Cosmic Queries – Origins of the Universe, with Janna Levin

Summary

StarTalk Radio: Cosmic Queries – Origins of the Universe with Janna Levin Episode Date: April 10, 2026 | Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Guest: Janna Levin | Co-Host: Chuck Nice

---

Episode Overview

In this energetic and highly accessible Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson, along with co-host Chuck Nice and leading cosmologist Janna Levin, dive deep into some of the grandest mysteries of our cosmos. Celebrating the release of the new StarTalk book "Cosmic Queries," they tackle questions inspired by chapters on the universe's origins, its age, and what it's made of. From dark matter and dark energy to string theory and the fate of the universe, this episode interweaves expert insight, wit, science, and speculation, making the universe feel both wondrous and approachable.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Composition of the Universe

• Universe: Why You Gotta Be Like This?

  • The episode opens (05:06) with a broad question: What are the fundamental ingredients and forces that shaped the universe?
  • Janna Levin: Illuminated matter—stars, galaxies, planets—is less than 5% of all that exists. The remainder is dominated by dark energy and dark matter.
    • “Everything anybody has ever seen or ever will see makes up less than 5% of the universe. The universe…has dark energy permeating every part of space.” (07:14)
  • Dark matter doesn’t interact with light, making it invisible, unlike black holes which cast observable "shadows" when illuminated.
    • “Dark matter…doesn't interact with the light at all. There’s no shadow cast, there’s no darkness. It just passes right through.” (08:56)

• Regular Matter as an Anomaly?

  • Chuck Nice proposes the idea that “we are the anomaly” since ordinary matter is only 5% (10:43).
  • Janna notes that neutrinos are an example of “known” dark matter, but the actual dark matter in the universe must be something else, likely even less interactive.

• Cosmic Imbalance: Matter vs. Antimatter

  • Levin explains the “broken law” that led to a tiny excess of matter over antimatter, allowing our existence:
    “There should be none of us…If there was equal amounts of matter and antimatter…there’d be nothing left.” (11:47)
  • This imbalance is still not fully understood, raising the possibility other universes might have different ratios or be made only of dark matter/energy.

---

2. Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Expanding Universe

• Dominance Through Time

  • Neil inquires about the balance of cosmic ingredients over time (15:35).

  • Janna: “Today, the overall energy density of the universe is dominated by dark energy…It didn’t use to be so—matter ruled early, but as the universe expanded, matter diluted while dark energy persisted.” (16:01)

  • The expansion rate is now accelerating due to this dominance of dark energy—which does not dilute as the universe grows.

• Cosmic Isolation: The Astronomy Now Imperative

  • Levin warns: “Eventually…the evidence that we had a big bang in our past will just fade away. There will be no galaxies in view anymore.” (18:10)
  • Tyson adds: Astronomy must be done now, before the universe’s structure escapes beyond visibility. (20:10)

---

3. Frontiers of Particle Physics

• What’s After the LHC?

  • Listener inquiry: Will we need bigger machines to probe quantum reality further? (26:18)
  • Janna: The search for dark matter is ongoing, but finding it may require particle colliders millions of times more energetic than the LHC; such energies are only naturally produced in astronomical events.
    • “A more powerful collider could just open up a whole new door to what’s going on in the universe.” (30:07)

• Microscopic Black Holes: Threat or Insight?

  • Discussion about fears the LHC could create dangerous mini–black holes (33:04).
  • Levin: Even if miniature black holes were made, they would instantly evaporate via Hawking radiation—not a threat to Earth.

---

4. Cosmic Theories and the Nature of Reality

• Predicting Particles & Completing Theories

  • What does it mean for a particle to “complete” a theory? (39:21)
  • The Higgs particle was anticipated to complete the Standard Model. Not all fundamental discoveries are “predicted”—some, like new forms of dark matter, may surprise us.
  • Quote: “The questions are the fun part. In fact, Robbie…his mother used to say to him, ‘Did you ask a good question today?’” (42:01)

• String Theory in Two Sentences (42:49)

  • Levin, summarized: At its core, string theory suggests all fundamental particles are tiny vibrating strings, with each particle representing a different vibration or “note” on the same string. Thus, all matter (and possibly dark matter) could be manifestations of these strings.
  • “An electron is simply ringing at a different note than a quark, but they are fundamentally the same.” (43:15)

---

5. The Quantum Vacuum & The Limits of Nothing

• Is True “Nothing” Possible?
  • On quantum vacuum in intergalactic space (44:53):
    • The uncertainty principle ensures we can never have an absolute, utterly empty vacuum. In quantum mechanics, there is always an uncertainty.
    • “There is no meaning to saying it’s exactly, precisely empty.” (45:43)
  • Dark energy might just be the energy of this quantum vacuum, which is never truly “nothing.”

---

6. Lightning Round: More Cosmic Conundrums

• Does the Universe’s Expansion Affect Quarks?

  • Local forces (gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear) hold atoms and galaxies together so they aren’t “stretched” by the universe’s expansion—at least for now. But in the very distant future, even these may break down in a “great rip” scenario. (49:36)

• Are Virtual Particles Like 3D Objects Passing Through 2D Space?

  • String (and brane) theories allow for higher-dimensional objects; what we see as "particles" could be endpoints of strings or connections to hidden dimensions. This could even explain phenomena that seem to violate locality. (51:17-52:23)
  • “Imagine we live on a three-dimensional membrane, and when we see a point particle, it’s really the endpoint of a string stuck to our membrane.” (51:18)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Black Holes and Shadows:

  • Neil: “The shadow is the absence of the light.” (08:36)
  • Janna: “Stepping into the event horizon is just like stepping into the shadow of a tree... You’re just going into that region where the light is being absorbed.” (08:56)

• On Scientific Humility:

  • Janna: “We don’t know what’s going on. But sometimes that’s the end of the story.” (12:49)
  • Neil: “Let’s go have a beer. We’re done here.” (12:57)

• On Existential Uncertainty:

  • Neil: “I lose sleep at night wondering whether we…live in a time where an entire chapter of data has been removed from our awareness.” (21:14)

• On the Cosmic Perspective:

  • Janna: “The questions are the fun part.” (42:01)

• Cosmic Humor:

  • Chuck: “So the universe is nothing more than one big version of Name That Tune.” (44:01)
  • Janna: “To say there’s nothing means you have zero uncertainty that there’s nothing.” (45:37)

---

Select Timestamps

• [05:06] – What really makes up the universe?
• [07:14] – Less than 5% of the universe is visible matter.
• [10:43] – Are we, matter-based life, the anomaly?
• [16:01] – Dark energy now dominates the cosmos.
• [18:10] – The coming “cosmic isolation”—do astronomy now!
• [26:18] – Do we need bigger colliders for new discoveries?
• [33:04] – Microscopic black holes: LHC hysteria and reality.
• [39:21] – What does it mean for a particle to “complete” a theory?
• [42:49] – String theory in two sentences.
• [44:53] – Is a true quantum vacuum possible?
• [49:36] – Expansion of the universe: does it affect quarks?
• [51:17] – Are virtual particles like higher-dimensional endpoints?

