Relativity Round-up: StarTalk Live! With Janna Levin

Is the universe infinite? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Paul Mecurio go to infinity and beyond as we explore the origins of relativity, time travel, and the discovery of expansion with astrophysicist Janna Levin, PhD live from Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On this episode of StarTalk, it is StarTalk Live at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. My comedic co-host is Paul McCarrio and our special guest is cosmologist Janna Levin. And we talk about my latest book, co-written with our longtime senior producer of StarTalk, Lindsay Walker. We talk about Einstein's greatest blunder. We talk about Hubble, Edwin Hubble, the man, not the telescope, and a lot more on StarTalk.

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, we have our friend and one of my favorite comics around, Paul McCarrio. Paul, come on up. Where are you?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, Paul, you got a podcast of your own?

• 0:59Paul Mecurio?

  I do.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was creatively called what?

• 1:02Paul Mecurio?

  It's called, see, he's insulting the title of my podcast already. Inside Out with Paul McCarrio.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inside Out with Paul McCarrio. Okay. All right. I've been a guest on his podcast.

• 1:11Paul Mecurio?

  And we had a great time at the planetarium.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we did. Yes, yeah.

• 1:15Paul Mecurio?

  And then a few drinks and we broke a couple of things, but no.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, my office is, so thanks for coming on.

• 1:21Paul Mecurio?

  Thank you for having me. This is a live thing. This is an amazing space. I've never been here. This turnout's amazing. I'm really excited. And then we're all gonna go swimming after this. Just right.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in the East River here.

• 1:33Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have a new, you can sit down, Ms. Ray. You have a new off-Broadway show?

• 1:39Paul Mecurio?

  I do. It's called Permission to Speak. And we were doing it off-Broadway and we're putting, bringing it back as COVID. The premise of the show is we're kind of nameless and faceless to each other, but if we share stories, we talk, we connect, and we realize we have more in common than we think. And it's produced by Frank, directed by Frank Oz. So we're taking the show out again and we're really happy and excited about it. It's not a stand-up show. It's about you guys.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interaction.

• 2:03Paul Mecurio?

  Interaction and connection.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. And you've also written for The Tonight Show and The Daily Show.

• 2:08Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, I was on The Daily Show for a long time.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got good chops in the business.

• 2:12Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, Carrie Jon Stewart. Okay, yeah. Oh, it's all me. No. And then the Colbert Report, and now I work on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Yeah, Stephen and I go back.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:23Paul Mecurio?

  But I always say about Neil, I repeat this. His enthusiasm, if I had him as a science teacher, I'd be doing science today. He makes it relatable, but his enthusiasm and his passion. You know, I had a guy with a cigarette, literally cigarette hanging from his mouth. "All right, here's how you make a battery." Like, that's like, he didn't care. But he's an amazing person. I got to know him through the show, so thank you for having me.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then, if I were your science teacher, we wouldn't have you as a comedian.

• 2:48Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, see, you gotta ruin everything, don't you?

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, next up, we all know and love her as Janice. She is Professor Jan Levin. Janice, come on up.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jan Levin, Taotao Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University.

• 3:06Janna Levin?

  Where we first met.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is, and you're Director of Science here at Pioneer Works. Editor-in-Chief of the Pioneer Works Podcast, author of How the Universe Got its Spots, one of my favorites, Black Hole Survival Guide, and also one of my favorites, The Black Hole Blues, and other songs from outer space.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you want me to say it?

• 3:30Janna Levin?

  All the time. I want you to say it all the time.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Black Hole Blues. And so, in fact, tonight, we are going to focus on the fourth section of the book, which is really where the title of the book takes shape. To Infinity and Beyond, Places Where Our Bodies Can't Go But Our Minds Can. So, let's begin here, right now, in Brooklyn. All right, so, in the book, it's about upheavals in our understanding of how the world works, and how we reacted to that. Were we elegant and graceful, or did we get dragged into the future kicking and screaming? Not all stories in the history of science have smooth, sort of journalistic,

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  oh, the "burn the midnight oil" and say eureka at the end. So, so let's detail some of the weirdest, wackiest ideas in the universe. And you gotta start with who?

• 4:29Janna Levin?

  Einstein. That was just a good guess.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so his special and general theory of relativity? And you're an expert on that, right?

• 4:37Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just checking. So, so tell us about Einstein's biggest blunder.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's known as his biggest blunder?

• 4:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah, he called it his biggest blunder.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we talk about this in the book just because this is some of the fits and starts that we go through to understand the universe. So what's going on with this?

• 4:57Janna Levin?

  I love this about him because here he is dreaming these dreams that defy everything everyone else took for granted, but then he has a moment of like resistance and it's emotional resistance. He wants to believe the universe is permanent, that it didn't have a beginning and it won't have an end and that it's like static. He wants that. That's an emotional response. And even in his own mathematical theory, he's surprised when other people study it and tell him it predicts a beginning of the universe and an end to the universe.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His own theory predicted it and he couldn't handle it.

• 5:32Janna Levin?

  He couldn't handle it.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He couldn't handle the truth.

• 5:34Janna Levin?

  Couldn't handle the truth.

• 5:35Paul Mecurio?

