The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull

Summary

StarTalk Radio Episode Summary:
Title: The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Kroll
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: Elise Kroll, Professor of Philosophy
Release Date: June 24, 2025

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Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics

In this engaging episode of StarTalk Radio, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson delves into the intricate relationship between philosophy and physics with esteemed philosopher Elise Kroll. The conversation is co-hosted by comedian Chuck Nice, adding a layer of humor to the deep scientific and philosophical discourse.

Neil deGrasse Tyson opens the discussion by highlighting a new and uncharted topic for the show: the philosophy of physics. He introduces Elise Kroll, a professor specializing in this field, who recently authored the book "The Einstein Paradox: The Debate on Non-Locality and Incompleteness in 1935".

[02:12] Elise Kroll: “The title actually comes from Schrödinger. He had a folder in his archive labeled the Einstein Paradox, which contained correspondence exploring deep philosophical questions about quantum mechanics.”

Historical Context: Newton vs. Einstein

Elise Kroll provides a historical backdrop, tracing the evolution of physics from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein. She explains how, during Newton's time, philosophers often doubled as physicists, seamlessly blending deep philosophical inquiries with scientific explorations.

[05:05] Elise Kroll: “Newton's 'Principia' doesn't even have equations in the first part. It's all about natural philosophy, which was essentially physics at the time.”

The conversation then shifts to Einstein, who, unlike Newton, was trained strictly as a physicist. Elise contrasts this with the modern specialization that often isolates philosophy from the physical sciences.

[07:40] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “So when you reduce your number of fat cells in your body, giving it up to energy, then you're reducing. It's a mass you're cutting from yourself.”

The Evolution of Specialization in Sciences and Philosophy

Elise Kroll discusses how, over time, the field became increasingly specialized, leading to a division where philosophers of science often require training in both philosophy and physics to contribute meaningfully to the scientific discourse.

[12:42] Elise Kroll: “We were able to be like, and you go to a conference in astrophysics nowadays, how many talks do you even are interested in? Like hyper-specialized.”

Chuck Nice humorously adds to this point, questioning the practical intersection of philosophy and physics in today's highly specialized academic landscape.

[09:08] Chuck Nice: “Yeah, I publish a paper, 100 people in the world will understand it or no, how many people in the world will care about it?”

Quantum Physics and Its Philosophical Implications

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the philosophical dilemmas posed by quantum mechanics. Elise Kroll elaborates on the foundational questions that emerged during the inception of quantum theory, highlighting the debates between prominent physicists like Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Bohr.

[22:33] Chuck Nice: “So let me ask you this. Often philosophy is thought of as a belief system.”

Elise emphasizes that philosophy in physics isn't about belief systems but about critical inquiries into the nature of reality, knowledge, and the methodologies underpinning scientific discoveries.

[25:25] Elise Kroll: “We come out of Newton, we go through Einstein, and these are still, they still make sense. Even if they're weird. You can still see why they make sense mathematically.”

Challenges in Quantum Cosmology

The discussion delves into the complexities of integrating quantum mechanics with general relativity—a quest that remains unresolved in modern physics. Elise Kroll points out that many of the interpretational debates in quantum mechanics are still ongoing, with no definitive answers in sight.

[47:33] Chuck Nice: “Yeah. At least what's coming.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson reflects on the persistent mysteries in quantum physics, citing phenomena like quantum entanglement and the instantaneous correlations it implies, which defy classical understanding.

[50:04] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “But some of the questions, I understand you correctly, we went from a quantum state to a macroscopic classical state. And there had to be a transition somewhere in there that allows us to bring these sensibilities together in a coherent understanding.”

The Role of Philosophy in Modern Physics

A recurring theme is the indispensable role that philosophy plays in framing and questioning the assumptions underlying physical theories. Elise Kroll argues that without philosophical inquiry, scientists might overlook foundational questions that could steer theoretical advancements.

[26:18] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Many do. But I can tell you this. To the extent that I can understand myself, I leave all philosophical preconceptions at the door.”

However, Elise counters by asserting that complete neutrality is impossible, as scientists inherently carry personal and philosophical lenses that influence their interpretations and discoveries.

[27:43] Elise Kroll: “You can't do that, though. I said to the extent that I am able, I'm self-aware that I could be constrained by a philosophical thought.”

The debate touches upon the balance between objective scientific inquiry and the subjective influences of personal belief systems.

Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Methodologies

Elise Kroll discusses how different philosophical viewpoints can lead to varying interpretations of the same scientific data. She uses the example of Kepler's attempts to align planetary orbits with Platonic solids, illustrating how philosophical inclinations can shape scientific hypotheses.

[24:40] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “It's simple and brilliant.”

Moreover, the conversation highlights how philosophical methodologies can either hinder or facilitate scientific progress, depending on how they interact with empirical evidence.

Conclusion: Science as an Endless Frontier

As the episode draws to a close, Neil deGrasse Tyson reflects on the nature of scientific exploration, emphasizing that as our knowledge expands, so does our understanding of what remains unknown. This perspective aligns with the idea of science being an "endless frontier," where each discovery opens new avenues for inquiry.

[53:10] Elise Kroll: “Seek and you will find. What's maybe not the case?”

[53:16] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Seek and you may find the answer to the question you have not yet posed.”

Neil concludes by appreciating the profound yet often perplexing questions that arise at the intersection of philosophy and physics, underscoring the importance of maintaining a cosmic perspective in scientific endeavors.

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Notable Quotes

• Elise Kroll on the accessibility of primary scientific literature:

  [03:15] Elise Kroll: “So why can't regular people read this? They sure can. It's just that the primary literature in particular, just reading the way that Einstein and Schrödinger and Heisenberg and Bohr talked to one another.”

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on the separation of philosophy and physics:

  [07:14] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “I'm distinguishing between people who go to school to be a philosopher and then attempt to contribute to the physical sciences, whereas that... you could do that in the day...”

• Elise Kroll on the impact of educational specialization:

  [13:01] Elise Kroll: “So this ties into your early question. It's like something about the extreme specialization has meant that in particular, the way we train physicists in the US even in high school is so divorced from the deep questions about but why, but how.”

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on the balance between knowledge and ignorance:

  [53:17] Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Seek and you may find the answer to the question you have not yet posed.”