---

Episode Tone & Style

Playful, curious, and intellectually inviting. Science concepts are grounded in humor and real wonder; even the universe's biggest mysteries are framed as open questions rather than dry dogma. Chuck Nice’s comic relief bridges jargon with lay curiosity, while Tyson and Levin keep ideas original and vivid.

---

Summary for the Uninitiated

This episode is a sweeping yet accessible tour of some of cosmology’s greatest open questions: what our universe is really made of, why there’s something rather than nothing, how the universe’s fate hinges on unseen forces, and how even what we call “nothing” may be seething with possibility. The trio demystifies dark matter, string theory, the life cycle of particles, and what it means to never have the full cosmic story—and manages to do it with wit, humility, and imagination.

"Keep looking up." – Neil deGrasse Tyson (53:36)

Transcript

[Shopify Announcer]

When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot. And turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.

[Rosetta Stone Announcer]

Hey, are you traveling soon? Imagine arriving and actually understanding the language. Imagine being able to communicate with the people that are there waiting for you to arrive. Rosetta Stone's immersive, intuitive method helps you naturally absorb your new language. The lessons are simple. They fit into your day wherever you want them to. You learn at your own pace. And you can access the lessons on your laptop or your phone or your table. It's super easy, very convenient and important because of course, everybody loves it when you're able to communicate with them in their own language. Are you ready to start learning a new language this spring? Visit Rosetta stone.com startalktoday to explore Rosetta Stone and choose the language that's right for you. Now, for me, that language was Spanish. One, because you know, I live in this hemisphere and there's a lot of Spanish speaking people. But two, because I secretly am listening mother in law talk about me behind my back and she doesn't even know that I understand what she's saying. All right, I've shared too much. How about you? Go to Rosetta Stone.com startalk today to explore Rosetta Stone and choose your language. Go to Rosetta Stone.com startalk right now and begin your language learning journey today.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, StarTalkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is Dartalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist with my co host, Chuck Knight. Chuck, a baby.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, what's happening, Neil?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck. Chuck, you know what today is. It's a rare thing. We gotta do this because I think people will want us to do it. This is. This entire episode is a shameless plug for the very latest Startalk book that is just coming out. And the reason why it's a shame. Maybe it's not shameless. Maybe it's full of shame. The point is it's. The title of the book is Cosmic Queries. And this is a Cosmic queries edition of StarTalk. The book was inspired by this spinoff of the StarTalk flagship. And so I just wanna celebrate that with all of our fan base and with you. And so I just thought I'd just put that out there. Chuck, I love it. So there's that. And it's published by National Geographic Books, who publish the first StarTalk book.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know what the first StarTalk book was called?

[Chuck Nice]

Jack, let me hold on for a second.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The StarTalk book.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that's what it was called. I'm looking at it over here. Wait a minute. It was called StarTalk.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The StarTalk book. This one inspired by this spinoff branch of the StarTalk book universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so, and so it's questions, 10 chapters. And each chapter is a really deep question that we barely have time to address given the nature of what we normally do in a Cosmic Queries. So what for this episode we're going to do, we're going to focus on chapters three, four and five.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Those are. How did the universe get to be this way?

[Chuck Nice]

Mm.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How old is the universe?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's so impolite.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And. And what's the universe made of?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, sweet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We'll see what you. So we had to reach uptown for our sort of cosmologist in the house. Jan11 Jamnit. Welcome back.

[Jana Levin]

Hi everybody.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

StarTalk. And you are published on these topics. You got your own books. Right. So first there's Together Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

The Black hole Blues.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The black hole blues.

[Jana Levin]

I just. I live for that. I live for

[Chuck Nice]

the black hole blue.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you've got that book and a more recent one called Black Hole Survivor's Guide, which is a very pocket sized book. And everything you needed to know to visit and not die in a black hole, I think. Did I characterize that properly?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So clearly black holes are one of the things in the universe. But could you just tell Janna, how do we get to be this way? What does it mean to have forces and matter and energy and space?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Universe. Why you gotta be like this?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like this? Why you gotta be like this?

[Chuck Nice]

Why you gotta be like this? Universe? I thought we were cool.

[Jana Levin]

Oh my God.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, I thought we should have.

[Jana Levin]

I have a Start talk book idea for you though. You could write a book, a self help book for like universes on how to be better. Like how to be a cooler better,

[Chuck Nice]

how to be a better actual universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is for the, for the multiverse and us all

[Chuck Nice]

more actualized universe. That's awesome.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, I mean, all right, so what's. What is. What's the basis? I can, you know, as an astrophysicist, I can say we've got stars, galaxies and planets. But you look at it as a physicist at a much more sort of refined level, and I see things that gather according to forces. So what's been going on to give us the universe?

[Jana Levin]

Well, it's really interesting. You mentioned stars, galaxies and planets and those.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh my.

[Jana Levin]

And those are things that actually shook us.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Allowed one really bad program. Galveston Galaxy will do it.

[Jana Levin]

I'm a good audience. I laugh at all his jokes. I laugh at all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, that's very good.

[Jana Levin]

So those are.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why you're my favorite guest

[Jana Levin]

and happy hour buddy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, Jen, I didn't properly introduce you. You're a professor of astronomy and physics up at Barnard College. That's why I said we go up the street. Cause you're just two miles north of the American Museum of Natural History, and you've been doing this since childhood and it's just been great to have your enthusiasm. And plus you. You hosted a PBS special.

[Jana Levin]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

On black holes. What was the title of that?

