Just Another Really Good Episode with Brian Greene

How do particles get mass? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discover squarks, sneutrinos, the Higgs boson, and whether dark matter has a particle with theoretical physicist Brian Greene.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, have you recovered from this?

• 0:01Chuck Nice?

  I have not.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conversation with Brian Greene.

• 0:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm surprised that I can even speak to you right now, to be honest.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look like you blew a couple of gaskets in there.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  It's more than a gasket. This was mind blowing, beyond mind blowing. I mean.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like blood coming out of your eye sockets.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your brain said, I gotta, I can't handle this.

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, when you and Brian get going, man, I've got to tell you, it's, uh, it's tough to keep up. I don't know.

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck, baby.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  What's up, Neil?

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. You know what you're going to talk about today?

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  I do not.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the only way to talk about physics.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is to talk about physics with Brian Greene in the house.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  That is true. Thank you.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta, you know, you can't, it's empty unless you have Brian Greene in the conversation.

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's just up the street, up at Columbia. You're a dual professor, professor of physics and professor of mathematics.

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Wow. You get paid twice for that. But I go to no faculty meeting. I'm always in the other department.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool. I'm sorry, I can't, I'm math today.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're author of several books, Until the End of Time, was that your more recent one?

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  That's my most recent.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that came out how long ago?

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  2020, right at the pandemic. What a moment to have a book called Until the End of Time.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the one I think most people know, if they know you at all, The Elegant Universe. There's another one, The Fabric of the Cosmos?

• 1:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely. That's the next one.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hidden Reality.

• 1:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that was about multiple universes.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, man. So he's all up in it.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  I believe The Fabric of the Universe is a tweed.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tweed?

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A satin weave.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, welcome back to the show.

• 1:58Brian Greene?

  Thank you.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like you're more than a three-peat, I think, at this point.

• 2:01Brian Greene?

  Yeah, oh, God.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're involved in a lot of things. You're writing the, other than being professor, you're writing the books. And are we in the 15th year of your, your World Science Festival? How many years have you been doing it?

• 2:14Brian Greene?

  That's right, we started 2008. So if you just subtract, it's even a little bit more, but the pandemic changed things a little bit.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:20Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but yeah, we're coming up to probably the 15th live event.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congratulations on that, although it's a little audacious to hold it in New York and call it the World Science Festival.

• 2:29Brian Greene?

  But we don't only have it in New York, we also have it in Australia. And we've had events in Amsterdam, in Moscow.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at that, I got nothing, I can't.

• 2:38Brian Greene?

  In Italy, in Spain.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I try to, I try to.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, New York is the world.

• 2:43Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  Let's be honest. I mean, for anybody out there listening, I'm sorry, you go to Paris, you find Parisians, you know, you, you go to England, you, you, you find the Brits, but you come to New York, you find everybody.

• 2:55Brian Greene?

  Audacious would have been like the cosmic science festival.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:00Brian Greene?

  Yeah, you know, then you would have had a point.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, congratulations on bringing it to the world.

• 3:06Brian Greene?

  Thank you.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, or taking it to the world. And what I enjoyed most about the several that I've attended is the effort to, to bring the arts into it in a meaningful way.

• 3:19Brian Greene?

  Oh.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, there is, you know, there are many artists who I would later learn, or, or not rare, who are inspired by science and the universe and discoveries. And they will compose dance and music and, and you have a mixture of these sessions.

• 3:36Brian Greene?

  We do, we do. I mean, the goal is to have science feel connected to everything that matters to us. And of course, culture is a big part of it.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Culture and arts matter to everybody.

• 3:46Brian Greene?

  In fact, now with AI, we're doing a program on the arts in the age of artificial intelligence. So how is AI changing how artists approach their work and how scientists think about art?

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There'll be more unemployed artists.

• 3:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, well.

• 3:58Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but it's a funny thing, people say that.

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  Just not paid.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They won't be unemployed, things just won't be paid.

• 4:03Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but when every new technology comes along, like the camera, people are like, okay, now you don't need artists anymore because anyone can just, you know, click. But there are artists who use the camera to create things that mere mortals can't.

• 4:13Chuck Nice?

  And there are painters who actually take a picture and then they actually paint the picture as opposed to having someone sit for a portrait.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's, but that wasn't the biggest. The biggest thing, the biggest force operating was you no longer needed the artist to portray reality, because of course the camera captured that.

• 4:29Brian Greene?

  Freed him up.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freed the artist to portray impressionistic.

• 4:34Chuck Nice?

  Reality.

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. It's not what the scene looks like, it's what the scene.

• 4:39Brian Greene?

  It feels like.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  It's the interpretation.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That matters.

• 4:42Brian Greene?

  It's huge. I mean, that's what is the magic in so much expression, right? It's what we do with it as opposed to just literally depicting what's out there. So there are many people who project that AI is going to create, you know, a new kind of art.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Brian Greene?

  Just the way the camera does.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just the way the camera, so it has to shake out. It still needs to.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  I think AI will just accelerates creativity. It doesn't replace it because what happens is you have associations that are being made at a level that you as a human being would maybe eventually over a course of years, you might make those associations, but the computer can do it almost instantaneously. And then you take that and you say, hmm, what does that mean to me?

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it pushes you along.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Pushes you along.

• 5:27Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but the flip side of that is if you have a computer creating so much, there's a lot of chaff, you know, that you have to separate out.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  So true.

• 5:34Brian Greene?

  So, yeah.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's chaff even in people. You're born and raised in New York City.

• 5:40Brian Greene?

  Yeah, right across the street from where we are sitting right now.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a selective high school that specialized in science, in the way the Bronx High School of Science specialized. In fact, they're rivals.

• 5:51Brian Greene?

  That's right.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Intellectual rivals.

• 5:53Brian Greene?

  Why do you think that we've wrestled each other now? I always lose them.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would not like a book if it didn't have equations in it.

• 6:00Brian Greene?

  It's true.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is weird.

• 6:02Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that has changed, I should say.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you read a novel.

• 6:05Brian Greene?

  That's right, now and then.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That meant you thought more deeply about math than you thought about words.

• 6:10Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but the one change I would make to that statement was, it was when it came to books for a science class, if the book was chock full of words, I feel like, oh, no, there's a lot of interpretation that's going to go into this particular science class. But if it was chock full of equations, I was like, nah, this is rigorous, this is going to be specific, and it's going to be something that I can nail because I don't have to interpret, I can just really engage with the equation.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so in a history class or a literature class. You would have been in tears.

• 6:45Brian Greene?

  Well, again, it was mostly just for science. But you're absolutely right. There is a different mindset that you bring to a history class or an English class, which I did not have a full appreciation for when I was younger. That's absolutely true. And as I got older, and especially there's a moment when I graduated college and I said to myself, I think I just got a technical education as opposed to learning about the world and life and humanity. And I went into kind of a tailspin for a little while because I was like, what did I do? And that really then changed it all for me. And words have become vital to the way I engage with the world.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think? I mean, it's for bestselling books. Yeah, but words matter.

