Cosmic Queries – Origins of the Universe, with Janna Levin

How did the universe get to be this way? On this episode of StarTalk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice sit down with theoretical cosmologist, Janna Levin, to help us break down the building blocks of the universe and how it started. Originally Aired March 8, 2021.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey StarTalkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, with my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck, baby. Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right, Chuck. Chuck, you know what today is. It's a rare thing. We've got to do this because I think people will want us to do it. This entire episode is a shameless plug for the very latest StarTalk book that is just coming out. And the reason why it's a shame, maybe it's not shameless, maybe it's full of shame. The point is, the title of the book is Cosmic Queries. And this is a Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk. The book

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  was inspired by this spinoff of the StarTalk flagship. And so I just want to celebrate that with all of our fanbase and with you. And so I just thought I'd just put that out there, Chuck. I love it. So there's that. And it's published by National Geographic Books, who published the first StarTalk book. That's right. You know what the first StarTalk book was called? Let me hold on for a second. The StarTalk Book. I'm looking at it over here. Wait a minute. It was called StarTalk. The StarTalk Book. This one inspired by this spinoff branch of the StarTalk universe. And so it's questions, 10 chapters, and each chapter is a really deep question that we

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  barely have time to address.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given the nature of what we normally do in a cosmic queries. So what for this episode, we're gonna do, we're gonna focus on chapters three, four, and five. Oh, wow. Those are, how did the universe get to be this way? Hmm. How old is the universe? Oh, that's so impolite. And huh.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's the universe made of? Oh, sweet. We'll see what you've made of. We had to, we had to reach uptown for our sort of cosmologist in the house. Jan Levin, jamnet, welcome back.

• 2:39Janna Levin?

  Hi, everybody.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk. And you're published on these topics. You got your own books, right? So first, there's Together, Chuck, the Black Hole Blues. The Black Hole Blues.

• 2:49Janna Levin?

  I just, I live for that. I live for that.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Black Hole Blues. So, so you've got that, that book and a, and a more recent one called the Survivor, Black Hole Survivors Guide. Which is a very pocket-sized book and everything you needed to know to visit and not die in a black hole, I think. Is that, did I characterize that properly?

• 3:11Janna Levin?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So clearly, black holes are one of the things in the universe. But could you just tell, Jenna, how do we get to be this way? What does it mean to have forces and matter and energy and space? Yeah, universe, why you gotta be like this? Why you gotta be like that? Why you gotta be like this, universe? I thought we were cool.

• 3:30Janna Levin?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I thought we shouldn't.

• 3:32Janna Levin?

  I have a StarTalk book idea for you, though. You could write a book, a self-help book for like universes on how to be better. Like how to be a cooler, better.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to be a better universe.

• 3:42Janna Levin?

  More actualized universe.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is for the, for the multiverse in us all, right? More actualized universe. That's awesome.

• 3:54Janna Levin?

  So, I mean.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So what's, what is, what's the basic? I can, you know, as an astrophysicist, I can say, we've got stars, galaxies, and planets.

• 4:04Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you look at it as a physicist at a much more sort of refined level. And I see things that gather according to forces. So what was, what's been going on to give us the universe we see today?

• 4:16Janna Levin?

  Well, it's really interesting. You mentioned stars, galaxies, and planets. And those

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my.

• 4:22Janna Levin?

  And those, and those are things that actually

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck has allowed one really bad

• 4:27Janna Levin?

  Okay.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Program.

• 4:29Janna Levin?

  Well, they all

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Galaxy, galaxy.

• 4:31Janna Levin?

  I'm a good audience. I laugh at all his jokes. I laugh at all.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's very good.

• 4:34Janna Levin?

  So those are

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why you're my favorite guest.

• 4:38Janna Levin?

  And happy hour buddy.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Jen, I didn't properly introduce you. You're a professor of astronomy and physics up at Barnard College. That's why I said we go up the street because you're just, you know, two miles north of the American Museum of Natural History. And you've been doing this since childhood and it's just been great to have your enthusiasm. And plus, you, you, you hosted a PBS special.

• 5:01Janna Levin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On black holes. What was the title of that?

• 5:03Janna Levin?

  Black Hole Apocalypse.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black Hole, see, see what I'm saying?

• 5:06Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's my

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were the on camera host of that Nova special. One of my son's favorite.

• 5:12Janna Levin?

  That's so sweet. I held a little black hole in my hand. I got to do all kinds of cool CGI.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. But okay, go on.

• 5:20Janna Levin?

  Well, so, so you, all the stuff that you listed, stars, galaxies, planets, are, are luminous objects, meaning they reflect or emit light. And that actually makes up much less of the universe, as you well know, than we used to believe. It's actually less than 5% of what's out there. I mean, if you think about everything anybody has ever seen or ever will see, makes up less than 5% of the universe. The universe is, in its volume, has dark energy permeating every part of space. And yet it is, it is, really should be called invisible because it's not dark looking. It's, it's literally invisible. We see right through it. And there's dark matter and those have huge influence.

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People will think, oh, dark matter, why isn't that just black holes?

• 6:02Janna Levin?

  Right.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so there's a difference between matter you can't see

• 6:05Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's not giving you light and matter that you can never see because it will never give you light.

• 6:09Janna Levin?

  Yeah, there have been

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How would you distinguish that?

• 6:11Janna Levin?

