Quantum Quandary: StarTalk Live! With Brian Greene & Janna Levin

Summary

StarTalk Radio Episode Summary: "Quantum Quandary: StarTalk Live! With Brian Greene & Janna Levin"

Release Date: June 3, 2025

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson

---

Introduction: Celebrating a Century of Quantum Physics

Neil deGrasse Tyson kicks off the episode by welcoming listeners to a special live event at the Beacon Theater in New York City. The occasion commemorates the centennial of quantum physics discovery and significant advancements in cosmology during the 1920s, such as the realization that the Milky Way is not the sole galaxy in the universe and the discovery of the universe's expansion. Joining him are renowned cosmologists Brian Greene and Janna Levin, along with comedian Hasan Minhaj, who adds a touch of humor to the scientific discourse.

Exploring Higher Dimensions

00:00 - 03:00

Tyson opens the discussion by highlighting ongoing research into extra spatial dimensions, a collaboration between Brian Greene and Janna Levin. Greene explains, “Brian and I have been working together for years. Mostly we've been thinking about extra spatial dimensions and different cosmological implications...” (01:11). The conversation humorously touches on the complexity and speculative nature of higher dimensions, with Chuck Nice interjecting lightheartedly about “magic numbers” and “gender,” which Greene and Levin clarify are grounded in deep mathematical theories rather than arbitrary concepts.

The 1920s Cosmological Debate: Curtis vs. Shapley

03:01 - 07:35

Tyson delves into the historical debate of the 1920s between astronomers Heber D. Curtis and Harlow Shapley regarding the nature of spiral nebulae. Curtis proposed that these nebulae were other galaxies ("island universes"), a concept introduced by philosopher Immanuel Kant, while Shapley argued they were part of the Milky Way based on observed motions. Hasan Minhaj humorously relates this to contemporary debates, emphasizing that scientific progress often involves refining or overturning previous theories based on new evidence.

Edwin Hubble and the Expanding Universe

07:35 - 16:16

The panel discusses Edwin Hubble's pivotal role in establishing the universe's expansion through the use of Cepheid variables as standard candles. Greene mentions, “Cepheid variables have a very predictable property where their luminosity is related to a sort of oscillation...” (12:15). Tyson narrates Hubble’s discovery that galaxies are receding from us, with more distant galaxies moving away faster, leading to the formulation of Hubble's Law. The conversation highlights initial miscalculations due to different types of Cepheid variables and the subsequent refinement of the Hubble constant, illustrating the evolving nature of scientific understanding.

Einstein's General Relativity and the Cosmological Constant

16:16 - 24:38

Janna Levin explains Georges Lemaitre's application of Einstein's equations to the entire universe, predicting its expansion—a concept Einstein initially resisted due to his belief in a static universe. Tyson quotes Einstein dismissively, “your physics is abominable” (22:37), reflecting the tension between established theories and emerging evidence. The discussion transitions to how these foundational ideas led to the Big Bang theory, coining the term "Big Bang" somewhat derisively by Fred Hoyle, who favored the steady-state theory.

The Hubble Tension: Resolving Discrepancies in the Universe's Age

24:38 - 38:04

As the conversation moves to present-day issues, Brian Greene and Janna Levin discuss the ongoing "Hubble tension"—the discrepancy between measurements of the Hubble constant from the early universe (cosmic microwave background) and the local universe (Cepheid variables and supernovae). Tyson notes, “when the Hubble telescope was launched... the number landed where you expected it to land” (36:52), but today's measurements are within a 5% difference without overlapping uncertainties, deepening the scientific puzzle. Levin emphasizes the importance of precision and accumulation of evidence, stating, “the truth is, we don't care [about the exact number], but we need to have a consistent description...” (36:27).

Quantum Physics vs. General Relativity: The Incompatibility

38:04 - 48:57

Transitioning to the intersection of quantum physics and cosmology, the panel addresses the fundamental incompatibility between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity. Levin explains, “when you try to simply put the equations together, you get one answer out from almost any calculation, which is infinity...” (41:06). This reveals the need for a unified theory, as quantum effects are crucial at the Planck scale (10^-33 centimeters) where space-time itself may be quantized. Greene adds, “string theory actually requires extra dimensions for it to make sense...” (68:07), suggesting that theories like string theory might bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and gravity.

Quantum Mechanics Fundamentals: Wave-Particle Duality and the Uncertainty Principle

48:57 - 64:50

The discussion delves into key quantum mechanics concepts:

• Wave-Particle Duality: De Broglie’s proposal that particles like electrons exhibit wave-like properties. Greene explains, “they have some concrete existence... Schrodinger starts to say... the particle itself in some sense isn't real anymore...” (55:13).

• Quantum Tunneling: Tyson illustrates with the sun's energy production, where quantum tunneling allows protons to overcome electrostatic repulsion at lower temperatures than classical physics would predict.

• Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: Levin articulates how it challenges traditional notions of reality by stating, “you can't specify the location and the speed simultaneously of any object” (60:24).

The Many-Worlds Hypothesis and Observational Mysteries

64:50 - 69:45

Levin and Greene explore interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Many-Worlds Hypothesis, which posits that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements become real in separate, branching universes. Chuck Nice humorously relates this to pop culture, emphasizing the conceptual leap required to accept such theories. Levin underscores that while mathematical frameworks predict scenarios like multiple universes, empirical verification remains elusive.

String Theory and Extra Dimensions: A Path Forward

69:45 - 77:52

Brian Greene introduces string theory as a potential solution, explaining that it posits fundamental particles as one-dimensional strings rather than point-like objects. String theory necessitates additional spatial dimensions, which could potentially explain phenomena like dark energy and dark matter by suggesting they are manifestations of these hidden dimensions. Tyson reinforces the significance of extra dimensions in unifying quantum mechanics with gravitational theory, stating, “these could be manifestations of these higher order phenomena in the universe” (69:45).

The Importance of Scientific Research and a Cosmic Perspective

77:52 - 78:23

In his closing remarks, Tyson emphasizes the indispensable role of scientific research in advancing civilization. He reflects on how fundamental discoveries in the 1920s laid the groundwork for modern technology, such as the IT revolution, and deepened our understanding of the universe's origins and our place within it. Tyson passionately argues against the notion of cutting scientific research, highlighting that every major technological advancement has roots in basic scientific inquiry.

Conclusion: Embracing the Unknown and the Future of Science

78:23 - End

The episode wraps up with Tyson urging listeners to maintain a “cosmic perspective” and continue supporting scientific endeavors. The panelists, alongside comedic interludes from Hasan Minhaj and Chuck Nice, reinforce the message that embracing and funding scientific research is crucial for future discoveries and the continued advancement of human knowledge.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Brian Greene: “Cepheid variables have a very predictable property where their luminosity is related to a sort of oscillation...” (12:15)

• Janna Levin: “We don't care the exact number, but we need to have a consistent description so that we have evidence that we know what we're doing.” (36:27)

• Jana Levin: “Quantum mechanics tells us that the things that you thought you could know are not the things that you can know.” (62:25)

• Neil deGrasse Tyson: “There is nothing more short-sighted in this world than anybody running up and saying we should do less science...” (39:40)

• Brian Greene: “String theory actually requires extra dimensions for it to make sense...” (68:07)

---

This episode of StarTalk Radio masterfully intertwines deep scientific discussions with humor and historical context, making complex topics like quantum physics and cosmology accessible and engaging for a broad audience. Listeners gain insights into the evolution of our understanding of the universe, the ongoing challenges in unifying fundamental theories, and the profound impact of scientific research on modern society.

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Coming up on StarTalk, we have StarTalk Live at the Beacon Theater, New York City. We're celebrating the hundredth anniversary decade of the discovery of quantum physics. Not Only that, the 1920s was when we discovered that the Milky Way galaxy was not alone in the universe and that the universe itself was expanding. So we brought out the big guns for that one. We've got Jana Levin and Brian Greene, two cosmologists with whom you are most familiar, and a very special comedic guest, Hasan Minhaj. So join me and Chuck. Nice. As we host that evening coming up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right. Right now. So before we begin, I just want. I didn't know this until today that the two of you are actually current collaborators on some research. Could you just highlight what that is? What are you doing?

