Cosmic Queries – A Ripple in Spacetime with Charles Liu

What if time had multiple dimensions? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly answer grab-bag questions about Hawking Radiation, the speed of light, and how rare black holes are with astrophysicist Charles Liu.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk Special Edition, we're gonna do a version of Cosmic Queries, but with the help of Charles Liu, everyone's geek in chief. And one of the questions posed is, who does he call when he doesn't have an answer? You'll learn that and more coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And as usual for special editions, we've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary? Hey Neil. If you didn't know, former soccer pro, football pro, I guess they say that over in the UK. A returned announcer, because he's retired. And we get to use a bit of him for StarTalk. So, thank you, dude. And recently married. Yes. Congratulations. Happily married. Who knew it would last this long?

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, six months? Not even that.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congratulations, the first six months of marriage. Thank you. Chuck, nice, Chucky baby.

• 1:13Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening Neil?

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel bad because we're checking in with you. You're doing a comedy stint in Aruba.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right now.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Right now, so.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're on this instead of being on the beach, so we'll try to make this quick for you.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  I was on the beach and left, left the beach.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rub it in, let me see that. No, you have to make a thing out of it.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Literally, I was in the Caribbean, swimming around just 20 minutes ago. Came up here and said, okay, let me get back to the room and set up and do this.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna have a kind of a Cosmic Queries, but like a special edition edition of Cosmic Queries. And whenever we're in kind of gram bag mode, I need some help. Uh, and you know who we go to for that, of course, Charles Liu. Charles, welcome back.

• 2:05Charles Liu?

  Hey, Gary, hey Chuck. Great to see you all. I was not on the beach just now.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not on the beach.

• 2:11Charles Liu?

  So, particularly happy to be here with you all. Hey Chuck, we're of course all envious.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, you brought in the questions and you curated the questions.

• 2:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had more, you told me we had more than a hundred, a hundred questions on this solicitation.

• 2:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, and apologies upfront for those questions. We couldn't get to, we only gonna get about an hour's worth of this show. So we had a flash through. They're all from our Patreon patrons. So thank you so much for your curiosity. Let's start with Gina Martin, shall we?

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this?

• 2:41Gary O'Reilly?

  "Since time as we know moves in a straight line, can we consider time being one dimensional from our perspective? That being said, what would it look like if time had three dimensions just like space? And is that even possible?"

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. Dave, I'm glad you're here, Charles.

• 3:02Charles Liu?

  We'll start with, start with an easy one, right?

• 3:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Charles Liu?

  The, the reality is that we can indeed, thank you for your question, think of time as a dimension. In fact, the Rolling Stones sang this song about that. "Time is a dimension," right? But yes, the general relativistic assessment of spacetime is.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Einstein general relativity.

• 3:25Charles Liu?

  Yes, Einstein general relativity describes space and time as three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. Now, there have been some work over the years theoretically, what if there were more than one dimension of time? And what happens is complicated, as you might imagine, but the most significant effect.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the answer. It's complicated. Next question.

• 3:50Charles Liu?

  Yes, well, the simplest, well, the most significant effect we would have in our lives is on cause out, right? Neil, as you know, we think of time passing as stuff in the past affecting what happens in the present and the future, but not the other way around, right? If you have three dimensions of time and you can travel both forward and backward, also left and right and up and down in time, then you don't know what the past is by definition. You have to change your concept of what causes what, because you can be dancing back and forth in a different dimension and something that you thought was in the past might actually loop around in a,

• 4:32Charles Liu?

  say, grand view and wind up in our future.

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you say grand view? You mean a view from outside of those three dimensions?

• 4:39Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, you'd have to be above, you have to be above.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, above and beyond that whole set of coordinate system.

• 4:45Charles Liu?

  Right. String theory, you've seen that happen all the time, too. But imagine kicking a football, right, a second ago, but actually having kicked that football a second ago in one dimension of time, but kicking the football five seconds from now in a second dimension of time and kicking it at the precise moment now in the third dimension of time.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. Is there a dimension where you don't kick the football?

• 5:12Charles Liu?

  Not in this configuration.

• 5:13Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's called the Charlie Brown dimension.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot about that dimension.

• 5:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's the Charlie Brown.

• 5:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Charlie, is it just humans that see time as a straight line? Other beings in other galaxies are perceiving in a very different manner?

• 5:31Charles Liu?

  Great question. At the moment, since we haven't found other beings in other dimension or other parts of the universe, we don't know what their brains are structured on. But the universe as a whole has a causality to. In other words, all of the universe as we conceive of it in Einstein's space only has one dimension of time. If there are other dimensions of time that we somehow can't perceive, but other creatures can perceive, and as a result, the universe's causality proceeds differently from what we see, then you build up those cool science fiction ideas like Arrival, for example, which that was the A.B. Adams movie three years back, I think.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not the other, not the Charlie Sheen Arrival.

• 6:18Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A few decades ago, but the one where they have the linguist and the physicist.

• 6:24Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instead of the astrobiologist and the cryptographer.

• 6:29Charles Liu?

  Yes, that one. Where, where the, the premise was, if you know your future, would you want to experience it anyway?

• 6:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh. Hmm, right. Yeah, and the answer is yes. I want to know my future.

• 6:46Charles Liu?

  And then you want to live it? I mean, even, even if you knew all the good and the bad.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  But here's the thing is, you wouldn't live it. No one's going to live the future that they know. But you may, you may ultimately cause it by not living.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  But no one is going to live the future that they already know. So that's the problem.

