Cosmic Queries – Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking with Charles Liu

Does the universe need observers to exist? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore questions about entropy, spontaneous symmetry breaking, spectroscopy and more with astrophysicist Charles Liu.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum paradoxes. Information and entropy. Spice dust. All of that and more on StarTalk Special Edition Cosmic Queries with our one and only geek in chief at the helm, Charles Lu, coming right up.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. We're doing a Cosmic Queries Grab Bag. Normally, you see these over on our flagship StarTalk show, but we've got with us not only, of course, Gary O'Reilly, Gary. Hey Neil. And of course Chuck Nice. Hey, hey. But the only way this becomes a party is when we bring in our geek in chief, Charles Lu. Charles, how you doing, man? Hey, hey. It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much as always. All right, all right. Charles is a professor of astronomy. Is that the, is that the department? What's the name of the department, Charles? Department is Physics and Astronomy. Physics and Astronomy. College of Staten Island.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  College of Staten Island of the City University System of New York, longtime friend. Many people don't know that Charles co-wrote the exhibit copy that lives in the Rose Center for Earth and Space. He was with us at the birth of the whole facility. So. That was so much fun. We had a great time, didn't we Neil? It was. All good, all good. And Gary, former soccer pro. Yes. Good. And, and I don't think Charles knows this, Gary, you're a new American citizen as of a few days ago. Hey. Yeah.

• 1:45Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Ah, freshly minted.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the club, Gary. That's awesome.

• 1:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you, thank you. And the three gentlemen here are part of the reason why being a US citizen for me is fantastic. So, thank you.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh wow. Okay, thank you, thank you. Now we have to live up to that.

• 2:02Gary O'Reilly?

  No pressure.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are honored, sir.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're gonna, you know, find topics that really only Charles could give us the best answer on. That's what we put in this show. So, so let's, let's, let's get this party started. All right. Who's got the first question?

• 2:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, I'll, I'll dive in first and thank you to all our Patreon members for their questions and their curiosity. If we don't manage to get to your question this time around, apologies. There's only so much time in the universe. Talking of which, let's start. Hannah Cantley from Oregon City, and guess where that is? Yes, Oregon. I'm a big supporter and love the show. So here's my question for Dr. Lou. In a universe where gravity, matter, and information all seem to emerge from the same underlying rules, and observers like us made of that exact same material, what does physics currently think observers are for? Are creatures like us just accidental byproducts of the laws? Or does the universe

• 3:02Gary O'Reilly?

  actually need observers in order to manifest or realize its own information? Oh, straight in the deep end. Here we go.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does it, what does it mean for there to be information anywhere if there's no sentient thing to record it as such?

• 3:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah. No, this is actually a deep philosophical question right now. Yeah. In, in physics and the philosophy of physics, we've.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  If a big bang happens in the multiverse and there's no one there to see it, did it really happen?

• 3:35Charles Liu?

  Right. It's, it's that kind of situation, right? Early on in quantum mechanics, right? There were people like Niels Bohr, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which basically said that the universe is in a flux state of sort of unknown states in the quantum level until you observe it and then the wave function collapses is what they say. And then reality appears, right? So in that kind of position, it is absolutely necessary for observers to observe something in order for a wave function to collapse.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just real quick. So it's called Copenhagen because Niels Bohr was, was.

• 4:17Charles Liu?

  Danish.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was Danish. A. B. Weren't there conferences there where a lot happened so that people associated these new thoughts with that country and that city? And

• 4:27Charles Liu?

  That's right, that's right.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I just wanted to

• 4:29Charles Liu?

  And even to this day, yeah, Denmark

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even to this day, yes.

• 4:32Charles Liu?

  Is a hugely important part. They have a cosmology center there.

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Charles Liu?

  Lots of neat science going on.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, sorry to interrupt, go on.

• 4:39Charles Liu?

  Yeah. So the, the question then has since moved on and clearly even back then, Niels Bohr wasn't saying that the universe didn't exist if there were no observers. It's just we didn't know what the universe consisted of until it got measured, right? But that has been taken to sort of its logical conclusion and by saying that, yes, actually observers are necessary and you'll find physicists today

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 5:05Charles Liu?

  That stick to that point. If you don't have someone seeing what's there, it's not actually there. I, I remember also something you did a long time ago, uh, Neil, uh, about reality in our brains, uh, how are the complexity in our neurons and the neural nets and so forth and consciousness and things like that rivals the complexity on the large scale of the universe itself in the galaxies and the stars and things like that, the numbers of

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We look at the total, the total number of connections in the brain and you look at the total number of stars in the universe and they all interact with each other gravitationally. And so in our neural circuitry, it all interacts with all the rest of the neural circuitry. So it may be that the universe is less complex than the human brain.

• 5:53Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting possibility there.

• 5:55Charles Liu?

  On the large scale.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Charles Liu?

  And so if you take that into the next level, before quantum physics was established, there is a philosopher named Rene Descartes, whom you've probably heard of before.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:06Charles Liu?

  Uh, he's named, well, the Cartesian plane, the X, Y axes that you guys all did in algebra back in the day, right?

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean you guys? You did it too. What do you mean you guys? Like you didn't do it too?

• 6:16Charles Liu?

  It's true.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  And what makes, what makes you think I actually showed up for algebra class?

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  You're assuming facts that are not in evidence, sir.

• 6:29Charles Liu?

  Well, okay. This guy Descartes basically said that reality is only conveyed to our brains through our senses.

• 6:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:38Charles Liu?

  So each of us actually lives within a reality that is distinct from every other reality that is visible. So in your brain, Chuck, and in my brain, and Neil's brain. Yeah.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  And he, I mean, honestly, that's demonstrable now. We actually have, you know, psychological experiments that have been conducted to show how we actually do live in our own distinct realities based on our experience and where we are and how, how we are receiving the information of the world itself. And one of those things that is most, I'll say, stark is how we remember things.

• 7:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Chuck Nice?

  Events. We all remember events in a very distinct way.

• 7:25Gary O'Reilly?