[Brian Greene]

I mean, Brian and I have been working together for years. Mostly we've been thinking about extra spatial dimensions and different cosmological implications. Implications for theoretical physics, you know, hiding some dark energy and some extra dimensions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

As one does.

[Brian Greene]

As one does. Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're thinking about higher dimensions.

[Brian Greene]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because the three plus time dimensions are not enough for you.

[Brian Greene]

Well, you know, even Einstein, when he started working, wondered why three. I mean, it's a curious question once you start.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, it's a magic number.

[Brian Greene]

Yeah. Is it your favorite number?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait.

[Chuck Nice]

Those are Schoolhouse Rock people right there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They count to three it right away. Okay, but how many dimensions are there really?

[Jana Levin]

We don't know. But certain theories tell us that it could be much more than the ones that meet the eye. So it could be as many as 10 or 11.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, like gender. I said it. And now I'm getting arrested.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, but to just make up other dimensions. It sounds like you're pulling it out of your ass.

[Brian Greene]

I mean, sorry.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, it's all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You didn't deny that immediately. That was worried about this.

[Jana Levin]

Okay, partly it is, but it is also deep mathematical reasons that lead us to these ideas.

[Brian Greene]

Yeah. And, you know, we figure if nature can try some experiments, she will. So every possibility might actually happen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Brian Greene]

So we're just exploring.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

How much weed do you guys smoke?

[Brian Greene]

All right, so complete silence.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The microscope and telescope were invented 400 years ago. And like I said, they take us to the grandest visions of our understanding of our place in the universe. And the tiniest visions that also give us an understanding of our place in the universe. And so those first steps were magnified at the dawn of the 20th century. Especially through the 1920s. And so let's start out with the large, and we'll end with the small. Okay, so let's go back to the Roaring twenties. Let's just do that. And here's something that. It's hard to even believe that just 105 years ago, we didn't know if there were other galaxies. We just thought all the stars in the night sky, the Milky Way, was the entire universe. We weren't given reason to think anything else. There were these fuzzy things in the sky. Okay. They're just fuzzy. We call them nebulae, which is Latin for fuzz. Yes, thank you. So.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So we just thought it was just space lint.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, sure. But some fuzz lint face. Now you mess nebulae. Some nebulae. Nebulae were spiral shaped and others were irregular. And the irregular ones were found in the plane of the galaxy, whereas the spiral ones were in every direction.

[Chuck Nice]

You looked interesting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that was. Oh, it was the first thing. Well, maybe we can unpack this and figure out what's going on. So there was a famous debate took place in 1920, hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, between Heber D. Curtis.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, unfortunate name.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He had that name. And Harlow Shapley, soon to become the director of the Harvard College Observatory, and Heber Curtis was director of the Allegheny Observatory. Two very different.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I'm gonna say one of those sounds more expensive.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so they debated whether these spiral things were other galaxies with a term coined by Immanuel kant in the 1700s. Who thought about this philosopher?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, Chuck, Brian has did it to me, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm sorry, what did Brian do to you?

[Chuck Nice]

Because he knows I can't hear the name Immanuel Kant without being 12 years old. I'm so sorry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so he's a philosopher. Deep thinking philosopher. He looked up and he saw these spiral objects and he thought of them as possible island universes.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's pretty cool. An island universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's beautiful.

[Chuck Nice]

That is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But we didn't have evidence to say that to support it. But it was a deep idea at the time. So there they are. They debated this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But based on what evidence? Just hot taken.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're scientists.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. All right. Which means sometimes we have rose colored glasses towards the past.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I get it, I get it. So here's how it works. Two scientists argue there's a pact implicitly signed before they even begin, which is either you're right and she's wrong, you're right and he's wrong, or you're both wrong. They Know this going into the conversation.

[Chuck Nice]

It's nerd Thunderdome. So two scientists enter, two scientists leave, but one's alone. Little embarrassed.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Pay per view Saturday night. Yeah, so, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So here's what this is their Tyson, Jake, Paul. Real kind of throw down.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let's go to the Harvard fellow.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much. Whoa.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, got it. So they were insufferable back then as well. Got it. Were they also, like, I went to school in Boston. Fuck you. Just say it. Just say it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So say it. You know, I don't know.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so back to the. Here's what happened.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Let's merge.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Shapley was heavily invested in the entire night sky being part of the. Being the whole universe and the Milky Way. And he had evidence at the time from a fellow astronomer who had looked at the spiral nebulae and claimed that he found them having moved on the sky. Now, if you're really, really far away, that's essentially impossible to measure. But if you're close up and you're moving, you can see that movement. Okay. Things that are close to you. The example here is if I see a plane moving across the sky, and then I see a bird moving at the same angle, I don't conclude that the bird is going 600 miles an hour. The bird is much closer. So at much lower speeds, I can see it cross my field of view. So because it's closer, that evidence suggested that the spiral nebulae were nearby. And he bet on that horse, but it was the wrong horse. Poor Scott. He was doing what a good scientist will do. He took the data, put his confidence in the data. It was later shown that the data he was basing his argument on was false. It could not be verified by the work of other scientists. In fact, no. The spiral nebulae had no motion across the sky. And so Shapley was just wrong. Later, we would later show that he's wrong. And what puts the nail in the coffin. 1923, Edwin Hubble. Oh, the man Hubble was a person before he was a telescope. Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I thought he was born a telescope.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Born a telescope.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Just like when you're a kid, you're like, of course there's Ninja Turtles and they were birthed.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, there it is. There it is. So he had an idea based on evidence, and it turned out to be wrong because the evidence was flawed. So there's some lessons there. All right. If one scientist has one bit of evidence, you don't alert the authorities. Yet until there's confirming other experiments to do.

[Chuck Nice]

So that is what the peer review is all about.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's peer review is all about.

[Chuck Nice]

And by the way, for anybody who wants to know, scientists are haters, okay? That is what they do. You come up with something and somebody goes, I call bullshit. And then it's on.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it?

[Chuck Nice]

Then it's just on.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wait, wait. So, Neil. So, Neil, peer review to us non scientists is basically it's scientific group chat where you present your take or information and the 17 other friends that are in the group chat get to be like, bullshit, bullshit.

[Chuck Nice]

And Sapley had a green bubble in the chat.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, God damn. God damn. What a horrible. What a horrible life to live. He was the one green. He was the one green surrounded by blues.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And if you have an idea and it's. And it's shown to be wrong, then it's just wrong. In fact, Einstein, after his relativity, which we'll get into in a couple of minutes, that was hard to accept by people, right? It was, you know, huge. Yeah, it was. It was hard. It was very counterintuitive. Someone came up with a work saying 100 against Einstein. 100 against Einstein. And then he's rumored to say what after that?

[Brian Greene]

Well, see, I just learned this anecdote, but he's rumored to have said, why 100? If I'm wrong, one would have been enough.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Brian Greene]

Yeah, it's pretty great.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And believe me, I've been married for 27 years. That is right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so here's what happened. So Edwin Hubble is curious about these spiral nebulae. And he finds a star in them that matches a kind of star that's not in a nebulae, that's just sort of nearer by than that star. And it's a very specific kind of variable star named after the very first of its kind. Cepheid variable. The first of its kind was found in the constellation Cepheus. And so that's how we categorize types of variable stars. The first one in a constellation. All the others, no matter where you find them, are that variety. Found a Cepheid variable there. And what was. Tell us what's special about the Cepheid variables?

[Brian Greene]

Well, they have a very predictable property where their luminosity, how bright they shine, is related to a sort of oscillation. And so you can tell that you're looking at precisely one of those. It's very easily identifiable if you get.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The luminosity out of it, then you can say, I can see the Period vary based on that period. I know how bright it should be.

[Brian Greene]

How bright it should be. So it's as though you knew your light bulb, right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Brian Greene]

You can tell if you have a very bright light bulb far away or a very dim light bulb up close.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. How can you distinguish the two?

[Brian Greene]

And how do you distinguish the two if you know nothing about the light bulb? But if you know everything about your light bulb, you know exactly what it is, then you can say, oh, I know this light bulb, so I know exactly how far away.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So he says, this star is of this particular luminosity, and the only way it could be that dim is if it is far outside our galaxy.

