A Cosmic Conversation with J. Richard Gott III

Why haven’t we found evidence of alien civilizations? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III to talk chess, tachyons, and what the Fermi Paradox and Copernican Principle say about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Plus, they rank super-genius movies.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we are featuring my exclusive, one-on-one conversation with my longtime friend and colleague, fellow astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III. Very deep thinker on all manner of subjects, under the sun, and moon, and stars.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rich Gott.

• 0:44Speaker 01

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

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the best compliment.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  It's just about the best.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rich Gott, you're a close friend, you're probably my closest colleague friend that I have.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've spent a lot of time together in conversations and dining with family. And we probably met earlier, but we didn't become close friends until Princeton University. I did my postdoc there many moons ago. And you spent almost your whole life on the faculty at Princeton University. So let me just put some of your professional background on the table. You were born and raised in Kentucky.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In high school, did you win some science fairs and things?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  I won second place in the Westinghouse Science Talents.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the big one.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  That's the big one.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now it's called the, uh, maybe called the Intel.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Regeneron, that's Regeneron.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now it's Regeneron.

• 1:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, to come in second place in Westinghouse, did you get to meet the president?

• 1:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Johnson? Which Johnson was that?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  And then I was, they asked me to be head judge of that contest for fourteen years.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Later.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's the most famous person you judged?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Uh, that'd be Natalie Portman.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie Portman?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Yes, and I remember her paper.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She was in the Science Talent Search?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yes, she was in the top three hundred.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:17Speaker 01

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

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  That's why I remembered it, I especially liked it.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even before she was famous?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I had no idea who this was.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Her paper was judged entirely on its scientific merit.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I had no idea who she was. It was about an enzyme to digest waste paper, make hydrogen fuel. I really liked the project, so...

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:47Speaker 01

  She does.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She plays an astrophysicist.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Someone thought to tap into that.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you go off to college, and you're in the same graduating class as Al Gore?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're like Forrest Gump.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  At the time...

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every place you turn, there's some famous thing that spawns off of the moment that you've had in life?

• 3:08Speaker 01

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

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:29Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:34Speaker 01

  That's right. And Tommy Lee Jones.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Oh, that'd be nice.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so after college, you went to graduate school.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Princeton.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Princeton, got your PhD there.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Then I went to Caltech.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ran away for a little bit.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And then I went to, uh, Cambridge.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  University of Cambridge, England.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  And then I came back, I joined the faculty.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've been there, been there ever since?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Been there ever since.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm delighted that you were there while I...

• 4:04Speaker 01

  And likewise, that you were there. When you first appeared at Princeton, I said, "This is somebody I gotta get to know."

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So, we were friends there.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we co-taught a class.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  We did.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and we wrote a textbook.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  We did.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a third, the three tenors, someone called it.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Michael Strauss. Michael Strauss.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael Strauss.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when you look at this, you don't think, oh, I need to take a class with it. This, you just sit down and read this. This is like a readable.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  For a reader.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coffee table book. One of my chapters in here is, why Pluto is not a planet. Chapter nine. I didn't notice that. Did you know that was true?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I get it now.

• 4:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm only just now realizing that.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Now I get it.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm trying to find, what are some of the biggest numbers we can possibly think of?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can, so how many people on Earth? Okay? How many stars in the galaxy? How many galaxies in the universe? And then you realize, you can say, well, how many atoms are in a star? In the universe? You add that up, and then you realize you run out of things to count. When there are no more particles left, there's not, so how would you ever need a number bigger than that? And then you get big numbers by asking about combinations of things. How many outcomes? How many scenarios? And the number one on that list was how many chess games you can play. And you ran off and gave me that number.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 5:50Speaker 01

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

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would mean it's an endgame and you're just wandering around the board.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  They don't let you wander around forever.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't want you to.

• 6:26Speaker 01

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

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  See, that's the longest possible game.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're trying to calculate the maximum number.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  The maximum number, okay.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 6:58Speaker 01

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

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All eight pawns go by, go by each other.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the longest.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My pawns take out four of your pawns.

• 7:31Speaker 01

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

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get some other piece.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Some other piece.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it, got it.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Your pawn gets to capture his knight.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And then you got your two pawns lined up and they can slide by the other pawns.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  You want them to all make queens at the end. So you, you want to make the game last as long as possible. Now, if you want to know how many, uh, moves are on the first move of chess, that's 20. You move each of the pawns one or two spaces, you can move the knights out. So there's 20 different moves for white. There are 20 replies for black. So the number of combinations on move one is 400.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twenty squared.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Twenty times twenty. You gotta keep multiplying by the number of combinations, okay? You wanna find a chess position that has the most possible combinations of moves. And I worked on this to find a position that I thought was...

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had anyone else done this before?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  What people had done was they said, "What's the most moves white could make?" Okay, 218. Some guy figured that out. But the other king, the king was kinda stalemate it, so they decided like, "One move, I resign." You know, so, so, uh...

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 8:52Speaker 01

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

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So, I found a setup where there were 133 moves for white and 124 replies for black. Okay, and multiplied together, that was over 16,000 combinations on that. And I figured that's pretty much maximal. Each player had eight queens on the board, not nine, and I had a knight there. You don't want all your pieces there, they start blocking each other. You know, and so if you put the rooks and everything on there, you get less. You get less combinations. So, this may not be the maximum combination was, but it's hard to imagine that this number is not enough. You know, 'cause it's better than most of them, combinations, okay?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I'm trying to get upper limit here. So, you'd have to take this number, 16,000 and something, the product of those two numbers, and you have to take that to the 5,900th power. Multiply that out, it's 10 to the 25,000 to the power 25,000. So, it's a 1 with 25,000 zeros after it.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Possible games.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Uh, upper limit.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Upper limit.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  On the possible games. You can knock off about, knowing how many there are at the beginning, and how many they'd have to be when there are only a queen and two kings left. You can knock this down to like... Twenty-three thousand, seven hundred and twenty-five or something. But, but I wouldn't bother doing that. What's a few, what's a thousand orders of magnitude between people? Anyway.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between friends, a thousand orders of magnitude.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Twenty-five thousand, ten to the twenty-five thousand. It's bigger than a googol.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By far.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  That's ten to the hundreds.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  And, and sometimes you see people say, there's the number of chess games, ten to a hundred and twenty power. No, that's, it's much bigger than that. And so, that's my upper limit.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so your upper limit includes completely ridiculous games.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  You play ridiculous games.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you did the calculation properly.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  It's a proper upper limit. I'm safely below that.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  We put that in the book.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I put that in the book.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Put that right in the book.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 11:12Speaker 01

  You had the number of quantum states.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's just nothing but big numbers, just bandied about here. Yeah, so that was our attempt. I taught the first third of the course.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, Michael Strauss, our colleague, the middle third, and you were the final, taking us into cosmology.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the like. So, do you follow chess tournaments today? I, I, I took you to the, was it the International Chess Championship?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  This was to see Carlson defend his championship.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magnus Carlsen.

