Cosmic Queries – Quantum Consciousness with Charles Liu

Is your consciousness a quantum phenomenon? Is the universe one predetermined block? Neil deGrasse Tyson and cohosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly answer grab bag questions about quantum theory, the cosmological constant, and retrocausality with astrophysicist Charles Liu.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary Chuck, something cool always happens when we have our geek in chief.

• 0:03Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Lou.

• 0:04Gary O'Reilly?

  He's the best.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With his new book on quantum, people started asking about quantum physics. My favorite was quantum consciousness.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  Quantum consciousness.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And boy, did we bask in that.

• 0:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yes. Straight in the deep end.

• 0:15Chuck Nice?

  Right to the deep end.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of us drowned.

• 0:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And of a special edition, you know, that means Gary O'Reilly's in the house. Gary, how you doing, man?

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm good, Neil. I'm good. It's cold, but I'm feeling okay.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cold? That's all right. It's colder than your UK roots would ever have for you in this moment, for sure. But we are getting the World Cup.

• 0:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you used to play professional soccer.

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, I'm interested.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got Chuck Nice, baby. How you doing, man?

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right, Chuck Nice, who played no soccer, no football, no nothing.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a special edition grab bag.

• 1:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. And we have for certain grab bags, only ones that like achieve great heights. We, we, we put, we put up the bat signal to call in the geek in chief. Charles Liu. Charles, how you doing, man? Hey.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Our returning champion, Chuck Lou.

• 1:36Charles Liu?

  It is so good to be back with you all. I played soccer when I was a kid too. I was usually the goal.

• 1:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 1:42Charles Liu?

  Not the goalie.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  Not the goalie.

• 1:44Gary O'Reilly?

  The goal.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The goal, okay. So then he twisted his ankle and he turned to astrophysics thereafter. Yeah.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Charles, you're a professor of physics and astronomy or just astrophysics?

• 1:57Charles Liu?

  Both of those, yeah.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I see University of New York on Staten Island.

• 2:02Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you also, I'm loving the fact that every couple of years, there's a book that comes out of you. Most recently, in the Handy Answer series.

• 2:11Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A series of books where, you know, you just wanna, you know, they're not gonna insult you by saying it's for dummies.

• 2:18Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they wanna elevate you and say, we know you're curious. We know you've got questions.

• 2:24Charles Liu?

  Awesome.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this one is the handy, the latest, the Handy Quantum Physics Question Book.

• 2:31Charles Liu?

  Yeah, yeah, right here. That's it right there.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

• 2:37Charles Liu?

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Question Book.

• 2:38Charles Liu?

  Right. You see, these days, answers we have, right? So if you want an answer, here it is. But what we really need to do is to know what questions to ask next. If we're moving forward in the science, this is a guidebook, right? It's not a textbook or anything, but it's like, here, you want some answers? Here they are.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a lot of people, they've heard, you know, quantum is all the buzzwords lately.

• 2:58Charles Liu?

  It really is.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just wanna become fluent in it, which is a great way to make that happen.

• 3:03Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we solicited questions from our fanbase and, but we told them that they were going to you.

• 3:10Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those who are already plugged into your geek in chiefitude, probably are gonna take us there. But I haven't seen the questions. So who's got the questions? Gary, Chuck?

• 3:21Gary O'Reilly?

  We do.

• 3:22Charles Liu?

  We do.

• 3:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck and I, I'll start us off. This first question.

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  By the way, before, before we go any further, Chuck, I don't know if you can see this, but that's, that's you next to Michelle Obama on my.

• 3:34Charles Liu?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Kendall, baby.

• 3:37Charles Liu?

  Dude.

• 3:37Chuck Nice?

  That's right. So, yeah, man.

• 3:40Charles Liu?

  I am truly honored.

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  The, yeah, there you go, buddy. That's you right there. You see that? That's you on my Kindle.

• 3:46Charles Liu?

  You are so kind.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually next to, so a picture of his book is next to a picture of her book.

• 3:52Charles Liu?

  No, it's, it's his book. It's just in digital form.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just said, I have the picture of you next to Michelle Obama. I said, I didn't know my boy was hanging out with Michelle.

• 4:02Charles Liu?

  Oh, well, yeah, it's his book and her book. I don't know her.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence my confusion here. Okay. All right. Let's start these questions off.

• 4:13Charles Liu?

  Here we go.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First one.

• 4:14Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, I'll, I'll kick us off. Morgan Fisher from Waterloo, Ontario. It's a slightly longer one, so bear with me. It is my understanding that quarks always exist in pairs. And separating the pairs creates enough energy to generate a new quark. Here's my question. If the universe ends in a big rip, that means that everything right down to quarks will be torn apart. But tearing apart quarks generates new quarks. Could this mean another big bang? If so, does this provide evidence that our current universe is simply one in an infinite number of universes that emerge, exist, then undergo another big rip from the infinite past to the infinite future?

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's, that's a variant on an earlier question that we got that none of us could answer. When, if a nucleon is falling into a, into a black hole and the tidal forces become so great, it breaks apart the nucleon into quarks and then it wants to break apart the quarks. It breaks apart the quark and forms two new quarks. And it just keeps doing that all the way down to the singularity. And it seemed to me you would have a quark catastrophe if that kept up. We took it to

• 5:23Charles Liu?

  Brian Green.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian Green. Everybody scratching their head. This feels like the same kind of question, Charles.

• 5:29Charles Liu?

  Well, it's a little bit different. But we'll, we'll address that big rip part first.

• 5:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Charles Liu?

  Okay, remember this question, which is a great question, by the way. Love, love our Canadian friends who come up with great questions, come up with great answers to. The issue is that the big rip is a scenario of the expanding universe and the end of the universe. That is true only if dark energy has a particular kind of characteristic, where it's kind of negative. Okay, that's known often as the phantom energy scenario of dark energy. And for that to be true, then that would mean that when quarks split up because of some sort of internal energy, not, not like what we're trying to do, but like some sort of a dark energy split, they won't create new quarks. So

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, why not?

• 6:19Charles Liu?

  The solution, because of the dark energy characteristic, the phantom dark energy itself basically allows for the creation of negative particles or negative energy particles. And these things don't exist as far as we have ever found. Wait, so we split the quark, then I have an isolated quark sitting out there, minding its own business? No, you split the quark and it becomes something completely different. It doesn't become quarks anymore. Oh, so it's a different- You wind up with a decay of sorts. It's a different reaction. Right, right. So you're not worried about that aspect of things if it's not a big rip. Chuck, I think he's trying to wiggle out of this one. What do you think? No. It's a different particle. If you want me to circle back to what Jana and Brian were trying to talk about,

• 7:03Charles Liu?

  I don't have any more insight than they do. They are much closer to the forefront of quantum research than I am. But what I would say is that you're thinking of a quantum particle, like a quark, like a classical particle, which feels tidal forces, right? If you think of a quark instead of a thing that can be pulled apart, like our bodies, like from our noses to our feet or something like that, then you get this weird catastrophe. But if you think of it as a packet of energy or quantum information, then as it falls in, it doesn't get stretched physically. It gets changed in a way, perhaps because of the tremendous gravitational tides and influences, but it will not actually wind up with more quarks.

• 7:48Charles Liu?

  You'll wind up with a bundle of energy going to the event horizon, and the event horizon growing to encompass it. That's my intuition. I think I would have to work the math out to make sure.

• 7:59Gary O'Reilly?

  But Morgan's question is predicated on the fact that there is a big rip.

• 8:04Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 8:04Gary O'Reilly?

  And therefore, it becomes rinse and repeat. But what if there's no big rip?

• 8:08Charles Liu?

  That's right. Right now, the odds are there is not going to be a big rip. Based on- Really? Because of the necessity, the condition, that a big rip requires, as far as we know, this idea of phantom energy being the dark energy component of the universe. And that would imply that we should see negative energy particles popping out in the universe, like randomly generated. Do they have negative gravity? They would have negative gravity, they would be able to uh push space forward. Uh, the Alcubierre Warp Drive, for example, could be found, you know, all those kinds of things.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could make wormholes.