• Elise Kroll on the intertwining of philosophy and scientific inquiry:

  [28:00] Elise Kroll: “The point is that you cannot. That you are going to walk in with some interpretive framework. Cannot be eliminated.”

---

Closing Thoughts

This episode of StarTalk Radio offers a compelling exploration of how philosophy underpins and propels the advancements in physics. Through the insightful dialogue between Neil, Chuck, and Elise, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for the nuanced interplay between abstract philosophical questions and tangible scientific discoveries. The discussion not only highlights historical shifts but also underscores the ongoing relevance of philosophical inquiry in tackling the mysteries that continue to challenge the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.

Transcript

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, why is it every time we have a show that goes to the frontier of science, you need an edible?

[Chuck Nice]

Because that is how I cope with science. Some people don't need to cope with science. I need to cope with science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so the frontier of philosophy, quantum physics, and physics coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck it, baby.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, what's happening to you?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Love it. When I look over and I see you there.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, you know the Felix Mutual.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, thank you.

[Chuck Nice]

It's almost like I'm looking at myself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we're doing something we haven't yet done on this show.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're gonna do the philosophy of physics.

[Chuck Nice]

What?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I know.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why we haven't done it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And we had somebody right up the street in the hood, actually, literally in the hood up in Harlem. And this is Elise. How do I pronounce your last name?

[Elise Kroll]

Krall.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Kroll.

[Elise Kroll]

Elise Kroll.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Elise krall. Welcome to StarTalk.

[Elise Kroll]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So you're a professor of philosophy in the philosophy department.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is a cuny.

[Elise Kroll]

Yep.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And you authored a book just last year came out, but it was like a very serious academic tome. The Einstein Paradox. This is a very seductive title. Okay. Einstein. Einstein Paradox. The debate on non locality and incompleteness. Oh, come on. Oh, in 1935.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah. So the title Actually comes from Schrodinger. He had a folder in his archive.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Schrodinger.

[Elise Kroll]

Schrodinger.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Of cat fame. Of the cat fame.

[Chuck Nice]

Of cat fame.

[Elise Kroll]

And in fact, the cat was born in this correspondence with Einstein that he had labeled in German the Einstein paradox. And. And so we translated those letters into English, many of them for the first time. And it's all the famous physicists talking to one another about what this physics is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So why can't regular people read this?

[Elise Kroll]

They sure can. It's just that the primary literature in particular, just reading the way that Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Bohr talked to one another.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They had their own language.

[Elise Kroll]

They did. And they had their own.

[Chuck Nice]

Like twins.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They just happened.

[Chuck Nice]

They like twins that get their own language.

[Elise Kroll]

Except in this case, their own language was often German. Sometimes it's Danish, but they're all Danish.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Would be for Niels Bohr.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, that's right. But they all had a really nuanced stance, like they had different ideas about what was problematic about quantum mechanics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Interesting, because quantum mechanics is just being born at that time.

[Elise Kroll]

It's about 10 years in at this point. Yeah. And what precipitated this was Einstein. Well, Einstein had had conversations with two guys, Podolsky and Rosenberg, about what he felt was an issue, that quantum mechanics was correct. But it wasn't finished yet. It wasn't complete.

[Chuck Nice]

And guess what? He was right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's complete. So that book is by Cambridge University Press, which has quite the catalog of astronomy and physics books for the public.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah. And I mean, the book is intended for people who are interested in learning from the physicists at that time themselves, their philosophical and. And physics sort of worldviews and learning about this history.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't understand the use of philosophical when it comes to their physics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's start right there. Let's just.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You are a professor of philosophy specializing in the philosophy of physics. Yeah. So what is the philosophy of physics in modern times? Cause I know what it was in the day. Cause in the day.

[Elise Kroll]

What's the day? Antiquity or the Renaissance?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, Newton. Post Galileo.

[Elise Kroll]

Newtonian worldview. Yeah. Okay, got it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Back then.

[Elise Kroll]

Scientific revolution.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Back then, philosophers were physicists. I mean, they were one and the same.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And in fact, Newton's greatest work has the word philosophy. The word physics isn't even in the title.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right. The Principia doesn't even have equations in the first part.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. The title is. Well, in Latin, but the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

[Elise Kroll]

Okay, that's right. Natural philosophy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Physics. Natural philosophy, yeah, yeah. Natural philosophy was physics. It's the deep thinking about how nature works. Okay, yeah, so we got that. But into the 20th century, you get quantum physics where you can't deduce from an armchair and you have an expanding universe. Who thought that up?

[Chuck Nice]

And the confirmation of all these things that were theoretically postulated and then proven to be the actual case.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what I noticed was that there was a sort of a separation of the turf. Yeah. And the philosopher couldn't really contribute to physics unless they were actually a physicist. They could still think philosophically, but you needed to be in the lab. You couldn't just sit back and observe and think deep thoughts.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, Einstein was never in a lab.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. But he was a physicist, not a philosopher.

[Elise Kroll]

I don't think he would make that distinction.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me say it differently. He was trained as a physicist, not trained as a philosopher. Oh. And that's the distinction I'm making.

[Chuck Nice]

So here's the real test.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That is. That is the distinction I'm making.

[Chuck Nice]

If Mel Brooks were doing a sketch with him, would he say to Einstein in the philosopher unemployment line, did you bullshit today? Did you try to bullshit today? Are you planning on bullshitting in the future?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is that from history?

[Chuck Nice]

History of the world. That's history of the world.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So I'm distinguishing between people who go to school to be a philosopher and then attempt to contribute to the physical sciences, whereas that. You could do that in the day, and I don't see that happening today unless you're busting that wide open in your existence in the world and in this office right now. Yeah.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah. Okay. Couple of comments. All right. First of all, in the German university system in which Einstein and Schrodinger and Bohr and all these guys were trained, they learned a hell of a lot of philosophy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sure.

[Elise Kroll]

And even Einstein into his.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was saying people didn't have philosophy chops. I'm saying if you go to school to be a philosopher in the 20th century.

[Elise Kroll]

Fair enough.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You became less and less useful to the moving frontier of the physical science. That's the only point I'm making now.

[Elise Kroll]

Go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Unless you go and bust that open.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, the first thing is, I don't accept your premise that in order to do what I do, that's how start an argument.