• 11:43Speaker 01

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

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was at South Street Seaport in Manhattan. They had the world championship there.

• 11:55Speaker 01

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

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 12:14Speaker 01

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

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he was like fifteen or something at the time.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Well, he won.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you were good.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  That's what somebody told me to swim me once.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  But anyway, Travis, because of you, they took you backstage, you'll say why? And, and you got to give my number on the broadcast to the world.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, to tell the world how many possible chess.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  So this is my big contribution to chess.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do I have to say here? Because all these people are, they live this game and I just, I'm an interloper. But yes, I did tap that content.

• 12:52Speaker 01

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

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 12:57Speaker 01

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

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For everybody outside.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  For everybody outside to see.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an acoustically insulated space.

• 13:16Speaker 01

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

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  It was, it was wonderful.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 13:25Speaker 01

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

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. I guess they give celebrity status to that. I.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It points to the.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 13:37Speaker 01

  You're just starting him off bad.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 14:04Speaker 01

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

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 14:25Speaker 01

  You pulled a fast one on it.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I noticed.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That if I didn't move a chess piece that was highly expected of me and I instead moved a different piece, it stumped its strategy.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it kept thinking, he's gonna move this other piece, cuz that's gonna give him an advantage. And it organized its strategies around that expectation.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when I started moving other pieces, it got flummoxed. And I found it would make mistakes at that point.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just went in for the kill. And I was able to beat it three out of four times, when before I realized this, I was 0 for 6 or something. But I feel bad, that's not right.

• 15:08Speaker 01

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

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ever.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Against the computer.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yes, you try to conquer territory.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And surround territory.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's considered way more challenging than chess, is it not?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  They say.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Um, but anyway, the thing was, you might consider a really stupendous program for Go, would just conquer, you know, like, three quarters of the field, you know, that kinda thing. But no, wants to win by just one stone. Just one extra square. It wants to win the easiest way possible. So the games, i- it's not quite what you think. You wanna spend, and in chess.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The computer doesn't have testosterone.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  It just wants to win.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Win even by a little bit.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  But that's better, that's quicker.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't wanna just conquer.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And slay you.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't wanna chase your king around the board, and it just wants to win.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  You know? Some of the games are a little dull, there'd be a lot of fireworks in these computer versus computer games, sacrifices and everything, then have, it wins by one pawn. So, the players today, they, they are, I would say, machine assisted.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  They train on the computer. They memorize the openings. They remember, you know, Carlson can look at a chess.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magnus Carlsen, yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Magnus, he's saying, oh, that was, you know, so and so versus so and so, 1934. You know, I mean, he can memorize all those openings and, and then they play with all those openings. But now they know the other players are doing that too. So what you have to do is make a suboptimal move at some point. Drives that person, your opponent off onto the territory they don't know. And you've practiced that variant. So you, it's weird because you'd think the best strategy is just to make the best move all the time. But they have to get the human opponent off track.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 17:43Speaker 01

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

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And they're doing that today.

• 18:04Speaker 02

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

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the latest on the Fermi paradox?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  The Fermi paradox?

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there some, is there emergent thinking on this?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Well, uh.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without even warp drives or anything, right?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  One tenth the velocity of light.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One tenth the speed of light, very modest for any modern civilization.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And still not us, we're not in that category yet. And. If that's the case, the galaxy could and should be teeming with alien civilizations. So where are they? What's the latest?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  That's what he said. Where are they?

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 19:22Speaker 01

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

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:33Speaker 01

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

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know he did this calculation. Brilliant steps to make. Christian Huygens.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Dutch polymath.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And I own one of his books, a charming book, "Celestial Worlds Discovered." He just speculates on what life would be like on all the planets. So, he looked at the sky and said, "Maybe if the sun is ordinary, so are these other stars." Is that right?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is just like the sun, how far away would it have to be to be as dim as we see it?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given how bright the sun is

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in front of us today? To even have that thought?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  To have that thought is brilliant. Yes.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:50Speaker 01

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

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Edwin Hubble, the man, not the telescope.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Not the tel-- they named it after him.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Anyway, they're all fleeing from us, and the further away, the faster. It's a homogeneous expansion away from us. We did not go fall for the, we're not gonna say we're at the center anymore. We're not gonna fall for that again after Copernicus. We're gonna say, why would we be in the one special galaxy for which all the others are fleeing? No, no. If it looks that way to us, it must look that way to everyone. You live on any galaxy, it's, you've got to think that you're the center and you've got to see it all of them expanding away from you. Then you get a homogeneous expansion like pennies on an expanding balloon. Each penny sees all the others moving away from it and it thinks it's at the center. And then you get the homogeneous models of general relativity, Big Bang models.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And Gaumau and his students Herman and Alfred then calculated that there would be hot in the early universe and that we could see the microwave background radiation left over from that today.

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of that based on this assumption?

• 22:02Speaker 01

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

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got the Nobel Prize for that first measurement.

• 22:22Speaker 01

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

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I slip in a quick story there?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is under Bush. And George Gama came up.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As someone who could earn this. And I'm there on a panel with biologists and geologists, they don't know this prediction. They don't, and so I strongly made the case for George Gamow's prediction, given how fundamental it was to all of cosmology.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think he was still alive and not doing well. And I'm proud of myself for succeeding at this. And he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Science.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and I think his, his relatives came to, to pick it up. And part inspired by our conversation just about how, how much of a brilliant extrapolation of very basic information about our universe that that was.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

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

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a student, as a student.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he picked me up in his Rolls Royce.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  You know, and he loved Rolls Royces because, um, once the axle broke and Rolls Royce sent out a team to fix it. And he said, um, well, how much will that be? And they said Rolls Royce axles do not break. No fee, you know?

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when I visited Cornell, I was picked up.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  By Carl Sagan.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By Carl Sagan in his Porsche.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  He had a Porsche?

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Porsche.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Well, they had that in common.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my who picked me up and what kind of car story.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  You got an equally good one.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I interrupted, so where were you?