  So go back to the point of observing. So, correct me, and you probably will have to. The dual slit, slit, thank you, the dual slit experiment where particles go through and they look just singular and then all of a sudden they become waves, but as soon as you observe them, they go back to not wanting to be observed. So they become

• 7:44Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 7:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Single again. So how does that sit in with that explanation of observing?

• 7:49Charles Liu?

  That's actually one of the big questions about that. The Young's two slit experiment, which has now turned into a big part of explaining so-called wave particle duality.

• 8:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Charles Liu?

  Right. Is one of the manifestations of this. If you're looking at it or trying to measure it with certain kinds of machines or detectors that are detecting waves, you'll find waves. But if you measure it using something that detects particles, you'll find particles. And you can switch midstream and get a whole different thing that you expected originally just by how you choose to measure it. And so it's a really amazing. Confluence between what's going on inside our heads, what's going on outside our heads? How much of it do we share? And how much of it is really, truly only our own? And I wish, Hannah, I had an answer for you, but it is still being discussed.

• 8:44Charles Liu?

  It is not yet confirmed whether or not observers are necessary for the universe to actually have an objective reality.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Charles, your account was so good. I think you should, I think you should write a book on this.

• 8:59Charles Liu?

  You, you mean, you mean this book? The quantum physics answer book?

• 9:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow, Chuck, you wrote that really quick, man.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  You work fast, brother.

• 9:14Charles Liu?

  It was there or it wasn't there until I observed it and all of a sudden there it was, you know? It's amazing.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Charles, in that question, there's a direct reference to information. And information feels kind of intangible when you think about it. Because I said in an earlier episode, you know, if I give you two oranges, you have two oranges. But if I give you two newspapers, you don't have twice the information than you would have had on one newspaper. So, information is clearly a different thing from what we think of as material reality. So, could you give us like a quick primer on what, what a physicist means when information is, is the topic?

• 9:59Charles Liu?

  It's kind of hard, but I'll do my best. If you think about information as you're looking at a system with lots and lots of stuff, what is it about the stuff that distinguishes this stuff from other stuff? Okay, in other words, you have a blob of matter in the universe. Then you have another blob of matter. What makes this blob different from that blob? It's the information you get from it. Okay, it's not the form. It's not, for example, the, whether it's an atom or whether it's a proton, whether it's a neutron, but rather whether it's spin up or spin down or whether it is this temperature or whether it is that. So, it's information in the way that we think about it, yes, but it also requires you to sort of think about it

• 10:44Charles Liu?

  in systems of stuff and not just the things themselves, but almost an abstract way of considering material.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, material can have information completely...

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  coursing through it. And unlike quantum physics, if no one's there to measure that information, the information is still there, correct?

• 11:05Charles Liu?

  Yes. It's kind of like an objective thing that's there no matter what. But if you don't measure it, then you don't know what it is. An example might be a bit. You've heard of the term a bit in a computer, right? A 16 bit chip or something like that. The bit is the information, one or zero, or on or off. But it doesn't matter whether the bit is an electronic chip, or whether it's a quantum bit, or whether it's a pair of electron, positron, or something like that. That information is still the important piece of the input or output that you're getting from that system. Does that make sense? So a lot of computation and thinking

• 11:47Charles Liu?

  requires about the information that the physical thing is carrying, and not the thing itself.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  This is Ken the Nerd Neck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:18Chuck Nice?

  If you change the chemistry of something, you haven't lost any information, because the information has changed, but yet the thing itself is no longer the thing. For instance, you've set wood on fire, okay? You end up with the charred remains, and smoke, and flames. The smoke is part of that information, but it's something else now. The flames are part of that information, but they're something else now. You know, they're the release of energy and heat. And then what's left over is what's left over. That is no longer a piece of wood. So even though you didn't lose any information, the thing is no longer the thing.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  So what is, what is the importance of, of the information then?

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I checked, Chuck, I think you just stepped on the big toe of entropy. Ah. Okay. Uh.

• 13:14Charles Liu?

  Entropy and information are closely linked.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Closely linked. And you just stepped on its toe because a log has much less entropy than a burned log. Right. Okay, and, and, and so, Charles, can you walk us through that?

• 13:30Charles Liu?

  I sort of can walk us through, but it, it, it's, it's long and complicated, right? But you, you hit your nail on the head, the, the information has a lot to do with something. Okay, Gary, let's say you flip a coin.

• 13:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 13:42Charles Liu?

  Okay, and it can be head or tail, right? Now, what happens if you flip 10 coins? What are the possible combinations of heads or tails?

• 13:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, one would imagine 50/50, oh, if you, if you toss them enough times.

• 13:57Charles Liu?

  That's right. Over, if, what, if you tossed 100 or 1,000 or 1,000,000 coins, almost certainly you would wind up with 50% heads and 50% tails.

• 14:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Charles Liu?

  But there are actually a lot of different combinations. In fact, if you flip 10 coins, there are 1,024 possible combinations. Coin one is head, coin two is tail, coin three is head, coin four is tail, coin five is head, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the number of heads and number of tails at the end of your flipping, there are many fewer than 1,024. There's only 11, right? 0 and 10, 1 and 9, 2 and 8, et cetera.

• 14:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Charles Liu?

  Right? So, the, out of the 1,024 flips that you can do, there's only 11 actual results that come up with the numbers of heads and tails. All of that extra stuff, the other 1,013 rolls, are rolled into the entropy of that 10-coin flip.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 14:58Charles Liu?

  In other words, that stuff is the hidden information that will allow you to sort of come up with how often you're going to get 5 and 5, how often you're going to get 4 and 6, and so on, and so on. So, so entropy is hiding in there. The information you get off the top is hidden by that stuff inside. And then, right, right now, what people are doing with quantum computing is really trying to figure out the kinds of entropy, the kinds of disorder that can hide in your systems when you're actually just looking at the top of the system, finding out how many heads and how many tails there are.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Is it my turn?

• 15:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 15:34Charles Liu?

  Did I do it right?

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 15:36Charles Liu?