[Chuck Nice]

That's how you start an argument. I think we're.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, that's how we're.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, we're well on our way into a philosophical debate.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Your premise is invalid. Okay, go.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, a premise can't be invalid. Only a whole argument can be valid. But I'm being an asshole on purpose because it's funny. The idea that what I need to do is be useful to science to be important or worth doing as a human endeavor and is a pretty narrow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

View, except that's how it used to be. And that's how what used to be philosophers were useful to the moving frontier. You have Kant thinking up stuff that the nebular hypothesis was kind of cool and you had.

[Elise Kroll]

So Einstein's own ability to get the theory of special relativity had to do with his taking a different approach than Lorentz and Poincare and others who were looking for a similar theory. He said, let's step back. That is a philosophical. Like that is choice to step back and say, we have these data, let's understand them a different way.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm not saying.

[Elise Kroll]

Now, if you're saying it's about how we specialize into different disciplines.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes.

[Elise Kroll]

That is something that naturally occurred as our measuring apparatuses and our technology got better.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Got it.

[Elise Kroll]

We were able to be like, and you go to a conference in astrophysics nowadays, how many talks do you even are interested in? Like hyper specialized. Fair enough.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. I publish a paper, 100 people in the world will understand it or no, how many people in the world will care about it?

[Elise Kroll]

Right. For me it's like maybe six.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, this works.

[Elise Kroll]

They're my buddies, you know. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Elise Kroll]

It's like when people are like, oh, how do I find you on the Internet? Like Google, Elise. And philosophy of physics. Because I think I'm the only one.

[Chuck Nice]

So let me just let me back up as a layperson and kind of broaden the view here. The intertwining that Neil was talking about, that existed at one point.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That you now say has kind of dissolved because of highly specialized training.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Where does that intersection happen now?

[Elise Kroll]

Good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, good question.

[Elise Kroll]

That's great. And I think that's exactly the question we want to. So you were asking, am I going to blow it open now? Yeah, I think the fringe, like the edge of that, the edge of science right now is in this place. So you're talking about people who are looking for a theory of. In this place. In this place. Metaphorically. And my office at the Hayden Planetarium.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right now, it happens here and now.

[Elise Kroll]

Localized entirely in this room.

[Chuck Nice]

Here in the room where it happened.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, okay.

[Elise Kroll]

We're getting beyond our means to empirically test and you know, as a cosmologist and astrophysicist, there's a limited amount of Data that we.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

On that frontier.

[Elise Kroll]

Yes, on that frontier. And that's true also in looking for quantum theories of quantum gravity.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, all of that.

[Elise Kroll]

I mean, we haven't yet found conclusive evidence for the lambda CDM model. That is only for the lambda CDM model of cosmology. It's the best we have right now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's the cold dark matter and dark energy.

[Elise Kroll]

It's just the concordance. Like the model we think is the best model of the universe right now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just catch people up. So we know the universe is accelerating in its expansion. And what's causing that, we call dark energy.

[Chuck Nice]

Dark energy, we just call it that.

[Elise Kroll]

We don't know, but it's a black box, quite literally.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then dark matter is a mysterious source of gravity in the universe. In fact, it's 85% of the universe's gravity. And we don't know what that is either. But if we assume it's a thing, because we measure it and then we can calculate with it, and with some assumptions about the behavior of matter, we get a sort of kind of our own standard model of how the universe works. It's called lambda cdm, lambda called dark matter. And we work with it. It gets us some understanding.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, it does some good work.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it's. But it's not a complete.

[Chuck Nice]

It's not a complete picture.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a complete theory.

[Elise Kroll]

Right. So this is true in a lot of arenas of physics. And so what philosophers of physics can do, although I think there are many ways to be a philosopher of science, is not just like you're trained in philosophy, but you sort of ask philosophical questions of science itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How many philosophers of physics are there?

[Elise Kroll]

I don't know. More than five, but less than 200. Okay, well, no, maybe there's more than 200. It's hard to say.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're the first one I've ever met.

[Elise Kroll]

Oh, really?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I met philosophers, but just think about everything.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Elise Kroll]

You know, it's a small field, to be fair. And I will also say back to your early point, most of us have training in physics as well, because that's important to us. Like what I.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Your undergraduate.

[Elise Kroll]

My undergrad is a physics. But then I also continued. I mean, I wrote my doctoral thesis on quantum decoherence. So, like, I was learning about the models that people are using your.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So was that in the physics department or the philosophy department?

[Elise Kroll]

So I was in the philosophy department, but I was part of a history and philosophy of science program. But I also took a number of physics courses from the physics department.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you just blend in all.

[Elise Kroll]

Of that, all the things, you just.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Put it all together. However, that's what we need for someone to bust. That's a great way to bust a movie.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great way to make sure that you get an A. Is that.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah. Well, how does that correspond to getting a good grade?

[Chuck Nice]

Here's how it works for getting a good grade.

[Elise Kroll]

Oh, good.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm listening. You have your philosophy people, they don't know crap about physics, and your physics people, they don't know crap about philosophy. So you're just like, yeah, you gonna have to take my word for it.

[Elise Kroll]

That's exactly right. We're all just pretending, right?

[Chuck Nice]

No, go ahead.

[Elise Kroll]

So this ties into your early question. It's like something about the extreme specialization has meant that in particular, the way we train physicists in the US Even in high school is so divorced from the deep questions about but why, but how. It's about following a scientific method.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Did you study abroad?

[Elise Kroll]

No, but when I've looked at education policies in other countries and sort of. It's no surprise that our messed up that we're. We're not. You know, we're still the best place to go for STEM at the graduate level.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Elise Kroll]

But that's. We're losing that. And there's a history about that. In particular, there were decisions made in the Cold War era to train people in science in a particular way that was gonna get technologies built, that was gonna be good for industry result for the Department of Defense. That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

Weaponry.

[Elise Kroll]

And it became not just not in vogue, but like, in fact, I have the original document in this office of the nsf. Creation of Konoha.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I have that document. Can I reach for it?

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, show it. Show it to us. Let's have a visual here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is what you were talking about.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah. Vannevar Bush.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's let our people at home making.

[Elise Kroll]

A case for why America needs to preserve and fund science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I think that was an easy case to make because it was physics that won the war.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, that definitely helps an argument. I'm just saying.

[Elise Kroll]

But there's a reason. This is good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is good.

[Elise Kroll]

This is funny. That's funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The endless frontier.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A report to the President.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is 1945. Oh, wow. This established.