• 24:34Speaker 01

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

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not fundamentally differently from the way Gamow.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Copernican principle layered onto the data available to him at the time. Okay.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And Huygens.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Huygens, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yes, right. So here's the answer from the Copernican principle, and it's very simple. A significant fraction of all the extraterrestrial and intelligent observers must still be sitting on their home planet, or else you'd be special.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  If there's a giant galactic empire out there that we don't know about, they've conquered the whole galaxy and they're just hiding, you know? They don't want the likes of us to know. We're in a little experiment for them, you know?

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would make us special.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Because if you're an intelligent observer, you should be one of the people in the big, the, the big one.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:37Speaker 01

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

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did he then say?

• 26:19Speaker 01

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

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I know, that's crazy.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't think of everything.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People got Nobel prizes off of black holes.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That he didn't predict off of his own theory.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  He predicted gravity waves.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That got Nobel prizes too.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crumbs off his plate.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  He didn't even get it for general relativity.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I know, that's crazy.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let me restate what I think I understand is your point.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the Copernican principle, as published in 1993 in Nature.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 28:20Speaker 01

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

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you're a colonist.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  You're a colonist. You were born in New York. We didn't colonize them as Americans.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't bring my skin color into this colony thing.

• 28:41Speaker 01

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

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Traceable there, yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  We're both born, and, yeah, and, and mo- the majority of the people on Earth today are, I'll call them colonists because they came from the original.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Majority of the people on Earth.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Were not from the home continent.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Their lineage is not from that location.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They arrived there ultimately.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Africa as the point of origin.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:07Speaker 01

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

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Africa, okay.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  That's our home planet.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, okay.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Now you see.

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, you analogize the galaxy to the surface of the Earth.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Africa is.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  The home planet.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The home planet, and all these satellite places humans are living.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would be all the planets across the galaxy.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Because so many more people do.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because so many.

• 29:41Speaker 01

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

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Now, for example.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying all the aliens out there are just like us?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  They don't have to be just like us, no.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just in terms of statistically. Just their homebodies on their home planet.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  If most of the intelligent observers in the universe are not living on their home planet, why aren't you one of them?

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we are an intelligent observer, then we should not be living on our home planet.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  And the fact that we're still on the Earth tells us something. For example, what's the chance that we will colonize the whole galaxy? There's a billion habitable planets out there. The Copernican Principle says the odds against us doing that in the future are a billion to one against. Why? Because if that's the truth, if that's what happens, what's the chance that you are living on the first planet out of a billion that people live on? A billion to one against. And let me make this a little, give you another example. I know that there's 11 people born in Antarctica. That's all. Are you born in Antarctica?

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  They're born south of everyone else. So you're not likely to wake up and find out that you're the most southernmost persons ever born. You're not one of them. There's only 11 of them. There's 8 billion of people out there.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight billion minus 11.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  So you're not, you're not likely to be one of them.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  So this puts some constraints on our future prospects. Now, if you ask me, can we become a multi-planet species? Like two planets, like us and Mars? Well, if that happens, you're on planet one instead of planet two, there's a 50% chance we could do that. Let's do that. That might as much as improve our long-term survival prospects of our species.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  By a factor of two, because we'd have two chances instead of one.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Well, um, I gave a talk on this.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Elon Musk was the other person giving the talk.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  And I said, my spiel.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  It's good for our survival and we have some lifeboats.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

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

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Not on impact.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  He said that.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've missed the second half of that sentence.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  It's an important half, okay. But after that, he said, "I like that talk," you know, you can hear him on tape saying that. "I like that previous talk, that was my talk." And since then, he has definitely used a survival argument. In fact, Carl Sagan wrote me once. He said, "I think you've come up with the best argument for going to Mars, even though I wrote a book on it, gave ten different reasons, this one seems really good." So, so, these space colonies are a very good bargain because you can send like eight people, thirty, thirty people. And they can live there on indigenous materials and chemicals that you have there. Mars has an atmosphere and so forth. It's a great bargain because they do all the work.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And it's not that you're gonna send a billion people there, no. No, that's not happening, but you can send a small number of people there. They can grow, doubling in population over the years. And, and so it's a great bargain and it's something we certainly should be doing for our survival.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why I disagree. I disagree. You'd rather just stay on Earth. Well, what happens if we have a really bad epidemic on Earth? Because, I, I, it's no, sorry, I, it's not that I disagree. It's not that I disagree. I'm a practical guy. Okay? I, I'm a dreamer when circumstances justify it. Okay. Otherwise, I just tell it like it is. Okay? You want to pitch tent on Mars. Grow a civilization there. So humans are on two planets. So if something bad happens on one planet, we have survivors on the other planet. There we go. All I'm saying is, everything bad we can think of that could possibly put life at risk here. Yes. The effort to prevent that, to me, Yeah. it seems,

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is less than shipping a billion people to Mars. No, no, no, you don't ship a billion people. You slim a small number. You know how many people colonize? Fine, okay, so you put some fertile people on Mars. A few. Fertile people on Mars, they start making babies, okay? And Leave them alone after that. Okay, after a hundred years, let's say, there's a colony of a thousand people. Let's say. Wait 600 years. Wait a thousand years. A thousand years. Yeah. All right. How long will it take for them to get billions? We'll have 10 billion by then. You don't necessarily need billions. All I'm saying is Over there. All I'm saying is you have two planets. Now something bad is gonna happen on one planet, is the other planet just gonna say, oh,

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we planned against this. You all just die and we will carry forth the genome. That's not how this is gonna play out. You're trying to protect the species Yeah. in case something bad happens on one planet. You should do everything to do that. If you have the power to live on two planets. Yes. You're not gonna allow the other planet to die. You're gonna ship them over or fix the problem in your, in your bio laboratory or deflect the asteroid. You try. If you have the power to ship people to Mars and terraform it, you have the power to deflect an asteroid that might put life at risk on Earth. And it seems to me, you have the power to reverse any

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  geo-engineered problem that we created for ourselves on Earth.

• 36:03Speaker 01

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

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For them.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  For them. If life didn't go out there, we wouldn't, wouldn't be here as land animals. The ocean is always gonna be better.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Eggs.

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eggs.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  They're little, it's water in there? It's like, it's taking the sea with them. Our blood is sort of salt, like salty water, you know? Bringing the nutrients to our cells, you know?

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So an egg can't survive outside of its shell, yet.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  The chickens, yeah.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The chickens, they can't do it.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It won't come out until it can.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  That's a little spacesuit.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little spacesuit.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I have on a spacesuit, that's my egg. And I'll be in that until I can live outside the spacesuit.