[Jana Levin]

Black Hole Apocalypse.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

See? See what I'm saying?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, it's my.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You were the on camera host of that Nova Scotia, one of my son's favorite.

[Jana Levin]

That's so sweet. I held a little black hole in my hand. I got to do all kinds of cool cgi.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. Okay, go on.

[Jana Levin]

So. So you. All the stuff that you listed, stars, galaxies, planets, are luminous objects, meaning they reflect or emit light. And that actually makes up much less of the universe, as you well know, than we used to believe. It's actually less than 5% of what's out there. I mean, if you think about everything anybody has ever seen or ever will see makes up less than 5% of the universe. The universe in its volume has dark energy permeating every part of space. And yet it is, it is really, should be called invisible because it's not dark looking. It's literally invisible. We see right through and there's dark matter. And those have huge.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. So people will think, oh, dark matter, why isn't that just black holes?

[Jana Levin]

Right, but.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So there's a difference between matter you can't see because it's not giving you light and Matter that you can never see because it will never give you light.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, there have been.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How would you distinguish that?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, no, no, it's a really good point. I mean, a black hole is really just a shadow. It just casts a shadow and you have to illuminate behind it, around it to notice the shadow. Just like a tree doesn't make a shadow. And the darkest night, so you need some light source to cast a shadow. So a black hole is just absorbing that light and casting shadow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's deep. I hadn't thought about that. So black holes only know a tree's shadow is there because there's light surrounding the shadow.

[Jana Levin]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The shadow is the absence of the light.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The presence of the tree is the absence of the light.

[Jana Levin]

The tree is absorbing some of the light and, and that's casting a shadow.

[Chuck Nice]

If that shadow falls in the forest,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

well, the thing you know, then only the shadow knows. How's that? You got me. Are we good there?

[Jana Levin]

So that's what people don't appreciate about black holes, that stepping into the event horizon of the black hole is just like stepping into the shadow of a tree. There's really nothing dramatic about it. You're just, you're just going into that region where the light is being absorbed. But it's a little trickier because the light can fall in behind you. But having said that, dark matter, which is what we were originally talking about, doesn't interact with the light at all. There's no shadow cast, there's no darkness. It just passes right through. So there's a cloud of dark matter, presumably between me and my computer. Maybe not very much in the local universe, but I mean, why do we

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

care it's there if it doesn't affect anything?

[Jana Levin]

It affects gravity. Right. So it interacts gravitationally. So there's a lot of it and there's a big halo of it around our galaxy. So when we look at our galaxy, we think it's this kind of planar spiral and it's so beautiful and it's illuminated by all the stars, but really there's this halo around it of dark matter. And we look right through the dark matter and that halo affects the behavior of the galaxy, the evolution of the galaxy, and actually dominates the mass of the galaxy. So it's just we're invisible to the dark matter too. You have to realize it doesn't see us either. Dark matter, technically, if it had eyes, would look right through us too. Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So this is a sci fi story. Dark matter people coexisting with regular matter people, we would just walk through each other.

[Jana Levin]

That's exactly what I've been talking about. I could be in the same body as a dark matter alien. And we wouldn't, because my gravitational field is so tiny that we wouldn't notice

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

the molecules won't interact at all because that uses forces that dark matter doesn't respect.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, there's a movie about that. It's so cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There is. There's a movie waiting to happen in there. Yeah, man. Man. Okay, so, all right, so we got dark matter, dark energy. That's 95% of everything. And so.

[Chuck Nice]

So is it possible? No. Is it possible we're the anomaly? If 95% of everything.

[Jana Levin]

It's a real anomaly, is the thing.

[Chuck Nice]

If 95% of everything is the thing, is it possible that we are the anomaly? That we're.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're the thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're not.

[Chuck Nice]

We're not the thing.

[Jana Levin]

It depends on how you look at it. The confusing thing about dark matter. We know examples of dark matter. We know neutrinos. Neutrinos exist. They emanate, for instance, from the sun, from thermonuclear reactions. They don't interact with light at all. They are technically invisible. So we know examples of dark matter, but we know that the neutrinos that we know about can't be the dark matter in the universe. We just can tell. It's not heavy enough. It doesn't have all the right properties. So there's something like a neutrino.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you're saying a neutrino is an example of dark matter, of a physical object that doesn't really interact with us, only weakly, only very weakly. So this could be matter, if it's matter at all that interacts even less.

[Jana Levin]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

With less strength than a neutrino would.

[Jana Levin]

That's right. Now, Chuck's question is really interesting because it could just be the fact that there's so little of us. I mean, there should be none of us, because you asked why does the universe got to be this way? And it doesn't. We don't really know why there's a little bit excess, for instance, of matter than antimatter. And so it doesn't have to be this way. We're trying to figure out why it is this way. If there was equal amounts of matter and antimatter when the universe was created, there'd be none of us because we would just merge with our antimatter and annihilate and there'd be nothing left. But the dark side.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So some law of physics that we take as canon was broken or violated in the early universe.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. And we still don't understand if matter

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

always comes in matter antimatter pairs. And we won that contest as this excess froth.

[Jana Levin]

Right, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so you just declare that some rule got broken in the early universe. That sounds very like you don't know what's going on.

[Jana Levin]

Well, that's true. We don't know what's going on. But sometimes that's the end of the.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Jana Levin]

So this is actually interesting, too.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's go have a beer. We're done here.

[Jana Levin]

We do know that there are slight matter antimatter violations in the laws of physics. Why there are these tiny violations, we don't know. There's an example. The universe was created with a lot more matter in it, a lot more. And a lot more antimatter. It all just went away. And this little ashy residue was left of this little excess of matter. Right. So that's what goes into us. So you can imagine, could you have

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

a universe where, in fact, the matter and antimatter were strictly equal all the way down, and still have a functioning universe? Maybe not with stuff in it, but is that. Would it be its own space, its own place? And could you have a universe that has just dark matter and dark energy in it and no regular matter?

