Celebrating Einstein

Join Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and astrophysicist Janna Levin as they celebrate the life and achievements of Albert Einstein and his impact on the scientific world around us including the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/celebrating-einstein/ Credit: Ferdinand Schmutzer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And I got with me Chuck Nice, co-host. How are you buddy? Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. Thank you sir, yes. You have to tell people that you're funny so that they'll laugh at your tweets? Otherwise, how would they know?

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, no one isn't a fan of Albert Einstein. That is true. He's like the modern icon of what it is to be smart. And he's also somebody that, he's so smart that people use him as the singular example of being smart. And his name is an adjective. Right. What are you, some kind of Einstein?

• 0:58Janna Levin?

  Do you know what he said about himself when he was?

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't introduced you yet, Jana.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jana just busting in.

• 1:04Janna Levin?

  I'm trying to like, like- I'm so impatient.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Warm up my homie here and now you gotta bust in. Alright, since you busted in. Janna Levin, always good to have you on StarTalk.

• 1:13Janna Levin?

  Always good to be here.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of our StarTalk All-Stars.

• 1:15Janna Levin?

  I am.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're like hosting your own PBS shows and stuff.

• 1:19Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's good for us.

• 1:20Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got a whole thing on black holes!

• 1:22Janna Levin?

  I pretend it's my evil twin.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god, that was Jana!

• 1:26Janna Levin?

  We have a show on black holes out.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jana was working it, man! With all kinds of-

• 1:30Janna Levin?

  Space suits.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High-tech CGI.

• 1:33Janna Levin?

  Space suits and stilettos, because you need stilettos.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She had a spacesuit! That's very cool. Of course, all spacesuits are shiny because apparently stars are brighter in the future and you gotta reflect the sunlight. Now, you guys are talking about shiny clothes and stilettos if you're-

• 1:47Janna Levin?

  He's distracted now.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trying to arouse me, I'm just telling you. It's working. It's working. So, so Jana, you're a professor of physics at Barnard in Columbia?

• 1:56Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, so thanks for coming in for this.

• 1:58Janna Levin?

  So glad to be here.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to help us sort of, I know a little bit about Einstein, but it's a subset of what you know about Einstein, and that's why we got you on the show.

• 2:06Janna Levin?

  I really wanted to give my Einstein quip though about the adjective of Einstein.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, tell me. What is that?

• 2:10Janna Levin?

  He said, he said about himself, "When I was a student, I was no Einstein."

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he really say that?

• 2:16Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us declare the legend here and now.

• 2:21Janna Levin?

  Google, man, Google and see if it's a verifiable quote.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've written a couple of books and what's listed here does not include that book. But I'm going to mention it anyway. How the Universe Got Its Spots.

• 2:33Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice, very, very Rudyard Kiplarian of you.

• 2:37Janna Levin?

  Yes, yes, definitely reference to How the Leopard Got His Spot.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, definitely. And also, most recently, Black Hole Blues.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 2:45Janna Levin?

  Nobody says it better than you.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And other songs of outer space. Black Hole, I'm a fan of the blues.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  A fan of the blues.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was that book about, just broadly?

• 2:55Janna Levin?

  So, the book really follows the recent announcement of the gravitational wave detection from the collision of two black holes. But it precedes the detection. So, the story is really about the climbing Mount Everest aspect of embarking on a very long-term scientific experiment that may or may not succeed. And so, it's called Black Hole Blues because Ray, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017, along with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, said to me, literally the month before the detection, 50 years into this endeavor, if we don't detect black holes, he said, this whole thing's a failure.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 3:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but then, now, we don't have to worry about that because it didn't happen that way, you see.

• 3:37Janna Levin?

  But, right.

• 3:38Chuck Nice?

  New song, Atlas, came out to be what it was, Lago, that's what I'm talking about.

• 3:43Janna Levin?

  But there is this interesting idea that you can fail.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because it was in Louisiana, that mean everyone spoke Cajun. That's because the experiment was in Louisiana.

• 3:51Janna Levin?

  You have to think, though, about the prospect of failure 50 years into an experiment that has a lot of negativity against it, even from other accomplished scientists, and that this is something we don't understand about science, is that the risk of failure, if you're not really risking big, you're not out there enough.

• 4:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's, it's, uh, think big or go home.

• 4:11Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Albert Einstein was born in Germany on March 14th, 1879. And Chuck, you know what day that is?

• 4:22Chuck Nice?

  Um, 1879, March 14th?

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  March 14th, any year.

• 4:26Chuck Nice?

  In any year.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what day of the year is March 14th?

• 4:28Chuck Nice?

  I, I believe it's the day that precedes the Ides of March. What, what is March 14th? I really don't know.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the Ides of March, that's Pi Day.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god. Yes. Yes. Okay, I didn't know it was actually March 14th, but of course that makes point sense. Three from three one four. One four, yeah, you got pi to March 14th. When written in sort of the American way where we put the month before the day of the month. Right. Yeah, I mean, so three point one four, that's Pi Day. Then you get really geeky. Mm hmm. And then at one fifty nine. Right, three point one four, one five, one fifty nine and twenty six seconds. Right. And you get a full up pi, pi moment.

• 5:10Janna Levin?

  Can I just suggest that that's probably the access code to every physics department in the world?

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the one, two, three, four of physics departments?

• 5:21Janna Levin?

  If you walk up to a sealed theoretical physics department, try three point one four, one five.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'll get it. Oh my god, it worked. And, and, and tomorrow, the missiles got launched. It'd be all because of Janet.

• 5:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I shouldn't reveal these things.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's, let's, let's talk about this. So, uh, Janet, how, what is that Annus Mirabalis or, and why, and why do we even say that in Latin? Why, why can't we just say it in English? His miracle year.

• 5:49Janna Levin?

  It, it's, well, I don't know, why do we say it in Latin? That's a different question. We'll just talk about the miracle year first.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's America, Jack.

• 5:58Janna Levin?

  So nineteen oh five?

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, nineteen oh five.

• 6:00Janna Levin?

  Nineteen oh five.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How old is he?

• 6:02Janna Levin?

  Twenty five.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, twenty, yeah.

• 6:04Janna Levin?

  Um, so Einstein was a clerk in a patent office and, um, he couldn't get a job in a physics department. His father was desperately writing to famous theoretical physicists, saying, you know, my son's really committed. And, um,

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any dad.

• 6:19Janna Levin?