• 8:46Charles Liu?

  That is another possibility, but we don't see them. We haven't seen a single wormhole, we haven't seen a single white hole. Uh, so the existence of those things has not yet been confirmed and appears to be contradicted or or refuted by the fact that we don't see these things. That phantom energy is not what dark energy actually is.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 9:07Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 9:07Charles Liu?

  But that's just for now.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the opposite of in math, the existence.

• 9:09Chuck Nice?

  Well then, well then, let it, since we don't know, so then what is dark energy, Chuck?

• 9:14Charles Liu?

  I don't know.

• 9:16Charles Liu?

  I have no idea. I have zero idea. All we know is.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't cop an attitude while you address my guest here.

• 9:23Charles Liu?

  It's okay, it's okay. Listen, here's something's really.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, then what is it?

• 9:27Charles Liu?

  Yeah, I have no idea, but I'll tell you something else that's been really interesting. Maybe we can save this for later in the show if there are other questions regarding this. But I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting not too long ago uh in Phoenix. And I I was just so happy, there was just a lovely time, I'm still basking in it, even though it's been a a little while. Uh, but one of the last speeches, one of the last talks in that conference was about the nature of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey, which has now gathered information about fifteen million galaxies and where they're placed in the universe, seems to show that what we have counted as dark energy, the cosmological constant, is probably not constant.

• 10:10Charles Liu?

  It looks like it's actually changing, which is really amazing, which adds still more speculation as to what this dark energy actually is, because you have to account for the fact that it looks like the universe doesn't have a constant cosmological constant.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, our assumption that it was constant comes directly from Einstein's equations.

• 10:30Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which his equation, his equations require it be constant.

• 10:33Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it's not constant, it means Einstein's general relativity is missing something about it as a model of the universe.

• 10:40Chuck Nice?

  Not so smart are you now, Einstein, are you?

• 10:43Charles Liu?

  No, it just means that, it just means that. Lambda, the number that he had put as a number is a function of time. It changes the equations. It it means that Albert was just, and and he himself admitted it. It was a temporary thing that made the equations work. He had no idea if there was anything physical about it. Right? And so now we're actually trying to see whether Albert's prediction of its existence is leading to something physical. And so the fact that it might be dependent on time or the age of the universe is further evidence that it is something physical and not just mathematical.

• 11:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh, snap.

• 11:19Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay, but that really makes, that makes things super freaky then.

• 11:24Charles Liu?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:25Chuck Nice?

  Like, i- i- if you're, if you're factoring in time as part of the equation, that's insane.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A whole other.

• 11:31Chuck Nice?

  That's a whole, I mean, you've opened up a whole new world.

• 11:34Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  You know?

• 11:35Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 11:36Chuck Nice?

  Crazy.

• 11:37Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 11:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So, oh, my god. It shows you how far away from knowing certainty we are.

• 11:44Charles Liu?

  Absolutely. Ninety-five percent of the material in the universe is still wholly unknown to human science.

• 11:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Only ninety-five percent?

• 11:52Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Ninety-six. Okay, maybe ninety-six.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, we'll, we'll, we'll have this figured out in a little time.

• 11:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're almost there.

• 12:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we're almost there, man. We only got ninety-six percent more to figure out.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would have worded that slightly differently. Uh, I would say ninety-five percent of what is driving the universe is unknown to us rather than ninety-five percent of the material.

• 12:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I don't know if it's material, knows what it is.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right. You don't even know if it's material. You can't even, we can't even say if we can call it material.

• 12:24Charles Liu?

  Yeah, I use the term material to be as general as possible. I didn't call it matter. I didn't call it energy. I didn't call it particles.

• 12:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:32Charles Liu?

  Right. I mean, the, an even better ambiguous word would be like the stuff of the universe. Right? Yeah.

• 12:40Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm. I kind of like that. Stuff.

• 12:43Charles Liu?

  Anyway, yep. Lots, lots in there to unpack for the future. Yeah.

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and for those who are, who are ego, who want to be ego stroked, this is the opposite of that. Where, you know, we're not even the majority of the stuff in the universe.

• 12:57Chuck Nice?

  Right. Right.

• 12:59Charles Liu?

  Right. Not by a long shot.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Cry in your pillow on that one. I gotta tell you, doesn't, doesn't bode well for the creationist. That's, I'm just saying, I'm not trying to start anything. I'm just saying, all right? I'm God and I'm sitting up here and I'm like, I'm gonna create a universe and uh, I think I'm gonna let you guys have 4% of it.

• 13:24Chuck Nice?

  But it's all for you. The whole thing is for you. No, I love you. I love you. I love you. And it's all for you. I mean, 4%, that's what you get. You get 4%, like, yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  You got another one. Bring it on. Here we go. This is Raphael who says,

• 14:05Chuck Nice?

  greetings, Dr. Tyson's and Lou, and of course, the cosmological constant Lord Nice. Raphael Vigod in Toronto, Canada. Okay. He gave me a phonetic spelling of his name. I still think I got it wrong. "The behavior of light seems to be intrinsic to both relativity and quantum mechanics, yet the two systems cannot be reconciled, at least not so far. Is there a single explanation for this? And is the imposition of observation or measurement an obstacle that just can't be overcome?"

• 14:41Charles Liu?

  Dang.

• 14:42Chuck Nice?

  I like that. Wow, Chuck.

• 14:45Charles Liu?

  Okay, the, the answer is, the key to the answer, shall we say, Raphael? And again, an excellent question is, we have not yet reconciled the situation. You see, general relativity's mathematical equations operate well down to a particular limit. But at that limit, it stops working in terms of how it explains how the universe works.

• 15:08Chuck Nice?

  Could you just give us a little overview there? Cause like you say that, but what you're saying requires a lot of understanding.

• 15:16Charles Liu?

  Sure. Real, real basic. Okay. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In very general terms, talks about space and time and how that interacts with us. Quantum mechanics, this quantum world stuff, it deals most with like matter and energy on the tiniest scales and how we interact with that. Okay. When they come together, space and time, matter and energy, they seem to have a problem getting through from one to the other. In other words, the math of quantum physics doesn't work really well when we're talking about space and time. And the mathematics of general relativity don't seem to work very well when we're trying to talk about little subatomic particles.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some kind of shotgun wedding waiting to happen with somebody has a new way to bring them together.

• 16:05Charles Liu?

  Once you can combine them, right, then we're in good shape. Now, people are working on this. Light does seem to be a place where you both somehow, for example, have a maximum speed of light, right? Speed of light is the maximum speed at which any object can move through space and time. Meanwhile, matter and energy, right? Light is both a particle and a wave and it's energy which can be converted into matter, things like that. So light does seem to be some sort of linchpin in this sort of shotgun wedding that Neil was talking about. But it might not be shotgun. I'll venture this. Neil, you and I both know a very, very, very good guy named Jacob Barindis.

• 16:48Charles Liu?

  Jacob is a preceptor at Harvard University and he has recently just-

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jacob Barindis, when I was in graduate school, he was in high school and he programmed my website at the time. That's the same Jacob Barindis?

• 17:03Charles Liu?

  It's that same Jacob Barindis, yes.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 17:06Charles Liu?

  But yes, that Jacob, who is now a preceptor at Harvard, he has written and published some articles just recently. He's an example of one of the many scientists that's trying to tie these systems together. And what he is basically saying is that there is actually a mathematical way to bridge general relativity, the macroscopic world, with quantum mechanics in the microscopic world, and it has to- To do with the math of statistical physics and chaos theory and the ability to take things which are uncertain and make them more certain. Not always certain, but more certain. And that pulled out from the microscopic to the macroscopic unites the two areas of physics.

• 17:52Charles Liu?