• 7:06Charles Liu?

  You're completely right if time is one dimensional. If it is one dimensional. If time is two or three dimensional, then you don't? Maybe that's not.

• 7:14Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh. There you go. Right.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, good question. Okay. Loved it. Okay, Chuck, you got a question?

• 7:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, here we go. This is Morgan Fisher. Morgan Fisher says, Doctors Tyson and Lou, it's Morgan from Waterloo, Ontario of the Perimeter Institute.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Perimeter Institute.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, hello. She says, I've wondered about this since first hearing of the LIGO experiments. It is said that colliding black holes create ripples in spacetime, but what's the medium? There's no air, there's no water, it's a perfect vacuum. So what's actually doing the rippling? And I think she answered the question in the question.

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me lead off by saying the the Perimeter Institute is a place of study where people are asking questions that kind of sit at the perimeter of of established and accepted thinking in physics, math, philosophy, this sort of thing. And so um it's it's an audacious construct among institutions that are out there. And if there's any weird, wild, wacky idea that turns out to be true, it's more likely to come from those kinds of think tanks rather than from those in the establishment. But so but Charles, why don't you take a gander at this answer?

• 8:37Charles Liu?

  Well, Morgan, you have put your finger right on the concept of the general theory of relativity.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 8:45Charles Liu?

  Itself is a medium. What Einstein explained-

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Empty space.

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  Empty space.

• 8:52Charles Liu?

  What Einstein explained was that our conception of space being just vacuum or nothing was incomplete. Rather, we should think of space as this sort of giant either a rubbery sheet or a flexible sort of jello that we live in that can be bent and twisted and torn and so forth.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jello? Jello?

• 9:15Charles Liu?

  Space is a lot like jello. Albert Einstein showed the space is a lot like jello. You know, I mean, it's it's a it's a children's song. Yeah.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Well, now what part of the universe has the pineapple chunks in it?

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth.

• 9:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:29Charles Liu?

  You see the pineapple chunks that sit in your jello mold, right? Some of you may have had that in Thanksgiving.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the grapes, yeah, that's the 1960s section of the of the jello mold.

• 9:38Charles Liu?

  Yeah, the the the things that are floating in it are indeed mass, massive particles and objects or agglomerations of mass such as planets, stars, galaxies, and so forth. And those blobs-

• 9:52Charles Liu?

  Cause an irritation to that otherwise beautiful, perfect jello. It it it's an irritant that winds up causing spacetime to curl in upon itself. And that's what gravity is. It's the curvature of spacetime.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I like about the jello is you can you can send a ripple from one part of the jello. And that ripple will propagate out as a jello jiggle. And jiggle its way across the pineapple bits. And if you're in the pineapple, you'll feel a little jiggle as the as the wave moves across.

• 10:25Charles Liu?

  Absolutely. So, good job, Morgan. You absolutely understand the point that Einstein was trying to make. When he developed the general theory of relativity.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I don't know if that's a satisfying answer to Morgan, because what you're saying is the vacuum is a thing, so get over it. That's really, I just gave the short version of your answer.

• 10:42Charles Liu?

  Well, I didn't use get over it. I would say, I would say revel in it.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:48Charles Liu?

  The nothingness is the thing, so revel in it and enjoy. Make jiggles in it so that you can send it, you know, off to the next part of the jellible.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 10:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's embrace the nothingness. Right, next up, Dennis from Indiana, black holes. Are we sure Hawking radiation is coming from the inside of the black hole? Or is it just from around the event horizon? Has an observation ever been made of a black hole dying or disappearing, stellar mass or otherwise? Gentlemen?

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to reshape that question and hand it back back over to Charles. So, we know that Hawking radiation is birthed just outside of the event horizon. We know this, okay? That's how the calculations unfold. That's the, however, somehow that means the mass inside the event horizon drops. And I want to ask Charles Liu, how does the inside of the event horizon have any clue what just happened outside of the event horizon? And that's a reshaping, but a tuning of that question.

• 11:55Charles Liu?

  That is a great question, and the answer still is we don't know. You see.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, next question. Okay.

• 12:02Charles Liu?

  But, see, the idea is that we know, mathematically speaking, Hawking radiation comes out of any object. It doesn't have to be just a black hole.

• 12:18Charles Liu?

  It just comes off of any object that has mass, except that from a black hole, that's the only thing that can come out of the event horizon. And that's sort of the strange part of Hawking radiation. It's not that it is unique to black holes, but we couldn't measure it coming off of me, for example, or of Chuck or the Caribbean, as much as we'd like to. It's a lovely place to be, but it's very, very slow and very, very small. What happens to create that Hawking radiation is still a mystery. Hawking himself didn't understand. Now, you know, Neil, right, about how people often describe Hawking radiation

• 13:00Charles Liu?

  as maybe like a particle getting close to the event horizon inside and then splitting off production into a particle and antiparticle. And then the particle escapes the red horizon, so on, so on. That is pure speculation. That works mathematically, but physically, it has never been shown. And it's actually a little bit problematic. So you're ready?

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm good with it, though. I'm good with it. If Hawking said it, I'm good.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  So, I mean, first of all, you're talking about the evaporation of something like the Mojave Desert, one half grain of sand at a time.

• 13:35Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:36Chuck Nice?

  Which is insane.