  He couldn't get hired.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:20Janna Levin?

  One of his professors called him a lazy dog. And here he is in this patent office in Bern, Switzerland, and he has a drawer at his desk that he calls the physics department.

• 6:32Janna Levin?

  And in this drawer, he has these scientific papers he's working on in between finessing other people's patents to make them better.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 6:41Janna Levin?

  And in that year, he has this extraordinary year where he publishes a series of three papers that absolutely transform modern physics. One of them is on the special theory of relativity. One of them is on Brownian motion, which refers to the atomic aspect of air and molecules. Like, if you see a little piece of lint, you notice that it takes a zigzaggy pattern, and that's because it's all these little molecules, atoms.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hanging on it.

• 7:07Janna Levin?

  And the photoelectric effect, which is staggering because it probes the wave-particle duality of light, that sometimes light acts like a wave and sometimes it acts like a particle.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He did this by the time he was 26.

• 7:19Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, how old are you?

• 7:20Janna Levin?

  And unemployed.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Verify. I'm 22. There's still time. I got time. Okay, you got time. Thank you for verifying that. So, they call it an annus mirabalis.

• 7:31Janna Levin?

  Why do we say annus mirabalis? Because it was all in German.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did that get him a job?

• 7:34Janna Levin?

  Oh, yeah. Well, he became, he did become, to the credit of the scientific community, even though this outsider was publishing these papers, it was very swiftly accepted, the significance of all of these papers, very swiftly. And that should also be a lesson to those many people who send me their theories, that when they're transparently correct, they are grabbed at with glee.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. All the most amazing, mind-blowing, earth-shaking scientific research was published in legitimate journals, accepted by peers.

• 8:08Janna Levin?

  Yes.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By peer-reviewed. So, as they say, to be a genius is to be misunderstood. Right. To be misunderstood is not to be a genius.

• 8:17Janna Levin?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you can't come to me and say, "I have an idea, but the establishment is not, they're going to reject it."

• 8:24Janna Levin?

  Therefore, it's brilliant.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Therefore, right. They don't get this, man. They just don't understand. Right, right.

• 8:30Janna Levin?

  I'm starting a Facebook page for everyone to evaluate, you know, so they don't have to come to us.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 8:36Janna Levin?

  Just amongst themselves. Talk amongst yourselves.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talk amongst yourselves. Yeah. Now, we have Twitter for that. I mean, it's... Now, he didn't call it special theory of relativity. So, when, who called it special?

• 8:45Janna Levin?

  That's interesting. Maybe, I actually don't know specifically the history.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do we have you on the show?

• 8:52Janna Levin?

  Because I could explain.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone out there know why.

• 8:55Janna Levin?

  I mean, the general theory obviously came later when he included the curvature of spacetime. But I don't know who actually coined it special. It was just a theory of relativity at the time.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the paper is on the electrodynamics of moving bodies. It's the name of that paper.

• 9:10Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the special relativity paper.

• 9:12Janna Levin?

  Grabbing title. But the amazing thing.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was, wait, 1905?

• 9:18Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then a general theory comes out when?

• 9:20Janna Levin?

  1915.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's 10 years.

• 9:23Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he basically pulled that out of.

• 9:26Janna Levin?

  And it's.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of the ether.

• 9:27Janna Levin?

  It's probably published in 1916, but it's like, it's 10 or 11 years of struggling with the mathematics to elevate what we now call the special theory to the general theory.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Working alone.

• 9:38Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I mean, he was being influenced by people like Grossman, who was a mathematician. Hilbert was very influential. So Einstein wrote down several wrong theories along the way. And there's actually a kind of adorable story when he was thinking about something like gravitational waves, where he kept changing his mind in print. He would write papers saying they're real.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adorable for a physics story.

• 9:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The record.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  Adorable for a physics story.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let the record catch that. Pause for a moment.

• 10:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:05Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  And right after this, believe me, we're going to get to some very darling theories.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cheeks you just want to pinch. All right, go on.

• 10:13Janna Levin?

  He writes a paper saying gravitational waves are not real. Then he writes a paper saying they are. Then he writes another paper several years later saying that they're not. And between acceptance of this paper and publication, he sneaks in a draft of manuscript that says that they are. And one of his colleagues says, Einstein, you have to be really careful. Your famous name is going to be on these papers. And he just laughs. He says, my name is on plenty of wrong papers. You know, you do not need to worry about that. So it takes him a long time. I mean, there's decades of him figuring out gravitational waves. And the general theory was 11 years and he needed help from other people. He wrote down several wrong theories.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did be.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  Einstein, you dumb ass.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  10 years.

• 10:55Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that actually, is that actually something that is? Did that do anything to?

• 11:01Janna Levin?

  In retrospect, that is short order.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:03Janna Levin?

  Look at string theory, we're decades deep.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still in it for decades after decades after decades.

• 11:07Janna Levin?

  It might be hundreds of years, I mean, there's no

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's dozens of leaders in the field.

• 11:12Janna Levin?

  Really brilliant people.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have one guy, Einstein.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  I himself.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Basically, yeah, no, I mean, I didn't mean to take away Janice's point, that there are others trying to push things along.

• 11:22Janna Levin?

  They're nudging him along.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 11:24Chuck Nice?

  They're nudging him along because he's actually putting something out there to be nudged.

• 11:28Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Janna Levin?

  I mean, it was really interesting, it was really interesting that it was it was really him on the, I mean largely, there were other physicists, but him largely on the physics side and the mathematicians pulling him up.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:39Janna Levin?

  Because he was not actually the most sophisticated mathematical thinker. Another one my Einstein quotes is, he says, "You think you have a lot of difficulty with mathematics? You should see my difficulties with mathematics." So he was a very intuitive thinker. And he really originally rejected the idea that you had to do all of this differential calculus and this really elaborate mathematics, he thought that's ridiculous, it's totally overkill.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pure thought, you should be able to-

• 12:02Janna Levin?

  You could just think it through and it'd be like algebra. And he did that with the special theory, it was stunning, but he could not do that with the general theory.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 12:09Janna Levin?

  He had to step it up to be differential calculus on curved manifolds, no mean feet.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 12:15Janna Levin?

  But it's pretty.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, how did you do in differential calculus?

• 12:17Janna Levin?

  It's not only adorable, it's pretty.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What grade did you get in that class, Charlie?

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say that what I kinda go with is that you don't need that.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, you say, "I will never need that in my life."