[Chuck Nice]

So this went to the president. This right here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He, Vannevar Bush was basically the first science advisor to a president. Okay. And he's advising.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't need one of those. Nobody knows more about science than I do.

[Elise Kroll]

That's really Good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I know he's going to.

[Elise Kroll]

I'm getting angry over here. Just.

[Chuck Nice]

That's how you know it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So here's what I want you to do. Just read the chapter. The section headings there. Just read them, read them.

[Elise Kroll]

Introduction.

[Chuck Nice]

Well played.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, excellent.

[Elise Kroll]

The war against disease. These headings, you mean are like Science and public welfare. Renewal of our scientific talent. A problem of scientific reconversion.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Elise Kroll]

The means to an end. Responsibilities for the government. Yeah. The means to an end. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So this. So everything I know and think of about how science happens in the United States, when I pull up this original document, it's all there. And so I have maybe. Is it a bias? I say that's how you do science, but it's how you do. Are you suggesting there's another way to do science?

[Elise Kroll]

I'm suggesting that when you get to the level of how we educate, when you divorce, you understand science as a thing that's about usefulness and application. That is one very small color from a spectrum of colors. And I'm also suggesting that when we look at people who are trained in the history and philosophy of science, along with the science itself, in high school, they're testing off the charts. There's something about, like, being able to answer that or ask that. Why. Why are we using this equation to solve for the energy level of a hydrogen atom? Why?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That never showed up in any of my classes.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right. That's right. Were you taught? You were taught. It's amazing. To physics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was taught physics as a thing, not as a way of thinking. I had to, like, realize that it was a way of thinking and bring to it the bit of philosophical meanderings that I had engaged in my life. I had to bring that to the physics that was not there when it was taught.

[Elise Kroll]

And you're told not to have it there, right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, not explicitly. It's not encouraged and it's not rewarded.

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[Elise Kroll]

I'm a mom.

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[Rob Lowe]

Cancel See T mobile.com hey everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard. I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday, so subscribe please and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Elise Kroll]

Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.

[Chuck Nice]

This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Okay, let me ask this. So what is it about asking these big questions, the why questions, the big why questions. What is it about that that contributes to the guiding principles of science itself?

[Elise Kroll]

Because there's no one recipe for how to do good science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, okay. It is true when I go to my different science, everybody's got their own angle on science. It's true. There was no centralized approach, right?

[Elise Kroll]

Well, but even if they're not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you're telling me that this centralized our approach not to our greater good?

[Elise Kroll]

I think it did in some ways to our greater good. Because I mean, Vannevar Bush Wanted the inner core of funding for NSF to be pure science. He thought there was always supposed to be a part of it, whatever funding.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Was left of it, as of.

[Elise Kroll]

Let us hang our heads in the moment of silence.

[Chuck Nice]

Do I get a plane from the nsf?

[Elise Kroll]

But did you know that if you drop a magnet into a glass of water, it loses its magnetism?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, he said that. He said that.

[Chuck Nice]

I love it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He said that.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And by the way, I'm still right, but it has to be avion. Okay, sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why you keep disrupting the lady. I know.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm so sorry.

[Elise Kroll]

This is like real world out there, right? It's like we're trying to do scholarship and then things. Right. But also, let me ask you this, Neil. Would you have been interested in doing science if it was just told, if it was taught to you as like following a recipe? I had to like the scientific method.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like, my philosophical interest in the universe was self driven. It did not come from the book that I was taught.

[Elise Kroll]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And my writings today, I don't want to say they're dripping with philosophy, but they take an angle on the content where it's not just, here, learn this. It's think about it in this other way.

[Chuck Nice]

That's very cool.

[Elise Kroll]

So, I mean, here's a metaphor, if you like. I mean, a lot of people can follow recipes and make really good dishes, really tasty dishes. So there's something wonderful about that. But the truly inventive chefs are the ones who say, well, or even the better cooks, I'm a terrible cook, but like, are the ones who say, but why do I melt the butter to this temperature? Why do I add the salt at this stage? Or why is this. These flavors work together. Expertise is something that our country is not. Has a very interesting relationship. Yeah, that's right.

[Chuck Nice]

So let me ask you this. Often philosophy is thought of as a belief system. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But in science, less so in the sciences.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, that's what I'm saying.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

But in science, you definitely don't want to be biased by your beliefs. So the one thing you want to do is divorce yourself so that whatever results you get, you're able to accept, irrespective of how you feel about them or what you believe. How is that reconciled?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Good. And let me add something to that. Yeah. Okay.

[Elise Kroll]

There's a lot of good questions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's go back to Kepler, who was, dare I say, philosophically driven to think that the orbits of the planets could be nested in such a way that they resembled the Platonic solids nested spheres.

[Elise Kroll]

Which always makes me think of Tupperware for some reason, but yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So what he knew was that geometrically in mathematics there are only five what are called Platonic solids. These are solid shapes where every surface is the same two dimensional shape. So a cube is such a thing. Every side is identical and has six sides. A pyramid is the same, okay, four sides. So you have four triangles and they can all be equilateral triangle. So there are five of these shapes. He saw that there were six planets and he thought to himself, maybe there's a divine connection between the two because the planets, it's the universe, it's where God lives, right? And then we're just mere mortals here. God surely knows what he's doing. And math is perfect, right? Math is badass. So he nested these in different ways to try to find out whether the separations of the planetary orbits could match what these solids would be if they were nested Tupperware style.

[Elise Kroll]

He was also thinking in terms of harmonic resonances. But yeah, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so my question to you is he. I don't wanna say he wasted 10 years. He devoted 10 years to this point of view and it took him that long to abandon it in favor of something that was not so philosophically beautiful. So in that case, getting back to Chuck's point, the philosophy prevented him from seeing the answer because he was driven by this concept of divine perfection.

[Elise Kroll]

So there's a couple of different ways we're talking about philosophy, right? There's the philosophy of just. I mean, if you go to a philosophy section at Barnes and Nobles or whatever, what they have there in the metaphysics section is some weird New Agey stuff.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Elise Kroll]

It has nothing to do with what academic philosophers are doing.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay?

