to deflect an asteroid that might put life at risk on Earth. And it seems to me you have the power to reverse any geoengineered problem that we created for ourselves.

[J. Richard Gott III]

On Earth, people worked hard protecting that Alexandrian library. In the Titanic, they had a hard time getting people to go off on those little dangerous lifeboats. Out in the water, it was comfortable. On the. Let's wait. On the Titanic, they had a hard time getting the people to go in the first boats. Mars is not as habitable as the Earth, but like life, life's living comfortably in the ocean, okay? Out on the land.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Very dangerous for them.

[J. Richard Gott III]

For them. If life didn't go out there, we wouldn't. Wouldn't be here. As land animals, the ocean is always going to be better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I liked an analogy you gave that our space suits are like eggs. Eggs.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's water in there. It's like it's taking the sea with them. Our blood is sort of salt, like salty water, you know, bringing the nutrients to our cells, you know, so an.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Egg can't survive outside of its shell.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yet the chickens, the chicken.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, you can't do it, right? It won't come out until it can.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's a little space suit.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a little space suit, right. So if I have On a spacesuit, that's my egg, and I'll be in that until I can live outside the spacesuit.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The budget that we would spend on sending people to Mars, I mean, you got one entrepreneur that wants to do it. You know, I mean, it's a small amount relative to gnp. And the thing that gets us may be something that takes us by surprise.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the only argument I can possibly embrace, is that there's some unforeseen thing that could put life on Earth at risk. And you want to be on two planets, but everything we can foresee, it seems to me, would be easier to solve that than to ship people to Mars after you've terraformed it. People said, oh, we're trashing Earth. We need an Earth backup plan. Whatever it takes to turn Mars into Earth has got to be a greater effort than to turn Earth back into Earth.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Living on the land is harder than living in the ocean. The species that go extinct are ones that are, like, on one island.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We got a whole universe out there that we could go, that we're standing on the shores of this universe, as you would say. As you have said. And are we going to go out there?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The surface of the Earth is like the shore.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's Carl.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's probably Andrean. She has.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a smart thing to do to go to Mars and with something we could do in our generation. I'm just saying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, Rich, over the years, you've shared with me exotic ideas about how the universe got here, but they're in the trash bin of blue brilliant ideas that have failed. But I remember two of them.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And one of them, because it's still a mystery, where did all the antimatter go?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because in the early universe, if you have a pocket of energy and it spontaneously becomes matter with through E equals MC squared, you get a pair of particles, a matter particle and an antimatter particle. And as the universe cools, these pairs produced particles should permeate the universe or then sort of come back together, annihilating the particles. And we'd have just a universe of photons.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. But we don't. We have matter.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We have all the photons, but we also have matter that doesn't have antimatter counterparts.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So some symmetry law got broken in the early universe. A cherished symmetry law, Right, Right. That for every matter particle, you have an antimatter particle.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you told me of an idea that there's some tunneling of the antimatter into another universe. What, what was this?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, this was an idea I had in 1974. It was an early attempt to find out what might have happened before the Big Bang.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Inflation does a better job of this.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That predates inflation.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Just barely predates inflation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Barely.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because the inflation idea came out during the era of very high inflation.

[J. Richard Gott III]

1980S.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The 70s into the early 80s.

[J. Richard Gott III]

So. So, so the story here is that I had done a paper on the gravitational field of attackion. I found an exact solution for the gravitational field of attackion. This is a hypothetical particle that would go faster than light, only faster than light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It lives faster than light.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Has to be going fast. You can't slow it down to light speed. You see one traveling here, it could have infinite speed. Its world line could be simultaneous in some reference frame. And I found a very interesting general relativity solution for this. And it had a Cherenkov cone of radiation, gravitational radiation, trailing behind it like a sonic boom. There was a cone of gravitational radiation coming behind it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's because it's moving faster than the speed a gravitational wave would move.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So then it makes a shock wave.

[J. Richard Gott III]

A shock wave. Right. And this is expanding behind it. But in front of it there was a collapsing gravitational wave of. These are called advanced waves. These are ones that go backward in time. Photons go forward in time. That's an asymmetry in the universe. Photons go forward in time, only shake an electron here. Photon goes to Alpha Centauri, gets there four years later, doesn't come from Alpha Centauri four years ago. When you shake an electron, electromagnetic waves don't come in from infinity and meet you there. That would be photons going back to the past. This tachyon solution lives in a universe that's time. Symmetric photons can go either to the future or to the past. It goes along a straight world line because it's not accelerated. Because the energy coming in from the Cherenkov cone in the future in the front is being made up for by the cone going out the back. If you look at a cross section of this, it looks like two blades of a pair of scissors that are tipped at a small angle and they're moving at speed of light. The intersection point can go faster than the speed of light. Like you can close a pair of scissors. The intersection point can move. That doesn't transmit any energy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not an actual thing moving.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's not transmitting any energy or information faster than the speed of light. So this was very interesting because it had that Property.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So when you close a pair of scissors, the point at the vertex of the closure is moving faster than anything that's part of the scissors.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right. Like you tip them at right angles. You move one foot forward this way and one foot forward this way with other scissors. The intersection point moves square root of two further down the line, and nothing's really moving faster than the speed of light. So I had a model where there was the Big Bang at the center and the matter particles went into the future light cone of that event, and they all went up here to become us, to become an open universe up here that would expand forever. The antimatter particles went backward in time because Wheeler showed that you could. A positron was equal to an electron going backward in time. This was an idea he called Feynman excitedly over the phone.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is John Artillery Wheeler, 230 Student of Albert Einstein.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And then Feynman was his student. He called him up, he said, I know why all electrons have the same mass. They're all the same electron. The world line just zigzags up and down in time, goes up as electron, back is a positron, up as electron, back as a positron. Imagine you have a tapestry that's woven with a vertical lines, with one spool of thread. That thread goes up as an electron, comes back down as a positron, up as an electron, back down as a positron. And so you're seeing all these electrons and positrons, but they're still the same world line, that one particle. Okay. Here if you look around, you see.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Many blue threads because every electron has identically the same mass.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's the same electron. This is what he's saying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And this model is the same electron.