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  Like, I actually use that.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, alright, so he does this, and then in 1920, 21, he wins the Nobel Prize.

• 12:36Janna Levin?

  Hmm.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but he did so many things, what did he win it for?

• 12:39Janna Levin?

  Well, he didn't win it for relativity.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That ain't right.

• 12:42Janna Levin?

  Which is really interesting.

• 12:43Chuck Nice?

  That is pretty crazy.

• 12:44Janna Levin?

  Yeah, was it the photoelectric effect? I think technically it was the photoelectric effect, or contributions to quantum, I don't remember the phrasing, do you have the phrasing?

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I might do my notes here.

• 12:52Janna Levin?

  It was something like contributions to quantum, like often they're phrased in a way that

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could give you latitude.

• 12:57Janna Levin?

  Removes it from a specific, right, but it was not for relativity.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:00Janna Levin?

  And that is clearly his greatest accomplishment.

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow, so it's kind of like, if, when an actor never wins an Oscar, and then they're just like, "Alright, so we're just gonna give you a lifetime achievement."

• 13:12Janna Levin?

  He won it in 21, which is quite early in a way. I mean, it was pretty soon after he proposed. It's it's not staggeringly late after he proposed this sort of revolution of quantum thinking. And the interesting thing is that he never really accepted quantum mechanics, right? So he initiates this revolution.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  What is up with Einstein?

• 13:33Janna Levin?

  Just keep insulting.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  Wait, is that his brilliance, the fact that he was so self contradicting? Like, he just, no, I can't, it couldn't be.

• 13:41Janna Levin?

  I think his brilliance is, I think there's something to that, which is his refusal to accept them, something he didn't actually understand.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good point. Plus, there was the, he, it was hard to, you've got to remember the era he came from. From the 19th century into the 20th century, this was the towering achievement of classical physics, where the world, the universe, was deterministic. If you tell me where to stand and I measure the motions and momentum, I will predict all future of this universe. That was a certain posture that the community of physicists has. Up comes quantum physics, where you, is it gonna, is it wave, is it a particle? Is it, is that some percent of the time and that and who? And, and, and what was his famous quote? He was trying to tell God what to do. What was it?

• 14:26Janna Levin?

  God doesn't play dice, was that the one?

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, God doesn't play, telling God not to throw dice.

• 14:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:31Janna Levin?

  Oh, he tells God not to throw dice?

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think as quoted by Niels Bohr or somebody.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  God doesn't play dice with the universe.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  No, he plays roulette instead. He plays craps, plays craps, you know, there.

• 14:45Janna Levin?

  Then what did Stephen Hawking say later? God not only, not only plays dice, but he sometimes throws the die where you can't see them?

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Sounds to me like God's a grifter.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, and then, and then Einstein said something else, said another point about God. And, and then Niels Bohr, I think it was Niels Bohr, said Einstein, stop telling God what to do. Just got pissed off.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so 1921, we've got general rela- so for my, for my money, I think general relativity is a brilliant achievement. In the fall, I can, let me quantify that for you, see if you agree.

• 15:23Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if Einstein didn't come up with a special theory of relativity in 1905.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some combination of others in the day would have come up with the same thing probably by 1910.

• 15:36Janna Levin?

  Hmm.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if Einstein didn't come up with general relativity in 1915, 16, I think it would have gone another 50 years undiscovered. And so, this for me, makes general relativity a greater singular achievement than special.

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 15:50Janna Levin?

  I do think that you're right, it would have been many decades before it was discovered, if it had not been discovered by Einstein, general relativity, and that is intriguing.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you badass among your colleagues.

• 16:00Janna Levin?

  I also think it would have looked totally different. So Einstein gave us all of this, the general theory of relativity is a theory of curved spacetime, and we follow the natural curves in space, and all of this elegance of, of geometry.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Janna Levin?

  But none of it is necessary. There's a whole bunch of extra degrees of freedom in thinking about geometry that are not at all required. And I think what would have happened is that somebody like Richard Feynman, who was a particle physicist, who was thinking about interactions of particles, would have discovered general relativity, but would never have hung all of this spacetime language on it.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:36Janna Levin?

  It would have just been masses, it's been gravitons.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would have had a different, um, facade.

• 16:40Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it would have looked totally different, and-

• 16:43Chuck Nice?

  And a completely different frame of reference.

• 16:44Janna Levin?

  Completely different machinery, yeah.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  Right, everything would have been-

• 16:46Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 16:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I really think it would have been like, oh, particles exchange light, and that's electromagnetism. This would have been, particles exchange gravitons, and that's the theory of gravity.

• 16:56Chuck Nice?

  Mm, yeah. So was Einstein more of a poetic thinker when it came to these things? I mean, where do you, where do you get this kind of expanse and elegance that you can attach to what you're talking about?

• 17:09Janna Levin?

  I mean, I don't want to presume to know, but you do have a sense that here is a very visual thinker, and very intuitive. And so, all the spacetime machinery, there might be excesses to it that are not formally required, but, but creates such powerful-

• 17:27Janna Levin?

  Imagery and tools that in that particular example, which is often rare, it's kind of the contrary of Occam's razor, where the extra machinery actually leads to better, clearer intuition than the total leanest abstraction of just particles exchanging gravitons.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful, right there. You should write a book or something.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, she, yeah, yeah. Look in there somewhere, isn't there? Somewhere, man. We gotta take a break. When we come back, more of our exploration of Einstein, the man, the myth, the legend on StarTalk.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. I got Chuck Nice, co-host. I got Janna Levin, old-time friend, colleague, physicist, expert on the universe in all ways that matter, especially for this conversation because we're celebrating the life and times of Albert Einstein. So Jana, your book, The Black Hole Blues, it explored the quest to measure gravity waves.

• 18:37Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what effort that would take. So could you describe to me what's going on when two black holes collide? And how they're going to give us a gravity wave? Why don't they give us gravity waves all the time?

• 18:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah, so in principle, they do give us gravity waves.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we giving off gravity waves now?

• 18:52Janna Levin?

  Yeah, right now, Chuck and I.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, right.

• 18:55Janna Levin?

  Pretty modest.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 18:57Janna Levin?

  If you think about how weak gravity is, like, the entire Earth is pulling on me. And with my little arms, I can, like, resist.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can lift stuff away from here.

• 19:05Janna Levin?