[Elise Kroll]

And academic philosophers are asking questions about what is the nature of personhood, what is knowledge? Do different people reason in different ways? What are ethical questions? Like what is the philosophy of law, philosophy of science, these sorts of things. We have specific tools that we bring to bear on that. When scientists think about it, I think they're understanding not philosophy as a discipline, but they're thinking about a worldview. And we come to everything with a worldview, with a lens that's inescapable. Now you're right that part of what scientists want to do is sort of shield. Maybe not shield for that or at least neutralize it in some way. We want to think about whether our comments are value laden. And I don't just mean value in an ethics way, but maybe Also do I privilege certain epistemic values like beauty or similarity. And many do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Many do. But I can tell you this. To the extent that I can understand myself, I leave all philosophical preconceptions at the door.

[Elise Kroll]

You can't do that, though.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I said to the extent that I am able, I'm self aware that I could be constrained by a philosophical thought. So I remain open to anything I see and anything I measure and what that could possibly mean. And without discounting it, and the reason why I'm going there is I had an issue in Hamlet.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

One of the lines is, there's more betwixt heaven and earth than a dreamt of in your philosophy.

[Elise Kroll]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I never understood that comment ever. Because as a scientist, if a ghost shows up, I'm fine, let me make some measurements. I have no issue with that. So why does that sentence make any sense at all? Until I realized that people who are deeply into a philosophy of belief do close off their access to things that fall outside of their understanding or their awareness. So a good scientist has no philosophy. Otherwise they're gonna miss stuff. Bad scientists will have a philosophy and they'll miss everything.

[Elise Kroll]

Your choice to set aside some world like so that you can be neutral.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Elise Kroll]

Is itself a philosophical position. Oh, okay.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a very good question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In a way.

[Elise Kroll]

Ineliminable.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's right.

[Elise Kroll]

That you are going to walk in with some interpretive framework.

[Chuck Nice]

Ineliminable.

[Elise Kroll]

Cannot be eliminated.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cannot be eliminated.

[Chuck Nice]

Ineliminable.

[Elise Kroll]

I got some. Some big words.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I would say that the philosophy that I have. No, philosophy. Is a very mild version of a philosophy.

[Elise Kroll]

The point is that you cannot.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I was going to say. She's about to tell you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm listening.

[Chuck Nice]

No, she's about to say that's like being a little bit pregnant.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me hear what she said. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

You can't be a little bit pregnant.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Can we hear the lady? Okay, go.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, well, so when you walk into the lab or whatever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's right.

[Elise Kroll]

It's not like you take off your religious hat or you take off your culture like you're an integrated whole person and how you were trained and what you were thinking about that morning and what you're predisposed to look for in the equations themselves. Those things play a role. Now there's a huge conversation in the philosophy of science about whether certain things are more or less appropriate when you bring in, but that you bring something with you. That is how we do. Science is a personal and social endeavor.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So all I did say, I think Was I reduce it as much as I knowingly can. That's what you said. So. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

But what she's saying is there's no extent to which you can actually know because the holistic person that you are, you are inexorably tied to. To your philosophy. Except even when you try to divorce.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yourself, except in the movie.

[Elise Kroll]

So you guys are talking about a philosophy like. Like, Like. And I think this is fair because I think a lot of people do this. Like. Like it is a political position. But I'm talking about something, not just a. I'm talking about the way you view the world.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now watch more comprehensively. Do you remember the show?

[Chuck Nice]

I like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The X Files.

[Chuck Nice]

I like that.

[Elise Kroll]

Of course, man. Best show ever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. The X Files. Yeah, I'm watching the show.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And there's like, the skeptic science.

[Elise Kroll]

Scully.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then molder. Molder. Mulder.

[Elise Kroll]

Moldow. Moldow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excuse me, Mulder. Molder. And I watch them interact. And I'm thinking, no, no. Okay. There was some glowing mass in a vestibule. Okay. And Mulder says, oh, this must be an interdimensional form. He just goes right to. To the most wild explanation for it. And Scully is saying, this can't possibly be real. It must be a projected. And she's all discounting of it because it doesn't fit her philosophy. That that can't exist.

[Elise Kroll]

And I'm telling you, you're making my point for me right here. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Good.

[Elise Kroll]

Good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Fine.

[Elise Kroll]

It is the chemistry of those two perspectives that leads them to certain discoveries and so on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You call that a chem. They look pretty immissible to me. How's that for a chemistry word? Do you remember immissible? Oil and water?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Don't mix.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know how to missile them.

[Chuck Nice]

I do not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You take a little bit of. Because when you're making.

[Elise Kroll]

Are we talking about Scully and molder?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yes.

[Elise Kroll]

How do we do it?

[Chuck Nice]

How do we get the vinegar?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I learned this in chemistry class, and then I applied it at home. So you have oil and vinegar, Right. And you shake it and it'll still separate, right? Yeah, it's together, like, for a few seconds. All right. But you can get an emulsifier to put in there. And it'll connect chemically to both sides and bring them together. How so? I think.

[Elise Kroll]

I don't wanna know the answer.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A little bit of egg yolk will do that.

[Elise Kroll]

Egg yolk is an emulsifier. That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

I know that from baking, believe it or not. Yeah, I was gonna say that's Egg yolk is used as an emulsifier in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A lot of cooking. So it brings it together. So they needed egg yolk.

[Elise Kroll]

Fair enough. But I mean.

[Chuck Nice]

But I like what you're saying. You're saying this is not philosophy in terms of, I believe, blomp, blomp, blomp. It is philosophy in terms of how.

[Elise Kroll]

Do you know what questions are good questions to pursue? How do you know when your apparatus is measuring what you want it to measure? Stuff like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's anchor this back in time. Please compare for us the philosophies of the two greatest physicists there ever were.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so I'm. You said this. I was gonna say. So he's talking. So one of them has gotta be Isaac Newton.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's gotta be one Nendian Einstein. So tell me. Cause you. Clearly you've studied this. Cause you're writing about the man and everything. Yeah, so. And I love the fact that we share sort of access to history and what that means in the present. So I just wanna know, how would you characterize Newton's philosophy relative to Einstein's philosophy? And I have. He. Hang on. Before I earned enough money to buy an actual book from Isaac Newton's days, I got this paperback called Newton's Philosophy of Nature. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Little paperback selections from his writings.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And it's not only from his great books, but also his writings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So may I? No. Oh, that's just a paperback. I thought. I was thinking that's your original. I don't know, I thought. It's my original.

[Elise Kroll]

He's holding it like it's a teddy bear or something. This means.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, but see, I've been all up in it.

[Elise Kroll]

You've been up in.