• 13:38Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very, very slow. But, but. Answer my question. If a black hole can evaporate completely, how does the inside of the event horizon know what happened on the outside? Or is the event horizon just a convenience for us to describe the edge, but really the black hole and its gravity field? The black hole doesn't maybe, maybe doesn't have an edge? That it's wherever the gravity field is, and the gravity field collectively is the black hole, and the Hawking radiation comes out of the gravity field, therefore it loses mass?

• 14:12Charles Liu?

  This is another frontier question. A paper was published about 20 years ago that suggested that mathematically, Hawking radiation could be described as quantum tunnel.

• 14:23Charles Liu?

  A thing where violating what we normally think of as the boundaries of any given object, you can temporarily, every once in a while, get a little bit of stuff past the boundary.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 14:36Charles Liu?

  And it's mathematically valid. So if it is a quantum tunneling process, then just as you said, Neil, that

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's escaping.

• 14:46Charles Liu?

  edge is a shimmering surface from which things can escape.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a fuzzy surface.

• 14:51Charles Liu?

  That's right. There's a lot more that needs to be done.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would take a minute just to describe quantum mechanical tunneling, then we'll go to the next question, right?

• 14:58Charles Liu?

  Sure.

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if you are, if you're trying to get to some destination in front of you and there's a hill there, you gotta climb up the hill and then climb down the other side. And that's a pain in the ass. Maybe you don't have the energy to do that, so you never get there. In quantum physics, you're a particle and there's a barrier there. You're not just a particle, you're also a wave. And that wave occupies space. And part of your wave exists on the other side of that hill. And so there's a chance you could disappear from where you are and reappear still within your own wave pattern on the other side of that hill. And when that happens, it's called tunneling. And it did not actually

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  have to go over the hill and come down the other side to get there. And when it happens, it happens instantaneously. There's not a, there's no time travel for it. The wave for the particle, as we say, collapses and the particle exists outside of the barrier.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Now, does, does this remain true even for Jack and Jill particles?

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who went up the hill and came down.

• 16:06Charles Liu?

  Jack and Jill didn't go up the hill to fetch the pail of water. They just tunneled right through it and got the water.

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  They just reappeared on the other side, inside of their own wave.

• 16:24Speaker 04

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

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, who's next up? Is it Chuck?

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  Gavin Bamber. And Gavin Bamber says, "Hello from North Vancouver. Please, visit." And then he says, "In lieu of a nice question, I kneeled down and asked the following..."

• 16:57Charles Liu?

  Oh, man. Three puns in a single sentence. Well done. Now I really have to go to Vancouver.

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  "How many black holes are in our, are there in our galaxy compared to the number of stars? Is there a fixed ratio, or is this just a random ratio?"

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 17:18Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah. Well, and what we know, and do you count the one at the center of our galaxy?

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just one, you know.

• 17:24Charles Liu?

  One, yeah.

• 17:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so that does count.

• 17:26Charles Liu?

  Well, this is a great question.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd like to compare our estimates, because both Charles and I have extensive research background in the answer to that question, but we might not end up giving the same answer. So, so, Charles, let me hear your answer.

• 17:39Charles Liu?

  Okay. Here's my take. Uh, black holes are formed only by the most massive stars dying. And so, for every massive star that can create a black hole at the end of its main sequence lifetime, there are millions of other stars that cannot do that. So, the maximum amount of black hole to regular star ratio is sort of millions to one. But then, black holes, it has now been shown, thanks to LIGO and others, that black holes can coalesce and combine and create larger black holes. So, that total amount can only shrink as you continue to go forward.

• 18:24Charles Liu?

  As big stars blow up, one in a million or less, new black holes can be formed. But then, as they coalesce, they drop. I don't know what the exact mathematical ratio of all that is, but I'm guessing that it's millions to one, or even more rare, black holes to regular stars. Neil, what's your take?

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I, I would say it's not... As rare as you're suggesting, because it's just a simple integration of the initial mass function of stars. And you just find out the stars that are more massive than eight, eight or 10 solar masses, whatever the threshold we agree that would be. What fraction of all stars in the galaxy have a, are born with a mass higher than that? I think it's not one in a million. And the reason why I say that is, we have clusters of stars that don't have a million stars in them, but have a high mass star that would die that way. Maybe a hundred thousand stars, or 10,000 to 100. So I would say, one out of every hundred thousand stars in the galaxy, objects, stellar

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  objects in the galaxy, is a black hole, as the consequence of the death of this process. Because when stars are made, they're made in, in, in, but what's a group of star, a pod? Or should we invent the name? A cluster, a, an association. Oh, yeah, that's so boring. I wanna, I want like a, I wanna. A litter. A zological. A litter. A litter, thank you. A litter of stars born out of a gas cloud. We know that the low mass ones, many more stars are made that are low mass that are high mass. It's rarer and rarer and rarer. Interestingly, if you take a sheet of glass and drop it on the ground and it shatters, there will be more small parts than big parts. Okay?

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of things land this way. The initial glass function. Initial glass. Very good. No, you're far out, yeah. So Charles, I'm saying, I, I bet it's more like one in a hundred thousand, not one in millions.

• 20:29Gary O'Reilly?

  That's quite a discrepancy between one in a million and one in hundred thousand.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But between astronomers, that's like the same number.

• 20:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we don't care. They don't care.

• 20:38Gary O'Reilly?

  We ain't doing my tax. Seriously, you're not doing that.