  Whereas if it was charged, or there was that much charge pulling on me, I'd be liquefied. So gravity is incredibly weak. It takes an entire planet for it to even make it hard for me to walk.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good thing, then. There's another quick calculation you can do. Back when we had a space shuttle that would launch people into space, if you took all the electrons out of one cubic centimeter of the nose cone,

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just remove the electrons and put them at the base of the launch pad.

• 19:34Janna Levin?

  That would be it.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shuttle couldn't, couldn't, um, wouldn't be able to launch.

• 19:37Chuck Nice?

  Hmm. Wait a minute.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the electrons would be-

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, just the electrons?

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In one cubic centimeter.

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  One cubic centimeter.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the base of the launch pad.

• 19:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would be pulling on the leftover extra protons that are at the top. They would be attracting one another.

• 19:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would not be able to launch this.

• 19:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, you could, oh, wow.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One cubic centimeter.

• 19:53Chuck Nice?

  One cubic centimeter.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:54Janna Levin?

  So the difference between the gravitational attraction between like an electron and a positron and their electromagnetic attraction is something like a trillion, trillion, trillions. So it's, it's that much stronger, the electrical attraction.

• 20:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 20:06Janna Levin?

  And the gravitational attraction.

• 20:07Chuck Nice?

  And gravity, it's the gravitational pull.

• 20:09Janna Levin?

  It's weak.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like-

• 20:10Janna Levin?

  So gravitational waves are incredibly weak, but so what you need in order to have any aspiration, even Einstein didn't think this would be possible because he didn't think anything in the universe could possibly bring spacetime-

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's pre-black hole.

• 20:21Janna Levin?

  Loud enough, it's pre-black hole. So, so you need something like the tremendous radical concentration of mass and energy in a black hole.

• 20:29Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 20:29Janna Levin?

  You need them, not only that, but you need them to be in the final throes of their orbits together. So it's like mallets on a drum. When they get closer and closer, they're getting louder and louder.

• 20:39Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:39Janna Levin?

  And it's like this crescendo. So when LIGO made its first detection, it was the last one-fifth of a second of the orbits of two black holes, each one about 30 times the mass of the sun, a couple hundred kilometers across. They're going very nearly the speed of light.

• 20:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:54Janna Levin?

  And they're executing, you know, a few orbits in the final one-fifth of a second and boom. It's finally loud enough that even though it's traveling for 1.3 billion years across the cosmos, by the time it hits the Earth, if you think about the time it left, that just multi-sold organisms were differentiating on the Earth.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, they were.

• 21:10Janna Levin?

  You know, and there's this race, they're building LIGO, you know, in the final hundred years. And then boom, when it hits, it's just barely loud enough.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all the while, that wave is heading towards Earth.

• 21:19Janna Levin?

  That's right. But it could have been for the previous several billion years, it's been ringing the Earth, but there was nothing there-

• 21:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:25Janna Levin?

  -incapable of detecting it.

• 21:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Now, is there any way that we could have missed it?

• 21:30Janna Levin?

  Yeah, anyway, so that actual night that the first detection was made was supposed to be the first science run of the advanced instruments. It was in September 2015. And they decided they weren't ready yet, so they canceled the science run.

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 21:46Janna Levin?

  And instead, they were there. It's like Sunday night, Monday morning, in the middle of the night, hammering on the instrument, trying to mess with it, just as tests. They're literally driving trucks along the access road, slamming on the brakes to see if it screws with the instrument.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Janna Levin?

  And then in the middle of the night, they get exhausted, they put their tools down, they go home. The same thing happens in Washington State, this is in Louisiana. And within the span of an hour, this thing that's been traveling 1.3 billion years, smacks the instrument.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't that, doesn't that tell you that this is happening more frequently than we think?

• 22:16Janna Levin?

  Way more frequently, because everyone told me, with the exception of Kip Thorne, that black holes would be years, years on, that we would detect all kinds of things first that we predict existed, but black holes were far off in our future. And they were not only the first things we detected.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first thing.

• 22:32Janna Levin?

  And it was beautiful black hole signature, but it was the first four things we detected. We're all black hole colliders.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, look at that.

• 22:39Janna Levin?

  Black holes all the time.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  All black holes all the time.

• 22:42Janna Levin?

  Exactly.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's, what's the future of this?

• 22:46Janna Levin?

  Well, the, a wonderful thing happened not too long ago. They made an announcement that they detected the first neutron stars colliding.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:52Janna Levin?

  So neutron stars are dead stars that aren't quite big enough to become black holes. They're, they're under two times the mass of the sun, and they're dense dead stars, they're often highly magnetized. But the interesting thing, see, black holes are empty. They're just darkness, empty space. There's nothing there.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:08Janna Levin?

  So when they collide, it's in darkness, the black hole collision.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, when we say that a black hole has a certain size.

• 23:14Janna Levin?

  Yes.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not a physically occupied volume.

• 23:17Janna Levin?

  Exactly.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Describe the size of a black hole.

• 23:19Janna Levin?

  The size of a black hole is really just the extent of the shadow that it casts on the sky.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By convention.

• 23:24Janna Levin?

  Yes, by convention. It's the region beyond which light cannot escape. And so it is literally just the shadow cast on the sky. If you were to...

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three-dimensional shadow.

• 23:32Janna Levin?

  Yeah, if you were to...

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that cool?

• 23:34Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 23:35Chuck Nice?

  You know you can have a three-dimensional shadow? Yeah, it's like, you should call it a black ball, not black hole.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 23:41Janna Levin?

  What's the, what, what could go wrong? The French already objected to black hole.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did they?

• 23:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah. Tru noir, it's offensive in French, apparently.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. What do they call it?

• 23:53Janna Levin?

  A black hole. They gave in, you know?

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They gave in, yeah.

• 23:56Janna Levin?

  Couldn't resist forever.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so that's the fascinating thing about a hole. When we think of a hole, we think of a, a, a circle in a horizontal surface that you go through. In a plane. Whereas this is a hole in three dimensional space. You can fall into from any direction.

• 24:14Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Woo!

• 24:15Janna Levin?

  And walking into the shadows should be as harmless as walking into the shadow of a tree. Nothing's there. You wouldn't notice anything. You'd cross right over. There's no dense material there. There's just nothing there. So when black holes collide, it's truly a dark event, which even though this, the first collision was the most powerful event ever detected since the Big Bang.

• 24:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:34Janna Levin?