• 37:06Speaker 01

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

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Living on the land is harder than living in the ocean. The species that go extinct are ones that are like on one island, right? We, we got a whole universe out there that we could go, that we're standing on the shores of this universe, as you would say, as you have said. And are we gonna go out there?

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The surface of the Earth.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Is like the shore, that's Carl, okay. Yeah, so, so, so I say...

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably Andrian, she has that.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  It's a smart thing to do, to, to go to Mars, and with something we could do in our generation.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  I'm just saying.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rich, over the years, you've shared with me exotic ideas about how the universe got here. But they're in the trash bin of failed.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 38:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliant ideas that have failed. But I remember two of them.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So some symmetry law got broken in the early universe, a cherished symmetry law.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That for every matter particle, you have an antimatter particle.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 39:40Speaker 01

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

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Inflation does a better job of this.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That predates inflation, just barely.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It predates inflation, yeah. Okay.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 40:01Speaker 01

  1980s.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So, so, so the, the story here is that I had done a paper on the gravitational field of a tachyon. I found an exact solution for the gravitational field of a tachyon. This is a hypothetical particle that would go faster than light. Only faster than light. Has to be going faster. You can't slow it down to light speed, you know? You see one traveling here, it could have infinite speed, you know? It's, it's world line could be simultaneous in some reference frame. Okay. And I found a very interesting general relativity solution for this. And it was, it had a Chernykov cone.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Of radiation, gravitational radiation trailing behind it like a sonic boom. There was a cone of gravitational radiation coming behind it.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 40:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then it makes a shock wave.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  A shock wave, right. And this is expanding behind it. But in front of it, there was a collapsing gravitational wave of, these are called advanced waves. These are ones that go backward in time. Photons go forward in time. That's an asymmetry in the universe. Photons go forward in time only. Shake an electron here, photon goes to Alpha Centauri, gets there four years later. Then come from Alpha Centauri four years ago. When you shake an electron, electromagnetic waves don't come in from infinity and meet you there. That would be photons going back to the past. This tachyon solution lives in a universe that's time symmetric. Photons can go either to the future or to the past.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  It goes along a straight world line because it's not accelerated because the energy coming in from the Chernykov cone in the future in the front is being made up for by the cone going out the back. If you look at a cross-section of this, it looks like two blades of a pair of scissors that are tipped at a small angle and they're moving at speed of light. The intersection point can go faster than the speed of light. Like you can close a pair of scissors, the intersection point can move. That doesn't transmit any.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not an actual thing moving.

• 42:13Speaker 01

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

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 42:31Speaker 01

  That's right. Like you tip them at right angles. You move one foot forward this way and one foot forward this way with other scissors. The intersection point moves square root of two further down the line. And nothing's really moving faster than the speed of light. So I had a model where there was the big bang at the center and the matter particles went into the future light cone of that event. And they all went up here.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To become us.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  To become an open universe up here that would expand forever. The antimatter particles went backward in time. Because Wheeler showed that you could, a positron was equal to an electron going backward in time. This was an idea he called Feynman excitedly over the phone.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is John Archibald Wheeler.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Two thirty in the morning.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Student of Albert Einstein.

• 43:19Speaker 01

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

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because every electron has identically the same mass.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It's the same electron.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this model, it's the same electron.

• 44:08Speaker 01

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

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 44:16Speaker 01

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

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 44:27Speaker 01

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

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So therefore, it's the same electron.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we only see it at the intersection point in the present.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Of our epoch, yes. In our epoch.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all the electrons are just passing their...

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Going through.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're going through our moving slice through time.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Right. So it doesn't, it's a wrong idea because you've got more electrons and positrons. Also, you can get a, a, a virtual pair to form in the vacuum.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And suddenly, there's an electron-positron pair. It lasts for a little while and then it annihilates again. These and Feynman showed that these existed in the vacuum and so forth. And you had to use them calculating, you know, the magnetic moment of certain things and so forth. And so we know that it's not all one electron. Okay, so I had the matter going-

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yes, well, here's an isolated pair you made out of nothing. That's a little loop of string. It's not connected. It's not connected to the other. It's not all part of one piece. So that has to come from the physics of the electric field and so forth. Okay, I mean, when I was at Caltech, I audited Mr. Feynman's course on quantum electrodynamics. I didn't do the homework. I just audited and sat in the back. And when he got to this point, he said, "When I figured out that I could use the electrons, the positrons, electrons going backwards in my Feynman diagrams, I nearly fell off my chair." So this was a very important part of Feynman diagrams.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And so then the tachyons would go, the antimatter goes in the past light cone of this event, and then the tachyons go out toward the present of this event, that big space between the absolute future and the absolute past. So inflation does a much better job of this, frankly.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 46:32Speaker 01

  That happened to be wrong.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess, how brilliant could it be, if it's wrong?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Well, I thought of bubble universes. This was in 1982. Guth had this problem of how does inflation end uniformly? He wanted, it was like he wanted to boil water on a pot and have it turn into steam, have the vacuum energy of the early inflating universe turn into particles. He wanted to do that all at once. Then the universe would be uniform. But unfortunately, it would form bubbles, and that's not uniform, and we don't see that. So my answer to this was, we live in one of the bubbles. The bubble universe, it expands, it turns into an open universe. It's an, and, and from inside the bubble, you just see toward the past, the uniform vacuum,

• 47:22Speaker 01

  and you don't see the other bubbles yet. And, and so, this is a solution to this problem. And Linde came up with the same idea a few months later. And, and then there was Albrecht and Steinhardt, again in short order. And so, their thing, they did particle physics with it, as well as general relativity, and that became what's known as new inflation, so that's a better idea.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because it had some truth to it.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  That's always good, yes. And so, the, but, but, but let me tell you this. The Higgs boson has this Mexican hat potential you've seen. It's, it starts off with a large vacuum energy. You're at the top center of the Mexican hat. You're a marble on top there. You roll off, and you land somewhere in the bottom rim, brim of the thing. And that's where we are today, not very much vacuum energy. And the boson can oscillate then, and that oscillation, that gives you a positive mass for the Higgs boson, okay? Because it's concave down there. But in the early universe, it's convex. And this means that m squared, the mass squared, is a negative number.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  That means that it's an imaginary mass, and that means it's tachionic. It's like a tachyon in the early universe. So when the vacuum decays, you get something called a tachyon condensate. And it's like you've created tachyons. It's turned into tachionic Higgs bosons that, that are, behave like tachyons. But instead of having a wave function that's sinusoidal, they have a wave function that is exponential.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  And so they decay very quickly and they don't last very long.