[Jana Levin]

You absolutely could have a universe. I mean, if you imagine the multiverse, which you made very quick reference to in the beginning, Neil. Like, if you keep kind of making universes like babies. They're all slightly different. Right. They have a certain genetic code. We know it's still the underlying laws of physics, but maybe certain slight parameters can be seeded differently. And so maybe there's a universe that has no excess of matter over antimatter. And that really depends on whether or not it's absolutely fundamental to the laws of physics or it's something that got broken, like you said. You know, for instance, universe is left, right, symmetric. I don't expect it to be different on my left and my right. Right. Because that doesn't even really matter. I can move around. The universe should be the same. But I know that in this room it's not. I know that my microphone's on my left. And that's different. That's broken it just physically. Even though the laws of physics should be the same on my left and right. I love the looks on your faces right now for anyone who is just listening. I just got, like, four eyes.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. It's like, what the hell?

[Jana Levin]

Well, you.

[Chuck Nice]

First of all, you had me at baby universes. Cause my mind just started going off to all these other universes that were just like, you better take care of your kids.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You got too many kids.

[Chuck Nice]

You got too many kids.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, there could be a whole bunch of little baby universes out there, some of which are, you could say, less successful on the basis of what we think is important, which is the emergence of sentient life. You're not gonna make a lot of sentient life out of dark matter, presumably. Now, there could also be this thing where the dark matter sector has a whole reality. It makes stars and galaxies. We just can't see them. And it sees them, and it has this whole other reality. And we are just, like, in parallel, completely invisible to each other. Dark galaxies, dark stars, dark planets.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so from what I've read, and I have a cursory understanding of this, I have, like, an evening news account of this. At different times, from the early universe to today, matter, gravity, dark matter, dark energy, all have different ways or different strengths of their capacity to manifest.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so who's dominating today?

[Jana Levin]

So today we know that the overall energy density of the universe is dominated by dark energy. And exactly as you said, that was not true very, very far in the past. It's like a soup of ingredients that compete at different phases. And the dark energy, the strange thing about dark energy is as the universe expands, because the dark energy is everywhere, it's like it feels more of it, so the expansion gets a little faster. And then it feels even more of it because it's.

[Chuck Nice]

Embrace your rage.

[Jana Levin]

It doesn't dilute. Right. Like, if I took a hot gas and I expanded it, it would dilute and get weaker dark energy. And that's what happens to the primordial soup of matter in the early universe. It's really powerful. It's totally.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're diluting our gravity. We're diluting our gravity and not diluting the dark energy.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, so that's right. The expansion is. We're getting further and further away from other galaxies. So that's diluting their gravitational effect on us. But the dark energies stay in the same.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you compare the two. The dark energy systematically wins out.

[Jana Levin]

Eventually it'll win, even if in the beginning, the galaxy. Not necessarily galaxy, but the stuff, dominated. And then the universe was expanding, and it got more and more dilute and weaker and weaker. And then the dark energy, there it was, and it just took over.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So dark energy feeds off the vacuum of an expanding universe.

[Jana Levin]

Well, this is. It might be the energy of the vacuum of the expanding universe. So the more vacuum you get, the more energy from the vacuum you get.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, weirdly, that reminds me of the Weeping Angels episode of Doctor who, where weeping angels, they feed off of your life energy and you disappear out of your time and you show up in the past because they took your present life energy from you. So dark energy is. Is taking whatever we possibly had left of ourselves.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a cosmic vampire.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a vampire. That's what it's doing.

[Jana Levin]

If it keeps going like this. You know, a friend of mine used to say we have to do astronomy now, because eventually, eventually in the very far future, there will be no galaxies in view anymore. They'll all be too far away for us to see.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There'd be no cosmology. There'd be no cosmology.

[Jana Levin]

There'd be no cosmology. We'll just see our galaxy and the rest of the sky will be empty. Imagine astronomy under those circumstances. We'd never know that there was anything outside of our galaxy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, that's what it was until 1920. Until 1920, no one had any idea that the fuzzy objects were galaxies. It was just the solar system and the stars in the night sky, and that was the universe. In fact, that was the universe. To Einstein, there was no understanding of a big Bang or anything else. And so it was just no. In fact, when did. Who's the guy who first advanced the Big bang? The monk or the priest?

[Jana Levin]

Lemaitre.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lemaitre. Lemaitre.

[Jana Levin]

Lemaitre.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Belgian priest. Right. Who really put the math behind Einstein's equations? Did he by then have Hubble's expanding universe? He must have, I think so.

[Jana Levin]

Friedman and lemaitre and some of these, Robertson and Walker. There were a bunch of cosmologists that were thinking about this long before actually Hubble and Einstein thought they were wrong. So Einstein publishes his theory, but he doesn't know that there's a big Bang. It's not like it just hits you in the face. You got to study the mechanics of the theory. And so people jumped in even before he did, and they realized, oh, this is really strange. If you imagine a universe dominated by matter, they didn't even know about dark matter, but just stuff. It actually wants to expand. It's actually hard. That universe doesn't want to just stay static. It's actually really, really hard to make it static. So they.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I guess what I'm thinking is they're imagining an expanding Universe before they even anything about galaxies.

[Jana Levin]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're just thinking about stars in the night sky.

[Jana Levin]

They were just imagining. Yeah, they were just imagining like a hot stuff everywhere, you know, just pretend. It was kind of pretend.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So without galaxies, we have no knowledge of an origin of the universe. And we'd be dumb, stupid. Yeah. So, yeah, we have to do astronomy now.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, because one day we're going back to that same state. Yes, but only because those galaxies won't be observable at all. Right. At all. So it'll be. Somebody will be like, son, believe it or not, there was a time where people looked up in the sky. There was a time and they. And they thought that they saw things, son. Oh, grandpa Chuck, tell me more. When you were a child, believe it or not, son, they used to look up there and see things. But no longer.

[Jana Levin]

It's true. Basically, most of the evidence that we had a big bang in our past will eventually just fade away.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Jana, before we take a break and then get to our actual cosmic queries with people's questions, I lose sleep at night wondering whether we today live in a time where an entire chapter of data has been removed from our awareness. Just as it will be in the day when there are no galaxies.

[Jana Levin]

Indeed.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I mean, in a post apocalyptic civilization, they will know nothing of Chuck's stories about the day gone by. And they will try to figure out the universe with what they've got. So what chapters are we missing today? Thinking we have full access to all the data, yet we don't.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's funny. Cause I lose sleep because I normally drink vodka before bedtime.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We've got different reasons for losing sleep. Okay.

[Jana Levin]

We should have little shots for our. Like if you get the cosmic query wrong. So, you know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Janet, you don't worry about whether we're missing something?