  Please correct me if I'm wrong.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I, you, no, you said it, what you said is just fine. I just want to make it clear that Chuck was saying something different and I have to point that out, okay? If you roll ten coins and there's some chance that two will be heads and eight will be tails, okay? That is not the total probabilities that Charles is talking about. Charles is talking about these particular two coins giving you heads and those particular eight coins giving you tails. And if, if each coin is specific in that enumeration, then you get to the ten twenty-four.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's just two heads and eight tails and you don't care which two coins are giving you the two tails, that's a different question asked of the ten coins or of the hundred coins, whatever it is, is all I'm saying.

• 16:31Charles Liu?

  Yes, Neil is precisely correct. And so the stuff that's hidden, that information underneath, right? That actual specific coin flips and then the actual result information that you want, how many heads, how many tails? That difference could be said to be the entropy of the system that you don't see when you're getting the information out of the flips.

• 16:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So it depends how close you wish to look as to regards which data you get back.

• 16:57Charles Liu?

  Yes, absolutely. This happens when we boil water, for example. When you're trying to turn water from liquid to gas on your stove. What happens is that it stops at a hundred degrees Celsius, right? A standard boiling temperature for a period of time. And then the steam that comes off is still a hundred degrees Celsius, but it has so much more entropy, so many more possible states of the individual atoms moving around compared with the liquid versions. It's not a matter of how. Far apart they are. It's a matter of how much

• 17:33Chuck Nice?

  How much freedom they have moving inside of it.

• 17:36Charles Liu?

  That's right. And so in order to compensate for that, you have to heat the water up extra. You don't change the temperature, but you're changing the amount of energy inside because of the entropy increase that you have to put in in order to turn it into gas.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, the flame that was raising the water temperature gets the water to 100 degrees and it stops raising the temperature.

• 17:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where does that heat go?

• 17:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where does that heat? It's going somewhere.

• 18:01Chuck Nice?

  Into the transformation.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into the transforming. Yeah.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, right.

• 18:05Charles Liu?

  Excellent.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 18:07Chuck Nice?

  Let's keep going. All right. Yeah, that was.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep that coming.

• 18:10Chuck Nice?

  Fricking good. That's good stuff. Yeah. All right. This is Andrew Martin. Hello, Doctors Tyson and Lou and the Right Honorable Lord Nice. Well, thanks, buddy. I'm right. That's the first time I've ever been right and honorable.

• 18:32Chuck Nice?

  He says, I'm Andrew from Stanford, Stafford.

• 18:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 18:36Chuck Nice?

  In the English Midlands.

• 18:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we don't know what that means. We don't know. We don't know what that means.

• 18:41Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a town in the the West Midlands of England. Very pretty.

• 18:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, dear.

• 18:47Chuck Nice?

  So good. So good of you to chime in from the Stafford's in the Midlands.

• 18:52Gary O'Reilly?

  The Shires. It's the Shires.

• 18:54Chuck Nice?

  In the Shires.

• 18:57Chuck Nice?

  I I believe that's somewhere near.

• 18:59Charles Liu?

  Do they make good whiskey there?

• 19:00Gary O'Reilly?

  No. Well, they may. They may do, but it's not known for whiskey. No.

• 19:05Chuck Nice?

  Right. Is it anywhere near Downton Abbey?

• 19:12Charles Liu?

  Okay, guys.

• 19:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Here we go. He says, anyway, I understand that a star's color is determined by its age and composition. I also know that its velocity relative to our collective selves can redshift its light. How do you resolve between the two? In other words, how do you know a star is made of something and traveling at a certain velocity isn't really made of something else and traveling at a different velocity?

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, people think, people think deep about the

• 19:51Charles Liu?

  Yeah, superb question. And, and in fact, I will say that that is actually a problem for astronomers sometimes. We don't know whether or not the object's colors are caused by, or the redshift of emotion, as opposed to the redshift of the expansion of the universe, or the colors intrinsic to the objects themselves. The answer to this quandary is spectroscopy.

• 20:18Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 20:19Charles Liu?

  It is a technique where we divide the colors into component colors. So instead of just seeing red, you see very red, and an orangish red, orangish, orangish red, orangish, orangish, orangish red, and so on, and so on, so on.

• 20:36Chuck Nice?

  Until you finally get to the most orange of all.

• 20:44Charles Liu?

  Okay, yes, until you get to that orange. But, but what happens is that by dividing all these colors up into little bits, the components of that reddishness that you see from a star are broken up into emission lines, absorption lines, and continuum radiation. And the patterns of those different lines and continuum are preserved regardless of whether or not you redshift due to velocity or not. So if something looks red, which you thought was blue, you measure the object using spectroscopy, and you take a look to see if the patterns, absorption and emission lines, have been

• 21:26Charles Liu?

  preserved in the red part of the spectrum when you thought it should be in the blue. If they're preserved, then we know it was because of redshift. If they're not preserved, then we think, oh, there's something physical going on in the star that made that color change.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what else happens? A star can sit behind an absorptive gas cloud, a cloud with with dust in it. And it could shift a white star, the the color that you'd see for a white star, into a regime that makes it look red. Big, big challenge for us. Do we really know what's in our sightline that could be messing with the star itself?

• 22:04Chuck Nice?

  So what you're saying is you're looking through this dust cloud.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 22:09Chuck Nice?

  At the star, but you don't. It's basically you don't know it. It's it's like a little screen.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You try to understand the dust cloud and sometimes you you forget that they're there. And Charles, wasn't there a huge discovery made about the Big Bang? And because but because they didn't correct for the for the reddening in our own galaxy of the cosmic microwave background. There was some.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was some paper that had to be retracted because they not retract. They you don't retract it not because it was fraudulent. It was just they had to say we messed up.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  They were wrong.

• 22:44Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were.

• 22:46Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Yes, because the cosmic microwave background, as it currently exists today, produces the same wavelength of microwave radiation as dust of a certain composition at a certain temperature.

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:02Charles Liu?

  So that dust turns out to envelop our Milky Way galaxy at different thicknesses or different densities, depending on which direction you look.

• 23:11Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 23:12Charles Liu?

  And so if you were unable to get that signal cleared away from the cosmic microwave background, that interference will completely mess up your interpretation.

