Why… Anything? With Harry Cliff

Why was there more matter than antimatter left over? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice explore the quantum origins of the universe, charge parity violation, dark matter, and the many quarks that make up our world with CERN particle physicist Harry Cliff.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, love me some particle physics.

• 0:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, who doesn't?

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's foundational to the world.

• 0:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I foresee a day where you walk into your kitchen and they're all just the particles of the universe.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 0:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you just take whatever you need.

• 0:11Chuck Nice?

  Just put what you need?

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And make whatever you want.

• 0:13Chuck Nice?

  And make whatever you want. That's cool. And I foresee a day where we will end this matter anti-matter feud.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the octagon. Coming up, all you ever thought you'd care about in the realm of particle physics on StarTalk.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Field of Grass Tyson here, if you're a personal astrophysicist. Chuck, nice there.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man. What's happening?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I say you're their personal comedian?

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  Uh, no.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Do not involve yourself with me on a personal basis at all.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I take it back. Take it back. Today's gonna be a cosmic queries.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but not after we learn some stuff.

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  And it's good stuff.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's good stuff. Yeah. All right. It's gonna be on particle physics.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Wow. I didn't know it was gonna be that good.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I know a little bit about particle physics, but I'm not an expert.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anytime we hit this kind of impasse,

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we gotta bring in the expert.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Right on.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where's sort of best particle physics in the world happening?

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  Uh, the collider?

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the collider.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a start, okay?

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it'll be a collider. That's where it's gonna happen. We've got someone who's worked at CERN

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in Geneva.

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the UK.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Help me welcome Harry Cliff. Harry, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:54Chuck Nice?

  Harry.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So you worked with the Large Hadron Collider, which is one of the experiments of CERN. And what did you do? What was your role with that?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Well, I still work on it, actually. So the LHC is this massive 19-mile ring buried underground, and there are actually four experiments on the ring. So there are these four places where we smash particles together, and I work on one of them, which is called LHC-B, and the B stands for beauty, which is a type of particle that we're interested in studying. So I still work there. I analyze data, look for places where our current theory might break down, although we haven't found any yet, which is a bit frustrating, although we're getting some hints. But that's the general job. It's going through loads and loads of data, trying to find places where we're seeing new effects we've not seen before.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But beauty, that's not one of the names on one of the quarks, is it?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. Yeah. So there are these six quarks that make up, well, two of them make up the nucleus of the atom, and then there are four others, and they have weird names. So the first two that were found after the original two were called Strange and Charm, and then the last two, there was this disagreement about what to call them. Some people wanted to call them Truth and Beauty, which is really lovely and poetic, but in the end, most physicists call them Top and Bottom, which is, you know, a little bit boring. But because we work on these particles, we study these B-quarks, we'd rather be known as beauty physicists than bottom physicists. So for us, at least, it's beauty.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got my vote.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, beauty, yeah.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Truth and beauty.

• 3:23Chuck Nice?

  I gotta say, though, I just think, you know, Top and Bottom might be a bit more interesting in some respects.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a family show.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Harry, you left off the up and down quark, so completing the family of six quarks. So we get up and down.

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  Up and down.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Strange and Charmed.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Truth and Beauty, Top and Bottom. That's it?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Top and Bottom, exactly. That's right. That's right. Six. As far as we know. Maybe there's more, but we've only found six.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're a quark man. We gotta love the quark people. And I'm delighted, just because I reach the public often, that you've written two popular-level books. I love it. And I'm looking at the title of your first one, How to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch: A Search for the Recipe of Our Universe.

• 4:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that evokes something Carl Sagan said.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Which is?

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In 1980. Uh, Cosmos.

• 4:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They said, how do you make an apple pie? He says, start with the Big Bang.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  Ha, ha, ha.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So was that, did that inspire this title?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that scene, I think it's episode five where he's sitting in, he's actually sitting in Cambridge in Trinity College and this apple pie is brought out to him. And he looks at the camera with a little twinkle in his eye and says, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. And then he kind of goes off to talk about how the atoms in the apple pie were made inside stars. So it's kind of like, it's quite a well-known phrase in physics. I, it came up like during my university education. So it was kind of, I thought it was a neat way of talking about, you know, what the universe is made from, but through the lens of trying to find out how you make an apple pie. But a really complicated recipe.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get down to basics.