  None of it came out as light. None of it.

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  So can I ask you this?

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if it did, it would be the brightest thing in the night and daytime sky.

• 24:41Janna Levin?

  It would have outshone all the stars in the observable universe combined.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  So, okay. What if we don't see what's colliding? Okay. What is colliding?

• 24:53Janna Levin?

  Space-time itself. So the black holes blob together.

• 24:57Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 24:59Janna Levin?

  And the shadow just starts.

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  Wait, just hold on. Ah, my head!

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About existential angst.

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God! Oh, space-time itself!

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Collapsing, colliding, yes.

• 25:11Janna Levin?

  Then, like this blobby thing, it sheds off all its imperfections and it settles down to be one bigger black hole. So there's a black hole out there, as far as we know, about a little bigger than 60 times the mass of the sun, that's just wandering the cosmos aimlessly, completely dark and completely quiet.

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  I'm just a hole.

• 25:29Janna Levin?

  But the fantastic thing is they settle down.

• 25:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I'm only a hole. Don't get in my way. So that's amazing!

• 25:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah, you see it in, I mean, you hear it in the recording that Lego makes. You hear it ring down. You hear it settle down to a final black hole.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so tell me how 1.3 billion light years away, we can know it's two black holes, 1 28 times the mass of the sun, 1 36. What is getting modeled there?

• 26:00Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us that confidence.

• 26:01Janna Levin?

  It is, there's an old fashioned mathematical problem. Can you hear the shape of a drum? And it's very similar. If I bang a drum, yeah.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  I think that'll be the title of my memoirs.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you hear the shape of the drum?

• 26:14Chuck Nice?

  Can you hear the shape of the drum?

• 26:16Janna Levin?

  We all recognize sounds. You know, our phones go off and we're like, that's my ringtone. So it's kind of similar. We have a prediction for how the mallets, the black holes bang on the drum of spacetime, creating a sound. And it's a very specific prediction. It's not a whole range of possibilities. We can literally hear if I played for you our predictions, the difference between black holes that were extremely disparate in size, it sounds different. If the black holes are on wildly eccentric orbits, it sounds different. So you can reconstruct the motion, size, behavior, spins of the mallets. With some things less confidence than others. So like the spin of the black holes is hard to determine.

• 27:01Janna Levin?

  They're both probably spinning. Some things with less confidence, but that there were two black holes with a pretty good degree of confidence.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And with the masses that they were ascribed?

• 27:10Janna Levin?

  Right, with the masses they were ascribed. So you can tell how big they are too, because if you can hear the orbits, again, just like how you can hear mallets on a drum. And even going-

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a weaker signal, though.

• 27:22Janna Levin?

  Well, it is, but it's 0.7 times the speed of light and you can tell when it's done one full orbit and that tells you how big the system is.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:28Janna Levin?

  And that means you've got, you know, these two black holes summing to a little more than 60 times the mass of the sun in a region only a couple hundred kilometers across.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 27:38Janna Levin?

  So how are you gonna do that?

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's only one way.

• 27:40Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  So are there any black holes tiny enough that they spin and collide and create the sound of a triangle?

• 27:49Janna Levin?

  Well, it is fantastic that black holes that are just a few times to hundreds of times, 10 times the mass of the sun, something in that range, actually rings spacetime in the human auditory range.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 28:01Janna Levin?

  Yeah, so the ligo as an instrument-

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You told me that once and I said, what are you talking about?

• 28:05Janna Levin?

  So ligo is an instrument-

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no sound in space.

• 28:08Janna Levin?

  Is sensitive to the range of the piano. So it's true, there's no sound in space because there's no air. And anyone who sees somebody screaming outside a spaceship is gonna write complaints on Twitter that they don't know what they're talking about. But if you were near enough those two black holes, really near enough, your ear could technically ring in response to the gravitational waves.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is your eardrum that is normally set into vibration by vibrating air molecules, in this case would be set to vibrate by vibrating fabric of spacetime.

• 28:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it would pluck it like a, like a string.

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like a harp string.

• 28:40Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's weird. That is weird.

• 28:43Janna Levin?

  I don't, yeah, I know, you could like, if you heard that, like, get out. Move away. Like, imagine, you would see nothing.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, if you heard that, it's too late.

• 28:55Janna Levin?

  It's right.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. Too bad it doesn't actually, uh, uh, maybe that's what it says when you hear it. Instead of a boom, it's just like, ha, ha, ha, you're cooked.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what would, hold my eardrums aside, what would my body feel if a wave went across my body?

• 29:14Janna Levin?

  So presumably, right now, there are black holes colliding all over the universe. We're being squeezed and stretched, but again, it's so weak that we don't even notice.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's strong, well, I say, ooh, I felt that. Or, or if it's reshaping the fabric of space and time and I occupy that coordinate.

• 29:30Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wouldn't I just shake with it and I wouldn't even know?

• 29:33Janna Levin?

  Yeah, probably, most of these.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get that, Chuck, what I was just saying?

• 29:37Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're in, if I, if I, if I draw a stick man on a rubber sheet and I bend the rubber sheet, the stick man goes with it.

• 29:44Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even knowing that he's being bent, it's just, this is my, I'm doing it.

• 29:48Janna Levin?

  But the, the difference with the stick man is that we're bound together. So for instance, your head is harder to squeeze and stretch than your eardrum.

• 29:57Chuck Nice?

  Speak for yourself.

• 29:58Janna Levin?

  So if you were, you know, if you were there, your ear would start resonating more willingly than your head would. So, you know, the fact that we're bound means we're resisting to some extent. So the whole earth, when the wave passes, doesn't really notice it. It's just so atomically bound to itself.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd just be so funner, in fact, we did.

• 30:17Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I think it's gonna be more like, for these long waves, it's gonna be more like bobbing on an ocean. You know, which is kind of what the mirrors in the LIGO instrument do. When the wave passes, they bob on the wave. It's not that the mirror itself is being squeezed and stretched. It's that it's starting to swing.

• 30:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:34Janna Levin?

  And that's what you're looking for. You're looking for the motion of the mirror.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's opened a whole new way of observing the universe. Any way to bring LIGO to bear on the Big Bang itself?

• 30:43Janna Levin?