• 23:23Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say it's like the tear function on a on a on a scale.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:27Chuck Nice?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 23:28Charles Liu?

  Excellent point. That's what it is.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 23:31Charles Liu?

  Yes, so so being able to see that.

• 23:33Gary O'Reilly?

  How how do we, A, make it go away? And if it's not possible, how do we navigate through this sort of natural filter that's that's there?

• 23:44Charles Liu?

  Neil, do you want to tell them about extinction curves? Or do you want me to do it?

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we got you on here. You the geek in chief.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just the geek deputy.

• 23:52Charles Liu?

  It's a great question, Gary, and it's actually pretty complicated. But I'll try to make it as simple as possible. Essentially, the effect of dust in making things look dimmer and redder is known in astronomy as extinction. Okay, not the kind where like dinosaurs go away because they're hit by an Earth is hit by an asteroid, right? But the kind of extinction that says that your light has been extincted or extinguished because of this dust. What you have to do is A, actually understand what dust does. And so there's a whole branch of astrophysics that is done in a laboratory where you make dust that might approximate what interstellar dust is looks like, is made of, what shape, things like that. And then you shine light through it.

• 24:36Charles Liu?

  And then you see what that dust does to the light that you might expect coming from a star or something like that. And then the second thing you do, you have to measure where dust is throughout your lines of sight from Earth out into deep space. See how much dust and what kind is in that line of sight. And everything you see in that direction has to be corrected for this extinction. And so there's something called an extinction curve. Okay, and every kind of dust has a different extinction curve. So you look in a direction, say, I look at a galaxy that's in that direction, far away. I first have to ask, okay, what does the galaxy's light look like from my telescope?

• 25:21Charles Liu?

  And the second thing is I have to ask somebody who did measurements of extinction, say, hey, what is the dust capacity, was the dust density and the dust variety in this line of sight? And then that person will say, oh, that line of sight was measured to have this much extinction and these kinds of gases and dust. And then you go, okay. And then you make a correction to make your galaxy light what it would have looked like had the dust not been there.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 25:48Charles Liu?

  It's a complicated stuff.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's insane. So the universe is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. We have to figure this stuff out. Yeah.

• 25:56Chuck Nice?

  That just sounds awful.

• 25:59Charles Liu?

  Although it sounds awful in one way, yes, it makes our ability to understand those distant galaxies that much tougher. It's also a blessing in disguise because it allows us to understand dust in the universe.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:12Charles Liu?

  If we want to know what we humans are created out of, literally, stardust. Stuff that came off of stars, cooked in the hearts of stars, and then spewed out into the universe in the Milky Way galaxy. So if we want to know where we came from as human beings, or as life forms, or even as planets, right? We need to understand that dust. So the combination of being forced to be able to compensate for that dust and to be able to know what's behind that dust has given us the opportunity to study the dust itself, which I think is pretty awesome.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  That is pretty awesome, but I will also say, when you were talking about the discovery of the, that the paper had to be retracted, at first I was just like, God, man, what, you know, these guys really screwed up. Now I'm like, yeah, I'm on their side. Like, you know, basically, I'm surprised anybody's able to find anything. Like, basically, every, every other week, a paper should come back, my bad, it was dust, it was dust, guys.

• 27:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's another feature of that. There are, I would call them ambulance chasing theorists, who saw these results, saw these results and said, I can explain that with a new model of the Big Bang, and that there were people who published papers on these false results.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so that's, that's, that's an important reality check on the front, the moving frontier of any science.

• 27:38Charles Liu?

  But that's what we do in science.

• 27:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Charles, this sounds like an awful lot of man-hours to log, chart, and then

• 27:46Charles Liu?

  Oh, yes.

• 27:46Gary O'Reilly?

  tabulate all of this information. Surely, this is perfect for AI.

• 27:50Charles Liu?

  Yes. People spent entire careers doing these kinds of maps. I'm sure Neil, you'll remember Schlegel did a lot of this. Bruce Drain did a lot of this. Some of the giants of our field are remembered for their legacy of making these maps happen. The problem with using an AI to try to make those maps is that you have to have the AI interpret just as the question was saying. How do you tell the difference between what dust is causing and what the light is causing from behind it? AI isn't sophisticated enough to tell that difference yet. It just sort of chooses the best option and sticks it in.

• 28:32Charles Liu?

  So there's that human need to be able to disentangle these two effects, which something like a large language model is still not quite able to do. So AI eventually will be extremely helpful in refining maps that we had found a long time ago and used optimal methods to figure out what they were. But they won't be able to make maps on their own because they don't have the decision-making capability yet to distinguish between the different things that are causing what we think dust might be causing.

• 29:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Wow.

• 29:08Charles Liu?

  At least that's my opinion.

• 29:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And you're sticking to it.

• 29:12Charles Liu?

  For now.

• 29:13Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, bring on, bring on another. We're ready for the next one? Okay, April Walsh. Hello, Sir Neil, Lord Chuck and Sir Charles. I'm April Walsh. It's, yes, and you're right, April, this is an easy one to pronounce. My 16-year-old son and I are obsessed with style talk. Well done. We absolutely love it and thank you for making it great. My question is, when all of the matter, here we go again, dust, gas, et cetera, in the universe, was condensed into something smaller than a pinhead at the Big Bang, how did that not immediately create a black hole? Ooh. Interesting.

• 29:47Charles Liu?

  Wonderful question. Wonderful question.

• 29:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Get out of that one, Charles.

• 29:52Charles Liu?

  It turns out that we don't have to get out of that one because the universe got out of that one for us. When the universe was the pinhole sized, it actually wasn't that massive. We think of the Big Bang, or think about the Big Bang, as rolling back the history of the universe and making it smaller and smaller and smaller. But at the moment of the Big Bang, the mass of the universe was, well, at 10 to the minus 43 second after the Big Bang, we'll call that, that Planck time, the mass of the universe was less than a glass of water. And it's actually not enough to have turned it into a black hole

• 30:33Charles Liu?

  at that time. Something further happened to inject the universe with so much energy that that inflation happened, that you probably have heard of, where at the, nearly the beginning universe, you wind up inflating the universe beyond its regular expansion rate by factors of many, many trillions. And then you wind up with all this extra energy in there, which then condenses into matter and becomes the galaxies and stars and planets and black holes that we have today. So there was a period of time early on where black holes didn't even do. Where'd that energy come from? Where that energy come from is still 100% unclear. Oh, no.