• 7:25Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you want to talk to other people who are not physicists.

• 7:28Brian Greene?

  And if you want to really get the essence of what someone's about as opposed to quantifying some quality of abstract or objective reality.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right. I think that's a, that's an enlightened posture.

• 7:41Brian Greene?

  Yeah, I've gotten there. Took me a while.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I want to do is follow up. There was a question to our cosmic queries that I didn't have an answer to.

• 7:53Brian Greene?

  Oh, no. Here we go.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And I said, you know, I don't know. I gotta.

• 7:57Brian Greene?

  We're gonna have to get Brian Greene in here.

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta get the big guns in here, all right? If I remember the question, it was, what happens if a quark falls into a black hole? You have a quark pair.

• 8:11Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've only ever found them in quark pairs.

• 8:13Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And in a normal lab, if you take them and pull them apart, the strength, the force that wants to bring them together grows, which sounds weird when you're used to gravity and other things where distance makes something weaker.

• 8:28Brian Greene?

  But they're like really creepy identical twins. Like, you ever meet identical twins that are like super creepy?

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they sort of talk together.

• 8:37Brian Greene?

  Where they kind of talk together. They got their own language.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:40Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, but it's kind of like a rubber band.

• 8:43Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you stretch a rubber band, the force is greater.

• 8:46Brian Greene?

  Yeah, the gluonic force between them.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The gluonic force. Because it's held together by gluons. Okay, so now, as I pull it apart, there will be a point where it snaps. As I understand my nuclear physics, it snaps with the exact amount of energy you put in, so that out of that energy creates two other quarks.

• 9:05Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now I have four quarks.

• 9:06Brian Greene?

  Quark, antiquark, pairs.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pairs, so thank you, okay, pairs, okay, so now.

• 9:11Brian Greene?

  So you want to see what happens?

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you send a pair of quarks down the black hole, it gets split, we make two other quarks.

• 9:18Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do, wait, thank you!

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you keep doing this, and they, so wouldn't the quarks eat the entire gravitational field of the black hole?

• 9:31Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that you wouldn't have a black hole left, you just have a ball of quarks?

• 9:34Brian Greene?

  You have to realize, number one, that we still don't know the under, the physics of the singularity of a black hole well enough.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why else did I invite you into this office now?

• 9:43Brian Greene?

  So, so, well, I wish, one day, one day, I pray that I'll sit here and tell you what happens at the singularity of a black hole.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring the person who knows, next time.

• 9:50Brian Greene?

  But here's the thing, there is nobody on planet Earth who knows the answer, unfortunately, yet.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:55Brian Greene?

  When we follow the mathematics to the actual singularity of a black hole.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Using Einstein general relativity.

• 10:00Brian Greene?

  Using Einstein general relativity, and even some of the modifications that have come from more recent thinking, we're still not there yet to truly understand what happens. And I should say, there are ideas, there are ideas of things, I don't know if you've heard of them, called fuzzballs, where there isn't actually a singularity, and the black hole is actually a more fuzzy collection of matter that, yeah. So there are ideas that people.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes your math come out, okay.

• 10:23Brian Greene?

  Makes the math come out, okay, but we're not.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they say the black holes are where, the singularity at the center of a black hole is where God is dividing by zero.

• 10:30Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that's a Stephen Hawking quip or something, I think it is, you know.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you remember why, if you divide by zero, this, it blows out.

• 10:37Brian Greene?

  Right, yeah, and it's actually, in a sense, it's literal, because if you calculate what's known as the scalar curvature, which is a number that characterizes how warped a region of space is.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:49Brian Greene?

  It does go to infinity as you go to the center of a black hole, just like when you divide by zero, it goes to infinity. In fact, it goes to infinity as the sixth power of your distance. So we know very well how badly behaved the center of a black hole is.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So goes to infinity. Infinity fast.

• 11:05Brian Greene?

  Goes to infinity fast.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's crazy.

• 11:07Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and so if you ask what really happens if something is just being crushed at the center, we can't really answer yet. So is it possible that as a quark antiquark pair goes, that the tidal forces will create additional quark antiquark pair? Sure.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you'd have the proliferation of quarks. Make me some sound.

• 11:25Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Brian Greene?

  So there may be a cloud and there may be some sort of cloud that forms just before it hits. Ultimately, we believe it hits the singularity, whatever that means, because we don't really know what the singularity is.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's a fuzzball, you can have a fuzzball of quarks.

• 11:41Brian Greene?

  Or the fuzzball may have a slightly different impact on the quark antiquark pair. Maybe before, yeah, influence on it. Yeah, yeah.

• 11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Impact.

• 11:50Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So it's a really good question, but it will have to fully await a full understanding of what truly happened at the center.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Answer it wasn't just my personal ignorance. It's a total ignorance of all humans on Earth.

• 12:03Brian Greene?

  Yeah, and there are.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't feel so bad.

• 12:04Brian Greene?

  And I should say there are many, many questions like that that we're still struggling with. Like, we believe that when any information falls into a black hole, we believe that information does not get destroyed. But for a while Stephen Hawking thought, no, any information ultimately hits the singularity and leaves our universe. He changed his mind later in life, which just goes to show.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bet with?

• 12:28Brian Greene?

  Yes, that's right. So they bet, I think in Encyclopedia, you know, the the source of information that we humans have created. So there.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keith Thorne was one of the executive producers on Interstellar. And he sort of spearheaded the effort, among others, but he was the exponent to build the Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, that detected colliding black holes. And he won the Nobel Prize for that. So he's significant in our field and I have at least a few books by him on my shelves.

• 13:00Brian Greene?

  And he was clearly on a level of geekdom where he bets encyclopedias. Yeah, but in terms of his book, he wrote an encyclopedic book on gravity and black holes, which is about, you know, 1,200 pages just filled with equations. Therefore, I loved it when I was a kid.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But with the Misner Thorn Wheeler.

• 13:20Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. I have two copies of that in my office.

• 13:23Brian Greene?

  Two copies?

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 13:24Brian Greene?

  Do you want to cross-reference or something?

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of those mine and the other one belonged to my wife.

• 13:30Brian Greene?

  Oh.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has a PhD in mathematical physics.

• 13:32Brian Greene?

  Wow, that's so cool.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we met in relativity class.

• 13:34Brian Greene?

  Really?

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taught by John Wheeler.

• 13:36Brian Greene?

  What? Really?

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes!

• 13:37Brian Greene?

  You took relativity from Wheeler?

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I did.

• 13:40Brian Greene?

  That is amazing. Wow. Nice.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so John Wheeler is one of the authors of this Misler, Thorne, and Wheeler.