  Uh, definitely gravitational wave experiments, but probably not LIGO. So, LIGO can put limits on the Big Bang. So, the Big Bang might have actually made a bang. Uh, when the universe was created, gravitational waves probably really cacophonous. It probably sounded like noise. Um, but it's the, it's outside of really the range LIGO's optimally designed to detect. It's much, uh, more likely that a space-based instrument like LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, um, if it ever launches, that LISA would be able to detect the sound of the bang.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be a cacophony.

• 31:19Janna Levin?

  Yeah, noise. Just like, shh. Yeah. And so you ask me, how do you know it's black holes? Those two things sound really different.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Different.

• 31:26Janna Levin?

  Yeah. You know, black holes sound like, brrr. There's this.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good. Let me hear that again.

• 31:32Janna Levin?

  I don't know if I could do it again. Brrr.

• 31:34Chuck Nice?

  It's a black hole.

• 31:35Janna Levin?

  Called a chirp.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black hole colliding.

• 31:37Chuck Nice?

  That's a black hole colliding.

• 31:38Janna Levin?

  Those are two black holes colliding, much less, I don't know, macho than most people expect. It has a sort of like sweet little chirp.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has anyone thought about how you get a 30 solar mass black hole?

• 31:48Janna Levin?

  That's a really excellent question. So, not only was the first.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know how you make one of those.

• 31:52Janna Levin?

  Right. And not, not only did they detect the first gravitational waves, but they actually started probing new astronomy. We had no idea there were black holes that big. The projections were for much smaller ones. And now we know there's one 60 solar masses, so maybe they're 100, 150.

• 32:05Chuck Nice?

  There's some that are bigger than that.

• 32:06Janna Levin?

  Right. So, did those already collide with other black holes to get that big? Or were they formed by direct collapse? Did they skip the death star state? Um, we don't really know. So, that's already people are, are working on.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because normally if you learn about black holes in your astrophysics class, uh, what did you get in your astrophysics?

• 32:24Chuck Nice?

  My astrophysics, uh, I'm.

• 32:26Janna Levin?

  Taking it with me next.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:28Chuck Nice?

  No, I got an, I'm, no, I got an incomplete that was. Got an eye, got an eye in astrophysics.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we learned that one way to get a black hole is the endpoint of a high mass star.

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the high mass stars are 20, 30, 40, 50 solar mass, but they lose a lot of mass on route. So by the time it's done, you don't have, you don't really have 30, 40, 50, 60.

• 32:51Chuck Nice?

  60 solar mass. So, and so, but now we know for a fact that we do have one because we watched them collide.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I go pick them up.

• 32:56Janna Levin?

  There are some people that think they're pure dark matter, that they don't form from stellar collapse, that they're not the death state of a star, that they're, they're.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll tell you, I'll tell you this, just as, as, just as a, as a vote for science here, anytime we have a new instrument that takes us into a parameter space where we had not previously looked.

• 33:16Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You discover stuff that nobody ordered.

• 33:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you can, now, now, a well-designed experiment is, is thought up to test for something that, that you have an idea about, right? So we think we will detect colliding black holes. You do it and oh my gosh, it's a kind of black hole we never even thought was there.

• 33:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And so, so good science is that which shows that maybe you're on the right track to begin with, but then opens up whole new places that you never even knew. So now the next generation LIGO.

• 33:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is going to know how to, how to, how to be better at what it is to, for the new stuff.

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  And they'll discover 60 solar mass black holes that will collide and say, damn, look out.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look. No, no, no, it wouldn't be.

• 34:03Chuck Nice?

  That's where you're going.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Chuck, it wouldn't be the 60s because the 60s would be more powerful than the 30s.

• 34:07Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it would, it would detect, uh, lower mass black holes or the 30 mass black holes farther away.

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  Farther away.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 34:14Janna Levin?

  Also, what about something we've never even thought of before? And when you think of the time Galileo first pointed the telescope at the sky, he's looking at Saturn, and he's looking at the sun, he's not thinking quasars and black holes. Those things aren't even conceivable to him. And what we all really hope secretly is that we're going to discover stuff in gravitational waves that we couldn't possibly see in light. After all, 95% of the universe is completely dark. Right, exactly. So maybe there's something out there that we have not even thought of. And that is what everyone hopes for, to be honest.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. Uh, we gotta take a break. Uh, when we come back, more on the life, the legacy, the predictions, the discoveries, uh, just the all over bad attitude of Albert Einstein.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, Einstein Edition. It's just nice, nice to have you. We got you, Janna Levin.

• 35:10Janna Levin?

  Hi.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, thanks for coming.

• 35:12Janna Levin?

  I'm glad to be here.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the physicist up at Barnard in Columbia, and I just heard you, you taught a class this morning.

• 35:19Janna Levin?

  Taught a class this morning.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass.

• 35:21Janna Levin?

  I did. I taught Gauss's Law.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whose law?

• 35:24Janna Levin?

  Beautiful, Gauss's Law.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gauss's, oh.

• 35:26Chuck Nice?

  Gauss's?

• 35:26Janna Levin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gauss.

• 35:27Janna Levin?

  Gauss is this brilliant mathematician.

• 35:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I thought it was the thing you get when your feet swell up because you're eating rich food.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've had Gauss before.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  I got the Gauss. I got a little case of the Gauss.

• 35:38Janna Levin?

  It's more elegant than that.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Gauss is a beautiful thing.

• 35:40Chuck Nice?

  What is Gauss's Law?

• 35:41Janna Levin?

  So Gauss's Law is this suggestion that you can look at all the flux coming out of a surface.

• 35:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:48Janna Levin?

  And determine all the charge enclosed. It sounds very simple, but it's basically a way to understand the electric fields as sources and sinks in the most elegant way imaginable. Like, you can do these incredibly quick, rapid-fire calculations where you're pulling out the electric field in these very sort of symmetric situations.

• 36:05Chuck Nice?

  And what is the surface that you're looking at?

• 36:07Janna Levin?

  It's, it's an imaginary surface.

• 36:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, just an imaginary surface?

• 36:10Janna Levin?

  So let's say I have, like, this table is charged. I can use Gauss's Law to find out the electric field from this table by drawing an imaginary surface around it and understanding how much charge is enclosed and the flux of fields in and out. It's incredibly powerful. It's, maybe I could say it shorter by forgetting what it actually says mathematically, by saying it is one of the fundamental laws of electricity and magnetism.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 36:31Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Because what you just described, a company came out with a baby monitor that does that for babies. I'm not lying. It takes exactly what you just said, and it puts a camera on it.