[Brian Greene]

I just recently saw the actual plate, and it's really stunning. He crosses out the photographic plate. Yes, the photographic plate where he makes this detection. He wrote Nov, I think, for. For Nova. Originally, he thought it was a different kind of object. And then he crosses it out and writes var as exclamation point for a variable star.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a fantastic.

[Brian Greene]

So it's a real epiphany that he realizes he knows what he's seen, and right at that moment, he understands it's far away.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So Immanuel Kahn turned out to be right. These were, in fact, island universes. And Hubble wrote to Shapley on this, and I had to look this one up. Shapley, what's the quote here? He said, here is the letter that destroyed my universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm Kais from Bangladesh, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Jana Levin]

It's important to know what he actually meant by that, because Hubble himself never was convinced that these were actually other galaxies. He proved that there was something beyond the outskirts of our galaxy. We knew our galaxy about 100,000 light years across. His analysis showed this to be 900,000 light years. We now updated to 2 million light years. But Hubble was so conservative that he was unwilling to then say, this is an island universe. This is a galaxy in its own right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What an idiot.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wait, what's the difference? Just from a space real estate standpoint, what's the difference between an island universe and. And a galaxy? What are we talking?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're poetically identical.

[Chuck Nice]

They're the same.

[Hasan Minhaj]

They're the same.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Poetically identical.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because if our galaxy is our universe and there's another galaxy, then you get to call that a universe. Except once we see the full breadth of it all, we got to reallocate how we use the word universe, because it's uni. Verse one in one verse.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right. But we're in the multiverse, Spider Man. We're in the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We'll get to that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get to that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Minus the spider Man. But.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You didn't like the second one. I thought it was great.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Jana, we're reeling from the fact that we are not the universe. We're just a part of a universe. And then a few years later, Hubble discovers that these spiral nebulae are in motion, body and soul. So what's going on there?

[Brian Greene]

Yeah. So once he's starting to be able to use these Cepheid variables and these standard candles to get a strong sense of how far away things are, he can start to do that, kind of mapping out the local environment, what we have right nearby, and then also galaxies further away, these little smudges on the sky. And he begins to catalog not only that there are other galaxies around us at great distances, but they also seem to be receding away from us, largely, predominantly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And so he makes a plot.

[Brian Greene]

Makes a plot. So this is very strange. I mean, you're looking at all of these enormous galaxies. So a galaxy is a collection of hundreds of billions of stars, and they're pretty localized, and maybe they're spirals and blobs, and they're very far away, and they're also moving away from us in every direction, which is very peculiar. So he makes this plot. It's completely freaky, but it gets freakier because the further away they are, the faster they're expanding away from us.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And they're calculating this all without computers. Well, hundreds of billions of dollars.

[Brian Greene]

Well, people were called computers back then.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. If you look at old dictionaries. Look at the word computer. A person who makes computers.

[Brian Greene]

The person who computes. Yeah. So wait.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And there's a room full of.

[Brian Greene]

And. Yes, but they're doing it without the machines.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's a room full of computers at Harvard at the time.

[Brian Greene]

Yes. So he actually uses the work of one of the Harvard computers, which was a woman named Henrietta Leavitt, and she was part of a group of women who worked at the Harvard Observatory that were called Pickering.

[Chuck Nice]

And she talked like this.

[Brian Greene]

Well, they were called Pickering's Harem because Charles Pickering, at one point, was so frustrated with his mail computers that he fired them all. And he said, my maid could do a better job. And he hired his maid, who was Wilhelmina Fleming, and she did a great job, and she hired all these other women and One of whom was Henrietta Levitt, and she made 30 cents an hour. Go ahead, applaud the.

[Chuck Nice]

Are we applauding her or her pay?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That was weird.

[Hasan Minhaj]

30 cents an hour.

[Chuck Nice]

She should be making iPhones.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so I said it.

[Chuck Nice]

I said it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so. But mixed in here, we've got simultaneous things going on. Einstein's general theory of relativity is already at the races. Okay, so that came in. In 1915. 15. Okay. That gave us a mechanism to understand what the whole universe could be doing. Just catch us up on that.

[Jana Levin]

Well, Einstein writes down his equations in 1915, and initially, he applies them to things like the motion of the earth around the sun and terrestrial and nearby motion, local things. But then some other very creative thinkers. One in particular was a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaitre. He decides to apply the mathematics not to something in the universe, but to the entirety of the universe and find from the equations that the universe should be expanding over time. It should be slow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But just to be clear, he was able to do that not based on his training as a priest. He was a priest physicist.

[Jana Levin]

He was a priest physicist. But no doubt his interest in applying these ideas to the entirety of the universe was not distinct from his focus on the big questions of existence. So they weren't that separate. Although he, in his own mind, was very clear. He said, there are two ways to have deep insight about the world. There's mathematics and there's salvation. And he said, let me follow both. And that's what he did.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But not intermingled.

[Jana Levin]

He was very clear not to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There was a line in the sand between the two.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, so what. So lemaitre.

[Jana Levin]

I'll let you guys figure out the pronunciation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So he takes the equations. We have an expanding universe. But he. So Lemaitre.

[Jana Levin]

Before. Before Hubble.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lemaitre predicts an expanding universe using Einstein's equations.

[Jana Levin]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So Einstein could have made the prediction, and he didn't.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. In fact, in 1917, Einstein actually got there first, and when he applied the equations to the entirety of space, was very disturbed that he couldn't get a universe that met his own philosophical prejudice, which was that the universe is fixed, eternal, static, and unchanging.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why would anybody think the universe could be anything other than other than that?

[Jana Levin]

Well, I mean, there is this book called Genesis, which seems to suggest a beginning.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Jana Levin]

So there are some people who think perhaps that that vision is not correct. But Einstein and many others at the time very firmly believed that the universe could not change on the largest of scales.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that's just a philosophical bias.

[Jana Levin]

Totally. And in fact, he changes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. How could he get away with that? If all the galaxies have gravity, and if they all feel each other's gravity, they would all collapse down into one point.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, so this is an argument that Isaac Newton actually gave hundreds of years earlier. But if the universe is infinitely big, and if the galaxies are spread across an infinity of space, then there is no center for them to collapse toward. So you can envision a static universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now, if it's infinite.

[Jana Levin]

If it's infinite.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If and only infinite.

[Jana Levin]

But even more than that, Einstein then, in his own general relativity, recognized basically the issue that you're raising in a finite universe. And he said, let me introduce a repulsive push to counter the attractive pull of gravity, anti gravity, an anti gravity force field called the cosmological constant. So he introduces this into the math in 1917. It was not in the 1915 equation. He introduces it just to have a static universe that will allow him to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Breathe easy and to fulfill his philosophical bias. Then the mantra says, we can have an expanding universe. And so how did Einstein react to that?

[Jana Levin]

Einstein learns of this from Lemaitre in 1927. And he says to Lemaitre, your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, them fighting words.

[Jana Levin]

Wait, by which he was saying, you can't trust that every mathematical calculation tells you something real about reality. Some math should be in math textbooks. And it's interesting, but it's nothing more than a mathematical curiosity. And he says, lemaitre, your idea of an expanding universe, that's a mathematical curiosity. It's not real.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so then, 1929, Hubble discovers an expanding universe. Now what? What happens next?

[Brian Greene]

Well, so it's interesting because the way I originally described it is kind of confusing. You might think it makes it seem like we're at the center of this expansion and everything's receding away from us. But the way the Hubble law is, specifically, it's much more like the space between every galaxy is actually stretching. So from their point of view, if you were on one of those other galaxies, it would also look like you're.

[Chuck Nice]

Moving away from them.

[Brian Greene]

Right. Everything's receding away from. And if you imagine that it's not the galaxies literally moving on spacetime, but actually the distance between the galaxies that's stretching, then something further away is actually moving away from you faster. There's more space stretching. And this was really closer to Lemaitre's description. Not even closer. It simply Wasn't static.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So just so I'm clear, at that time, they believe there's only one galaxy in approximately 1925. Just so I'm following. I feel like I'm in a. Chris Nolan.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Watching tenet. Let me just. Let's pause real quick.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no. Up until.