  But maybe, maybe he just was exhausted at that point. He's like, I've done all this. I know some of it's wrong, but I just, I need to, I need, I need a year off. I need some drinks. Like, maybe that was the issue for the guy.

• 5:46Janna Levin?

  Well, crazily enough, the guy almost can't be wrong even when he tries. So he, he introduces what he calls the cosmological constant, which is just a term that's mathematically consistent with the general theory of relativity, but he, he, he declined initially to include it because it made no sense. It came out of nowhere. He couldn't explain it. He couldn't justify it. But what it allowed him to do mathematically was precariously balance the universe so that it was static, but it was very, very unstable, so. And when he realized that, he was like.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So just so people are on the same page, I know you guys are scientifically literate here, but just to make sure you can balance a marble at the top of a hill and that's, that's a point of equilibrium, but it's not stable. Because any gust of wind will send it one way or the other.

• 6:40Janna Levin?

  Yes, and in this case, the gust of wind would say the universe contracting or expanding.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas if the marble were at the bottom of a hill, it's also it's also a point of equilibrium, but it's stable because you can displace it and it'll always return to that spot.

• 6:55Janna Levin?

  And that's what he was hoping for. He was hoping that if you tried to make the universe expand or contract, not be static and permanent, that it would actually prefer to stabilize. But it doesn't. It's actually very, very hard to stabilize the universe. And as we know today, the universe is in fact expanding.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Einstein was an idiot, you're saying? Yeah?

• 7:15Paul Mecurio?

  But what was it? I mean, there's a quote in the book where you say, "With the notion of a static universe firmly anchored in its philosophical substrate, Einstein developed his general theory of relativity and it embodies his assumption of a stagnant universe, even though his own equations reveal the unsettling truth." So he must have known, why couldn't he get his head around that reality?

• 7:37Janna Levin?

  I think that's, nobody really knows. I don't know if there was really a sense of investigating with him why he was so resistant to the predictions of his own theory.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But can it be really his fault? Who would have been the first to say, "The universe has a beginning." I mean, religion said it, but scientifically, there's no reference frame to even have that thought.

• 8:00Janna Levin?

  No, it's really stunning. It's the first time there's a scientific concept of a beginning, a big bang, beginning of the universe.

• 8:08Paul Mecurio?

  Listen, I think it's clear the guy was closed off emotionally.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got the analysis. So tell me about Le Maitre.

• 8:14Janna Levin?

  Yeah, so physicist, and there was also a Russian, there were others. But they looked at Einstein's equations. Let's assume that there's a description.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a Catholic monk physicist.

• 8:30Janna Levin?

  Yeah, sorry, I forgot that important part. Yes.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's a monk, a physicist.

• 8:34Janna Levin?

  Monk. Pretty intense.

• 8:36Paul Mecurio?

  Talk about closed off emotionally. Wow, that's a... There's a whole, thank you, it's one guy's getting everything, the hell with the rest of you.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but that's some kind of business card to have.

• 8:46Janna Levin?

  Yeah. It's amazing, he kind of made it into the canon, really, that he wasn't just sort of forgotten and excluded.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Janna Levin?

  He's studying this and he says, you know, if I imagine a universe where everything is kind of smooth and uniform, the whole universe, and I ask, how does space and time respond to a universe full of stuff, as long as it's kind of smooth? You know, it's a very simple system, but not that far off from actually what we observe. But he realized that in response to a universe full of stuff, it wants to either expand or contract.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so...

• 9:28Janna Levin?

  It doesn't want to just sit there.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did he finally agree to this?

• 9:32Janna Levin?

  I'm saying, yeah, he agrees after Hubble in the 20s.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble, the human being.

• 9:38Janna Levin?

  Hubble, the human being, not the, after whom the satellite is named.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:42Janna Levin?

  Hubble looks out at a smudge on the sky and he's not sure what it is and he's trying to figure out, is it a nova, which would be a nearby object that's very bright, or is it a distant galaxy? And much brighter and much more distant, and there's an actual plate, a photographic plate, that he took where he crosses out NOV and he writes VAR with an exclamation point, a variable star. And it makes him realize, because of his understanding of variable stars, that it's a bright object far away.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very far away.

• 10:17Paul Mecurio?

  And that's based on Leavitt, right? Henrietta Leavitt's work.

• 10:21Janna Levin?

  Henrietta Leavitt's work, yeah, exactly.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Henrietta Leavitt classified this variety of variable star that turns out to be crucial to understanding the distances to objects, so...

• 10:32Paul Mecurio?

  Leave it to a woman, there you go. Made it happen. Good job.

• 10:37Janna Levin?

  Great, unbelievable story, actually, about Henrietta Leavitt and all that, that whole crew of female astronomers. Around the turn of the previous century, they were called Pickering's harem. Because Charles Pickering, who was the director of Harvard's observatory, hired them for 25 cents on the dollar after he fired all of the male astronomers because they weren't doing a good job. And he said, "My Scotch maid could do a better job." And he hired her, which was Wilhelmina Fleming. And she hired all these women. And they became this cluster of phenomenal observational astronomers. Unsung heroes, they died in poverty. Pinurius. And, but Hubble...

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highlighting their careers.

• 11:17Janna Levin?

  Yeah, Davos Sobel.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Davos Sobel, that's right. Called it "The Glass Ceiling," I think. No, no.