• 13:46Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Misner taught physics at University of Maryland.

• 13:51Brian Greene?

  Charles Misner.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles Misner, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I would think of it as a quark catastrophe that would happen in the center of the black hole. The trouble with quarks, they're like tribbles. By the way, there's a previous, if we're physics geeking out here.

• 14:05Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a previous time, was it 100 years, 110 years ago? There's something called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Do you remember that?

• 14:12Brian Greene?

  I remember it. Well, I wasn't there, but I've learned about it, yeah. This is the start of quantum physics.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it had to predate 1900.

• 14:20Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It predated Planck, Max Planck.

• 14:23Brian Greene?

  Oh, okay.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there was an equation that would show how much energy would come from glowing objects.

• 14:29Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how much energy of a certain wavelength of light and then another wavelength. And so there'd be the spectrum of what it gives you.

• 14:38Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you follow that equation to higher and higher energies, it blows up. And it's called the ultraviolet catastrophe.

• 14:48Brian Greene?

  I see.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we knew that's not happening in the actual universe. But we had no theoretical understanding of why the actual universe was not doing what our equation said. So we knew something was missing.

• 14:59Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Max Planck comes along, finish the story.

• 15:03Brian Greene?

  Yes, and Max Planck comes along and he suggests an idea that he never fully believed. This is interesting. He suggests that maybe the energy only comes in packets of certain quantized sizes. And therefore, your calculation of the amount of energy was biased by assuming that energy could come in arbitrarily large or small amounts. If you assume it only comes in packets of a minimum size, then the total energy inside that cavity

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It actually converges and drops off.

• 15:32Brian Greene?

  And it agrees with experiments.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:34Brian Greene?

  But the weird thing is...

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he got an equation. The equation is like, holy shit. That this would come out of someone's head.

• 15:41Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To make this happen.

• 15:42Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got an exponential, and the exponential has interesting properties. Where it goes up and then it comes down again if it's a negative exponent. I mean, there's a fun math in there.

• 15:51Brian Greene?

  Exactly.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And was it just a fitting function? Or did he actually have deep physics insight?

• 15:56Brian Greene?

  He had a model in mind. He really quantized the energy. He broke it up into little bits and redid the calculation. And that's what came out. But then later on, he never fully believed that energy in light, in photons, as we now call it, did come in little packets.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:14Brian Greene?

  He said, sure, the math seems to describe it.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But.

• 16:18Brian Greene?

  But I'm not willing to go to that next up. Of ascribing a full reality to it. And so it's really Einstein who came along and came up with the idea of photons, more particularly with the photoelectric effect. And that's how he wins the Nobel Prize. Many people think he won the prize for special relativity or general relativity. No.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My boy, Chris, he could have had eight Nobel Prizes. His Nobel Prizes are for what he's least famous for.

• 16:41Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 16:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Brian Greene?

  Perhaps the most impactful.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  That's straight up.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are people winning Nobel Prizes for discovering things that he predicted.

• 16:54Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you add everything he predicted to the Nobel Prize count, plus what everything, if they give out Nobel Prizes for everything you did, I give him eight Nobel Prizes. What would you give him?

• 17:03Brian Greene?

  Uh, well, certainly gravitational waves. Although again, he didn't fully believe it, but it comes right out of his 1916 and 1918 paper.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you give him a Nobel Prize for everything people discovered based on his stuff.

• 17:15Brian Greene?

  Well, then it's kind of everything.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The person who's on the Nobel Prize receiving, I said, nope.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  It's like that Bugs Bunny, first base Bugs Bunny, second base Bugs Bunny, third base Bugs Bunny. Yeah, every Nobel Prize is Albert Einstein.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the answer right there.

• 17:31Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, and so of course, since if energy is quantized, thus is born the branch of physics called

• 17:40Brian Greene?

  Quantum mechanics.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum mechanics.

• 17:43Brian Greene?

  Wow. And that probably has had the greatest impact on life as we know it.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the year 1900.

• 17:48Brian Greene?

  Yeah, well, 1905 is when Einstein writes his paper on the idea of photons. But Max Planck, you're right, was 1900.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was clean, clean 1900, starting a new century.

• 17:58Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  Before they even had calculators.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, was that, really? Was it that far back?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're old enough to remember when the United States lost the most powerful collider in the world. The superconducting supercollider. Which they already, there was money allocated, they started digging a hole. Was it 200 mile circumference or something huge? And superconducting, it was gonna use superconducting magnets, which had very powerful magnetic fields. And, because that was coming of age at the time, it was gonna push the frontier. My analysis, as you read the report, "Well, there were cost overruns and we have too many other priorities here, so we're gonna zero the budget for this superconducting supercollider." And you read the report and say, "Well, we have other priorities, plus this is gonna be built in Texas,

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and if we're gonna build the space station, which is based in Houston, Texas is already getting a chunk of change." You know when all this happened? Like, between 1989 and 1992. When the debates and then they zeroed the budget. What else was happening over those years? Let me think. Oh my gosh! Peace broke out in Europe. No longer do we need the physicists to protect us from the evil, godless communists. That's what I think was the subtext of that story.

• 19:50Chuck Nice?

  Damn you, Harmony!

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because no other particle accelerator was ever canceled for any reason that was designed, conceived, and built in the 20th century. So if you grant me one conspiracy theory, that's the, grant me that.

• 20:03Brian Greene?

  But then you think they kept the space station because that was the place where the new battles might be waged.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Possibly.

• 20:11Chuck Nice?

  It's what we're looking at right now when you think about it.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, with the Space Force and everything else. So that's where I am on that. But, I say this only to note that once that got canceled, the center of mass of particle physics went across the pond to Europe. And then CERN, the European Center for Nuclear-

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you sure?

• 20:36Brian Greene?

  Somewhere in there, yes.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a French acronym.

• 20:40Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When the words are in the French order or something.

• 20:43Brian Greene?

  That's it.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It goes there. And I think our lawmakers don't really understand that if we don't do the physics, someone else can and will. We don't own all access to future discoveries of science. And so now Europe does it. And so they went ahead, build a large hadron collider. And they successfully found the Higgs boson, the big holy grail.

• 21:10Brian Greene?

  July 4th, 2012.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it July 4th? That's sticking it to us.

• 21:14Brian Greene?

  Wow, that really was.

• 21:15Chuck Nice?

  And you know, they really found it on like June 28th. You know, they found it on June 28th and they were like, guys, we're gonna sit on this for a few days. Yeah.

• 21:26Brian Greene?

  But, but there are a lot of Americans involved in the long.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course.

• 21:30Brian Greene?

  But just to say, but yes, exactly right.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, even Peter Higgs, is he American?

• 21:35Brian Greene?