[Hasan Minhaj]

One galaxy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

One galaxy. It was.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're the main character.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It was one universe. One universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Copy. Yes, here we are 20, 25, from what I understand.

[Brian Greene]

Yes. Now there's.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How many. How many universes are we in now?

[Chuck Nice]

But are you talking island universes or are you talking universe? Universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm talking about the whole.

[Jana Levin]

Oh, good God. There's one universe that we know about filled with 100 billion galaxies, each of which has on the order of 100 billion stars. There are theoretical ideas that Neil suggests we might get to tomorrow that speak to the possibility there might be other universes. So the answer is, we don't know for sure, but the data seems to suggest that there's one universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, we were talking about this backstage. If the delta is that big between those two numbers, which is one, and you just basically said a gajillion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do we know that what we're living in right now, the data that we know right now isn't going to be wildly off, and 50 years from now or 100 years from now, they'll be like, look at those dumb dumbs in 2024.

[Jana Levin]

We hope that that's what will happen.

[Brian Greene]

That's what we live for.

[Jana Levin]

We live to be wrong, Stupid.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We live to be wrong.

[Chuck Nice]

We're scientists.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, got it.

[Jana Levin]

We live to be wrong.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so let's follow through this reasoning. We discover an expanding universe. If we're expanding, that means we're bigger today than we were yesterday and bigger yesterday than we were the day before. So logically, where does that take us?

[Brian Greene]

Bigger.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, no.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Going back in time.

[Brian Greene]

Oh, I'm sorry. So, yeah, so if you're already disturbed about the lack of permanence to the universe, then this very quickly leads you to have even greater existential dread. Because if you run the movie backwards, then everything was once closer together. And if you keep running the movie backwards, it gets to a point which seems quite catastrophic, where these galaxies are literally on top of each other. And eventually you're kind of imagining something that's so dense that you have to start thinking of it as hot and soupy and chaotic. And then what.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What did lemaitre call this?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, so Lemaitre basically said, look, if the math is saying that the universe is expanding today, and if then Hubble's that the universe is expanding today, just wind the cosmic film in reverse, you run the film backwards and things get closer and closer together. And there suggests that there's a point in the distant past when everything was on top of everything else. And he calls this the primeval atom. This is the beginning, according to his description.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And I happen to know there was an astronomer active at the time, brilliant guy named Fred Hoyle, who was not into a universe that would be changing.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He knew the universe was expanding. He couldn't reason that away.

[Brian Greene]

He accepted that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, he accepted that. But if you're expanding but you're always the same, that must mean matter is being spontaneously created in the void to create new galaxies. So that statistically the universe always looks the same.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, but here's the thing. If the universe is expanding, that in itself is a change. So why would you not accept a changing universe?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because he wanted to always look the same for all of time, for all eternity, in the past and in the future. Again, it's a philosophical bias, but I.

[Brian Greene]

Think the idea of a beginning was particularly disturbing. The idea. So this primeval atom that lemaitre's disturbing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To scientists, but not for religious people, where God made the universe, they're perfectly happy with the beginning.

[Jana Levin]

Look, Pope Pius xii, perhaps the nerdiest pope in history, who loves science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait. Why do you know this?

[Jana Levin]

I don't know. He took lemaitre's work and he said, there is the scientific evidence for Genesis. That's what he said. And when lemaitre heard this, he threw a fit.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Belgian priest Lemaitre, the Pope is talking to him?

[Jana Levin]

Not directly, but yes. When he catches wind that this is what the Pope is saying. And one of his students who was in the class that lemaitre had to teach that afternoon after learning, said that lemaitre, who normally is very quiet, mild mannered, he came in and ranted for 45 minutes because his whole point was, I am not blending my religious life and my scientific life. And here the Pope is taking my scientific work and he's turning into religion.

[Chuck Nice]

But notice he said all that to a student and not the Pope.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You don't want to know the Galileo situation.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So I have a tamer version of that quote. It's. As far as I see, such a theory of the primeval atom remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, that's after I had a Couple drinks and chilled.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So then it got called the Big Bang by Fred Hoyle. By Fred Hoyle.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Jana Levin]

So Fred Hoyle was in a 1948 BBC radio interview.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why do you know this level of tale about this?

[Jana Levin]

And so he is describing his own approach, which, as you mentioned, is a steady state approach where matter is created spontaneously and fills in the gaps in space. And so they ask him about this other approach, not his. And he says, oh, that theory in which all matter must be created in one big bang. And that's where the idea of Big Bang theory comes from. Now, people have interpreted that as a derogatory description. His own way of recounting the story is he was simply trying to draw a distinction between a theory in which, in his steady state, only a little bit of matter is created here and there across space versus this other theory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like one hydrogen atom per century per cubic light year. I mean, there's some small rate, not quite that small.

[Jana Levin]

So it is one atom per century per Olympic size swimming pool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay. I think it was bigger than that.

[Jana Levin]

And that's all that you need. And so it's kind of an amazing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In the whole universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jana Levin]

Because what's more believable, that one little atom forms in cubic, you know, in a swimming pool size arena of space per century, or that there's this moment where everything is created all at once. Framing it that way, his theory sounds perhaps a little bit more believable.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Less. Less crazy. Yeah, yeah. So what do we have to assume if there is a Big Bang? So we got to assume that the expansion has been uniform the whole time.

[Brian Greene]

Not necessarily.

[Jana Levin]

No, it doesn't have to be uniform.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, it can change over time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, that's been always expanding.

[Jana Levin]

It's always expanding.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Brian Greene]

And unless there's extra dimensions, those might.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so it could expand differently in a hole.

[Brian Greene]

Brian and I had to talk about this later. Well, yeah, you can squeeze the other dimensions. There could have been chaotic mixing of the expansion and contraction. But overall, the overall volume of the universe was expanding.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But the way you get this is looking at the rate at which the universe is expanding.

[Jana Levin]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that is a slope on a graph. And Hubble first derived that, and there's a slope, and he called it the letter C, which is for constant. But since then, we swapped that out with a capital H for Hubble and we call it the Hubble constant. Very famous Hubble constant.

[Brian Greene]

So it's constant over space. I mean.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Brian Greene]

It's important to realize over time, it's.

[Jana Levin]

Really, The Hubble parameter, we should call it, because it does change in time.

[Brian Greene]

It could have been faster in the early universe, faster in the future.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so Hubble, he had the wrong turned out. The Cepheid variable he used. He didn't know at the time there were two varieties of Cepheid variables. The one that's near us and the one that you can see from far dist. Far away. And he presumed they were the same. No reason to think otherwise. So he got the wrong distance, the wrong expansion rate of the universe.

[Chuck Nice]

So Cepheus is like diabetes is type one and type two.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. There's a type one and type two. Exactly. I think.

[Brian Greene]

Maybe not exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, there's literally type one Cepheid and type two Cepheid. And you got to use apples and apples when you're doing this exercise. So he got an age of the universe of 2 billion years. We would later refine these numbers. When I was in graduate school many moons ago, the uncertainty in the Hubble constant was a factor of two. There was a 10. So with the Hubble constant, you run the film backwards, ask how much time at this expansion rate. Looking backwards, when do we get to time zero?