• 36:41Janna Levin?

  Tells you how many babies are in there?

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  No, what it does is it uses all these little flux around the baby to tell you, like, the baby's heart rate, the baby's temperature, how you're, actually, the health of your baby.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a tricorder for the crib.

• 36:54Chuck Nice?

  It's basically a tricorder for the kid, for the crib. And whenever you go check on the crib, there's a recording that goes, "He's dead, Jim."

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a cube, Jim.

• 37:05Janna Levin?

  Electricity and magnetism is the first example of unification, and this actually relates to Einstein because he was interested in this idea of unification. So there used to be two forces.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, right, yeah, exactly.

• 37:14Janna Levin?

  Electricity, which had to do with charges, and magnetism, which we saw in rocks and stuff, and there didn't seem to be any obvious.

• 37:20Chuck Nice?

  Anybody who knows, anybody who's ever been electrocuted, hello, knows that those two things are very, very closely related.

• 37:27Janna Levin?

  How can I let go of this pole?

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 37:31Janna Levin?

  This was the first example in the late 1800s that two seemingly totally different forces could actually be unified into one. And we could realize that electric fields and magnetic fields are different sides of the same coin. It's really one field, one force. And so that program has gone on for the past hundred years and more to realize that basically all the matter forces are just one. The electro weak theory is unified, so electromagnetism and the weak force, and the strong force easily in a grand unified theory could be, you know, a couple of problems.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Einstein was digging this. He liked the unification.

• 38:01Janna Levin?

  He was loving this.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How far did he get?

• 38:03Janna Levin?

  So, right, so at the time, you know, that Einstein was thinking it wasn't all worked out perfectly, but he kind of accepted matter was all the matter forces, all of them were going to be one. Gravity stood apart. And, and one of his...

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't gravity a matter force? I don't understand.

• 38:20Janna Levin?

  So, gravity actually is just pure spacetime. I mean, it's two masses interact gravitationally, but in some sense, you're not talking about, in, in matter forces, you can ignore spacetime if you wanted to, and only talk about how matter interacts with each other, like in your body, in this room. I'm not really so concerned about curved spacetime theory. It's just too, too large scale. It's not relevant. But when you try to push those things towards each other, like in the center of a black hole, and ask how matter behaves in a very strongly curved spacetime, it all falls apart. We can't unify them together. There should be one theory, a theory of everything.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that a bias?

• 38:57Janna Levin?

  It's the hope.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are bringing a philosophical bias.

• 38:59Janna Levin?

  It's a bias. I am indeed. I am bringing aesthetics.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Confess right now.

• 39:03Janna Levin?

  Worse, worse, I'm bringing aesthetics.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and the last best example of bringing aesthetics to the problem was Kepler, who said, wait a minute, there are five planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. There are five planets, and there are six platonic solids. Do you know about this? There's a cube, a tetrahedron, these are solid shapes where every surface is identical to every other surface, okay? A dodecahedron, an octahedron, okay? There's only five. He said, well, there's six of those and five of these. Maybe you can embed the distances of the planets with these five solids, because this is geometry and it's perfect, and it's the universe, and if it's the universe and it's created by the same thing, it's, that must be it.

• 39:49Janna Levin?

  Nature missed an opportunity.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He spent ten, yeah. What a great answer.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Major missed an opportunity. Yep, yep. So, so he spent 10 years driven by the, by the elegance and the purity and the simplicity of this idea, and it was just bullshit.

• 40:07Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Janna Levin?

  So, many people spent, you know, years since Maxwell to the 70s, 80s successfully unifying matter forces. And they did a beautiful job. I mean, the thing is, is there was a lot of reward in the previous attempts. Why gravity is so stubborn and insists on standing apart. It plagued Einstein's thinking in his later years and has plagued an entire two, three generations of physicists.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, maybe, so, he got as far as he did. There's a lot of discussion about things that, that interested him in childhood.

• 40:40Janna Levin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a compass.

• 40:42Janna Levin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like watching, or thinking that, why, how does the compass know?

• 40:47Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:47Janna Levin?

  Oh, it's great.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we have to explain today what, what a compass is.

• 40:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so it's, um, it's a thing you put a pencil in and it has a point on it, and then you can draw perfect circles.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no. Another compass, right.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  That's another compass. Oh, yeah.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, nobody-

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  Has anybody actually used a compass?

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you got GPS.

• 41:03Chuck Nice?

  Have children even seen a compass?

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. They got GPS.

• 41:07Chuck Nice?

  You know, we had to learn about the, you know, compass and-

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, a compass doesn't-

• 41:10Chuck Nice?

  Magnetic fields and the-

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't point-

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  And poles and all that, but-

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does, compass doesn't point to Santa Claus.

• 41:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It points to the magnetic north, not the actual north that you really care about.

• 41:19Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And any good Boy Scout knows that. And, I don't, the girl, I've only seen the Boy Scout manual.

• 41:23Janna Levin?

  I don't know. I'm, I would not know.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would, she said it defiantly. I would not know. Uh, so there's a, there's an angle corrector depending on your latitude on Earth.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you're up in Canada, your north pole compass could be pointing south because there, the, the magnetic poles separated from the geographic pole.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're up, hiking around Canada, a compass is not very useful to you. Not to find Santa. Just like, just like the Canadians.

• 41:51Janna Levin?

  It's a really, but it's an interesting point. How the magnetic fields are invisible. And that's what intrigued Einstein, right? How does it know? That's what you're asking. And the magnetic fields aren't actually invisible. Right now, I am seeing you because of electromagnetic fields bouncing off of your face. And it's just that we're, we can't see magnetic fields that are fairly static. Our eyes are really bad detectors of those. Really excellent detectors of ones that wave around at a certain frequency. Cause they make light.

• 42:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:21Janna Levin?

  And so, so it looks to us like there's this invisible force, but it's, it's something only invisible to us. There are weirdly animals that can see it.

• 42:30Chuck Nice?

  Wait.

• 42:30Janna Levin?

  Not many.

• 42:30Chuck Nice?

  There are animals that can see the magnetic fields.

• 42:33Janna Levin?

  Magnetic fields that are static. Yeah.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, see is a loose word there, right? They, they can know it's there.

• 42:37Janna Levin?

  They have a, they have an organ.

• 42:39Chuck Nice?

  They detect.

• 42:40Janna Levin?

  Which detects it.