  Peter Higgs was Scottish, I would think. You know, I think he's from Edinburgh, although I think he was Edinburgh, but I don't think he was Scottish. Maybe he was English. You know, I don't know hundreds I know. But, but yeah, you know, he, he predicted its existence and then it was discovered. And at the announcement, saw tears welling in this man's eyes who'd been waiting decades for this idea that at first nobody believed.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 21:59Brian Greene?

  Ultimately was accepted theoretically, but it was proven experimentally finally.

• 22:03Chuck Nice?

  And what is the, what is the Higgs boson exactly?

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the particle categories, one of them is bosons.

• 22:10Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And bosons are force mitigating particles.

• 22:15Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, and when we think of a force action at a distance, there's a way to think about that in terms of the particle that in the category of particles is a boson. One of the bosons is this Higgs boson, which has what properties?

• 22:29Brian Greene?

  Well, it has.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was I right?

• 22:31Brian Greene?

  Yeah, it's very good.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. He said I was very good.

• 22:38Brian Greene?

  Can I answer?

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian. Please.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:41Brian Greene?

  It's what endows other particles, even itself, actually, with mass.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 22:47Brian Greene?

  Now, where does that come from? Well, just to take Neil's idea. It starts with the idea of a field. That's how you get rid of this idea of action at a distance. You imagine that space is filled with stuff.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't invent it fields?

• 22:58Brian Greene?

  I really don't.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael Faraday.

• 23:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really? Well, that makes sense.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was the first.

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And think what a leap that is.

• 23:05Brian Greene?

  Yeah, that is.

• 23:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Brian Greene?

  It's an insane leap.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:08Brian Greene?

  You take it for granted, there's nothing there.

• 23:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You're looking at nothing, you're seeing nothing.

• 23:12Brian Greene?

  And you're positing that there is something there. And that's an amazing thing. But he was talking electric and magnetic fields.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:19Brian Greene?

  What Higgs is talking about is a new field called the Higgs field, which he didn't call it that, but that's what we call it. So it's this field that fills space and as particles that otherwise would be massless, as they try to go through space, they have to burrow through the Higgs field. And that creates a kind of drag force on them, which is what imparts the mass that they have.

• 23:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 23:41Brian Greene?

  And that's the field. Now, what's the particle? Well, if you have this field in principle, if you hit it hard enough, like hitting the surface of water, you can cause little particles of the field to spray out. And that's what the Large Hadron Collider did. It slammed proton against proton and that way jostled the Higgs field and caused a little droplet of it to break free and that's the Higgs particle.

• 24:04Chuck Nice?

  And then we got the, oh my God, so you're seeing an actual piece of the field?

• 24:06Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 24:07Chuck Nice?

  You're, oh my God!

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Higgs field generated via E equals mc squared.

• 24:12Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Its own particle of its own.

• 24:14Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 24:15Brian Greene?

  That's right.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of its own DNA.

• 24:16Brian Greene?

  Or you can say it's a quanta, to go back to the other language. It's a quanta of the Higgs field, like the photon is the quanta of the electromagnetic field.

• 24:24Chuck Nice?

  All right, that's amazing.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's some stuff.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  So.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  If, okay, but, okay, now I get it. So it's not the particle that you're actually seeing. It's not the particle that is imbued with mass itself. It is the thing on which the particle is traveling, the field, the medium itself. Boom, it kind of splashes apart for a quick second and then that itself becomes a particle and has mass. Holy...

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait.

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  Rick, that's amazing. That is amazing.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck just blew a gasket.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, that's crazy. Dude, that is insane.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call the doctors.

• 25:04Chuck Nice?

  This is the first time I've actually really understood.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call the doctors.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Because, oh my God, that's so freaking crazy. Oh my God.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A week later, he's there in bed still.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eyes this big. That is fantastic. So my favorite analog to this. Yeah. Is whenever, when I explain the Higgs field to people, I say it's, it's like a Hollywood party. Okay, so there are people in the party. Right. All right, and the bar is at the back of the wall. Okay. Okay, and if you, if no one knows you and you walk into this party. Okay, that's my experience. You, you have near zero resistance to movement through that party. True. So you have a very low, if not zero, party mass. Exactly. Okay, because you have no. You get into the bar right away. Right, you get in the bar right away.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your inertia, it knows no resistance there. Exactly. Whereas Beyonce walks in. Uh huh. Everybody will crowd around her.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She can only make very small steps towards the bar. Right. She has a very high party mass. Is that fair? That's awesome.

• 26:20Brian Greene?

  That's the party field.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The party field.

• 26:22Brian Greene?

  And then if you slap all those partygoers, you can slap off one of them, that's the party particle.

• 26:27Chuck Nice?

  Somebody from the beehive, somebody from the beehive pops out.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, that Beyonce. Oh, there it is.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I have learned, not from you, and I'm disappointed because I thought you would have told me the whole story. Yes. I come to you for these frontier conversations, that the Higgs mass that a particle would have is only for free particles.

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a particle is in an atom, it's not getting its mass from the Higgs field.

• 26:57Brian Greene?

  I have told you this in the past, though. I absolutely have.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think, I don't think.

• 27:02Brian Greene?

  But you're absolutely right, absolutely right.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I'm, I'm, I'm a fat proton in a nucleus, I'm not getting my mass from the Higgs field.

• 27:10Brian Greene?

  No, and that's why it's a really misleading notion that many people have. They think that all mass comes from the Higgs field. It is just the fundamental particles. And here's the thing, if you were to go up into your particle data book, which I know you have a few copies lying around in here.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's very good.

• 27:27Brian Greene?

  If you look up the masses of the quarks, the up quark and the down quark that make up a proton, up, up and a down, add up their masses.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said that quickly.

• 27:35Brian Greene?

  Up, up and down.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the, the nucleons have three quarks in them, all bound together, making up the proton and the neutron. But they're different combinations of three quarks. This is, this is good. Tell them, so quarks have charges, fractional charges.

• 27:51Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So watch, watch, watch this.

• 27:52Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So proton has a charge of plus one.

• 27:55Brian Greene?

  All right.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you get that from three quarks?

• 27:57Brian Greene?

  Yeah, how do you do that?

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So give me, give it to me.

• 28:00Brian Greene?

  You have a two thirds and a two thirds and a minus one third. Two thirds, two thirds, minus one third.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So two thirds plus two thirds is one and a third, and then a minus charge to bring it down to one. Now, now, neutrons have charged quarks inside of them, but they don't have any charge. So how do you get them?

• 28:14Brian Greene?

  How do you get them? Let's hear it.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, must be up two thirds, down one third, down one third.

• 28:22Brian Greene?

  Yes, so if you have an up and then a down, and down, down, then you got a two thirds, minus one third, minus one third.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus one third.

• 28:29Brian Greene?

  Now.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Canceling out, and so it's a neutral thing, even though what's inside of it has charges.