[J. Richard Gott III]

This is what he was saying. Now this doesn't work because we got more matter particles than positrons.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It has to be an equal number for this to work.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If it were that universe, we would see positrons and electrons moving forward in time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. A positron moving forward in time is an electron going backwards in time. They're the same thing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So therefore. Therefore it's the same electron.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But we only see it at the intersection point in the present, across our epoch.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, in our epoch.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So all the electrons are just passing.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They're going through.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're going through our moving slice through time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. So it doesn't. It's a wrong idea because you got more electrons than positrons. Also, you can get a virtual pair to form in the vacuum and suddenly there's an electron positron pair. It lasts for a little while, and then it annihilates again. And Feynman showed that these existed in the vacuum and so forth, and you had to use them calculating, you know, the magnetic moment of certain things and so forth. And so we know that it's not all one electron. Okay. So I had the matter.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because we're seeing electrons do other things, is the point.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. Well, here's an isolated pair you've made out of nothing that's a little loop of string. It's not connected. It's not connected to the other. It's not all part of one piece. So that has to come from the physics of the electric field and so forth. Okay. I mean, when I was at Caltech, I audited Mr. Feynman's course on quantum electrodynamics. I didn't do the homework. I just audited, sat in the back, and when he got to this point, he said, when I figured out that I could use the electrons, the positrons, the electrons going backwards in my Feynman diagrams, I nearly fell off my chair. So this was a very important part of Feynman diagrams. And so then the tachyons would go. The antimatter goes in the past light cone of this event, and then the tachyons go out toward the present of this event, that big space between the absolute future and the absolute past. So inflation does a much better job of this, frankly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So was that the most brilliant idea you've had, just happened to be wrong?

[J. Richard Gott III]

That happened to be wrong.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I guess. How brilliant could it be if it's wrong?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, I thought of bubble universes. This was in 1982. Guth had this problem of how does inflation end uniformly? It was like he wanted to boil water on a pot and have it turn into steam, have the vacuum energy of the early inflating universe turn into particles. He wanted to do that all at once. Then the universe would be uniform, but unfortunately, it would form bubbles. And that's not uniform, and we don't see that. So my answer to this was, we live in one of the bubbles. It's a bubble universe. It expands, it turns into an open universe. And from inside the bubble, you just see toward the past, the uniform vacuum, and you don't see the other bubbles yet. And so this is a solution, this problem. And Linda came up with the same idea two months later. And then there was Albrecht and Steinhardt again in short order. And so their thing, they did particle physics with it as well. As general relativity. And that became what's known as new inflation. So that's a better idea.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Because it had some truth to it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's always good. Yes. And so the. But let me tell you this. The Higgs boson has this Mexican hat potential. You've seen it starts off with a large vacuum energy. You're at the top center of the Mexican hat. You got marble on top there. You roll off, and you land somewhere in the bottom brim of the thing. And that's where we are today. Not very much vacuum energy. And the boson can oscillate then. And that oscillation that gives you a positive mass for the Higgs boson, okay, because it's concave down there, but in the early universe, it's convex. And this means that m squared, the mass squared, is a negative number. That means that it's an imaginary mass, and that means it's tachyonic. It's like a tachyon in the early universe. So when the vacuum decays, you get something called a tachyon condensate. And it's like you've created tachyons. It's turned into tachyonic Higgs bosons that behave like tachyons, but instead of having a wave function that's sinusoidal, they have a wave function that is exponential. And so they decay very quickly, and they don't last very long.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exponential decay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Exponential decay. Some people say, well, it's not really a free t. But Whitten's written papers on tachyonic thing, and my student Matthew Hedrick has written papers on tachyonic condensate in the early universe. So maybe tachyons have a role in the early universe still.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'll keep them on my radar. And recently on my past or my future radar.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Neil Turok has proposed that we have a boundary condition on the early universe. It's like a mirror. So you look back into this mirror, you see the mirror image of us is the antimatter going the other way. It's not really there. It's a mirror boundary condition. So he's coming like that. And I did a thing with Li Jingli. You've seen this. There's a little time loop at the beginning of the universe. Like, there's a tree, and it has a trunk, and branches are coming off the trunk. More and more inflating universes. This is Linde's picture. What if one of the branches simply curls back around and grows up to be the trunk? And you have a little time, microscopic time machine there the virtual pair is like a little time machine. Goes up as electron comes back as a positron and makes a little loop.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did you talk about this in your book? Time travel in Einstein's universe?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. The only self consistent solution, if you got a little time loop at the beginning, and we found a stable quantum vacuum state for this, the only stable solution, the only self consistent solution, I should say, is when the photons go only toward the future, it solves that problem. Why the photons go only toward the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Future, which is what we observe.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And the temperature in this loop is zero. You can calculate the temperature in there. There are no particles at all. And when you come out, you start seeing Hawking radiation. It heats up because you can't see all the other branches. And so the universe starts off in a low entropy state and goes to a higher entropy state. That could explain the entropy arrow of time. It would be a great prediction for our theory if no one had noticed it. But unfortunately they've noticed it. So it's only a post prediction.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Post diction.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Post diction, we would say yes. So it has a number of interesting features and there's about six different ideas out there, and we're one of them. But all right, you know, all right, this is what you do if you're a theorist.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You were the first to introduce me to the concept of a gin particle.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, Just.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just give me a fast explanation for that, because I. This fascinated me.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, there's a movie called Somewhere in Time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I know that one. And Christopher Reeve is in there.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Christopher Reeve, he goes to this place up in Michigan, big hotel, I've been there. And he fell in love with this actress. He saw a picture in there. I love this girl, I gotta meet this girl. I said, well, she died in 1908, you know, unfortunately for you. So he goes to his old professor who talked about time travel.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

