Science at Warp Speed: StarTalk Live!

How much energy would it take to make a warp drive? Neil deGrasse Tyson joined by Sasheer Zamata & Pete Holmes explore the science in TV shows from antimatter annihilation to tachyons to warp bubbles with astrophysicist & science advisor for Star Trek, Erin Macdonald, and particle physicist & advisor for The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer, David Saltzberg.

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, we're live from the Novo Theater in Los Angeles. Join me and my co-host, Sasheer Zamata, in conversation with particle physicist David Salzberg, and astrophysicist and Star Trek science advisor Erin McDonald. Also joining us is special comedic guest Pete Holmes. Check it out.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Live at the Novo Theater, Los Angeles, and we've got a show for you tonight. Thanks for coming out. Tonight, we're gonna find out where the sci is in the sci-fi, the science in the science fiction. And we'll also explore some of the most iconic science fiction stories that have ever been told. But I want to first introduce my guests. As you may know, StarTalk is a juxtaposition. It is a braid of science, pop culture, and comedy. And right now, I will introduce to you my comedic co-host. That is Sasheer Zamata. Sasheer, come on out. Where are you?

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A comedian, actress, a former cast member of Saturday Night Live? But you had more hair back then.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I did have more hair, yeah. I think people think I'm a different person when I shave my head. I shaved my head for the first time ever in college, and I lost like half my friends over the summer.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just didn't recognize you.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  They truly didn't recognize you. I was like, what?

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, in addition, we will have two expert guests. Let's bring the first one out. We have astrophysicist Erin McDonald. Erin, come on out. Here you go.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Erin, hello.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where did we find Erin McDonald? She is the official science advisor to the Star Trek franchise. Whoa. Whoa. I want that job. We all want that job.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Everyone wants that job.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone wants that job.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have your PhD in astrophysics from the University of Glasgow.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Specializing in, what is it, neutron stars. Is that correct?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yep, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, and gravitational waves. So I'm excited to talk about those.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And actually, and you worked a bit with LIGO.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind us what LIGO stands for?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we abbreviated LIGO. Okay, in addition to Erin, we have David Salzberg. Dr. David Salzberg, come on out, David. All right.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, man. David Salzberg, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, right here in our backyard.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're an experimental particle physicist. Correct. And this is like, that's a rarefied space. There's a lot of people that I have to deal with.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, why is he on this panel? Because he is the science advisor to the Big Bang Theory TV show. As well as Young Sheldon. And he advised Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer. Oh, my gosh. So his job wasn't to edit the script. They had other people to do that. He made sure that all the set design did not really mess up for what was supposed to be there at the time and at the place, Mr. Particle Physicist. All right. Well, it wouldn't be a complete StarTalk show unless we round out. We have one empty chair here.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Sashir, you brought a guest comedian with you. Who might that be?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, you know, as you've said before, the show is about science, pop culture, comedy, and I don't want to be the only comedy arm on this panel. So I'm bringing a buddy who is the creator and star of HBO's Crashing and the host of the podcast You Made It Weird. Give it up for Pete Holmes.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete Holmes.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Hi Neil.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing Pete? Pete, okay.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  There it is. We cleared the nicknames before.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete, thanks for coming.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love your work, I love your portfolio. And we decided you're ideal for this show.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Well, I'm here to be confused, bewildered, afraid, belligerent.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's bewitched, bewildered, confused.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Not this time. I'm just here to represent the common person who doesn't know what dark matter is, or anti-matter, or reality.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, there you go. So let's bring this around. David, you study matter.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Erin, you study spacetime. Correct. That's kind of the whole universe, right there. It covers it, yeah. That's, that kind of covers it. And you've got the expertise in The Big Bang Theory, one of the most successful shows there ever was. And I have two cameos in that, season three and season eight.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Brag. Weird flex.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you were a scientist, you might have a cameo too.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I know.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Or a comedian, or an actor, damn it!

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have the consulting for Star Trek. So, you know, when you think of astrophysics, or astronomy in general, you think of telescopes, and telescopes look up, and they detect light. And the first telescopes detected visible light. Of course, because our eyes see, by definition, visible light. Then we discovered other kinds of light. First described as unfit for vision by William Herschel. He had the spectrum laid out that Newton told him, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, from a prism. And he put a, he said, "I wonder what temperature each color has." So he put a thermometer in each color, and put a control thermometer just outside of the red.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's no color there. That's your control thermometer. And every experiment he did, the control thermometer was hotter than all the other colors. And then he put it somewhere like in his backyard and it went to a normal temperature. And he concluded, there must be some extra light coming from the sun that you can't see that's below the red. He called it light unfit for vision. The boy discovered infrared light in that experiment.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to even ask that question. So, so then we, then the race is on. We go from, there's infrared, there's microwaves, there's, there's radio waves, there's, there's ultraviolet, gamma ray, X-rays. That's the whole electromagnetic spectrum. And we have telescopes and detectors in each of those bands. But that's not enough. The universe talks to us in more bands than that. So you seek out other ways of detecting the universe. Give me, give me another way.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  So for example, neutrinos travel in straight line just like light, but they're not light. So if we could.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a particle.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  It's a particle instead of, that's not a particle of light. Right.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  It's a nutritious particle?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Nutri-

• 7:37Speaker 03

  It's the neutrino. It was named by an Italian, uh, who called it the little neutral one.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Oh. A neutrino. It's a neutrino. Why do I love my mama so much? Let me come closer. Is that a right?

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little neutral. It's a particle with no charge.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  And maybe the best way to think of them is it's like an electron that lost its charge. That's about as close as it is.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little emotional, buddy.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Get your charge back. Yeah, that's right. You can have your Brendan Fraser moment. Get it back.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get all emotional.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so you try to detect neutrinos?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where do you find them?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  So the experiments that I did were in Antarctica. We used the Antarctic ice as a giant lens or target to collect them.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is like glacial ice?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Glacial ice that's hundreds of thousands, if not more, years old.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Just waiting for us to... It's incredibly clear to radio waves. So the idea is that neutrinos mostly pass through, but one will hit, and it will make particles that emit radio waves that we could then detect from our platform.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Awesome.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how many neutrinos are out there?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Well, through the sun, the most of them that were coming through us right now are from the sun. And through our bodies right now, there's about 100 trillion per second going through you.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neutrinos?

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Ah!

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, now you feel it.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  I didn't know about it before now.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  But only about one or a dozen will actually interact with you in your lifetime.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Define interact.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, define interact. Be specific.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  That's a good question, because we... But let's just say it leaves a little energy behind.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Or breaks up your DNA a little bit.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Okay, well, that's less good. That sounds bad.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Aaron, so not only are these particles, but there's also waves that are not electromagnetic, that are not part of that whole spectrum that I just delineated. And so predicted by good old Albert.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me some of that background there.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  So one of the things that Albert Einstein did was general relativity, which was sort of describing the fabric of our universe. If you've seen that bowling ball and a trampoline idea, that that's kind of how gravity works that they figured out. Most of us learn Newtonian gravity, the apple falling from the tree, it's a force. But that only really, it's an approximation for gravity.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It turns out, we didn't know at the time.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  We didn't know, yeah. And so Einstein was the one who kind of introduced mass into this fabric that scientists had already been thinking about, and saw like that that works. That described the gravity that we were struggling to describe at the time. And one of the things he did was like, well, what if the bowling ball explodes, right? What if two bowling balls crash into each other? And you can propagate that through the math, and the trampoline will ripple. And so spacetime ripples when there's a change to it. And it travels at the speed of light, but Einstein was like... It's there, but it's so tiny, no one will ever detect it. And scientists went, "Challenge accepted." And 100 years after his prediction, we detected the motion of spacetime in our universe.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  And the best analogy I can give you, but really pay attention to what I'm saying, it is like hearing the universe. It is not hearing the universe, sound doesn't travel in space. But it is like, you know, if you just didn't have any light and you're just hearing the universe, that's a different sense. And that's effectively what gravitational waves are. They give us information in a different sense.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they ripple away from the incident.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they move at the speed of light.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And LIGO detected its first in 2016, if I remember.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  15, they announced it in 16.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They announced it in 16.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  It's a common mistake.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  I know, I know. What are you gonna do to this guy?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  It's a little embarrassing, but yeah. 2016 over here. May I, may I?