• 28:32Brian Greene?

  Right, but here's the thing. The point I want to make though is if you add up the masses of those quarks, they're much less than the mass of the proton. So what's going on here? They make up the proton, and yet the proton's much heavier than its ingredients.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:44Brian Greene?

  Answer is, there's another contribution to the mass which has nothing to do with the Higgs field. Which is the thing we were talking about before, the energy in the glue.

• 28:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's the glue.

• 28:55Brian Greene?

  Holding the quarks together.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, the gluonic force.

• 28:58Brian Greene?

  There's energy holding them together equals mc squared. There's mass associated with that energy and most of the mass of the proton is coming from the glue that's holding the quarks together.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  That's insane.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's take a neutron, which has a half-life in minutes, like 15 minutes if memory serves. And after that amount of time, half the neutrons will have decayed into a proton. And if, let's say if it's a regular proton and then an.

• 29:23Brian Greene?

  Electron.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An electron.

• 29:24Brian Greene?

  And an anti-neutrino.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And an anti-neutrino. If you add up the masses of those, don't you recover the mass of the proton?

• 29:30Brian Greene?

  As long as you're taking kinetic energy into account in all this too.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they fly away.

• 29:34Brian Greene?

  They fly away. But yes, but yes.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the energy budget is all there.

• 29:38Brian Greene?

  It's all there.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:40Chuck Nice?

  So everything is conserved.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Chuck Nice?

  All the time.

• 29:42Brian Greene?

  And in fact, the way the neutrino was predicted was from looking at these particle decays and finding that the energy budget was not adding up. And so the idea was maybe there's an invisible particle that's carrying away some additional energy.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was this in Rico Fermi?

• 29:57Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what I like about this is he's like, look, folks, I can't explain this. Let's make some shit up.

• 30:03Brian Greene?

  Yes, but geniuses make up shit that's right.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a quote. That's a quote. That's a bumper sticker right there.

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  That's it. I'm getting a t-shirt. I'm getting that t-shirt.

• 30:19Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome. That's great.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what Carl Sagan was famous for saying. They laughed at Einstein, they laughed at, you know, all these people with these great ideas. And he said, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Just because people laughed doesn't mean they're going to be wrong.

• 30:37Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He makes it up and then everyone starts looking for it. And it's this highly elusive particle that has no charge because we knew all the charges had already balanced in, in the lab. It's got no charge, but it's carrying away energy and no one has detected it. And, and he was Italian, right? So neutrino is like little neutral.

• 30:58Brian Greene?

  Little neutron.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Little neutral one, I think is.

• 31:00Brian Greene?

  Oh, that may be right, little neutron.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Little neutral one.

• 31:02Brian Greene?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that's the only thing that allows me to, okay.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not gonna get in your way. When people saying dark matter, it's some elusive particle that we can't detect.

• 31:16Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's accounting for the extra gravity. And it's a particle, we haven't found the particle yet. And I'm thinking that's intellectually lazy, but it's no different.

• 31:25Brian Greene?

  Than the neutrino.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than the neutrino. So that's why I cut it some slack, more slack than I'd otherwise would.

• 31:30Brian Greene?

  Now, we still need to find it.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We still haven't found. If it's a particle we haven't found.

• 31:34Brian Greene?

  Yeah, right.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you a betting man? Is it a particle or is it something else?

• 31:38Brian Greene?

  Uh, look, I'm relatively conservative when it comes to these things. So I think that it's likely to be a particle, but look.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because we've been down that road before.

• 31:46Brian Greene?

  We've been down that road before. It fits in so well to our theoretical framework. It doesn't require.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a slot for a dark matter particle?

• 31:53Brian Greene?

  Well, the amazing thing is, and here's where you're gonna come back at me and say this should undercut my confidence. When you look at a theory called supersymmetry, that I've spent a long time working on.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:04Brian Greene?

  Within this theory, which goes beyond what we know about particle physics, for reasons that are well motivated.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's ordinary symmetry.

• 32:11Brian Greene?

  That's right. It takes the symmetries that we have and it takes them one step further. And it's the only step further that you could possibly go. So of course, nature must make use of this final symmetry principle. Why else would it exist? That's the thinking that we've had.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just let me back up for a minute. So as I was learning particle physics, I was intrigued to recognize that you have your electron, you have your photon, you have your neutrino, and these other sort of basic particles. And they exist in our world that we live, we experience. Okay? If you up the energy knob, other particles manifest. There's a version of the electron that manifests only in these higher energy levels, and it's called a muon.

• 32:56Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And so there's a whole layer of particles sitting above the ones that are in our world.

• 33:04Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's three of these layers. And tell me the three electrons.

• 33:08Brian Greene?

  You get the electron, the muon, and the tau.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tau.

• 33:11Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And there's electron neutrino, there's a muon neutrino, there's a tau neutrino. So now I have three layers here, and you have access to them in your particle accelerators, because it takes a lot of energy and you can get there.

• 33:22Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, what does supersymmetry do with this package?

• 33:25Brian Greene?

  Supersymmetry says that.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This package is.

• 33:28Brian Greene?

  Beautiful and confirmed.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tell me the three, the three force carriers. We have a photon.

• 33:33Brian Greene?

  You got the photon, then you got the gluons, you have W and Z bosons, or the weak nuclear force.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:38Brian Greene?

  And those are the three forces.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Discovered by Bozo.

• 33:40Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually Bose, Bose is a, is a, is an Indian physicist.

• 33:45Brian Greene?

  And yes, absolutely. And then for the quarks, you got the up and the down that we spoke about. You got the charm, the strange, you got the top and the bottom. So again, they come in three pairs of two.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:55Brian Greene?

  Supersymmetry says, take all of those particles and double them. Another shadow version of all of those particles.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shadow governs.

• 34:04Brian Greene?

  For the electron.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are the puppets.

• 34:08Brian Greene?

  This is the deep state.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the deep state? They are the puppet masters. The quantum deep state. Wait, wait, wait. So I didn't know this, the entire set of particles

• 34:18Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  would have a counterpart in this supersymmetric

• 34:22Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  place.

• 34:23Brian Greene?

  So for the electron, you have the supersymmetric electron. For the quarks, you have squarks. For neutrinos, you have neutrinos.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People just making shit up.

• 34:34Brian Greene?

  You do run out of news after a while.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're like the latest cartoon.

• 34:37Brian Greene?

  But here's the thing, this is all mathematically motivated by an completely compelling rationale. So this is not pulled out of, you know, thin air.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have our universe three ways, a three-layer cake. And there's a whole other cake. Where does that live?

• 34:53Brian Greene?

  With us, but we believe they're more massive, which is why we wanted to build the superconducting supercollider to try to find them. And now we've looked for these at the Large Had Collider.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they're massive, why can't, why aren't they right here in front of our faces?

• 35:06Brian Greene?