His old physics professor?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah, physics. How do you do it? Well, long story short, he's able to go back in time, meet her, they fall in love and so forth. Before all of this happens, what motivates him to try to go back is there's an old woman, strangely, that comes up to him, and she hands him a gold watch and she says, come back for me. And he doesn't know who this woman.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is, but I think it was a locket of some kind.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a watch. It's a watch. Are you sure?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a watch.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a time travel movie. It's a watch. And he goes, looks up this actress to see who she is. Oh, my God. It's this actress he fell in love with. The picture he saw in the thing. She's an old woman. She came and wants me to come back for her.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And she had handed him this.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The watch.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The watch.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He's got the watch. He takes the watch back with him.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, back in time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He meets her, they fall in love, et cetera, et cetera. They're planning their future together.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then, because he successfully goes back in time on the advice of his physics professor.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, that's right. He's got the watch with him. She says, oh, that's an interesting watch you've got. He hands it to her. She's holding it. And then he sees a penny that he's brought with him that he shouldn't have from 1979 or something. This breaks the spell, you know, and he just.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Time travel.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He just goes away and he's back in the present.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He forgot to swap out his currency to be appropriate.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He wanted to, he did. Had to do everything authentic.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Got the old kind of fashion, clothes and everything. But they forgot that there was some coins in the coin pocket. So that broke the spell. You know, it's not really physics here. But anyway, I broke the spell, and then he's back in the present. He can never get back. But now, if you look at the watch, she then has this watch in her hand, and she takes that watch. She gets old and she takes the watch and she delivers it to him. He brings it back in time and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gives it to her.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And gives it to her. So the watch had no association with a watch factory. It's a circular world line. This is called a gin particle.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

J I N J I N N. Like a genie. Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Gen and it has a circular world line. It has no.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No one created it. No one destroyed it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It lives in a time loop.

[J. Richard Gott III]

In a way, the virtual particle is like that because the electron and positron pair is formed and then disappears. It's a little loop. It's just sitting there. It's formed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so once you explain this to me, I got to then realize that in Back to the Future.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Marty is playing a tune by Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry's cousin, hired to perform at this dance, hears Marty play.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right you are.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here's Marty play.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Chuck Berry song.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And gets on the phone, calls Chuck Berry and says, hey, Chuck, this is the sound you've been looking for. Check it out. And he holds it up.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there it is.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The Song itself is a gin.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The song is a.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Only the song itself, that's a gin. I didn't notice that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I didn't get that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I didn't get that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So am I allowed to call a non material object a gin? A gin thing. It's a song that was never written.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it was never created.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It lives in this loop.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Absolutely. Now, the thing my comment on that would be. And in a time loop, in a time machine, you can have an electron that goes around in a complete circle. And just because it's going toward the future all the time, it's curved space time. It's like Magellan went west, his crew went west all the time, and they got back in Europe because it was a curved thing. So this can occur.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do you know the story about. But his scribe, or whatever they call the people who kept notes on the ship. Pigafetta was his name.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, no.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He was an interloper, a wealthy Italian guy who just bought a seat on the trip. And he kept very good records of every day.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Which you can do, as you know, when the sun hits, the day has gone by.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Comes around and he thinks it's Monday. That's right, whatever. But everyone else says it's Sunday. Or whichever order this was.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He's thinking that the townspeople are playing a practical joke on him.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. Oh, that's a good story. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So this is the discovery of the need for an international dateline.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it happened on Magellan's voyage.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. So you can have a gin particle, that's an electron. One electron. You can have a gen particle, that's more complicated, like the watch. And I would just say the watch is less probable to find. Like you have a virtual particle. It's electron and positron. You could have a virtual, you know, Leonard Nimoy and his antimatter counterpart form and then disappear again. That's less probable to happen than the. Than the single electron.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you will agree with me that this song that Marty was saying, that's a ginseng.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's a very good insight.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ginsult.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's because of you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I wouldn't have thought. Oh, well, I wouldn't have thought to.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Think that you thought of that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Commercial Speaker]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[J. Richard Gott III]

It's better over here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So rich. I've kept a list my whole life of movies that portrayed genius behavior and people. I was always just intrigued by them.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thought it'd be fun to show your kids, Right? Just that there are things you can value. Like being smart is one of them.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right? Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And one thing I couldn't wrap my head around. Somehow everyone believes that if you're really, really, really smart, you can move objects with your mind. Like, where does that come?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Who did?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Who says that? They're not saying they can just solve problems faster or better than you. They can come up with solutions that others couldn't. No. Their mind is gonna make tops spin in the middle of a table. No, I'm not accepting that. Because get the smartest person you've ever known, met, or heard of, if there was any chance being smart would have those powers, there'd be suspicious things happening in their presence, even in the mildest of senses. But no. Somehow, screenwriters can't resist. Storytellers cannot resist this.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. This happened in the movie Lucy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Lucy? Yes. She's Scarlett Johansson.