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please, please, go, yes.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  When, Aaron, fascinating, when you said, fascinating, says the guy who didn't know what you were saying. I do love that it's a bowling ball and a trampoline, that this was solved in like some trailer park somewhere. It's like a thimble and an above tramp pool. We're gonna figure this out. When you say it's the sound of the universe, what is the subject of that? Wouldn't it be a more localized source?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  So, everything that's moving in our universe is giving off gravitational waves. So we're rippling spacetime as I'm waving my hands around. But they are incredibly small and hard to detect. So the only things that LIGO detects are extreme events. Essentially, two black holes crashing into each other, or a black hole and another compact object, like a neutron star or a dead star, that crash into each other. And it's this huge ripple. Now, I say it's really big, but what we're detecting is changes in spacetime, 1 one thousandth the size of an atom. So it's tiny.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But LIGO measured that.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  But they measured it.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  With mirrors made of atoms, which blows my mind. Like, the physics word is so cool. Yeah. And they, and they saw it.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Nailed it.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  You guys are great. I hope you get back to your car safely.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Go LA Lakers.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Nailed it.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, that was my one sign.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my favorite way to think about it is Einstein in 1915 or 16?

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Yep, 15.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boop.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Common mistake.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He predicts the existence of gravitational waves. Then, a few years later, he describes an obscure quantum phenomenon called the stimulated emission of radiation. This is a research paper that obscure stimulated emission of radiation. A few decades later, that became the foundation of the invention of the laser. Laser is an acronym for?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Well, we just got your Netflix password.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  That's solid.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so then LIGO comes around. The first L in LIGO stands for?

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Laser.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laser. So we did, so 100 years later, we detect gravitational waves predicted by Einstein using lasers that he laid the foundation for.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Einstein was badass. That's all I can say.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  It's irritating how much stuff that guy discovers.

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Like, it is wild.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  It's irritating that your acronym is made of another acronym.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Double acronym! Oh, I didn't thought about that!

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Right?

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Do the whole thing.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole thing.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Oh god.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unpack it.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Spell out laser and then the rest are hers.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Interferometry gravitational wave observer.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Oh man, I am turned on right now.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  This is sexy.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, so we've got this window to the universe that can detect things that ordinary telescopes couldn't. We've got this other window to the universe, and, but there's a third one, there's more, but another one, I want to make sure before we move on. Cosmic rays, just catch me up on that.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Cosmic rays are also particles that move through the universe, but they would be things like protons, or electrons.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So familiar particles.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, mostly yes, and nuclei.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Okay, so then... But the problem with them is because they're charged, when they go through the magnetic fields of the universe, they bend. So the one, the direction you see them coming is not the direction they came from. So it's really hard to do very meaningful astronomy.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Right, so that you might just see them spread, even if there's one source out there you'd love to study, it kind of rains down on you from almost all directions.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so these come from what?

• 15:41Speaker 03

  We don't exactly know.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, next thing.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, science is like the only branch of human inquiry where you can stand flat-footed and say, "I don't know." Ask yourself, who else can say that? Who else does say that? Everyone's gotta have an answer to something, everybody. And so in science, you're at the frontier, at the precipice, it is?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  "We don't know."

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Don't know." Oh, it became a "we don't know," he doesn't want to be an "I." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but, but they're high energy, so some high-energy phenomenon must be driving them.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Right, and also probably they have to be contained in some magnetic fields, so they, in order to stay in one place long enough, to get accelerated. So we have the idea that it could be the remnants of supernova.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exploding stars, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Um, it could be...

• 16:33Speaker 02

  We knew that.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Active galactic nuclei, which are...

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Supernova, exploding stars, keep going, please, you're boring us. Nutrinos are going through us.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nuclei of galaxies can be quite...

• 16:44Speaker 03

  It would be powered by a black hole, for example.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  But, there's a lot of candidates, and we don't know which one yet is the, is the real winner.

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, so these are three whole new windows to the universe that tell us what's going on out there that we had no idea before we had these other kinds of telescopes, if you want to think about them that way. Okay, so now we use telescopes to, and we look out in the universe and we find that eighty-five percent of the gravity of the universe has no known origin. And we call that

• 17:21Speaker 03

  dark matter.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, gotta say, dark matter. Say, say it like you mean it.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's not really the greatest word, so it should be called the invisible matter. Because you don't see it. It's just not luminous, and so people called it dark.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I, see, what I would call, I would call it dark gravity. That's what it literally is.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You okay with that? It doesn't sound like he's okay with that.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  He's like, alright, I gave you my answer, it's invisible.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Well, I'm a little, I'm a little bit not, not knowing what you're after because there's dark energy and there's dark matter, and I wasn't sure which you were doing.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm saying dark gravity is something that's got gravity and we don't know what it is. Okay, so here's my question to you. We don't know what it is, but some of your people...

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Go on.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you have to say about the whites?

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you got on the whites?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Neil, we're outnumbered on this thing.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, you, you, the community of particle physicists,

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you know, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you. The particle physicists are sure that dark matter, what we call dark matter, is some other kind of particle we have yet to detect.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And that's the original idea, but it could be, for example, uh, more, black holes left over from the early universe. There's other, it could be a particle and we have certain places it would fit in really nicely. If we need a particle that does this, and by the way, it would also be the dark matter, so that's really great. But no one, no one says that it isn't, uh... Black holes, for example.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  But what's cool is because gravitational waves don't rely on light to detect them, we can't see dark matter using that traditional electromagnetic radiation, but we see the gravitational effects of something there. And that is could potentially with gravitational wave detectors in the future. We're not that sensitive to them yet, but that may start giving us clues as to what dark matter is because we really don't know.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not invisible to you?

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Heh.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but if it might be a particle, how would you detect a particle that doesn't interact with our particles? You're kind of sort of already doing that with neutrinos.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  We have many ways that we're looking for dark matter.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark matter particles. Because you're a particle physicist.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're a hammer looking for nails.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  So I have friends that go, well, we really, it's very small nail, but.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I feel like I'm your lawyer. Objection! Objection! Leading the witness with a nail analogy.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  He's looking for the truth.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I did lead the witness there, yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I like that. But for example, people go into very deep caves to get away from the cosmic rays, which would be stray noise, and have very, very cold vats of liquid noble gases like liquid xenon and liquid argon. They make it as cold as they can, as low radioactivity as they can. They shield it as much as they can and they wait for something to hit it.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A dark matter particle from space.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Right, and just one might hit it.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just sit there.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  And just wait and wait until they see it.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  I'm Joel Cherico, creator of Cosmic Mugs, cosmicmugs.com, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Star Trek, you know, any, I don't want to create fights in the audience, but Star Trek cares about real science. Uh-oh. Take that, Seaquest!