[Jana Levin]

I totally do. But I think this is a really interesting question because people say things like, if there's no way to observe the multiverse, then it's not a scientific question. I think that's false. For instance, in the far future, if people say there's no way to observe other galaxies, and I don't know why, and one person pontificates, maybe it's because the universe was expanding so rapidly that they're now beyond our view. They'd be right. But it's technically untestable for them. So I do think it's a scientific question, even if you can't resolve it observationally. So, yeah, there are things like if the universe has extra spatial dimensions. And right now they're really small and we're really big. Maybe that's something we can't test right now, but maybe in the far, far past, it was technically testable.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, so, Chuck, she's saying one day a new dimension is gonna grow out the side of your body?

[Chuck Nice]

That's what she's saying. Oh, believe me, since the pandemic, that has already happened.

[Jana Levin]

Mercifully, we're all, like, filmed from here up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck has six legs at five. We got to take a quick break. When we come back, Jana, you're here for us. We're going to take questions from our Patreon members when Star Talk returns.

[Dr. Horton Announcer]

Now is your time to get into a new Dr. Horton home by taking advantage of its national red tag sales event going on right now through Sunday, May 3rd. Stop by any of its participating communities and find select red tag homes at incredible pricing. So whether you're buying your first home or looking for an upgrade, you don't want to miss the red tag sales event going on right now. Discover the Dr. Horton difference. Tap your screen now or visit Dr. Horton.com Dr. Horton, America's builder and equal housing opportunity builder.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Walmart Express Delivery Announcer]

Walmart Express Delivery can get what you need delivered in as fast as an hour, whether it's baby formula, when you're down to the last scoop, pet food before the bowl runs empty, batteries for a dead remote or a last minute gift. It is handled. Try Walmart Express Delivery today and get free delivery with promo code Express Promotion valid for First Express delivery order $50 minimum, subject to availability restrictions apply.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm Brian Futterman and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. This is a celebration of the release of the second StarTalk book called Cosmic Queries, inspired by this spinoff of our show, one of our more popular formats of the StarTalk A portfolio. And Chuck, I got you here for this. Of course. That's right and we're doing chapters three, four, and five, and I got their titles written here. How did the universe get to be this Way? How old is the universe? What's the universe made of? And, Chuck, you've been collecting questions. Let me just lead off. Jana. I've heard people say the universe is designed just for us, okay? Just so that we can have life. But that seems really inefficient if life as we care about it. Human life has been around only for a couple hundred thousand years, and the universe has been around for 14 billion. That just seems really inefficient. So if you want to say, you know, everything's set up for us, that's a pretty big waste of time and space.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. Especially if we're just here to make plastics for a little while, and then we're going to go on and leave the plastic behind, you know, the plastic will survive us. Yeah, it's like a George Carlin skit. He's like, the planet just wanted us to make plastic for it and then be gone.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. Because there's no known thing that dissolves plastic, right?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, Right. Not yet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Chuck, give me some questions, dude.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, here we go. Let's all from Patreon. Everybody's from Patreon. And this is Richie Damani. Richie Damani says firstly, Jan. Neil, Chuck, thanks for taking my question. So we know about the LHC at cern, which has made huge discoveries in particle physics. But do you have any knowledge of a larger project that it is in consideration that will further our knowledge of the quantum world?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Janna, is there another particle that people think is out there? And now we need something bigger than the Large Hadronic Collider to find it.

[Jana Levin]

Well, dark matter. So the Large Hadron Collider's been very successful. It's very exciting. It discovered the Higgs particle, which explains why anything has mass.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Did you say Hicks particle or Higgs particle? I thought you said the Hicks particle.

[Chuck Nice]

The Higgs particle is a little different. The Higgs particle explains why you eat possum.

[Jana Levin]

Very culturally insensitive.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, exactly. Just the Higgs particle is just like, I believe I'm on a quantum level. Y' all

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

barbecue that possum.

[Jana Levin]

Well, so, you know, it's called the God particle in, like, sort of colloquially, but it was originally called the goddamn particle by Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize winner. He wanted to write, called his book the Goddamn particle because they hadn't found it yet. And his publisher made him change it to the God particle, which he said ended up alienating two groups, those that believed in God and those that didn't. So it's a great. Stuck. It's stuck. Yeah. So. But the LHC could have detected dark matter, and that would have been really, like. That would have just been what everybody had mostly hoped for, and it hasn't. So could we go higher energy and higher energy? If you think of the energy of the Large Hadron Collider, it's from a very early era in the universe's history, and you'd expect to be able to make kind of everything. The earlier back you go, the more you can make more kinds of particles you can make.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I never thought of it that way. You're telling me the LHC is a kitchen? Yeah, it's a cosmic kitchen. And so if you. Whatever energy you hit, you just look on your cosmic scale and say, I got you back to two seconds in the Big Bang.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then higher energy. I got you back to 1 1/2 seconds.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So where. What. How much more energy you're gonna need to get to the formation of dark matter in the early universe?

[Jana Levin]

Like 10 million times higher.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay, Chuck, that's all. That's all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we got that. We got this. Not a problem.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

And so that's really high.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

1.22 gigawatts of it.

[Jana Levin]

That's what we need now, like, here's what's going on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

121 gigawatts.

[Chuck Nice]

And we're going back in time, too, so.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. So in the recipe book that Neil's looking at, that tells you, if I cook at this temperature, I'm gonna have this number of particles that's just based on as much as we understand and as much as we understand between the energy of the Large Hadron Collider and very, you know, the earliest second of the big micro, Tiniest little fraction of a second. The Big bang is, like 10 million higher in energy, but it doesn't mean we're right. So there could be, like, a bunch of stuff that starts to appear that we had no idea about, and that's what everybody. Other stuff, like, not just, like, dark matter might appear in there, you know, and other stuff might. And maybe dark matter isn't alone. Maybe there's, like, a whole dark sector, a whole dark reality, and we start to discover tons of dark matter particles and forces. Dark forces.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Jenna, I love this. You're saying a more powerful collider could just open up a whole new door to what's going on in the universe?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cooking with particles oh, dear.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Jana Levin]

Now, we do know that we can't. We will never hit certain scales with usual technology. Like, you would have to have all the resources in the solar system and a particle collider the size of the solar system. So that's why we do astronomy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You need 1.21 gigawatts of power.