[Chuck Nice]

That makes sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Just when is everybody in the same place at the same time? Same time. That's a perfectly sensible question. And we got two numbers. There are two camps. A 10 billion year camp and a 20 billion year camp. A whole factor of two. And everyone is, you know, fighting for their. And we know they both can't be right. And so we need better data. One of the goals.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wait, isn't being off by 10 billion quite a bit? That's a lot. But again, and I only took Physics 1 in undergrad. I did not advance. I don't want the smoke. But I heard saying being off by 10 billion is a lot. Here's the thing, like if you go out to dinner and we split it and I'm off by that, like that big of a Delta. If I'm 50. If I'm. Yeah. If I'm 100% off.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Aren't you like you lose your science little thing?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No. So you know what I mean?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Like you've been disbarred.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, here's the thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But you know, you just get to talk your shit.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here's the thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You are off by 10 billion. You get to talk your shit still.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here's the thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Like my dad in the living room when he's giving his opinions about politics, he just gets to run his mouth Continuously.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I got this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Go ahead. This is me, and this is a me and my dad thing, but I'm just a little mad that a capital S scientist was this off. Okay, go ahead. And I have a second question, but go ahead.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The universe is vast, yes, in time and in space, sure. It is vast in every metric we've ever established for it. There are things that are vast in size, in temperature, in speed, in gravity. And so if I'm off by a factor of two, between 10 billion and 20 billion, yeah. I could have been off by a factor of 10, by a factor of 1000, by a factor of a million. We were quite happy. We were in the same sandbox having that conversation.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's kind of like being Jeff Bezos, you know, if I'm off by 10 billion, eh, not so bad.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So can I also ask you the second philosophical question? Which is. Which is. No, no, no. This is. This is for real. When you were like, it's either 10 billion or 20 billion. And I was asking you this backstage, which was, if. When the number is that big, is it almost like the United States is debt, where they're like, the Deficit is at 28 trillion, and you're like, what does it even matter now? Yeah, but it's at a gajillion manilion. Like, what does it matter? Why does the number. Because I feel like a freshman in college.

[Chuck Nice]

It's going to matter an awful lot.

[Brian Greene]

I would. I would say that actually 10 billion is actually quite good. 10 to 20 is very much in the ballpark.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You should run the Federal Reserve.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You should.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brian Greene]

At this stage, you know, this is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

A good way to think about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You could have been off by a trillion.

[Brian Greene]

Well, but the future is going to be much, much longer than the past. So it's not as though the universe kind of will expire within another 10 billion years. Like we're confined to this number. The future could be just a huge number. We could be living in a time where it's not 10 billion.

[Jana Levin]

But can I give you perhaps one. These are all very, very good answers, but perhaps one other way of looking at it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're saying it was a bad question. It's a bad question. Your great answer is bad question.

[Jana Levin]

We don't care whether it's 10 billion or 20 billion. The number doesn't matter. What does matter is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's the most American answer, by the way. That's the most American answer here.

[Jana Levin]

The truth is, we don't care. But we want our theories to work. We want our theories to make predictions that match with observations. That's the only thing that matters to us. The actual answer that comes out, whether it's 10 billion or 50 billion or 42, like you're saying, it just doesn't matter. But we need to have a consistent description so that we have evidence that we know what we're doing. Because evidence matters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And both sides could not be right.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so when the Hubble telescope was launched. Okay, I'm just getting out of graduate school. It is launched. The number one goal set for that telescope was to resolve that discrepancy. The telescope's named after the guy who gave us the Hubble constant in the first place. Within two or three years, we nailed it. And the Hubble constant, its value would give us an age of the universe at about 14 billion years, which is comfortably between those two extremes. And that's science working at its best. It was. There's a limit to how much we can keep beating each other over the head. Let, let's get more data. Let's build a telescope that'll solve this.

[Jana Levin]

And in fact, today there is a similar argument happening. It's not between 20 billion and 10 billion, which as you say, is a factor of 2 or 100% difference. Now we're down to the 5% difference. We understand things that well, that we have two groups that are 5% apart describing a number of years, billions of years into the past. And that's the precision with which we can do it within 5% and we.

[Chuck Nice]

Will kill each other.

[Jana Levin]

So again, we don't care the exact number. We care that we can describe it with that level of precision. When we're talking about events that happened billions of years ago, that's the mind bending.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And here's the issue, when it was 10 and 20 billion, you always have to report your uncertainties for a number in science. And those uncertainties had a little bit of overlap in the middle and it landed where you expected it to land. Now that we have two other warring factions on the value of the Hubble constant, those two numbers are within 5% of each other. But the uncertainties are tight. So the uncertainties don't overlap. And if you look at go Google search on Hubble tension, and that's what will come up.

[Brian Greene]

Adam Reese is coming to Pioneer Works in October. I just planted an ad. Tell me too, Adam Rees, who's the Nobel Prize, one of the Nobel Prize winners who discovered that the universe is not just expanding, the expansion's getting ever faster, it's accelerating. Who is part of this Hubble tension debate will be speaking at PioneerX on the Hubble 10 commercial. I dropped a commercial.

[Chuck Nice]

Without waxing philosophical, I just don't want to miss this point that we're not actually saying, which is what makes science so incredibly great, is exactly what you all just demonstrated. It is this pursuit of the truth based upon the best available information at the time. So it's okay if it's wrong, because when it's right, we're gonna get there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, you got it. All right, so we're turning the clock back and we get to the big bang. But now the universe, large scale universe described by general relativity, is now small. It is so small, you extend the equations. Go back. The universe is the size of an atom. Does quantum physics apply to the entire universe or only to atoms? Where are you on that, both of you?

[Brian Greene]

Well, at this point, we feel we have to invoke quantum mechanics to understand what was happening in the big bang. The energy scales are so dramatic and that we're really probing quantum physics, high energies. You're really looking, somewhat surprisingly at small scales. So we are still trying to grapple with what the big bang is telling us about the potential to understand not just general relativity, but a kind of quantum variant of that, if there is such a thing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, so I got general relativity and I got quantum physics. Do they make nice in the sandbox?

[Jana Levin]

It's a deep and difficult question and one that I and many others have spent their lives trying to answer. And we do not fully had the answer yet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me restate that.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That you and others have spent your lives failing to answer.

[Jana Levin]

Yes, okay, I agree.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But I think established to this guy.

[Jana Levin]

Okay, you hear that? Ah, take that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, you got a fan over here? All right, go.

[Jana Levin]

No, it's exactly the case. So when you take Einstein's equations of the general theory of relativity and you try to invoke quantum mechanics within the same calculations, which, as you eloquently noted, you'd have to do if you're talking about the whole universe when it's incredibly small, you need Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's the whole universe after all. But you also need quantum physics because it is so small. And that's the theory that describes the small things. And when you try to simply put the equations together, you get one answer out from almost any calculation, which is infinity. And that might sound. Oh, that's interesting. A big, deep, mystical number. No, it's nonsense. Infinity is nature's way of grabbing us by the lapel and Slapping us around and saying, you're doing something wrong. You've got to figure this out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I've heard another one. That's what I do. Affinity is where God divides by zero.

[Jana Levin]

Yes. Stephen Hawking, yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Oh, Stephen Hawking said that.

[Jana Levin]

Well, at least that's what he's attributed to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, okay, so. But you're saying they don't make nice in the sandbox.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So there's a limit. What's this plank length? What's going on there?

[Brian Greene]

Well, the Planck length is the scale at which.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Named after who?

[Brian Greene]

After Max Planck.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The.

[Chuck Nice]

I love how you say Max.

[Brian Greene]

I don't know, is it. What do you think of my. I say Max Planck, max.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Brian Greene]

Well, 100 years ago in the early discoveries of quantum mechanics, was thinking about whether the universe was discrete or if it really was a continuum. And if I look, for instance, at the air in this room, if I look closer and closer, do I find out it's actually made of individual molecules moving around and is not actually continuum. And same with water. Was thinking about these things.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So in other words, water is not infinitely divisible. You get to a molecule at some.

[Brian Greene]

Point, eventually you get to an individual quanta, a little particulate, a discrete bundle. And in thinking about this, there was sort of a fundamental scale that. That we would say is when we can definitely no longer think in a way where we're ignoring this quantum scale where we're forced, as Brian's describing, beyond that, we're definitely going to strike an infinity. But by the Planck length, we're in trouble. We really should be trying to understand the theory of gravity at a quantum level. Maybe that means that space time is coming and little individual bundles. I don't even know how to think about that. I'm just thinking about correlations between little tiny spaces.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Space time is coming.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, that was a wild sentence.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that was very Game of Thrones.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Space time is coming.

[Brian Greene]

Well, I mean, if it came from the Big bang, I mean, was it the moment that space and time was in fact created? And are we thinking about things of a continuum of space time itself?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Brian, how big is that smallest unit?