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Oh, we don't hate on Seaquest.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't hate on Seaquest, Darwin Hungry, Darwin Hungry! I'm just saying, I don't want to name names, franchises, but Star Trek cares. So how does Star Trek think about dark matter?

• 21:33Speaker 04

  So what's interesting about Star Trek is because it's been around for 60 years, you can kind of trace where scientists are based on the science terms that come up. Like, you can kind of look at like how we started learning more about genetics. Like genetics showed up a ton in Enterprise after they had mapped the genome, like all of these things. And so only recently has Star Trek kind of sprinkled in some dark matter stuff. And in Star Trek Discovery, so, did you want to talk, do you want to talk about the discovery of dark matter, or should I talk about the discovery of dark matter?

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, go for it, go for it.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Okay, so.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I can take it from here, yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, you got it.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Actually, no, no, you can go.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Okay, alright, alright, alright, yeah.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not like you don't have dark matter stories.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  So many.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  I'll tell you after.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, alright.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Sounds good, sounds good.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You queue them up and we'll come back to you, yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  So Franz Wicky in the 1930s was able to look at sort of distant galaxies and see how they were moving and see how the stars in them were moving. And it appeared that there was more stuff there than how the stars were behaving. And so that's kind of the first origin of that. And then Vera Rubin came along and she was a great woman astrophysicist and she was able to... Some Rubin heads. Yeah, Rubin! And mapping our own galaxies, showing that the movement of the stars, like that there is dark matter in our own galaxy. And I love Vera Rubin, Rubin head here.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  And in Star Trek Discovery, we actually named a dark matter nebula after her, because it's called the Veruben Nebula. I was very excited to get that in there. I know, little shout out.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Sounds delicious.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  I know, shocking, but there's a lot of overlooked women in physics.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Any opportunity to shine a light on them. Beer Rubin was awesome.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so we have these things that are kind of mysterious and sci-fi-y. I don't, don't ask me to spell that. Sci-fi-y things, you know, and one of them is antimatter. And we, many people's first encounter with antimatter was Star Trek.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have matter, antimatter, drives. And, and what goes on there?

• 23:39Speaker 04

  So, I, you know, with antimatter, it's one of those things, you hear these technical words thrown around and you don't really know what's science and what's science fiction. Antimatter sounds like science fiction, but it is actually a real thing, but it has to do with particles, so I'll let you

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  explain antimatter.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Antimatter.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  I know.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give it to me.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  So, okay, it was an interesting case where that was predicted before it was found. And we had Paul Dirac, the 1930s, playing around with the equations of

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's two names, but Paul Dirac.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yes, first name was Paul, last name was Dirac.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you said Paul Dirac.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  The sister was Tesseract.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  He was playing around with the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics, and he had to take a square root, essentially. And, you know, the square root of nine is three, but it's also minus three.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  So he had two answers.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus three times minus three is also nine.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it has two solutions.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  And, and that's kind of close to why he found two solutions when he combined these equations. And one was a positive charge and one was a negative charge that we now identify as the electron and its antimatter particle, the positron.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, he had, as I understand it, he hypothesized that since we are regular matter, there might be a whole other place filled with antimatter.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  And he also had this idea that there could be an entire sea of particles that correspond to the antimatter.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  And there, there the matter, and we're the antimatter, man.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  The weird thing with matter and antimatter, though, is if you touch, you annihilate yourselves, and you turn into pure energy. So if you met your matter counterpart and you shook hands, you, pff, energy.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so don't do that.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  So don't do that. Just be careful.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so this is 100% efficient in converting matter into energy.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  If a positron meets an electron, they collide and produce pure energy. All the mass, all their mass disappears and goes into energy by E equals mc squared.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Star Trek uses matter/antimatter for warp drives.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Yes, that is correct. So, strap in, because it's awesome. So, sheet of spacetime, right? You want to go faster than the speed of light. You can't on the surface of spacetime.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, if you went the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, and that's too much time for a TV show.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got to do that during the TV commercial, so how do they pull it off?

• 26:10Speaker 04

  There you go. Yeah, the nearest star to us is over four light-years away, and if you have a five-year mission, it's boring. So, to go, there's lots of different ways you can sort of cheat this.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Star Trek is a five-year mission, I forgot about that.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a five-year mission.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five-year mission.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  The original series, yeah.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To seek out and explore strange new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  We activated it. I'm gonna pull this.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alien, wait, wait, so it's a five-year mission, but the show only lasted three seasons?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  I know, well, that's a different conversation.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's embarrassing. And why do they have all those clues for a three-hour tour? Catch us up on the warp drives.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Okay, so the idea behind warp drives is you can't go faster than light on the surface of spacetime, but there's nothing that says that spacetime itself can't go faster than the speed of light. And so you wrap a bubble of spacetime around your ship, and then that bubble pushes you faster than the speed of light. In order to do that, you need energy, because E equals mc squared. If you don't have mass, if you don't have a bowling ball, you can use an equivalent amount of energy. And in Star Trek, they get that energy from matter/antimatter collisions. Most people will conflate dilithium crystals, thinking that those are powering the ships, but those are more like control rods for the matter/antimatter reactions. They like keep it stable.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  But there's lots of, like, once we start poking holes in it, we're gonna, like, how can you contain antimatter, right? Like...

• 27:38Speaker 03

  So right, if you put antimatter in a bottle and not an anti-bottle, the elec- the positrons in the antimatter would see the electrons in the bottle and they would annihilate and give off a lot of energy.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you, how do you carry around antimatter?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  So one way, uh, we saw in the movie, uh, Angels and Demons.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, I remember that. Uh, uh, the priest, what was, who played the priest in that?

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Ewan McGregor, he, he's walking around with this vial. The Vatican has the only vial of antimatter. And I'm looking at it, it's like, Dan Brown did not take any physics in his entire life, the author of this story. First, we make antimatter all the time in labs. The Vatican does not have a particle accelerator in its basement, I assure you of that, okay? And so they're thinking that this is, but he's walking around with a vial.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  But that part I think was, was reasonable. They had magnetic fields made by superconducting magnets. And the idea is that you, the antimatter just spins in a circle and never touches any walls. It just sits there in a vacuum and it's totally fine.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  How do you hold it in real life?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Uh, we have things, traps, penning traps, pall traps, they have specific names, but they're basically magnetic or electric bottles.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A magnetic bottle?

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then it just touch, it sees the magnetic field, which is not matter. So therefore it will not annihilate.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Magnets, bitch!

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Do you get that reference?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody knows how they work.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Well, that, yeah, that.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, so next, alright.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  I got the wrong reference.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the benefit of the audience, I just wanna measure the scale of energy we're talking about here. So in Oppenheimer, uh, the, they built the first atomic bomb. How efficient was that conversion of matter to energy?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  So there's, in the first atomic bomb, I'm sorry, it's kinda sad to talk about, but there's dozens of kilograms of, of uranium. Only about 1% of that uranium underwent fission, which is how you get the energy out. So 99% didn't even know it was a bomb. And of that 1%, only about 0.1% of the mass of the uranium is converted into energy by E equals mc squared, or by the fragments of uranium flying apart from one another.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as devastating as that bomb was, it's a fraction of the energy that it might have had.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Had it been used, had it used all the uranium, it would have been 100 times more powerful. There's really no way with fission to, for the reactions that do happen, you just happen to get about 0.1%.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, next up was fusion, which was alluded to as the next wave of warfare in Oppenheimer.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  So fusion is combining deuterium and tritium and smaller, instead of taking large nuclei and atoms and breaking them apart, you can also get energy out of combining small nuclei. You can do this all the way up to iron in both directions.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how efficient is that, going up from hydrogen?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  So that's, that's a few percent more. One of the things, ways a fusion bomb, people don't always realize is that a lot of that's still fission. The fusion is making neutrons, and those neutrons are hitting uranium outside, and then those are fissioning. And probably about half the, half the energy released is still coming from fission.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so whatever these are, these are percentages.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, very small percentages.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas matter, antimatter is 100%.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so why don't we just have all antimatter energy sources in the world today?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Well, I did say dozens of kilograms, right? So you would need...