• 11:23Janna Levin?

  The Glass... The Glass Universe. That could be it. Thank you.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Janna Levin?

  We had Davos here to talk about that book. Yeah. And, and it's an incredible story. But Hubble knew about that work, which is remarkable. If he did not know about these unknown women and their work that they were doing at the Harvard observatory, he would not have understood that he was not looking... You know, if you just imagine a light bulb up close, that he wasn't looking at something up close, but he was looking at something much, much brighter that was very far away.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, we are now in this centennial decade of Hubble's major discoveries. As well as the centennial decade...

• 12:02Janna Levin?

  We are, exactly. It was 1922.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. Of most of the discoveries of quantum physics. So that was a watershed decade, right there, in 1920s.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, fast forward to 1998. And we discover a value for Einstein's constant.

• 12:38Janna Levin?

  That's insane. It's insane. So this is what I meant. He can't even make a mistake. So he introduces this thing to try to make the universe not expand. Hubble comes along and says, "I saw this galaxy. It's really far away. And then I saw a bunch of them, and they're all moving away from us. The universe is expanding."

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole universe is expanding.

• 12:56Janna Levin?

  The whole universe is expanding. We're not at the center. We're just part. We're also moving away from everything else.

• 13:02Paul Mecurio?

  And then that calls into question the age of the universe, and if any of those numbers are right, and all of that.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we find out that not only is the universe expanding, it's accelerating by the power of this term in Einstein's equation. So in fact, the term does exist. So even when Einstein was wrong, he was right.

• 13:22Janna Levin?

  He was right. Exactly. So everyone's like, "Einstein,

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass.

• 13:26Janna Levin?

  Get rid of that constant. It's a big blunder." And he's like, "Oh, my biggest blunder." And then in 1998, long after Einstein passed, they realize, "Oh, actually, the only thing we can think of, not just to make the universe expand, but to make it expand faster and faster to accelerate, is the cosmological constant, his biggest blunder."

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:46Janna Levin?

  So it turns out to be right.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if we're expanding, that means yesterday we're smaller than today. And the day before, smaller than that.

• 13:53Paul Mecurio?

  And I'm shrinking then.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you go back in time, there's got to be a point where the whole universe is occupying one spot. It had a beginning. Oh, my gosh.

• 14:03Janna Levin?

  That's Lemaître coming in, which is actually very interesting. As a monk, I wonder why Einstein was more resistant to the idea of an expanding universe than a Catholic monk who had to confront the idea that the universe was ancient and had a beginning.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 14:19Janna Levin?

  I mean, I think that's quite amazing.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The beginning part is easy because Genesis is a beginning.

• 14:22Janna Levin?

  Right, but not 6,000 years ago.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:24Janna Levin?

  14 billion years.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, billions of years ago. So if it had a beginning and it's expanding, does the universe have an edge? And by the way, these questions, is that any different from sitting here on Earth and saying, "How do I get to the moon?" "I don't know." Pose the question. And you heard in this exchange that the answers to the theories had to wait for experiments to join the conversation. You can't just sit in an armchair and claim you fully understand the universe. So, does the universe have an edge?

• 15:01Janna Levin?

  Are you asking Paul or me?

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, does the universe have an edge?

• 15:05Paul Mecurio?

  I think it does. I've been to the edge and

• 15:10Paul Mecurio?

  it's the Hamptons.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, some people have edges.

• 15:13Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, a lot of rich people with an attitude and I walked away.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 15:20Paul Mecurio?

  So, in the context of this, in the book you talk about the human ego, right? And there's an interesting concept there that I thought, which really sort of surprised me. And what you say is that, given the battles that raged, etc., etc., you say, "We know the universe is expanding, blah, blah, blah." "The ultimate defining barrier between space and well-known space." However, yeah, there's a lot of stuff. By the way, the book needs more pictures.

• 15:50Paul Mecurio?

  You know, it's like, "Oh, look, a spaceship, woo-hoo." No, it's a great book to fall asleep.

• 15:59Paul Mecurio?

  I think I'm never coming back on this show again.

• 16:03Paul Mecurio?

  No, so in all seriousness, this is a quote from the book. "We know the universe is expanding, and that expanded from a single point. Furthermore, everything in the universe must obey a speed limit. Reason would dictate that the universe must therefore have an edge. However reasonable though that might sound, it arises from a faulty premise, driven in part by the human ego." And I was fascinated to know what you meant by that, driven by, in part, by the human ego.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, ego, just are you in the center of everything? The authentic center? If you learn you're not in the center, how, can you deal with that? Can you handle?

• 16:34Paul Mecurio?

  You can't.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, no, sitting, just think about it. And we detail this, once again, in our ascent from Earth into the solar system. You say to yourself,

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "We're in the center." By the way, we made calendars, not knowing, calendars we still use today, not knowing Earth went around the Sun.

• 16:57Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, but they're adorable. They have puppies on them.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're all good. So, you can deduce a whole lot about the world without telescopes, but one of the things you cannot deduce is that Earth is going around the Sun. That's messed up. Okay, that meant we went thousands of years thinking we're in the center of the known universe, fully feeding our ego.

• 17:19Paul Mecurio?

  But why wouldn't you? And when there's no proof of anything else, in all seriousness, why, why? What other premise would you?