[J. Richard Gott III]

She's getting smarter and smarter because she's taking some drugs. She's using more and more of her mind.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So she's moving, using powers that her mind already has were just never tapped by her.

[J. Richard Gott III]

People are coming for her with guns. She just levitates them to the ceiling, knocks the guns down.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And she's walking down the street, she changes the color of her hair.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I love this movie. My wife's named Lucy. She's very smart. But I haven't caught her levitating things around the house yet. I mean, it's not something.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If you come by, you're floating on the ceiling.

[J. Richard Gott III]

My phone is not just 10 times better than the Cray computer from 1970s, the early days. It's 100,000 times, basically more memory, 100,000 times as faster. And it's not levitating anything, you know, So I agree with you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there's another movie that actually preceded Lucy. It came out in 2011, I think it was called Limitless.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

At Bradley Cooper. One of his early. And he.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He took a pill as well.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He took a pill?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And that was a. Felt a little more real because he could figure things out. The stock market, you know, it showed a actual mental acuity going up, not power over matter.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there are others. This is irrational. I think it's irrational fascination with childhood. Genius. Will we ever get over this? I mean, come on now. Really? Really. Okay, so your 7 year old is doing calculus. So everyone has to like crowd around the seven year old and presume that they will one day become an adult, that'll get five Nobel Prizes. But that never happens.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay, well, sometimes it happens.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me say it doesn't happen as often as people expect it or want it to happen, given the level of resources directed to such people.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, that's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, did Natalie Portman. Who you was judge of her science fair project.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did she become a scientist?

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, she found something she liked better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is my point.

[J. Richard Gott III]

She not wasting her time doing that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is my point.

[J. Richard Gott III]

She found something.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We see what a kid does really well and all the adults crowd around and we force them into these things. Let them be a kid. You know, the psychologists want to get ahold of your kid, right. And someone else says, let him be a kid, otherwise they won't get socialized. They won't.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You know, there's a movie gifted like that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gifted, yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah, yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A girl.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Little Man Tate is sort of that theme, you know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. That Jodie Foster. They have real stars in these movies.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Give the kid love and a good support and let them do what they're interested in.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But meanwhile you have the authorities who want to sweep the kid away. And again, on the Assumption that kids like that become adults like that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

When Gauss was six, the teacher, he'd done something naughty, and she made him add up all the numbers from 1 to 100.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And he said, this is Gauss, the brilliant Gauss.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. And he thought about it. He said, well, I could pair the 1 with the hundred, that's 101. He pairs the 2 with the 99, that's 101. And there are 50 pairs like this. And he got the answer, which is 5050, you know. And he just says 5050, you know. But there's a method to it, you see. But he was 6, so, you know, Mozart, you know, there's some people that are like this, but a lot of people flower later, they show up later. So all different things can happen, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So the teacher gave Gauss that task.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Just to punish him.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To punish him. It was like to shut up and go to the corner and figure he.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Came back right with the answer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Didn't even. In the time it took him to walk to the corner, he had the answer.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Feynman said once, if he lived back in the day of quantum mechanics, he might have done better, like Heisenberg, you know, I mean, you know, like, he would have had more opportunities back then to discover even more important laws of physics, depending on where you live.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did he say this?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So he thought he was born in the wrong time.

[J. Richard Gott III]

When he introduced Heisenberg, who showed up at Caltech, he said, you know, if I'd been back there, I might have done something even bigger.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He might have been somebody.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Might have been more. Might have been more. That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then they have the autism movies where they have what they used to call savants. Yeah, yeah, the savants. Remember? You got. You got.

[J. Richard Gott III]

There are people who can remember what happened to them on every day of their life.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

People plot what day of the week, a date that you give them. No matter where that is, you have to pull it out of their head.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm intrigued by all of these movies. Another one had John Travolta in it. Phenomenon. I enjoyed that one. He was hit by lightning because you need some reason for your brain to be different, right? He's hit by lightning and then he's, like, really smart, Right. But they couldn't resist. And he's levitating things as well.

[Commercial Speaker]

He couldn't resist that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. As a kid, I remembered reading Flowers for Algernon.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Only later to learn it became a movie called Charlie.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I think that had Cliff Robertson in it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So in this, as a kid, I think he was mentally very delayed. And there was an experimental drug that they would give to him.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right, right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And they decided to test it on him because it had worked on mice.

[J. Richard Gott III]

A mouse.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A mouse.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Algernon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Algernon, Right, right. And they gave the drug to Algernon and it didn't the maze much faster.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Better. And remembered it and everything. And so they gave it to him. And I remembered this because I was old enough to feel this.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because all of his friends made fun of him because he was just. He was not smart like anybody else. Okay. He would do dumb things or stupid things and they're just mean people, bullies and things. They would make fun into adulthood.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right? Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. He had a janitor job and they made fun of him. They put dough in his.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He was a good hearted person.