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does antimatter cost?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  What was it, how much you got?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  We can buy antimatter?

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On, on the dark web.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go. There you go.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're fissioning now, boy. He's gonna get antimatter on the dark web. Okay, that was good.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Alright, so it depends how you get it, because for example, your body is making antimatter right now. There's potassium in your bones, and about, usually it decays to electrons, but about, once every few seconds, there's potassium in your bones that's producing an positron, or antimatter. So that would be free, you just have to catch it.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one gram of this might cost how much?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  But if you had to make it at an accelerator, and it was a hundred million dollar accelerator, and you're making nanograms, we're talking a lot of money.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Trillions.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  You could say an astronaut.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a physicist, I expect you to quantify that answer. You're not President Bush, you know? Make with the data!

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Well, we just did a hundred million divided by nano, so...

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, so that's ten to the eight.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  That's giga, becomes tera, so ten to the twelve, so we're trillions of dollars.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  I was right.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, way more than trillions. You were doing it.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  No one heard it.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I loved it.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  That I was right.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard it. What was it, what'd you say? You are not an overlooked woman and says it. Yeah, I think we're up at, we're up at quadrillions, I think, of dollars per... Per gram. Okay, so, there's not that much money in the world. And that's in my body right now?

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all I heard. Did you just see me in the parking lot with a styrofoam cup and a lighter? How do I get it? Sorry, so, so... Who's the buyer? Where's the drop?

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. So, so Aaron, what is, I've heard in Star Trek, they reference subspace.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is that?

• 33:06Speaker 04

  So subspace is...

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's fictional.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Yes, subspace is fictional.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a website that helps people get paid to write, relax.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so, subspace is fictional, dilithium crystals are fictional, antimatter is real.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Subspace is, the concept is real, it's just the fictional term hasn't been a, it's basically the area outside of the trampoline, however you want to think of it. Everywhere outside the trampoline is subspace. And that's how they communicate faster than light in Star Trek, because again, if you want to communicate, fastest you can go is send a signal at the speed of light, but they create subspace buoys that poke through the trampoline, and then talk to each other faster than the speed of light, which is awesome.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  But things.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  You're all clearly impressed by.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  I think, are we confused if that's real?

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Huh?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Do we know that's not real?

• 33:55Speaker 04

  So, the idea of

• 33:57Speaker 02

  The buoys?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Additional dimensions

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  would be, uh, is a real concept. We don't call it subspace. That's what Star Trek calls it.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  And the physics of the idea of subspace buoys is solid, but it doesn't exist.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  We don't, we don't know how to get out of our own universe into subspace. Yeah. Does that help?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Sheer, you had Trekkie parents.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did, did any of that spill out onto you? Or would you just have weird geeky parents and you were the artist in the family?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  I'm still geeky. Next Generation was my show.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, and yeah.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and, and they gave, the one black guy on the bridge, he had the full vision.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  There were two black guys on the bridge.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, sorry. Thank you. Thank you. So Jordi La Forge had that, that visor, they called it.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is acronym time. Uh, who's got the acronym?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Is it the visor?

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Visual.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Visual, integrative.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Sensor.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Sensor overload resource.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  Optical.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Optical. Pulling that out of your ass.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  I did, but I, I bet it's resource. I bet it's resource.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was half right. Okay.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Laser.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  So close.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Lidar Assumption Symmetry.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  ER George Clooney.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, it's a, it's a self-driven acronym. So he was able to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Uh, and so was, was he one of your favorite people or?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Willy Goldberg was one of my favorites.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoopi. Oh, we love Whoopi.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  We love Whoopi.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wasn't she the bartender?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Blue milk.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what is that? What was blue milk?

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Wrong franchise.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They all have it.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  You're right. I take it back. I take it back.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Sequest, regular milk.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  We're having our own show.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been having to sing.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Blue Milk is, yeah, very Star Wars.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, my parents really, um, yeah, I feel like Star Trek was very much in our household. And like, you know, my mom would braid my hair while we're watching the show. And, uh, my dad, I remember asking him one time, I don't know why I asked him, but I was like, "Where are you from?" Or sort of like, "Where'd you grow up?" or something. And he was like-

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You asked your father this?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't know each other that well.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, just getting to know him.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  And he said he's a Vulcan. And-

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  That he speaks Vulcan. I never heard it, but-

• 36:32Speaker 02

  When he does?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  That's what he said, which, you know, my parents divorced later and my mom was like, "We're not like great at communicating with each other." And I was like, "That makes a lot of sense."

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two consecutive sentences.

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My father speaks Vulcan.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My parents divorced later.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Doesn't that-

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is-

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Doesn't that make sense?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  How does that not track?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  That is the most convoluted "I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes" I've ever heard.

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And never come back.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  "I, uh, I speak Vulcan." Like, that was weird.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Got to go home. I, uh, I was actually embarrassed to have a name from Star Trek. So when I was a kid, I would tell people like, "Oh, it's a crystal from far away."

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it wasn't actual the name of a-

• 37:19Speaker 01

  It wasn't the name of a character, no. Like, so, uh, after Captain Kirk gave a rose to this princess, she was like, "We have something like this on my planet, except it's made out of crystal and it's called a sashir."

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this a, an alien he had just boned, like?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  He was trying to bone, he was courting.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Courting, okay.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, got you. So, so she gives him a flower.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  He gave her a rose.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A rose?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Like, I guess, a plant that looks like an Earth rose.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An Earth rose, yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  And she was like, "We have something that looks like this on my planet, but it's made out of crystal."

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's called a-

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Sashir.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sashir.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so cool. That's beautiful, that's beautiful.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  It's a little rude, someone's like, "Look at my flower." He's like, "We got this, but it's better."

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's kind of what that's, "Ours is crystal."

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one dies.

• 38:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do we have actual, I mean, other than Star Trek and hyperspace and all of this, do we have actual, anything on the books that could get us going faster than light? Aaron?

• 38:18Speaker 04

  It's all theoretical, but the math checks out. So things like wormholes. Wormholes are a mathematical construct. And that would allow you to shortcut a distance in space and time. We do love wormholes.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, we can, in principle, wormholes are makeable if we had negative gravity stuff, which we don't have.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Yes, and enough energy to bend it. But, but they may exist naturally. We just don't know how to find them. We don't know what to look for. But again, the math checks out.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that doesn't require engines or anything? You're just stepping through?

