Cosmic Queries – Grabby Aliens with Charles Liu

What would happen if the speed of light were infinite? Neil deGrasse Tyson, joined by co-hosts Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly, and astrophysicist Charles Liu, answers questions about quantum entanglement, qubits, higher dimensions, grabby aliens, and more!

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you jumped into the Quantum Soup on this one. We did. Add some flavor to it. Add some flavor. And I've learned a little more. You know, we had our geek in chief with us.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We always learn something. We got the geek in chief.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  I learned that it's delicious with crackers.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on special edition.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And it being special edition means we got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, in the house. Hey, S in the house. In the house. Former soccer pro. Love your Wiki page with your sexy legs. You're looking too much. Stop it.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Chuck, nice. Always, man.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, guys?

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right. So we brought in our geek in chief for this.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  A returning hero.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A return... Charles Lu. Charles, welcome back.

• 1:05Charles Liu?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got your own podcast.

• 1:08Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Luniverse.

• 1:09Charles Liu?

  The Luniverse.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's clever. That's clever.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  Is that a play on Luna as in moon too? I mean...

• 1:15Charles Liu?

  I can't take credit for it. I... No, no, no. I'm sitting at the table for dinner, right? And we're like, well, what do we call this podcast? And our youngest kid says, "The Luniverse, of course." And I was like, "What?" And that's it.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  No, no, the same kid.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so compared to your kid...

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  Wait, and then Chuck went like this. "It's a dumb idea." And then he named it The Luniverse.

• 1:37Charles Liu?

  I said, "No such thing." I just sort of said, "Wow."

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I happen to know your wife is really smart, so it sounds like your kids are even smarter than both of you at this point.

• 1:44Charles Liu?

  I am so pleased that my wife and my children are all way smarter than I am.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51Charles Liu?

  And it is a great privilege to be...

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what Michael Dell said?

• 1:54Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The day you wake up and you're the smartest person in the room?

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Change rooms.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  Very, very better.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, before you introduce the show, Chuck, what are you wearing?

• 2:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Today, I am mostly wearing-

• 2:07Chuck Nice?

  I feel like I'm on the worst red carpet ever, right now. What are you wearing?

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your hammer's in your groin a half a second ago. Could you pull your smartphone out of your groin?

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  That's not my smartphone, Neil.

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  So, we were playing a little baseball, well, softball, earlier today. And I don't believe in showering. I do that once a week, and that's it, baby.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only if necessary.

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  And that's only if necessary. And so, you know, you guys changed, and so I'm like-

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did not change.

• 2:39Chuck Nice?

  I'm not changing.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We look clean.

• 2:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you look clean. And, you know-

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still got your leg braces on?

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  Those aren't braces. Those are, what do you call them? Augmentations that were placed in me by DARPA. Yes, it's the-

• 2:55Gary O'Reilly?

  You are now a superior augmented human being.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  I am, that's right.

• 2:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Good, amazing.

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  Don't ask me to jump up and get nothing off the roof, because I can do it.

• 3:03Gary O'Reilly?

  That explains why you were tearing around the bases so fast. It's amazing.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And DARPA, Defense Advanced Projects Research-

• 3:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Agency?

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Advanced Defense-

• 3:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Authority?

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is a branch of the military-

• 3:17Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That people might not know. Where there's a subset of budget that goes to very high-risk projects that probably won't work, but if they do work, they'll be amazing.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And nothing is higher risk than Chuck Nice.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, they expect a high percentage of the proposals to actually-

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  To fail.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not work to fail.

• 3:37Chuck Nice?

  And they don't care. Because the idea is, the one that works-

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  Is going to make us badass.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  DARPA.

• 3:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, what you put together for that?

• 3:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Alrighty, so, these are questions from our Patreon listeners, and as you know, they have a curiosity that is almost endless.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boundless, yes.

• 3:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So, let's kick it off.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this Cosmic Queries?

• 3:57Gary O'Reilly?

  For sure, it's a Cosmic Queries. Yeah, it's a grab bag. And we had 42 pages of questions.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Well, we better shut up and get to it.

• 4:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, but they're not all on there, but thank you so much for your curiosities. Right, let's start with Danielle's. Hello, Neil, Dr. Lou, Gary, and, of course, Lord Nice. Could quantum particles possibly be connected in a higher dimensional space and only appear to be separate particles in three dimensions?

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd love that!

• 4:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Would a connection like that affect quantum entanglement? Over to you, gentlemen.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you were gonna take that.

• 4:32Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah. I'll see how well you do.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna defer to Charles, but I'm gonna introduce this.

• 4:38Charles Liu?

  Ooh, tee Charles up.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we see particles popping in and out of existence and tunneling through space and time. And we're trying to make sense of it. But I don't see why a higher dimension wouldn't help that out. For example, suppose we all lived in just a plane, a flat, with 2D people, okay?

• 4:57Charles Liu?

  Ah, you know, some of my friends I see.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have no depth.

• 5:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah, no depth at all.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we're here, and then like a dot shows up, and we all gather around the dot. And then the dot sort of becomes a circle. And it slowly grows. And we get our top scientists to analyze this. Where did this come from? What is it? What's happening? And then it shrinks back to a dot and then disappears. We would invent a whole quantum physics to try to understand this. When all it is, is somebody passing a sphere through the two-dimensional plane in which we live. Because the first contact is the point, and then there's a circle. As you go through, it maximizes at the diameter, comes back out. But here we are, touching, we're thinking there's something magical. And from three dimensions, it's completely simple.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Charles, this question sounds like, let's up it, let's up the game. Can we explain all this mystical, magical, quantum spookiness? By just, it's ordinary people in four dimensions playing marbles?

• 6:03Charles Liu?