  But we're not quite there yet. This just one hypothesis that appears to work sort of. And then there's going to be a lot more work and a lot more people have to keep working on it. So in that case, if Jacob and his colleagues are right, then the wave particle duality is only temporary. This this incompatibility is only there because we're not advanced enough yet in our mathematical construction of physics to unite them. Interesting.

• 18:18Gary O'Reilly?

  If it were a Venn diagram and you've got quantum in one circle and general relativity in another, is there a crossover at all or are they too separate?

• 18:27Charles Liu?

  At the moment, they just touch. They do not have any crossover area. If we're talking about Venn diagrams, for for anyone who don't don't know what a Venn diagram is, it's a box and then you've got little circles that come overlapping things to sort of show.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, who uses a box in a Venn diagram? What kind of?

• 18:44Charles Liu?

  That's the universal set on the outside.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:47Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right. Otherwise, you use little circles, but sometimes you can use different shapes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but if you have GR and quantum just kissing in the middle.

• 18:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The way physics has worked historically is somebody's going to come up with, and maybe it's this Jacob Berendis solution, with another circle that encloses both of them within.

• 19:09Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it's not like you shift somewhere else and discard anything that has already been demonstrated to work.

• 19:16Charles Liu?

  That's exactly what Einstein did with Newtonian physics.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 19:19Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Mm hmm, mm hmm. So we'll see how that goes.

• 19:23Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 19:24Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Great question.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me some more.

• 19:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Ready for the next one. Right, this is from Andrew D. Greetings, Doctors Tyson, Lou, and of course, Lord Nice. Andrew Dack from Minneapolis. Well, stay safe and stay warm, sir. The question goes as such.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially safe.

• 19:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. The path integral formulation calculates probabilities by summing overall possible paths a particle could take. The two-state vector formalism describes quantum systems using both a forward-evolving state from the past and a backward-evolving state from the future. Both suggest quantum mechanics can be written with boundary conditions at both ends of time, not just initial conditions. It goes on. Sorry about this being as long as it is, but it's complicated.

• 20:09Chuck Nice?

  This is good. That background is good.

• 20:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Has this led to experimental predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics? And do physicists take retrocausality seriously as part of reality's actual structure? Could retrocausality be evidence of a four-dimensional deterministic universe where the indeterminacy we observe is just our limited perspective of a structure that is already complete?

• 20:35Chuck Nice?

  All right. So first of all, let me just say this. Let me just say this, Chuck, before you. This is not the place to show off. All right? This is not the place to show off, Mr. Andrew D.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  All right. Before you answer that, Chuck.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Chuck Nice?

  There's so many things that he packed in there.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 20:58Chuck Nice?

  You gotta explain them, man.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just. By the way, just a shout out to my wife. We met in graduate school. Her, she got her PhD in physics. She specialized. Her PhD thesis was on path integrals.

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was her entire. She had, so technically, her PhD is in mathematical physics.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so.

• 21:17Gary O'Reilly?

  We should have her as a guest then.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that as that question unfolded. Yes. No, that's a great point.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  Isn't that something that in Neil's family, he ain't even the smart one?

• 21:28Charles Liu?

  It's true, my family too. I'm a big fan. Yes, I have, I had the pleasure to, to meet all various spouses and like, none of us can match up to our spouses in their, in their brilliance. It's so true. Well, okay, yes, we don't want to get too deeply into the vocabulary of it, I agree. But Andrew, that is a very good question, and let's just cut to the basic chase. Yeah. Andrew is basically asking, with the way that we're trying to figure out how the universe works on the quantum level, is it true that time could be considered as running backwards and forwards at the same time? And therefore, the entire universe is filled, not just in space, but also in time. In other words, the past, the present, the future, all already exist.

• 22:13Charles Liu?

  And all we're doing is either moving forward into it or standing still, we're not moving backwards. Right? That's basically what he's asking. And then the corollary to that is- Which means all trajectories are predetermined. That's right. So if that's true, right, then should we do physics backwards as well as forwards? Can something happening in the past cause what's happening or predict what's happening in the future and vice versa? Hence the retro causality. Retro causality, right. Fancy word, but just time running back. Great word, though, if you think about it. Pretty clear what it means. So here's the bottom line, in my opinion, on that one, which is again, a great question. Thank you, Andrew. The idea is, does time already fill all of the dimension?

• 22:57Charles Liu?

  The fourth dimension? Or does it not? Right? What do you mean by fill it? What do you mean by fill it? Well, okay, uh, think of the universe as a big, tall glass of water, okay? And time zero is the bottom of the glass. As you're filling the glass, you're basically adding more and more content in the vertical dimension of the glass. Until it's full, and then it's all- Until it's full. But if we, right, are right at the surface of where the water is now, right? Is the glass already full?

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's what you mean. Has time already timed out?

• 23:36Charles Liu?

  That's right. It's already ticked and we're just experiencing it. This has been explored in several science fiction stories. For example, Ted Chiang's excellent story called Story of Your Life, which became adapted into the movie Arrival that starred Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was also in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

• 23:57Charles Liu?

  That's right. That's right.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, where the the the main character, who's loosely autobiographical from his time as a prisoner of war cleaning up Dresden after the bombings. He's abducted by an alien.

• 24:12Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And put in an alien zoo.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that doesn't sound very free, except they grant him access to his entire timeline.

• 24:21Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so so so.

• 24:23Charles Liu?

  Don't don't don't spoil it for those people who haven't read it yet. It's worth reading once, but but yes, your point is exactly taken.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a movie of it too.

• 24:30Charles Liu?

  There's also a movie. That's right.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, the fun part is it changes how you even speak of things. So you don't say, well, when were you born? Well, I was always being born. I'm always dying. I'm always because that timeline is just always filled out.

• 24:47Charles Liu?

  Right. That's right. So so this is sometimes referred to as what's called block time or a block universe, where there are four dimensions of space and time, and it's already filled. It's a block that's already filled, and we just happen to be moving through it. And because of our physical limitations, we can only move it in one direction. Okay, but that is only one possible solution to the mathematical equations. Right. Andrew invoked quite a bit of advanced mathematics, but that math has yet to be borne out in experiment. And so his asking, you know, has an experiment been borne out? The answer is no experiment has yet shown that the universe is in fact a full block. So we will see.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  I'm trying to figure out what experiment would you, how would you?

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 25:36Chuck Nice?

  How would you?

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Chuck Nice?

  What experiment could you concoct that would actually show that?

• 25:42Charles Liu?

  One thing that people think might help is if we could somehow send information faster than light.

• 25:49Charles Liu?

  Through perhaps quantum entanglement or some quantum teleportation. Uh, it is at the moment absolutely technically impossible, but some people have thought, uh, imagine if we could create an experiment between here and the moon. Where somehow we could send a signal and see if we could get a different signal before the light from the earth would get to the moon. That's a really cool idea. Some people think that we could get that experiment off the ground in half a century or so. I am less optimistic, but it's a possibility.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. It would have to be through quantum entanglement.

• 26:28Charles Liu?

  It, well, that's one way to do it.

• 26:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Charles Liu?

  Uh, it, you have to get rid of what we call a local hidden variables in order to be able to do that. But that's again, a deep conversation for another time. That's a, that's a lot of Bell's theorem stuff to unpack in quantum.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  All right. All right. Okay, this is, uh, Janata. Jayanta. No. Jayanta. Jayanta. Jayanta Bannick. I like Janata better. Okay. I'm a, you gonna.

• 26:58Charles Liu?

  It's not your choice, Chuck.

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay. This is, this is Jayanta Bannick who says, Dear Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice, uh, warm greetings. My name is, uh, Jayanta Bannick from California. I'd love to get your take on quantum entanglement exhibiting instantaneous correlations even though no information can travel faster than light. Could this apparent non-locality be explained by particles being adjacent in a higher spatial dimension, appearing distant only in 3D? Or is the institution fundamentally incompatible with quantum field theory? My intuition is further supported by the recently measured speed of quantum entanglement

• 27:43Chuck Nice?

  formation of 232 atosecond. There's a new one on me. Atosecond. Dang. Atosecond. So, like, the whole deal is, happens in another dimension, which doesn't make a difference what time it takes in, if you're outside the dimension. And then back here in 3D, instantaneous, faster than light. So.