• 38:51Speaker 04

  You're just walking through, yeah.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what else do we have? Tell me about tachyons.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  So there's particles that are called tachyons. If a particle goes faster than the speed of light. We've never seen one. We don't know that such a thing exists.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's just making this up.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  And that's just a word. So not me, I'm experimentalist, those are theorists.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're talking about a particle, and you're a particle physicist.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Well, they just, because they name it, doesn't mean it exists.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Wow. That was some real theoretical physicist chain that you just threw down.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  It's actually... I think it's tense up here. I don't know what's happening.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  It's a good field.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  But there's actually a good reason particles don't go faster than the speed of light. Because as long as nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we never violate what's called causality, meaning that if I press a button, a light turns on. And any observer moving around the universe will always see me pressing the button before the light turns on. We might disagree about how far apart they were, we might disagree about the time difference between them, but if A caused B, no one will see B happening before A. As soon as we start communicating with tachyons, if they existed, that would go out the window. So you would lose causality. So I don't even know how you would live in a universe that you can have faster than light communication.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Because you can't, if you're gonna detect them, you have, they'll be detected before you turn the detector on.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you'll be detected before they were sent.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Before they were sent, yes. Which is like, why? And Star Trek uses tachyon, so you may have heard that word because Star Trek uses tachyons all the time, and that is another thing that is a physics concept, a theoretical physicist over here. But they, but we don't know how to detect them, but like you said, the causality, Star Trek is pretty consistent with how they use tachyons, because anytime they break causality, like through time travel, when they break those rules, tachyons show up. So like when Janeway came through the wormhole at the end of Star Trek: Voyager, they, thank you, they, they detected a surge of tachyons first, and then this wormhole opened, and it was because they were violating causality, because that's what Janeway does.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, tachyon has the Greek root tachyon, meaning fast, like a tachometer, that, these are the same roots to that word. But I just want to clarify here, that according to Einstein, you cannot accelerate past the speed of light, but that doesn't stop a particle from being birthed faster than light, so never had to cross the boundary.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're okay there. You're okay? Don't look at me like, like you were a practical guy.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  And based on that, you are the killer. This, this season on CBS.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I, I don't know, I don't know how you get around the causality problem still.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here it is, you ready? You're, you're walking down the road, and there's, and you, you slip on a banana peel. And I say, you're my friend, I don't want you to slip on the banana peel. So I invoke tachyon texting, okay? And I send you, this is after it happened, so I send you a tachyon text, you get it before you slip on the banana peel, and your phone alerts you, you look down at the phone, and it says, "Watch out for the banana peel," and you're not looking at where you're going, and you slip on the banana peel.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  That is a closed time loop.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  What's really gonna bake your noodle is what you would have broken it if I hadn't said anything.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Right?

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Matrix lady.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're a prominent African-American science fiction character, I'm very sorry to bother you.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so to me, that's my favorite tachyon example. That you actually caused, caused the person to slip on the banana. It's like a rival too, right?

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This I'm not. Oh, the rival, yeah, yeah, yeah, the movie. She was pretty tachyon-y. Yeah, but in her, in her interpretations of the past, present, and future. But she whispers a thing to a guy that hadn't. Yeah, yeah, there was some of that. All right.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Definitely tachyon's involved.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a definite.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, and plus, there was a, there was a Mexican physicist named Alcubierre.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about the Alcubierre Drive.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, uh.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chris, wasn't he, in the United States, and they deported him? Is that what happened? Just kidding.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  It's my duty as a comedian to join you in the riff. I must.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  I couldn't leave you out there.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, one-third of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences that have been earned by Americans were earned by American immigrants. A third. A third. These are foreign-born nationals becoming American citizens, earning the Nobel Prize for murica. Murica. Murica. Apostrophe, M-U-R-R-I-C-A. So, uh, so he's a Mexican physicist.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about this drive.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  So he, so he kind of motivated by Star Trek was like, well, could we build? Is, it's a neat idea? Is this possible? And so did the math to try to figure out if it was possible to have a warp drive, um, using the manipulation of spacetime. And the answer was yes. And that's what we call the Alcubierre Drive. And so he, he published a paper about this. And what was funny about it is.

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an authentic physics paper?

• 44:10Speaker 04

  It is a physics, the physics of warp drive checks out. Like, it checks out. And, um, and he was sort of the first one to come up with a good concept of how you, uh, make physics laws happy when you're doing this. And, and they did.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, not to violate known laws of physics.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That apply. So you dance around that if you can.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Conservation laws and all those sort of things.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  And so, um, the issue with it is, remember I said earlier, like, if you want to bend spacetime, but you don't have the matter, you could use the energy. So the question is, well, how much matter and antimatter are you gonna need? How much energy is gonna be used to build this warp drive? And the first calculation that they did of this, the answer was all of it.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of what?

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Energy.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  All energy matters.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Ever existed. The number was so high that they were just like, uh-oh, that's not great. Nobody needs to go anywhere that bad. Exactly, and a lot of it was just because of all the manipulation of spacetime. And so they kind of like go back to the drawing board, as it were, go through the equations and figure out that you can do the same thing without breaking any laws of physics with about the energy equivalent of a semi-truck being torn, like E equals mc squared, the mass of a semi-truck, but as we talked about earlier, the amount of matter used for an atomic bomb, like multiply that to the size of a semi-truck, and that's why Zefram Cochrane is hitting the juice.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  I'm not going to strap myself into that anytime soon, but that's our big limiter to how we don't have warp drive now. The math is fine theoretically, it all checks out, but we just don't have any understanding of how to obtain and hold and manipulate all of that energy in order to do it. Detecting gravitational waves is actually seeing the motion of spacetime, that's starting to get us there in terms of like, how do we start playing with spacetime? So this is all just things that lie in front of us, and they're just unknowns of how long it's going to take.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is we'll never have warp drives.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  Be positive, I say 2063 is probably pushing it, but if we make a huge discovery in energy, maybe we do find a way to more efficiently capture antimatter, that's a different conversation.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm looking at his facial expressions while you speak.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  I know. They put us as far away as possible on purpose.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we kept them separate here. The theorists and the experimentalists, yeah.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've also heard things about higher dimension. I love me some higher dimension.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love, I love higher dimension. What, what?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  I just like the way you say it.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  It's very casual.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right. So, we, we live in three spatial dimensions, up, down, left, right, forward, back, right? And then there's a time dimension in there. And so, these are our four dimensional realities. And if you're not completely comfortable with thinking that we live in four dimensions, I'll convince you right now, okay? If someone comes up to you and say, "Uh, I'll meet you tomorrow at Starbucks." What time?

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a place, but it's not a time. You need the space. And if I say, "I'll meet you tomorrow at 10 o'clock." Where? The four dimensions of our space-time reality are built into our language and our capacity to encounter one another, even if you didn't know it. And one thing that Zoom did during COVID is it broke that space-time continuum.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  That really checks out.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, here it is.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  We've all had that meeting.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All you needed, no, think about it. It's called your world line, where you are in space and time. And if you want to meet someone, your world lines have to intersect. You have to be at the same place and the same time. You can cross a street where trucks have been, but you're not killed by the truck. You're in the same place, but at a different time.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  There's some following.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're good. So, what Zoom did only required that you be at the same time, not in the same place. And you still had the encounter. So that, I, I was deeply moved by this fact. Okay? So.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  This is how they felt about phone sex.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  You can get it anywhere now. Anyway, payphone, cell phone, car phone.

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Payphone? Who's doing it at a payphone? Okay, so. Desperate times.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  See, we're bound by the laws of yeses.

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I'm saying is, so, so, the universe, particle physicists tell us, is more than these four dimensions.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Oh, maybe. So, uh, we, my students and I looked for extra dimensions at the Large Hadron Collider. Uh, the particle's called a radion.

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? Say that again?

• 49:29Speaker 03

  A radion. It was another case of just because you name it doesn't mean it existed. We didn't find it. We found it, we'd found that there'd be one more Nobel Prize in the denominator of your fraction.

