Cosmic Jazz, with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock

Neil deGrasse Tyson gets his improv on with legendary jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. Featuring Chuck Nice, Sean Ono Lennon, Stephen Tyson, Mona Chalabi, Charles Limb, and the Columbia University Jazz House. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Natural History. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and tonight we're gonna talk about the art and science of jazz, featuring my interview with jazz greats Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. So let's do this.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's my co-host tonight? Do I get a Chuck in the house?

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes, you can, my friend.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice!

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  How are ya? Good to be here, Neil.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. Welcome back. Thank you, thank you, man. Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. That's right, baby, ChuckNiceComic. He's feeling the jazz already. That's my jazz voice, man. That's my jazz voice. Now, we need some, like, artists...

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  We need some cred, man.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need some, we need some street cred. So we went out and found Sean Ono Lennon. Sean Lennon, welcome to StarTalk. I got the street cred. I'm gangsta.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a musician, a deep thinker. I think of him as a philosopher, because I've talked to him, and it's like, this guy's brain is everywhere it needs to be to make sense of this universe. Yeah. Wow, thank you.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who else do we have? We need, we need some art, artsy folk to do this show. And we also have art historian and artist Steve Tyson. Steve, welcome. Glad to be here. Yeah. You're also quite the jazz enthusiast. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, with my interview with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, they both played for the legendary Miles Davis Quintet.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Wayne Shorter's a saxophonist and composer.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's won 10 Grammy Awards. Herbie Hancock, a pianist, a keyboardist, a composer. He's got 14 Grammy Awards. And it's some of the all-time greats in the field. And I sat down with them recently at Wayne Shorter's home in Hollywood. And at first I asked Wayne how he got started on his path to music. As I always do, I want to know what the tracking is of people's lifelong love. Let's check it out.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I was playing hooky from my classes at our side school.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you never amount to anything if you play hooky.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Right. And they caught me. And they caught me. And the vice principal had my mother and father in the office and all that. He said, "What, why didn't you go into class? Let's see where you went when you played hooky." I said, "I went to the Adams Theater around the corner from the school." And saw Jimmy Lunsford, Dizzy Gillespie, Lyle Hampton, and all that. Charlie Parker. He said, "Oh." So what she did, she called the music director and put me in his class.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there it is.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  What a great teacher you had.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, rather than wrap you over the wrist, they're saying, "There is an energy here to be harnessed."

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So not energy, curiosity to be harnessed. That's what we need here.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  But those are the great mentors that we've had the opportunity to experience that have recognized something. And instead of taking the naysayers' kind of standard, say, standard viewpoint.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  They wanted to find out something. And as a consequence, we have a Wayne Shorter.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, you glad we have a Wayne Shorter?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  I'm very glad we have a Wayne Shorter.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I wonder is the contingency of life. Because if that didn't happen, if it's enough in him, maybe it might have still expressed itself? I just wonder that. Because you're an artist, you've been an artist as long as you can remember in your life.

• 4:03Chuck Nice?

  So did you play hooky? Don't answer that.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a yes face.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  No, no, not really. But, yeah, what would have happened if the teacher hadn't said, you know, "Let's take that energy and let's see where it can be applied."

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think he would have never become a musician were it not for that moment? Or that there's enough other possible contingencies in life that it would have manifested?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  I think it's hard to say.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  I think it's because mentoring in those days was kind of a requirement for being a jazz master. I mean, Miles taught so many people and brought in young players like Tony Williams and Herbie when they were like teenagers. And, you know, there's not really a culture of that. There's almost like a philistinism now where there's like an anti-cultural, anti-learning...

• 4:47Speaker 05

  You know, trend in, in the world and I feel like musicians don't mentor young people in the same way that they used to and I think that's why there aren't as many great jazz musicians as there used to be.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you ever play hooky?

• 4:58Speaker 05

  I actually was thinking about that, um.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another, yes, that's a yes.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  I didn't have to play hooky because I had a Walkman and I remember listening to Bitches Brew in class and getting in trouble.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that counts as playing hooky.

• 5:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, um.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your brain was nodding.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Mental hooky, for sure, yeah.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mental hooky, that's a whole other thing.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Wayne Shorter was on that record, he basically ruined my academic career.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Steve, how did you know you wanted to be an artist?