• 31:18Charles Liu?

  But there are some guesses. We know where it came from. Came from Jesus? Jesus. Came from Jesus. That's part of the problem, right? A lot of people do, in fact, have a problem with that Big Bang cosmology at that early time, because there seems to be no way for us to explain that injection of energy any way, other than some sort of divine supernatural activity. But if we were to do that, then we'd just be like, oh, okay, we've given up on science. We're not going to try to figure out how it actually works. Let's just go home and have a, you know, drink and forget about. So we refuse to sort of give up and just say, oh, it was something that

• 32:00Charles Liu?

  we'll never be able to understand. It was some divinity, or it was some supernatural thing. So if we try to think about nature... Then the way you can actually inject energy has to do with something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Neil, have you told our distinguished Patreons about the fundamental forces in the universe? Assume no, assume no. Yeah, yeah, okay, assuming no. Currently, we think that the universe has four forces in it that sort of determine all of the transfer of energy and material and so forth around the universe. There's something called the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force,

• 32:45Charles Liu?

  and gravity. Okay, now, gravity is its own strange beast because there is a hypothesis that gravity is as a force actually has more to do with the structure of spacetime than the transfer of little particles back and forth. But electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force are now separate forces. They have different mathematical explanations and they behave differently depending on where they are and what size and scales and so forth are around. It makes sense to hypothesize that right around the time of the Big Bang, there were not four forces, but there was only one. And something happened at the quantum level

• 33:30Charles Liu?

  to break forces off from one another. And that break is called a spontaneous symmetry break. Okay, so when I was saying spontaneous symmetry breaking, you can imagine something breaking and from the inside of that break that used to be symmetric, this one beautiful force that followed all of its math, now is two, or now is three, or now is four. And the resulting chaos, it's almost like unleashing, to some extent, that entropy we were talking about when trying to boil water. But now we're unleashing just straight up energy in such huge densities and such huge amounts that it will propel the universe to grow at such a rate and such a speed

• 34:14Charles Liu?

  that we pass the black hole thresholds and then you have to start all over again and turn that energy into matter and then make black holes thousands or even millions of years later.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's pretty wild. Okay, so how do you feel about, we didn't have her on the show, but we were supposed to. I believe her name is Sabine Hoffen something. She's Hoffen something. It is. I mean, I don't know. But you guys know who I'm talking about. Hosenfelder. Okay. Yes. Now, she says that anything, anyone who tries to surmise what happened at the Big Bang is only telling a story because we don't have, and we never will have, data

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  that will allow us to make a conclusion. How do you feel about that?

• 35:12Charles Liu?

  Hmm. Oh, that's a great philosophical point of view. I would answer, all of physics, all of astronomy is trying to tell a story. Right? The hypotheses of every explanation as to why something happens in our universe is a story. The difference between a story that is non-scientific and a story that is scientific is that the scientific story seeks to find ways to confirm or refute that story. And so, we're always pushing in that direction. If you could tell a story that can be falsified, that can be shown to be untrue, based on

• 35:56Charles Liu?

  observations, or experiments, or something like that, then you are trying to do science. We have forever thought that, oh, we would never be able to see like, the origins of our Earth. And yet, here we are, able to understand planets. Because we kept asking questions and finding ways to look further and further back in history. We used to think we could never understand how our solar system was formed. It must have been supernatural, must have been divine. But no, now we know, because we looked, and we found ways to find hypotheses that we could test. Now, we're going further and further back. How can we find the formation of galaxies? How can we find the birth of black holes? And now, to the point of the Big Bang itself.

• 36:40Charles Liu?

  The recent results from the DESI group, Dark Energy Survey Group, are remarkable. They are looking at echoes of the imprints of matter and energy in the large-scale structure of our current universe that were put in there very, very close to the Big Bang, before even the cosmic microwave background was established. We're talking about like ripples in a pond that have been imprinted in the galaxy distributions of our universe for the past thirteen and almost fourteen billion years. And we're seeing that imprint, which itself is long past the beginning of the universe,

• 37:23Charles Liu?

  but maybe that's fossilized information that could tell us about things like the Big Bang, which we just can't see anymore. Damn. So it's a philosophical point. That's what science is so cool about.

• 37:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have to watch out to presume that just because we have ideas about something that it'll never be tested. There was one of the more boneheaded predictions made by a philosopher in the nineteenth century was, oh, I love this, I'm paraphrasing, I love this field astronomy, we can know where the stars are, we can know what colors they are, but we will never know what they're made of. That is forever beyond our reach. And he's presuming to know what something's made of, you have to go there and sample.

• 38:07Charles Liu?

  Got there and take a sample.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was like ten minutes before spectra as applied to astronomy was invented. And with spectra, as Charles said earlier, you can find out what are the chemical components of stars. That's one of the great triumphs of nineteenth and twentieth century modern astrophysics. But the fact that we didn't know and someone got clever and figured out how to know, we are never stopped on the frontier just because we don't know how to do something yet. That we'd still be in the caves if that's how we functioned as scientists.

• 38:40Charles Liu?

  Yeah. And that's why I always tell everybody that the questions are more important than the answers, because we can't get all the answers now. But if we ask the right questions, someday we will be able to answer them.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The German poet Reinhard Maria Rilke, in his book Letters to a Young Poet, I hope I don't mangle this too badly, one of the poems ends, "Be patient with all that stirs within your heart." Learn to love the questions themselves.

• 39:12Chuck Nice?

  See, that's what I tell my wife when she's like, where were you last night? I'm like, you need to learn to love your questions.

• 39:22Chuck Nice?

  The answers are not really the whole issue here.

• 39:27Gary O'Reilly?

  How'd that work for you?

• 39:28Charles Liu?