• 17:25Janna Levin?

  Yeah, you're being too hard on, you know, pre BCE civilizations.

• 17:32Paul Mecurio?

  What are issues that you have inside of you?

• 17:34Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, what I'm saying is.

• 17:37Paul Mecurio?

  You need a hug.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole universe.

• 17:39Paul Mecurio?

  Come here.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole universe is masquerading as a system centered on us. And so we're not given reason to question it because it feeds our ego. When something feeds your ego, you say, yeah, it's probably true. Not asking, well, maybe it's not true. Because maybe it's not true could have the result that you're not in the center.

• 18:06Paul Mecurio?

  But think about the ego you have to have as these great astronomers and scientists to say, I'm going to go and look into something that no one else has done and then stand by it and believe in it before anyone else does.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not ego, that's curiosity.

• 18:21Paul Mecurio?

  No, but you've got to have an ego to be stand by something, I think.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, yeah, no, that's then you're then you're stubborn.

• 18:28Paul Mecurio?

  I'll fight you right now.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you have an idea and you stick by it regardless of the data, go home. That's not what science is about.

• 18:36Paul Mecurio?

  That's what Einstein did.

• 18:37Janna Levin?

  Which is why we discuss not having debates over science because nobody, no scientist worth their salt wants to come in with a notion and be unyielding or unwilling to to accept a new idea or or or adopt it when it's clearly right.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So two scientists in an argument, there's a different contract between them than there is between two people debating on a stage.

• 18:59Janna Levin?

  Absolutely.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that contract is either I'm right and you're wrong, you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong. So we'll argue until we get to the edges of what our data can show. And then we say, you know, I think we need better data. Let's go have a beer, right? Said no one ever at the end of a political debate.

• 19:20Janna Levin?

  But the idea of the infinite universe kind of fell into that category because when Einstein was first writing things down, he was just doing the first pass, so to speak. And he has a famous quote where, you know, he assumed the universe was infinite, but he also assumed it was static. And he said something to the effect, "Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity."

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, best quote ever.

• 19:44Janna Levin?

  And then he added, and I'm not so sure about the universe.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. I forgot about that.

• 19:49Paul Mecurio?

  Isn't it a matter of the observable edge versus...

• 19:54Janna Levin?

  There's an observable edge, for sure. So we can only see as far as the light has had a chance to get to us.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not a physical edge of the universe.

• 20:01Janna Levin?

  But it's not a physical edge.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can't drive through the universe and say, "The universe ends here."

• 20:06Janna Levin?

  Well, we don't think so. We're not actually 100% sure. We don't believe that there's an edge any more than there's an edge to the Earth, like...

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the surface of the Earth.

• 20:13Paul Mecurio?

  So there's not a sign, "Welcome to the edge of the universe."

• 20:16Janna Levin?

  Right. So, you know, if I travel from New York City and I go in a straight line, I don't fall off the edge of the Earth.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:22Janna Levin?

  Right? There's no edge. I make my way all the way around and I come back to New York City again. And that's actually a really valid model for a universe that is finite, not infinite, in which you go into a spaceship, leave the Earth, you travel in a straight line, you go out of the galaxy, you don't deviate, and you find yourself approaching the Milky Way again with the Earth in front of you. And you've never fallen off the edge of the universe. It's completely contiguous, but it is finite.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have to repeat a quote from one of my earlier books. "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to Earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get back to Einstein's theories of relativity. Tell me about the intersection of time and space, which feels so unintuitive, but actually, we exist. This way, the example I give is if I say, "Jenna,

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll meet you tomorrow at 10 o'clock." What's your next question?

• 21:49Janna Levin?

  Where?

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where? Sorry. Where? I gave you a time, but I didn't give you a space.

• 21:55Paul Mecurio?

  I'd say, "Are you bringing wine?"

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then I say, "Paul, I'll meet you tomorrow at Starbucks." Okay? We know which Starbucks, and then you'll have to say?

• 22:05Paul Mecurio?

  What time?

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What time? So you know, we know this intuitively. So then Einstein stitches them together. Why do people lose their mind?

• 22:13Janna Levin?

  Well, I mean, it's amazing, because a lot of things he did were actually really simple and intuitive. But he pushes it much farther, where you'd... Many people would start to get flummoxed and give it up and just be happy to meet at Starbucks with a bottle of wine. That doesn't really make any sense, but okay, Paul.

• 22:32Paul Mecurio?

  Always go to one with a bathroom. You can do whatever you want.

• 22:38Janna Levin?

  So he starts to think, "Well, you know, I can draw up and down, north and southeast and west. Why don't I just also draw a dimension called time? And then we can just agree on where we are in space and time." And then he kind of pushes that further and further and further until he starts to say, "Oh, it's a spacetime."

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As one phrase.

• 23:02Janna Levin?

  One phrase.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spacetime.

• 23:04Janna Levin?

  I don't, right, I can't, I don't like editors out there. I don't like when you put a dash in there. It's spacetime.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, paired words have to evolve.

• 23:13Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they eventually lose their hyphen. Okay? But like percent used to be two words, then it was hyphenated.

• 23:20Janna Levin?

  Yeah, in French it is.

• 23:21Paul Mecurio?

  Well, why don't you like the hyphen?