• 20:42Chuck Nice?

  Here's what, here's what I wanna know, when a, when a, when a stellar nursery produces a litter of stars, does the galaxy then hound the rest of the galaxies to take one of them?

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Chuck Nice?

  Like, hey, they're so cute, you're gonna love it.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we just need some galactic nannies to take care of them at the same time.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Charles, do you see my reasoning there?

• 21:07Charles Liu?

  I do. I ask then, do you take into account very low mass stars and brown dwarfs? Because if you think of a typical South Peter initial mass function, right? 10 solar masses, every star that's 10 times the mass of the sun, there are 100 or more stars, 200 or more stars, that are the mass of our sun.

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  But those brown dwarfs, isn't another term for brown dwarf a failed star?

• 21:36Charles Liu?

  Or an overachieving planet, right?

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, there you go.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what all we're saying is that the initial mass function of stars would include these things that are not stars, that would come in even higher numbers than the lowest mass stars. So Charles is just being sort of complete in the mathematics there.

• 21:56Charles Liu?

  If you're going all the way down to the borderline of brown dwarfs, right? And for every star that can produce a black hole, there are millions of objects that cannot.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other objects.

• 22:11Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  Other objects.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There we can agree with that.

• 22:13Charles Liu?

  Yeah, and the initial mass function of brown dwarfs appears to be flatter than that of regular stars that could have nuclear fusion, so yeah.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Gary, well, both of your taxes coming up, okay?

• 22:23Charles Liu?

  And you can take the average of our answers, then you'll be bang on.

• 22:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I'm sure the IRS are gonna love that.

• 22:28Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, you could take the average of the answers and you'll still go to jail.

• 22:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Don, I'll stick with someone else.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, give me another one.

• 22:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Cameron Berg says, hello, Dr. Tyson Liu, and of course Chuck himself, hailing from Salt Lake City, and this question is, is it possible that what we call matter and energy since the Big Bang have left a lasting or ghost effect in the fabric of spacetime? And dark energy continues to grow because the effect keeps building as matter moves and expands into new space. So, there we go. Cameron Berg's question.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he saying, Charles, do you think he's saying that is the dark matter, the absence of the matter that has moved from its location? Is this?

• 23:16Charles Liu?

  Um, I feel like if I were to interpret this question more, it would be sort of like, is the residual effect of the Big Bang what the dark energy is as it fills spacetime?

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark energy or dark matter, did they say? Dark energy. He said dark energy.

• 23:33Charles Liu?

  Right, right, right. And so I, my response to that, right, Anil, you can correct me if you disagree. Uh, that dark energy. You're very sweet. A dark energy is, has been shown clearly not to be the result of matter and energy as we understand it, including dark. All the contents of the universe cannot explain how the universe itself is expanding in a way that is counter to that nature. So that was a different thing.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That dark energy is operating in the opposite sense that, that energy, matter and dark matter would have the universe behave.

• 24:17Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's hard to explain one thing with the other when they are complete opposite in what their forces are.

• 24:24Charles Liu?

  Right. The larger the universe gets, the more dark energy there has to be in the current formulation. And that just means that anything that's left over from what exists in the current universe cannot power that additional dark energy creation.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So deal with it.

• 24:42Charles Liu?

  Wow. You are, you are harsh today.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I know. I'm getting old and tired and I'm, I'm, I'm on the porch in my rocking chair. You know, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling, I'm older than all y'all, so I get to behave this way.

• 24:56Charles Liu?

  Nah.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No excuse.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, what you got?

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  So this is Emil Forstblatt, who says.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, what?

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forstblatt. Emil.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Emil. Emil Forstblatt, who says, "Hey, Emil from the San Francisco Bay Area, wondering about the potential measurement of consciousness. I believe what we call consciousness is an energy or a quantum equivalent that emerges, grows, expands, converts like other forms of energy or slash matter. It seems that as the universe expands, consciousness is emergent as a natural result of the separation of all matter from its source over time." We likely need something to measure emergent consciousness if it exists as some fundamental energy. What would we use to measure other forms of energy like consciousness?

• 25:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Honestly, your consciousness is not, your consciousness right now is electrical.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Chuck, that's the wrong, that's the wrong reply. It's, what are you smoking?

• 26:04Charles Liu?

  I don't know. No, no, no.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck, miss that one. I got low hanging fruit right there.

• 26:10Charles Liu?

  No, no. Like, Emile, Emile, many people agree with your belief. Believe as you do that consciousness must be something physical.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a thing. It's a thing.

• 26:22Charles Liu?

  Right. There is not yet any scientific evidence to confirm that. If there were some way to measure it, we'd be working on it right now. In fact, there has.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  Where's it come from?

• 26:34Charles Liu?

  Right. There have been studies.

• 26:36Chuck Nice?

  Where's it come from though?

• 26:37Charles Liu?

  Right. There have been studies, for example, where they tried to measure the mass of a soul or a consciousness based on the mass of your body or your brain before an event and after an event in terms of consciousness or unconsciousness. And there just hasn't been anything yet. So, that said, we should consider the possibility, the more likely possibility, that consciousness is not an emergent form of new energy, but an emergent form of information or organization of well-known existing energy that somehow transcends just the motion of photons back and forth in our brains. Neil, you probably have much more understanding about consciousness.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I like what you said there, but I want to add to it.