  Not only can we do it, some people have already tried. It's called string theory. The idea is that every particle we see in three or four dimensions here might actually have many more dimensions attached to them. And interactions on those other dimensions, like the sphere with that particle, but imagine two spheres interacting, not on our two-dimensional world. And bingo, you have additional weird things happening. So, you, Daniel, are right on the cusp of exactly what physicists have been trying to figure out for decades. Is there perhaps another explanation? Where we can say, the reason this thing is acting so weird is because there's connection elsewhere? Now, the problem is...

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you test for that?

• 6:47Charles Liu?

  Right. We can't have any good experiments.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  Because we can't access those dimensions.

• 6:52Charles Liu?

  And there are so many...

• 6:54Chuck Nice?

  And we never will, thinking that way, Chuck.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be such a downer.

• 7:00Charles Liu?

  There are so many different ways to think about it, that you can have essentially an infinite number of solutions to a finite number of questions that we see or phenomena that we observe here on the world. So we don't want that. So the more a theory is simple, and the less it requires additional pieces attached to it to explain observed phenomena, the more likely it is to be something that we can test and confirm. So that's what's going on here.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And history says the more likely it is to be right.

• 7:29Charles Liu?

  Generally speaking, that's right. I mean, the famous term Occam's razor, right? Just the philosophical.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you exactly what he said. He said, "Multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity."

• 7:42Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the actual quote from Occam. And that we convert that to just his Occam's razor.

• 7:48Charles Liu?

  Right. The simpler idea is more likely to be true than the more complicated idea. That's only a philosophical idea, though. It's not exactly confirmed in every instance.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nature doesn't have to obey you in that regard.

• 7:59Charles Liu?

  So in this instance, that's right. It could well be that that helps to explain quantum entanglement. But entanglement is yet another phenomenon, which is a little bit odd. And we're still working on that. I know right now it's a hot topic and a lot of people talking about it.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got top people working on it.

• 8:13Charles Liu?

  But there are still many, many questions about it. So we could relate it to entanglement, but it's not yet there enough for us to be able to answer that question, yes or no.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or it could be like when Einstein did general relativity, where he was solving some other problem, and bada bing, the mysteries of Mercury's orbit were solved overnight. Mercury's orbit was not behaving the way Newton would have it go. And all of a sudden, Einstein's general theory of relativity explained it without even trying. And so it became a side benefit of it. And one thing about your negativity, okay?

• 8:48Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 8:50Chuck Nice?

  I feel a read coming on.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I was on The Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox in London.

• 8:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're stopping, Greg.

• 8:59Chuck Nice?

  How many monkeys are in an infinite monkey cage?

• 9:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Let me guess.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's the name of his show, his podcast. It was a radio show. And so, we were talking about wormholes. And I said, well, the wormhole, you could do this and travel through. And he jumps in and says, well, wormhole is not stable. It'll collapse immediately. So, we need to think about it. Someone from the audience, a Brit, said, that's what distinguishes Americans from us Brits. They're always so positive about what can be solved. And we're always saying what can't happen. And that shut him up.

• 9:33Gary O'Reilly?

  That's culturally accurate. Not always, but on a number of occasions, you will find an American positivity against a British.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, yeah, till we go there.

• 9:45Chuck Nice?

  I mean, it has its drawbacks, you know, when it's just like, I'm the biggest, the best. Many people don't realize, I'm the most positive.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going, whatever.

• 9:56Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Chuck, you want to hit the same question?

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck's got them too.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  This is Ryan Harris, who says, Dr. Tyson Lord Nice, Geek and Professor Lou. And Gary, Ryan Harris from Burnham, British Columbia, Canada. Given the laws of science, if they hold true, when it comes to quantum entanglement, staying on the subject, would there not be some sort of energy slash force being exerted slash used by entangled particles? And can it be qualified as of present? I am trying to understand how two particles across vast distances are influenced by each other instantaneously?

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  And if there are some sort of exotic, scary or otherwise force that has been associated with this phenomenon?

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what I would say, how can a thing happen at all without there being an active draw on energy? Or some other thing that we can measure changing? For them to be permanently connected, or while they're connected, they're connected, something's gotta. Some clock is ticking, something should be measurable from that.

• 11:04Charles Liu?

  This is one of the big differences between quantum physics and classical physics. We are, we're conditioned, we're trained to think that there had to be something exchanged back and forth. Energy, a particle, whatever, between two things.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a classical.

• 11:21Charles Liu?

  That's a classical bias. Quantum entanglement, again, as we said earlier, is still not completely well-understood. In fact, we don't even know if it's a special thing, or if it happens all the time.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I have to clarify, we understand that it happens, and we can measure that it happens. So what you're saying is, we don't understand why.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  But you know what?

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very important distinction.

• 11:44Chuck Nice?

  Before we go any further, before the why and all that, somebody ought to tell somebody who might just be joining us, what is quantum entanglement? Because this person.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because you don't know, don't assume everyone else in our audience doesn't know.

• 11:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, somebody should tell me that.

• 12:02Charles Liu?

  It's a perfectly legitimate question, because even if you ask, say, 50 quantum physicists, you might get 51 different answers.

• 12:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:10Charles Liu?

  As to what quantum entanglement really is.

• 12:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that I did not know.

• 12:14Charles Liu?

  Right, it's kind of like if you ask 100 biologists what life is, you'll get 101 answers. Same sort of situation. But the fundamentals, biologists know what life is when they see it, right? The same is sort of true for quantum physics and quantum entanglement. But boiled down to its most basic point. You can basically think of two entangled particles as being one particle that somehow gets separated. But even if it's separated in space and in time, they are still the same particle. You're just stretching it. So imagine if you have a little ball, and you break it in half, and then you're kind of moving it.