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exponential decay.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Exponential decay, you know, so you, some people say, well, it's not really a free tachyon, but Whitten's written papers on tachionic thing and my student Matthew Hedrick has written papers on tachionic condensate in the early universe. So maybe tachyons have a role in our universe still.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll keep them on my radar.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And recently.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On my past or my future radar.

• 49:34Speaker 01

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

• 50:15Speaker 01

  there. The virtual pair is like a little time machine, goes up as electron, comes back as a positron. It makes a little loop.

• 50:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talk about this in your book.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time travel in Einstein's universe.

• 50:25Speaker 01

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

• 50:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is what we observe.

• 50:49Speaker 01

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

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Post-diction.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Post-diction, we would say, yes. So, so, uh, so it has a number of interesting features, and, and there's about six different ideas out there.

• 51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And, and we're one of them.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  This is what you do if you're a theorist.

• 51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were the first to introduce me to the concept of a gen particle?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 51:44Speaker 01

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

• 51:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I know that one.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And, um...

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Christopher Reeve is in that.

• 51:49Speaker 01

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

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His old physics professor.

• 52:09Speaker 01

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

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I think it was a locket of some kind, not a watch.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  It's a watch, it's a, it's a watch.

• 52:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You sure it's a watch?

• 52:37Speaker 01

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

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she had handed him this...

• 52:53Speaker 01

  The watch.

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The watch.

• 52:55Speaker 01

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

• 52:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in time.

• 52:59Speaker 01

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

• 53:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he successfully goes back in time on the advice of his physics professor. Yes.

• 53:09Speaker 01

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

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The time travel.

• 53:27Speaker 01

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

• 53:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He forgot to swap out his currency to be appropriate.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  He wanted to. He did had to do everything authentic.

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 01

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

• 54:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And gives it to her.

• 54:05Speaker 01

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

• 54:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  J I N.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  J I N N.

• 54:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  N gin.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  It's like a genie.

• 54:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Gin. And and it has a circular world line. It has no.

• 54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one created it. No one destroyed it.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It lives in a time loop.

• 54:27Speaker 01

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

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marty is playing a tune by Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry's cousin.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 54:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hired to perform at this dance.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's Marty play.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Right, you are.

• 54:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's Marty play.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Chuck Berry song.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 55:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there it is.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  The song itself is a gin.

• 55:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Song is a gin song.

• 55:21Speaker 01

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

• 55:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't get that.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  I didn't get that.

• 55:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was never created.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It lives in this loop.

• 55:37Speaker 01

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

• 56:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was, he was an interloper, a wealthy Italian guy. He just bought a seat on the trip.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he kept very good records of every day.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Which you can do.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 56:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As, you know, when the sun hits the, it's a day has gone by.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comes around.

• 56:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he thinks it's Monday.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 56:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whenever, but everyone else says it's Sunday, or whichever order this was.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 56:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 56:39Speaker 01

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

• 56:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it happened on Magellan's voyage.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Right. So you can have a gen particle. That's an electron, one electron. You can have a gen particle that's more complicated, like the watch. And I would just say the watch is less probable to find.

• 57:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Like you have a virtual particle, it's electron and positron. You could have a virtual, you know, Leonard Nimoy and his antimatter counterpart form and then disappear again. That's less probable to happen than, than the, um, than the single electron.

• 57:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, you would agree with me that this song that Marty was saying, that's a, that's a gen song?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  That's a very good insight.

• 57:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gen song?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. That's because of you. I didn't want to thought that.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Oh, well.

• 57:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wouldn't have thought to think that.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You thought of that.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rich, I've kept a list my whole life of movies that portrayed genius behavior in people. I was always just intrigued by that.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it'd be fun to show your kids.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just that there are things you can value, like being smart is one of them.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 58:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Right. This happened in the movie Lucy.

• 59:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lucy, yes.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  She's...

• 59:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scarlett Johansson.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  She's getting smarter and smarter because she's taking some drugs.

• 59:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  She's using more and more of her mind.

• 59:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  She's...

• 59:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 59:20Speaker 01

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

• 59:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Knocks the guns down and...

• 59:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I love this movie. My... my wife's named Lucy. She's very smart, but I haven't caught her levitating things around the house yet. I mean, it's not something... The iPhone is not just ten times better than the Cray from computer from nineteen seventy. It's a hundred thousand times basically more memory, hundred thousand times as faster. And it's not levitating anything, you know, so I, I, I agree with you.

• 1:00:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bradley Cooper, one of his early, early hits. And he.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Took a pill or some kind of.

• 1:00:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes it happens.

• 1:00:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:01:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did Natalie Portman, who you was judge of her science fair project? Did she become a scientist?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  No, she found something she liked better.

• 1:01:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is my point.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  She not wasting her time doing that.

• 1:01:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is my point. We see what a kid does really well and, and all the adults crowd around and we force them into these things. But let him be a kid. You know, the psychologists want to get a hold of your kid. And someone else says, let him be a kid. Otherwise they, they won't get socialized, they won't, you know.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  There's a movie gifted like that.

• 1:01:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gifted, yes. Yes, a girl.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that Jodie Foster, they're real stars in these movies.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But meanwhile, you have the authorities who want to. Sweep the kid away and again, on the assumption that kids like that become adults like that.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  When Gauss was six, the teacher, he'd done something naughty and she made him add up all the numbers from one to a hundred. And he said.

• 1:02:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This Gauss, the brilliant Gauss.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Yes, and he thought about it. He said, well, I could pair the one with the hundred. That's a hundred and one. He pairs the two with the ninety-nine, that's a hundred and one. And there are fifty pairs like this and he got the answer, which is five thousand fifty, you know. And he just says five thousand fifty, you know. But there's a method to it, you see. But he was six. So, so, you know, Mozart, you know, there's some people that are like this, but, but a lot of people flower later. They show up later. So, all different things can happen.

• 1:02:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so the teacher gave Gauss that task just to.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Punish him.

• 1:02:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Punish him. It was like.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To shut up and go to the corner and figure this out.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  He came back right with the answer.

• 1:02:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, didn't even, in the time it took him to walk to the corner.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He had the answer.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he say this?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he thought he was born in the wrong time.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He might have been somebody.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Might have been more, might have been more, that's right.