• 28:06Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 28:06Chuck Nice?

  What do you think, Chuck?

• 28:07Charles Liu?

  First of all. Did you pick that question just because we started talking about quantum? Or was that question predetermined? In which case, it might have been leading back to the dimension we had about quantum entanglement in a sort of block time kind of way. What a coincidence. That's really awesome.

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  I see what you did there.

• 28:27Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Chuck Nice?

  I see what you did there.

• 28:28Charles Liu?

  I know. Well, it's not what I did. It's what the universe has done because of its strange structure. I don't know. So to answer this very good question, what I would say is that if you invoke an additional dimension to move through literally anything, right? Then you don't have to follow the rules of physics as they currently exist. You just add, as long as you can make the math work, you just add a loop or a different travel time of that information. Okay. So your suggestion that quantum entanglement just merely means that there's actually an entanglement that's physical, but it goes through a different dimension to get from one part of the entangled pair to the other part of the entangled pair

• 29:09Charles Liu?

  is a mathematical strategy that can explain a bunch of things. The only thing is, if you're doing that, then you have to explain what that other dimension is doing, right? Where is it affecting the rest of the universe in other ways? Is it true for every entangled particle that they go through the same dimension? Does it go through a different dimension? Also, philosophically, does that mean that there is actually a hidden local thing going on? Right? The idea of quantum entanglement fundamentally is that once you have these two particles or two parts of a pair of an entangled pair separated,

• 29:52Charles Liu?

  or once they've created, it doesn't matter if there's a physical space in between them. There's nothing connecting them at that moment other than the fact that they were entangled at one point in the past. And so there is no real way.

• 30:08Charles Liu?

  That we can show that that extra dimension is necessary or even effective. The the time, the 223 atoseconds in which quantum entanglement occurs that you quoted, is a very cool experimental result. It needs to be further confirmed and things like that. But the idea is that it doesn't give us a lot of insight as to whether or not another dimension is necessary. At the moment, we probably don't want to go in that direction yet. We don't have enough information to know whether or not that's a fruitful path, so to speak, for entanglement.

• 30:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's a known unknown.

• 30:48Charles Liu?

  It's an unknown unknown, right?

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it would allow us to to accept

• 30:53Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  this faster than light communication because it's happening in another dimension.

• 30:57Charles Liu?

  Precisely.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not actually moving faster than light.

• 31:00Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 31:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. That's the thing. It's still it's still not moving faster than light. It's just, well, isn't that what subspace would be?

• 31:07Charles Liu?

  Well, subspace is only vaguely determined, decided or defined

• 31:12Chuck Nice?

  Or defined.

• 31:12Charles Liu?

  in Star Trek, right?

• 31:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:13Charles Liu?

  But yes, if you're in a in a kubiere warp drive or something like that, right? And you are in subspace as a result of being in a warp bubble, right? That could be considered a dimension or it could be considered something that is in the existing spatial dimensions that just happens to be temporarily not accessible. And yet you have subspace communications in Star Trek. So it is accessible and it's just all kinds of weirdness.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also you've thought about it and tried to come up with a solution to it.

• 31:46Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unlike Star Wars, that doesn't try to find solutions to anything.

• 31:49Charles Liu?

  Correct. Well, that that's one of the interesting things between Star Trek and Star Wars, right? I love them both, but even though Star Trek has tried to be much more scientific, right? Star Wars just gave up on being scientific. Star Wars is just a space opera. And so in that sense, it's actually still kind of fun. Although things like the Mandalorian and so forth, they still have a little bit of science thrown in there, right? The ideas in general of things like the force and whatnot in Star Wars, eh, not so much.

• 32:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we ready for another question?

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, bring it on.

• 32:43Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, this time we are Cindy Brill, Ice, Dr. Tyson Liu and Lord Nice. Cindy from Tua Latin, Oregon. My question, oh, I like this. My question is consciousness, is consciousness the result of quantum physics?

• 33:00Charles Liu?

  Ha, ha, ha, ha. What a great question.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we don't really understand consciousness and no one understands quantum physics. You just get one of those to explain the other and we're all fine.

• 33:12Charles Liu?

  Yeah. This is, this is another great question. Thank you, Cindy. And in fact, this is a question that I was asked like exactly word for word when I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting back in January. Yeah, I, I know, like I said earlier, I'm still feeling really good about that meeting. I really was. I mean, you know, the world is on fire. I mean, things, oh, it's also in ice. Things are just messed up. But when I went there.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what he did there, Chuck? World was on fire and I'm like.

• 33:41Gary O'Reilly?

  It's also in ice.

• 33:42Charles Liu?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. That was Robert Frost, everybody. I didn't invent that. But when I was there and I was just with all the wonderful young people at the American Astronomical Society meeting, presenting their research, asking questions, talking, being together, it just felt so good. It felt like the future is what matters, you know? We not, things can suck, but that's only now and, and the world is in good hands.

• 34:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Not if I can help it.

• 34:15Charles Liu?

  But anyway, yes, this was asked a student of mine. Now, Neil, you, of course, you were even a trustee, a counselor of the American Astronomical Society. So you're, you're deeply in, into the society.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As were you. I mean, you were, you were on the board as well for a while.

• 34:30Charles Liu?

  That is correct. Yes, it's the.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people know the American Astronomical Society is the organizing group. A professional astrophysicist in the country.

• 34:40Charles Liu?

  That's right. And in fact, all of North America, it's it. There are more members of it than the International Astronomical Union, uh, which was the organization that amongst other things, uh, helped you demote Pluto, Neil.

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't blame that on me.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pluto so had it coming, but the official vote was the IAU.

• 34:59Charles Liu?

  IAU, right. So the double A S is a great organization and.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how many, what, how many is it up to?

• 35:04Charles Liu?

  Uh, eight thousand members.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight thousand members and they're eight billion people in the world.

• 35:08Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that makes us.

• 35:10Charles Liu?

  One in a million.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do the math.

• 35:12Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a million.

• 35:13Charles Liu?

  That's right. So it's very cool. And, uh, so many people there, there were about three thousand people there overall, and so many of them were students, younger people. Um, and one of those folks had come up to me and said, hey, you know, um, I remember hearing you guys talking about free will. And that made me wonder, is consciousness quantum? Is it quantum consciousness? And is that why there's free will? Because there's uncertainty in the quantum realm? That we can't pin down. And so we can't determine what we're going to do at any given moment.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we interpret that uncertainty as free will.

• 35:49Charles Liu?

  Possibly, right? Yeah. But when we talked way back in the day, right, um, wasn't that long ago, but it feels like a long time ago about free will. We were actually asking ourselves, right? At what point do we say we don't know what's coming next? Right? And if we, the more and more science we've done about human behavior and physics and so forth, the more we think we know how determined the system is, and we just have reached a boundary where we don't know. It could be all the way down at the quantum level. Now, there have been ideas about quant consciousness for a long time tying to physics. In fact, Nobel laureate Roger Penrose. Had come up with a hypothesis with some of his colleagues decades ago,

• 36:33Charles Liu?

  suggesting that consciousness is sort of like the quantum spaces in between our synapses. And that is not why he got his Nobel Prize. That is not why. Clear. No, that's a different thing. He got it for black holes. That's right. But nevertheless, he, very creative guy. He did all kinds of stuff about tesolations, mathematics and things like that as well. So he gave this particular hypothesis about, about how we store information, right? The bottom line is, in my opinion, and I use that term a lot because I like putting things down to the bottom. We haven't yet defined consciousness.

• 37:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 37:08Charles Liu?