• 27:23Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something that, I think it was Brian Greene, we were having lunch a couple of months ago, this came up in conversation and it's stuck with me ever since. All right. You want consciousness to have some energy field that might be shared among people. By the way, in physics, anytime something happened that we.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Couldn't explain. We investigated it, found out what caused it, exploited it, and then went to the bank with it. So, go back in the middle of 19th century. There's Faraday, who puts a wire through a magnetic field, and there's a meter over on the side, connected to that wire, and it moves. And, well, how does that happen? It's like, well, today, which seems so trivial, back then was an amazing, you do this, this over here, and that happens over there. What, what, what did that? And then you find out there's current, there's something called an electron, which hadn't been discovered yet, and, and all kinds of discoveries come out of this. Anytime, any of us in the physical sciences confronted something

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that was behaving in a way that we didn't know or know the cause of, we investigated it, okay? And so, on a tabletop today, there's nothing left that is happening where we're saying, we don't know what's happening. Not on a table, maybe in a particle accelerator, but on a tabletop, no. Your consciousness counts as a tabletop. Everybody's sitting around the table. So now, here's the, here's the mind-blowing part. When LIGO measures the, the gravitational wave washing over the detector, it is measuring the movement, it is measuring matter

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  at the level of 1 twentieth the diameter of a proton. And that is this wave that has moved through the universe for a billion years. If there was something going on in the universe affecting matter,

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we would see it in that experiment. If there was some mysterious other thing, oh, somebody has a sixth sense and they have a, they have a energy field and they got a thing, it was, it would show up in those data. But it doesn't. So I think we can speak with confidence that there's not some mysterious mind energy that's permeating space that, that science has yet to discover. Because I'll tell you, I'll tell you what, if it was shaking up that atom, we'd have to account for that before we measured the, the, the gravitational wave. And that, and there was nothing there left to encounter.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Charles, do you know I visited the LIGO in, in, in Louisiana? Wonderful. Oh, what a great facility that must be. And I happened to be there like three weeks before they made the announcement and everybody was like hushed lit because they thought I would run to social media and say, no, I'm way more responsible than that. But anyhow, so, so when I watched the kind of stuff that they had to subtract out of their signal, with somebody walking Yeah. On the ground a hundred meters away, there they are, right there. A car a mile away. Um, there's an experiment where they measure the gravitational constant, that's not LIGO, another one. Okay.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they got these torsion beams and things measuring, which is a very hard thing to measure. Yeah. You realize there's a mound near that facility where if it had just rained, that mound is waterlogged and they can detect the extra gravity of the water that's in the water, in the, in the, in the soil. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So anyway, that's my long discussion to say, I, I agree with you, Charles, it's not a new kind of energy or force, it's familiar energy configuring itself in such a way to give us a perception of reality that we call consciousness.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So Neil, do we measure consciousness as positive and negative, bearing in mind the thought process you have?

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It depends on if you're into positivity or negativity. I don't know. Haters will be haters, that's negative.

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Yeah. All I know, all I know is my soul did weigh 21 grams, but then I went to SoulCycle and got it down to about eight. Oh, hello.

• 32:07Charles Liu?

  Nice job.

• 32:28Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's get our next one up here. This is from Boutaye Badaoui, and he is from Nice in the south of France.

• 32:37Charles Liu?

  Boutaye, that brings back memories. The surname Boutaye, yeah, I'll tell you all about that.

• 32:43Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no. Boutaye is, I believe, the first name, and the family name is Badaoui. If I've pronounced that incorrectly, my apologies.

• 32:49Charles Liu?

  Is, is, no, wait, wait, wait. Is this a European guest?

• 32:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, from Nice.

• 32:54Charles Liu?

  Then they probably put their surname first, right?

• 32:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Boutaye.

• 32:59Charles Liu?

  He's a Brit. What does he know, Charles?

• 33:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 33:01Charles Liu?

  No, no, no.

• 33:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm no longer European. I'm not allowed in.

• 33:05Charles Liu?

  That's right. In, in the Olympics, this is a famous Olympic story. In 1992 in Barcelona or 96 in Atlanta, I can't remember which one, there was a long-distance runner named Boutaye. And he was in this 10,000-meter race, and two other people, someone named Chilamo from Kenya, another one named Ska, I think from Morocco, were lapping. And he, you know, this Boutaye was a great runner. He had run, won a number of international competitions, but he was in the way. And you're supposed to move away. Yes, you are. And so as Chilamo, as Chilamo and Ska were coming toward him, Ska was like, move, move, move, you know, tell, tell him, take the arm, and so he finally moved away.

• 33:49Charles Liu?

  And what happened eventually was that Ska won and beat Chilamo. But then the event judges, the judges of the event took away his gold medal. Because they said that Gutayev had helped him by blocking Chilima. And it was a, it was quite the controversy.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, whoa.

• 34:09Charles Liu?

  What happened was it was reversed the next day upon appeal. But I remember watching that when I was a little kid, um, watching like that actual event happening uh, on the coverage for the Olympics.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 34:22Charles Liu?

  And then it's showing Scar being so upset, but then.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In every Star Hook episode, I have to do this, right?

• 34:28Speaker 05

  Charles, why, how do you know that? How do you know this?

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Why do you know that?

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Because he does.

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Random. All right, so Gary, I'm going with Charles' pronunciation here, okay?

• 34:42Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, I'm.

• 34:42Charles Liu?

  Butayev, yes.