• 23:23Janna Levin?

  Because it separates space and time in a way that Einstein was trying to transcend.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in this book, we did not use a hyphen. We have editors that followed suit here. So we got National Geographic editors. That's a National Geographic book. Okay, so... So this, so what that means is that if time is a coordinate, it can stretch or shrink. That's where you have different rates of that. Christopher Nolan did that in, in the movie Interstellar.

• 23:52Janna Levin?

  Yeah, which was by our friend, the original treatment was by Kip Thorne.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:56Janna Levin?

  Who's gonna probably come up in conversation today.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's your counterpart at Caltech.

• 24:00Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:01Janna Levin?

  Well, that's a compliment. Thank you. I'll take it.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally.

• 24:06Janna Levin?

  Um, no, Kip was one of the most gracious, you know, elder statesman of science when I first met him. He was one of the most generous.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Producer of Interstellar. So that meant you knew the science had some backbone.

• 24:17Janna Levin?

  And then he won a Nobel Prize. Really weird order of things.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 24:22Janna Levin?

  Chronologically weird order of things.

• 24:24Paul Mecurio?

  This, behind that Nobel Prize, the real person was Matthew McConaughey. Gave him all the information. He's a brilliant handsome man.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The person behind the Nobel Prize, yes.

• 24:33Paul Mecurio?

  He'd hang out his trailer and Matthew would be like, no, man, that's not how you do it.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, but wait, so you have, if you're nearer a, a, a significant source of gravity, your timeframe slows down relative to other people.

• 24:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah, this.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's freaky.

• 24:49Janna Levin?

  It's very freaky, but, but in Einstein's language, it's no more freaky than the fact that my left and my right are rotated relative to your left and your right. In Einstein's language, you can rotate space and time differently than somebody else's notion of space and time.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coordinate space.

• 25:08Janna Levin?

  Yeah, in a four dimensional space.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Easy to grab there, yeah.

• 25:12Janna Levin?

  That, you know, when you near the black hole, it's as though you're rotating in spacetime, just like you could rotate left and right relative to somebody far away. And just as I won't be like, my left is an absolute notion. Obviously I'm rotated and it's relative to your left.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I face you, that's my right.

• 25:31Janna Levin?

  Exactly. A hundred percent rotation.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 25:34Janna Levin?

  And he says, as you near the black hole, you have a hundred percent rotation of your space. If you're far from the black hole.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With my time.

• 25:42Janna Levin?

  That's near the black hole. It's just like my left being a hundred percent rotated into your right.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff.

• 25:47Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So what about, uh, wormholes? And whether we can use that for time travel?

• 25:55Janna Levin?

  That's Kip Thorne, or maybe it's Matthew McConaughey. I'm not really sure. I don't know.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we do this without a DeLorean?

• 26:03Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is now, by the way, on Broadway. It's Back to the Future.

• 26:06Janna Levin?

  No way.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Musical, now on Broadway. Yes.

• 26:10Janna Levin?

  You really said that as though you were promoting.

• 26:14Paul Mecurio?

  He's got a piece of the act.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just a quick point there, to your space-time fact, just to slip this in, because we have it in the book. It's, it's, if you go in a time machine and say, I want to go back three days. So you go in and then you step out and it's three days earlier. You would be in the vacuum of empty space because Earth is in a different place.

• 26:35Paul Mecurio?

  But why is it empty? It's still Earth. Why are you in a vacuum of?

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Earth is in orbit around the sun.

• 26:40Janna Levin?

  And the atmosphere went with it.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth is, you, you, you just went back in time, but Earth was in orbit? You go three days back in time, you didn't say, keep me on Earth and do that.

• 26:51Janna Levin?

  And the whole solar system moved.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you actually want to go back in time and show up on this stage, you have to go back in time and in space. So that the Earth is where you need it to be at that time. So, the space-time thing is real. If you want a, if you want a time machine your way around, around the galaxy. Now, they got around this in Back to the Future, because he jumps into the car, quickly types in a thing, and he goes back exactly thirty years.

• 27:18Janna Levin?

  Ah, so he's in the same orbit, same point in the orbit.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would have been in the same spot in its orbit.

• 27:22Janna Levin?

  But the, he, did he also calculate for the fact that the whole solar system is rotating around the center of the galaxy?

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For thirty years? No, he left that one out. You gotta give him a hall pass. They got one of those right.

• 27:33Paul Mecurio?

  But what is magical about thirty years in that scenario?

• 27:35Janna Levin?

  It's just.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it goes, wait.

• 27:37Janna Levin?

  Any years.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. In that scenario, it goes from nineteen eighty-five, the year of the film, to nineteen fifty-five.

• 27:43Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is a very fun setting to put a movie in, okay? Because teenagers are coming of age, so.

• 27:52Paul Mecurio?

  Chuck Berry's music gets stolen. It's a great thing.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Chuck Berry's music? Do you know, are we speak, do, have you, who has not seen Back to the Future?

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, a hand went up. Security, could you take this person out?

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just a quick point about Chuck Berry's music. Marvin Berry, the brother or the cousin? Was he the cousin? Okay, here's Marty play Chuck Berry. But that song isn't written yet. He holds up the phone for Chuck Berry to hear Marty play this Johnny B. Goode song. Was it Johnny B. Goode? Yeah. To play it. And he says, "Mar- uh, Chuck, this is the sound you've been looking for." Okay. So, holding aside that it credits a white person for giving music to a black person. Holding that aside!