• 12:56Charles Liu?

  It's kind of like this quantum taffy, or caramel almost, that continues to connect them even though there could be a huge amount of space or time between those two parts. They are still the same particle.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a quantum thing that you're describing.

• 13:12Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not a classical thing.

• 13:14Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because classically, there's nothing between them.

• 13:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 13:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm speaking like a classical, with a classical brain, to say that.

• 13:20Charles Liu?

  And we all do that. It's very, very hard for us, even those of us who have done a lot of work in quantum physics.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, these two particles. I like the way you're saying it's the same particle, but they have slightly different properties that complement each other.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To make the whole particle, right? So they have, each side took out some features of that same particle.

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  So is this like the twins where if you slap one on the butt, the other one goes ow?

• 13:46Charles Liu?

  Sounds like you've done that.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's, I don't want to say that's true, but I think that's true.

• 13:53Charles Liu?

  That requires an additional assumption about classical physics of twin butts. Yeah, interacting with quantum butts. And then you have some real issues.

• 14:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So do we get to the point where we say the universe is one single particle? And that's just all of a sudden done its thing and it's.

• 14:11Charles Liu?

  Great question. We are definitely not all one particle. But the universe could be one single entity that contains a multitude of very, very small, more complex parts. This is something that happens a lot. We think of, for example, atoms as being some sort of indivisible piece of matter. But then we've learned since, right? We've learned since.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Atom means indivisible, that word in Greek means indivisible.

• 14:36Charles Liu?

  Nice. We've learned since that atoms are made up of.

• 14:39Gary O'Reilly?

  The Greeks any good at anything?

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Greeks sucked. Those idiots.

• 14:44Charles Liu?

  They did pretty well in the World Cup back around 60 years ago, right?

• 14:47Gary O'Reilly?

  No, they won the European Championship a few decades ago.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the democracy thing is overrated, you know?

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm Vicky Barok Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neill Grass Tyson.

• 15:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Shall we jump into next question?

• 15:19Charles Liu?

  Let's go for it.

• 15:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Ezekiel Reeves. Hello, Neil, Chuck, Gary and Lord Lou. My name is Ezekiel from Wawa, Ontario. I love this already.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not Lord Lou, it's Geek and Chief Lou.

• 15:29Charles Liu?

  Okay, I accept any title.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I adjudicate titles here.

• 15:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Doctor. Quantum physics is rooted in observation and particles deciding which state they are in depending on probability. Can this explain how we evolved the conscious mind and free will? Wow.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have four hours.

• 15:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I did not see that.

• 15:51Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah. No, no, no, that's great. The key question, in my mind, based on your question Ezekiel, is the word deciding. Right? The decision of something to go this way or that, that suggests that there was something behind the ultimate outcome. Right? When you and I decide to have a ham sandwich, or we decide to...

• 16:12Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I want one. No, you said that.

• 16:13Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right. Or we decide that we're going to dive left for a penalty kick instead of dive right. That has a whole bunch of stuff behind it. And the causality of it is dependent on everything from the goalie's life experience to the muscular twitches of that very moment and everything in between. So when individual particles are switching or landing in certain states, Niels Bohr would have called it the wave function collapsing.

• 16:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 16:41Charles Liu?

  Right?

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Niels Bohr, physicist from 100 years ago.

• 16:44Charles Liu?

  Yeah. When you have that kind of an interpretation, then you can ascribe, perhaps, intention? Right? But we just cannot say. Even now, we still don't really understand what free will is. The definition of it varies from person to person. The philosophical ideas.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because people are still writing 500-page books on it.

• 17:06Charles Liu?

  Sure.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the evidence that we don't know anything about.

• 17:08Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 17:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting.

• 17:09Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But keep going there. So we've got quantum probabilities.

• 17:14Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that a particle, quote, decides, is it going to decay or is it not?

• 17:19Charles Liu?

  Yep.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we know that probability precisely. That's what's fascinating.

• 17:23Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's something that's completely probabilistic that we know with precision. It's a weird combination of facts there. All right. So you're not prepared to analogize... I love the thing, the goalie... Leaning right or left to the particle decaying in one moment or another. You're not prepared to have your free will be a similar kind of expression?

• 17:47Charles Liu?

  That's right, because that's the problem, right? If you decide that free will is something where, say, we humans decide to do a thing, right? There's a whole host of events that happened before that moment that helped us to make that decision.

• 18:00Chuck Nice?

  And there's also a number of events that lead up to the moment before the event that also influences that.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that what he just said?

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  No, he was talking about immediately before the event, like...

• 18:13Charles Liu?

  It's okay.

• 18:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but, yeah. So I'm saying, I'm saying that you can take that all the way down. You can keep slicing those layers all the way down.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Turtles all the way down.

• 18:23Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 18:23Chuck Nice?

  Turtles all the way down.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 18:25Charles Liu?

  And there's...

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do those psychology experiments

• 18:29Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they put probes in the brain. I'm gonna mess up the details here, but the results are what I'm landing on, where they can trigger you to stand up.

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  Whether you want to or not.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you're standing up, they say, "Why did you stand up?" And then they make up some reason for why they stood up when the neuro-signatures, the neurosignals, already were prompting him to stand up, and he made up a reason after the fact.

• 18:56Chuck Nice?

  And they were, so the signals were generated externally, but you internalize it and say, "Oh, I stood up for this reason."

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think you had free will to do it, when in fact it was predetermined? That's spooky.

• 19:11Charles Liu?

  It is.

• 19:11Gary O'Reilly?

  You talked about probability and the certainty of probability. What is it, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? So where does that fit in? Because you don't really...

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not certain about that.

• 19:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, I didn't expect anything else.

• 19:24Charles Liu?

  Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that's a great question, Gary. It actually has a little bit...

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, once again, from 100 years ago.

• 19:33Charles Liu?

  Right. It has a slightly different connotation, because what we're saying is that we cannot measure things precisely with infinite precision. That uncertainty describes how much you don't know, no matter what. So Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is actually describing a minimum amount of uncertainty in any measurement.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  Any measurement.

• 19:53Charles Liu?

  Not necessarily uncertainty about... Yes, about what's going to happen, or what's going to happen, or not going to happen.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And part of that is because the, yeah, I can know that you're sitting here and the measurement of that is completely sufficient for anything I might do to you or with you. But when particles are involved, which is the whole world of the quantum, if you try to measure it, the act of measuring it changes what it is you're trying to measure.

• 20:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So, so the interaction with the particle confounds your ability to measure what that particle is doing with precision. And I think that's foundational, that's what's foundational. That was so hard to accept by classical physicists.

• 20:33Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's hard to accept by anybody.

• 20:36Charles Liu?

  Any, any step of science going forward, whether it be classical quantum, has been hard to accept. It takes time and we should allow ourselves that time.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me to quote, was it, yes, it was, was Max Planck, was it? Who said, no great, I'm paraphrasing, no great discovery in physics gets accepted by the guard of the day. They just get old and die and the next generation takes it on as though it has always been.

• 21:07Charles Liu?

  Well, the cosmological constant might be an exception to that.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, but, but he predates the cosmological constant in that quote. But hey, go, what you got?

• 21:15Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll go with the next one. George Vallakis, back from the Greeks. Hey. From New Jersey. Can someone please tell me what a qubit is made of? Uh huh. Is it an electron stuck inside some type of magnetic box? Is it an atom with multiple electrons frozen in multiple quantum states? How is one made?

• 21:37Charles Liu?

  What a wonderful, wonderful question.

• 21:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you, George.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me just, let me just preface this by saying, our geek in chief, in the past year, published an entire book on quantum physics. What's the title of it?

• 21:51Charles Liu?

  The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. There you go.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  So we're not gonna answer your question, just go buy the book.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we can go have a beer right now, okay?

• 22:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Get that back.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buy the man's book and then we can all just have a beer. Okay. The handy quantum physics answer book.

• 22:07Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 22:08Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it's not designed to be a textbook or anything like that.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's still.

• 22:11Charles Liu?

  It's just if you have Q and A.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That takes go ads with a title like that.

• 22:14Charles Liu?

  Well, again, I cannot claim actually having made any of those discoveries. I was just trying to put together a little guide for people who had questions and answers. And they are explaining.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For your quantum questions.

• 22:26Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As one would have.

• 22:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Someone to come along and hold your hand.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Walk you along.

• 22:31Charles Liu?

  It's great, amazing stuff that our colleagues have done over the centuries.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 22:37Charles Liu?

  And this year being, of course, the 100th anniversary as designated by the United Nations of International Quantum Physics.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did they declare that?

• 22:45Charles Liu?

  Yeah, International Year of Quantum Physics.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right in the middle of the decade, yes. The whole decade goes to quantum physics.

• 22:49Charles Liu?

  It's really quite amazing.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Charles Liu?

  So a qubit actually doesn't need to have a physical form. It's a piece of information. Let me make an analogy to regular bits. Okay? Bits are just pieces of information.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:04Charles Liu?

  So for example, if you've got a 64-bit chip in your computer, all right? All that is, is that it can carry or hold 64 pieces of information that are either 0 or 1. If you have a bit, it's just a piece of information and you can store it either electronically in a chip, you know, with a plus 5 volts or minus 5 volts or something like that. Or you could say store a bit of information in a QR code, which is just a square that's white or a square that's black. Or you can do a coin flip, whether it's heads or its tails. So the bit.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the QR code, that's the little thing we scan.

• 23:44Charles Liu?

  Yeah, the little scan thing with the.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I always thought of that as like a two-dimensional barcode.

• 23:48Charles Liu?

  This is exactly what it is.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because barcodes are you white or black? And how thick is the black?

• 23:53Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's all the information and you scan across.

• 23:56Charles Liu?

  The one dimension, right.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I presume because we added a dimension, the QR codes can hold way more information.

• 24:02Charles Liu?

  With the same amount of area.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than a, than a.

• 24:05Charles Liu?

  Than a barcode.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have QR codes that have entire web addresses on them.

• 24:11Charles Liu?

  And they can be little bit things, but in the end, there's just squares. Some square that's white or square that's black, square that's white, black next to each other. And that is the information. So the bit is the information. It's not the thing that it's stored in. So George, your question, what is a qubit really? It's a quantum bit, but it's a piece of information. And you can store it in any kind of container that quantum systems can hold this information in. Didn't Microsoft just bring out a quantum chip? They tried, yes. That's right. It's the very beginnings of using quantum computing in regular computing that we're used to. But they are far, far away from a true quantum computer.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you just said that it's not a thing, it's information.

• 24:54Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now tell us the difference between a traditional bit, which is a zero or one, or black or white, and a qubit, which is a statistical occupation of a... So just go there.

• 25:09Charles Liu?

  Okay. Well, a bit is either a zero or a one.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or black and a white.

• 25:14Charles Liu?

  Black and a white, you know, just a piece of information that is or is not. So it's binary. And so it's a binary piece of information. Right. The qubit is binary when you read it. But before it becomes read, it can... it is not yet settled. So it can be somewhere between zero and one. And the complexity of the amount of zereness or oneness a qubit has fluctuates and varies until such time as you read it. Right. So if you have a computer nowadays, we want to make a bit switch as quickly as possible. All right? So we want our computers to switch from zero to one or one to zero.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The speed of the computer is better than that.