  Right? Philosophers will, and I know you love philosophers, Neil. I mean, you embrace them and you think that they're awesome. So. So I'll quote philosophers as much as I can here, that everything is conscious. It's just the different levels of consciousness that matter, right? Gary, let me ask you, when you played soccer, did you sometimes feel like the ball had a mind of its own?

• 37:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, yeah, there were days, but basically I worked, I worked out that it was mainly user error. On my behalf.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Nice, nice.

• 37:47Charles Liu?

  Mainly, just mainly. Right. So philosophers of consciousness sometimes do argue that the soccer ball does have its own consciousness. But it's at such a low level, right? Such a level that we cannot understand that the, how hard it's kicked, whether the valve was affected or not, whether the wind is blowing, whether there's a spin, you know, things like that. That fully explains how it moves. And that its own free will or its own consciousness has no effect.

• 38:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, then what good is it?

• 38:19Charles Liu?

  The soccer ball?

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. What good is it to have consciousness if it's of no, of no effect? Zero agency and zero influence on outcomes. The whole idea of consciousness is that you somehow can influence an outcome. Other than that, what good is it really?

• 38:40Charles Liu?

  Well. I don't know. That's a really great point. Let's let if if you have this kind of consciousness, if even exists, right? Think uh we humans, I don't know, what what is something that we have that has no that serves no purpose? And yet we have it, and therefore it is part of who we are.

• 38:59Chuck Nice?

  An appendix.

• 39:00Charles Liu?

  Ah, there you go. There you go. Um, the fact that you have an appendix, does that make you different? From when you have your appendix removed because it got infected? Are you the same as you were before?

• 39:13Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 39:14Charles Liu?

  And if you aren't, what is it about removing that particular part of you? Is it that part's consciousness? That part's quantum effects, that part's physical effects that make you a different person?

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  Now, do I have insurance or not? Because I live in America.

• 39:34Charles Liu?

  Uh, you know? That that is.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's a good point. You can you can have. There is obsolescence that is a part of us.

• 39:43Charles Liu?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, and I'm sure it served a purpose at some point, and now it doesn't.

• 39:48Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  You know, so.

• 39:49Charles Liu?

  Consider it on an even deeper level, right? Surgery isn't necessary. Our uh skin cells completely cycle through every month or so. Right? Everything that used to be the dermis epidermis and then it flakes off.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they slough off and.

• 40:03Charles Liu?

  It is completely true that none of us here at this meeting um have the same skin cells that we did.

• 40:10Chuck Nice?

  A month ago.

• 40:11Charles Liu?

  Maybe not even, yeah, might be not even same muscle cells. We have a lot of the same bone cells, a lot of the same brain cells, but a lot of them are gone now. Right? But our consciousness continues. And in fact, our consciousness continues to grow because we continue to experience things, you and I. I think my consciousness is enriched and improved because I'm hanging out with you guys today. Right? So how does?

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Give it time, give it time.

• 40:37Charles Liu?

  How does our consciousness continue? Even though our physical characteristics have discontinued?

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, the best evidence that nobody understands consciousness is how many books are written on the subject?

• 40:49Charles Liu?

  That's true for quantum physics.

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Consciousness explains means no one really understands it.

• 40:55Charles Liu?

  But it's worth thinking about, isn't it?

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Definitely.

• 40:57Charles Liu?

  Yeah, no. So, so, so this is.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Context, that's on the consciousness shelf of the library in the bookstore. There's no end of consciousness books, but you go to the gravity section, there's like two books.

• 41:08Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but one of them is big. It's, it's, it's, uh.

• 41:13Charles Liu?

  Thorin Weyman Wheeler, right?

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another book.

• 41:16Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. All right.

• 41:17Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but I'm just saying, we're not continuing to rewrite a book on gravity. Because gravity is understood. So don't confuse the existence of a book that says something is explained. As a statement of the state of the science behind it.

• 41:31Charles Liu?

  I think that's a very good point. Uh, and so this question that Cindy has about quantum consciousness, right? Is, is that point? Can the quantum properties? That are inherent in our brains or in our overall physical systems? Allow us to hold together? Something what we're calling consciousness? That persists? Despite our physical changes being so radical?

• 41:58Chuck Nice?

  I hope so. That's all I can say is because that, that is the greatest. Possibility that our consciousness will extend beyond? Our so-called life. You know, our physical life.

• 42:11Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 42:11Chuck Nice?

  That is the greatest case to make that we could in some way go on. Especially when you think about the fact that, well, the question before that. When we talk about entanglement and different dimensions? That maybe we could actually exist? On a higher plane of being in another dimension? Because of quantum consciousness? And the only way we can find out, people, is go ahead and die.

• 42:35Charles Liu?

  No.

• 42:39Charles Liu?

  Thanks. Thanks. That's great advice there. Oh, marvelous.

• 42:43Gary O'Reilly?

  I love the fact you end it with a laugh.

• 42:48Charles Liu?

  Actually, that's the point, right? Right now, research in things like consciousness and quantum awareness and things like that are dependent on the fact that we don't want people to die as a result of that.

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Charles Liu?

  And people have tried to make these experiments, more than a hundred years ago, for example. There were some experiments about people who were about to die and they were willing to be subjects of an experiment that were carefully weighed. Neil, you know this better than I do.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it started out with, you know, after the X-rays were invented, so let's X-ray dying people, see if there's a soul that comes out. And, you know, in retrospect, it's like, what were you doing? But at the time, that's a completely sensible experiment.

• 43:27Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Religion makes a prediction and now you have a means of probing what's inside the body. If the soul is inside the body, maybe the X-rays will find it. Nothing wrong with that as an attempt to gather evidence for those whose faith is challenged.

• 43:42Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let me ask you this then.

• 43:44Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay. This is a philosophical question. Do you think that perhaps we do a disservice by looking for something like that and after, an afterness, I will call it, and afterwards, I will call it, because it robs us of the urgency and importance of being here now? So here's the deal. If I understand the urgency and importance of being here now, and that is always at top of mind and at the forefront of my consciousness, then it allows me to live to the fullest.

• 44:23Chuck Nice?

  Whereas if I retreat to this sense of there's going to be something after, I'm waiting for the after, then I am robbing myself of the fullness of life in the here and now.

• 44:40Charles Liu?

  Whoa. Well.

• 44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Check the president.

• 44:45Charles Liu?

  I'll just say one thing about that and I'd love to hear everybody else's opinions on this, but here's my take on that, Chuck. Go ahead. Your idea of that sort of thing, talking about afterlife and things like that, has been the basis of just about every apocalyptic cult or evangelical religion, you know, where you are going to be saved or that you are heading on to be to better things.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Each one of them requires an end of the world scenario for you to then.

• 45:13Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your lifetime.

• 45:15Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The world might end in a thousand years, you're not getting anybody in that cult.

• 45:20Charles Liu?

  Something like that, right? So the idea for that one is that if current life is worth living, if you feel good about your life right now, then looking for an afterlife is kind of like a bummer. But if current life sucks, in your personal opinion, maybe you want to be delivered somewhere else. Right? This has become in so many different religions. I'm not actually the religion expert in my family. My eldest daughter actually studied religion in school. But the bottom line, oh, again, the bottom line thing there for there is that this idea of the afterlife has been used by organized religions.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Co-opted, I would say.

• 46:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah, to do anything, right? The caste system that is part of some religions. Well, you may be really bad right now, but that's okay. You do the thing that we ask you to do and maybe you'll be born again as a higher caste individual. You know, or you that so that's a way to sort of make people not worry about their current lives. Mm hmm. But it can bring hope if your life currently sucks, but you're like, you know, if I keep working, I'll do better and life will become better. But you're not looking at the present as much as you're looking at the long game.

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And reincarnation in that flavor also gets you the other way.

• 46:45Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you misbehave, you'll come back as something maybe not even human.

• 46:49Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you come back as a soccer ball getting kicked around by Gary and his friends.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that little bit of consciousness that's in the ball.

• 46:58Chuck Nice?

  Right. I'm really effed up.

• 47:03Charles Liu?

  It's a tough call, right?