• 42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Janna Levin?

  Fair enough.

• 42:41Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, seeing is, it, it, I don't mind using the word see, but we have to make sure people know.

• 42:46Janna Levin?

  Sure.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  They see the way dogs see with their nose.

• 42:49Janna Levin?

  It has some organ which detects it. What, what emerges in their little minds? We don't know.

• 42:54Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, fascinating. You know what I want to do one day?

• 42:58Janna Levin?

  We can do this all night.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you know what I want to do?

• 42:59Janna Levin?

  Can we rap? Can we just hang out?

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I want to do is when we perfect genetic engineering of human, humans.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We go through the animal kingdom and find all the things that they have that we don't have, that we want.

• 43:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:12Janna Levin?

  And we didn't even think of.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, right.

• 43:14Janna Levin?

  I want to, I want to see static fields.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. And you know else? I want to be able to see in the infrared like snakes. What else I want to do? I want to be able to eat a sandwich five times bigger than my head, like snakes.

• 43:24Chuck Nice?

  Like a snake. Unhinge your jaw.

• 43:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unhinge your jaw, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 43:28Chuck Nice?

  I'd like to be able to hear like a dog, but not smell like a dog. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I believe there's more problems than the benefits.

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta, yeah, be careful what you wish for.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, plus there are plenty of animals that regenerate limbs, something that would be hugely useful, especially for disabled veterans.

• 43:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so a newt can do it and we can't.

• 43:51Janna Levin?

  It's very true.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here we are, so we're at the top of the evolution every chain.

• 43:54Janna Levin?

  Why can't we do that?

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, please, newt, can we have some of what your stuff can do?

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  What happened is science will find a way to help us regenerate limbs, but then we'll actually grow a tail.

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could be useful too.

• 44:09Janna Levin?

  It is hard to predict all the possible consequences.

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, the, the, you don't always know. Well, what else it comes with?

• 44:19Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but the, the, the full package of what, what, what it would mean if that were the case. Always unintended consequences. Always, always. So, uh, can you give us just some final reflections on Einstein's life? So that if we want to think, if, if we want to live, you know how a religious person would say, I want to live the way Jesus lived.

• 44:37Janna Levin?

  Hmm.

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So in the geek world, you say, I want to live the way Einstein lived.

• 44:40Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there anything that you can tell us?

• 44:42Janna Levin?

  Um, I really admired above all else Einstein's independence of mind and spirit. So when everyone else was saying, oh, there's something wrong with this supposition that speed of light is a constant. That just makes no sense whatsoever.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:00Janna Levin?

  Einstein.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still doesn't really make sense.

• 45:02Janna Levin?

  It's really challenging, but Einstein accepts, and this is something that's often misunderstood in the idea of relativity. He accepts the rigidity of the constraint. That's what he does.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 45:12Janna Levin?

  And then around that constraint, he sees where he's free to move and it's very limited. But from this tight constraint, he makes this like, it's like squeezing a balloon in one direction and it blows out in the other direction.

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 45:23Janna Levin?

  Like he, it leads to things that were so much more magnificent than just allowing the speed of light to not be constant.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, it's interesting that you say that. I just thought of this now.

• 45:32Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the worst thing you can tell an engineer is build this and there are no constraints and spend as much as you want.

• 45:39Janna Levin?

  Right.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do.

• 45:41Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you say, it's gotta be 30 kilos in weight, in, in, in mass, and it's gotta use this much power. And it's gotta fly in this way, and it's gotta be made of these materials. Go. Right. Then that's where the creativity.

• 45:55Janna Levin?

  Absolutely.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, for example, how do you get a telescope bigger than the width of your rocket into orbit? How do you do that? Hmm. And people say, oh, okay, you tell the engineers. Right. Hey, invent a telescope that unfurls.

• 46:11Janna Levin?

  Unfurls.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Who would, who ordered that? Think of that. Who, who would have thought of that?

• 46:15Janna Levin?

  Cessity is the mother of vengeance.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Think of it because I didn't let you do something else.

• 46:20Janna Levin?

  Yeah. I think this is.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I loved your reference to Einstein in that context.

• 46:23Janna Levin?

  Thank you.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It didn't constrain him, it liberated him.

• 46:25Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I want to ask you something.

• 46:26Chuck Nice?

  Because you just sparks a question in me.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make it quick because we're out of time.

• 46:29Chuck Nice?

  Out of time. Okay, so you said about Einstein and light being a constant. So when LIGO detected the pulsar, the neutron star.

• 46:39Janna Levin?

  Oh, the neutron stars, yeah.

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  Neutron star. When they detected that, did they make the detection and see the light at the same time, since the light is a constant?

• 46:47Janna Levin?

  This is why everyone was incredibly excited. It might be, at the end of the day, the most highly studied astronomical event in history. Basically, some huge fraction of the entire international astronomical community turned telescopes, satellites, all kinds of instruments in the direction of the collision.

• 47:05Chuck Nice?

  We do that.

• 47:06Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it was a network.

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good about that.

• 47:08Chuck Nice?

  The astrophysicist.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good, we're good that way.

• 47:10Chuck Nice?

  I got your back.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got your back. It's a very important thing. I'm in the middle of my own research program, and then, in the old days, it would have been a telegram. Now, it's, oh, my gosh, there's an event over here.

• 47:21Janna Levin?

  Gotta drop it.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I have my detector, which is different from your detector, different from, now, we have ninety-two hundred different kinds of detectors getting different aspects at one event.

• 47:32Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you look at this part, and I look at that part, and I look at this wavelength, and you look at that wavelength, and you put that all together, you, you, all eyes, all hands on deck.

• 47:41Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All telescopes, check it out.

• 47:43Janna Levin?

  It was really remarkable. So LIGO caught about a minute in the recording, but all of these telescopes combined caught, you know, a month. And, and it kept spiking in different wavelengths. It would go in the infrared, in the gamma ray, in the X-ray, and so all these different instruments had their, their time.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 48:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so we, that's how we, that's how we roll.

• 48:07Janna Levin?

  Collaboration, international collaboration.

• 48:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got each other's back. Guys, we gotta shut it down here, but Chuck, always nice to have you.

• 48:14Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's even more nice to have you. We'll, we'll find some excuses to talk about Einstein and the universe just to get you back.

• 48:21Janna Levin?

  Love it.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. You've been watching and possibly only listening to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and as always, I didn't, didn't keep picking up.