• 5:25Speaker 04

  My father would sit us down and he would take out a pen and he would start drawing and I started seeing that, that wow, this is like a family experience here and he is expressing something and we would look at what he created and I said, well, let me start doing some drawing and by the time I got to high school, uh, the High School of Music and Art, it was music and I was drawing and painting to music, so that further stimulated the interest of this fusion of arts.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did I say that he's my brother? Did I, did I say that?

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I've only ever known you to want to draw. I've, I don't know another Steven Tyson but that one.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  I loved drawing. That was, that was my vehicle of expression. Simple as that.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  And somebody encouraged that for, for you?

• 6:14Speaker 04

  That's right. And, and having that kind of support system, you know, where our parents would said, you know, well, we can see where the energy is going, we'll support that.

• 6:24Chuck Nice?

  See, I might have been an artist too, but instead they arrested me for my art because they were like, "You cannot spray paint the side of people's garages." That is called destruction of property.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that was vandalism then, but now there's a lot of really famous, you know, graffiti artists like Basquiat and stuff. You just needed to break through.

• 6:42Chuck Nice?

  I was ahead of my time.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, you did graffiti too?

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Don't worry Steve, the statute of limitations is up.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Wayne got his path playing hooky, but we had to, how about Herbie? Got to find out Herbie. I asked Herbie too. Let's check it out.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  There were a couple of reasons I got into music. One of them is that my mother recognized that when my best friend, LaVester Corley, had a piano that his parents had bought him, she noticed that I seemed to like the piano because every time I would go to his apartment, the first thing I'd say is, "Hey, can I play your piano?" Well, I couldn't play the piano. I don't know what I'd play.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I bang on your piano?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. So she said, "Well, he seems to be interested in the piano." So she told my father, "We gotta get this boy a piano." So that was the first thing that happened. But even before I got the piano, even before I went to LaVester's apartment, you know, to ask him if I could play his piano, even before that, I was already taking watches apart and clocks and trying to put them back together because I was always curious and I wanted to see how things worked.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I noticed what you said. You were taking them apart and trying to put them back together.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I caught that.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  That was well and good.

• 8:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was always with the parents.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Right. Well, that was well and good until I tried to take apart my Lionel electric train. Then I got a spanking for that.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's got some extra stuff going on.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  That was when spanking was allowed.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Today, that wouldn't happen here.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's been suggested that the next generation, their curiosity is not fostered in exactly that way because nothing can be taken apart. You don't take apart your computer to meddle with its parts. You don't take apart your watch. You don't even have a watch, and if you did, it's digital. So this whole world of the tinkerer, learning how things work, it might be a lost era.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  There is tinkering in music. And all kids love music.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sean, do you tinker?

• 8:51Speaker 05

  I am a tinkerer because, I think it's because my dad was famously self-taught, that I always thought when I was young I had to be an autodidact, you know, just teach myself. And, you know, I think I actually would have benefited from some more mentoring, because I was always like, "I'm gonna learn myself." But yeah, I would tinker, taught myself piano, taught myself guitar, taught myself drawing and all that stuff. But, um, it was sort of like a pride thing, like, "I'm gonna do it like my dad did." But in a way, I regret, you know, not studying more seriously.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Steve, isn't doodling a form of tinkering, right? It is. It's the artist's version of, you know, a proto-engineer taking apart the radio.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You know, it's looking, testing things out, trying this, trying that, you know, seeing what feels right, what fits right.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know in science, we can tinker in many ways, physically with objects, but of course, in the mind.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Albert Einstein famously had thought experiments, in German Gedanken experiments, where you just, that's kind of, that's intellectually tinkering.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 9:45Chuck Nice?

  When you talk about the engineering, if you listen to his music, you can hear the engineering and the structure of his music. Like, one of the favorite songs that I have from him is a song called "Watermelon Man", and the opening sequence is like, a bunch of, like, tropical bird calls made with different...

• 10:18Chuck Nice?

  But, that, when you look at that...

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do I get a fist bump too?

• 10:23Chuck Nice?

  But when you look at that, the structure...

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you actually on that album?

• 10:28Speaker 05

  You know how they did that with the water bottles, right? That African percussionist, he had two different water bottles and he's going...