• 25:58Charles Liu?

  Right. With a qubit, you might want to slow it down a little tiny bit. And while that stuff inside the qubit is settling out, it may actually be able to make calculations. You can actually ask the qubit, using various electronic inputs, to give you a number...

• 26:16Charles Liu?

  Doing some sort of a calculation or some sort of a figuring that you could not do in real time at high speed. And because the quantum timeframe is so fast, even if we slow it down, you still wind up being able to do certain calculations way faster than any classical computer can do.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  So why so probabilistically you're no longer bound by the binary?

• 26:36Charles Liu?

  Yes. During the time in between the zero and the one, you've got a chance to really mess with it and really gain some new knowledge that you couldn't have done before.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  So the moment you read it, all that's over.

• 26:49Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 26:49Chuck Nice?

  Because probabilistically, you are now back to the binary. It either is, or it is not.

• 26:56Charles Liu?

  That's right. And so what you're trying to do when you're creating a qubit with technology is to figure out how you can sustain that qubit, how you can make it last for a tiny fraction of a second longer than otherwise would, or what you can make that qubit do a calculation for you, which you can't watch.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't it make a VR code qubit that has a grayscale in it?

• 27:16Charles Liu?

  Eventually you could. But right now, we don't have the technology.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that would be everything between the zero and the one.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Zero and one.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the black and white.

• 27:23Chuck Nice?

  On a grayscale. That'd be amazing.

• 27:25Charles Liu?

  That would be awesome.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  That would be amazing.

• 27:26Charles Liu?

  But we're not anywhere near there yet. But the technology's getting us there slowly but surely.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called black and white photo. That's all it is.

• 27:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. But this is why they say, like, encryption ends when we have a quantum computer. And it's because all of those possibilities you could actually figure out,

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  manifest.

• 27:45Chuck Nice?

  Manifest it inside of that, inside of those qubits, kind of all at once.

• 27:51Charles Liu?

  That is very similar, yes. You have, right now, the way we keep our internet connections as secure is through a particular kind of algorithm, a strategy. That strategy can be broken according to the theoretical calculations if you have a quantum computer.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an encryption.

• 28:08Charles Liu?

  Right. The only thing is, once that... Code can be broken. Can we make another one that can't be broken?

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  That can't be broken.

• 28:15Charles Liu?

  Right, so there will always be this race.

• 28:16Chuck Nice?

  So now you got quantum encryption.

• 28:18Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 28:19Charles Liu?

  And this and the back and forth, those are some really interesting stuff.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, George, thank you for that. I think we've learned a lot from that answer. James Kovacs, hello gents from Detroit, Michigan.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We said it right, Detroit.

• 28:31Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, I'm getting there.

• 28:32Chuck Nice?

  He says like a black man.

• 28:33Charles Liu?

  But did you say Kovacs, correct?

• 28:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Probably didn't say Kovacs. Kovacs, yes, sorry, he's mangling. So we know speed and mass cause time to slow down. In the case of speed, we know the universe's speed limit is the speed of light. You may disagree, you may not. Time stops altogether at the speed of light and nothing can surpass that speed. Is there a similar mass limit? Is there a point at which you have so much mass that time stops?

• 29:00Charles Liu?

  Let me make first just a tiny bit of adjustment to the question. The assumption is that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. It's not that time will stop if you are moving very fast or at the speed of light, right? The speed limit.

• 29:14Chuck Nice?

  It is relative.

• 29:16Charles Liu?

  Everything is relative, so that question has a little bit of a nuance to it. But to answer that basic question, is there a mass limit of objects? The answer is no. You can make an object of arbitrarily large mass in the universe and that would be totally fine. But there is a limit because if you have too much mass in any given location in the universe, you create a Schwarzschild radius, which is the outer boundary of a black hole.

• 29:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 29:44Charles Liu?

  So the way to think about a maximum mass in the universe is to think about the maximum amount of mass that can fit inside a limited volume. Okay?

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not be a black hole.

• 29:55Charles Liu?

  And not be a black hole.

• 29:57Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, because don't, black holes, isn't the idea of a singularity as unlimited volume inside of no limits on volume?

• 30:06Charles Liu?

  Great, great point. A singularity is defined as something that has no volume.

• 30:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:11Charles Liu?

  But infinite density. Because it has non-zero mass. However, a black hole.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, so density has volume in the denominator.

• 30:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if the denominator goes to zero, you're dividing by zero.

• 30:26Chuck Nice?

  And there you go.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 30:27Charles Liu?

  And that number doesn't exist in our mathematical system.

• 30:30Chuck Nice?

  And so now, this is what I'm gonna say. What y'all been lying to us all these years, man?

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About what?

• 30:35Chuck Nice?

  Y'all, everything.

• 30:40Charles Liu?

  Okay. Sorry dude.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm joking, that's a joke.

• 30:43Charles Liu?

  The situation really is that if you add more mass to an object.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:48Charles Liu?

  And it's already at its black hole mass limit. It just gets bigger. The black hole itself gets bigger. Inside the black hole's event horizon, you could have an incredibly massive object or a singularity or something like that, but we will not be able to know because information cannot pass through that event horizon, at least as far as we know now.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. All right.

• 31:10Chuck Nice?

  The cosmic blood brain barrier. That's what I call it.

• 31:14Charles Liu?

  Excellent.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very organic of you.

• 31:15Charles Liu?

  Yes. But does that mean our brain is inside the barrier or outside the barrier?

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It depends on who you are.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 31:23Charles Liu?

  That was good.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it going.

• 31:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Next one up, comes from Raluka Alexandrescu, formerly of Bucharest, Romania, but now living in Toronto, Canada. My question is, how would we study the universe if light traveled at infinite...