[Jana Levin]

I think that's the benefit of astronomy, is that stuff happens at higher energy scales than human beings can engineer. And so we know we have high energy particles hitting our atmosphere from supernova explosions or solar systems that are at higher energies than the Hadron Collider.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So the universe is a better hadron collider than our Large Hadron Collider.

[Jana Levin]

That's right. It just requires, you know, it's harder. You can't manipulate it. You can't force it.

[Chuck Nice]

You just have to wait. You have to wait until it makes it right. Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Part of it bites you in the ass. It's like, okay, I guess you exist.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

It's basically like being an actor. Don't call us, we'll call you.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly. Just gotta wait for it to roll up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so that's good. I like that. But I wanna emphasize a point you made before we go to the next question. What you're saying is, in our life experience, if something lasts three minutes or five seconds or one second, that's not very much time. And who cares about the difference? But in the early universe, there are things that lasted a trillionth of a second and then a quadrillionth of a second. And we say, oh, that's just less than a second. But each of those are huge differences in the energetics of the early universe. Is that a fair way to think about it?

[Jana Levin]

Absolutely. I mean, there's stuff that can be created in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second that very quickly decay away into other stuff and will never be made again. Because the energy scale required to create a single particle with that mass, even though the mass itself is objectively not a lot compared to, you know, a coffee cup, it's a lot for one particle. And it will never be made again, probably in the history of the universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So anything that was born in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second and dies on a trillionth of a second later lived for a trillion of its own lifetimes.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, that was a full life, right, Man. That was its life expectancy.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, look at that.

[Jana Levin]

Okay, so we do think, like, you could make. In fact, it's possible that one of the heaviest single particles that ever could be made is a microscopic black hole. And that it was made not by dead stars, not by collapsing matter, but it was made as like a quantum particle in the very early universe. And that it was the weight of like a little pile of flour, but it was incredibly smaller than a nucleus. So it's very dense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So dense to be a black hole. It's black hole dense.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly. It's very spatially tiny, but heavy for its incredibly small size. Spatial size.

[Chuck Nice]

And if I lost my keys into a microscopic black hole, don't reach in

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

to pull them out, because that ain't gonna work. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Could I get them back? Don't do that, Chuck.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'll get you another pair of keys. Another set of keys.

[Jana Levin]

That's chapter three in Black Hole Survival Guide.

[Chuck Nice]

Sweet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you know what this reminds me of, Janna? I forgot which book. Forgive me, but the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, one of his novels, he says, this is the last sentence ever spoken by humankind. It was one scientist speaking to the other and says, let's try it the other way. That's the end of all civilization.

[Jana Levin]

Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let's see if we can make a mini black hole. Last word ever spoken.

[Jana Levin]

Well, so there was some just discussion, serious discussion about whether or not the Large Hadron Collider could make one of these.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A mini black hole.

[Jana Levin]

A mini black hole. And we usually think, no, you really couldn't until you were at the much, much, much higher energy. But it does turn out that the universe does have extra spatial dimensions, and they're of a certain size. You could actually manipulate the strength of gravity. If you think about it, gravity dilutes. When you have more dimensions, like more volume, it gets more dilute. So. So if these dimensions, you start to notice it brings the scale of making black holes down in energy. Because gravity's getting. It's getting into your range because of these extra dimensions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, so what you're saying is if you have extra dimensions, then the gravity has more space to dilute into. Yeah, but that means that your thresholds of gravity, bad stuff, is lower, is lower.

[Jana Levin]

So you might make a black hole at the Large Hadron Collider. If that's the case. And so there were injunctions taken out by people to try to stop the Large Hadron Collider from turning on. Because there was this anxiety. Well, if you're going to make a black hole, it's going to, like, digest, you know, it's going to consume the Earth and the.

[Chuck Nice]

It'll kill us all.

[Jana Levin]

But the argument, which might not be very soothing because it is theoretical, is that they would evaporate too quickly. They would just go off like firecrackers.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you're saying you would possibly make them and they would consume the Earth. Except that Hawking radiation protects us.

[Jana Levin]

That's right. And we. Look. Black holes are not as dangerous as people portray. There's a black hole in the center of our galaxy. We orbit that black hole. It dominates the entire behavior of the galaxy. And doesn't. It's not a vacuum cleaner. Right. You have Chuck.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck says the person who wrote the book, Black Hole Survival Guy.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No one writes a book.

[Jana Levin]

If you want to survive, just stay here. Basically, no one writes the book.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Puppy Survival Guide. No. You write survival guide with stuff that's going to eat you.

[Jana Levin]

Okay, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That's funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is the Kitten Survival Guide. No, no. Black Hole Survival Guide.

[Jana Levin]

Explorer's Peril. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, we got to take a quick break. When we come back, more cosmic queries when Star Trek returns.

[Dr. Horton Announcer]

Now is your time to get into a new Dr. Horton home by taking advantage of its national red tag sales event going on right now through Sunday, May 3rd. Stop by any of its participating communities and find select red tag homes at incredible pricing. So whether you're buying your first home or looking for an upgrade, you don't want to miss the red tag sales event going on right now. Discover the Dr. Horton difference. Tap your screen now or visit Dr. Horton.com Dr. Horton, America's builder and equal housing opportunity builder.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Walmart Express Delivery Announcer]

Walmart Express Delivery can get what you need delivered in as fast as an hour. Whether it's baby formula when you're down to the last scoop, pet food before the bowl runs empty, batteries for a dead remote or a last minute gift. It is handled. Try Walmart Express Delivery today and get free delivery with promo code Express Promotion valid for first express delivery order $50 minimum, subject to availability restrictions apply.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Query. We are celebrating the release of the second StarTalk book, Cosmic Queries. Inspired by this format, by the way. We're gonna have different guests for the different kinds of chapters that are in the book. And right now we've got some very deep questions about what's the universe made of? And how did the universe get to be this way? Jana Levin, always good to have you.

[Jana Levin]

Always good to have you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A good friend of the show, and thank you. And by the way, that place behind you, it looks like a bunker, but it looks like a chill place to never be found. So where are you right now?

[Jana Levin]

So I am also director of sciences at a cultural center in Brooklyn called Pioneer Works, which is largely originated in the arts. And I've been doing science events here and bringing science into the community. It's very much an attraction that is

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

just so Brooklyn cool. You know, I'm jealous.