  Yeah, no, no, it's a, it's a really good point. I mean, a black hole is really just a shadow. It just casts a shadow and you have to illuminate behind it, around it, to notice the shadow. Just like a tree doesn't make a shadow and The darkest night. Um, so you need, you need some light source to cast a shadow. So that a black hole is just absorbing that light and casting a shadow.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's deep. I hadn't thought about that.

• 6:34Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You only know a tree's shadow is there because there's light.

• 6:39Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surrounding the shadow.

• 6:41Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shadow is the absence of the light.

• 6:44Janna Levin?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The presence of the tree is the absence of the light.

• 6:47Janna Levin?

  The tree is absorbing some of the light.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 6:51Janna Levin?

  And that's casting a shadow.

• 6:52Chuck Nice?

  If that shadow falls in the forest.

• 6:57Janna Levin?

  Well, the thing, you know.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then only the shadow knows. You got me? Are we good there?

• 7:02Janna Levin?

  So that's what people don't appreciate about black holes. That stepping into the event horizon of the black hole is just like stepping into the shadow of a tree. There's really nothing dramatic about it. Um, you're just, you're just going into that region where the light, um, is being absorbed. But it's a little trickier because the light can fall in behind you. But having said that, dark matter, which is what we were originally talking about, doesn't interact with the light at all. There's no shadow cast, there's no darkness, it just passes right through. So there's a cloud of dark matter presumably between me and my computer. Maybe not very much in the local universe, but I see right through it.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do we care if it's there? If it doesn't affect anything?

• 7:38Janna Levin?

  It affects gravity, right? So, so it interacts gravitationally. So there's a lot of it and there's a big halo of it around our galaxy. So when we look at our galaxy, we think it's this kind of planar spiral and it's so beautiful and it's illuminated by all the stars. But really there's this halo around it of dark matter and we look right through the dark matter. And that halo affects the behavior of the galaxy, the evolution of the galaxy and, and actually dominates the mass of the galaxy. So it's just, we're invisible to the dark matter too, you have to realize. It doesn't see us either. Dark matter, technically, if it had eyes, would look right through us too.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so this is a sci-fi story. Dark matter people coexisting with regular matter people. We would just walk through each other.

• 8:21Janna Levin?

  That's exactly what I've been talking about. I could be in the same body as a dark matter alien. And we wouldn't, because my gravitational field is so tiny that we wouldn't notice.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the molecules won't interact at all because that uses forces that dark matter doesn't respect.

• 8:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Chuck Nice?

  There's a movie about that. It's so cool, too.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is, there's a movie waiting to happen in there.

• 8:39Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, man. Okay, so, all right, so we got dark matter, dark energy, just 95% of everything. And so...

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  So is it possible that we're... No, is it possible we're the anomaly? If 95% of everything...

• 8:58Janna Levin?

  It's a really good question.

• 8:59Chuck Nice?

  Is the thing. If 95% of everything is the thing, is it possible that we are the anomaly? That we're...

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ain't the thing.

• 9:08Chuck Nice?

  Right, we're not, we're not the thing.

• 9:10Janna Levin?

  It depends on how you look at it. The confusing thing about dark matter, we know examples of dark matter. We know neutrinos. Neutrinos exist. They emanate, for instance, from the sun, from thermonuclear reactions. They don't interact with light at all. They are technically invisible. So we know examples of dark matter. But we know that the neutrinos that we know about can't be the dark matter in the universe. We just can tell it's not heavy enough. It doesn't have all the right properties. So there's something like a neutrino.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying a neutrino is an example...

• 9:38Janna Levin?

  Of dark matter.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a physical object that doesn't really interact with us.

• 9:43Janna Levin?

  Only weakly.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only very weakly. So this would, could be matter, if it's matter at all, that interacts even less...

• 9:51Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With less strength than a neutrino would.

• 9:53Janna Levin?

  That's right. Now Chuck's question is like really interesting because it could just be the fact that there's so little of us. I mean, there should be none of us. Because you asked, why does the universe got to be this way? And it, it doesn't. We don't really know why there's a little bit excess, for instance, of matter than antimatter. And so it doesn't have to be this way. We're trying to figure out why it is this way. If, if there was equal amounts of matter and antimatter when the universe was created, there'd be none of us because we would just merge with our antimatter and annihilate. And there'd be nothing left but the dark stuff.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So some law of physics that we take as, as canon was broken.

• 10:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or violated in the early universe.

• 10:38Janna Levin?

  Yeah, and we still don't under-

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If matter always comes in matter antimatter pairs.

• 10:42Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we won that contest.

• 10:44Janna Levin?

  Right.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As this excess froth.

• 10:46Janna Levin?

  Right, right.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and so, so you just declare that some rule got broken in the early universe? That sounds very like you don't know what's going on.

• 10:55Janna Levin?

  Well, that's true. We don't know what's going on, but sometimes-

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the end of the-

• 11:01Janna Levin?

  There you go. This is actually interesting to you.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go have a beer. We're done here.

• 11:05Janna Levin?

  We do know that there are slight matter antimatter violations in the laws of physics. Why there are these tiny violations, we don't know. Um, and there's an example, the universe was created with a lot more matter in it, a lot more, and a lot more antimatter. It all just went away. And this little ashy residue was left of this little excess of matter, right? So, so that, that's what goes into us. So, you can imagine-

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could you have a universe where in fact, the matter antimatter were strictly equal all the way down and still have a functioning universe? Maybe not with stuff in it, but is that, would it be its own space? Its own place? And could you have a universe that has just dark matter and dark energy in it and no regular matter?