[Chuck Nice]

You got every. All the pages of Dawn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I've had it since middle of high school. Wow. So me and Newton go back and don't you badmouth Newton.

[Elise Kroll]

No, I'm not gonna badmouth Newton. I love Newton.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Good.

[Elise Kroll]

He's a primary source in my Philosophy of Space and Time class. Because, students, it's a class you take. It is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I want to take that class.

[Elise Kroll]

I would love to have you. I'm teaching it in the fall. Also, Einstein as Philosopher is a course I'm teaching in the fall.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Got it.

[Elise Kroll]

Anyway, Newton was motivated, at least in developing by many things, but in developing in particular his theory of gravitation in an essay called De Gravitatione. I don't know how to pronounce the Latin, but there it is. He's responding to Descartes, who had three Laws of motion. But Descartes thought that all motion was relative. And so it is in developing his response to Newton, to Descartes theory of motion, entirely on philosophical grounds, he is reasoning from his armchair how he can understand motion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He must have had a badass armchair.

[Elise Kroll]

He did. He also invented the calculus from that same armchair. Einstein is responding to Newton. He was bothered by the fact that in a fully physical worldview that Newton said he was presenting, you nevertheless had a background space time that was not. That was influencing matter, but not itself able to be influenced by matter. This asymmetry of dynamics bothered him.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let me restate what I think. You said, that Newton is describing a universe embedded within space and time.

[Elise Kroll]

Sort of a theater. Yeah. Background in which matter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. A theater set. Yes. And so whereas Einstein wanted the theater set and the players in the theater to interact with one another.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right. And in particular, Newtonian mass is inertial mass. It's an intrinsic. In the old school philosophy tradition, it is a property that belongs to the thing in virtue of the thing itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This also.

[Elise Kroll]

Mass.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Just remind people, you know, Weight Watchers is really Mass watchers.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you wanna weigh less, just go to the moon.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, go to the moon.

[Elise Kroll]

There you go.

[Chuck Nice]

Thanks, Oprah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's a lot of ways to weigh less.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So.

[Elise Kroll]

But how do you get the money to go to the moon in the first place?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But yeah, I just want to just clear. So when you reduce your number of fat cells in your body, giving it up to energy, then you're reducing. It's a mass you're cutting from yourself.

[Elise Kroll]

It's supposed to be some deep essential meaning, essence of the thing. This also bothered Einstein. He didn't think that things should have innate properties in this way.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Elise Kroll]

And so one of the things that motivated him going from special to general relativity was a paper he wrote in 1913, where he predicts gravitational waves, by the way. So he didn't want mass to be something that just belonged because God decreed it thus. And so he developed. He developed a way of accounting for mass that was also dynamical. We give something inertial mass because it's following a geodesic. It's following a particular path through space time. And that is why we call something having inertial mass. It is not an intrinsic feature of the universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The geodesic on Earth is a path that you would take where if you sliced through that path, your slice goes through the center of the Earth. So it turns out, if you do the math, it's the shortest distance between the Earth.

[Elise Kroll]

Shortest distance, that's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that's why you see on a map, you see these loops back and forth, they have arcs. If you made that a sphere, that would be the shortest distance. We call that a geodesic, meaning Earth. But now you're taking it and using it for the whole universe.

[Elise Kroll]

Because another thing he was doing in this 1911, in these papers, when he's developing what's called the entwerf, like the in between theory, between general and special relativity, he's working toward general relativity publishing along the way, and he's realizing that the effects due to acceleration are the same as the effects due to gravity. So acceleration and gravity are like two sides of the same coin.

[Chuck Nice]

So every time I hear it, I'm like, so brilliant.

[Elise Kroll]

It's bananas.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's simple and brilliant.

[Elise Kroll]

But he was motivated by Newton's account, not answering his why questions. This asymmetry between space and time, being this God ordained theater in which things happened but the things themselves couldn't affect space. Time was a principal motivation for his wanting to dig deeper and come up with a theory of space and time and gravitation that didn't sort of wasn't ordained on high.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Did he apologize to Newton?

[Elise Kroll]

I have no idea. Did Einstein apologize to Newton? Perhaps in jest.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I have a memory. Because his whole understand general theory of relativity supplants Newton's gravity.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think he apologized at some point.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, it's gotta be one of those. Sorry. Not sorry.

[Chuck Nice]

I was gonna say, is it like the way you apologize to Pluto?

[Elise Kroll]

It was like, you can also apologize to somebody while saying, but I did a better job. Right. Like he's still clearly sorry for blowing.

[Chuck Nice]

You out of the water.

[Elise Kroll]

It was like you have. But also, you know, we're building on the people who came before us in developing our viewpoints of the world. So he owed a great deal to Newton.

[Chuck Nice]

So this started with Descartes is what you're.

[Elise Kroll]

Descartes himself took three laws of motion from Kepler. Like Kepler's three law, this game had been going on for a while. For a while, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

From a philosophical standpoint, all of these.

[Elise Kroll]

Are philosophies, if you mean it in the sense that they're trying to ask the deeper questions of why do the things that I observe behave the way they do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why does Newton have only three laws of motion and not four or two or ten?

[Elise Kroll]

He thought that three laws of. He describes this in the General Scholium at The beginning. Which is all philosophical arguments for why he thinks absolute motion can be differentiated from relativistic motion. And he needs relative motion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm talking about Newton.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, Newton, the general scoliosis.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He said relativistic in that.

[Elise Kroll]

I meant relative motion. I'm sorry, from Cartesian or Descartes. Relative motion. He thought that that's what he needed to give all of the account of all the mother.

[Zoe Saldana]

Hi, Zoe Saldana. Welcome to T Mobile. Here's your new iPhone 16 Pro on us.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Thanks. And here's my old phone to trade in.

[Zoe Saldana]

You don't need a trade in when you switch to T Mobile. We'll give you a new iPhone 16 Pro. Plus we'll help you pay off your old phone. Up to 800 bucks and you still get to keep it.

[T-Mobile Representative]

There's always a trade in.

[Zoe Saldana]

Not right now. @ T Mobile.

[T-Mobile Representative]

I feel like I have to give you something in return for karma.

[Zoe Saldana]

That's okay.

[T-Mobile Representative]

I don't really have much in my purse. Oh, let's see. Hand sanitizer. It's lavender.

[Zoe Saldana]

I'm good. Seriously.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints.