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm gonna be honest though. It's a, it's a long walk around the block to get to an apple pie.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From, from the start of the universe.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Good, good things take a while, you know?

• 5:14Chuck Nice?

  But it's cool. It works.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  13.8 billion years.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm especially delighted by your recently published book. I love this title, Space Oddities. That's very David Bowie of you, Space Oddity.

• 5:25Chuck Nice?

  Space Oddities.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, that was his first hit. Did you know this? David Bowie's first hit was Space Oddity.

• 5:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Ground Control to Major Tom.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what put him on the map. And that's, that's the title. The subtitle is The Mysterious Anomalies, Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe.

• 5:42Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's based on that that we solicited questions from our audience, from our Patreon supporters. We'll get to those in a minute.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I want to first extract more physics out of you. Uh, tell us more about our inventory of fundamental particles. Are we there yet?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  If, if we're there, I'll be out of a job. So I really hope there's more. We know about 17 particles in total at the moment. So there are the six quarks that we've already talked about, two of which make up the nucleus of the atom. Then there's the electron, which goes around the atom. And the electron also comes in this triplet. There are three electron-like particles. The next one's called the muon and then something called a tau. So that's another three. That gets you to nine. And then there are three neutrinos, these like ghostly particles that zip through the universe and through us and we don't really notice most of the time. So that gives you 12, what we call matter particles in total.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The neutrinos are related to the three. Species of electrons, right?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we think of them as a family?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So the electron has a partner called the electron neutrino. The muon has its own version neutrino and the same for the tau. So, yeah, you've got these 12 particles. I mean, that in itself is a mystery because they come in these like three copies, these what we call the generations, and we don't know why. It's very mysterious. So it's kind of like we have these Lego bricks in our set, but we don't understand why we have these particular pieces. And then there are the forces. So there are three forces in our kind of quantum description of the world. We don't include gravity. Don't know how to deal with that yet. But we've got the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force, and they each have particles. So the photon is the particle of light that goes with electromagnetism. Something called a gluon, which is the particle of the strong force that sticks the quarks together.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  And then the W and Z bosons, which are the particles of the weak force, which is this weird force related to radioactive processes and other things. Sixteen in total. And then the last one, which was found about a decade ago at the LHC, which is the Higgs boson. So that kind of finishes off our 17 particles in what we call the standard model. But we don't think that's the end of the story for lots of reasons, mostly to do with astronomy, actually, thanks to, you know, you and your colleagues discovering this inconvenient stuff out there in the universe called dark matter. So that suggests there must be more stuff that we haven't found yet.

• 8:03Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, whatever dark matter is, we have no idea. And maybe these guys will find it in their particle accelerator.

• 8:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they do, we'd be very happy because right now it's it's just this term in our equations.

• 8:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  But we know it's something.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something's there.

• 8:20Chuck Nice?

  Something's there.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we throw it in the equation.

• 8:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let somebody else figure out what the hell it is.

• 8:24Chuck Nice?

  What the something is. What about dark energy, though? Because that's not a particle.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we don't, well, we don't know.

• 8:32Chuck Nice?

  Harry?

• 8:34Chuck Nice?

  Harry, I'm gonna throw this one over to you, Harry.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, no, we have no idea, right? We have absolutely no idea. I think it's fair to say. I mean, this is when particle physicists try to talk about dark energy, things go really badly wrong. So I should be careful. But there was this original, well, the idea, one idea for what dark energy is, is what we call vacuum energy. So it's the energy left over in empty space, once you've taken away everything else, all the atoms and all the particles. And in particle physics, the actual truth is that particles aren't really the fundamental ingredients of the universe. They're actually made of something more fundamental, which is called a quantum field. So for all of these seventeen particles we talked about, there is a corresponding field, and the particles are actually like little vibrations in that field.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  They're like ripples in an ocean, if you like. So those fields, even when you've got rid of all the particles, they're still there in the vacuum. And if you take, the idea was that maybe dark energy is all the kind of quantum fluctuations that's left over in these fields in the vacuum. But if you run the numbers, you find, you get an answer that is ten to the power one hundred and twenty times too big. So that's ten with a hundred and twenty zeros at the end, which is a ludicrously enormous number. If it was that big, the universe would be ripped apart in an instant. So we have no idea what's going on, really, from a particle physics point of view.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's the biggest discrepancy ever between a theory and an observation.