• 11:46Janna Levin?

  You absolutely could have a universe. I mean, if you imagine the multiverse, which you made very quick reference to in the beginning, you know, like, if you keep kind of making universes like babies, they're all slightly different, right? They have a certain, uh, genetic code. We know it's still the underlying laws of physics, but maybe certain slight parameters can be seeded differently. And so maybe there's a universe that has no excess of matter over antimatter. And that really depends on whether or not it's absolutely fundamental to the laws of physics, or it's something that got broken, like you said. You know, for, for instance, the universe is left-right symmetric. I don't expect it to be different on my left and my right, right? Because that doesn't even really matter. I can move around. The universe should be the same, but I know that in this room, it's not. I know that my microphone's on my left, and that's different.

• 12:30Janna Levin?

  That's broken it just physically, even though the laws of physics should be the same on my left and right. I love the looks on your faces right now. For anyone who is just listening, I just got like four eyes.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's like, what the hell?

• 12:53Janna Levin?

  Well, you-

• 12:53Chuck Nice?

  First of all, you had me at baby universes because my mind just started going off to all these other universes that were just like, "You better take care of your kids."

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got too many kids.

• 13:03Chuck Nice?

  You've got too many kids!

• 13:05Janna Levin?

  Yeah. There could be a whole bunch of little baby universes out there, some of which are, you could say, less successful on the basis of what we think is important, which is the emergence of sentient life.

• 13:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:17Janna Levin?

  And, you know, you're not going to make a lot of sentient life out of dark matter, presumably. Now, there could also be this thing where the dark matter sector has a whole reality. It makes stars and galaxies. We just can't see them. And it sees them, and it has this whole other reality, and we're just like in parallel, completely invisible to each other. Dark galaxies, dark stars, dark planets, and-

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so from what I've read, and I have a cursory understanding of this, I have like an evening news account of this, at different times from the early universe to today, matter, gravity, dark matter, dark energy, all have different ways or different strengths of their capacity to manifest.

• 14:02Janna Levin?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so who's dominating today?

• 14:07Janna Levin?

  So today, we know that the overall energy density of the universe is dominated by dark energy. And exactly as you said, that was not true very, very far in the past. It's like a soup of ingredients that compete at different phases. And the dark energy, the strange thing about dark energy is as the universe expands, because the dark energy is everywhere, it's like it feels more of it. So the expansion gets a little faster, and then it feels even more of it, because it's just everywhere.

• 14:37Chuck Nice?

  Embracing rage.

• 14:38Janna Levin?

  It doesn't dilute, right? Like, if I took a hot gas and I expanded it, it would dilute and get weaker. Dark energy, and that's what happens to the primordial soup of matter in the early universe. It's really powerful, it's totally dense-

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're diluting our gravity- We're diluting our gravity and not diluting the dark energy.

• 14:59Janna Levin?

  Yeah, so that's right. The expansion is, is we're getting further and further away from other galaxies. So that's diluting their gravitational effect on us. But the dark energy is staying the same.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you compare the two. The dark energy systematically wins out.

• 15:16Janna Levin?

  Eventually it'll win. Even if in the beginning, the gal, you know, the, not necessarily galaxy, but like the stuff dominated. And then the universe was expanding and it got more and more dilute and weaker and weaker. And then the dark energy, there it was. And it just took over.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So dark energy feeds off the vacuum of an expanding universe.

• 15:35Janna Levin?

  Well, this is, it might be the energy of the vacuum of the expanding universe. So the more vacuum you get, the more energy from the vacuum you get.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, weirdly, that reminds me of the weeping angels episode of Doctor Who, where weeping angels, they feed off of your life energy. And you disappear out of your time and you show up in the past because they took your present life energy from you. So dark energy is, is, is taking whatever we possibly had left of ourselves. It's a cosmic vampire. It's a vampire. That's what it's doing.

• 16:16Janna Levin?

  Well, if it keeps going like this, you know, a friend of mine used to say, we have to do astronomy now because eventually, eventually in the very far future, there will be no galaxies in view anymore. They'll all be too far away for us to see.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There'll be no cosmology. There'll be no cosmology.

• 16:33Janna Levin?

  We'll no cosmology. We'll just see our galaxy and the rest of the sky will be empty. Imagine astronomy under those circumstances. We'd never know that there was anything outside of our galaxy.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's what it was until 1920. Until 1920, no one had any idea that the fuzzy objects were galaxies. It was just the solar system and the stars in the night sky. And that was the universe. In fact, that was the universe to Einstein. There was no understanding of a big bang or anything else. And so it was just, no, in fact, when did, who's the guy who first advanced the big bang? The monk or the priest?

• 17:07Janna Levin?

  Le Matre?

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Le Matre.

• 17:11Janna Levin?

  Le Matre.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Belgian priest, right? Who really put the math behind Einstein's equations. Did he? By then, have Hubble's expanding universe? He must have.

• 17:21Janna Levin?

  So Friedman, and LeMaitre, and some of these, you know, Robertson and Walker, there were a bunch of cosmologists that were thinking about this long before actually Hubble. And Einstein thought they were wrong. So Einstein publishes his theory, but he doesn't, he doesn't know that there's a big bang. It's not like it just hits you in the face. You gotta, you gotta study the mechanics of the theory. And so people jumped in even before he did, and they realized, oh, this is really strange. If you imagine a universe dominated by matter, they didn't even know about dark matter, but just stuff, it's actually wants to expand. It's actually hard, that universe doesn't want to just stay static. It's actually really, really hard to make it static. So they-

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I guess what I'm thinking is they're imagining an expanding universe before they even knew anything about galaxies.