• 1:03:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then they have the autism movies where they have the.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what they used to call.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Savant.

• 1:03:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, the savants.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Remember.

• 1:03:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rain Man, you got, you got.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People pull up what day of the week, a date that you give them, no matter where that is.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:03:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pull it out of their head.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm intrigued by all of these movies. Another one had John Travolta in it, Phenomenon.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I enjoyed that one. He was hit by lightning. Because you need some reason for your brain to be different.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 1:03:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's hippie-lining and then he's like really smart.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And but they couldn't resist and he's levitating things as well. Couldn't resist that.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:04:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a kid, I remembered reading Flowers for Algernon.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only later to learn it became a movie.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, called Charlie.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think they had Cliff Robertson in it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in this, as a kid, I think he was mentally very delayed. And there was an experimental drug that they would give to him. And they decided to test it on him because it had worked on mice.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  A mouse.

• 1:04:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A mouse.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Algernon.

• 1:04:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Algernon.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely.

• 1:05:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  He was a good-hearted person.

• 1:05:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, he's a good-hearted person. You just see these mean people.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they started doing the drug on him and he got smarter and smarter.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he started outsmarting the people who were mean to him.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they rejected him because he was no longer someone they could poke fun at. And then we learn how the story ends, right?

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Drug wears off.

• 1:05:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the mouse dies.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Oh, well, worse.

• 1:05:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he did.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:06:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, I don't mind a system that wants to find the smart people in the group. No problems with that at all, however one defines being smart. But if you now put people in a category, and define that category in such a way that no one else can participate, even if they try hard and succeed, then there's something wrong with that, to me. I, I, it doesn't sit well within me. When I was a kid, I was identified by the US Department of Education, Office of the Gifted and Talented. And by being so recognized, I had access to certain opportunities.

• 1:07:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I thought to myself, they call it gifted and talented. Gifted, what is a gift? Somebody hands you something. Did you earn it? Did you work for it? No, a gift. And I wanted that branch of the US government to be renamed Office of the People Who Work Hard. Office of the People Who Are Devoted to Succeeding. That way, if you're not branded as gifted, you can say, well, let me just try harder. I'll try harder next time. I'll study harder. And yes, some people will learn faster than others for whatever, you know, biochemical, neurological reasons, but so what? I'll work harder than you do, maybe to even be equal to you.

• 1:08:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if I keep at it, maybe I'll be better than you. And the system had no way to find that. And so, and, and can I give an example?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Princeton.

• 1:09:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Princeton University.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:09:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You live in Princeton, don't you?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Right. This was a victory.

• 1:09:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what I wanted to say, and this is what I did say. You know what I wanted to say? I want to say, "F*** you!" Okay? That's my... First, I don't get your high score, no teachers pointing to me I will have any literary ability in the future. Now you want to use my writing as an exemplar? To test people on your exam? Something's wrong here! Uh, okay. That was on the inside. On the outside, I said, "Yes, I gave you permission." But I was very disturbed by the fact that things can unfold that way.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Well, they were.

• 1:10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, that was even before.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My bestselling book, okay? Which was on the bestseller list for eighty-one weeks, okay? None of them, none of them would have, it's not like I was a late bloomer. I knew what I wanted to do with life early, just like you did, okay?

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Gotta give them credit, they're smart enough to ask you to write the essay. Let me, let me give you an example. Bob Vanderby and I wrote a book.

• 1:11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bob Vanderby, he's our co-author on.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  On the 3D book.

• 1:11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The 3D version of our textbook, yes.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's an engineered photographer extraordinaire.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  He worked on this 3D book with us and.

• 1:11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  3D objects in the universe, yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Yes, I would like people to start playing 3D chess, you know?

• 1:11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's above my head.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  On a four by four by four grid, you know?

• 1:11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight by eight serves me fine.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  What's the same number? Four by times four by four.

• 1:11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  I'll just speak up for 3D chess.

• 1:11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I didn't know 3D chess has only four by fours?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Well, it was proposed in eighteen fifty-one on an eight by eight by eight board. Then it was popular in nineteen oh seven on a five by five by five board. I think they should use a four by four by four board because it has the same number of places for the pieces to sit. You know how it works, the rook can't just go north, south and east, west. It can also go up and down.

• 1:12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  So anyway, we worked on this 3D book together and Bob and I had written. This book sizing up the universe.

• 1:12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wonderful.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  And we asked.

• 1:12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ways to compare different relative sizes of things in the universe.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Right, and we asked. We asked you to write a blurb for us for the front of the book.

• 1:12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I write a blurb?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  You did.

• 1:12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it good?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Well, here it was. You said, "A feast for the eyes, a banquet for the mind." And I said, "How did he come up with that?" It's terrific.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  That's amazing. That's an amazing sentence.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  A banquet for the mind? Where'd you, you know, this is terrific.

• 1:13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  It's a terrific sentence.

• 1:13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no English teacher would have said any of that.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  And if Shakespeare couldn't find that, he invented the word.

• 1:13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my latest book, I invented seven words.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not, not to show off or anything. There was a sentence where I needed a word that didn't exist. And so I created it.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have one word in the Oxford.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 1:13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know this?

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never, I.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  You got one in?

• 1:13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one in. Not on purpose, it just is.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 1:13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Manhattan Henge.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes!

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  And they.

• 1:13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they block traffic for reasons other than.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Con Ed digging holes in the street.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Right, that's great.

• 1:14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had ambition to just learn and enjoy the universe my whole life, as did you.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just didn't, I didn't want people telling me what I could or couldn't accomplish. I found that to be so counterproductive. We should have ways of measuring people's ambition. Because ultimately, I think that's where you win in your life's trajectory. From childhood into whatever is the professional status you seek.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Uh huh, okay.

• 1:14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Rich, we're about to rank films that feature genius.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna rank them. Now, the categories are S for superior and then A, B, C, D, E, F.

• 1:14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all you have to do is-

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Oh, these are grades plus A plus.

• 1:14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess the S would be an A plus.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Let's call it an A plus.

• 1:14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  E is not excellent. E is below D. Where would you rate the movie Charlie? Cliff Robertson in a role-

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Uh, that's an A. Because of his special performance when he was, uh, smart. I thought he was very effective there.

• 1:15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When he was smart, as an actor, he had a whole different facial-

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Look to his eyes. It twinkled somehow.

• 1:15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I don't know how he did that.

• 1:15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I'd give that a C.

• 1:15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  C?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I vaguely remember that movie, but I don't- They got even with everybody.