• 28:40Paul Mecurio?

  Which is exactly what I was gonna say.

• 28:42Janna Levin?

  You're holding a lot aside. That's a tsunami.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holding that aside. Uh, there's something called a gin particle. You know about gin particles? These are things that are neither created nor destroyed. And they involve the time continuum. It's a loop in time where that song in that movie was never written. It only existed to be handed into a time loop. And we call it gin particles because you can hand a person something that you then give to me later in time. And that was never created nor it was...

• 29:14Paul Mecurio?

  No, but when she hands you that later in time, you can't say that it wasn't invented previous to that.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because I go back in time and give it to her. This is, the time travel enables gin particles to exist.

• 29:25Paul Mecurio?

  So, this is along the lines in the book where you talk about, sort of, you go back in time with a spaceship and just before you're about to leave, the day before you blow up the spaceship, right? And then you've got...

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wouldn't do that, but yeah, go on. Yeah.

• 29:39Paul Mecurio?

  Well, it's in your book, sir.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a scenario. Go on.

• 29:43Paul Mecurio?

  And where you're talking about parallel universe, right? And sort of how things break off.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 29:48Paul Mecurio?

  Right?

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. That's right. So, how do we, how does, can we travel backwards in time authentically?

• 29:53Janna Levin?

  Well, this is all interesting related to it because you're assuming that the person who traveled back in time could make a choice that was inconsistent. With the physical universe in which they live.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Janna Levin?

  Right, and Neil, you saying, "Well, I wouldn't do that," is actually kind of close to the bone, because it's really the presumption that we have a free will that could do something that defies the laws of physics. So you can completely go back in time, as long as you don't exercise any free will that deviates from the consistency of that universe.

• 30:23Paul Mecurio?

  That's what you call in the book, "The butterfly effect," right? Like, you go back in time.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:26Paul Mecurio?

  And then you start this sort of ripple, right? But so-

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could then change all future events.

• 30:31Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 30:31Janna Levin?

  But you don't have the option to do that.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if it prevents the birth of you, who then went back in time-

• 30:36Paul Mecurio?

  Wait, wait, wait, let's back up. What?

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So my favorite example of this is, is I see a friend of mine walking down a corridor, and they slip on a banana peel, okay? And they get hurt. I don't want my friend to get hurt. So I pull out a new texting service that uses particles that travel backwards in time, tachyons. And so I send a text backwards through time, so that my friend receives the text before he steps on the banana peel, and therefore they don't fall. So I do that.

• 31:07Paul Mecurio?

  But what if he has his phone on airplane mode, and he doesn't get the text?

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's find out. So, I send the text back. My person feels the vibrate, picks it up, looks at it, and it says, "Watch out for the banana peel." But while they're looking at it, they don't see the banana peel, and they slip on it. So the very fact that I sent the message back in time is what caused the slippage on the banana peel. And so that's the temporal event laws of physics that you're referencing.

• 31:38Janna Levin?

  Strictly speaking, the laws of physics, we know that general relativity has universes hypothetical, not ones that we've yet observed, in which you can do exactly what you just described, go back in time. But there is no law of physics that we know of that allows you to do so in a way that is inconsistent-

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That prevents you from existing.

• 32:00Janna Levin?

  With the exact path that you are on.

• 32:01Paul Mecurio?

  So the idea of being able to alter my future by going back in time is-

• 32:06Janna Levin?

  It's very 12 monkeys. Yeah.

• 32:09Paul Mecurio?

  Ooh.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twelve monkeys?

• 32:12Janna Levin?

  Yeah, you don't know, you're giving people a hard time about how did you miss twelve monkeys?

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember, I saw it, but I forgot it.

• 32:17Janna Levin?

  It's somewhere in between now and, you know, Back to the Future.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I forgot it, sorry.

• 32:19Paul Mecurio?

  But could that be wrong?

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could what be wrong?

• 32:22Paul Mecurio?

  Could that be wrong, right? So there was a, there was a refinement of the process to figure out the age of the universe, right? It started three billion and then 5.5 billion or whatever. And to this day, right? There could be some new science that gets discovered that makes this inaccurate, right? What we believe now.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or some time science.

• 32:39Paul Mecurio?

  So there's nothing absolute.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That remains to be discovered.

• 32:41Paul Mecurio?

  There's nothing absolute.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never, never is there.

• 32:43Paul Mecurio?

  Other than Neil's handsomeness, there is nothing absolute.

• 32:47Janna Levin?

  And even Kip Thorne, who's come up a couple of times, who looked at this concept of wormholes. Wormholes were originally proposed kind of like, you know, the battery tunnel or something. It was a shortcut from one place to another, you know? Or you go under the East River and you get, you connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. Not that weird, right? To find a shortcut to get from one place to another. But what Kip Thorne did, which was exceptional, is he figured out a way to make that shortcut also traverse through time. So that you weren't just traveling from a shortcut from one space to another space. So you didn't have to go the long way around, but you could actually go earlier in time.

• 33:32Janna Levin?