• 10:04Chuck Nice?

  However, couldn't there also be something else, since we don't know what that is? Couldn't there be something else that's tamping that, tamping the field, so that it isn't ripping?

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're just making stuff up.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  I mean, that's just as, that's just as feasible as a field!

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I mean, no, you're dead right. Like, this is what theorists do. They go, okay, this number's crazy, so let's add in another thing that cancels it out. That's exactly what people try to do. So, you know, you could be a theoretical particle physicist.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is just perhaps semantics, but of your sixteen particles, plus the Higgs boson, and minus the three force carriers, so that takes us down to thirteen, I think, do you count their antimatter?

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Versions of those particles as separate particles?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you could you can multiply that number many times. So like the quarks, for example, the version of electric charge for the strong force is called color. And whereas with electric charge, there's only one type of electric charge. In the strong force, there are three. They're called red, green and blue. So you get red quarks, green quarks and blue quarks bizarrely. So that means actually there aren't six quarks, there are eighteen. If you add in the anti-quarks, that gives you thirty six. So you can go up to like crazy numbers if you take all these things into account. But basically, the antiparticles, they exist in the same field. So you have your like your electron field. An electron or an anti-electron are just different sorts of vibrations, but in the same fields. We tend to just count that as like one thing, not two. And if you because if you start doing that, you it gets mad.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:38Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clarify that.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  We were talking about the lifespan of particles before the show and you mentioned.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Offline.

• 11:47Chuck Nice?

  Offline, offline. And you mentioned that you measured a particle, I don't.

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's for his PhD.

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  For his your PhD thesis. Measure particle and the last it's its lifespan was one trillionth of a second. And you said that that was relatively long?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there are only a couple of very privileged particles that live forever. There's the electron that we think lives forever and the proton that lives forever. Everything else decays eventually, even like the neutron. If you have a neutron floating about in space, it will decay in about fifteen minutes. So as you get heavier and heavier, particles tend to decay.

• 12:30Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, fifteen minutes, that's it.

• 12:32Chuck Nice?

  If you break off a neutron and set it free, fifteen minutes later, it just goes.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it turns into a proton and it'll and and to it. No, you tell me, what are the decay products of a neutron?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  It turns into a proton, an electron and an anti-neutrino. You get three things out.

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  Ah, gotcha. Okay.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here's something cool. I want to show off the little bit of particle physics I know. You hear what he said?

• 12:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your neutron becomes a proton, an electron and an anti-neutrino. Okay, now watch. The kind of particle the neutron is, you can end up with something that isn't that kind of particle when you're done. Okay, there's conservation laws. It's okay for the neutron to become a proton. But wait a minute, the proton has a plus one charge.

• 13:17Chuck Nice?

  Right, so now you gotta cancel that out.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cancel that out. We cancel that with a what?

• 13:23Chuck Nice?

  Um, wait, the proton has a, oh, they, uh, they, uh, oh, wait, wait, the proton, so it's a proton.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus one.

• 13:28Chuck Nice?

  Plus one.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's got a minus one?

• 13:30Chuck Nice?

  That's electron.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Electron, boom, he said.

• 13:32Chuck Nice?

  And he said electron.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those cancel, we're good. However, we now have an electron. That's a kind of particle that we didn't start with. We gotta undo the fact that we now have an electron.

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  Ah, cuz you gotta need the conservation.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta concentrate on this.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  So now.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you get rid of the fact that you now have an electron? You, and the electron is paired up with these neutrinos. And what do you say? You not only get the electron, you get the.

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  Anti-neutrino.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anti-neutrino cancelling out the electron.

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  Now, that's a great way to balance this out, but my question is, do these things, are these things actually here? Or are you just saying, okay, we need this to cancel it out?

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, take us there.