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Charles Liu?

  So it's a great, it's a great question in the end. We know that we human consciousness, we're no longer to able to communicate our consciousness once we have expired.

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except if you want to upload it into soft software.

• 47:17Charles Liu?

  Right. We can't tell people if we're still alive or not, but there's been some really neat fiction these days, right? Where people have uploaded themselves into some sort of an AI system or.

• 47:28Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I think there's a, there's a great show. I think it's called Altered Carbon, if anybody wants to check it out.

• 47:33Charles Liu?

  Hmm.

• 47:34Chuck Nice?

  Uh, where the idea of your consciousness can be downloaded into a little disk. And then the corporeal body is called the skin. It's just skins and you can put it in whatever skins you would like to put it in. And yeah, and so you could go from being, you know, a really attractive woman to a fat stubby guy to, it doesn't make a difference because it's just your consciousness that gets loaded into another body, including bodies that can be especially made just to hold your consciousness.

• 48:10Charles Liu?

  Wow, wow.

• 48:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Alter Carbon.

• 48:12Charles Liu?

  The, the pro altered carbon. Now, the problem with that, and just to wrap up quantum consciousness on this idea, okay? Is that if we are thinking that consciousness is quantum in nature, we can't digitize it. Because digitizing would mean that you could get every single bit of information correct and properly reproduced.

• 48:32Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 48:32Charles Liu?

  But if you're in a quantum system, right? You, the, you.

• 48:36Chuck Nice?

  You only have possibilities.

• 48:37Charles Liu?

  Right. Your qubits.

• 48:39Chuck Nice?

  You're right.

• 48:39Charles Liu?

  Settle.

• 48:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:40Charles Liu?

  Only when they are read.

• 48:42Chuck Nice?

  And then they're destroyed.

• 48:44Charles Liu?

  That's right. So you can never actually get a perfect copy of your brain. You will only get an imperfect copy every time you try to retrieve that information. So in the altered carbon situation, every time you're put into a new body, you could be fundamentally different in your consciousness.

• 49:01Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. Damn, you just ruined their whole show.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Charles, you just ruined everything.

• 49:07Charles Liu?

  Don't tell them. Don't tell them.

• 49:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Charles, to that, to that point.

• 49:10Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Gary O'Reilly?

  If you, if you were to upload, download whichever load of your consciousness. All you will be doing is taking a snapshot of your consciousness at that moment.

• 49:20Charles Liu?

  Hundred percent.

• 49:20Gary O'Reilly?

  You keep, you keep existing, your consciousness, as we've just discussed, grows. Even though you, you will lose cells.

• 49:27Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 49:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Consciousness is there and continues to grow. So you'll only have a snapshot if you're able to capture it.

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point, good point. What's wrong with the snapshot? Because every neurosynaptic connection with the bio, the, the, the, the chemistry, the electromagnetic fields. If I get a snapshot of that and put that in a jar and then re-engage it later.

• 49:50Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't that an exact copy of where I am the moment that copy was taken? Like Apple time machine.

• 49:58Charles Liu?

  It is an exact, like Apple time machine. It is an exact copy as well as it can be digitized. But then, once you start running it, if you're a quantum consciousness, then all the decisions start changing again. Right? So everything is different the moment you turn it back on.

• 50:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or, no, no, no, I, okay, I think you missed something there.

• 50:21Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So what I said is not even possible. That's the point.

• 50:25Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you cannot know the state of every particle down to the last particle that's running your brain. Because quantum physics prevents that knowledge.

• 50:35Charles Liu?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So to say I have an exact copy of it cannot be a real statement.

• 50:40Charles Liu?

  Excellent way to put it. Excellent.

• 50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that front ends what you just said about trying to recover what your thoughts were.

• 50:47Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay. Interesting. Wow. God. That put a kibosh on all uploading consciousness.

• 50:55Charles Liu?

  Absolutely. Well, yes. And if you're talking about like fictional characters which are digital, like the holographic doctor in the Star Trek Enterprise.

• 51:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 51:05Charles Liu?

  Um, what you're doing is that you're assuming that.

• 51:10Charles Liu?

  Consciousness can be digitized, at least to a facsimile, to where a starting point can be produced that is reproducible, right? In other words, every time you turn on the doctor, it's please state the nature of the medical emergency, right? And if you can get to that point, and then the future time evolution is also digital, right, and not quantum, then maybe you can get some semblance of consciousness. But if it's quantum, no chance.

• 51:40Chuck Nice?

  No chance. Now, how about this? Suppose I'm able, suppose I'm able to run subroutines in a program that is everything about me, every single thing. So I have the main program, which is Chuck, and then I have, like, just, almost, it can't be infinite, but like...

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one, you need a whole subroutine that has you put on lip balm 20 times a day.

• 52:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 52:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a lip balm subroutine.

• 52:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. That's good, you've reminded him now.

• 52:08Chuck Nice?

  So the subroutine would be called Chuck Chuck. And then the, then the sub-subroutine would be Chuck Chuck Chuck. Right, exactly. Yeah, so, so there's this kind of replication of everything that I am, that I am, all the way down, turtles all the way down, okay?

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just a map, that's not consciousness.

• 52:25Chuck Nice?

  And that's my point. What, what? But, everything about that is me. And when you run that program, you're talking to me. And then let's put in AI, an AI element, we'll call it, that allows that same program to grow and flourish mentally, the same way I would. So be able to take in information, process it the way Chuck would, and do every, so it's me on every single level, level.

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're describing Chuck.

• 52:55Chuck Nice?

  But, but digitized.

• 52:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck, what you're describing is the last chapter, if memory serves, of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, written by Douglas Hofstadter.

• 53:05Chuck Nice?

  It's called what? God bless you.

• 53:11Chuck Nice?

  What's it called?

• 53:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gödel, Gödel, Escher, Bach.

• 53:15Chuck Nice?

  Gödel, Escher, Bach, okay.

• 53:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gödel is a philosopher, mathematician, who did some important contributions in the early 20th century.

• 53:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 53:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, point is, it's a philosopher wrote the book, and it's a, it's quite the meandering of ideas inspired by these brilliant three...

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People in our history, little Asher and Mike. Point is, the last chapter he reserves, if that's the book I'm remembering, it might have been one of his other books. I think it's in that book where he has a conversation with Einstein's brain.

• 53:47Charles Liu?

  Uh huh.

• 53:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you take Einstein's brain, like right when he dies, and then you map everything that's there. Okay. And then it has an auditory capacity. So you ask it a question. And you watch the sound waves trigger neuro synaptic connections. And then it goes through and then it triggers a connection back because it knows it's a question. And then Einstein brain speaks back to you. And he made a very convincing account of how and why that quitter should work, at least in principle. But no mention of quantum uncertainty was given.

• 54:24Charles Liu?

  Right. So the, the principle is good. I mean, we humans don't interact with one another on the quantum level. So it, it's certainly possible that we could get to a point where we humans could not tell the difference between Chuck and Chuck two, right? Uh, but that doesn't mean that they're the same, right?

• 54:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  True.

• 54:43Charles Liu?

  And, and this is, you know, uh, we don't even have to go, go to, you know, 20th century, uh, nonfiction to think about this. On Broadway, there is actually a, a pretty acclaimed play recently. It was called Marjorie Prime, if you guys are familiar with that, where a character is speaking to a deceased spouse, uh, via artificial intelligence. It's, it's really.

• 55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very Black Mirror.

• 55:08Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but, but it wasn't dark or anything. It was just a kind of a, a, a, a plot device to have someone try to think about what does it mean to be alive? Or is it better to have yourself alive in some way? Uh, even if you actually aren't alive, is it worth it? Or is it better that you just not, and you know, things like that?

• 55:29Chuck Nice?

  It's not worth it to me, but it may be worth it to like, you know, maybe my children who could benefit from my life experience, even though I'm not there. And my spouse who could be comforted by the fact that, you know, I know them better than anybody else. And so they can talk to me the way they can't talk to anyone else. There are benefits to that. They're just not benefits to me. I would love to have that.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I met your kids. They ain't coming to you for advice.