• 10:37Speaker 05

  He's singing and blowing on the bottles. I mean, talk about engineering, right?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And it sounds like a really weird pan flute, the way he does it.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the thing.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Super cool.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the thing, if you're genius, you can see things that are there that no one else noticed. But that ability of the mind has a flipside. And that flipside is like, adjacent. It's like, right there. Because if you are so good at seeing patterns in nature, or anywhere... You could be so good that you'll end up seeing patterns that aren't really there at all.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is crossing over into madness.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  Sure. Are we talking evil genius here? Well, no, I mean, I was, I was reading about how, um, you know, savants who have a kind of autism, but like a successful reinvent type of autism. It's because they might be missing certain regular parts of the default mode network or their, how most brains work. And so they are forced to create novel neural connections, which are basically insights. And, you know, I know with brain scans, you can see the difference between an insight versus a linear puzzle solving. So if you're given like a math problem, sometimes you can just see the answer, which is inspiration. And then sometimes you just methodically solve it. And insight is what genius is, right? And where that's what creativity is.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where you're assigned to genius.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  Exactly. Thank you.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're featuring my interview with jazz greats Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. And while in Wayne Shorter's home, I found something special when I was rummaging around his house. Check it out.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This, what is this?

• 12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dated 1949.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  1949. I saw a movie called Rocket Ship XM.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  That's the first, first book I ever read.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Robert Heinlein.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Robert Ship, yeah.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I look at it, so this is.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  And I sat.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what, what is, what? Did you draw these?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a comic book.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With rocket ships.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You even had the, the bullet shaped ship that was common at the time.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was designed, that concept is derived from the V2 rocket.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was used in the Second World War. Because that rocket left the atmosphere before it re-entered and hit its target. And anyone at the time knew that the future of space exploration is going to have to have something that looks like that.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we'd never sent anything outside of the atmosphere before. So in the 1940s, the 1950s, everybody who drew a spaceship, the spaceship looked exactly like this.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did we, how old were you?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  I was, uh, let's see, 15.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is out of control.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yes, and in 15.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wayne!

• 13:21Speaker 02

  You start looking at the anatomy of girls.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's some curvy linear shapes in here.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And when I was drawing and my parents would walk through, I sit in a big armchair and they walk through the room. I was drawing and I do like this.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Put my hand.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, cuz.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  My mother, she knew what was happening. She just.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's incredible. These are some shapely people you're drawing here.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so. Plus the balance is incredible, right? It's just perfect. Wayne. Wayne.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  And when I made a mistake, I would make some landscape and I was thinking, there's no such thing as a mistake.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  You can't go back. You gotta, gotta.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Chris, it's just in pen.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  That's why I drew with an indelible pen to make, to, to kind of parallel. You can't go over anything. Gotta keep going forward.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going forward. That's. Transforming the negative into the positive.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm still reacting to it. That is super cool. Steve, you drew comics as a kid, I remember.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yes, I used to like drawing comics a lot. I think a lot of it had to do with wanting to tell a story. You know, observing life and wanting to tell a story and, and nobody's a greater storyteller than Wayne on his saxophone.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  And the fact that he could sustain a story for 54 pages.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In his, in his book.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  In his book, yeah. I mean, that's incredible. That's incredible. And his skill at, at the age of 17 or something.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  15.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  15? I mean, it's amazing.

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The man's got some talent.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it also captured his science interest cuz he could have drawn just landscapes or something. Right. But there's a rocket ship. There's, there's, you know, planetary surfaces and I'm always enchanted when I find artists that have been touched in any way. Excuse me? By science. Oh, sorry.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Wayne Shorter's interest in science, it manifests in so many ways. Perhaps birthed with that series of comics he drew, but there's more to come. Let's check it out. So Wayne, you've got space-related titles. For, I got the, I've been looking at the list. Orbits, On the Milky Way Express, Supernova, Universe, Pegasus. These are constellations, concepts, ideas.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you a closet astrophysicist? That's what I'm really, that's the whole point of this interview, to find out.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yes, when I went to NYU, I wrote a piece called Universe. You know, my first year, first freshman year.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you and the universe go way back.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I can talk about the universe, but if an artist is touched by cosmic themes, it enables us all to feel the universe. That's why I like it when I see it, I'm just saying.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I wonder, Sean, how does science influence your music?

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Well, I think I'm especially dorky in that I have quite a few songs that contain science-inspired lyrics. I could tell you some if you want.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, your latest album is titled what?

• 16:35Speaker 05

  My new band is called The Delirium and our album is called The Monolith of Phobos, which was inspired by the C-SPAN Buzz Aldrin clip where he reveals to us-

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was on C-SPAN, no one saw it.

• 16:45Speaker 05

  I know, I don't know. I don't know, I thought, but you know, he reveals that there's this monolith on Phobos, essentially, which is the moon of Mars. And I'm not saying it's an artificial structure, but it's odd that it's there, let's put it that way.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have other scientifically-inspired lyrics?