  And they were time travel wormholes. They were time wormholes. But I think if I remember correctly, you could not go back earlier than the time... Oh, no, than the time at which the wormhole was created.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 33:47Janna Levin?

  The whether you could go, so none of these things forbid the possibility that you could go back in time before you were born, kill your grandfather, the grandfather's paradox, before he had your mother and then you were never born.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to kill him, you just have to prevent them from meeting.

• 34:03Janna Levin?

  Well, this is kind of...

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's so Terminator.

• 34:05Paul Mecurio?

  Or slipping on a banana peel, one of the two.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just, or have them have sex 10 minutes later than they did. A different person gets born.

• 34:12Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, now I'm throwing up in my mouth a little bit.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, I'm sorry. Okay.

• 34:15Janna Levin?

  It's actually very much like your banana peel story because a lot of people think that the resolution is that if you went back in time and tried to kill your grandfather, you might just wound him. And then he's so mentally disturbed that when he has your mother, she's tormented and traumatized, and you're so psychotic that you go back in time to try to kill him.

• 34:33Paul Mecurio?

  What happened in both of your childhoods?

• 34:38Paul Mecurio?

  So, so what you're saying is that the wormhole is like a doorway that has to exist at that point in time, or before that point in time that you want to travel back to, right?

• 34:49Janna Levin?

  It was just Kip Thorne's idea for a way to make that happen, without altering the entire universe, a way of doing it locally, so that you don't have to think of an entire universe that violates, you know, time moving forward. But you could do it right here. You could make it like a machine.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're still constructing the rules of time travel, is what it sounds like.

• 35:10Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. So, so, but traveling to the future, that's no problem?

• 35:15Janna Levin?

  Oh yeah, I can definitely, obviously, we're all traveling to the future. We are in the future from where we were.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At a rate of one second per second.

• 35:22Janna Levin?

  Exactly, and none of us can stop it. It's really weird. I can stand still in space, more or less, but I can't stand still in time.

• 35:29Paul Mecurio?

  So, right now, this is the future. It's not the present?

• 35:32Janna Levin?

  It's the present, but a second ago when we stood on stage is the past. We have traveled.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are prisoners of the present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future.

• 35:45Janna Levin?

  He went back in time and gave himself that note.

• 35:47Paul Mecurio?

  That's what happens when you drop acid before a show.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so...

• 35:51Paul Mecurio?

  Wait, wait, can we, can we just go back to that for one second?

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back to the future?

• 35:54Paul Mecurio?

  There can't be, there, there is a present.

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:58Paul Mecurio?

  Right now.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 36:00Paul Mecurio?

  And there is no future.

• 36:02Janna Levin?

  Um, I, I, I can't say that. So, there's questions like, is this like a hill where the future exists already and we're just traveling towards it, but it already is there, like a physical hill, or is it kind of unraveling in front of us instantaneously? That's not a question we know the answer to.

• 36:22Paul Mecurio?

  Is there a predetermined destiny that's scientifically based?

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's part of that question. Well, you're not going to stop the expansion of the universe. I would call that... A scientific future.

• 36:31Janna Levin?

  I would say that if it wasn't for the pretty big curveball of quantum mechanics, that the answer scientifically would have been, if not for that curveball that, as you pointed out, happened right at this time a century ago, absolutely predetermined from the second the universe was created. Us sitting here would have been exactly as it had to be. Quantum mechanics is a curveball, but it's not a curveball that really saves us a lot.

• 36:57Paul Mecurio?

  So what is deja vu? In all seriousness, like, we all had it, right? Like, we're in a moment where we go, "I remember feeling this thing," or "It just happened to me the other day," right? So is that somehow tied to this? Could one argue that it's tied to all of this?

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, George Carlin argued that he has vujadé, which is where he goes into a place and he's certain he's never been there before. Okay? So that's me. That's right.

• 37:34Paul Mecurio?

  So I mean, to me, this feels in some way, I mean, you're nodding your head.

• 37:38Janna Levin?

  Are you having deja vu right now?

• 37:39Paul Mecurio?

  I am. I feel like I was in a place before where Neil was telling that joke.

• 37:43Janna Levin?

  Because we're on this terrible loophole. We're never getting off of it.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So we got to bring this to a close here.

• 37:52Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, can we talk about the human ego? No, free will. You talk about free will in the book in the context of this.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a whole nother.

• 37:58Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, but it's a really fascinating concept.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then they have to buy the book.

• 38:02Paul Mecurio?

  Well, I'm helping you sell the book, buddy. Why don't you talk to them? I can't do everything, Neil. I can't write the book. He didn't write the book. Lindsay wrote the book.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Janet, take us out with, can you imagine a future of actual wormholes that we create? Or warp drives? Something to help us move across the galaxy with something other than chemical fuel rockets?

• 38:29Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I actually can. No, but it's been, it's really, so just like you build a bridge, you know, under the water between Manhattan and Brooklyn, you have to think about like-

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tunnel.

• 38:40Janna Levin?

  A tunnel.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Under the water.

• 38:42Janna Levin?

  To me, they're all bridges.

• 38:43Paul Mecurio?

  Wow, you just lost a lot of credibility with me. I'm not being a jerk, but I know the difference between a bridge and a tunnel.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:52Paul Mecurio?

  I'm the smartest one on this stage right now, everybody.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:55Paul Mecurio?