[Zoe Saldana]

Really, I'm fine.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Oh, I have raisins.

[Elise Kroll]

I'm a mom.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Wait, wait one sec. I've got cupcakes in the car.

[Designer Shoe Warehouse Representative]

It's our best iPhone offer ever. Switch to T Mobile. Get a new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on us. No trade in needed. We'll even pay off your Phone up.

[T-Mobile Representative]

To 800 bucks with 24 monthly bill credits. New line, 100 plus a month on experience. Be beyond finance agreement. $999.99 and qualify. Imported for well qualified, plus tax and $10 connection charge. Payout via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days credits and amounts due if you pay off early. Or cancel CT mobile dot com.

[Rob Lowe]

Hey everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday, so subscribe please and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We come out of Newton, we go through Einstein, and these are still, they still make sense. Even if they're weird. You can still see why they make sense mathematically. But you go into the 1920s and then quantum physics descends and nothing makes sense. But it works. It works. You can make predictions. The understanding of the periodic table, of elements, of molecules, of atoms, all clicks into place and everybody's scratching their head. So what does a philosopher do then?

[Elise Kroll]

All the things. It's so much fun. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you just like it when we don't know what we're doing?

[Elise Kroll]

No, no. I think we would say that all of physics involves interpretive moments. But they're particularly painful in the case of quantum mechanics. And it's fascinating. Let's go play like, let's go talk about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's a word for that. It's called sadomasochism. It's particularly painful. Yeah, let's get it.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, but I mean, but it's also like these are the questions that keep you awake at night. There's pain, but joy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Elise Kroll]

So it didn't come out of nowhere. Right. I mean, there was an old quantum theory that Bohr and Sommerfeld, who was a physicist in Munich, had been working on in the 1910s to account for atomic spectra.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sommerfeld or Sommerfeld?

[Elise Kroll]

Sommerfeld.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sommerfeld.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, Sommerfeld. I pronounced it in the German way.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excuse me. Okay, I saw an S there, so I just said Sommerfeld. I had one of his books.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was really important. He was also the doctoral advisor of like Heisenberg and Pauli and a lot of these guys who went on to be important progenitors of the new quantum theory. But they were trying to understand these empirical data. Right. The spectrum.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By the way, every one of these people got a Nobel Prize. Every one of them down the list.

[Elise Kroll]

Einstein's Nobel Prize was not for relativity. It was for the footprint photoelectric effect, which was dealing with quantum and Brownian motion. And Brownian motion. Yes, that's right. Brownian motion, which is to do with getting microscopic about quantum effects.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But yeah, so Brownian motion, you suspend.

[Elise Kroll]

A particle like a pollen grain. Like pollen, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You put it in a fluid and it just bounces around. And that wasn't fully understood, like what's going on.

[Elise Kroll]

It looks like it's random motion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, right. And then you have to calculate there's particles hitting it.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That are. That are smaller than it, that are hitting it. And you realize there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world's oceans. And we didn't have insight into that until Einstein explained Brownian motion to understand what the hell is going on in there.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, we don't know the insides of atoms very much yet. There's so little known about the structure of atoms. And so that's partly what they're debating. And part of what allowed Heisenberg and Pauli and some of the people working at the forefront in the 1920s, they were looking at these descriptions. You remember Bohr's planetary model of the atom? Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's part of why we called them orbitals.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Because he made it look like.

[Elise Kroll]

But there are huge mysteries with this model. It doesn't account for all the spectrum, the data of the spectra they're seeing. I'm using all the right Latin plurals here, I hope. But also, how is it that it jumps from one energy level to the next and it does it discretely? That's right. It does it quantum. Like there's no actual physical motion from one place to the other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What does the philosopher say about this?

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, well, they were born d' Omerfeld in the old quantum theory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You've been here sitting here for half hour.

[Elise Kroll]

I'm about to deliver the coup de grace. If he would shut up, I'll do his.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. At least finish him.

[Elise Kroll]

They were trying to describe the electrons using classical terms for particles, position, momentum. Heisenberg said, what if we use totally different things to describe the electron? What if we tried to write down, instead of equations of motion in this classical way, we think about the electron in terms of wave. Like by writing down the intensity by writing down the amplitude.

[Chuck Nice]

Like a wave.

[Elise Kroll]

Yeah, sort of. But he didn't use quite that language. But he said, let's look. He used what's called Fourier, like F O U R I E R, another French to Fourier analysis, to look at it. And he got these equations out that worked. And it was only by sort of stepping back and saying, the language we're using is presenting to us a world.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That is a classical philosophical pivot.

[Elise Kroll]

It was a new approach. It was a new lens for looking at the problem. It was a new lens for attacking the problem.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. Because if you. If you believe or you think that these other metrics are what actually matter, and if they don't actually matter, you're gonna get the wrong answer.

[Elise Kroll]

And Schrodinger continued to argue like he developed wave mechanics in 26. Heisenberg did this in 1925. Yeah. So right on the heels of this, Schrodinger gives a description in terms of wave. And everybody knew wave. We love waves. We see waves everywhere. Sound waves, water waves. We understand how waves behave at the macroscopic level. And so when Schrodinger gave a version of quantum mechanics that was all written down in terms of waves, people said, I can visualize that. I can understand how to model that. But it didn't quite do all the things Heisenberg's matrix mechanics did. But they were arguing about these viewpoints in a philosophical way, like, what do we need when we have a full scientific theory? Do we need to be able to visualize in space and time what's going on? Or do we need the right equations?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so they did their duty, and we are now 100 years later.

[Elise Kroll]

We are 100 years on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There are certain quantum questions that the layperson sees unanswered over that entire century. How can two particles be entangled? What does that even mean? And how is it. You observe it over here and then instantly, it's not even the speed of light. It's instant. And people wanna wrap their head around this. And you have not given us an answer to it.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. At least what's coming.

[Elise Kroll]

We haven't figured it out yet. It's an ongoing puzzle. It's a oncoming. Well, in that case, you're forgetting conversation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Maybe. Maybe it's not something to be figured out, it just is.

[Elise Kroll]

Here's where this matters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you're trying to figure out. No, I'm just. I'm saying maybe you're trying to bring a classical sensibility to something that has a different reality.