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do. I actually, since this is a jazz-themed show, I thought I'd mention, I wrote the lyrics for a John Zorn song. He's a famous jazz musician from New York. And they're pretty science-inspired. They're like, "The sun is a selfish lover 'cause the moon's often left half-full, and stars always stare at the gutter 'cause even light has to bend some rules. Man will fly farther and farther to escape woman's gravity, but there is a hole at the heart of every galaxy."

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  Yo, that is hot!

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  You like that?

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I love that. All right, coming up, how would you explain jazz to aliens? That's next when StarTalk returns.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. I asked them, what is jazz? Check it out. An alien just arrived from Mars, and they're curious, and they have a sense of hearing, and you need to tell them what jazz is. What are you gonna say?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  I would, I would take them to hear the music.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  And then, if they had some questions after that, uh, I would respond to the question.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you wouldn't try to explain it up front?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just take them to the club?

• 18:34Speaker 03

  That's no fun.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take them to the club.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  You know what I'd do?

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  I'd put them in front of a mirror.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  An Earth mirror.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you say that's jazz?

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jazz is you.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, jazz is you.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even when you're an alien?

• 18:52Speaker 03

  It's very hard to explain it.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  So maybe Wayne's on to something.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, consider that the bar scene in Star Wars, they're playing jazz. How's that for intergalactic?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not playing classical music, it's not a ballad, nobody's singing anything, the aliens are jamming.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On their, on their alien musical instruments, but it was clearly jazz.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think there was no question about it.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, something I don't understand. Steve, you know, I happen to like jazz, I was a latecomer to the genre, but there are people who hate jazz. And can you explain that?

• 19:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Shaun, could it be that improvisation has an unpredictability that creates discomfort in us? That we need the confidence that what comes is something we expect, rather than something we don't?

• 19:54Speaker 05

  I don't think so, because people like blues, and that's an improvised form of music, and there's a lot of soloing in blues, you know. I think it has to do with being ready for, you know, stretched harmonies and dissonance and chords that are more dense and complex than, you know, simple triads, which is what rock and roll and blues is usually about. Jazz has more complex geometries that are harder to appreciate if you don't have a sort of foundation to get it, I think.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just makes me wonder if human spontaneity, the edge of creativity and freedom, everyone else, whatever you've just discovered there, nobody else is ready for it yet. It's gotta sort of work its way in and create a level of comfort within us.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  But in the 30s and 40s, I mean, even like the early bebop, you know, everyone loved jazz. It's just now, people aren't as into it, because, you know, they'd rather listen to Bieber or something, they're believers. And I think it has to do with the-

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Believe like Justin Bieber?

• 20:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it has to do with the culture, you know, because I don't think jazz was so unpalatable when it was, you know, it's the golden era.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Steve, what is jazz to you?

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Well, jazz is an expression of the human spirit.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I brought an alien. A Martian is not human, so are you gonna tell the Martian is an expression of the human spirit? They're not gonna get it, for sure.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Well, to the extent that the human spirit is an expression of life, and the alien is a living thing, then I would say that that's where the connection is.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  What you gonna do with that? Snap! Yeah, but if they're not human, who's to say that they would even hear the frequencies of music that we play music in?

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I prefaced my question that they have audio sensors.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  Okay, of course.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Take that! I agree with Herbie, I mean, you know, Frank Zappa said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, so I feel like there's not much you can do other than just, you know, jam with them or show them a jazz show, you know?

• 21:48Chuck Nice?

  All I know is I don't know what to believe anymore. Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock don't know what the hell jazz is, and I just found out his father was in a rock and roll band.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  You don't like Def Leppard, man? Come on.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  What's wrong with you?

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, do you have any insight as to why the French love jazz more than Americans do?

• 22:09Chuck Nice?

  Because the French love anything that we don't like. They're doing it to spite us. You don't love your own America, awesome? Good for you. We love it.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Do they really like it more?

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  You know, I think jazz is celebrated all around the world more so than it is here in America.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  I think in France it's because they didn't have segregation and there was still segregation in America, so a lot of jazz musicians were able to tour and thrive there, so they were touring there a lot.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  That's a very good... But how do you explain Japan, then?

• 22:38Speaker 05

  Japan? Well, Japan, they, you know, they're into lots of different things.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  Seriously, they love all kinds of music.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, this is true.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so I tried to get Wayne Shorter to express sounds of the universe through jazz, through his saxophone.