  Not probably what people were saying, but you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So what we're dealing with here is known unknowns rather than known unknowables. So to try and get ourselves into the position where we do know, different thinking again, because we've used our own thinking that we've brought historically. So I mean, it's not quite the change of angle of approach, but a different way of thinking about the same conundrum subject.

• 40:00Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 40:01Gary O'Reilly?

  How do we go about altering our thinking as to provide us with an answer for this?

• 40:08Charles Liu?

  Well, the history of science is not linear, nor is it continuous, right? What we found over the centuries is that people ask a question and they can't answer it. And then you wait a, sometimes a really long time. And then somebody just goes, hey, how about this?

• 40:34Charles Liu?

  And then someone goes, wow, that's neat. Most people go, wow, that's crazy. We can't ever figure that out. And then somebody else says, you know what? We probably could. I'm thinking, of course, of general relativity, right? Neil, you know that famous story. People are trying to figure out gravity forever and how the speed, how light travels through the universe. And then over about a 15 year period, Albert Einstein first devises the special theory of relativity and then the general theory of relativity. And people are like, oh, space bends and curves. That's very interesting, Albert, but how are we ever going to figure that out? And a guy named Arthur Eddington says, I know how we can figure this out.

• 41:15Charles Liu?

  And organizes an expedition to see a total solar eclipse and take photographs. And sure enough, he was able to measure with his colleagues that very amount of curvature in spacetime that Einstein had predicted.

• 41:32Charles Liu?

  And so people had been thinking about gravity ever since Newton's time. And then, within that short 10, 15 year period, boom, we figured it out. But then we had to wait another long period of time to the next thing and the next thing.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to clarify, is the eclipse itself is not what Eddington looked at. He needed the eclipse to darken the sky to see starlight from far away in the universe. It's path moving to the side of the sun. The sun is the most massive thing we have available to us. So if, if, if gravity is going to distort the fabric of space and time, the sun is our best chance at this. So he waits for the eclipse.

• 42:11Charles Liu?

  Perfectly said, Neil.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and then the starlight comes across very near the edge of the sun. He measures where it is on a very, with great accuracy, then waits six months. Till the sun is on the other side of the sky, goes back to that same area and measures where the stars are on his frame. And they had all moved in, in the presence of the sun, having their path lengths go by the limb of the sun relative to six months ago. So that whole, that whole project took six months to confirm. And there was an eclipse in 1918 that he really wanted to use, but the world was still at war.

• 42:50Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that was a lost opportunity. It had, it was delayed until 2019. I'm sorry, delayed until 1919.

• 42:58Charles Liu?

  19.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1919.

• 42:59Charles Liu?

  Right. Uh, no, yeah, you're completely right, Neil, in what you've said. I, I, the key there, Gary, to sort of circle back to your point, wasn't the eclipse, but it was to use the eclipse as a way to measure the curvature

• 43:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:15Charles Liu?

  of the space and time and thus the motions that are different.

• 43:19Gary O'Reilly?

  And then going back in six months, you've got a constant because the stars will be the constant and you're working. Yeah, I get, that's fine. Thank you for that explanation.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  So when he looked at this, when he looked at the light from behind the sun, then the movement was, meant that the light had to bend in order for him to see it the way he saw it.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 43:38Chuck Nice?

  Uh, got you, got you.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  And, and the only thing that could have done that would have been the actual mass of the sun, the, because the sun is so massive.

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the way to affirm that is wait six months. Now the sun is on the other side of the sky.

• 43:52Chuck Nice?

  Now, well, that is, first of all, I

• 43:57Chuck Nice?

  Ah, Jesus Christ.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are smart people. These are smart people.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  I mean, here's what's, but it's so simple, but it's so brilliant.

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  I feel so dumb. Why was I born so dumb?

• 44:17Charles Liu?

  No, Chuck, I feel like that all the time. It really is amazing how smart all of our predecessors have been. Yeah.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we live in a time where people say, I'm just a scientist. What does scientists know? I'm gonna look at my YouTube video and I'll figure it out. You know, what, what do you think we do? It's all we do is try to figure stuff out.

• 44:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So Charles, that information was always there. Yeah. It didn't just appear because Eddington showed up with some calipers and measuring stuff. So it's looking at things and thinking, what information is here that we are not thinking or seeing or identifying?

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, one of the, one of the prevailing and persistent definitions of genius is the genius is the person who sees what everyone else sees, but thinks the way no one else has thought. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's pretty cool.

• 45:10Charles Liu?

  Eloquent.

• 45:10Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not just looking, it's seeing.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I'm not a look, see guy, you know, I, to me, they're the same thing, but that's fine.

• 45:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, no, you, you can look at things, but you won't see what is really there.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, that's like saying, uh, you, you heard me, but were you listening to me? You know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not a heard, listen, see, I'm not that guy.

• 45:33Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't come to me for that.

• 45:35Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I'm not. Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm just, you know, as this discussion opens up, it makes me think, is that, is the information we need there, we just don't quite know how to extract it right now?

• 45:48Charles Liu?

  In many cases, yes. One of my colleagues right now is doing an amazing kind of theoretical work about quantum information.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 45:58Charles Liu?

  When you're trying to send information through, say, fiber optics or something like that, you lose information because there's noise in the system.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 46:09Charles Liu?

  But this guy is like saying, you know what? I can take that noise and learn, find information in there that we thought was lost and thus make my quantum communications that much better. And it's amazing. It's like thinking about dust in the solar system and the galaxy, blocking our view of things we want to see, but then turning it around and saying, you know what? That dust itself has information. I wonder what we can learn from that. It's that kind of thing that happens on every scale.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not talking about acoustic noise. We're talking about light noise. We have a light signal going through fiber optics. And so noise is in physics is a general term for

• 46:53Charles Liu?

  Interference.

• 46:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of a signal that would interfere with your target signal. It's not just acoustic. It can be anything.

• 46:59Charles Liu?

  Interference, background, static.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Background.