[Jana Levin]

The Planck length is 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. And again, I know the question will be, well, you know, how do you think about something that's so small? What does it matter? 10 to minus 3, 33 or 10 to the minus 31? And again, we don't care about the exact value, but that's where the mathematics takes us. And just to get a feel for that, if you were to take an atom and all the. Take a tree. Take a tree and expand it to be the size of the observable universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A tree.

[Jana Levin]

Yes. Then the Planck scale that 10 to the -33 centimeters would expand roughly to the size of an atom. So the Planck scale is to an atom as a tree is to the universe. That's how tiny the distance we're talking.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

About here and why I'm going to channel this.

[Chuck Nice]

You measure this with a ruler? What do you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I know. I'm going to channel. Can I channel you right now?

[Hasan Minhaj]

You can channel me. I'm not going to even pretend like I understand what's happening. I'm going to be 100% honest. There's like 3,500 people here. And I'm like, don't act like you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Know I'm going to channel you lost.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Me at space time is coming. And by the way, you came in quite hot, Brian. And you're like, I know what you're thinking, and that's not what I was thinking. I was thinking, I think it's really incredible. Let's just have a quick little tangent here. I think it's really incredible. It is almost 9pm and this many people went on Ticketmaster.com paid fees. You way back there in the. Up there? Yes, way up there. Yeah. You guys paid tickets to learn about space nebulae. It was very heartening. So that's what I was thinking about, Brian, actually. Like, you know when people say this country's going to shit and math and science is at an all time low? I'm like, you know what? It's. It's the math and science lovers theater on a. You know, of all things you could be doing at 9pm Just so.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I'm channeling Hassan here. Sure. What? Why? Do you have any confidence at all that you know what's happening on a scale that small?

[Jana Levin]

We don't.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh. Okay. That's the end. Thank you. Oh, Chuck, come back. Thank you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You guys, we don't know anything. We could be off by a whole lot. Good night. Take care. Thank you, Beacon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So. So let me see if I can unpack this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We're going to figure it out right now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, sure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is it true that every prediction we've ever made with quantum physics, when we've been able to test it, has come true?

[Jana Levin]

Absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, well, is it true that general relativity, we already know what its boundaries are because there are calculations you cannot make because of this infinity problem?

[Jana Levin]

Absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Therefore, if one of those is Going to succumb to the other. It sounds like Einstein has to.

[Chuck Nice]

He's going to have to bow down to the quantum.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He's going to have to. That's what's happening. Bend the knee to the quantum.

[Chuck Nice]

He's going to bend the knee to the quantum.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So either quantum will absorb Einstein or there's a higher level understanding that'll absorb them both.

[Brian Greene]

I would say it's. That's true. But also, quantum isn't in competition. We have theories of matter, for instance, nuclear forces that we understand they can be quantized. Theory of electromagnetism can be quantized. So there are laws of physics. And quantum mechanics is a regime in which we're understanding the highest energy attributes of those laws of physics. Now, gravity, Einstein's general relativity is replace the theory of gravity with this theory of space time, this theory of geometry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Replace Newton's theory of gravity.

[Brian Greene]

Replaces Newton's theory of gravity. But it is one of those forces. It should sit with the matter forces and have a classical regime, meaning a regime in which we don't have to worry about quantum mechanics. Things look smooth, we understand. General relativity works beautifully.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Regime sounds very political.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It does, it does.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Dictator, totally does. It sounds very, very ussr.

[Brian Greene]

It sounds very, unfortunately, everywhere.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, got it. Okay.

[Brian Greene]

But then when we go to the early universe, like the big bang or in the course of black holes, where things start to get very extreme, we want to be able to quantize that law of.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

As we have quantized other things, we're.

[Brian Greene]

Going to replace gravity. Exactly. It's not going to replace gravity. We want to quantize gravity. And that seemed like a perfectly reasonable request.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so Einstein's equations are not quantized.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They require continuum.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So how do you quantize gravity? Good.

[Jana Levin]

So Jan is describing the history is very insightful and useful. So we had an equation for electricity and magnetism that came from Maxwell. We were able to blend that with quantum mechanics, giving us quantum electrodynamics. It works. We had equations describing the strong and weak nuclear forces. We were able to embed quantum mechanics into those theories. Works wonderfully well when we try to play exactly the same game with Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, and try to put quantum mechanics in there to quantize it. It just doesn't work. So what does that mean?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, it means you're not smart enough to.

[Jana Levin]

Well, it's an interesting. It could be that we're not smart enough. And I'm full well willing to take that as the ultimate answer, but there's A lot of evidence. If you allow me to come right up till today for just a moment, I know you wanted to go, this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is the centennial, but go on.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. So there is evidence today that Einstein's general relativity, the reason why you can't quantize it, the reason why you can't put quantum mechanics into it. It already seems to have quantum mechanics embedded in a deep and subtle way that Einstein himself didn't recognize.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, please. Do tell. Because my edible just kicked in.

[Jana Levin]

And this is fascinating.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, what you're saying right now is revolutionary. Because what you're saying is you can't put something into something if it's already there.

[Jana Levin]

That's it.

[Chuck Nice]

We just don't know where it is inside of that thing. But once we find it in there, we're gonna be like, yo, that's where it is. And be like, I told you not to put it in there. It was already in there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Amazing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck just blew a gasket. We got a.

[Chuck Nice]

No, that is like. That's like.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's simple.

[Chuck Nice]

It's elegant, it's profound. It's amazing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I agree. All right, so let me. Let's back up back to the Roaring twenties. And I just want to go down the list of completely freaky things that quantum physics prescribed that defied anybody's common sense, which is why it's still freaky. In fact. What's that quote from? Was it Feynman about quantum physics? What did he say?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, there are a few. But if you think about quantum mechanics without getting dizzy, you haven't understood a single single thing about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

And I understand it very well.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So 1923, the wave particle duality is proposed.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that's kind of freaky that particles are also waves.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. It was Prince Louis de Broglie, who basically.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He was a prince.

[Jana Levin]

He was a prince. Yeah. And so he said, look, in 1905, Einstein showed us that light, which we had thought of as a wave, actually needs to be described as a particle. So called photoelectric effect. That's how he went 1905. And then in 1923, in his PhD thesis, Louis de Broglie says, let me do the reverse electrons. We always think about them as particles. Maybe they need to be thought of as waves.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Jana Levin]

And that is a key moment in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wasn't his Ph.D. the thesis like that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Was a prince who did that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A prince.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Prince. I don't believe it. I know. Current monarchy. Not that intelligent. Let's be honest. Harry or William, you're not cooking you're not cooking this up. There's too much incest. I mean, you know this. You understand science. For you to be operating at that level. So not buying it. You cheated off someone's paper. Not buying it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So his PhD thesis, if I remember correctly, was like 12 pages long or something? Very short, Very short, yeah. And he got a Nobel prize for his PDF.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And he got a Nobel Prize for.

[Brian Greene]

A 12 page PhD.

[Hasan Minhaj]

A PhD paper.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, let me just say that's the smartest dude ever.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, that's how, that's how, you know he was royalty. He turned in a 12 page, 12.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Page and he took it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

They're like Dr. Prince and he thought, thank you. Double spaced, 12 page PhD paper.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Tighter margin.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You entitled piece of shit.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Couple years later.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Neil, you just. I'm sorry, Neil. I shouldn't have. Shouldn't have spoken ill of the monarchs there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no, I got nothing. This America, we fought a war to get away from monarchs.

[Chuck Nice]

Not for long. Just give it time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so. So then Schrodinger came around. Oh, we have a Schrodinger fan up there.

[Chuck Nice]

That was the cat?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that was the cat.

[Chuck Nice]

That was the cat.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cat. So what does Schrodinger do for us?

[Brian Greene]

Well, Schrodinger begins to think more abstractly about what's real and what's not real. So we're used to thinking of particles you've already described, De Broglie and the electron. We think of these little fundamental particles almost like billiard balls acting out their lives and they have some concrete existence. Schrodinger starts to say, well, this wave particle duality, that's pretty profound. But maybe the only thing that's real is this thing called the wave function, which is the probability for the particle to be in a certain state, to be in a certain location, to be moving with a certain speed. But the particle itself in some sense isn't real anymore. If you look for it sometimes you'll find it in a concrete location. But what is really determined by equations, by the laws of physics, is the wave function, which is this probabilistic description.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And the wave function occupies physical space, doesn't it?