• 22:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I prepped him for a cosmic phenomenon to see how he... Can he roll with it?

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  Uh-oh, this is gonna be deep.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's check it out. I want to describe something astrophysical to you, and I'm wondering if you could convert that to a musical expression. In the center of the sun, energy is created by fusion, and a photon of light is born. This photon of light, careening back and forth, eventually escapes the sun. That takes hundreds of thousands of years for that photon to get from the center of the sun to its surface, and it takes...

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight minutes to get from the sun to earth.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there music in that?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you feel the photon?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Feel the photon?

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feel the pho- I like that. Feeling, that's an album title right there, Feeling the Photon.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  The photon fears nothing.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And if I move in any direction other than that,

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I think thi- this one thing incorporates a tone that's really, like, incorporates all of the movement and struggles and everything like that, and all of the short-term goals and stuff like that that other people be looking for. And this photon is wrapping around that whole thing for millions and millions of years. And something else is wrapping around that. And that's us.

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay, now we know why people hate jazz.

• 25:07Chuck Nice?

  What the hell was that? Did you see your face in that clip? He was like, "Huh!" You were like, "What the hell are you doing? What are you doing, Wayne Shorter?"

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Well, you know, Herbie and Wayne are Buddhists, man. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. That was the sound of one photon rocking, you know?

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even Shaun Livingston can clean it up.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  I tried.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I want to hear another take on the sound of the photon's journey from deep inside the sun.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I think we all do.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've got a band called the Columbia University Jazz House to help us out. Guys, can you give it a shot?

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that was Wayne's note.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  That was Wayne's note. Who knew he was right all along?

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think maybe he had that whole piece in his head?

• 26:53Chuck Nice?

  No, I don't.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then just the note was the last expression of it?

• 26:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that's exactly what happened.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sean, is that your take on it?

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that his brain is like the sun in that piece. And it took many years for the thought of the photon to escape his neural network. And then by the time we heard it, it was escaping his brain as a single note, which is like the eight-minute travel to the earth.

• 27:26Chuck Nice?

  So what we heard was the eight-minute journey to earth, but not the hundred-thousand-year struggle?

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  Right on.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  Now the whole thing makes sense.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, talking about curiosity and creativity through the lens of the great American innovation called jazz.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And right now, it's time for everybody's favorite segment, Cosmic Queries. There we go. This is where we answer questions from our fans. And tonight, we took your questions about the math and physics of jazz.

• 28:06Chuck Nice?

  And our first question is from Jessica Schaffner from Detroit, Michigan. She says, "Songs written in major keys tend to be more happy and uplifting, while minor keys tend to give feelings of melancholy. Is there a possible biological reason, or is this a learned trait?"

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sean?

• 28:26Speaker 05

  I think it's partly cultural, because if you look at Indian music, which is microtonal, and Middle Eastern music, there's a lot of minor thirds that are sort of celebratory lyrically. So I don't think that minor is physically inherently sad, although I do think it's more common in cultures to associate the major third with a happy feeling. But certainly, I do think there are examples of a minor third being happily sung.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  So Jessica, your answer is yes and no.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next.

• 29:08Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir. Our next question is from Matt Snyder from McConaughey, Pennsylvania. And he says, "When humans travel to Mars, would they be able to play and hear music outside of their shelter? Or is the atmosphere too thin?"

• 29:25Chuck Nice?

  Now, that is a real question.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is. I got this. Bring it on. Well, you may remember from your physics class that there's one of these great demos where they have a ringing bell inside of a jar, a glass jar, and they evacuate slowly the air out of that jar. And you're listening to the bell ring, and as the air comes out, the bell gets weaker and weaker and weaker. But it's still hammering away, and there's a point where you can hear nothing at all. It doesn't mean there's no air in there. It means there's not enough air to communicate the vibrations of the bell through a medium, through the glass, and then through the regular air in the room.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a thinness of air below which you're not gonna hear any acoustic sounds. And Martian atmosphere is like, it's a fraction, a small fraction of Earth's atmospheric pressure. So I'm thinking you're not hearing much noise at all.

• 30:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, very cool.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck.

• 30:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only do you read me cosmic queries.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  That is correct.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are also our senior sidewalk science correspondent.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have for us tonight in math and music?

• 30:33Chuck Nice?

  Well, I actually dropped in on the guys of the Columbia University Jazz House at their dorm.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 30:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes, to see if they could make math into music.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's check it out.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  I can hear the guys playing right now. See? Jazz House Jam Session. Come on, guys.