• 14:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are, are, were these hypotheses that we require of the universe? Or were these observations that the universe requires of us? Ooh, that was a good one.

• 14:19Chuck Nice?

  I liked it, I liked it a lot.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I guess it goes back to 1896. So Henri Becquerel, French physicist, famously discovered radioactivity in his lab when he left these uranium salts on top of a piece of photographic paper. And he saw that even when there was like a bit of card in between the salt and the paper, the, the photographic film got exposed. So that was what, what he was seeing there were pro, were neutrons decaying into protons, basically. That was the radiation that was being emitted by those uranium salts. So we kind of knew about this process. It was called beta decay back in those days. And, and then Ernest Rutherford and others studied it in the late 19th century. So we kind of knew about this process way before we even knew what a neutron was. That took another forty years or so.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  So the phenomena appeared first and it took a lot longer to actually figure out what was going on.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The beta particle was the electron, correct?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. Yeah.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because at the time, we didn't know about neutrons. Neutrons would come. We didn't know about neutrons until 1930. So we had to have clumsy other language to account for this.

• 15:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So you're saying that the universe is requiring it of us.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To recognize these properties. And they become rather helpful, correct? In calculations you do and predictions you make.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this whole, the whole subject of particle physics is kind of built on this idea of mathematical symmetry, these symmetries that are either respected or broken. And that generates this very powerful mathematical description of the universe. And I mean, this like, this way of looking at the world is extraordinarily successful. Like, to give you like, an example, how amazing this theory is. One, there's one quantity that we can, one example of a quantity you can use to calculate is the magnetism of the electrons. The electron, as well as having an electric charge, it behaves like a little magnet and limits a magnetic field. And you can calculate how strong that little magnet should be to one particle, I think now 10 billion. And if you do an experiment, a really, really precise experiment, you get the same number

• 16:18Speaker 02

  to 10 decimal places, which is crazy. So this, this, this kind of way of looking at the world is incredibly powerful. But at the same time, we know we're massively missing something because we don't know what dark matter is or dark energy or any of this other stuff. So it's this amazingly successful theory, but also incomplete.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, it's, you know enough about the universe to quantify your ignorance.

• 16:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say, yeah, without a doubt. Anything you get to 10, 10 places, you, you, you pretty much nailed it.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you nailed it.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I'm Jasmine Wilson, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go to our questions now.

• 17:20Chuck Nice?

  You got it.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, they were our Patreon supporters. These are patrons of StarTalk.

• 17:25Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They are occasionally solicited for questions they might have, specifically tuned for the guest. So you're not in studio with us, you're coming to us from London, but that doesn't matter to the questioners, they don't care where you are.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 17:38Chuck Nice?

  There we go.

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you got, Chuck?

• 17:40Chuck Nice?

  All right. He says, "Hi, StarTalk team, Andrew here from Cork City, Ireland. Dr. Cliff, can you please explain how your research on CP violation in B-masons contributes to our understanding of the matter-anti-matter asymmetry in the universe? Thanks a million."

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. Let me tee this up.

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I can do the astronomy part of this, and then he can go in

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  To the particle physics.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of it, right? So you look in the early universe, you have matter and there's energy there, and matter and energy we know are equivalent.

• 18:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And from this bath of energy, you can spontaneously make particles.

• 18:16Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you do that, the laws of symmetry of the universe say the particles are matter-anti-matter pairs. And it came out of nothing.

• 18:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta be able to come back together and be nothing again.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  And be nothing.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again.

• 18:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you got the, and this is just going on.

• 18:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And, but, at some point, the universe, out of this soup of energy, created one extra particle for every hundred million particles that it made. And so in the dance-off, all the pairs go away.

• 18:47Chuck Nice?

  So that's annihilation, annihilation, annihilation, annihilation.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's one person left, has got nobody to annihilate with.

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is everything we know and love in this universe that we call matter.

• 18:55Chuck Nice?

  So wait, all matter?

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, from that one.

• 18:58Chuck Nice?

  Wait.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  All matter?

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Yes, everything else is a photon, everything else turned into energy.

• 19:04Chuck Nice?

  From this leftover, just the one out of a hundred million playing musical chairs?

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the musical chairs, everybody pairs off.