• 1:15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they got even with everybody, using their brilliance.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  I saw it, but I don't remember.

• 1:16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm gonna give it an A.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because-

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  They outsmarted the other people.

• 1:16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because-

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before then, no one, nerds got wedgie'd by the football quarterback.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what happened in 1984? The Apple Macintosh gets released. All of a sudden, computing comes into our home, into your classroom. And the jocks and all the beautiful people-

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Billionaires.

• 1:16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they wanna do well on their homework, or they need to be friends with the nerds.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I view that as transitional.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I titled it Revenge of the Nerds.

• 1:16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because all of a sudden, the richest people in the world were the nerds. Not the oil tycoons or the steel tycoons. Right. It was the geeks. Right. Who would have been rejected from all the party invitations. That's true. So I viewed it as an important movie in our culture. Okay, then. Even if as a movie, it might have only been a C. Alrighty then. But I gotta give it an A. Okay. Social, politically. Cultural importance, okay. Let's keep going. Real genius. If you didn't see that, I'll just rate it. I don't remember that. Okay. S. Oh my gosh. I didn't see that. S. I mean, think of Revenge of the Nerds, but a better film. I see. It had Val Kilmer in it. Oh, okay. And it's just some really smart kids just out of high school. Oh, okay. Pacific Tech. Okay. What was that?

• 1:17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, which school was that? The Pacific Tech. Real genius was a celebration. Yes. Of just being smarter than everybody else. Oh, okay. Look at how many movies are celebrations of people who are more athletic than everybody else. Right. Who are prettier or handsomer than everybody else. Right. This was a movie of people who are smarter than everybody else. There you go. And I found one error in it. Yes. There are others, but this one was. Okay. Okay? There's a vending machine and his friend comes in and sees him with this lab cutter. And he's cutting this cylinder. That's, the cylinder is smoking. And he says, what are you doing? And he says, oh, I'm cutting nitrogen.

• 1:18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So solidified nitrogen, okay? Like, what is he doing? And then he gets a little circular disc out of it. And he puts it in the vending machine. Gets the candy out. I see. That's good. I see. That's good. And the mistake they made was they said, what are you doing? He said, oh, it's liquid nitrogen, which of course it isn't, it's solid. I see. So they messed that one up. But just, so, so finally, being smart could be fun. Okay. Fun and irreverent, rather than weird and, and whatever else you might do with it. How about, you see Good Will Hunting?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what do you think of that with Matt Damon as the janitor turned math genius?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Uh, that's an A with some reservations.

• 1:19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I liked the, it's a deeper movie, you know.

• 1:19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  This is, and, and the psychiatrist, um, you know, Robin Williams won the Oscar for that. And he was very good and they explained his genius work in psychiatry, you know? And, and so the, the, the quibble I had was that, that the field medalist in the thing, he said, "I am nothing." This is Sarsgaard, you know? He said, "I am nothing." This guy's a, I mean, compared to this guy, I'm just, Matt Damon, I am nothing.

• 1:19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My work is worthless. Actor Sol, Sarsgaard.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Sarsgaard.

• 1:19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's the professor who had been a field medal winner, which you only win if you're younger than thirty. So he's later in his career.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. This is the, the highest achievement in mathematics.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Yes. I know field medalists and I think they think their w- work is important, but they're thrilled when they see somebody even better. It doesn't diminish what they've done, but for example, Roger Penrose came to Princeton one time. He gave a talk. He said, "Let me tell you what Stephen is thinking." This is Stephen Hawking.

• 1:20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  I mean, he's not gonna give his own talk. He's gonna tell you what Stephen is thinking.

• 1:20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So good people are that.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So they, they can, they can be good. They can feel great about the stuff they've accomplished, but recognize somebody of even greater accomplishments.

• 1:20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this movie.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  They can be happy with that.

• 1:20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't interview enough field medalists to know how he, he would have behaved in that situation.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  I thought, yes.

• 1:20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that's, you're gonna drop it a score for that reason?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I said an A with reservations.

• 1:20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right, hey. I'd give it an A.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of the story was more interesting and it was richer and it's a, it's a townie. You know, if you're a townie.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one gives you any respect if you're

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  live in the town of a very

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  highly respected university. In that case, it was Harvard.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you had the snooty Harvard students.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I thought it captured that very well. Having seen that and

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and live that. Okay, let's keep going. Uh, Lucy with Scarlett Johansson, how would you rate that?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you give it an S?

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Let's break format here, just for this one exception. Queen's Gambit. It was a TV mini-series on Netflix.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  I would actually give it an excellent or a superior, you know?

• 1:22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, as would I.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Because they went to the trouble to get grand, world champions and things to produce the chess moves for the movie.

• 1:22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were real chess moves?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Real chess moves.

• 1:22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did you know this?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Well, they told you.

• 1:22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  You know, later, you know, behind the scenes.

• 1:22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  They bragged about doing this. But, you know, that was very authentic.

• 1:22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause they're all just actors and they just do what the script tells them.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  And she practiced moving the chess pieces like she observed.

• 1:22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The way professionals would do it.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  They move them fast and kind of, you know, they have a certain style. There's a certain wrist action and a certain nonchalance about moving them. If you've played chess a lot, she studied that.

• 1:22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she is Anya Taylor-Joy.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  That was terrific.

• 1:22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  A superior, the top of the list.

• 1:22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was localized to being a chess genius. But you, you'd still explored what that meant around people who don't understand you.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what your abilities are.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you got a little bit inside her head where you saw her play chess on the ceiling.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  I, I like to see a movie that tries to explain to you how they got this idea.

• 1:23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inside the head.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  And they rarely do that.

• 1:23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  I'd say that's maybe a B.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  C, B, B.

• 1:23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm gonna give that one a B, cuz it was, I liked John Travolta in that role.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  It just didn't stick with me that much.

• 1:23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, gotcha. There's some biopics here.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so these are like real people who had sort of... What do you think of The Man Who Knew Infinity? Math genius.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Super, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  I mean, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.

• 1:23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jeremy Irons. I love him in anything, by the way. We interviewed Jeremy Irons after that movie came out.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  I know you did.

• 1:23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's in our archives.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yes, can I come and work with you?

• 1:24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I come work?

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  And they did, and they did a great thing on partitions, which is the ways of summing up to a given number for very high numbers, and they made a big contribution to that field. And I might mention, I mean, the amazing thing about Ramanujan was, he came up with these incredible formulas. You know your man Newton?