[Jana Levin]

I have to say what I love about this place. It's free and it's open to all, and it's a donation only model. And we really bring, like, amazing people here to talk about science, to talk about art, to have exhibitions. And it's really important to us that the doors are open for everybody, and

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

the intersection between science and art is much greater than anyone ever thinks about or imagines. And you're there in the middle of that, so keep up the good work. All right, so, Chuck, give me some questions for our cosmologist in the house.

[Chuck Nice]

Here we go. Toby sonnenberg says, hey, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Levin, sometimes physicists say that the existence of a particle such as the axion is predicted by. By a theory or completes a theory. What do they mean by this?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ooh, good question.

[Jana Levin]

Well, that's okay. So let's. You know what the best example of that is, is the Higgs, which we already mentioned. So we looked at the standard model of all the matter in the universe, and there was just, like, one thing missing, because there was. We couldn't make sense of why particles had masses, essentially, unless the Higgs was proposed. So what the Higgs does, it's basically, again, it permeates.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Higgs was a person. Peter Higgs was a person. Okay?

[Jana Levin]

The theory and the idea of the Higgs particle was that there was this field that permeated all of space, kind of like what we think about dark energy. So some people wondered if dark energy itself was like the Higgs permeating all of space. But the. The numbers didn't quite work out. But it could be something like that dark energy. It could be something like this field that permeates all space. And as we move through this field, because of our interactions with the Higgs, it creates a kind of inertia. We get sticky, we get gluey. It's like viscous moving through it. And that's what gives us mass. Right. Mass means I'm harder to push around than a thimble, but I'm less hard to push around than a car. There's inertia. And this difficulty pushing around has to do with our interaction through the field was the idea.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So the Higgs particle was filling a gap. So that's different from discovering a particle that nobody ordered.

[Jana Levin]

That's true. So, like Robby said, it's a great quote, the physicist Robby said, who ordered that when he began to discover more particles. So the Higgs was predicted to fill a gap, which was exactly what the question was about. And lo and behold, there it was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This can make all you all very proud of yourselves, right? Because it means you understand not only the physics that we've discovered, but the physics awaiting to be discovered. That gives you pretty good confidence there.

[Jana Levin]

That's the best. Although I have to say, everyone really hoped that something like the Large Hadron Collider would discover something we had never predicted. What people don't understand about physicists, we don't want to wrap it all up in a bow and be done. We want more. And so it would have been incredibly exciting if they had discovered something that nobody had ordered. A lot of questions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We look forward to being steeped in ignorance.

[Jana Levin]

Yes, we look forward to the questions. The questions are the fun part. In fact, Robbie, who you're quoting, his mother used to say to him, did you ask a good question today?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, ooh, I like that.

[Jana Levin]

Not, did you learn something?

[Chuck Nice]

Basically, you guys are just never satisfied is what you really say.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's right.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. It's a weird job. Like, the more questions you answer, you're getting yourself out of work.

[Chuck Nice]

Sweet, Sweet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You want job security? All right, there it goes. All right. All right, let's keep it going. Let's do a lead in up to a lightning round. So let's do a little faster, and then we'll pick up the pace and see how far we can get.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, that's a perfect segue into John Swabach's question, because John says this. Hi, Jana. Please tell me, what is string theory in two sentences?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, he wants it in two sentences.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go. He's right on time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, go for it.

[Jana Levin]

String theory is actually so compelling because it can be summarized in two sentences. When we look at the microscopic universe, we used to think we saw little fundamental particles. It's possible that if we zoom in on those fundamental particles, all of which are different, there's a lot of them, quarks and electrons, that when we zoom in, we realize that they're each tiny loops of string, the same kind of string, and they're playing different harmonics on the string to express as a different particle. So an electron is simply ringing at a different note than a quark, but they are fundamentally the same. That was more than two sentences. But it was fast.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That was good.

[Chuck Nice]

That was good. Listen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That was good. So you're saying everything in the universe could be made up of strings?

[Jana Levin]

That's right. Even light photons? Even the Higgs. Everything would be.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How about dark matter?

[Jana Levin]

All of them would be the same fundamental string playing different notes.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow. So the string could be playing notes that we can't detect, such as dark matter, dark energy.

[Jana Levin]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That we can't see.

[Jana Levin]

Right. So we think of particles as just their identity in terms of whether they interact in certain ways. And so all of those features, it's like a short list of numbers, are harmonics on the string.

[Chuck Nice]

So the universe is nothing more than one big version of Name that Tune.

[Jana Levin]

And this is the one we're in. We're in this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're stuck in this one.

[Jana Levin]

We got this one going.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, give me another one. Yeah. Short answer, Janet.

[Chuck Nice]

That's so funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Best short answer ever.

[Chuck Nice]

If somebody else is able to observe us, but we can't observe them, could you imagine? They'd be like, God, what a shitty song. All right, so this is Woody. Woody says, is a quantum vacuum possible in intergalactic space or anywhere else? And would an area of absolute nothing be a hole in space time? So if you can actually get to nothing. Did you punch a hole in space time?

[Jana Levin]

Well, there's a lot of stuff going on there, but the quantum aspect is the most important to some extent. You can never have a quantum completely vacuum nothing. You can't have a complete quantum vacuum. And that's because if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, you know, I can't ever really precisely state that a particle is there or not there, it means I can't say nothing exists because I have the same uncertainty. There's an uncertainty for things to exist.

[Chuck Nice]

Listen, let me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, wait. No, that'd be easy on Chuck. No, not be easy on Chuck. Chuck had a hard night last night.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You laying this on him now?

[Chuck Nice]

I drank last night. You should Let me know. Dang.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. So you know, to say there's nothing means you have zero uncertainty that there's nothing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Jana Levin]

You cannot have that at the quantum level, it doesn't exist. There is no, it's not just that there's a problem with the human knowledge. There is no meaning to saying it's exactly, precisely empty.

[Chuck Nice]

So you're saying that nothing can't exist is basically what you're saying. There can't be. There can't be a nothing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that there can't be a nothing.

[Jana Levin]

Nothing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You cannot be sure that there's nothing.

[Jana Levin]

Well, there's nothing isn't quite as empty as you might imagine.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, right. Exactly.