[Commercial Speaker]

Yes, yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He's a good hearted person.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You just see these mean people.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then they started doing the drug on him and he got smarter and smarter and he started outsmarting the people who were mean to him. And then they rejected him because he was no longer someone they could poke fun at. And then we learn how the story ends. Right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Drug wares off.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, the mouse dies.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, well, worse. Yeah. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But anyhow, I don't know. I just.

[J. Richard Gott III]

The remarkable thing to me about that movie and Cliff Robertson won the Oscar for it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, he did.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Was when he was smart. I don't know what they did or what he did as an actor, but his eyes sort of twinkled. I mean, his eyes looked alive in a way that was abnormal. He managed to encapsulate the look of someone who was incredibly smart. I don't know how he did this, but I saw it there. And his performance playing the smart person was very extraordinary, I thought, because he. He looked. And there was no levitating in that movie. He just could solve complicated problems. He was trying to find the cure for his disease, as I recall.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I just don't think just because if you have a smart kid, other people shouldn't come in and tell your kid what they should do with their smarts. I have a visceral objection to it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

True.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Of course, I don't mind a system that wants to find the smart people in the group. No problems with that at all. However one defines being smart. But if you now put people in a category and define that category in such a way that no one else can participate, even if they try hard and succeed, then there's something wrong. With that, to me, it doesn't sit well within me. When I was a kid, I was identified by the U.S. department of Education, Office of the Gifted and Talented. And by being so recognized, I had access to certain opportunities. And I thought to myself, they call it Gifted and Talented. Gifted. What is a gift? Somebody hands you something, did you earn it? Did you work for it? No. A gift. And I wanted that branch of the US Government to be renamed Office of the People who Work Hard. Office of the People who Are Devoted to Succeeding. That way, if you're not branded as gifted, you can say, well, let me just try harder. I'll try harder. Next, I'll study harder. And yes, some people will learn faster than others for whatever biochemical, neurological reasons, but so what? I'll work harder than you do, maybe to even be equal to you. But if I keep at it, maybe I'll be better than you. And the system had no way to find that. And so. And can I give an example?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So in high school, we all took the SATs, right. I think they existed in your day. You're not that old.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So I took the SATs. My verbal score was like, okay. It wasn't bad. But it was nowhere near any level where a teacher would say, watch him, he'll go far. Teachers pass judgment on you based on your performance on exams that either they administer or the state or the federal government give you. Okay. No teacher would have said that at all. After my third book and I had a column for a major magazine, I get a letter in the mail from the Educational Testing Service. And, Richard, where are they based?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Princeton.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Princeton University.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You live in Princeton, don't you?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So the Educational Testing Service, purveyors of the sat.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to show you what kind of a grip they have on us all, I got to the letter. I said, did they rescind my scores? Do they? You know, this is like, after my PhD. Okay? And it says, Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson said, oh, okay. They must know at least that I have a PhD earned long after their exam that I took. So I open up the letter and it says, Dear Dr. Tyson, we recently read one of your essays. We want to excerpt sections of it to include in the reading comprehension section of the verbal essay. Will you grant permission?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. This was a victory.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is what I wanted to say, and this is what I did say. You know what I wanted? I want to say you.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

First, I don't get your high score. No teachers pointing to me. I will have any literary ability in the future. Now you want to use my writing as an exemplar to test people on your exam? Something's wrong here. Okay, that was on the inside. On the outside, I said yes. I gave him permission. But I was very disturbed by the fact that things can unfold that way.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, they were.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And by the way, that was even before my bestselling book. Okay. Which was on the bestseller list for 81 weeks. Okay. None of them would have. It's not like I was a late bloomer. I knew what I wanted to do with life early, just like you did. Okay?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I was in the science fair and I owned a telescope. And I was in the astronomy club and I was in the physics club. It's not like I later on figured out how to put myself together. So that's why these people who are identified early by some system of measurement as being deserving of who should be coddled and supported and funded going forward, omits whoever else is left behind.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Gotta give them credit. They were smart enough to ask you to write the essay. Let me give you an example. Bob Vanderbijn and I wrote a book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Bob Vanderbijn. He's our co author on.

[J. Richard Gott III]

On the 3D book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The 3D version of our textbook. Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He's an engineer, photographer extraordinaire.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He worked on this 3D book with.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Us and 3D objects in the universe. Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. I would like people to start playing 3D chess.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know, that's above my head.

[J. Richard Gott III]

On a 4 by 4 by 4 grid.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, the 8 by 8 serves me fine.

[J. Richard Gott III]

What's the same number? 4 by times 4 by 4? Okay, I just speak up for 3D chess.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so I didn't know 3D chess has only 4 by fours.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, it was proposed in 1851 on an 8 by 8 by 8 board. Then it was popular in 1907 on a 5 by 5 by 5 board. I think they should use a 4 by 4 by 4 board because it has the same number of places for the pieces to sit. You know how this works? The rook can't just go north, south, and east, west. It can also go up and down.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. So anyway, we worked on this 3D book together, and Bob and I had written this book, Sizing up the Universe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wonderful. And we asked ways to compare different relative sizes of things in the universe.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Brilliant. Right? And we asked.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Great exercise.

[J. Richard Gott III]

We asked you to write a blurb for us for the front of the book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did I write a blurb?