  They typically have short lifetimes, so they'll decay into lighter particles. But the lightest of the supersymmetric particles would not decay, and therefore it should be all around us.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell them why the lightest one would not decay.

• 35:19Brian Greene?

  If it's the lightest one, when it decays, the decay products have to be lighter than it.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:24Brian Greene?

  And so if it's the lightest one, subject to a certain conservation law.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No place for it to go. It's no place for it to go.

• 35:31Brian Greene?

  In essence, yes.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the same reason why you can have an energy field of any kind, and you will not make particles out of that.

• 35:40Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless the energy available is higher than the E equals mc squared of two electrons.

• 35:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it has to make them in pairs.

• 35:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:52Brian Greene?

  To keep the charge conservative.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's plus and a minus.

• 35:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, an electron is the lightest physical particle.

• 35:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, nothing's happening.

• 35:59Brian Greene?

  Lightest charged particle.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why it's not happening around us right now.

• 36:02Brian Greene?

  It's the lightest charged particle. So, it has to talk to electromagnetic field.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. That's why, light coming from lights is not just making particles. It doesn't have enough energy.

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if-

• 36:11Brian Greene?

  If it did?

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If X-rays started coming out of there, X-rays, high-energy X-rays, you can pop electrons into existence.

• 36:19Chuck Nice?

  Because they're stepping down, so they leave something.

• 36:21Brian Greene?

  The energy of the field is big enough to create the electron and anti-electron, and so, it will pair-produce them.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact-

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  That's so wild.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Electron microscopes are enabled by X-rays creating them, and the wavelength of X-rays is so tiny that you can see tiny detail. That's, it's tinier than the detail. You can't have resolution higher than the wavelength of light that you're using to see it. Right.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:51Brian Greene?

  Now, back to dark matter, just to finish this point.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is a whole massive other layer cake, and you're telling me that is the mass of the dark matter?

• 36:59Brian Greene?

  Well, the lightest supersymmetric particle would be stable, should be around us.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what everybody's looking for.

• 37:04Brian Greene?

  So, maybe it's filling space.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:06Brian Greene?

  And here's the beautiful thing. Here's the bea- This will blow your mind. This will blow your mind.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My mind's already blown.

• 37:11Brian Greene?

  When you, when you do the calculation of how much of this lightest supersymmetric particle should be left over since the Big Bang, it exactly matches what you need to be the dark matter. It comes in the right abundance.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bang.

• 37:26Brian Greene?

  And yet, we've not found it.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You haven't found it.

• 37:27Brian Greene?

  And it may be the wrong answer. So, sometimes, things that just seem so deeply compelling are wrong, but we don't know yet.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, do you know enough in the theory of these particles to predict how you should detect it?

• 37:40Brian Greene?

  Yes. Now, they can vary which is the lightest supersymmetric particle on the flavor of the supersymmetric theory you're looking at. But in any given version, yes, you know exactly how the particle interacts.

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, you have everybody's favorite flavor, the theorists-

• 37:54Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -come out with their competing models.

• 37:56Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But still, they gotta have one of these particles.

• 37:58Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, now, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a experimentalist, and it's, I'm gonna test for this one. I don't find it. Let me test for that one. I don't find it. So, it's not looking good.

• 38:06Brian Greene?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:07Brian Greene?

  I agree.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 38:09Brian Greene?

  I agree. But yeah, when I was a student- It was almost a foregone conclusion that you just had to look for it, you'd find it. This is the dark matter. Because supersymmetry also solves other problems, the so-called hierarchy problem. It's all the dark matter problem. It's a beautiful idea that seems perhaps not to be right now. It's not fully ruled out yet, but that may be where we're going.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's the one that said, "The great tragedy in science, a beautiful theory slain by some facts."

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody said, I forgot.

• 38:41Brian Greene?

  Right, there's exactly what it may be.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've not been the same since we had lunch months ago. And you explained to me, and I've said it here, that there are ideas percolating, that the fabric of spacetime might be woven by wormholes that connect the virtual particle pairs that come in and out of existence. And that if they're connected by wormholes rather than just some field, then the wormhole is an actual structural texture of the universe.

• 39:37Brian Greene?

  Yeah, in fact, the other way.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. First of all, I need some weed to even deal with this. Because if I'm, I'm trying to figure out what you just said because it's so fricking, I mean, it really is just crazy.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just back up. The vacuum of space is not a vacuum because quantum physics requires what?

• 39:57Brian Greene?

  There's all sorts of uncertainty, and that uncertainty means that there's fluctuations, and therefore there are particle antiparticle pairs, there's energy fluctuations, there's field fluctuations. It's a roiling mess out there in empty space.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's no nothing, there is no such thing as nothing.

• 40:12Brian Greene?

  That violates uncertainty if there was truly nothing.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, if there's truly nothing, we couldn't have uncertainty. So the uncertainty is, you know, gives us the fact that we do have.

• 40:22Chuck Nice?

  Virtual particles.

• 40:22Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 40:23Chuck Nice?

  We know that they pop in and out of existence. What you're trying to tell me is.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's not that we know they're there.

• 40:28Chuck Nice?

  I know.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one denies it.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay, no one denies it.

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely consistent.

• 40:32Brian Greene?

  Well, I said, well, the Casimir force, where you actually put two metal plates in otherwise empty space, they should simply sit there, they're drawn together, and our best explanation is it's the virtual pairs of particles.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know about the Casimir?

• 40:45Chuck Nice?

  I feel like I have fallen into a Star Trek nightmare.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you take two exactly parallel plates.

• 40:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and evacuate what's in between.

• 40:57Chuck Nice?

  In between them.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely.

• 40:58Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best vacuum you can muster.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you slowly move them together.

• 41:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is a point within which a whole other force kicks in.

• 41:07Brian Greene?

  That's right. And it's not the gravitational force.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not electromagnetic.

• 41:11Brian Greene?

  Not the electromagnetic force, rather, it's a force that comes from the Casimir field, which is basically.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got a Nobel Prize, the Casimir?

• 41:18Brian Greene?

  Well, 1948 is when it was discovered.

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it got one in my book.

• 41:22Brian Greene?

  But it should have.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just gave it one.

• 41:24Brian Greene?

  Yeah, it definitely deserved one.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's insane.

• 41:26Brian Greene?

  But it's an imbalance between the fluctuations of uncertainty within the place and the fluctuations of uncertainty outside the place.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 41:34Brian Greene?

  And it's that imbalance.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great, so force puts them together.

• 41:38Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, so that's how we get the particles in the vacuum of space. Okay, so now, so now, why a, what compels you to say wormhole rather than just a field?

• 41:51Brian Greene?