• 49:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  We didn't find it, but we look, and the idea is, remember how we talked about Paul Dirac was combining the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics? Well, it, more modern physicists have tried to combine the full equations of general relativity with quantum mechanics. It was a bit harder, and to make that work, they needed to add extra dimensions. Now, obviously, there's nothing more than, that we experience in up, down, left, right, et cetera, as you said. But the idea is that they'd be really small, so we missed them. And so they started.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  How convenient, right?

• 50:14Speaker 04

  I know, I know. Particle physicists, jeez.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  So they started with the idea there'd be 26 extra dimensions. And then they said, "Well, that seems like a lot," but then they had this idea called supersymmetry, where every particle has a partner, just like matter and antimatter. Where every part, every particle would have a supersymmetric particle. We haven't found that yet. That lowered the number of extra dimensions to we only need 10 total dimensions.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're down to 10?

• 50:41Speaker 03

  10, as long as this other symmetry exists that we've never found.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Or we could just smoke some DMT and be done with it.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Have you considered that you're the particle collider man?

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so here's my favorite example of interdimensionality. If I may.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  You may.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you'll understand why I say I love some dimensions, okay?

• 51:08Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 51:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, if we lived just in a, in a flat plane, two dimensions, alright? And all of a sudden, someone noticed a dot, just appear out of nowhere. And then it grew, became like a circle. And then, it shrunk back down to another dot, and then disappeared completely. We'd be scratching our heads, what is this? You know what that is? That is a sphere moving through, a three-dimensional sphere, moving through the two dimensions of your world. And it manifests as something that's not there, it appears and then disappears.

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when your particles pop in and out, quantum mechanically, I wonder, is there some higher dimensional existence that's passing through our spacetime? And we just happen to get a glimpse every now and then?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe? That's your best answer, maybe? That's my whole point.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  I loved it, I loved it.

• 52:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After my huff.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  I feel you.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  I'm mad.

• 52:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought, I thought I'd get more than one word answer from this guy here.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think you've gotta make, we're, it's science, you have to make a prediction. And then, and the more surprising the prediction, the better.

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  And then we will go look for it. And that's, the idea can sound great, but the idea can, but it has to be the way the world works.

• 52:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete and I will work on it and we'll.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  We'll work on it.

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but wait, if there are these other dimensions, there could be other versions of us, are they like other universes in a way? Because in the Netflix series Stranger Things.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Heard of it.

• 52:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's fifth season now. It's, they have an upside-down? What is that? Did you know what that, you, have you seen the show?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I have seen the show. I don't understand all of it, but they do have upside-down. And it's, and, it's upside-down.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  So, Shere, I'm gonna say.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  It's underneath. It's like, you know, like, we're up here?

• 53:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we're up here?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And then they're, okay, so like.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  It's like an alternate reality.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Flip it around.

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so then, what, so what's there?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  I didn't think I would ever see that again. Thank you.

• 53:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's there in the upside down world?

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Creepy, monsters, Demogorgons.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Cookie, it's like a black scary stormy.

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black?

• 53:21Speaker 04

  The trees are black.

• 53:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black?

• 53:27Speaker 04

  It's very dark.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Uh, dark.

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Dark.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Okay.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Well, what's, I mean, so strange.

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what?

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Oh, but they communicate.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did they get access to this? This upside down world?

• 53:40Speaker 04

  They opened a portal to another dimension.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  And then they communicate through like the Christmas lights.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  But I like the upside down idea because it is like they, you just multiply everything by minus one, which is kind of the original multiverse question, which was like, but what if goatees and evil? Like that was Star Trek, right? They had the mirror universe, which was just our universe.

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 54:04Speaker 04

  Just flipped upside down.

• 54:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  That means there's another.

• 54:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you had a goatee, you were bad.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  There's another version of this podcast happening where we're all hanging like bats from our feet.

• 54:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll have goatees.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  We have goatees.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it, but it sounds like they, I heard they opened it with a particle accelerator, so that would be.

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 54:22Speaker 04

  And Stranger Things.

• 54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Stranger Things.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think they did, yeah. I think, but.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  I'll just say, you say black hole, particle, neutrino, you can kind of do whatever you want. Get to the demons, get to Winona Ryder.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  We don't care.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  We're good.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, you care. That's your job to care.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  A little bit, yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  We're sort of out here going like, who cares?

• 54:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so, but there's some mixed things here. So, we have this upside down world. Is it another dimension or is it in, is it in the multiverse? Right? I mean, so, so we've heard a lot about the multiverse and Marvel has run with it in the multiverse.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? They, and has.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  With no missteps.

• 55:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has, has Star Trek? Picked up the multiverse?

• 55:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they did, um, in The Next Generation, there was an episode where Worf is going through a quantum fissure, which I would probably push back on the language of that, just because that's quantum, doesn't, anyway, um, and then sees all these different versions of like, what would happen, where, you know, he's married to Deanna Troi, and there's a birthday cake at one point, and like, there's all these, there's all these different things, and so, we did in more recent seasons in, uh, Lower Decks, season five, which, yeah, like, that show's great, I'm biased, but it's a great show, uh, but we brought that multiverse concept back, and they do a cool explanation with it.

• 55:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is Lower Decks?

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Star Trek Lower Decks.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Duh!

• 55:50Speaker 04

  It's one of the animated shows.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a fan of Star Trek Upper Decker, but I don't know. Wait, so David... To boldly go. Don't you split your infinitives on my stage. Uh, did they, did they fix the split infinitives in the later... To go boldly? Yes.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  No, it's Star Trek.

• 56:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought they tidied up that. In the future, split infinitives are a different thing. So, so David, we think of these multiverses as, oh, I have a goatee or not, or somebody's married to someone else, but really, as I understand multiverses, it's quantum forged, so that there'd be variations, not just in who you marry, but in the actual laws of physics, that we'd find in those universes, which would make it really hard to set up life again, as you come to know it.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Well, the last part you said is the key part, as we come to know it, we don't know what else we would call life.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Maybe we don't, maybe it's not made of atoms, maybe it's something else, you have lots of other chances, in whatever, whatever that universe is that you've made in its own rules, is there gonna be some local collection of matter that locally, uh, lowers entropy, at the expense of expend, expending heat?

• 57:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is what we do here, in our universe.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  And that's basically a lot of what you need to have life, um, so maybe there'd be something that would satisfy our criteria for it to all live.

• 57:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll give you that, but isn't, you're married to someone different, I'm thinking not, it's, it's all, it's, it's other kinds of creatures. Sure, we're not atoms, but who are we?

• 57:28Speaker 04

  I think there's, there's...

• 57:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we horny?

• 57:32Speaker 04

  There's like different kinds of multiverses and I think that like different multiverse theories and one is where the laws of physics would just be different in one universe than the other. And then there's that like genuinely infinite concept of multiverses where however it's structured, there is and you really hard to wrap your brain around the concept of infinite, that everything is exactly the same but one and then.

• 57:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you have an infinite number of those kind of universes, any variation will exist.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can find the universe for which that is true.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But those would have the same laws of physics in that. Exactly.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  In that concept, yeah. That's why they're kind of different theories, but I love multiverses.

• 58:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, let me, let's, let's tackle the biggest topic here, which is the storytelling in science fiction. And, and Sashir, you're, I, I heard you comment on when you saw some sci-fi, was it the Jetsons? What was the, what did the Jetsons mean to you when you first saw them?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Um, was it the Jetsons?

• 58:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  What?

• 58:43Speaker 02

  I was just thinking, how funny would it be if you didn't talk about this before?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  That's, that's what's happening.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  What are you talking about?