[J. Richard Gott III]

You did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Was it Good.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, here it was. You said, a feast for the eyes, a banquet for the mind. And I said, how did he come up with that? Terrific. That's amazing. That's an amazing sentence. A banquet for the mind. Weren't. You know. This is terrific.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you. Thank you.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a terrific sentence.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. No English teacher would have said any of that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, there you go. We appreciated your expertise in language.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, I love words. Words are fun. The right word in the right time, in the right place, there is no substitute.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And if Shakespeare couldn't find that, he.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Invented the word, why not?

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In my latest book, I invented seven words.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Really?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Not to show off or anything, there's a sentence where I needed a word that didn't exist, and so I created it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have one word in the Oxford name.

[J. Richard Gott III]

What is that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You don't know this?

[J. Richard Gott III]

No, I never.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I.

[J. Richard Gott III]

You got one in. I got one in. This is not on purpose.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It just is.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You need a word and you have the word. And now.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's the word for when the sun sets on the Manhattan grid. Oh, Manhattan Henge.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's right. That's terrific. People now congregate there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And they.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, they block traffic for reasons other than Con Ed digging holes in the street.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or police activity. They're stopping traffic for the universe.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. So that's great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I had ambition to just learn and enjoy the universe my whole life, as did you. And I just didn't. I didn't want people telling me what I could or couldn't accomplish. I found that to be so counterproductive. We should have ways of measuring people's ambition because ultimately, I think that's where you win in your life's trajectory from childhood into whatever is the professional status you seek. Okay. All right. So, Rich, we're about to rank films that feature genius.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're going to rank them now. The categories are S for superior, and then A, B, C, D, E, F. And all you have to do is.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Your grades, plus A plus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I guess the S would be an A plus.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Let's call it an A plus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And since F is below an E, F is really bad because who knows what an E is, right?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The E is not excellent. E is below D. Where would you rate the movie, Charlie? Cliff Robertson in a role that's an A.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Because of his special performance when he was smart, I thought he was very effective.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

When he was smart as an actor, he had a whole different facial look to his eyes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

His eyes. It Twinkled somehow. I don't know how he did that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That was good. I'd give Charlie a B.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not. Not because I didn't enjoy the movie or think it was important or have it have meaning to me at the time, I just thought it didn't fully explore what genius could be.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It was a very narrow storyline in the context of genius. Revenge of the Nerds.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I'd give that a C. I don't know. I mean, I vaguely remember that movie, but I don't. They got even with everybody.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, they got even with everybody using.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Their brilliance, I guess. So I just. I just. I don't remember much about it, so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I saw it, but I don't remember.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I'm gonna give it an A.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay. Because they outsmarted the other people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It came at the exact moment where people learned that maybe being a nerd is cool.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Before then, no one nerves got wedgied by the football quarterback.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And what happened in 1984? The Apple Macintosh gets released. All of a sudden, computing comes into your home, into your classroom. And the jocks and all the beautiful people if they want to do well on their homework or they need to be friends with the nerds.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So I view that as transitional.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I was invited to give the commencement speech in the year 2000 for the Bronx High School of Science.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I titled it Revenge of the Nerds. Because all of a sudden, the richest people in the world were the nerds, not the oil tycoons or the steel tycoons. It was the geeks who would have been rejected from all the party invitations. So I viewed it as an important movie in our culture. Okay, Then even if as a movie, it might have only been a C. Alrighty, then.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I gotta give it an A. Social, cultural importance. Cultural importance. Okay. Let's keep going. Real genius. If you didn't see that, I'll just rate it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I don't remember that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. S. Oh, my gosh.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I didn't say that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

S. I mean, think of Revenge of the Nerds, but a better film. It had Val Kilmer in it.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it's just some really smart kids just out of high school into Pacific Tech. Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

What was that? Yeah. Which school was that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Pacific Tech. Real genius was a celebration of just being smarter than everybody else.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Look at how many movies are celebrations of people who are more athletic than everybody else.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Who are prettier or handsomer than everybody else.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This was a Movie of people who are smarter than everybody else.

[J. Richard Gott III]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I found one error in it. Yes, There are others, but this one was. Okay, okay. There's a vending machine. And his friend comes in and sees him with this lab cutter, and he's cutting this cylinder that's. The cylinder is smoking. And he says, what are you doing? And he says, oh, I'm cutting nitrogen. So solidified nitrogen. Okay. Like, what is he doing? And then he gets a little circular disc out of it. Then he puts it in the vending machine. He gets the candy out. I think that's good. I think that's good. And the mistake they made was they said, what are you doing? He said, oh, it's liquid nitrogen. Which of course it isn't. It's solid.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they messed that one up. But just so finally, being smart could be fun.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Fun and irreverent rather than weird. And whatever else you might do with it. How about. Do you see Good Will Hunting?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. What do you think of that? With Matt Damon as the janitor turned math genius.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That's an A. With some reservations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, I like the. It's a deeper movie, you know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, it is.