• 47:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah, all that stuff. Imagine if you could figure out stuff from that, you know? That just changes your whole dynamic of what you're trying to be able to transfer.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The original discovery of the cosmic microwave background using horn antennas in New Jersey, they said, you know, they're working for AT&T, the labs, and AT&T said, let's find out what the noise is in the background so that when we send signals through the air, we will be able to understand that noise and possibly correct for it. Okay, so they opened up their antennas and they get, they look in every direction and there was this residual noise everywhere they looked. And they said, okay, we're gonna have to report this, but wait a minute, let's look inside the antenna. They looked inside the antenna, there was pigeon dung in the antenna.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's reported as a dialectric substance in the original survey. Which actually can be responsible for a noise level. So they cleaned out the pigeon poop in this antenna.

• 48:02Charles Liu?

  Good job.

• 48:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they looked back and it dropped the noise level, but it didn't take it to zero. And so they reported excess noise every direction in the universe, and that was the cosmic microwave background.

• 48:14Charles Liu?

  Thank you.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobel Prize winning discovery after they removed the pigeon poop.

• 48:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, now, first of all, the pigeon, the pigeon should have got the Nobel Prize.

• 48:24Chuck Nice?

  Got an assist, should have got an assist. Okay.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An assist. Brought the pigeon to Stockholm.

• 48:34Charles Liu?

  Here is the dialectric substance that helped us find the cosmic microwave background.

• 48:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, let's see if we fit in some more questions here.

• 49:01Chuck Nice?

  All right, you're up next.

• 49:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been very luxurious with our answers. You think we can like?

• 49:05Chuck Nice?

  They're good questions. This is Carrie Manenberg. This is Dr. Tyson, Dr. Lutz, Chuck, Carrie from Kalamazoo here.

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 49:14Chuck Nice?

  With observatories like Webb and Vera Rubin already pushing the limits of what's technologically possible, what scientific and engineering breakthroughs do you think the next generation of telescopes will demand? And what new discoveries might those future inventions unlock?

• 49:31Charles Liu?

  That's not going to be a quick answer. Can we just pick like one thing?

• 49:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, go, pick one, I'll pick one, and we'll call that it.

• 49:39Chuck Nice?

  Just pick one breakthrough, I mean.

• 49:41Charles Liu?

  All right, but that's a tremendous question. Wonderful. Okay, the one breakthrough I think is going to be amazing is the ability to fly spaceships in formation. When you fly spacecraft that are basically going in lockstep with one another, not deviating by even a millimeter over thousands or millions of miles of travel, then you can use something called laser interferometry and shine and position the light and the detectors in such a way that we can find gravitational waves from space at a level that's hundreds or thousands of times greater than we can on the ground.

• 50:24Chuck Nice?

  So you're saying that these spaceships become an array? Is that what you're talking about?

• 50:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 50:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 50:29Charles Liu?

  That's exactly what I'm talking about. And so that technological development is just the one that I'm going to mention this time around. But that will change the number of detections we have of gravitational wave events, colliding black holes usually, by a factor of a hundred or even a thousand. And that's going to be able to let us map the universe like a well-struck gong. I think it's just amazing.

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, wow. That's good. And I'm looking forward to more telescopes that operate, that are sensitive to things other than light. Because we've got the whole spectrum mapped out. All right, we've got, and gravitational waves is another version of telescopes that operate outside of light. It's using gravitational waves. But they're, I'm looking for neutrino telescopes. There might be some other particles, dark matter telescopes, things that will see the universe in whole, not just different windows, but whole other buildings. In another, windows in another building for what is otherwise is going up on out there in the universe. And this could be a new frontier opens up, much the same way, when we discover there's more than just visible light coming to us in the universe.

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's build a telescope to see in it. Oh, my gosh. All right. Our eyes were so feeble compared to what the universe is trying to tell us. And right now, we got the visual, we got the whole light spectrum figured out. It's time for new frontiers in cosmic discovery.

• 51:55Charles Liu?

  In NASA speak, we call that multi-messenger astronomy.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 52:01Charles Liu?

  Where the messenger is not just light waves or electromagnetic radiation of any kind.

• 52:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't know they had a term for it.

• 52:07Charles Liu?

  But these particles and exotic things, yeah, yeah. Multi-messenger astronomy, watch.

• 52:12Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 52:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, and by the way, Galileo's famous book from 1609, where he reported on his telescope observations of the universe, something no one had done before. The title of that book is Sidereus Nuncius, translated from the Latin starry messenger. The stars were the messengers.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 52:35Charles Liu?

  All right, go for it.

• 52:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Next one.

• 52:36Charles Liu?

  Next one.

• 52:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 52:37Charles Liu?

  We do that in like four minutes.

• 52:38Gary O'Reilly?

  I know. Okay, right. Your guest, Jok. Uh, hello, Dr. Tyson Liu and Lord Nice. Your guest from India. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book actually created a lot of questions in my mind. Then it answered.

• 52:49Charles Liu?

  Oh, wait, wait. Which book now again? Which book did this guest ask about?

• 52:54Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll say it slower. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. And what's handy about it?

• 53:01Charles Liu?

  Oh, you mean, you mean this? Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. That one.

• 53:07Gary O'Reilly?

  That one.

• 53:08Charles Liu?

  Everybody, I'm sorry. That was a pretty self-serving, but I'm really proud of the book. It really is a great opportunity. So are we. We are proud of the book.

• 53:17Gary O'Reilly?

  And we are proud of you.

• 53:18Charles Liu?

  Oh, you're so kind. Thank you.

• 53:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Here we go.

• 53:20Charles Liu?

  Okay, please continue. Please continue.

• 53:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Does the Scharn-Horst effect imply that the universal speed limit is an environmental variable rather than a fundamental constant? If so, could an advanced civilization pump the vacuum to create local bubbles of infinite causality? And would this effectively turn the universe into a lossless energy distribution network? Answer is all yours.

• 53:47Charles Liu?