[Jana Levin]

The most nothing. Nothing is something might be. So this is why people talk about the dark energy as being the energy of the vacuum. The most nothing you might be able to get is this kind of frothy quantum things, a cloud of possibilities. And that has an energy associated with it. And you can calculate the energy associated with it. And so far we keep getting the number wrong. If I look at quantum mechanics as I understand it, and I calculate the energy of the vacuum, I either get zero or I get something absolutely enormous. What I don't get is dark energy. So you could say dark energy is not mysterious. What's mysterious is why it's so low, why it's either not zero or huge. And that's what the real mystery is. How do we make the energy of the vacuum tuned just to where what we observe. And nobody knows how to do that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, I cry foul here. So what you are taking as a given that everything you're describing is happening in the space time that we've come to know and love. But back to the person's question. If you did find a place where the quantum laws don't apply, have you opened up a rip in the very fabric of space time where possibly other rules of quantum behavior apply? Well or no rules at all?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. I would say that to do such violence as to have a hole in space time. So you have to think of space time as being formed, responding flexibly to matter and energy. And so you can't make a hole without having tremendous other phenomenon going on. It just. We know what the solution would be. It would be nice, smooth, empty space time. So you make a hole by doing something like a black hole, like doing some real intense violence with energy and matter to create that hole. So I would say maybe closer answer to our listener's question is that it Might be quite the other way around. That quantum mechanics creates space time. And that is a new idea that's been kind of people have been flirting with maybe for decades. But that it's not that you have these two separate things. Gravity, space time, quantum. It's that things like a black hole emerge from the quantum phenomena and not the other way around. So you don't even have space time unless you have quantum mechanics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I get it. So you can't even pose the question what happens if there's no.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can't separate the existence of space time from the quantum phenomena that operate within it.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Created it in the first place.

[Jana Levin]

So one way to think of it is like embroidery. So embroidery, like let's say you're embroidering something. Each thread is like a quantum phenomena and from far away it might look like a black hole, but on closer inspection, you realize it's a bunch of intertangled quantum threads. Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, that's cool. That's a really cool concept.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm just saying, I can't wait to go to a party with a bunch of theoretical physics and do whatever drugs they are doing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We'll sign up Chuck. Exactly. Okay, Fast lightning round, let's do it.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, here we go. My name is pronounced Frederick. If the universe with everything expands, does that mean that quarks grow too? Or is it just the space between them?

[Jana Levin]

Very good question.

[Chuck Nice]

Very good question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lightning round, go.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, here I am in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. Famous reference to Annie Hall. So locally I'm bound to the Earth. I'm not expanding with the expansion of the universe because locally the Earth is more important to me. Also, my atoms are bound together by different forces and they're stronger than the expansion rate of the universe. Presently, I'm not being torn apart. If that's maintained in the future, remains to be understood. It might be that the expansion gets faster and faster and eventually, indeed, Brooklyn begins to expand. And that's just something we don't know about the fate of the universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And in fact, the final chapter of the Cosmic Queries book takes you there. The great Rip, the runaway, where not only does everything get ripped apart from everything else, the very structure of particle matter itself breaks apart. It can't even hold itself together. That scared me. I lost sleep that night.

[Chuck Nice]

It doesn't scare me. I've been in that position many times in my life. Well, I just can't hold myself together.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can't hold yourself together?

[Chuck Nice]

Just can't hold myself together.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, we're actually out of time. But I want to get one more question in here. Here.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, Jana. Hey, Neil. I love you both. Big fan for a long time and thank you both for instilling me with a cosmic perspective. In our universe, we observe virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Could this phenomena be compared to that of a 3D object passing through a 2D flatland?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[Jana Levin]

It's very interesting. Well, it is possible. So I said string theory, but I only had two sentences, which I already overused. But it is possible that there aren't just strings, but there are membranes, higher dimensional circles, surfaces. And so imagine we started with particles, points, and then we went to strings, one dimensional objects. Now maybe there's like a membrane, a two dimensional object, and maybe there's higher dimensional objects as high as you can fit in the higher dimensional space time. So one of the ideas is imagine we live on like a three dimensional membrane, and when we see a point particle, it's really the endpoint of a string stuck to our membrane. It's not exactly the question asked, but it's related.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But it is at the intersection of dimensions.

[Chuck Nice]

That's so cool though. Yeah.

[Jana Levin]

So that I see a point particle moving around in my spacetime because I can't see that it's really connected by a string to somewhere else. And also imagine how that allows for what would appear as an illusion to be faster than light travel. Because I could have this thing that's actually connected and it's doing something synced up, but that's because it's fundamentally connected.

[Chuck Nice]

And I don't realize that's amazing. So it's like having the point of a pencil down on the paper. And the point is what I'm seeing on the paper, but then there's a whole pencil connected to that point.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

That's some freaky, freaky stuff, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Freaky Friday stuff.

[Jana Levin]

When we calculate the energy of the vacuum and try to find the dark energy, we have to calculate all of these kinds of objects that might be in the universe and what they're contributing in their quantum energy to the vacuum.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Damn. We gotta close it there. I'm not gonna sleep for three days. Janet, thanks for showing us your digs. Pioneer works. And Chuck. You tweet at Chuck. Nice comic.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Always good to find you there.

[Chuck Nice]

Thank you, sir, for saying it. I just love that Jana has pioneer works.

[Jana Levin]

You thank.

[Chuck Nice]

It's like. And Jen, we see your pioneer works, your swan song accomplishment to science. And Chuck tweets. You tweet, right?

[Jana Levin]

What do you mean?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're on Twitter? You're on Twitter. Chuck's on Twitter. Okay, fine.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, snap.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so we just encourage you to check out Cosmic Queries, the second startalk book. National Geographic Press. I'm Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and of course I bid you keep looking up.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Anyways, only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty.

[Liberty Mutual Bird Companion]

Liberty, Liberty.

[Walmart Express Delivery Announcer]

Walmart Express Delivery can get what you need delivered in as fast as an hour. Whether it's baby formula, when you're down to the last scoop, pet food before the bowl runs empty, batteries for a dead remote or a last minute gift, it is handled. Try Walmart Express Delivery today and get free delivery with promo code. Express Promotion valid for First Express delivery order $50 minimum, subject to availability restrictions apply.