  Well, because it really comes from the idea of quantum entanglement. What we find is that entanglement, which normally we think of as particle pairs, but now we're finding that the vacuum of space may be stitched together by the threads of quantum entanglement itself. So, deep down within the substrate of reality, it may all be stitched together by quantum entanglement. And then, other work shows us that quantum entanglement connecting two particles is just like a wormhole.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 42:20Brian Greene?

  Going from one to the other.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what happens in one happens to the other instantly.

• 42:24Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that means they're touching each other in that instant.

• 42:27Brian Greene?

  In some weird way. And entanglement is one language, but we believe wormholes may be the general relativistic version of that quantum language.

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  So it's like a little quantum net holding the whole universe together.

• 42:41Brian Greene?

  Exactly right. Because. Because we find, we find mathematically, if we cut the threads of quantum entanglement, which we can do mathematically, space falls apart. It discretizes into little tiny pieces and then just disappears. I gotta go. I gotta go.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I need you to the end of this. Chuck, don't leave me. Don't leave me, Chuck.

• 43:04Brian Greene?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  Dan, that's insane.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just that there's a field there. It's the fact that they were quantum entangled that makes the wormhole model compelling.

• 43:18Brian Greene?

  Yeah, but I would say you don't even need the particle pairs. It's as if the entanglement is entangling regions of space. So, space itself has a fundamental substrate woven by these threads of quantum connection. Now, look, it's mathematical, but it comes out of our cutting-edge ideas. It all makes sense.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's saying he's not pulling out of his ass.

• 43:41Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, he's saying the math gave it to him. And he started out saying, "My boy loves the math." So, now, last thing.

• 43:47Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explain why you need more than four dimensions for your string theory universe.

• 43:56Brian Greene?

  Well, it's a very concrete explanation. When we look at the equations of string theory, there's a consistency equation where something must equal zero or the math doesn't work. That something is a product of two things. One term is really complicated. It's never zero. The other term is the number of dimensions minus 10. The only way to get it to be equal to zero is for d to be equal to 10. That's it. I am not joking. This is where the constraint of extra dimensions comes from in string theory.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The math is forcing our hand.

• 44:28Brian Greene?

  Forces your hand. And then you say, "Well, let me take this math here." And one thing you could say as well, if it's not d equals 4, 3 space and 1 time, throw the theory away. Others of us will say, "Hey, let's consider the possibility."

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't sell the universe short.

• 44:42Brian Greene?

  Yeah, exactly. So, why should these three dimensions of space be the only ones?

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 44:46Brian Greene?

  We only are aware of them because they're big enough that we can be directly aware of them with these really faulty sensors that we have.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. If it's only your sensors that limit that awareness.

• 44:56Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not, in principle, can we build something that can gain access to these higher dimensions?

• 45:01Brian Greene?

  Yeah, so there are experiments on the table. Some have been carried out, but more precise ones may be done where you study Newton's law of gravity. Why is Newton's law go like 1 over r squared? Why do we teach our kids G M M over r squared?

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a geometric.

• 45:15Brian Greene?

  A geometric sphere in three dimensions of space.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:19Brian Greene?

  Look at that sphere in four or five or six dimensions and the 2 in Newton's law won't be a 2.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 45:25Brian Greene?

  It'll be a bigger number, the falloff will be differently.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:28Brian Greene?

  And so look at the gravitational force on very small distances. Look for a deviation from the 1 over r squared that Isaac Newton told us about in the late 1600s.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because that's only in our dimensional measurement of it.

• 45:41Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because I'd asked you, again, over that same lunch.

• 45:44Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do we have lunch? I forgot, we were just catching up.

• 45:47Brian Greene?

  We're hungry.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We were just catching up. You know, it's my annual fix, my annual Brian Greene infusion. It was, could dark matter be ordinary matter with ordinary gravity in a parallel universe? Because for reasons I don't understand the math of, the field theory equations of, you were telling me that electromagnetic energy cannot escape our spacetime, but gravity can.

• 46:17Brian Greene?

  In a certain model called the brain universe, where our universe, B R A N E, it comes out of a membrane. Yeah, it's a membrane. So our universe is like a four dimensional membrane floating in a higher dimensional universe. That might have other membranes.

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Higher dimensional membranes.

• 46:33Brian Greene?

  Yes, and those other membranes like parallel to us, like two slices of bread in a big loaf of bread.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like it. So one slice of bread is some other membranal universe.

• 46:41Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ours is this one, but it's one, it's one multigrade.

• 46:46Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so gravity could leak out of one into the other.

• 46:49Brian Greene?

  Or it could just be the, yeah, that's right, so the gravitational pull, yeah.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm getting. So if the other universe has six times Nobody, see, this is where you corrected me. Because I was thinking, because we have six times as much force of gravity operating in the universe as matter and energy can account for it.

• 47:05Brian Greene?

  Okay.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Factor of six.

• 47:06Brian Greene?

  Right.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was saying, why isn't it just a parallel universe that has six times the mass and it's leakage into our universe? And we're trying to feel the elephant, trying to figure out what it is, but it's just regular matter in another universe whose gravity leaked. But then you said, if it's in another membrane, it's going to be dropping off faster than one over r squared.

• 47:26Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like one over r cubed, there's some higher dimension.

• 47:29Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if that's the case, it has to be way more than six times.

• 47:33Brian Greene?

  You could imagine rigging it so that it would have the right amount.

• 47:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 47:36Brian Greene?

  And people have studied this, and it's hard to make these theories work in detail.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And build self-consistency.

• 47:42Brian Greene?

  But in principle, it's an idea that's absolutely worthy of investigating because that's one way to make it invisible, just put it in another membrane.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just stick it somewhere else.

• 47:50Brian Greene?

  Exactly.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, and then where we can still calculate with it, it's not a problem.

• 47:54Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah.

• 47:55Brian Greene?

  That's crazy.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 47:57Brian Greene?

  Oh, man.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 47:59Brian Greene?

  I, uh, I don't know what to believe about anything.

• 48:04Brian Greene?

  Nothing is real. Nothing is real, man.

• 48:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark energy. I'm curious about this because it was a natural arithmetic element of Einstein's equations. It's like an integration constant, as I understood it.

• 48:23Brian Greene?

  You're talking about the cosmological constants?

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cosmological constant in his equations. That enabled Le Matre to calculate that the universe is either expanding or, but the universe is not static. And so there's a term there. And if you've had calculus, you might remember there's a constant of integration, often it's just zero and you can ignore it. But when we were in graduate school, I'm a little older than you, when we were in graduate school, we always recognized, we paid homage to that constant, but said, let's assume it's zero. If this term existed, it would mean there was a force operating in the universe opposite that of gravity.

• 49:03Brian Greene?

  Depending on the sign of the cosmological constant, but yes. Because it could have either sign.

• 49:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it would either work with gravity or against it.

• 49:09Brian Greene?

  Exactly.

• 49:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But if we had a static universe, it would be something just holding up the universe against the collapse of gravity.