• 58:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, so, so it was, if you look at 100% of sci-fi, future sci-fi.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I know what you're talking about. Okay.

• 59:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, when I watched the Jetsons, I was like, where are the black people? Where, where, where are anyone but white people? And that is also like how I felt about a lot of sci-fi growing up.

• 59:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  We didn't really see brown people in the future, which makes it feel like we don't belong there. And, uh, I mean, it's definitely changing now, which is so wonderful to see more representation in stories about our future because we belong there.

• 59:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, I guess I wasn't thinking that, because just everybody...

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Isn't that what you wanted?

• 59:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm just saying...

• 59:51Speaker 02

  That is hilarious.

• 59:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I'm just saying...

• 59:53Speaker 02

  You gave him exactly what he wanted.

• 59:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no. No, no, just when I was a kid. No, I'm just saying, when I was a kid. It's just, everybody on TV was white. So that was just that universe.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all, so, so I wasn't, so I, I thought it was weird that, you know, today we have self-driving cars, but they didn't have self-driving cars in the Jetsons. He had to fly his own car. I thought that was weird.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  That is weird.

• 1:00:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even at the time. Right, I thought that was, and why did, why did Rosie, the maid, have to wear an apron?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  To cover her vagina.

• 1:00:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's a robot.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  You're gonna love the answer.

• 1:00:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so in storytelling, in Star Trek, what I've always admired about it, is each story was a bit of a morality tale. A little bit of a mirror held up to whatever was going on back here on Earth. And there was, I just sort of value when you can tell that kind of story. Otherwise, what are you doing? It's just a, it's just fantasy in the future.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for me, good literature, you can bring it home in some way, and have it mean something to you, and have it mean something to your society.

• 1:01:15Speaker 04

  Well, I think what's great about Star Trek 2 is that it is very explicitly humans on Earth in the future. Like, as opposed to just some other universe or galaxy, or whatever thing. It is like, this is where Earth is gonna go, this is what people will be doing, and this is what it looks like, and these are the people who have jobs. And for 1966, it was a really big deal, not just to have Nichelle Nichols, and I'm not undermining the importance of that by any means.

• 1:01:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, plus, if you look at her title, her military title as lieutenant means she is in the path of succession to be captain.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:01:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though that never happened, the fact is, that was a real possibility to even have such a title, and not be the, you know, the janitor. So, how do any of us feel, and you coming at this from the liberal arts, I'm curious. I'm a big fan of, Mark Twain has a saying, "First get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure." And to me, that should be instructions for the artist, who has access to science. And so, do any of us, I'd like to get an opinion here. Do you feel how much science can or should be sacrificed for the sake of a good story that you want to tell?

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  So...

• 1:02:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You sound like you got a-

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  I always felt, like, my job was not to be the science police. My job was to be a resource to the people that were actually telling the story. So I would tell them if something wasn't correct, but I wouldn't, and maybe give some other ideas. But it's the idea of the, it's what universe any particular story is. If I had consulted on Back to the Future, I might have told them, you know, we really don't know how to do time travel, and it probably wouldn't work. And then it wouldn't have been a very good movie.

• 1:02:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have been fired that afternoon.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  But he's horny for his mother.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  The way-

• 1:02:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're ruining the story! How's he gonna want to fuck his mother?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  The way I like to think of it is like, science fiction is a huge spectrum between science and fiction, and every story is gonna pick somewhere on that and say, "This is where we're gonna land." But I think, you know, I think that quote is perfect and really apt for how you integrate science into story is that you get the foundation or the backbone of science and then build the story around that. But when you're in those decision rooms and maybe the budget doesn't work, or maybe we have to change something, the story comes first, then the characters, then the science.

• 1:03:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was talking with William Shatner about the transporter, and he said, "They invented that so that they didn't have to have lower ramps and land, and it's too costly."

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To beam them in and get on with the show. So there was a cost provision there, but-

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Except the problem is it murders the person and recreates them on the planet.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  It's not great.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Would you get in one?

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  It's not great. It's not great.

• 1:04:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're telling me this?

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  This is awkward. I teleported here.

• 1:04:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't exist, and then you get reassembled on the other side?

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the information, if I understand, goes down, but not you, so...

• 1:04:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what are you-

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  I think they've murdered you in Greek Creations Effect.

• 1:04:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. What are you, if not the sum of the information that comprises you?

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Uh oh, you believe in a soul. Sorry. Sorry, science guy. Caught ya. Whoops.

• 1:04:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so on one of my... He's busted right there, I tell you.

• 1:04:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, on one of my two cameos on The Big Bang Theory, my first of the two, there were...

• 1:04:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have the whiteboards throughout the show, right? And there are equations on those boards. And someone on set told me that you had found equations from my research to put them up there, but they were not my equations. There's someone else named Tyson in modern astrophysics, his name is Tony Tyson. I call him Cousin Tony, affectionately. But those were his equations.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  I'm not buying that. I remember finding your PhD thesis and using it.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Uh oh, someone doesn't recognize their own thesis.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Too long in trailers and show business, forgot about the app.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Or I got Tony Tyson's thesis.

• 1:05:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. There's an alternative universe there.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  We'll find out.

• 1:05:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, how about this?

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Have our team of researchers get on the...

• 1:05:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  According to Aaron, there is a universe in which you did it correctly. Let's imagine that that was it. And so, just in terms of storyline, in the final episode, I think it was, of the final season of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon, who's like the smart one with multiple degrees, teams up with his wife, Amy Fowler, who in real life is Mayim Bialik, who is a real-life neuroscientist.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Has a PhD.

• 1:06:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She has a PhD in neuroscience in real life, plays a neuroscience scientist on the show. They collaborate with some new kind of physics that I couldn't follow. But did you advise on that?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. It was actually one of the rare cases where they gave me a lot of warning. Usually it's like, "We're doing this script tomorrow, put some science in it." And this time they told me, "We're actually..."

• 1:06:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  That is nice, that's nice.

• 1:06:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Classic Chuck.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  But this time that

• 1:06:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Lorre

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  warning and said they need some Nobel Prize worthy discovery, go.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  You're like, look, if I could, I have a Nobel Prize.

• 1:06:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wouldn't waste it on your show.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  And I wouldn't retire a year before it was given. Oh, no.

• 1:06:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  That really, that was deep, that was deep.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  You have it, just tell people you have it, we'll never look it up.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:07:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I remembered something like, super.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  Super asymmetry.

• 1:07:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asymmetry, instead of supersymmetry.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  And we've been talking about supersymmetry, that's been a theory since before I was a graduate student. People have been looking for evidence of this theory forever. I looked it up, there's about 10,000 papers with the title containing supersymmetry and another 10,000 carrying the title supersymmetric. But then it came to me, supersymmetry. And I was like, ah, is there, are there any, zero papers with that title.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  That was their new theory.

• 1:07:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that gave you, that gave you a, a space in which to operate.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was new.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 1:07:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I can explain what I, in my mind, the theory was, but it's not Nobel Prize worthy.

• 1:08:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was good enough for the show, I mean, yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  The, the idea is like, where, in, in, in real physics, is where are the supersymmetric particles? Where is this partner of the electron? We know it's antimatter partner, we can't find it supersymmetric. So, it's a symmetry that is broken. So people make the symmetry theoretically and then it's broken to explain why we don't see it. And the idea of their theory is that the, you don't have to, it doesn't, it's not symmetric and then broken, but it starts asymmetric.

• 1:08:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you just clarify here? Just clarify.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Please don't ask me more questions.