• 18:05Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just thinking about stars in the night sky.

• 18:07Janna Levin?

  They were just imagining, yeah, they were just imagining like a hot stuff everywhere. You know, just pretend. It was kind of pretend.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So without galaxies, we have no knowledge of an origin of the universe, and we'd be dumb stupid. Yeah, so yeah, we have to do astronomy now.

• 18:24Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Chuck Nice?

  Because, because one day we're going back to that same state.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 18:27Chuck Nice?

  But only because it, those galaxies won't be observable.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At all, right.

• 18:32Chuck Nice?

  At all. So it'd be, somebody would be like, son, believe it or not, there was a time where people looked up into the sky. And they, and they thought that they saw things, son.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Grandpa Chuck, tell me more when you were a child.

• 18:45Chuck Nice?

  Believe it or not, son, they used to look up there and see things, but no longer.

• 18:49Janna Levin?

  It's true. Basically, most of the evidence that we had a big bang in our past will eventually just fade away.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Janet, before we take a break and then get to our actual cosmic queries with people's questions, what, I lose sleep at night wondering whether we today live in a time where an entire chapter of data has been removed from our awareness, just as it will be in the day when there are no galaxies.

• 19:20Janna Levin?

  Indeed.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a post-apocalyptic civilization, they will know nothing of Chuck's stories about the day gone by, and they will try to figure out the universe with what they've got.

• 19:30Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, what chapters are we missing today, thinking we have full access to all the data, yet we don't?

• 19:38Chuck Nice?

  And that's funny, because I lose sleep because I normally drink vodka before bedtime.

• 19:47Janna Levin?

  We should, yeah, we should have little shots for our, like, if you get, if you get the cosmic query wrong.

• 19:56Janna Levin?

  So, you know, there's so many possible things.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jana, you don't worry about whether we're missing something?

• 20:00Janna Levin?

  I totally do, but I think this is a really interesting question, because people say things like, if there's no way to observe the multiverse, then it's not a scientific question. I think that's false. For instance, in the far future, if people say, there's no way to observe other galaxies, and I don't know why, and one person pontificates, maybe it's because the universe was expanding so rapidly that they're now beyond our view, they'd be right, but it's technically untestable for them. So, I do think it's a scientific question, even if you can't resolve it observationally. So, yeah, there are things, like if the universe has extra spatial dimensions, and, and right now, they're really small, and we're really big, maybe that's something we can't test right now, but maybe in the far, far past, it was technically testable.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Chuck, she's saying one day, a new dimension's going to grow out the side of your body?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Oh, believe me, since the pandemic, that has already happened.

• 20:51Janna Levin?

  Mercifully, we're all, like, filmed from here up.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck has six legs and five... We gotta, we gotta take a quick break. When we come back, Jana, you're here for us. We're gonna take questions from our Patreon members when StarTalk returns.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk: Cosmic Queries. This is a celebration of the release of the second StarTalk book called Cosmic Queries, inspired by this spinoff of our show, one of our more popular formats of the StarTalk. A portfolio. And Chuck, I got you here for this, of course.

• 21:50Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're doing chapters three, four, and five. And I got their titles written here. How did the universe get to be this way? How old is the universe? And what's the universe made of?

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, you've been collecting questions. Let me just lead off. Jana, I've heard people say, "The universe is designed just for us." Okay, just so that we can have life. But that seems really inefficient if life as we care about it, human life, has been around only for a couple hundred thousand years. And the universe has been around for 14 billion. That just seems really inefficient. So, so if you want to say, you know, everything's set up for us, that's a pretty big waste of time and space.

• 22:33Janna Levin?

  Yeah, especially if we're just here to make plastics for a little while and then we're gonna go on and leave the plastic behind, you know?

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The plastic will survive us.

• 22:43Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's like a George Carlin skit. He's like, "The planet just wanted us to make plastic for it and then be gone."

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's no known thing that dissolves plastic, right?

• 22:55Janna Levin?

  Yeah, not yet.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, give me some questions, dude.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Let's, uh...

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All from Patreon.

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, everybody's from Patreon. And this is Richie, uh, Damani. Richie Damani says, firstly, Jana, Neil, Chuck, thanks for taking my question. So, we know about the LHC at CERN, which has made huge discoveries in particle physics. But do you have any knowledge of a larger project that is in consideration that will further our knowledge of the quantum world?

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Jana, is there another particle that people think is out there? And now we need something bigger than the Large Hadron Collider to find it?

• 23:39Janna Levin?

  Well, dark matter. So, so the Large Hadron Collider's been very successful. It's very exciting. It discovered the Higgs particle, which explains why anything has mass.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But did you say Higgs particle or Higgs?

• 23:53Janna Levin?

  Higgs.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you said the Higgs particle.

• 23:54Chuck Nice?

  The Higgs particle is a little different. The Higgs particle explains why you eat possum.

• 24:00Janna Levin?

  Very culturally insensitive, yes.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. Just, the Higgs particle is just like, "I believe I'm, uh, on a quantum level." Y'all.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Barbecue that possum.

• 24:14Janna Levin?