• 34:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Butayev, and it's been phonetically spelt for us here. So here we go. If we imagine a thought experiment where two photons of light travel parallel to each other, one in the vacuum of space, the other in a fluid. They both travel at the speed of light and by definition, their respective experience of time is zero. However, their relative speed being different, life moves slower in the fluid. They should actually have a different internal clock. Um, how can we make that work as a question? Or is there a mistake in this experiment?

• 35:17Charles Liu?

  Great question. It happens all the time, actually. Uh, and I want you to know that that's a great thought experiment and it's actually a physical experiment that's been done a bunch of times. It, it happens when, for example, subatomic particles enter Earth's atmosphere. There, say, one subatomic particle, this is the atmosphere, it heads off into space. The other one comes into Earth's atmosphere and thus is going through the fluid known as the atmosphere, right? The compressible fluid of the gas of Earth's atmosphere. And what happens is that indeed, they experience different times.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A fluid doesn't have to be liquid or wet.

• 35:51Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if a fluid takes the shape of its container, a gas would do that.

• 35:55Charles Liu?

  So it can be compressible.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the whole field of fluid dynamics, the equations are the same that apply to the air or would apply to a liquid because of the dynamics that goes on for objects moving through it. Continue, Charles.

• 36:08Charles Liu?

  Yes, you're right. And so, uh, we have shown. experimentally that the clocks for those subatomic particles that go through Earth's atmosphere actually run differently from the ones that are gone off in space. And because of that, their decay patterns are different. Their half-lives are different as measured by us, not in the frame of reference of the particle. So this is an experiment that has been done, and there's some famous ones, specifically about a particle back then known as mu mesons.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we don't still call them that? We don't still call them that?

• 36:44Charles Liu?

  We just, well, usually you just call them muons or mesons, right?

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, muons, sure, sure. Mu meson became muon. Thank you.

• 36:52Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right. So you can find these experiments and show that indeed the clocks of those individual particles differed from those of their companions that did not enter Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, great story.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, the clock, so just to be clear, we're talking about particles traveling not at the speed of light. They have clocks.

• 37:18Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you're actually traveling at the speed of light, you would not have a clock. And the question was about two photons, not about two particles.

• 37:25Charles Liu?

  Oh, well, in that case, what you do is think about it as having no clocks, but through different media. And so the speed of light will be different from one medium compared to the other. So you still have the same effect of causality of the surrounding environment having clocks. I hope that makes sense. I may have not have explained it very well. But the idea is that if you're thinking of time and measuring time of that photon, which itself experiences zero time, the medium still affects the measurement.

• 37:58Chuck Nice?

  So the speed of light is still the speed of light. The light is still traveling at the speed of light. It's just that stuff around it is slowing it to less than the speed of light.

• 38:07Charles Liu?

  Less than the speed of light in vacuum.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So Charles, something I learned only recently, because I never really thought about it, that when light slows down in a medium, it actually doesn't slow down?

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's, what's happening is it's still moving at the speed of light between the particles that it encounters. It just keeps hitting pieces. Yeah, yeah, and then it has to get through that particle somehow. It gets absorbed, re-emitted, or whatever, if it's coherent. Because if the, if the glass is translucent, then it's not a straight line through. And if it's opaque, it's not getting through at all. So the, the, the molecules have to be just right so that it is transparent to the photon. So it moves through where there's no particle at the speed of light. It's a particle that delays it because it got to come out the other side to continue at the speed of light.

• 38:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't that just what Chuck said?

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 39:04Chuck Nice?

  But I wa- I wasn't gonna say anything. Thank you, Gary.

• 39:07Charles Liu?

  I like your explanation, Neil. I like both explanations. They're great.

• 39:14Charles Liu?

  I'm exerting positive consciousness.

• 39:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so the energy of the photon just had to get in and out of the atoms or the molecules that were in its way. But between them, it's still moving at the speed of light.

• 39:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's getting, it's getting refracted, it's getting diverted, it's getting, yeah.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All that can happen, and that takes time to get in and around the particles. But that's the energy moving, not a photon as a speed of light moving particle. So, so the point, Charles, is, and I, like I said, I only learned this very, much later in life than should have been, that photons only ever actually move at the speed of light, even through a medium.

• 39:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, I can, I can kind of see that.

• 39:55Chuck Nice?

  I can kind of see that. That's cool, that's really cool. All right, let's get a little personal then. This is Mikhail Boesford, who says, uh, um, hello, guardians of the geeks.

• 40:09Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a t-shirt, there's a t-shirt.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guardians of the geeks.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  Mikhail here from Canada. Who does Charles Lu call when he doesn't have? Oh, no. Oh, no.

• 40:26Charles Liu?

  Well, Mikhail, it's very kind of you to say that, but obviously I know much less than what I don't know. So when I need information, the first people I go to are obviously...

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know much less than you don't know? What does that sentence mean?

• 40:45Charles Liu?

  It means that what I don't know far outstrips on an infinite level what I actually do know.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got you. Except what you actually know far exceeds everybody else by an infinity. So they don't even know how to ask you a question in your infinity, because we're still embedded in our own infinity.

• 41:05Charles Liu?

  Dude, dude, that's too much. Thank you. You're very kind. But when I do have a question, my go-to people, Mikhail, are Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly.

• 41:16Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 41:17Charles Liu?

  You guys may not know this, but actually, Gary and Chuck, I wanted to ask you if you had a chance to take a look at my question that I sent you last week, where we would maybe use the cross-terms in Einstein's field equations to figure out the topological constraints to a W, many-worlds interpretation quantum multiverse. Have you guys figured that out yet for me yet?