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 31:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I knew you'd like this one.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me some light speed.

• 31:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. It goes on. There's more. If we lived in a universe where the speed of light was infinite and we did not have the benefit of seeing back in time as we look into deep space, how would the study of the universe change? Would other laws of physics be changed if light traveled at infinite speed?

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me tee this off and I'm gonna pass it off, pass the baton. If the speed of light were infinite, we would know nothing about the history of the universe.

• 32:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, because we couldn't...

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the Big Bang would be forever lost in time because there's no time lag from things that happened 14, 13 billion years ago. We need the finite speed of light to know anything about our past. It would be like in geology where anything just got in sedimentary rock, it just dissolved or disappeared and removed all record of anything that had happened before. That would be a sad universe.

• 32:36Gary O'Reilly?

  The universe wants us to know.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I... Ooh.

• 32:39Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 32:40Charles Liu?

  Look at that.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, this is deep in, you got your white robe on here. This is very...

• 32:44Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm not actually sat in this chair, I'm actually levitating just a little bit out of this seat.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that would be sad to me. If we lose all of that knowledge and information. Charles, you have any other insights here?

• 32:58Charles Liu?

  I don't know how sad it would be. It would be different, that's for sure. Our ability to tell time would be essentially wiped out. That's what Neil is saying. And, and that's kind of a trouble.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, tell, tell history time.

• 33:10Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can know it's 2:00 in the afternoon. I can know that.

• 33:13Charles Liu?

  The causal time gets messed up.

• 33:16Gary O'Reilly?

  But it's just us as a species that registered the concept of time?

• 33:19Charles Liu?

  Not at all. We know that there are many species that can tell difference between day and night, for example.

• 33:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 33:25Charles Liu?

  Right? And they actually age and they know when to spawn and when to come back to the stream. So, they do measure time, but not in the way that we understand it as ticking and so forth, right? But clocks here on Earth, if the speed of light were infinite, would also run funny. There would be an ability to see things that are happening, but the way that we measure them is dependent on how fast that information gets around the universe. So, there's lots of interesting, cool results. I don't know if they'd be sad, but it certainly would be very, very different. But I'm gonna focus on something that's slightly different. And I gotta give credit to our former colleague Ken Crosswell.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember him.

• 34:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Ken Crosswell was, wound out writing a number of books about astronomy also. A very, very talented astronomer. He wrote, had a very good insight that I saw in one of his books. And that is, if the speed of light were infinite, night would always be day.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point.

• 34:21Charles Liu?

  Because the light from distant parts of the universe would get to us immediately, as well as stuff close to us. As a result, every single spot in the sky would be covered somewhere by a star. Right? So, all the lines of sight in the universe would be brightly lit. And so, we would never have a sky that we could look at night and see what's out there. So, that's the most fundamental difference in our study of the universe.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but wouldn't an expanding universe still dilute the light, even if it traveled?

• 34:51Charles Liu?

  If the expansion rate is finite and the speed of light is infinite, then it doesn't matter.

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't catch it.

• 34:58Charles Liu?

  Right. It will never catch up.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't win.

• 34:59Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. So, there would be no night.

• 35:01Chuck Nice?

  So, light outraces everything.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:03Chuck Nice?

  All the time.

• 35:04Charles Liu?

  If it were infinite, that would be it.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if memory serves, the fine structure constant has the speed of light in it.

• 35:11Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 35:11Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, you lost.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the universe has among its several constants, the speed of light is one of them. Some constants are combinations of other constants.

• 35:20Chuck Nice?

  So the fine structure constant.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gives us information about the formation of energy levels inside of atoms.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so if that were infinite, what does that mean?

• 35:32Chuck Nice?

  All right, we gotta do an explainer on the fine structure constant.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we have to bring Geek and Chief back for that.

• 35:37Charles Liu?

  Well, it actually has a really interesting history because for a period of time in the history of quantum physics, the fine structure constant was measured to be exactly 1 divided by 137. And no one knew why 137 was this magic number. And today, we know that that was actually an approximation. It's off by a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction. But that's something fun to talk about in the future and about the advancement of history and how we tried to create ideas.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it 1 over 137.16 or something?

• 36:07Charles Liu?

  Point oh oh blah blah blah.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it is that clean?

• 36:10Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it's very, very close.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's another thing. So it could mess with other stuff as well. Because the speed of light shows up in our calculations. And if it's infinite, what does that do to the calculations?

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I see what you're saying. You change everything.

• 36:24Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's so wild.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying. You're blowing stuff up now. Yeah, you really have to. You blow up the system.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God, that's right.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it almost doesn't even mean anything to say the speed of light is the limit.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if it's infinite, the relativity doesn't even make sense. That's no longer relative.

• 36:43Charles Liu?

  Albert Einstein's theories are not useful.

• 36:48Chuck Nice?

  It's no longer relative.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's no longer relative. Right, and simultaneity would be real.

• 36:53Charles Liu?

  You actually would have things happen exactly the same time.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just put the notes down for a screenplay for another movie. Okay, yeah, oh, my gosh.

• 37:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What if?

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  It's kind of fun, though, to think of the whole universe bathed in light, though. The entire universe would just be.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we kind of already are, but it would be more intense than your.

• 37:12Chuck Nice?

  It would just be.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're right, that's a screenplay that we gotta work on. Yeah, it's ours. Hands off tomorrow. You know who I'm talking to.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, a couple of minutes left.

• 37:42Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Mahawi Garesia, apologies if it's mispronounced. Time is impacted by extreme-

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck never apologizes when he mispronounces.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Because it's a privilege to have me mispronounce your name. Better be happy I even said it. Anyway, go ahead.