• 19:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're happy.

• 19:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you think everybody's paired, and then one person is left. And there's no one to pair it with ever more. And that makes up everything. All the matter that we love and know in this universe. So Harry, why did you do this?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  I mean, I wish I could claim responsibility for this, this is the universe. Well, I mean, yeah, this is a big problem, as you say, because like we see this in experiments. When we bang particles together at the Large Hadron Collider, you always see equal numbers of particles and antiparticles being made. So this is what happens. So the question is, how did you get this asymmetry? And there was a Russian physicist back in the seventies, I think, called Andrei Sakharov, who came up with three conditions that had to be satisfied to allow matter to win this battle with antimatter in the early universe. The first one, pretty obviously, is you need a process that makes more particles than antiparticles. That's number one. The second one, though, is this condition known as CP violation.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  So CP stands for charge parity, which is a sort of symmetry that relates matter to antimatter. It's kind of like a mirror. If you put matter in the CP mirror, it shows up as antimatter. So what we're looking for are processes that violate this symmetry. And these b mesons that the question are asked about, so these are particles which contain a beauty quark and another quark, so like paired up with an anti-quark usually. And there are a particular type of these particles that do this really weird dance, where you create one of these b mesons, and as it travels through your experiment, it oscillates backwards and forwards between matter and antimatter. So it will flip its identity with this very nice sort of periodic way.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  And you can, what you then do is you watch how often does it decay in the matter state? And how often does it decay in the antimatter state? And you measure the difference. And if you see a difference, that tells you that the laws of the universe violate this CP symmetry, this symmetry between matter and antimatter. So this is the kind of key ingredient, one of the key ingredients we need to explain this mystery.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe has the power to violate its own laws by this process.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So this was first discovered, I don't know, back in the eighties originally. And we're studying it in lots of different particles now. So we know that this CP symmetry is broken, which is a good thing, because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here. But the mystery is our current, the particles we know about don't break it enough. So the symmetry is very, is only very slightly broken. And we need way more of this symmetry breaking to explain the fact that we exist and the universe is there to look at.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know we had any mechanism at all to break the symmetry. I'm Cockles are warmed by this knowledge.

• 21:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is fascinating stuff. Okay, this is Sauran, Sauran Sarkar, friend of ours. Is matter, antimatter asymmetry the cause for the Big Bang? We just talked about it, but could that, I mean, are you gonna make a Big Bang, man?

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what are you hiding from us?

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astrophysically, it happens much later than the formation of the universe. But with your Large Hadron Collider, you are probing the conditions that would have prevailed at the Big Bang itself, or very close to the very beginning. So, do you think that this, I'm rewording this question, that this matter, antimatter asymmetry would have mattered before it otherwise mattered astrophysically in the universe?

• 22:39Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not, we don't really know when the process that broke this symmetry happened. It could have, so the LHC, as you say, is kind of recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, and we're probing conditions that existed about a trillionth of a second after time zero, if there was ever such a thing. So that's kind of where we are, and there is a possibility that that was the moment. It's all actually related to the Higgs boson. There was this thing that happened about a trillionth of a second into the universe's existence called the, called electroweak symmetry breaking, which is basically where the Higgs field, which gives mass to the particles that we're made from, switched on for the first time. And that reset the laws of, well, reset the basic ingredients of the universe, set the form of the forces.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  And it was a sort of a transition, a bit like water boiling. It's like a kind of, like a change of state, but a change of state of the vacuum itself. And that, that may have been the moment which created more mass than antimatter. And that's why we're doing, one of the reasons we built the LHC is to recreate those conditions, to see if we see that process happening.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These phase transitions, you said water boiling, going from just regular water to boiling, or even freezing, right? Water going, it's water completely changing its state. And you now use this vocabulary sort of loosely in the early universe, or maybe literally, the universe is changing its... Its state of existence, are you just saying if it's gonna happen anywhere? That's where it's gonna happen. Cause that's where there's some serious action going down, down the pipe.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's well theoretically, you can, when you do the, you sort of figure out what this event looked like. Under certain conditions, you find in the equations of the standard model that you can make more particles than antiparticles in certain, this phase transition has to happen in a very particular way. And you actually need more particles than exist in the standard model. So the standard model on its own can't do it, but the standard model plus some other things can do it. But it's also possible it happened earlier. So we're talking like, you know, not a trillionth of a second after the big bang, but a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So you're getting closer to time zero.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that helps me become more accepting of the fact that you can blame these transition, you can blame all the weird oddities that are going on, on these transitional moments in the universe. Right? Because that's where stuff is going down.