[Brian Greene]

Yeah. The wave function occupies physical space only.

[Jana Levin]

For a single particle. So it's a kind of important subtlety for one particle. You can think about this wave function as filling space. If there are two particles, it lives in six dimensional space. If there are three particles, it's in nine dimensional space. So you really can't think of it in these ordinary terms.

[Chuck Nice]

Ooh, I am high.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, okay. So if the particle can be anywhere here, and I have some barrier here, it could show up on the other side of the barrier.

[Brian Greene]

Right. But it doesn't actually travel through. So let's say your barrier is a concrete wall. There's some small probability that you would find the particle. The wave function would describe the probability of finding the particle in this region of space. But it doesn't actually, like a billiard ball, travel through this.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, this might be the THC talking, but the way you guys are talking, there just might just be one particle. Like, there aren't bunch of particles. It's just one particle.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I told you he blew a gasket.

[Jana Levin]

Well, but Richard Feynman had the idea that maybe there was one particle that circled around through time and cycled back over and over again, giving what appeared to be many particles. But there's only a single particle through this temporal cycle. So you're right on target.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Moving forward and backwards through time.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, okay. All right. So, but what I'm saying is if a particle can show up on the other side of the barrier, then that you guys came up with a word for that. And it's tunneling.

[Jana Levin]

Quantum tunneling.

[Brian Greene]

It can quantum tunnel through the barrier. But that's the point of Schrodinger saying what's real is just this probabilistic likelihood of finding the particle. The particle itself, in some sense, does not have concrete existence anymore. It challenges the whole nature of reality.

[Jana Levin]

But concretely, there is a probability that we could calculate for the likelihood of you tunneling through the stage and being underneath the floor. And it's a non zero probability. It's kind of small, so it's unlikely to happen. But that's what quantum mechanics tells us.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But the smaller I get, the more likely it will happen.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly.

[Brian Greene]

It can happen in the laboratory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Okay, so just for context here. Wow. That is. We were trying to understand how the sun made energy, and we did the calculation. Once we determined the sun is mostly hydrogen and it's hottest in the center, we said it must be undergoing fusion. But you run the math. To undergo fusion, a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, has to merge with another proton, the nucleus of another hydrogen atom. Protons have the same charge electrostatically, like charges repel. So they have to be moving fast enough so that before they have a chance to repel, they stick together and form a new nucleus. Okay. We calculated what temperature that was necessary because high temperatures give you higher speeds. We calculated that temperature, and it was 100 million degrees and There was no way the center of the sun was going to give us 100 million degrees because you can calculate through sensible laws of thermodynamics what that should be. And we were scratching our heads, and then quantum physics comes around. And then you invent this spooky, magical thing called tunneling. And we discover in our calculations that at a mere 10 million degrees. See, this matters. 10 million, 100 million. Sure. At a mere 10 million degrees, they would otherwise not hit. But some of them tunnel through and connect. Tunneling makes the sun's energy production even possible. And I was like. Because it's not just some. Something that particle physicists worry about in their laboratory. I had to worry about it as an astrophysicist.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why are you worried about this? It's okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

The sun's gonna. Sun, you know, Hill, Robbins. Let them. Let the sun. Let the sun do that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Thank you, Neil. Don't, don't blow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's very, very.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, so tunneling. Tell us more. There's a lot tunneling and. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So now what about the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle? That seems like the biggest thing of them all. Talk me through that real fast.

[Jana Levin]

Yeah, I would say so. That's the real moment when the old ways of looking at the world are shown. They have to be jettisoned. Because the old way of looking at the world. What is reality? Reality is stuff that's at a location, moving with a certain speed. That's the way we describe the world. And Heisenberg, with the armature of quantum mechanics, says you can't actually do that. You can't specify the location and the speed simultaneously of any object. You can't do it according to the quantum equation. So the very language of reality that we used to use no longer applies.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why can't you measure both at the same time?

[Jana Levin]

Well, if you have a particle described as a wave, right? And you want that particle to have a definite location, that wave has to be highly spiked so that you can say, ah, almost 100% likelihood it's at this point location. But when you see how the notion of velocity comes into quantum mechanics, it has to do with the wavelength of the wave. And so if you want something to have a definite speed, it has to have a definite wavelength. That's not spiky. So to have definite location, you need spike. To have definite speed, you need wave. Those are different shapes, and you can't.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Have them at the same time.

[Jana Levin]

You can't have them at the Same time.

[Brian Greene]

Can I try analogy? Nowhere near as precise as what Brian just said, but sometimes I like this musical analogy. If you play a chord, which is a whole bunch of notes together, you can play chords, but you can't simultaneously be playing a single note. So the chord is like a superposition of the notes. And how this relates is that when you're in a precise location, what Brian's describing as a sharp spike, you're sort of in a superposition of velocities or momenta. So it's like the location is the note, the velocities are the chords, or vice versa. If I know the velocity exactly and I'm playing chords, I'm no longer playing individual. I can't isolate a single individual note. I'm in a superposition of notes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So how does all this connect to what they call the observer effect, where you. I want to measure the particle right there. I got to look at it. So I shine light on it, and the light sends it somewhere else. So I can't actually ever know what the particle's doing. Right.

[Jana Levin]

And. And so there's two things in there. One is, as you're saying, to look is to interact. And when you interact, say by bouncing a photon off a particle, you affect.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The particle because I need the photon to take the picture that.

[Jana Levin]

That's right. So that's one key point that emerges from these ideas. But the other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we can never know anything.

[Jana Levin]

No, no, no, no.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I don't. That's the crazy. Y' all went on this crazy.

[Brian Greene]

Hello.

[Jana Levin]

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got. That is just not right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Jana Levin]

Quantum mechanics tells us that the things that you thought you could know are not the things that you can know. But with quantum mechanics, we've made predictions of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron to 14 decimal places using a theoretical calculation. And we've measured it, and it agrees decimal by decimal by decimal on all of those numbers. And that's why we love these numbers. They show us that we understand what we're doing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Thank.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Brian just blew a gasket.

[Chuck Nice]

So you can know without knowing, is what you're saying we can know.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Let me just say this, Brian, the type of energy you're bringing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Wait, wait.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I mean, you are built for cnn. This type of panel smoke. Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So this should so be in one of those street fighter squares. The decimal to the decimal to the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, it's great. This is great. This is good stuff. This is good television.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So so go ahead, Neil. So this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This observer fix bring us home with certain.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Has been widely misapplied by people thinking my consciousness is affecting measurement.

[Jana Levin]

Look, there is a big mystery at the heart of quantum mechanics. Even with our capacity to make calculations that agree with observations to the level of precision that I just emphasized, perhaps with unnecessary theatricality, there is a question that we don't know how to answer, which is what you're asking. When you observe, you seem to be able to coax one result, one answer. Even though the quantum description embodies many possibilities, we don't understand how that happens.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is this the many worlds hypothesis?

[Jana Levin]

It's one answer.

[Brian Greene]

But the Schrodinger equation is so beautiful, and it does not actually include in it a way to understand how measurements are made.

[Jana Levin]

Yes, that's the key point.

[Brian Greene]

And so if you really take the Schrodinger equation very seriously, it simply says there are all of these possibilities, and they're all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we don't have a theory of measurement to get us through where we are in the physics.

[Jana Levin]

Just so you know, there are proposals people have put down mathematical equations that do answer this question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What is the many worlds hypothesis?

[Jana Levin]

The many worlds hypothesis is if you have a description of a quantum system, like a particle, and the Quantum wave says 30% chance here, 20% chance here, 50% chance over here. When you measure it, you don't get only one result. There's one of you that finds it over here. There's another one of you that finds it over here. And there's a third one of you that finds it over here. But these are all in different.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, it's Rick and Morty.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you just invented multiple universes to explain something you can't otherwise explain the math?

[Chuck Nice]

Invented it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you, Chuck.