• 37:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Mahawi's from Dallas, Texas. Time is impacted by extreme gravity, like with a black hole, and extreme speeds. Do these things have something in common? For example, is the extreme gravity really just making things move faster? And that's why they both impact time?

• 38:13Charles Liu?

  I think the question you're asking is indeed answerable, thanks to Albert Einstein.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just set it up again. So, two things can slow down time. The strength of your gravity field and how fast you're moving. Relative to observer. So, they feel different, but are they different?

• 38:32Charles Liu?

  The thing is, they're not actually slowing time for the whole universe. It's just slowing the amount of time or the rate at which time is being experienced by the object that is either moving very quickly or the object that is in a gravitational field.

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Because time is the same for the observer.

• 38:49Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In both cases.

• 38:51Charles Liu?

  So, in fact, what's going on is, it's the effect is on spacetime. It's that gravity affects spacetime in such a way that if you're in a gravitational field, you experience time more slowly than if you were not in that field. So, you have the same effect if you're moving faster. You experience time more slowly. But the effect is not on you as the object or on time as the dimension. The effect is on spacetime overall.

• 39:22Chuck Nice?

  Which is why it literally slows down in the measurement-

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay, which is why if I get this right, please help me out. Particles actually decay slower.

• 39:36Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:36Chuck Nice?

  As they approach the speed of light.

• 39:38Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  So it's not the perception of time. It is a literal slowing down for the object that is approaching the speed of light.

• 39:47Charles Liu?

  Absolutely.

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:48Charles Liu?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  It was space-time.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like your angle on that because what that even says is it's not even what's happening inside you. It is your place.

• 39:57Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the space-time continuum.

• 40:00Charles Liu?

  It is your location. And the rate that you're changing out of that location, otherwise known as speed, right?

• 40:05Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy.

• 40:05Charles Liu?

  But yes, your your statement about the decay of particles was actually one of the most important confirmations experiments that was done to prove that the specialty of relativity was correct.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because a particle has an expected decay time.

• 40:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And very precisely measured, you accelerate that puppy, takes longer to decay.

• 40:22Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something happened inside there. Yep.

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and a fun fact is we've said this before, but now it has foundational context. Our GPS satellites are not on Earth's surface with us. We're in a higher gravitational field than the GPS satellites. So that has their time tick faster. However, they're also fast in orbit, which would have their time tick slower. The it turns out the gravitational well is a stronger effect on the time reckoning.

• 40:58Charles Liu?

  Than the speed.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than the speed.

• 41:00Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that in fact, GPS time is ahead of us and it has to correct with Einstein's relativity before it sends to the cellphone towers. So we have the time that is our spacetime, the surface of the Earth. Not its spacetime up in Middle Earth orbit.

• 41:16Charles Liu?

  Without regular.

• 41:17Chuck Nice?

  And is that a is that an adjustment between the speed and the gravity well?

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They calculate, we we got we got top people.

• 41:23Chuck Nice?

  We got people?

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got I got people.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got people.

• 41:26Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Harry, listen, something's wrong with my with your calculations, man.

• 41:31Charles Liu?

  Neil, just for future reference, Middle Earth orbit is what you go around like orcs and dwarves and.

• 41:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. What about second breakfast?

• 41:40Charles Liu?

  Medium. Orbit. Medium Earth orbit.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  What'd I say?

• 41:44Charles Liu?

  Middle Earth.

• 41:45Chuck Nice?

  I think middle's better. I'm sorry. I like it when I hear people say middle Earth orbit. Instead of medium Earth orbit.

• 41:52Charles Liu?

  The middle Earth orbit is reserved for the Hobbit Space Telescope.

• 41:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one.

• 42:00Chuck Nice?

  I like what you did there, son. I gotta tell you.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I have to say medium?

• 42:04Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 42:05Charles Liu?

  It would be better.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll just say MEO. There's Leo and MEO.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  MEO. Leo, MEO, and GEO.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leo, MEO, and GEO.

• 42:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I knew you'd get there soon enough. I knew you'd cover it.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The triplets.

• 42:15Chuck Nice?

  Here's why I don't have a problem with it.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the triplets, I call them Leo, MEO, and GEO.

• 42:19Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would totally call them that.

• 42:21Charles Liu?

  I would call them Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's too old.

• 42:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, those are the chipmunks.

• 42:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Charles Liu?

  No, no, no, no.

• 42:27Chuck Nice?

  I would call them...

• 42:28Charles Liu?

  Those were the ducks.

• 42:29Chuck Nice?

  I would call them Dewey, Cheatem, and Hal.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The law firm.

• 42:37Gary O'Reilly?

  One?

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last question.

• 42:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, one more. Okay, this from Doug D. in Danbury, Connecticut. What do you think about...

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's this?

• 42:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Doug D. from Danbury in Connecticut.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doug D. from Danbury.

• 42:46Gary O'Reilly?

  What do you think of the grabby aliens theory? Is it similar to the dark forest Fermi paradox solution as depicted in the Three Body Problem books? Do you think it's just one example of an opportunity for speculation?

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grabby aliens? What is that?

• 43:00Charles Liu?

  What a great question to end this episode on.

• 43:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I knew you'd like it.

• 43:04Charles Liu?

  The concept of the grabby alien. First of all, just to clarify for everybody, right. Grabby is a word that was invented for precisely this. G-R-A-B-B-Y. As in aliens that want to grab things. Not Grabby aliens. Okay? Actually, they invented the word grabby, the people who are trying to talk about this, so that they would not ascribe any kind of emotion or ethics or morals to these aliens. It's just that they have a tendency to want to expand. And wherever they go, they tend to want to take things, natural resources.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  Here we go again.

• 43:44Charles Liu?

  We...

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the...

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So colonization has one sentence. Is that yours? It's mine now, okay? That's colonization.