• 41:38Chuck Nice?

  And I wrote you back and I was like, what a dumb question.

• 41:42Charles Liu?

  Oh, I mean, you had it, right? I knew it. I mean, Gary, I don't know if you had a different opinion on that already.

• 41:47Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I'm selling that to a really high-ranking think tanks at the moment, so I'm not prepared to discuss it in public.

• 41:57Charles Liu?

  Well, no, when Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly do not have a question answered for me right away, I usually go to my brilliant wife, Dr. Amy Rablou, and my three kids. I am blessed to be the dumbest person in my sample.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to acquit to that, actually, because I've hung out with this kid.

• 42:19Charles Liu?

  And so I always can count on...

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His wife has a PhD in mathematics, so, yes. Charles is the dumbest one in the household, by far.

• 42:29Charles Liu?

  Order of magnitude. So Amy and the kids are really helpful and I always go to them if I don't know something. And then if we all have to look something up, I always try to find at least three different sources with three different answers to compare them. There's so much misinformation.

• 42:47Charles Liu?

  Breitbart doesn't have your answer there and Breitbart and Newsmax and.

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:52Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 42:52Chuck Nice?

  Fox News.

• 42:53Charles Liu?

  Really? Yeah, yeah. I always want to be sure. There's so much information out there that I estimate that a third of it is outright wrong. And a third of it is sort of right. And then a third of it is probably right. So I'm always trying to find at least three sources of information. People that I trust, sources that I know. I actually go back and read the papers if I can. The original sources, yes. Yeah, look at the actual pieces of information.

• 43:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but now the real, the real question there though, Charles.

• 43:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  Because that, that can be flawed. I can look up three different sources and they're not credible sources. So how do you?

• 43:28Charles Liu?

  He's it.

• 43:29Chuck Nice?

  How do you, how do you vet your source?

• 43:31Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  To make sure that it's credible. That's what I, that's what I would want.

• 43:34Charles Liu?

  That is a process and it's sometimes it's frustrating. It takes quite a bit of time. I will look at the source and then I will look for references to that source and say, are those sources reliable or unreliable? What have other people said over long periods of time? Very often, if you say, type a search into any given search engine, the top 20 answers are all from the same source. You'll just copy each other. Spread out everywhere else. You have, you need to have to make sure there's independence among. That's right. So I don't hesitate to do that. It's a little bit of extra effort. Sometimes a lot of extra effort to find the answers, but it's worth it. It's the way that I protect myself from misinformation.

• 44:13Charles Liu?

  So Charles is like the credible Hulk who backed up all his planes with research and documented here with New Journals. That's the credible Hulk.

• 44:22Chuck Nice?

  Chalk smash. Chalk dismember.

• 44:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, let's, let's go jump into the next question and we'll see. Cause I think, you know, what it's a bit of a hot topic question, having looked at it here. This is from Jane Von Schilling from Scottsdale, Arizona.

• 44:39Gary O'Reilly?

  What are the possibilities of the combination of AI and quantum computers?

• 44:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So is this, does this devolve into another question where is one more powerful than the other?

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're both badass and you put them both together?

• 44:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  And that's the, and that's the end of us.

• 44:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Or, or is that the beginning?

• 45:01Chuck Nice?

  And that's orders, no, you put it together and that is the end of humanity. Say goodbye.

• 45:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Or is that, does that solve Charles's problems?

• 45:09Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you what, let me tell you what, let me tell you what the first, you know how like the first computers they had, well, they were numbers, but they were for calculations. But the first thing that came out of computer was hello, all right? Or the first.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first one was from the Macintosh. Yeah.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  From the Macintosh. Hello, that was the first thing that came out of the computer. The first thing that will come out of a quantum AI computer will be, oh, you F'd up now, Gigi.

• 45:38Charles Liu?

  It could be, it could be, but I'll say this, right? Our understanding of intelligence itself may in fact evolve dramatically once we understand how quantum computing and artificial intelligence merge. It's really neat. Right now, remember everyone, quantum computing is even in an earlier stage in its development than regular computing was in the era of those first counting machines that you were mentioning. We are decades away from being able to do anything like put a quantum computer on your desktop, right? Maybe a century. Right now, the quantum computers are cryogenically cooled, they're the size of a room and they're

• 46:23Charles Liu?

  only able to do.

• 46:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the big hardware issue right now, not just.

• 46:27Charles Liu?

  A few tiny qubits at a time to make the calculations, right? But those tiny qubits can be extremely powerful, not necessarily because they're numerous.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A qubit is the quantum computing version.

• 46:38Charles Liu?

  Yes, thank you, yes.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't otherwise find in a computer.

• 46:40Charles Liu?

  I should have made, I should have made that clear earlier.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why I'm, that's why I'm here. Don't worry about it. Keep talking.

• 46:44Charles Liu?

  No, thank you. Yeah. A quantum bit, a qubit, right, is a thing that depends on staying coherent with other qubits in order to make its calculations. The quantum coherence is extremely fragile. It requires temperatures very close to absolute zero, almost no noise of any kind.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you look at it the wrong way, if you breeze on it the wrong way.