[J. Richard Gott III]

This is. And the psychiatrist, you know, Robert Williams won the Oscar for that. And he was very good. And they explained his genius work in psychiatry, you know. And so the quibble I had was that the field medalist in the thing, he said, I am nothing. This is SARS guard. You know, he said, I am nothing. This guy's. I mean, compared to this guy, I'm just Matt Damon. I'm nothing. My work is worth. Sorry.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Actor Solgard Sarsgaard, who's the professor who had been. Which you only win if you're younger than 30. So he's later in his career.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is the highest achievement in mathematics.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, I know. Field's medalists, and I think they think their work is important, but they're thrilled when they see somebody even better. It doesn't diminish what they've done. But, for example, Roger Penrose came to Princeton one time. He gave a talk. He said, let me tell you what Stephen is thinking. This is Stephen Hawking. I mean, he's not going to give his own talk. He's going to tell you what Stephen is thinking. So good people, they can be good. They can feel great about the stuff they've accomplished, but recognize somebody of even greater accomplished in this movie. They can be happy with that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They didn't interview enough field medalists to know how he would have behaved in that situation. I thought, okay, so you're going to drop it a score for that reason?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, I said an A with reservations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, all right. A. I'd give it an A because of the story was more interesting and it was richer and it's a townie, you know, if you're a townie.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No one gives you any respect if you're live in the town of a very highly respected university. In that case, it was Harvard. Right. And you had the snooty Harvard students. So I thought it captured that very well, having seen that and lived that. Okay, let's keep going. Lucy with Scarlett Johansson. How would you rate that?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Love that movie. But it's crazy, as you say, you don't levitate things if you're, you know, smart. But I love that movie. She needed to get an operation. She went into the operating room. She looked at the X ray on the wall, killed the patient on the operating table. He's going to die anyway. You need to operate on me. She held him at gunpoint while they operated on her. I mean, she didn't feel the pain, you know, I mean, it was. It was fabulous movie. I'd give that an A.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Would you give it an S?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, it went a little too far. I'd give just A.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, let's break format here just for this one exception. Queen's Gambit, it was a TV miniseries on Netflix.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I would actually give that an excellent or a superior, you know, because would I. Because they went to the trouble to get world champions and things to produce the chess moves for the movie.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They were real chess moves.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Real chess.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How did you know this?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, they told you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Later, you know, behind the scenes, they bragged about doing this, but, you know, that was very authentic because they're all.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just actors and they just do what the script.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And she practiced moving the chess pieces. Like, she observed the way professionals, they move up fast and kind of, you know, they have a certain style. There's a certain wrist action and a certain nonchalance about moving them. If you've played chess a lot, she studied that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And she is Anya Taylor. Joy.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

That was terrific.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I agree. This would be an S right at the top.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Superior, Top of the line.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it was localized to being a chess genius, but it still explored what that meant around people who don't understand you and what your abilities are. And you got a little bit inside her head where you saw her play chess on the ceiling.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I like to see a movie that tries to explain to you how they got this idea inside the head. And they rarely do that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, they don't. How about Phenomenon? John Travolta? He gets hit by lightning and he gets really smart.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I'd say that's maybe A, B, C.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

B, B. I enjoyed it while I watched it, but it didn't keep calling to me.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I'm gonna give that one a B. Cause it was. I like John Travolta in that role.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It doesn't stick with me that much.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right, gotcha. There's some biopics here.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So these are like real people who had sort of.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What do you think of the man who knew infinity? Math genius.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I give that the top mark. That's an excellent. Yes. That's S for super. Super.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Super. Yeah, yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I mean, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Jeremy Irons. I live in anything. By the way, we interviewed Jeremy Irons after that movie came out.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I know. You did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, he's in our archives.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right. Yeah. I mean, I heard all these stories from Littlewood, who was played by Toby Jones in the movie. It's a true story. It shows you also how hard Ramanujan worked.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He was an Indian mathematician who was discovered only when he wrote a letter to the University of Cambridge, to Hardy, the mathematician.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. Can I come and work with you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can I come work.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And they did. And they did a great thing on partitions, which is the ways of summing up to a given number for very high numbers. And they made a big contribution to that field. And I might mention. I mean, the amazing thing about Ramanujan was they came up with these incredible formulas. You know, your man Newton, he came up with an infinite series that gave it equal to PI. Okay. And the first term in his series, the biggest number that appeared in the formula, he's got a lot of N factorials and things like that. But the biggest number that appeared in the formula was six. Okay. And the first estimate from just the first term was PI equals three. And then you add the second term, it gets more accurate. And each one, it converges quite rapidly. It beat all the old.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You talk about Newton's formula.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Newton's formula beat all the old polygon formulas. It was a new infinite series, new method. Use calculus. So Ramanujan has this formula and he just presents it, you know, and it's an infinite series like Newton's, and it's. But it's got these big numbers in it, like 26,390. There's an 11. Oh, three, there's a 9,801. There's a 396. What are these? What do these numbers have to do with PI? What is this formula? And the first term in his formula is acro PI to one part in 13 million. And then it gets better after that. And people were just astounded by these things that he came up with.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But you want to rate it high because he's smart or did the movie do a good job conveying?

[J. Richard Gott III]

I think the movie did a good job of conveying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me hold your feet to the burner here, because you've got a beautiful mind.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I give that a super also.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You give a C. Cause that was.