  Well, so you know, it's called the God particle in like, sort of colloquially, but it's, it was originally called the goddamn particle by Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize winner. He wanted to write a call his book, The Goddamn Particle, because they hadn't found it yet. And his publisher made him change it to the God particle, which he said ended up alienating two groups, those that believed in God and those that didn't.

• 24:37Janna Levin?

  So it's since stuck. It's since stuck, yeah. So, but the LHC could have detected dark matter and that would have been really like,

• 24:48Janna Levin?

  that would have just been what everybody had mostly hoped for. And it hasn't. So could we go higher energy and higher energy? If you think of the energy of the Large Hadron Collider, it's from a very early era in the universe's history and you'd expect to be able to make kind of everything, the earlier back you go, the more you can make, more kinds of particles you can make.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never thought of that. What, you're telling me the LHC is a kitchen?

• 25:13Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a cosmic kitchen. And so if you, whatever energy you hit, you just look on your cosmic scale and say, I got you back to three seconds in the Big Bang.

• 25:22Janna Levin?

  Exactly.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then higher energy, I got you back to one and a half seconds.

• 25:25Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where, what, how much more energy are you going to need to get to the formation of dark matter in the early universe?

• 25:32Janna Levin?

  Like 10 million times higher?

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. That's all. That's a thing of collection. Yeah, we got that. We got that. It's not a problem, right?

• 25:42Janna Levin?

  And so that's really high.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1.22 gigawatts of energy. That's what we need.

• 25:47Janna Levin?

  Now, like, here's what's going on.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1.21 gigawatts. And we're going back in time, too, so, yeah.

• 25:51Janna Levin?

  So in the recipe book that Neil's looking at, that tells you, if I cook at this temperature, I'm going to have this number of particles, that's just based on as much as we understand. And as much as we understand, between the energy of the Large Hadron Collider and the very, very, you know, the earliest second of the micro, tiniest little fraction of a second of the Big Bang, is like 10 million higher in energy, but it doesn't mean we're right. So there could be like a bunch of stuff that starts to appear that we had no idea about.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other stuff.

• 26:21Janna Levin?

  And that's what everybody, other stuff, like, not just like dark matter might appear in there. You know, and other stuff might, maybe dark matter isn't alone. Maybe there's like a whole dark sector, a whole dark reality. And we start to discover tons of dark matter, particles and forces, dark forces.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jenna, I love this. You're saying a more powerful collider could just open up a whole new door.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To what's going on in the, in the universe.

• 26:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cooking with particles. Oh dear, yeah.

• 26:51Janna Levin?

  Now, we do know that we can't, we will never hit certain scales with usual technology. Like you would have to have all the resources in the solar system in a particle collider, the size of the solar system. So that's why we do astronomy.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need 1.21 gigawatts of power.

• 27:08Janna Levin?

  I think that's the benefit of astronomy is that stuff happens at higher energy scales than human beings can engineer. And so we, we know we have high energy particles hitting our atmosphere from supernova explosions or solar systems that are, are at higher energies than the Hedges Collider.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the universe is a better hadron collider than our large hadron collider?

• 27:29Janna Levin?

  That's right. It just requires, you know, it's harder. You can't manipulate it. You can't force it to do what you want.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just have to wait. You have to wait until it makes what you want. Right.

• 27:37Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. The particle bites you in the ass. It's okay, I guess you exist. It's, it's basically like being an actor. Don't call us. We'll, we'll call you.

• 27:47Janna Levin?

  Exactly. Just gotta wait for it to roll up.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, all right, so that, so that's good. I, I like that. And so, but I want to emphasize a point you made before we go to the next question. What you're saying is in our life experience, if something lasts three minutes or five seconds or one second, that's not very much time and who cares about the difference? But in the early universe, there are things that lasted a trillionth of a second and then a, a quadrillionth of a second. And we say, oh, that's just less than a second. But each of those are huge differences. In the energetics of the early universe, is that a fair way to think about it?

• 28:22Janna Levin?

  Absolutely. I mean, there's stuff that can be created in the first, you know, trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, that very quickly decay away into other stuff and will never be made again. Because the energy scale required to create a single particle with that mass, even though the mass itself is objectively not a lot compared to, you know, a coffee cup, it's a lot for one particle. Um, and it will never be made again, probably in the history of the universe.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anything that was born in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and dies a trillionth of a second later,

• 29:00Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  lived for a trillion of its own lifetimes.

• 29:03Janna Levin?

  Yeah. That was a full life.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, man.

• 29:09Janna Levin?

  That was its life expectancy.

• 29:11Chuck Nice?

  Wow, look at that. Okay.

• 29:13Janna Levin?

  So we do think, like, you could make, in fact, it's possible that one of the heaviest single particles that ever could be made is a microscopic black hole. And that it was made not by dead stars, not by collapsing matter, but it was made as like a quantum particle in the very early universe. And that it was the weight of like a little pile of flour, but it was incredibly smaller than a nucleus. So it's tiny.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So dense to be a black hole, a black hole dense.

• 29:46Janna Levin?

  Exactly. It's very spatially tiny, but heavy for its incredibly small spatial size.

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  And if I lost my keys into a microscopic black hole?

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, don't, don't reach in to pull them out, because that ain't gonna work, okay?

• 29:59Janna Levin?

  Oh, could I get them back? Don't do that.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck, I'll get you another pair of keys, another set of keys.

• 30:06Janna Levin?