• 30:57Chuck Nice?

  Stews are playing in the kitchen. What's up, guys?

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  So I'm here with Kevin and Andy, the brass section of the Jazz House.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  She's our woodwinds, so.

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  I don't appreciate your tone, Kevin. All right, guys, so if music is math and math is music, can you play this?

• 31:14Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 31:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah?

• 31:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:24Chuck Nice?

  No, that's not, that's not the song. That's not the song. That's not the song. That's not the song. That's not the song. But I hear some more music. Ah, who do we have here?

• 31:37Chuck Nice?

  What's up, man?

• 31:38Speaker 07

  Hey, how you doing?

• 31:38Chuck Nice?

  All right, what's your name?

• 31:39Speaker 07

  David.

• 31:40Chuck Nice?

  David, how are you, buddy?

• 31:41Speaker 07

  I'm doing great.

• 31:41Chuck Nice?

  Is this your dorm room?

• 31:42Speaker 07

  This is my room, yeah.

• 31:43Chuck Nice?

  Get a lot of jazz action happening? Lot of, lot of improvised and going on in it?

• 31:48Speaker 07

  No.

• 31:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay. How important is math to music?

• 31:52Speaker 07

  Uh, math is absolutely essential to music, in my opinion. Uh, it's the, it's the foundation of everything that we know about rhythm and harmony.

• 32:00Chuck Nice?

  Beats and measures, measures and beats.

• 32:02Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you, if math is music and music is math, can you play this?

• 32:09Speaker 07

  Of course, it's one of my favorite tunes.

• 32:10Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 32:15Chuck Nice?

  Really? That is not, that's not the song. Like, I don't know that song. But I hear some drums. I hear some drums. Nice. Alright. Who do we have here? My name is Daniel. Daniel, can I ask you a couple of questions?

• 32:32Chuck Nice?

  Alright, Daniel, if music is math and math is music, can you play this? Give me a week. I don't have a week, man. It's our show. Alright? Do my best. Do it.

• 32:47Chuck Nice?

  That is not it. That's not it. That's not it! That is definitely not it. How about you guys? Can you guys? Can you guys play this? That's what I love about the jazz house. There's musicians everywhere.

• 33:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That's it. I think that's it.

• 33:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!

• 33:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah! That's it. That's it. That's it! That's it! Yeah, Neil! You see that, Neil? That's music and math, baby!

• 33:36Chuck Nice?

  Shout!

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, jazz greats Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter explain what it takes to be creative on StarTalk.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back for StarTalk, right here at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. We're featuring my interview with jazz legends, jazz greats, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. And I asked, what do they do as creative artists to overcome any forces in society that might constrain their creativity? So let's check that out.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  You get a lot of resistance from the practical business world. We cannot sell this because it's not a viable product, too ethereal, something like that. And then we will blame, there's a tendency to blame these marketing people and everything for not marketing what we call, something called art. And they stand as resistance. But when we get on a path of enlightenment, we know that the resistance, we have to investigate what resistance means. If we take the example that an airplane cannot take off without resistance, what does that mean?

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, the airplane takes off into the wind.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because only into the wind does it achieve maximum lift.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  So you need that resistance.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  The resistance that people present, instead of money, power, and fame that they want, their real function is to be the resistance that's needed for the creative process, whether they know it or not.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he just justify all the naysayers that are out there? Saying the creative people in the world need the naysayers? Did I just hear him say that?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  We actually do, we have a phrase in Buddhism that is turning poison into medicine.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  And much of it comes, I think, from a misunderstanding of the relationship between you as a human being and external circumstances. And if you understand that that relationship is really a symbiotic relationship, and that much of what happens to you that you blame for your suffering.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Actually has to do with a much deeper part of your own life. In Buddhism, we call it the fundamental darkness. You know, and we also have our fundamental enlightenment. And so, actually through doing this practice, you strengthen the fundamental enlightenment part of who you are, and that really helps you with the idea of stress and understanding.

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's always forces that will stress people out. So it's not so much, I suppose, of getting rid of stress. It's dealing, knowing how to navigate the stress.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  You navigate. That's Buddhism.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I'll be Buddhist for the day.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Sean, you have constrainers in your music business?

• 37:02Speaker 05

  I do think what they're saying is true, that, you know, resistance, the metaphor is beautiful. Resistance is what makes an airplane fly. I mean, they're obviously Buddhists and very philosophical, those guys. But, you know, for instance, Bach...