• 1:24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My man.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  He came up with an infinite series that gave equal to pi, okay? And the first term in his series, the biggest number that appeared in the formula, he's got a lot of N factorials and things like that, but the biggest number that appeared in the formula was 6, okay? And the first estimate from the, just the first term was pi equal 3. And then you add the second term, it gets more accurate, and each one, it converges quite rapidly. It beat all the old...

• 1:25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're talking about Newton's formula?

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Newton's formula. It beat all the old polygon formulas. It was a new, infinite series, new method. We use calculus. So, Ramanujan has this formula, and he just presents it, you know? And it's an infinite series like Newton's, and it's, but it's got these big numbers in it, like 26,390.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  There's an 1103. There's a 9801. There's a 396. What are these, what do these numbers have to do with pi? What is this formula? And, and the first term, the first term in his formula is accurate to pi to one part in 13 million, and then it gets better after that. And people were just astounded by these things that he came up with.

• 1:26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  I think the movie did a good job of conveying.

• 1:26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, let me hold your feet to the burner here. Because you've got A Beautiful Mind.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  I give that a super also.

• 1:26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get it, see? Uh, cause that was.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 1:26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, and who's, we're talking about?

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Nash.

• 1:26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Russell Crowe playing John Nash.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, John Nash would walk by every day.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  I went to see them, them film the movie.

• 1:26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Okay. And everybody was excited. Everyone was see Russell Crowe or, you know, um, everybody was excited when the filming was there. And as I'm driving in, I see Mr. Nash walking, you know, out of the physics building, you know? I, I just see him on my way in. And when I got, I talking to some of the people at the Concessions, I says, you know, I saw the real, everybody's here to see Russell Crowe. The real, meanwhile, the real Nash, John Nash, is walking about a block away from me. It was a bit surreal, but.

• 1:27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's order these then. Let's take back your grade for The Man Who Knew Infinity.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's just take it back for a moment.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have The Man Who Knew Infinity, Remuneration. We have IQ, also filmed at Princeton.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which portrayed Einstein.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Walter Matthau was in that, Meg Ryan. We have The Imitation Game.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Cumberbatch.

• 1:27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Playing Alan Turing.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Alan Turing, yeah, sure.

• 1:27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, The Theory of Everything with Stephen Hawking. All of these.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are epic movies, true stories, mostly true stories, with lead actors, like marquee actors playing in these roles. Just rank them for me.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Well, let's see.

• 1:28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amadeus.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  I think I might even put Amadeus first.

• 1:28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree. S.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  S.

• 1:28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amadeus, next.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which they didn't.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let's put that at an A. Okay?

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you're ranking these.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next one up?

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So would I, I think.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Because they explained how he thought of it.

• 1:28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know where Imitation Game comes from, that name?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't say it in the movie.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  They didn't?

• 1:29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. His original paper.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On...

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Is this about imitation of artificial intelligence?

• 1:29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His original paper on the Turing test.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Turing test, yeah, sure.

• 1:29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't call it the Turing test, he called it the Imitation Game.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you interact with a computer.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the computer pretends it's a human and makes you think it's human. And if it can make you think it's human, that was counted as official AI.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Turing did for computer stuff what Gödel did for mathematical. Show there was computer programs that you couldn't call an algorithm that would say when something would end because you'd get into these logical self contradictions.

• 1:29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you, did you know Gödel at Princeton?

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  I saw Gödel.

• 1:29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You saw him?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  I saw him walking.

• 1:29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  That's... Godel.

• 1:30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  I was impressed.

• 1:30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Uh. He did general relativity, the first time machine and general relativity did. That wasn't even his main field.

• 1:30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  He did the rotating universe, that you could do time travel to the past. It was the first solution, nineteen forty-eight, that showed that general relativity could have time travel solutions.

• 1:30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then he kicked math in his ass after that.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Well, I'd think he did that before.

• 1:30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  You know, he'd already, he'd already done that.

• 1:30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so where would you put IQ?

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  That is possible, you know? But, um, I thought it was charming.

• 1:30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, charming is not enough to get a high score from you.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Well, so that's why I'm giving it a B.

• 1:30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, see, I'd give it a C.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Really? Okay, well, we're sort of on the same page.

• 1:30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, relative to these other biopics?

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Yes, okay, well, I, I gave it a B.

• 1:30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  (laughing).

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  I may be easier or greater than you.

• 1:31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  (laughing).

• 1:31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, how about Searching for Bobby Fischer?

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Maybe that's even, even the super category. Uh, it's, it's, um, for this one great line in it.

• 1:31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That has Ben Kingsley in it, right?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Ben Kingsley is playing the chess.

• 1:31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coach.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Guru, and I think your son studied with the actual guy.

• 1:31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he had a son who got good at chess when he, he'd already studied with him when he.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beat you.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  He beat me.

• 1:31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He played you in chess.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so, so.

• 1:31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He beat you pretty quickly.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  (laughing). I have a photo of you just holding your head, like, looking at the chess.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  (laughing).

• 1:31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  So, so, there's this one line in the movie that's just magical. He, he's trying to convince the father that he should let his son be under the tutelage of him.

• 1:31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Because he, Ben Kingsley, wanted to see the next Bobby Fischer, because he loved chess so much, he wanted to see what magical creations, just like you're looking for a work of art. He wanted to see what the next Bobby Fischer would be like. And he goes to the Manhattan Chess Club, and this is the best chess club in the country. And he, he says, "Now, these are, over there is the American champion. Uh, over there is the Chinese grandmaster or something. And, and over there is this, uh, grandmaster or something." He says. You won't find Bobby Fischer here. He's asleep at your home in the bedroom.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Oh, and the father says, "I'll sign him up." "I'll sign him up to work with you."

• 1:32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's also based on a true story.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not know that.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Which shows that he had a talent for devoting yourself to something.

• 1:33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To being good at something.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  And getting to be the champion.

• 1:33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a bunch of movies that have kid geniuses, right? There's Matilda, that was fun and entertaining. There's baby geniuses, that was a little weird. That was kind of a fun premise, that baby talk can be decoded into actually fully intelligent conversations they're having with each other.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 1:33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought that was an interesting premise. But these are more sort of cartoony storylines than anything else. But anyway, I think we ranked enough of them there. None were a D or an F, D E or F.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  No, I think people that take that project on as a challenge are probably gonna try to do a good job of it.

• 1:33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Right stars.

• 1:33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. J. Richard Gott III.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming by.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Thank you, Neil.

• 1:33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, for StarTalk. As always, I bid you, keep looking up.