  That's like chapter three in Black Hole Survival Guide.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sweet. So you know what this reminds me of, Jana? I forgot which book, forgive me. But the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, one of his novels, he says, "This is the last sentence ever spoken by humankind."

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was one scientist speaking to the other and says, "Let's try it the other way." That's the end of whole civilization.

• 30:36Janna Levin?

  Right.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, "Let's see if we can make a mini black hole. Last word ever spoken."

• 30:41Janna Levin?

  Well, so there was some discussion, serious discussion, about whether or not the Large Hadron Collider could make one of these. And-

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A mini black hole.

• 30:50Janna Levin?

  A mini black hole. And we usually think, no, you really couldn't, until you were at the much, much, much higher energy. But it does turn out that the universe does have extra spatial dimensions, and they're of a certain size. You could actually manipulate the strength of gravity. If you think about it, gravity dilutes when you have more dimensions, like more volume, it gets more diluted. So if these dimensions, you start to notice, it brings the scale of making black holes down in energy. Because gravity's getting, it's getting into your range because of these extra dimensions.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so what you're saying is, if you have extra dimensions, then the gravity has more space to dilute into.

• 31:31Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that means that your thresholds of gravity, bad stuff is lower.

• 31:37Janna Levin?

  Is lower. So you might make a black hole at the Large Hadron Collider, if that's the case. And so there were injunctions taken out by people to try to stop the Large Hadron Collider from turning on. Because there was this anxiety, well, if you're gonna make a black hole, it's gonna like digest, you know, it's gonna consume the Earth and the-

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll kill us all.

• 31:56Janna Levin?

  But the argument, which might not be very soothing, because it is theoretical, is that they would evaporate too quickly. They would just go off like firecrackers.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying you would possibly make them, and they would consume the Earth, except that Hawking radiation protects us.

• 32:13Janna Levin?

  That's right. And we, look, black holes are not as dangerous as people portray. There's a black hole in the center of our galaxy. We orbit that black hole. It dominates the entire behavior of the galaxy. And doesn't, it's not a vacuum cleaner, right?

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck says the person who wrote the book, "Black hole survival guy."

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one writes a book.

• 32:34Janna Levin?

  If you want to survive, just stay here, basically.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one writes the book, "The Puppy Survival Guide." No, you write survival guides with stuff that's gonna eat you.

• 32:45Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's "The Kitten Survival Guide." No, no, "Black Hole Survival Guide."

• 32:50Janna Levin?

  It's "Explorer's Peril," yeah.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We gotta take a quick break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries when StarTalk returns.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We are celebrating the release of the second StarTalk book, Cosmic Queries, inspired by this format. By the way, we're gonna have different guests for the different kinds of chapters that are in the book. And right now, we've got some very deep questions about what's the universe made of? And how did the universe get to be this way? Janna Levin, always good to have you.

• 33:37Janna Levin?

  Always fun to be here.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a good friend of the show. By the way, that place behind you.

• 33:41Janna Levin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks like a bunker.

• 33:42Janna Levin?

  I know.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it looks like a chill place to never be found. So where are you right now?

• 33:48Janna Levin?

  So I am also Director of Sciences at a cultural center in Brooklyn called Pioneer Works, which is largely originated in the arts. And I've been doing science events here and bringing science into the community. It's very much an attempt to...

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is just so Brooklyn cool. You know, I'm jealous.

• 34:07Janna Levin?

  I have to say, what I love about this place, it's free and it's open to all. And it's a donation-only model. And we really bring amazing people here to talk about science, to talk about art, to have exhibitions. And it's really important to us that the doors are open for everybody.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the intersection between science and art is much greater than anyone ever thinks about or imagines. And you're there in the middle of that. So keep up the good work. All right, so Chuck, give me some questions for our cosmologist in the house.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Toby Sonnenberg says, "Hey, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Levin, sometimes physicists say that the existence of a particle, such as the axion, is predicted by a theory or completes a theory."

• 34:53Chuck Nice?

  What do they mean by this?

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good question.

• 34:57Janna Levin?

  Well, that's, okay, so let's, you know what the best example of that is? Is the Higgs, which we already mentioned. So, we looked at the standard model of all the matter in the universe, and there was just like, one thing missing. Because, there was, we couldn't make sense of why particles had masses, essentially. Unless, the Higgs was proposed. So, what the Higgs does, it's basically, again, it permeates-

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Higgs was a person.

• 35:26Janna Levin?

  Higgs was a person who proposed the theory. And the idea of the Higgs particle was that, that there was this field that permeated all of space. Kind of like what we think about dark energy. So, some people wondered if dark energy itself was like the Higgs permeating all of space. But, the numbers didn't quite work out. But it could be something like that, dark energy. It could be something like this field that permeates all of space. And as we move through this field, because of our interactions with the Higgs, it creates a kind of inertia. We get sticky, we get gluey, it's like viscous moving through it. And that's what gives us mass. Right? Mass is, means I'm harder to push around than a thimble, but I'm less hard to push around than a car. There's inertia.

• 36:10Janna Levin?

  And this difficulty pushing around has to do with our interaction through the field. That's the idea.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the Higgs particle was filling a gap.

• 36:19Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's different from discovering a particle that nobody ordered.

• 36:23Janna Levin?

  That's true. So, like Robbie said, it's a great quote. The physicist Robbie said, "Who ordered that?" When he began to discover more particles. So, the Higgs was predicted to fill a gap, which was exactly what the question was about. And lo and behold, there it was.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This can make all you all very proud of yourselves, right? Because it means, you understand not only the physics that we've discovered, but the physics awaiting to be discovered. That, that, that gives you pretty good confidence there.