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it was just physics.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  Some of Bach's most beautiful... But some of Bach's most beautiful pieces are very constrained, like fugues and cantatas. And, you know, for example, there's the Crab Canon that Bach wrote, which is a Mobius shape, and it's a palindrome. And, you know, that's very restricted. It has to be completely symmetrical. But it's a very beautiful piece to listen to. So I think there is a direct relationship between rules and constraints and creativity. It's sort of like a balance. It's a tug-of-war.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it turns out you could actually bring some science into this conversation of creativity in music. Because after all, this is StarTalk, and we find science in every nook and cranny it could possibly hide. So we found someone who studies what playing jazz looks like in your brain.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. Dr. Charles Limb is a neuroscientist and jazz musician at the University of California, San Francisco. And he's standing by live on video call. Drew, can you bring him on? Dr. Lim.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a surgeon, a neuroscientist, a saxophone player, and as I understand your profile, you've carried out research on the neural basis of musical creativity.

• 38:34Chuck Nice?

  When are you gonna do something with your life, man?

• 38:38Speaker 08

  No, that's right. I've been studying how the brain enables us to not only hear music, but also make music. And, you know, it started for me as, like I said, an obsession with sound. And then turned into the idea that I should actually use something like neuroscience to address the topic and learn more about it.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about the images of people, was it playing or listening to jazz? What's going on in their brain? What have you found?

• 39:01Speaker 08

  Sure. So we used a functional MRI to look at jazz pianos' brains while they're playing, improvising, and we compared the improvised brain from the memorized brain. And we found a pretty interesting thing, which is that the prefrontal cortex of the brain was shutting down when musicians were improvising in comparison to memorizing. And this is a big portion of the brain, responsible for a lot of things. But to some extent, conscious self-monitoring might be the most important role of the brain that gets shut down during improvisation.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just so I understand, there's the improvisational brain that you observe, and then you said the memorized brain. So that would just be sort of aping something that you've learned and try to get it perfect?

• 39:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, we basically had musicians memorize a standard and play that tune, and then improvise on it. It was just the blues. And we looked at the difference between when they were soloing on the blues and playing a memorized blues melody, and that the brain changes radically.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what can we learn? I mean, so that's just factual information. Now what does that mean?

• 40:04Speaker 08

  So I think it means that creativity is kind of a novel combination of ordinary processes in the brain, meaning that the brain is basically shutting itself off in order to allow for an unrestricted flow of ideas during improvisation. It's the brain doing something that it's very well-equipped to do in order to come up with a new idea.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except some people are better at it than others.

• 40:24Speaker 08

  Absolutely.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But can we assert that creativity?

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is hardwired into the brain? Or do you have to train your brain to be creative? Because we agree, not everyone is equally creative. And some people are not creative at all. And some people are leading us into the future by virtue of their creativity.

• 40:45Speaker 08

  I think that humans are inherently creative. It's just that there are multiple forms of creativity. Some of them that are in the art realm and some of them that are in a very mundane realm. So this conversation is creative. When you're driving home from work and you're zipping through traffic, you're improvising. I think that the human brain is hardwired to create because that's how we survive as a species. One thing is for sure, though. We as scientists understand very little about how humans are able to be creative. And when we think about all of the capacities that human beings have, the one, the capacity for creativity may be the most important thing that we've had as a species. And so to be able to examine the creative brain as it's real time generating new ideas may be one of the most important things for us to understand how it is that we're able

• 41:29Speaker 08

  to generate novelty and how does it will come up with new solutions for problems in the future. And I think that one way to view this is that artists may be our creative experts in our society and they're sort of trained to generate new ideas. This is what they do for a living. And I think that in the case of the jazz musician or the freestyle rapper or any other artist who does spontaneous improvisation as their main craft, they've essentially trained their brains over many years of study to be able to improvise on the fly. And this is not something that you just sort of wake up and can do all of a sudden. You really have to practice this craft. And I think that these people that have devoted their lives to these kinds of arts have certainly figured out a way to get their brains to generate ideas in a way that we did not previously know how to do.

• 42:12Speaker 08

  And maybe by looking at how they're able to do these things, we can understand some of the basic fundamental mechanisms of how the brain is able to create.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Thank you, Charles.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about creativity and art and in science. And it turns out, there's extra insight we can get into what it is to get extra insight. Because we've got Mona, who's got some data for us. Mona, can I get some data, please?