• 55:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 55:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were done with you years ago.

• 56:00Chuck Nice?

  Brutal. Oh, oh, cold.

• 56:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me I'm wrong.

• 56:03Chuck Nice?

  Chuck, I was gonna say that would hurt if it weren't true.

• 56:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 56:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially that daughter of yours, Chuck.

• 56:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, that's so true. Yeah. I go to Charlie for advice.

• 56:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Let's get to the next question. We luxuriated on that one.

• 56:22Chuck Nice?

  We did. We took a bath in that one.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 56:26Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so, uh, let's have a little run of the jump at this particular contributor's name. Amagerrakana. Yes. Um, Dr. Lou Amerikana. Amagerrakana. Sorry if I apologize if I've mispronounced that.

• 56:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Gary, I thought you were better than that.

• 56:44Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't speak Danish very well.

• 56:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 56:46Chuck Nice?

  Danish? Oh, okay.

• 56:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, so, Dr. Lou Tyson and, oh, Chuck, you'll love this, Just Smart Enough, Lord Nice. Hello from Copenhagen.

• 56:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smart enough. Wait, wait, wait. Chuck, that's the name of your comedy special.

• 56:58Chuck Nice?

  That is the comedy special, which, by the way, you can watch on the YouTube.

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me say that. You can watch on the StarTalk YouTube.

• 57:06Chuck Nice?

  Yes, you can.

• 57:07Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, here we go. We've recently seen people that believe there are penguins in Greenland.

• 57:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Gary O'Reilly?

  What are other, please, hold that thought. What, what are other glary examples of scientific ignorance you have witnessed in the realm of public opinion which make your collective jaws, jaws drop? Please, and he says tuk, which is, I know, thank you in Danish.

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got, we'll just go round robin. I got one. You ready?

• 57:32Chuck Nice?

  Well.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only penguins in the Arctic, bears in the Antarctic.

• 57:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 57:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The very word Arctic means bear, so Antarctic should tell you there are no bears there.

• 57:44Chuck Nice?

  That's true. That's true. Right.

• 57:46Charles Liu?

  All right, well, well, I would say, uh, because, uh, you said tuk, I would say velkommen. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I would, that's a great question. And there are a lot of misconceptions, but the one that I find probably the most saddening for me is the idea that vaccines are dangerous. That, that one is, is the problem that bothers me a lot because there's probably no, uh, science that has been better tested. And when mistakes have been made, they have been corrected faster. Uh, than uh, good vaccine science and the attempt of a lot of people to prey on the fears

• 58:28Charles Liu?

  and the insecurities of parents or uh, just people in general. That bothers me a lot. I think that's the thing that jaw drops my jaw the most and.

• 58:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Charles, that's deep. You know, I'm just gonna say flat earth, but after that.

• 58:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 58:43Charles Liu?

  Flat earth ain't great either. Okay, we'll say that.

• 58:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flat earth's never killed anybody, I think is the thing.

• 58:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, I don't think so. Killed one guy.

• 58:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Killed a guy who built his own rocket.

• 58:52Chuck Nice?

  Built his rocket to go up supposedly to prove that the earth was flat.

• 58:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but he didn't get the Darwin Award. You know why?

• 58:58Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 58:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You already had kids.

• 59:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 59:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Darwin Award, you can't have kids.

• 59:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, can't have kids because the whole idea is that.

• 59:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole idea is, you know, he removed from the.

• 59:07Charles Liu?

  Well, I, I don't, I don't want to, you know, disparage anybody who falls for the pseudoscience, right? I mean, these are, these are not necessarily dumb people. These are not necessarily unkind people.

• 59:19Chuck Nice?

  It's an emotional decision that is made in ignorance. And I say, I use the word ignorant there for in, in its most technical sense. And people think that they are protecting a child, their child. But their ignorance unfortunately puts the child in peril. Because many, many needless deaths happen because people do not vaccinate their children. And we have probably the most tragic account of that was in Samoa. When um, RFK Junior, uh, God only knows how he became in charge of our country's health. He says he did not encourage anyone to uh, steer away from vaccines.

• 1:00:03Chuck Nice?

  But the, the truth is, he went there, he preached against it. People stopped vaccinating. They had a measles outbreak and many children died. So it's just that simple.

• 1:00:15Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it's, it's true. We don't remember anymore. How you would come back to school after summer vacation? And look around and see who amongst your friends from last year aren't there anymore? Because they died of polio during the summer. Right, or because because they had some sort of childhood disease. We don't remember that. And so it's easy for us to say, yeah, it's easy for us to think it's all fake. But it absolutely is not. And the reason that we are so luxuriously comfortable in our public health these days, as bad as, you know, some healthcare issues are, we don't get those kinds of diseases anymore is because of the success of the scientific vaccinations.

• 1:00:54Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:55Charles Liu?

  That we have been fortunate enough to enjoy.

• 1:00:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the victim of its own success.

• 1:00:58Chuck Nice?

  It's a victim of its own.

• 1:00:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the same thing as in the in the simplest example. Why are you using dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff.

• 1:01:08Chuck Nice?

  Right. That that there you go. They know it's true.

• 1:01:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop using the dandruff shampoo.

• 1:01:13Chuck Nice?

  And you will, and you will have dandruff. Yep, it's that simple.

• 1:01:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another thing, we're we're recording this in January 2026. It's still football season. And I will highlight for people on the East Coast, because the sun sets early, so it gets dark around five or six o'clock. When you are watching a football game on the West Coast, and the sun is still up. This is evident, Earth is round.

• 1:01:42Chuck Nice?

  Round.

• 1:01:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I don't know how else. That's the simplest evidence I can give you.

• 1:01:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate. Um, I.

• 1:01:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun has not yet set in the West.

• 1:01:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:01:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the people three time zones away from you.

• 1:01:59Chuck Nice?

  It's, you know, windmills are are a hoax.

• 1:02:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Right. Well, look, I, to me, you know, and this is such a good question. And of course, it comes not from the United States. So it's not at all anything about our country or any individual society or country. But when there is.

• 1:02:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The origin of the question, the person who asked the question.

• 1:02:22Charles Liu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the question. Thank you. We have to remember that. Everybody is subject to ignorance. There are things that each one of us does not know. It may be different depending on where we are. So instead of like forgetting about it and just being angry about it, we got to reach out and continue to convince folks and help them understand that whatever you think you may know, please be sure to check it with as many people as possible and as many different reliable sources as you can, so that you can really get it done, right?

• 1:02:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All you need to do is look at a 20-minute YouTube video, and then you become the expert.

• 1:03:03Charles Liu?

  Right. Thanks, Neil.

• 1:03:04Chuck Nice?

  Especially if that video is hosted by Joe Rogan.

• 1:03:07Charles Liu?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:03:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're missing there, Charles, I think, is, you know, we're all educators here. And the word ignorance, as Chuck accurately described, in its formal definition, it just means you don't know something.

• 1:03:23Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 1:03:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we thrive in the space of where others are ignorant because we teach them. That is what we do as educators. The problem is not when people are ignorant of a truth. The problem is when they are ignorant of a truth and don't know they're ignorant of the truth and assert that they know what they're talking about. Then it's a battle. It's not just a student in your class eager to learn what is true from an expert. There's some other construct in society where people are rejecting the advice of experts on the basis of what someone who's not an expert told them, or like I said, or they did their own research spending 20 minutes on YouTube.

• 1:04:08Charles Liu?

  So what we need to do is just remind ourselves that too, right? Our greatest...

• 1:04:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tactically, it's two different things.

• 1:04:17Charles Liu?

  Right. As scientists, our greatest power is to be able to say, "I don't know", and not feel bad about ourselves about it. Right. And what we want to do is to help other people do that.

• 1:04:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientists, it was the first branch of human inquiry where "I don't know" became a fundamental part of discovery.