• 36:51Janna Levin?

  That's the best. Although, I have to say, everyone really hoped that something like the Large Hadron Collider would discover something we had never predicted. But people don't understand about physicists, we don't want to wrap it all up in a bow and be done. We want more. And so, it would have been incredibly exciting if they had discovered something that nobody had ordered. It would have given a lot of people work.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steeped in ignorance.

• 37:14Janna Levin?

  We, yes, we look forward to the questions. The questions are the fun part. In fact, Robbie, who you're quoting, his mother used to say to him, "Did you ask a good question today?" You know.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 37:24Janna Levin?

  Not that you learned something.

• 37:25Chuck Nice?

  Basically, you guys are just never satisfied, is what you really said.

• 37:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 37:29Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's a weird job. Like, the more questions you answer, you're getting yourself out of work.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you want job security. All right, there it goes.

• 37:40Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's keep it going. Let's do a lead-in up to a lightning round. So let's do it a little faster, and then we'll pick up the pace and see how far we can get.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's a perfect segue into John Swoboc's question, because John says this. "Hi, Jana. Please tell me, what is string theory in two sentences?"

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he wants it in two sentences.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So he's right on time.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go for it.

• 38:10Janna Levin?

  String theory is actually so compelling because it can be summarized in two sentences. When we look at the microscopic universe, we used to think we saw little fundamental particles. It's possible that if we zoom in on those fundamental particles, all of which are different, there's a lot of them, quarks and electrons, that when we zoom in, we realize that they're each tiny loops of string, the same kind of string, and they're playing different harmonics on the string to express as a different particle. So an electron is simply ringing at a different note than a quark. But they are fundamentally the same. That was more than two sentences, but it was fast.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good.

• 38:45Chuck Nice?

  That was good.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Listen, that was good. So you're saying everything in the universe could be made up of strings?

• 38:49Janna Levin?

  That's right. Even light, photons, even the Higgs, everything would be...

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about dark matter?

• 38:53Janna Levin?

  All of it would be the same fundamental string playing different notes.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so the string could be playing notes that we can't detect, such as dark matter, dark energy.

• 39:02Janna Levin?

  That's right.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we can't see.

• 39:04Janna Levin?

  Right, so we think of particles as just their identity in terms of whether they interact in certain ways. And so all of those features, it's like a short list of numbers, or harmonics on the string.

• 39:14Chuck Nice?

  So the universe is nothing more than one big version of Name That Tune.

• 39:21Janna Levin?

  And this is the one we're in. We're in this tune.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  We're stuck in this one.

• 39:25Janna Levin?

  We're stuck in this one. We got this one going.

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, give me another one. Best short answer, Jana. That's so funny. Best short answer ever. If somebody else is able to observe us, but we can't observe them, could you imagine they'd be like, "God, what a shitty song."

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  All right, so this is Woody. Woody says, "Is a quantum vacuum possible in intergalactic space or anywhere else? And would an area of absolute nothing

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  be a hole in spacetime? So if you can actually get to nothing, did you punch a hole in spacetime?"

• 40:07Janna Levin?

  Well, there's a lot of stuff going on there, but the quantum aspect is the most important. To some extent, you can never have a quantum completely vacuum, nothing. You can't have a complete quantum vacuum. And that's because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says, you know, I can't ever really precisely state that a particle is there or not there. It means I can't say nothing exists, because I have the same uncertainty.

• 40:36Janna Levin?

  There's an uncertainty for things to even exist.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  Listen, listen. Wait, you gotta be easy on Chuck. Chuck had a hard night last night. Exactly. You're laying this on him now. Woo, I drank last night. You should let me know. Dang.

• 40:51Janna Levin?

  Yeah, so, you know, to say there's nothing means you have zero uncertainty that there's nothing. And you cannot have that at the quantum level. It doesn't exist. There is no, it's not just that there's a problem with the human knowledge. There is no meaning to saying it's exactly, precisely empty.

• 41:07Chuck Nice?

  So you're saying that nothing can't exist, is basically what you're saying? There can't be, there can't be a nothing. Because, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that there can't be a nothing. You cannot be sure that there's nothing.

• 41:20Janna Levin?

  Well, there's, nothing isn't quite as empty as you might imagine.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 41:26Janna Levin?

  The most nothing you can get might be, so this is why people talk about the dark energy as being the energy of the vacuum. The most nothing you might be able to get is this kind of frothy quantum things. A cloud of possibilities. And that has an energy associated with it. And you can calculate the energy associated with it. And so far, we keep getting the number wrong. If I look at quantum mechanics as I understand it, and I calculate the energy of the vacuum, I either get zero, or I get something absolutely enormous. What I don't get is dark energy. So you could say dark energy is not mysterious. What's mysterious is why it's so low, why it's either not zero or huge. And that's what the real mystery is,

• 42:09Janna Levin?

  is how do we make the energy of the vacuum tuned just to where what we observe? And nobody knows how to do that.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, I cry foul here. So what you are taking as a given that everything you're describing is happening in the spacetime that we've come to know and love. But back to the person's question, if you did find a place where the quantum laws don't apply, have you torn a... Have you opened up a rip in the very fabric of spacetime where possibly other rules of quantum behavior apply?

• 42:47Janna Levin?

  Well...

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or no rules at all?