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Mona Chalabi, she's a data journalist with The Guardian. What do you have, Mona?

• 42:47Speaker 09

  Thanks, Neil. I wanted to look at this connection between music and math. And what I found was a study that was published in the journal Nature, where people were asked to listen to Mozart Sonata K448 for about 10 minutes before taking a test. And what they found was that people...

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before taking a math test?

• 43:04Speaker 09

  No, it was a test of spatial reasoning skills, right? And those are skills like the ability to visualize an object and then try and build it out of Legos. They're skills that are related to problem solving, so they're relevant to subjects like physics or math. And again, these people demonstrated better spatial reasoning skills after taking the test. In another study, they actually found that rats who had listened to Mozart Sonata were able to navigate a maze faster than rats who hadn't listened to the music.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa!

• 43:30Speaker 09

  I know, it's incredible, right? Loads and loads of studies have found this, but there is a bit of a snag. They call it Mozart's effect, but it only seems to improve spatial reasoning skills for about 10 to 15 minutes. So it doesn't really hang around too long.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to listen to Mozart continually?

• 43:45Speaker 09

  Oh, I don't think that will do it.

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, so we have, in New York City, in our subway, we have street musicians, some of whom play Mozart. So that's why the rats navigate the subway tunnels really well.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, like, that's the last time I'm listening to Mozart in my house, because I don't want to encourage the rats to get any smarter. Yeah, exactly.

• 44:04Speaker 09

  But anyway, the research might help explain why Herbie Hancock developed an early interest in science and music.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 44:11Chuck Nice?

  Super cool.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 44:13Chuck Nice?

  So now, what happened to those rats when they listened to hip-hop?

• 44:18Speaker 09

  I don't know.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That study hasn't been published, they're still working on that one.

• 44:21Speaker 09

  The controls in that experiment were compared to white noise or no music at all.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  And what is white noise?

• 44:30Speaker 05

  That's a...

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck is very sensitive.

• 44:34Chuck Nice?

  I'm sensitive to race, I don't like, I don't see color.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  White noise, yeah.

• 44:38Chuck Nice?

  To me, white noise is just like, "Oh, God, turn that down."

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's when Donald Trump's audience claps, that's white noise.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Mona, I'll explain to Chuck what white noise is.

• 44:47Speaker 09

  Okay, thanks very much.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Mona.

• 44:48Speaker 09

  Take care, thank you.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's some famous people where the art and the science was one and the same. And at the top of that list is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. And there was nobody like Leonardo.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, to him, how could you possibly say, "Tell me about your art distinct from your science"? No, it is the one and the same. No difference. And then you have other places where engineering has affected art and art has affected engineering. You look at the design of Apple products and you say, "Well, there's not only the beauty of the design, but the functionality of the product." And Herbie Hancock is definitely thinking about this connection. So I asked Herbie, just to see his take on this, especially given his background in engineering. Let's check it out.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  The scientific community created this technological age. Where did that impetus come from? If you ask many of the people like Larry Page, it was music. He said it was music.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Larry Page was one of the co-founders of Google.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yes. There are many people who we revere in the scientific community. Einstein played violin, and I've seen that happen over and over and over again. So if these people who have this attachment to the arts created this technological age that we're living in, then in order for it to thrive, we need the arts the same way they needed it. To me, the arts are like the heart. And I think it's a crime, really, to dismiss the value of the arts in the human experience.

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when I think about creativity and art and science, I see what's similar and then I also notice what's different. And what's different is, if Beethoven were never born, nobody would ever compose the Ninth Symphony. That came out of him and nobody else.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas if Einstein were never born, somebody would have eventually discovered relativity. He was kind of ahead of his time, so it would have taken a little longer. Might have been a combination of scientists. But he is discovering a pre-existing thing in the universe.

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the creativity of the scientist is wrapping our head around a pre-existing reality. Whereas the artist has no pre-existing reality. They can create a reality. And maybe it's a little too far for whoever's looking at it to understand it at the time. So we all sort of drag behind it and eventually say, hey, wow, they were on to something. Because that's the true moving of a frontier forward. Did what you do kind of leave people behind and they got to run and catch up after you? So while both fields are deeply creative, in science, the universe is the judge, jury, and executioner of our creativity.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In art, in music, the ultimate judge is the human spirit and the human soul. And that's what it looks like from the cosmic perspective. Guys, take us home.

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always, keep looking up. Thanks, Chuck. Sean. Brother Man Steve.