  Amazing. Charles, you take this one. Amazing. I haven't heard about the Scharn-Horst effect being asked in a very long time. A scientist named Scharn-Horst, uh, I think it was around 1990 or so, hypothesized that if you took, um, two perfectly smooth metal plates and brought them within a millimeter or a millionth of a millimeter within one another, you would create a zones because of the quantum fluctuations of the universe where the index of refraction was less than one. What it means practically means is that in those tiny zones

• 54:31Charles Liu?

  that are only a fraction of an inch across, the speed of light could actually exceed the speed of light in vacuum. Okay. This would be a hypothetical. There's been no way to be able to test it. And the effect is tiny. All right. So it would be one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent faster than the speed of light in vacuum across this zone, which was less than a millionth of an inch across. So it's this really neat effect that if we could test it. It would be neat to find. Unfortunately, we cannot create, at least as far as we know,

• 55:11Charles Liu?

  if the Schonhorst effect is true, these kinds of pumped spaces that our questioner is asking. Because the causality and the speed of light and the stuff like that at those micro levels cannot translate into a macro level thing like being able to draw energy from nothing. Okay, now that said, and I'll just stop with the technical mumbo jumbo in one sentence. The concept of zero point energy, which is what the Schonhorst effect is talking about, is still highly uncertain. We would love to find out more about it and maybe someday we could in fact tap it to get something cool out of it for our use.

• 55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, is this related at all to the Casimir effect? Where you'd have two parallel plates with an evacuated space in between? But this has taken it up another level. Is that?

• 56:04Charles Liu?

  Correct. That's exactly right.

• 56:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a cosmological phenomenon inside.

• 56:08Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 56:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quantum cosmological phenomenon rather than just a sort of a laboratory thing. I mean, is that?

• 56:16Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right. The Casimir effect is exactly what we're talking about here. Casimir, everyone, in case you don't know, C-A-S-I-M-I-R.

• 56:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds right.

• 56:27Charles Liu?

  The scientist, Dr. Casimir, hypothesized it exists and it was in fact measured to exist. That if you bring two plates of metal really, really close together, you actually wind up with energy that sort of magically, but not magically, scientifically, because of quantum physics, appears when you didn't think there was anything there. Right? And so this is taking it to the next level. The Schonhorst effect would be like...

• 56:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The two plates are attracted to each other by forces that are not gravity or electromagnetic. They're quantum. That's right. Quantum attraction.

• 57:01Charles Liu?

  Quantum.

• 57:02Chuck Nice?

  That's insane. I love it.

• 57:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. All right, next one. Let's get one more in here.

• 57:08Chuck Nice?

  Great question.

• 57:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck or Gary?

• 57:09Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Narav Shah, who says, hello, astro gentleman. Narav Shah from Arizona. My question is, can you point me towards some resources where I can learn more about the universe theoretically and practically? As an ardent receiver of starlight, knowledge from star talk, I often paint an incoherent picture of the universe. I want to learn more so I can ask better questions.

• 57:33Charles Liu?

  Well, I got, I got a book for you, man. It's, uh, it's called the, uh, Quantum, the Handy.

• 57:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it sounds like.

• 57:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 57:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounds like he's not in a hurry. So my book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, that's not for him because he sounds like he's got time on his hands. Charles, how, how many pages is your book?

• 58:01Charles Liu?

  Uh, geez, I don't know. Let's see. Uh, I'm looking at everybody just so you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like 458 pages. Yeah.

• 58:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:11Chuck Nice?

  That's a commitment.

• 58:12Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a commitment.

• 58:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but not really because you got to understand Chuck's book is broken up so that it's almost like a resource. You don't have to read it straight through.

• 58:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Chuck Nice?

  You know, you can read about the scientists of quantum physics in certain parts. You can read like from the beginning, which is very good. The very beginning of the book is great for just like, what is a particle? What is quantum? What like, so you know, even though it's like almost 500 pages, don't look at it like it's, oh, 500 pages. You know, it's, it's, it's broken up in ways that you can digest it in chunks. So it's really.

• 58:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Resources is a good word for it.

• 58:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's a resource.

• 58:53Charles Liu?

  Yeah, you're, you're very kind to say that. Yeah. And then your description is exactly right, Chuck. I, I wrote that book specifically to say, hey, you could take it in whatever size pieces you want and, and whatever level you want to go at it.

• 59:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck was not being kind. He was being factual. Don't confuse the two.

• 59:12Charles Liu?

  Now, you're being kind, Neil. Thank you.

• 59:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If your book sucked, and he said, "You wrote a nice book," then he's being kind.

• 59:21Charles Liu?

  You're very kind. Thank you very much. No, I would say if you want to go deeper into the mathematics, right, because the Handy Quantum Physics Answer book and many of the other books about these topics are usually talking about deep concepts and ideas, but those ideas arose from the mathematical and the scientific depths of really trying to wrestle with the equations that described how the universe works, or the calculations or the measurements that would give us a clue about how the universe works. So if you want, I'll just mention this, there is a group called

• 59:57Charles Liu?

  OpenStax, S-T-A-X, and it is free for anyone who wishes. It's basically a set of textbooks. These are textbooks that are legitimately for people who want to learn or to major in something or to do, but it's free on the internet. And I encourage anybody who wants to look at some of those things, to see, like, get a little taste of what an actual textbook looks like, and see if you want to go deeper into it, see if you want to drink deeply of that Steijian Spring, or if you would rather just have a little knowledge, which, of course, as Alexander Pope says, is a dangerous thing.

• 1:00:39Chuck Nice?

  And always remember, a mind is a terrible thing.

• 1:00:44Charles Liu?

  That it?

• 1:00:48Charles Liu?

  To waste or otherwise huge.

• 1:00:50Chuck Nice?

  That's right. That's the bad part. Sorry.

• 1:00:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:00:55Charles Liu?

  Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff now. I encourage everyone to take a look.

• 1:01:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's all the time we have. Well, Geek in Chief, we love you, but our fans love you even more.

• 1:01:07Charles Liu?

  I am, I'm very, very happy to be with you guys always, Gary, Chuck, Neil.

• 1:01:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:14Charles Liu?

  It's so much fun for me and I really, really appreciate.

• 1:01:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Glad you do. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right, Gary. Thank you, Neil, and thank you, Charles. StarTalk Special Edition Cosmic Queries, and it's been a Geek in Chief grab bag. All right, guys, good to have you. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.