[J. Richard Gott III]

And it also explained a bit how he thought of the idea.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. You get inspired.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I like that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And who's we're talking about?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Nash.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's Russell Crowe playing John Nash.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My office at Princeton, when I postdoc there when we first met.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

John Nash would walk by every day.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I just see him walk by, kind of staring up into the sky.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I went to see them film the movie.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay. And everybody was excited. Everyone wanted to see Russell Crowe or, you know, everybody was excited when the filming was there. And as I'm driving In, I see Mr. Nash walking, you know, out of the physics building. You know, I just see him on my way in. And when I got I talking to some of the people at the concessions, I said, you know, I saw the real. Everybody's here to see Russell Crow, but the real. Meanwhile, the real nad. John Nash is walking about a block away from me. It was a bit surreal.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So let's order these then. Let's take back your grade for the man who Knew Infinity.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let's just take it back for a moment.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We have the man who Knew Infinity, Ramanu. We have iq Also filmed at Princeton, which portrayed Einstein.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Walter Matthau was in that. Meg Ryan. We have the Imitation Game.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Alan Turing, yeah, sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And of course, the Theory of Everything with Stephen Hawking. All of these are epic movies. True stories. Mostly true stories. With lead actors, like marquee actors playing in these roles. Just rank them for me.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, let's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, let me add another one. Let's not be so science oriented.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Amadeus.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I think I might even put Amadeus first.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I agree. S. Amadeus next.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes, among those. Now, I should comment that Redmayne's performance of Stephen Hawking captured his personality. It was great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I mean, they could have done more of explaining How Hawking got these ideas a little detailed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They didn't.

[J. Richard Gott III]

But I think his personality and he did a terrific job and he won the Oscar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so let's put that at an A. Okay. You're ranking these. Okay. Next one up.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I guess I'd put Beautiful Mind ahead of An Imitation Game, so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So would I. I think because they.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Explained how he thought of it, that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Made you feel for the character more because you got inside his head. Right. Okay, then Imitation Game. Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do you know where Imitation Game comes from? That name? No, they didn't say it in the movie.

[J. Richard Gott III]

They didn't.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. His original paper.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Oh, on. Is this about Envisage artificial Intelligence?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Oh, his original paper on the Turing Test.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Turing Test. Yeah. Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He didn't call it the Turing Test. He called it the Imitation Game.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where you interact with a computer and the computer pretends it's a human and makes you think it's human. And if it can make you think it's human. That was counted as official AI.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Turing did for computer stuff what GERDL did for mathematical show. There was computer programs that you. You couldn't call an algorithm that would say when something would end because you get into these logical self contradictions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did you. Did you know Girdle at Princeton?

[J. Richard Gott III]

I saw Gardel.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You saw him?

[J. Richard Gott III]

I saw him. We had the same doctor, actually. But I saw. At one point. But I.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I saw him walking.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay, that's. I was impressed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He did general relativity. The first time machine in general relativity did. That wasn't even his main field.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[J. Richard Gott III]

He did the rotating universe that you could do time travel to the past, which was the first solution, 1948, that showed that general relativity could have time travel solutions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then he kicked math in his ass after that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Well, you think he did that before? Oh, he'd already. He'd already done that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so where would you put iq?

[J. Richard Gott III]

I guess I'd sort of give it a B. I thought it was nice that, you know, you can find somebody really smart in the gas station. That is possible, you know, But I thought it was charming.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, but charming is not enough to.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Give it a B.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, see, I'd give it a C. Really? Okay, well, we're just sort of relative to these other biopics.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yes. Okay, well, I'm. I gave it a B. I may be easier. Greater than you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Oh, how about searching for Bobby Fischer?

[J. Richard Gott III]

Maybe that's even the super category. It's for this one great line like.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ben Kingsley in it. Right.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Ben Kingsley is playing the chess coach, guru. And I think your son studied with the actual guy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Who got good at chess when he. He had already studied with him. When he beat you, he played you in chess.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Yeah. Okay, so he beat you pretty quickly. Thanks.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have a photo of you just holding your head, like, looking at the ch.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Okay, so there's this one line in the movie that was just magical. He's trying to convince the father that he should let his son be under the tutelage of him because he, Ben Kingsley, wanted to see the next Bobby Fischer because he loved chess so much. He wanted to see what magical creations. Just like you're looking for a work of art. He wanted to see what the next Bobby Fisher would be like. And he goes to the Manhattan Chess Club. And this is the best chess club in the country. And he says, now these are. Over there is the American champion. Over there is the Chinese grandmaster or something. And over there is this grandmaster or something. He says, you won't find Bobby Fischer here. He's asleep at your home in the bedroom. Oh, and the father says, I'll sign him up. I'll sign him up.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Based on a true story.

[J. Richard Gott III]

It's a true story. And the interesting thing about that actual kid was that he got bored with chess after a while. He did not become the world champion, but then he became a world champion in tai chi, this martial arts.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I did not know that.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Which shows that he had a talent for devoting yourself to something, to being good at something and getting to be the champion.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there's a bunch of movies with that have kid geniuses. Right. There's Matilda. That was fun and entertaining. There's baby geniuses. That was a little weird. That was kind of a fun premise that baby talk can be decoded into actually fully intelligent conversations they're having with each other. I thought that was an interesting premise, but these are more sort of cartoony storylines than anything else. But anyway, I think we ranked enough of them there. None were a D or an F, D, E or F. No.

[J. Richard Gott III]

I think people that take that project on as a challenge.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Are probably going to try to do a good job.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do a good job with the right budget and right stars.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Right stars.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, J. Richard got the third.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Thank you, Neil. One of my great friends in the world.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thanks for coming by.

[J. Richard Gott III]

Thank you, Neil.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, Neil DeGrasse Tyson here. Four star talk, as always. I bid you. Keep looking up.

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