  Good night.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, no.

• 38:58Janna Levin?

  So you know about the spherical cow? This is kind of like all physicists think anything that connects one thing to another is a bridge. Anything that connects one thing to another is a bridge. And you think about how much energy, money, it would cost and how to do it, like what materials you would need. So very similarly, when Kip Thorne and people like that were talking about wormholes in spacetime, they were like, what kind of fuel would I need? And they just made it up. I know it has to have certain properties, it has to repel, it has to keep this open. And they, you know, made the wormhole great, but then they looked at the fuel and they were like, we've never seen anything like this in the observable universe. So nobody knows of a fuel or an energy source that can do what the wormhole can do.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if we had that fuel, we could build wormholes.

• 39:45Paul Mecurio?

  Well, that was my, how does one make a wormhole? And it's very difficult to get contractors to do work. How long does it take to get someone before they give you an estimate and actually start on the wormhole?

• 39:56Janna Levin?

  Time, you're asking me about the time?

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Plus, wormholes, as I understand it, are unstable. If you go through a wormhole, it could collapse on you in a moment's notice.

• 40:03Janna Levin?

  Right. That was a real problem, is it kept pinching shut and separating the two spacetimes completely. And so you, you know, you couldn't make it through without being crushed to death or annihilated. But doing that, you can make them stable again if you make up a form of energy that we don't have never seen in the universe. But it doesn't mean we never will see. I mean Einstein's greatest blunder, you know, in 19, when did he, 1916 was general philosophy? When did he write it down? Must have been that same year.

• 40:35Paul Mecurio?

  1917.

• 40:36Janna Levin?

  1917. And it was 19, I believe in you.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good, good.

• 40:42Paul Mecurio?

  You wrote the book!

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good.

• 40:44Paul Mecurio?

  No, no, I don't care.

• 40:45Janna Levin?

  He is the smartest person on this planet.

• 40:46Paul Mecurio?

  Shut up, wait.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I was impressed.

• 40:49Paul Mecurio?

  I made notes, buddy. I made notes. Hang on a second.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just looked at me.

• 40:53Paul Mecurio?

  You talk about the difference between bridges and tunnel. I'll be right back here, right?

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, very, Paul, we're proud of you. It was real good. So, so, so watch. So, so, so.

• 41:05Janna Levin?

  The universe finds a way is all I'm saying.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and it's not any different from going back 200 years ago and saying, in order to get to the mute, the moon, we need a fuel that has this amount of energy in it. They, they would not be able to fathom that. And you pack all the energy into this tube, and then you can reach that they would, they would say, what's wrong with you? Okay, so that's what gives me hope that you can make a wormhole in the, we'll go right to you when we have the material. And then that would completely transform transportation in the world. In Star Trek, you wouldn't need the transporter, just open a wormhole and step down to the planet.

• 41:49Janna Levin?

  Much less terrifying than having all your atoms reassembled.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, exactly.

• 41:53Paul Mecurio?

  Is that doable at some point, you think?

• 41:55Janna Levin?

  Transporters?

• 41:56Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, to break down your molecules and put them back together.

• 41:59Janna Levin?

  Technically, they have teleported a molecule from one place to another.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean.

• 42:06Janna Levin?

  A molecule.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taking the energy that it.

• 42:09Janna Levin?

  All of its facts.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and put it over here.

• 42:13Janna Levin?

  Tossed them over there.

• 42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Paul Mecurio?

  And it, it appeared exactly as it was when before.

• 42:20Janna Levin?

  Now, we have a lot of facts about us. It's a lot more information.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than just the existence of the.

• 42:25Paul Mecurio?

  I know you two do. You got a lot of issues inside of it.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, so just again, to round this, to close this out and land this plane, this rocket. So I look forward to a future, because that's the whole spirit of the book, where the next wave of what happens is beyond the reach of what we're, we can even imagine building today. That's the beyond infinity.

• 42:52Paul Mecurio?

  See, but this argues against your thing in all seriousness about sort of the ego. Thinking we're at the center of the universe. So when you were talking about how they found a way to invent fuel to go to the moon, it was ego-less. It was actually the opposite. It was striving to find other life, right? So it works against that argument, doesn't it, on some level? About that we're ego-driven?

• 43:15Janna Levin?

  Wait, you're saying we are not ego-driven because of the example of the moon?

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never said we were ego-driven.

• 43:21Janna Levin?

  But I think the example of the moon is very ego-driven because it was very fueled by the Cold War. When the Soviets put Yuri Gagarin in space for the first time, Americans panicked and they said, you know, the phrase...

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Translation: We lost our shit.

• 43:34Janna Levin?

  We lost our shit. And that's when, you know, when JFK came out and said, "Hey, space exploration is for all mankind." It was very ego-driven in that sense. So, I mean, we are what we are. We're a product of evolution and maybe the ego was important in our survival. And here we are.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the fact that we can't be contained in a box.

• 43:57Janna Levin?

  Which is also important for our survival.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed it is.

• 44:00Paul Mecurio?

  I've always said that about Neil. You can control them, but you can't contain them.

• 44:05Janna Levin?

  Can you control them?

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be the last words of this recording of StarTalk. Join me in thanking Janna and our comedian, Paul.