• 1:08:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, okay, no, clarify something else. What does it mean to break symmetry?

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:08:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that implies that things are a certain way that you like. And then they're different and you say they're broken. But if nature is that, what does it mean for nature to be broken if that is nature? Maybe it's your understanding that's broken.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  I like, I like this a lot.

• 1:09:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give him some.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Well, we have, we have.

• 1:09:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He made some alien hair. It's fake. I know.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  And we have broken symmetries all the time in, in just ordinary mundane physics. Like a magnet, the laws of magnetism are, have no preferred direction. But when you pick up a magnet, it does point a particular direction. It chose a direction and once it started to form the magnetic field one way, it was reinforced and that's the direction that the magnet has. So we see that all, we see symmetry breaking all the time in physics. We start with something symmetric, but the actual

• 1:09:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Product, the, the end product.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  instances we see are, are broken.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Now drop your mic.

• 1:09:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they give it to you.

• 1:09:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My favorite fact about magnets is, um, you know, there's a north pole and a south pole. Okay. You got that? Okay. So we, we together on that? Okay. I guess. Okay. Um, and opposite poles attract.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yep. I like that you're looking at me.

• 1:10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you have two magnets, the north will connect, will point to the south. Okay. So now you take the magnet, suspend it from a string and the magnet, the north pole of the magnet will point to Earth's north magnetic pole. But it's supposed to repel north to north. So the fact that the north pole of a magnet points to Earth's north pole means Earth's south magnetic pole is in the north.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our north magnetic pole is in the south.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  I like it. I didn't get it, but I like it. I was waiting for-

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Every few hundred thousand years, they flip and we're overdue.

• 1:10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Well, that's comforting. We don't have enough on our plate right now. I gotta be waiting for the poles to flip. Great. I'll tell that to my daughter next time. I'm reading her a bedtime story. Just so you know, we're overdue. Good night.

• 1:11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about like future tech. Because I have on good authority that the first sort of flip phone by Motorola was inspired by the communicator in Star Trek. It was a...

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  Thank you. Teamwork.

• 1:11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys get a room, okay?

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Not without you, Neil.

• 1:11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, he just thought that was cool. It was an engineer with Motorola. And we had cell phones before that, but they weren't flip phones and they weren't that small. So this is, this is science fiction inspiring design.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had clamshells.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  You don't think a caveman ever went, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no." "Oh, no, no, no, no, no." Imagine?

• 1:12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know the tricorder?

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell everyone what the tricorder is.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, well, the medical tricorder is what we commonly think of, but that's sort of like the medical device that they hover over and they go like, "Oh no, we have a problem." And so it's a touchless diagnostic tool.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Science Reiki.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  And it's a thing that like...

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Neil loves Reiki.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  We've wanted, it's so, it so is. Like, I mean, I love it.

• 1:12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but there's an X prize for the first tricorder.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so...

• 1:12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the X prize is money gathered and it's given to, and then people compete for a device that you can hover over a person and it'll diagnose your, get your vitals.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this prize that they offered, it was like you had to, I'm, the numbers are approximate, but you had to pick up like five to eight vital signs and be able to diagnose a handful of ailments without touching someone, like just with scanning it, and someone won it. Like they have that ability.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Elizabeth Holmes did it.

• 1:13:18Speaker 04

  No, she didn't. Perfectly clear.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Sweet Theranos riff, bro.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what's neat is that idea of necessity driving invention. And, you know, we went through a period where we didn't really want to be in close contact with a lot of really sick people. And so that sort of moves that machine. And just because it was invented, it's like that technology exists, but it's the size of a house and is, you know, so.

• 1:13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody's got to be motivated who's thinking about the future. And you have creative futurists doing just that. And storytellers that can have all of us participate in that. So I'm old enough to be the first Trek series, okay? Like Captain Kirk, that one. And I, so I, the warp drives, check. Photon torpedoes, check. That's the future for sure. And I was just going down the list. And then they just walk up to a door and it just automatically opens. And I said, nah, that'll never happen. So don't ever take future predictions from me, right? Because that was the least believable thing. That's how old I am.

• 1:14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doors didn't automatic, you had to physically open the door yourself.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  This is the first time you rode the subway in New York. You were like.

• 1:14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about doors that do open automatically. I'm talking about doors that know you're approaching the door. And then they open. That the subway doesn't know you're there.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  I understand. Grocery store, then.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the first thing, I had touch sensitive pads.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  They had pads on the Enterprise. They were just the same color as the carpet. That was Whole Foods in space.

• 1:15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I'm just wondering what, what the future might bring. What do you, what do we need out of?

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  We want the molecule thing that makes a hamburger.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Replicator.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Replicator.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the one we're closest to that we don't have yet.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Honestly, because 3D printer technology has gotten so good and efficient and smaller. And like we all, I'd never thought I would own a 3D printer. Now I have three because I'm that type of person.

• 1:15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, the three 3D printer.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Well, the first one printed the other.

• 1:15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 1:15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You missed it. It's one for every dimension.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Ah, very good.

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  There you go. Yeah, exactly. But also, the food science and like, things like discovering the protein responsible for red meat.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  They can do this?

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  Like, we're getting there in these advances that maybe one day we can print a burger that will take 25 hours and taste horrible, but like, it might happen. So, anyway.

• 1:15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's what you're after.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  That's what I'm excited for.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Still better than Shakey's.

• 1:16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking, of all the things you're wishing for in the future, you want to print a hamburger?

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Not wishing for, the one I think that... I'm wishing for.

• 1:16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you want for the future?

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  I want, I want, I want radios that use dark matter to communicate.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, see now, that's the thing.

• 1:16:15Speaker 04

  I said I want a dark matter.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  You don't want to print a burger?

• 1:16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No!

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  The environmental implications of raising cattle are staggering. This guy wants a walkie-talkie that works a different way?

• 1:16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Shere, what do you want?

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Drop the mic for me!

• 1:16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Shere, what do you want for the future?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Um, I do want to teleport, but I don't want to be murdered. But, uh, yeah, if I can just get somewhere quickly, that'd be great.

• 1:16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta land this plane.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  StarTalk with Neil deGrasse. StarTalk, he's real sassy. StarTalk, three dimensions. StarTalk, check out the mentions.

• 1:17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you just pulling random words out of this conversation?

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Dark matter. Vision, fusion, all of the Fs. Neil is horny, what you think of the Jetsons?

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'll never be asked back.

• 1:17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me offer some parting thoughts here. I don't, I think you're here because you have some appreciation for science. At, as a minimum, you're science-adjacent, okay, as the saying goes, and...

• 1:17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know that civilization pivots on the progress of science and what it can do for our health, our wealth, and our security. I relish in the creativity of those who tell us stories about a future that could be. Because it has me thinking beyond the moment and saying, what do I have the knowledge, the power, the wisdom, or the insight to implement so I can create a world like that? And there's this time-honored debate. Does art imitate life? Does life imitate art?

• 1:18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think we can elevate that to the next level. Does life imitate science fiction? Or does science fiction imitate life? Or maybe we are needlessly turning that into a binary question, and perhaps as we go forward, it is the interplay of the two that'll shape the future of civilization. A future world that we be proud to live in and not embarrassed that we created. And that is a cosmic perspective. Nobel Theater, Los Angeles. Evan McDonald, David Selfburn.

• 1:19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pete Holmes. Cecilia Domena. This has been StarTalk, brought to you live on stage, and as always, keep looking up. Neil deGrasse Tyson, everybody.