• 43:58Charles Liu?

  There is a colonial, imperial kind of connotation to this, right? Because what do we say when we want to go live somewhere else? We colonize Mars, right? That's actually not what we would want to do in a moral environment or an ethical environment. We might want to live there. We might want to visit or explore or be immigrants or something like that, but we wouldn't want to colonize them. But the point of grabby aliens is that they don't ascribe that kind of, say, imperialistic or colonialistic kind of idea.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just in their native.

• 44:29Charles Liu?

  This is in the nature of, say, human species. If we go somewhere, we want to take a look and see what's there and use it and improve our society or improve our lives. Grabby aliens are a version of the kind of aliens that would, for example, if they show up, take advantage of their environment and improve themselves as a result of it, okay? That would mean that if your civilization actually interacted with a grabby alien civilization, you would have very little time between the time you found them and the time they showed up and took all your natural resources, okay? So the interaction between grabby aliens and non-grabby aliens becomes a very interesting dynamic of science.

• 45:13Charles Liu?

  Should we, as a species, attempt to be grabby? In other words, be open to the universe? Send out explorers and pods? And then establish ourselves as being, say, a dominant species in this part of the universe? Or should we hide ourselves and be quiet and not let other aliens who are grabby find us and take our natural resources from us?

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a grabby alien showed up here, I'm kicking its ass.

• 45:38Charles Liu?

  That would be nice, except most likely the grabby aliens that showed up would have superior technology to us.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm still kicking their ass.

• 45:47Charles Liu?

  Unless, as long as they have one.

• 45:50Chuck Nice?

  What's great about what you're talking about-

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, "Ali, where's your ass?"

• 45:55Charles Liu?

  So, The Three Body Problem, books and now TV shows and so forth- Are describing a scenario where they are so afraid, humans and other species, of being detected by other aliens, that they hide themselves. And the moment that they're detected, it's not that grabby aliens that come and take their stuff, it's that actually vicious, devastating, angry aliens want to remove them immediately from a threat. So, instead of trying to exploit them, they will wipe them out.

• 46:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Preemptively.

• 46:25Charles Liu?

  Yes. So, it's not exactly, you know, without spoiling the series, it's not exactly the same thing as The Three Body Problem.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As of now, there's only one season posted, right?

• 46:34Charles Liu?

  But without spoiling anything, the basic point is, watch this and you can see one idea- Well, look, that's-

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has ways.

• 46:42Charles Liu?

  That's another topic.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has ways.

• 46:43Charles Liu?

  It's best to think about how alien civilizations interact with one another from the sense of, should we be quiet, or should we be loud? And grabbiness is just one aspect.

• 46:54Chuck Nice?

  Here's another great movie on this subject, but completely the antithesis of what you said, and that's District 9. Where they are super advanced, and they come here, and we're the grabbies.

• 47:07Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 47:08Chuck Nice?

  Without even, we never left home, and we're still like, total a-holes.

• 47:12Charles Liu?

  Isn't that something?

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, cool. I learned something. I'd never heard about grabby aliens.

• 47:17Charles Liu?

  It's fun.

• 47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just, aliens, you come down, I'm gonna kick your ass. You ain't taking my stuff.

• 47:21Chuck Nice?

  I have no problem with grabby aliens.

• 47:25Charles Liu?

  If, actually, just as a little plug-

• 47:27Chuck Nice?

  Sometimes you have to grab 'em by the alien. They let you do it. They let you do it.

• 47:36Charles Liu?

  There are some very good YouTube videos about grabby aliens. Not that kind of grabby aliens, but generally grabby types of aliens.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, it's a philosophical point?

• 47:48Charles Liu?

  Yes. And you can find lots of discussions on it.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Motivations of species and life.

• 47:52Charles Liu?

  There's a channel called Rational Animations that has a whole series of them, but just look.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Charles, thank you for illuminating.

• 47:59Charles Liu?

  It is always a pleasure. I love being here with you guys. Such great questions. Congratulations for you guys for having such amazing on-

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. So, it's got me thinking, if I might offer a-

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perspective on this, especially that last question. Quantum physics, we're reminded that we can measure things, but we don't know what is really going on. That frustrates so many of us. And maybe aliens would know, are they more advanced? And if they are, they probably do. Maybe they have access to higher dimensions. Grabby aliens, that, I'm gonna kick their ass if they come down here. But I can tell you this, that if aliens are grabby, and that is a feature of them all, that is a self-limiting property of their behavior. Because a grabby alien wants to grab everything they see. And if they grab everything they see, that is the spread of the grabby aliens.

• 48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, they wanna grab the same thing as each other, as one another. And they would then have wars, wouldn't they? Because some other part of their grabby aliens grabbed something that the other grabby people wanted, and now it's not available for them anymore. If it's so fundamentally part of their inner soul, of their inner source of exploration and discovery. So it seems to me, grabby alien scenario would implode just the same way the European colonization scenario imploded. Where you had the Dutch, and the British, and the French, and the Spanish,

• 49:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and everybody trying to claim land on Earth's surface, and there's a finite amount of land on Earth's surface. Eventually, they start fighting each other. So, I don't see grabby aliens as a stable future of the universe. But I'm still kicking their ass if they come.

• 49:57Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective. A badass cosmic perspective. This has been Special Edition.

• 50:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I know.

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, thank you for putting this together.

• 50:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you're welcome, and thank you for our audience. They're just brilliant with their questions.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Geek in Chief, we're gonna follow up on your quantum insights. We're gonna all get your book. Give me the title again.

• 50:19Charles Liu?

  The Handy Quantum Physics Answer.

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't want more than a title like that. Come on now. Right, right. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Always. This has been Stark Talk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.