• 42:49Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I would say that to do such violence as to have a hole in spacetime... So you have to think of spacetime as being formed, responding flexibly to matter and energy. And so you can't make a hole without having tremendous other phenomenon going on. It just... We know what the solution would be. It would be nice, smooth, empty spacetime. So you make a hole by doing something like a black hole, like doing some real intense violence with energy and matter to create that hole. So I would say maybe closer answer to our listeners' question is that it might be quite the other way around, that quantum mechanics creates spacetime.

• 43:36Janna Levin?

  And that is a new idea that's been kind of people have been flirting with maybe for decades. But that it's not that you have these two separate things, gravity, spacetime, quantum. It's that things like a black hole emerge from the quantum phenomena and not the other way around. So you don't even have spacetime unless you have quantum mechanics.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get it. So you can't even pose the question, what happens if there's no?

• 44:05Janna Levin?

  Exactly.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't separate the existence of spacetime from the quantum phenomena that operate within it.

• 44:10Janna Levin?

  Exactly.

• 44:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's created in the first place.

• 44:12Janna Levin?

  If that's true. So one way to think of it is like embroidery. So embroidery, like let's say you're you're you're embroidering something. Each thread is like a quantum phenomenon and from far away, it might look like a black hole. But on closer inspection, you realize it's a bunch of intertangled quantum threads. Exactly.

• 44:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's cool. That's a really cool concept.

• 44:34Janna Levin?

  It's pretty cool.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, okay.

• 44:35Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying, I can't, I can't wait to go to a party with a bunch of theoretical physicists and do whatever drugs they are doing.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll sign you up, Chuck.

• 44:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Okay.

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fast lightning round. Let's do it.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. My name is pronounced Frederick. If the universe with everything expands, does that mean that quarks grow too? Or is it just the space between them?

• 45:01Janna Levin?

  Very good question. So.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  Very good question.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lightning round, go.

• 45:04Janna Levin?

  Yeah, here I am in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. Famous reference to Annie Hall. So locally, I'm bound to the earth. I'm not expanding with the expansion of the universe because locally, the earth is more important to me. Also, my atoms are bound together by different forces and they're stronger than the expansion rate of the universe presently. I'm not being torn apart. If that's maintained in the future, remains to be understood. It might be that the expansion gets faster and faster and eventually, indeed, Brooklyn begins to expand. And and that's just something we don't know about the fate of the universe.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, the final chapter of the Cosmic Queries book. Takes you there.

• 45:43Janna Levin?

  Hmm.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks at the great rip, the runaway where not only does everything get ripped apart from everything else, the very structure of particle matter itself breaks apart. It can't even hold itself together. And that scared me. I lost sleep that night.

• 46:01Chuck Nice?

  But it doesn't scare me. I've been in that position many times in my life. Well, I just can't hold myself together.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't hold yourself together?

• 46:08Chuck Nice?

  I just can't hold myself together.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're actually out of time, but I want to get one more question in here.

• 46:13Chuck Nice?

  All right. Hey, Jana. Hey, Neil. I love you both. Big fan for a long time. And thank you both for instilling me with a cosmic perspective. In our universe, we observe virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Could this phenomena be compared to that of a 3D object passing through a 2D flatland?

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 46:32Janna Levin?

  It's very interesting. Well, it is possible. So I said string theory. I only had two sentences, which I already overused, but it is possible that there aren't just strings, but there are membranes, higher dimensional surfaces. And so imagine, yes, we started with particles, points, and then we went to strings, one dimensional objects. Now, maybe there's like a membrane, a two dimensional object, and maybe there's higher dimensional objects as high as you can fit in the higher dimensional spacetime. So one of the ideas is imagine we live on like a three dimensional membrane, and when we see a point particle, it's really the endpoint of a string stuck to our membrane. It's not exactly the question asked, but it's related.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it is a, it is a section of dimension.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool, though. Yeah.

• 47:14Janna Levin?

  So that I see a point particle moving around in my spacetime because I can't see that it's really connected by a string to somewhere else. And also imagine how that allows for what would appear as an illusion to be faster than light travel. Because I could have this thing that's actually connected and it's doing something, you know, synced up, but that's because it's fundamentally connected and I don't realize it.

• 47:37Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. So it's like having the point of a pencil down on the paper and the point is what I'm seeing on the paper, but then there's a whole pencil.

• 47:48Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Chuck Nice?

  Connected to that point.

• 47:50Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Chuck Nice?

  That's some freaky, freaky stuff, man.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freaky Friday stuff.

• 47:55Janna Levin?

  And so when we calculate the energy of the vacuum and try to find the dark energy, we have to calculate all of these kinds of objects that might be in the universe and what they're contributing in their quantum energy to the vacuum.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 48:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. We gotta close it there.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not gonna sleep for three days.

• 48:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Janet, thanks for showing us your digs. Yeah. Pioneer works. And Chuck, you tweet at Chuck Nice Comic?

• 48:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 48:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good to find you there.

• 48:25Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir, for saying it. I just love that Janet has pioneer works. It's like, and Janet, we see your pioneer works, your swan song accomplishment to science.

• 48:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck tweets.

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  You tweet, you tweet, right? You're on Twitter, right? You're on Twitter.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck's on Twitter. Okay.

• 48:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, snap.

• 48:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So we just encourage you to check out Cosmic Query as the second StarTalk book, National Geographic Press. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And of course, I bid you to keep looking up.