[Elise Kroll]

I agree with you, and I get a lot of shit for that in the philosophy community. I think a lot of the interpretations of quantum mechanics that are proposed are trying to tell a story about how we get from a probabilistic set of solutions to an actual solution. And I think the world just makes a choice. There are some dynamic considerations in there. It's a much more nuanced story than what I'm giving you right now. But I think you're right that we're still, like, very much moored to these classical.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because pictures of the world. Classical pictures make sense in an armchair. But you start saying particles pop in and out of existence in the tunnel. They do this and that. And I, as a. As a scientist, as an astrophysicist, I accept what quantum physics does for me to understand what the universe is doing. And I've learned to not lose sleep over trying to understand why.

[Elise Kroll]

If you were working in quantum cosmology, you would want to know. Because we don't have a theory yet that brings together general relativity when the large or small, and quantum mechanics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Elise Kroll]

And in fact, most of these interpretational debates are happening with respect to non relativistic quantum mechanics. But we know that the final theory we think will be relativistic, it'll be a relativistic quantum theory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you foresee philosophers helping the physicists towards this goal?

[Elise Kroll]

I don't. I mean, having a conversation with. I would say, and I would say that the physicists are also having this conversation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Elise Kroll]

So, for instance, there's a real question as to whether certain inflationary paradigms that are thinking about how we get to effectively classical, like field modes for the different parts of, you know, gravitational field modes or, you know, matter field modes, whatever you want. But we think the initial state was a quantum one. So we need to know a story about how we get from a quantum.

[Chuck Nice]

State to what looks like to what we are now.

[Elise Kroll]

That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

Because you're saying that if there is a model that makes sense, it started with the field. It started with kind of like what we would call nothing, but really it's everything all at once being nothing. And then out of that pop, and then boom, and then all of this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, it's everything everywhere all at once.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I'm sorry, you left out one another.

[Elise Kroll]

I gave a talk on entanglement that was about that, like had that title. But I watched the movie on the flight and had to cross that title out. It was like, ah, it's not quite what they're doing there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But some of the questions, I understand you correctly, we went from a quantum state to a macroscopic classical state. And there had to be a transition somewhere in there that allows us to bring these sensibilities together in a coherent understanding.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, even when we're trying to understand what the universe looked like in those early stages before we got to the big asymmetric distribution of matter we have now, those are stories that rely on our understanding, how we get classical field modes, classical values for field modes out of a quantum soup. And so these questions show up there. Here's another.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are they being answered by your brethren or by.

[Elise Kroll]

They're not being answered by anybody, anybody. We're talking about them together. And there are, you know, some cosmologists who want to understand. Like these early. They're asking whether or not we can have. Whether we could find residue of entanglement from this early state. And that's where I say, even as a philosopher, no. Because entanglement relations are going to be so damped down by interactions with the gravitational field mode and all these others that we could never measure them. But that doesn't mean they're not a part of the story. So we're having conversations with one another about these things because the answer is unclear.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Yeah, well, there's still those mysteries. You begging me.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm a joke. I don't know. Give me my gummies.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Give me a gummy. You need some.

[Chuck Nice]

Get my edibles, please. Get my edibles right now. Cause, damn.

[Elise Kroll]

You know, I'm a philosophy professor. I should be on, like, I have the worst. I've had the worst experiences. I just can't do it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

People around me, there are no edibles in this office.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, there we go.

[Elise Kroll]

People are like, is your color red the same as mine? I was like, yeah. Hobbs thought about that tooth out. Like, who cares?

[Chuck Nice]

You know?

[Elise Kroll]

Let's go on from that Leviathan.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hobbes. That Hobbes.

[Elise Kroll]

That same Hobbes. Yeah, we all thought about that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not Calvin and Hobbes.

[Elise Kroll]

That's the Hobbes. Hobbes. Calvin is named after John Calvin, which is, you know, John Calvin. And Hobbes is named after Hobbs.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Calvin, as in Calvinist Calvin.

[Elise Kroll]

And Hobbes is named after John Calvin, the reformed theologian. And Hobbes is named after the philosopher. The philosopher and political theorist Hobbes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And how about the. The tiger?

[Elise Kroll]

The tiger is Hobbes.

[Chuck Nice]

The tiger is Hobbes. That's Hobbs.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I forgot now.

[Elise Kroll]

Okay, yeah, this is super important now.

[Chuck Nice]

Who is Marmaduke named after?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[Elise Kroll]

This is beyond my realm of expertise, y' all. This is beyond my realm of expertise.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, we gotta land this plane. But this must have been highly confusing. Simultaneously enlightening and confusing.

[Chuck Nice]

Is that possible? I have to say.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you have a word for that? To be enlightened and confused at the same time.

[Elise Kroll]

To be a philosopher.

[Chuck Nice]

That's how you do it. Full circle.

[Elise Kroll]

Well, let's keep talking about it at some point. Not now. You have other things going on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that brings us to a close. Sorry we didn't fully answer everybody's questions.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, there are not the answers. The answers are out there, Scully. No, their answers aren't known yet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No. You know what is?

[Chuck Nice]

That's the beauty of it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Seek and you probably won't find.

[Elise Kroll]

Seek and you will find. What's maybe not the case?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's a good one. I like that. Seek and you may find the answer to the question you have not yet posed.

[Elise Kroll]

There you go. Ooh.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow.

[Elise Kroll]

That's true.

[Chuck Nice]

Let me tell you something. Jesus is happy. He didn't say any of those things. People would have checked right out, like, and see.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. What fascinates me most about the frontier of science is to do it right. Yes. You gotta keep at least one foot in the perimeter where we at least think we know what's going on. And then you put the other foot outside and test the water for new ideas, new perspectives, new ways to think about how the universe works. But for me, it may be a specious goal to believe that the more you do research, the more you understand about the universe. Because what remains true is that as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. And if that's true, that might mean that science is indeed the endless frontier envisioned by vannevar bush in 1945. That is a cosmic perspective. Thank you, Elise Krall.

[Elise Kroll]

Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, thanks for coming down to share some of your vision and expertise with us here.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, it was great.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck, always good to have you, man.

[Chuck Nice]

Always a pleasure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This has been startalk, the Quantum Philosophy edition. Neil Degrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

[Rob Lowe]

Hey, everybody, it's Rob Lowe here. If you haven't heard, I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe. And basically it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J. Fox. There are new episodes out every Thursday, so subscribe, please and listen wherever you get your podcasts at.

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[Elise Kroll]

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