• 47:08Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it's it's all gone. So it's really, really in its infancy. But it shows a great deal of promise in the sense that when you put in one and one, before it puts out two, there's a lot of stuff in between which we can't see and happens almost instantaneous. And so is that a measure of how our own brains work? That's a great question. Artificial intelligence is attempting, is our current human attempt to use non-quantum classical physics to mimic our brains and our intelligence and our consciousness, right? And we're seeing that that problem is almost intractable.

• 47:49Charles Liu?

  To mimic a human brain, I saw a YouTube video on this recently. It is remarkably counterintuitive. We know the steps, but the hardware is seemingly insurmountable in its difficulty. So those two things put together might do it, but we've still got a long way to go before that actually gets to changing.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The insurmountable complications of the human mind might not be what you'd want to emulate at all. You want to emulate the parts of the human mind that are capable of good things and accurate things. The actual human mind commits violence and war and crime and genocide and all of this.

• 48:30Chuck Nice?

  Not to mention that just the way that we perceive information is a perception. We don't actually view information, we perceive information, which is a big problem.

• 48:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After your senses dealt with it, right? So it might, so it's easy to praise the brain because we don't understand it rather than ask. Does the brain do things that we don't need to emulate at all because we can do it better by other means?

• 48:56Charles Liu?

  Well, let's first understand it, figure out what's actually good and bad and what's causing them all, all the interconnectednesses. And then we can distill the good stuff without worrying that that will accidentally cause the bad stuff to happen.

• 49:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the frontier of neuroscience, but I agree with Chuck. Maybe AI will figure out how to perfect quantum computing.

• 49:18Charles Liu?

  And then how to perfect human beings.

• 49:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Will it not then, as you say, Neil, solve its own problems? I mean, look at it, look how long it took us from a computer the size of a room to get to a smartphone. That, that, that time is gone now. That won't hap, that won't take that length of time for it to solve problems that we

• 49:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 49:39Gary O'Reilly?

  are impossible right now.

• 49:40Charles Liu?

  So the issue is how we solve the problems.

• 49:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that's 60 years.

• 49:44Charles Liu?

  Right on the head.

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, within lifetimes, right?

• 49:46Charles Liu?

  Well, well, think about this. If we put an AI on the problem of solving climate change, okay? It might be able to solve it in a day, but how would it solve it? By killing every human being so that we don't have to create any more carbon. You know what? That kind of solution, right? That's the simplistic, simple minded thing when you're saying, well, solve this problem quickly.

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, this evil AI, that's the evil AI.

• 50:09Charles Liu?

  No, that's the AI that doesn't know the difference between good and evil.

• 50:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The immoral AI.

• 50:15Charles Liu?

  The amoral AI.

• 50:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amoral.

• 50:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Amoral, yeah.

• 50:18Charles Liu?

  So that's where that frontier is, I believe, Neil and Gary and Chuck. It's the issue of trying to make sure that we do it right and do it safe so that whatever AI doesn't ignore what we need of it. It's the other way around.

• 50:35Gary O'Reilly?

  But if a human is in charge, if a human is in charge of AI and quantum computing.

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we tell ourselves.

• 50:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Right? Yeah, well, let's, let's go with temporarily in charge.

• 50:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you tell yourself about your cat. Yeah, I'm in charge of my cat.

• 50:48Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, yeah, that's never, ever, ever going to be the case.

• 50:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 50:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, somewhat, some, I know, but someone's, someone's going to have that immoral attitude. And steer that intelligence in a certain direction. There's not always going to be Captain Good Cat in charge of AI.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not everyone who's immoral believes that they are immoral. That's a whole other challenge that we have.

• 51:11Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go. This becomes very ethical.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The winners of wars are those who write the history books. And so that's how that goes. And just to be clear, in case people didn't know, you can be moral or immoral. A moral means you are neither moral nor immoral.

• 51:26Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 51:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's, that's, it, it, just to be clear, people don't know how we use that term. And so Chuck, if you're an A-hole, are you either one kind of hole or another?

• 51:38Chuck Nice?

  Right, well, no, if you're an A-hole, we know exactly what kind of hole you are.

• 51:46Charles Liu?

  You know, I will wrap up by saying that Neil, you actually know this much better than I do. Astronomers have been using AI and machine learning technology for decades. We have no fear of this material. We are perfectly understanding that this can be used to do great things like help us understand data from millions of stars and galaxies when a single human being couldn't do all that calculation at once. So it's not a matter of being afraid of it or saying, oh, my gosh, we have to avoid it, or, oh, my gosh, we must exploit it. It's another mystery, a puzzle, a tool that we can work with and we can learn about and we can sic on our unknowns.

• 52:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if that fails, we all die. Okay, that's, and on that note.

• 52:29Chuck Nice?

  Folks, we're all gonna die.

• 52:32Charles Liu?

  Well, we'll all die eventually, right? It's just a matter of when and how.

• 52:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys, Charles, it's always good to have you.

• 52:38Charles Liu?

  It is such a pleasure to be here, everybody. Thank you so much for having me.

• 52:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rejoining us. And we know that when we all visit your house, we just say, where's the dumb one? I want to talk to you. It's gonna be you.

• 52:49Charles Liu?

  Hands down.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hands down. All right, Gary, always good to have you, man.

• 52:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure, my friend.

• 52:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck Nice, you are in Aruba right now. Say hi to the Caribbean for us all.

• 52:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Charles Liu?

  I will do.

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition, its own version of Cosmic Queries, a delight in its complexity and its joy, specially brought to us in the guise of Charles Liu. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.