[Jana Levin]

Wait, wait, wait. That's really important. So this guy named Hugh Everett, in 1957 in Princeton, he studies the math. The very equation that Janet made reference to, the Schrodinger equation. He says to himself, let me take the math completely seriously and see where it takes me and the math takes you. When you look at the paper, it's direct to this possibility of there being multiple universes. It's not made up. It really emerges directly from an analysis of the equations, and the equations make predictions that are confirmed. So you say, maybe I should take this math fully seriously. And that's where it takes you.

[Chuck Nice]

So the passion with which Brian is describing this is like me explaining why I have glitter on my face when I come home. Because I was at an arts and craft Fair.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. We're gonna have to land this plane soon. Just briefly. Yeah, I know you spent your career doing this, but just in 30 seconds, explain string theory.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God.

[Hasan Minhaj]

20 seconds. Does life have meaning? Go.

[Jana Levin]

I only need 10. Look, the old picture was that the fundamental constituents of matter were little dot like particles. The string idea is that maybe they're little extended filaments. And why do we introduce this idea? When you introduce this idea, quantum mechanics and general relativity do play well in the sandbox.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So.

[Jana Levin]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

And that was less than 30 seconds.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Whoa. All right. Okay, so what's in the future? So I know astrophysically, we don't know anything about dark matter. We don't think about dark energy. We shouldn't have even named them because we don't know enough about them to even name them.

[Brian Greene]

And they should be called invisible.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Should be called Fred and Wilma with no bias, so. Or faster than light. Time travel. Time travel. Faster than light travel. Before the Big Bang is what you're working on or your peeps, does it address any of this? Will quantum mechanics take us to all the places we need?

[Jana Levin]

Yeah. I mean, there's zero evidence that quantum mechanics has any cracks whatsoever. It's the only theory that we've written down in the history. It's the most successful theory, most successful theory ever. And so we.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It gives you confidence to believe crazy stuff that it predicts.

[Jana Levin]

Exactly. And so we're pressing on. And ultimately, we think putting general relativity and quantum mechanics, either because they're already born together or because they're blended together will be the key to answering these questions. We're not there yet, but that's exactly where we're headed.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And why do you need these extra dimensions?

[Brian Greene]

Well, Brian was describing string theory, which may or may not be true, but string theory actually requires extra dimensions for it to make sense, for the mathematics to allow gravity and matter and quantum mechanics to play nice together. But even without string theory, the idea that there are extra spatial dimensions is just kind of a natural extension when you start to think about space and time and you start to take seriously Einstein's ideas. So now we're in the predicament where maybe those extra dimensions are harboring the dark energy. Maybe there's some explanation for the dark matter having to do with the extra dimensions. So now we can start to think of the extra dimensions as a dark sector that are harboring really the resolutions. Like we're observing them already. We just don't have the direct connection to be certain.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So they're visible in plain sight, Is that what you're saying?

[Brian Greene]

Yeah. I mean, they're not literally visible, but maybe dark energy is a consequence of quantum energies, which is what paper Brian and I wrote many years ago.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Dark energy.

[Brian Greene]

Dark energy, which is driving the universe to expand ever faster, which is something we observe.

[Chuck Nice]

It is also driving my administration.

[Brian Greene]

I've got to land this plane.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Go on, go on.

[Brian Greene]

Oh, well, just that we might be observing through something like dark energy. Indirect evidence of extra dimensions. We can't literally see into them, we can't point to them, we can't move around in them yet, but we are living with the consequences.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So these could be manifestations of these higher order phenomenon in the universe, which.

[Brian Greene]

Is part of the motivation for thinking about them.

[Chuck Nice]

Perfect sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Just wanted to put a button on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That quote from Einstein. In his denial of quantum physics, in spite of him contributing so mightily to the field, you described the probabilistic nature, especially from Schrodinger's equation. And Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe.

[Jana Levin]

And Niels Bohr retorted, einstein, stop telling God what to do.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, you don't know if God needs to make some money real quick. You don't know that with the dice. Yeah, you know, I can see him down. Papa needs a new universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I like how back in the day scientists threw shade at each other very poetically. The way they, you know, kind of shit posted was very. The use of.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, we have good vocabulary to work.

[Hasan Minhaj]

With, great vivid language.

[Chuck Nice]

They still do it the same today.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The way I'm going to land this plane is offer you a cosmic perspective, something that I'm prone to do when we are exposed to this much information. When I think of the 1920s as a scientist, it may be the most consequential decade ever in the history of, of science based on how it influenced our thought, the trajectory of our research, that would follow. But I want to make a slightly different point. Before the 1920s, what are scientists doing? Well, doing sciencey things, right. In a lab, there's a chemical or there's a particle, there's a material.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Erlenmeyer flask.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, flask. Thank you. Yes. You flesh out the picture of your lab. Okay. Suppose it was the 1920s and you had a friend, relative, or you were a politician and you heard that someone is working on the structure of atoms and molecules. You'll say, why does that matter to anyone? I'm a carpenter. I just care that my wood atoms cut or that they can be shined or polished or painted why does that matter to me? I'm making cars in an assembly line. Why does that matter to anybody? You're taking your brilliant intellect and applying it to something that nobody cares about except your cadre of people. But they will tell you, well, it's the foundations of matter. And they'll tell you, I don't care. You're using up national resources to do this. Well, what has happened every time we research the frontier of science, in basically every frontier of science, whatever it looks like when you're doing it, it's easy to say that'll never apply to anything. I don't, why are you doing that? You wait a little while. They're clever engineers, clever other scientists, they see problems in the world and they see a possible solution. Do you realize today there is no creation, storage and retrieval of digital information without an exploitation of the quantum. The IT revolution that is responsible for nearly half the GDP of the world at some level was birthed in that decade at a time when people are just exploring the edge of our understanding of the world. Yeah, it would take 50 years longer than what is typical for an R and D project to show up as a household product. But all I can tell you is if you know anyone who says we're doing too much science, or this science is not relevant to me, or I don't know why you're doing this, that doesn't sound like it makes sense. What you're doing is you're cutting out at the kneecaps, the legs of a future waves of discovery that could transform civilization, not only take us to where we might want to go, but possibly solve problems that we might have created for ourselves. So there is nothing more short sighted in this world than anybody running up and saying we should do less science because every one of us in this room has been touched by it. And there's no greater demonstration of that than the science that unfolded in that decade, the 1920s. That's the quantum side of it in the astrophysics side that births our understanding of the beginning of the universe and how the sun makes us energy. We would then learn how the stars manufacture elements in their core. We would learn, take a few more decades, exploiting the quantum, applying to other realms of science. We would learn that the very ingredients of our bodies, the carbon, the oxygen, the nitrogen, the iron, are traceable to stars that underwent thermonuclear fusion following all the rules of quantum physics. And those stars exploded, scattered that enrichment across the galaxy, creating the environment, the chemical ingredients to make star systems with planets and on some of those planets, life. So that that era not only gave us our it revolution, it gave us an awareness of ourselves that borders on the spiritual. And it's the fact that not only are we alive in this universe because of our ingredients are traceable to stars. The universe is alive within us. And that is a cosmic perspective. This, this has been Star Talk live from the Beekman Theater. This is like our fifth time at the Beacon Theater. Fifth or sixth time. And you guys have been a marvelous audience for us. We love you all. I and oh, no, thank you. But more than loving you all, we love the support you give for science because there is no future of civilization without it. We might as well just move back to the cave. So as always, Neil DeGrasse Tyson here thanking our panel. We've got Chuck Nice, Brian Greene, janet Levin, Hassan. Mr. Not Neil Degrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep. All eight of you knew this. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We'Re gonna do it one more time. Come on. All right, here we go. What's the tagline? Let me just do it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Gilda Grass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist physicist, bidding you to bidding you too. Keep looking up.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Keep looking up.

[Brian Greene]

Here we go.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Remember, it's. He's going to go, he says, and remember those eight people, they cared. You guys all paid money, rusty currency. A real number that we know. Brian, you know exactly how much you paid to those sharks at Ticketmaster them. Now he's going to go, Neil degrass to keep. And you go looking up. Here we go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysical physicist, bidding you all to keep.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Keep looking up.

[Brian Greene]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.