• 49:15Brian Greene?

  Which is why Einstein thought of it.

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't have any reason to think it, so it could be zero and we just, but we always had to go through that portal. We say, here it is, we set it to zero and move on.

• 49:26Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 49:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, then it gets discovered.

• 49:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, dark energy gets discovered in 1998. It gets the Nobel Prize using quantum physics, which has done so well by us.

• 49:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perhaps the most successful theory ever about anything fails in its attempt to predict the amount of dark energy in the universe.

• 49:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Brian Greene?

  Hmm.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it fails badly.

• 49:50Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By a factor.

• 49:51Chuck Nice?

  What's up with that, Brian?

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a googol.

• 49:54Chuck Nice?

  Wow, by a factor of a.

• 49:55Brian Greene?

  Bigger than a googol. Ten to the, ten, ten to like, it's like 10 to 123 or something.

• 50:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A googol is 10 to the 100?

• 50:02Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gets the wrong answer by the biggest amount ever in a mismatch between theory and observation.

• 50:07Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where are we with the dark energy theorists?

• 50:10Brian Greene?

  Well, look, what this is showing us is that quantum mechanics is incredibly successful when you apply it to the electromagnetic force, to the weak nuclear force, to the strong nuclear force, but we've long known that when you apply it to gravity, something goes wrong, something changes. This is the motivation for string theory, and this is the motivation for trying to go beyond conventional approaches. And so you're absolutely right, this is the clearest signal.

• 50:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 50:35Brian Greene?

  That something is wrong. Now, here's, I think our best guess.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not something's wrong, that's actually a good thing.

• 50:40Brian Greene?

  Well, it's an opportunity.

• 50:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Opportunity, that's the way.

• 50:42Brian Greene?

  Yeah, it's a huge opportunity.

• 50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The press always says, oh, scientists are angry or this. No, we're delighted.

• 50:47Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If something breaks, oh my gosh, it's a new thing.

• 50:49Brian Greene?

  Exactly, that's right. And so I would say, my guess where we're going is, and many of my colleagues agree with me, that you can't quantize gravity the way you had to quantize Faraday and Maxwell's electromagnetism, or the way you had to quantize the weak or strong nuclear forces. It may be that gravity and quantum mechanics are already so intimately connected that it's a completely different mindset when you approach them. You don't take the rules of quantum mechanics and slap them onto gravity, that gets you the wrong answer, that's the wrong approach. In fact, this idea of entanglement and wormholes suggests that gravity and quantum mechanics, they're already in there.

• 51:32Chuck Nice?

  They're already there.

• 51:32Brian Greene?

  They're already there.

• 51:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes sense. They already have the shotgun wedding, you just didn't attend.

• 51:35Brian Greene?

  Exactly, so you just need to understand that melding better, and when you do, perhaps you'll be able to do a calculation of the cosmological constant and get the right answer.

• 51:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:45Brian Greene?

  Yeah. Now, another answer might be, maybe the cosmological constant is not a constant. Right, there's recent data.

• 51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're working on that now.

• 51:53Brian Greene?

  Yeah, maybe it's changing over time. And so you don't actually calculate the number. You just need to understand the dynamical process.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, doesn't the math in general relativity require that it be constant?

• 52:07Brian Greene?

  No.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how it came out of the integral.

• 52:09Brian Greene?

  There can be a constant, but it doesn't have to be the only contribution that looks like that constant, and the other contribution can change over time.

• 52:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What'd he say there?

• 52:18Chuck Nice?

  It can be a constant.

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But?

• 52:20Chuck Nice?

  But it doesn't have to look like, and then...

• 52:23Brian Greene?

  No, it's not the only contribution to that term. So you can have a field that slowly varies over time, and that field may dominate.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that field is meta to that equation.

• 52:35Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 52:36Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 52:36Brian Greene?

  It is meta to that equation.

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 52:38Brian Greene?

  Absolutely. So Einstein did not talk about that field.

• 52:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he wasn't there yet.

• 52:41Brian Greene?

  You're right. And he did talk about the constant, because you're right, it's just an integration constant.

• 52:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an integration constant. It's a constant, it's a constant.

• 52:47Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 52:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if, if in fact it needs to modify, because that's how they reconcile this tension in the age of the universe.

• 52:55Brian Greene?

  Yes.

• 52:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the age of the universe, there's, in my day, we didn't know it by a factor of two. Now people are...

• 53:02Brian Greene?

  It's not.

• 53:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a 10% difference.

• 53:04Chuck Nice?

  So it's more than 6,000 years.

• 53:07Chuck Nice?

  Is what you're saying.

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yes, yes, yes. When Noah's flood took place. So to relieve the tension, as we describe it, this was a 10%, some single-digit percent, uncertainty in the age of the universe, actually not uncertainty, these two methods have very small, tight uncertainties that do not overlap.

• 53:27Brian Greene?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why everyone is freaking out. And one, as I learned recently, you can resolve that by allowing the cosmological constant to vary in some way, but that's a meta variation on top of Einstein.

• 53:39Brian Greene?

  Yes, yeah, no, this Hubble tension that people are struggling with today is exactly something that also may point toward a dynamical value. So we'll, we'll see.

• 53:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 53:48Brian Greene?

  But, uh, yes, their true test of a version of gravity that you fully understand with quantum mechanics included would be a calculation of the cosmological constant and get a number.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you and your people smart enough to get this figured out?

• 54:00Brian Greene?

  I don't think so.

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's so true.

• 54:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good answer, because you know I've dragged you over the cold. We have come full circle. Because I told him, I said, "Look, you know, Einstein came up with general relativity in 10 years by himself. You, you string theorists, dozens of you have been working on this for decades. Either you're all wrong, or you're all just too stupid to figure it out." And it's probably a combination.

• 54:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love you, man. Brian, thanks for coming back. My pleasure. To StarTalk. Always good, Chuck. So great. Chuck, we'll find you in the hospital. Bless you, Will. I'm completely fried right now. I'm fried. Just to take us out, let me remind us all, we are in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. The Cosmic Crib. The Cosmic Crib. And after this conversation we just had, I delight in realizing and celebrating the fact that just a few pounds of organic matter inside of our heads can not only contemplate,

• 55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but figure out how the universe works. And, yes, we still have a long way to go. And we don't even know how long a way to go remains in front of us. But the distance we've come thus far gives us everything that we call civilization. And it's the power of mind over the mysteries of the universe. And that is a product of the eternal curiosity expressed by our species, beginning in childhood, continuing, for some, into adulthood. We call them scientists,

• 55:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  those who never lost that childhood curiosity. Brian Greene, of course, among them. So I'd like to just give a shout out to our species for all that has wondered as we looked up at night, all that we have discovered, and all that we have yet to figure out. That is a cosmic perspective. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.