• 1:04:37Chuck Nice?

  And something good.

• 1:04:40Chuck Nice?

  It's something good. And you know what? That's I hate to I don't hate to say this. I'm happy to say that it's the number one thing that I have learned from scientists and hanging out with scientists for all these years now is one, I celebrate my own ignorance. I think it's a great thing because when I don't know something, guess what I do?

• 1:05:10Chuck Nice?

  It's that simple. And so there's no shame in not knowing. And it's a wonderful thing. You're just ever growing. Not knowing is ever growing. That's what I that's the way I look at it.

• 1:05:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice little phrase. Oh.

• 1:05:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, catchy.

• 1:05:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not knowing plus curiosity is ever growing.

• 1:05:26Chuck Nice?

  Yes, yes, exactly. Right. Yeah, you can't just stop with the not knowing.

• 1:05:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary, what do you have on that list?

• 1:05:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, not much, really. I think it's.

• 1:05:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the UK, was there anything specific when you were growing up that was particularly anti-science or science ignorant?

• 1:05:43Gary O'Reilly?

  I remember, you know, get vaccinated, get there, do this, do that. My father, my father was technician in the physics lab at East London Polytechnic, which is now.

• 1:05:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never told us that.

• 1:05:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:05:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're the son, the soccer player. Okay.

• 1:05:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. The fruit fell off the tree and rolled a long way.

• 1:06:03Chuck Nice?

  The only professional footballer in the UK whose father is like such a disappointment.

• 1:06:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where did we go wrong?

• 1:06:18Chuck Nice?

  Our son, that professional footballer.

• 1:06:21Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd walk in the room.

• 1:06:22Chuck Nice?

  Life that everybody wants to live.

• 1:06:25Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd walk in the room and you'd just see his head go.

• 1:06:29Chuck Nice?

  Hilarious, hilarious.

• 1:06:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, I think we've got time for one last question if we do it quick.

• 1:06:34Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Margot Lane, O Sages on the Cosmic Mountain. As I watch the monks for peace walk from Texas to DC, I'm struck by the constancy of their energy, how they all seem like one. On some molecular level, are we all one being?

• 1:06:49Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 1:06:50Chuck Nice?

  Deep into swimming pool, guys.

• 1:06:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've asked starter there, but it's not the answer, but it's a starter information. I, we walked out of Africa into Europe, Asia, across the Bering Strait, North America into South America. We walked that. Hmm. So, human beings and walking is something we genetically know how to do. I just want to put that on the table right now.

• 1:07:17Charles Liu?

  So, if they're constantly moving and so forth, I don't know that they're one single organism, but what they are is they're communicating really well. They're able to listen to each other or see each other and they can synchronize their steps and their pace and their speed and things like that. So, in a sense, although we are many, uh, or though they are many, they are able to put themselves together and move as one.

• 1:07:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And clearly, being a monk is not the prerequisite for that, because soldiers do that as well, who are marching somewhere to do harm. Okay, and so it, that's, it's a human thing, not so much that they are monks, uh, in the interest of peace. Chuck.

• 1:07:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay. That is why we have the Department of War and no D E I.

• 1:08:08Charles Liu?

  Well, I think the monks have something to say about that.

• 1:08:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:11Charles Liu?

  There you go. I love it.

• 1:08:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but, but Chuck, you, you did ayahuasca at one point.

• 1:08:17Chuck Nice?

  I did.

• 1:08:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Find yourself resonating spiritually with others on the same wavelength kind of thing?

• 1:08:23Chuck Nice?

  I know we don't have a lot of time, so I'm gonna make this quick. Um, the oneness you feel is not just with person kind. You actually feel connected to like, everyone who's in the Malacca with you, which is the sacred place where the rituals are. But you also feel like all the other people out there, like everywhere, all at once. And then, I can't explain this, you feel a oneness with all that is the universe itself.

• 1:08:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 1:08:55Chuck Nice?

  And this is all happening inside of your head, but outside of your being, all at once.

• 1:09:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So monks are trained, I mean, I don't know if this is the meditative branch of monks, but. Presumably Chuck, one might be able to reach that state of consciousness without drugs.

• 1:09:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, without a doubt.

• 1:09:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just and so and you feel that connectivity just as the questioner was inquiring.

• 1:09:21Chuck Nice?

  You know, I don't have time for that. So I went to a place called Rhythmia and in Costa Rica. And I spent a week.

• 1:09:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have time to learn any.

• 1:09:30Chuck Nice?

  I don't have time to learn it and they did it for me and it was amazing.

• 1:09:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus we all like choruses when they sing together and you know, we we highly value coordinated efforts. Uh, in our culture, in our society and and Charles, you sang in it. You sang solo or chorus?

• 1:09:49Charles Liu?

  Uh, everything and whether it was solo and you're connecting with an audience or whether it was in a choir. When you're with a whole bunch of like minded people trying to produce one single piece of music. It was a connection that really transcends the individual.

• 1:10:04Chuck Nice?

  It does.

• 1:10:05Charles Liu?

  There was no, there was no need for any kind of external, you know, drugs or whatever. No, nor years of training. It was just listening, watching, following. And everybody together somehow trying to get something more than themselves.

• 1:10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming of a common mind.

• 1:10:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah. And if the monks were able to achieve.

• 1:10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mind, body, spirit.

• 1:10:23Charles Liu?

  Yeah. That's exactly what we're doing.

• 1:10:25Chuck Nice?

  I would love to see these monks singing on ayahuasca.

• 1:10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that note.

• 1:10:35Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's all the time we have. So, so Charles Liu, you've got, you've got the quantum physics handy.

• 1:10:50Charles Liu?

  This thing, the handy quantum physics answer book.

• 1:10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not in my office right now, but I have two copies on my shelf, just so you know.

• 1:10:55Charles Liu?

  That's very sweet.

• 1:10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes you just a little wealthier because I bought an extra copy.

• 1:10:59Charles Liu?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There that is. No, it's quite the complete, uh, cause there's so many dangling. Bits that people they get they hear bits and pieces of quantum. They don't put it all together. And that book does that.

• 1:11:11Chuck Nice?

  In in the year or so since that book came out, there's been all kinds of new stuff. So there's gonna have to be another edition soon because it just keeps growing.

• 1:11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, we posted your your comedy special, Just Smart Enough.

• 1:11:25Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 1:11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was New Year's Eve Eve, I think we posted it.

• 1:11:28Chuck Nice?

  That is correct.

• 1:11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our main channel, wasn't it?

• 1:11:30Chuck Nice?

  That's correct.

• 1:11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is a it dropped then. Check it out. It's all there and it's free.

• 1:11:36Chuck Nice?

  Yep. Go watch it. Apparently it's been well received. The people are loving it and I'm very, very happy about that. It's very, it's very satisfying to see the StarTalk audience supporting the show that much. It's very cool.

• 1:11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know the most evil thing someone said in the comments?

• 1:11:51Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 1:11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They said, you know, I used to come to StarTalk to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson, but now I do it to hear Chuck.

• 1:12:02Chuck Nice?

  That was my that was my brother who wrote that.

• 1:12:08Chuck Nice?

  Tony, Tony, I owe you $20. It's coming soon.

• 1:12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary.

• 1:12:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, Neil.

• 1:12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got to get a gig for for announcing for the World Cup and we'll all come listen.

• 1:12:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's see what I can do. Just before we go, I'd like to say thank you to all our Patreon group that supplied questions here today. There were so many and we just only have time for so many, but.

• 1:12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we juried occasionally on one.

• 1:12:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, there were 35 pages of questions. So thank you. Thank you so much to the good guys at Patreon.

• 1:12:39Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 1:12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's been yet another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. This one was a grab bag, a good one, too, with our geek in chief, Charles Liu. Guys, always good to have you here.

• 1:12:52Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:12:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you, Neil.

• 1:12:54Chuck Nice?

  What a joy. Thank you.

• 1:12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.