• 25:03Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? Okay.

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time for a couple more? What, what you got?

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  All right. You know, I'm gonna go to Magnus here. Says Magnus. I am Magnus, son to a fallen father. Husband to a murdered wife. I am Magnus and I shall have my revenge. Okay, I'm sorry.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That just come out of you?

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 25:30Chuck Nice?

  It just sounds like what you should say. Well, your name is Magnus.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Name is Magnus.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  You know.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is clearly the plight of Magnus.

• 25:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. All right. He says, my respects, Dr. Cliff. May you describe the link as you see it between A, quantum field theory as the gold standard of the standard model until now, a perfect description of our current knowledge. B, various versions of quantum gravity. I.e. string theory and loop quantum gravity, which depend on the ADS CFT duality with or without background dependency. And just to add, I'm a Swede in Switzerland, confusing, no?

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 26:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how?

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  It's only confusing to Americans, okay, Magnus, because?

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is that question? I don't, I don't get the question.

• 26:26Chuck Nice?

  Um.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Go ahead. So, Harry, did you follow the question? I think so. I think they were asking about, well, the relationship between quantum field theory, which is the language of the standard model, the language of particle physics, and string theory and loop quantum gravity. I mean, I think that was the question. I mean, what I would say is that I am really underqualified to talk about quantum gravity, not my area. I think the, but what I would say is that quantum gravity theories, they say very little about particle physics at the moment. So, you know, string theory, loop quantum gravity, whatever your favorite flavor of quantum gravity theory is, it has no bearing on any experiments that we do in high-energy particle physics at the LHC. And one of the big problems with these theories is they don't really make testable predictions so far. So, I would

• 27:12Speaker 02

  love it if string theorists or someone else could come along and say, you know, if string theory is right, you can do this experiment at a collider and you'll see this. But so far, that hasn't happened. So, really, quantum field theory is the, is the kind of gold standard. It's the theory that works. Maybe it'll be replaced by one of these theories later, but I think we're a way aways from that. Interesting.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, what he says, he doesn't care about gravity.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I'd love to include gravity. I'd love it, but it's a hard problem.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Currently, what is our best understanding of the most things going on in the universe? Is it just sort of quantum field theory? Is that what gives us the best understanding of everything? And maybe we'll just have to modify that? Or is there something else ready to take over all of it, waiting in the wings, an umbrella to it all?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, as you know, like in modern physics, we have these two pillars of, which describe pretty much everything in physics, which are quantum field theory, on the one hand, which describes particles, quantum mechanics, you know, all that stuff. And then we have gravity on the other, on the other hand, and general relativity, which is a classical theory, a non-quantum theory. And so, you have these two separate theories, but they, they actually don't really overlap with each other. I mean, the only places where you would see quantum gravitational effects are at the center of black holes, or at the very earliest moments of the Big Bang, these really extreme conditions. For everything else, these two separate theories work perfectly well. So, and that's kind of the problem, actually, because the only place you get evidence for quantum gravity are in these really extreme

• 28:41Speaker 02

  conditions, which we're way, way away from being able to recreate in the laboratory. So, that's what makes it very difficult.

• 28:47Chuck Nice?

  Cool, man.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, give me another.

• 28:49Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here's another one. This is, uh, Friedrich Johansson, who says, "Hello, Friedrich here from northern Sweden."

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Friedrich, I'm up in the hood.

• 29:02Chuck Nice?

  Right. "Hello, Friedrich here from Detroit."

• 29:10Chuck Nice?

  So he says, "Friedrich, uh, here from northern Sweden. Do all fundamental particles of a type have exactly the same mass? And how can we know that?"

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'd love that.

• 29:25Chuck Nice?

  It's a really cool question.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd love that.

• 29:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are all particles of any species identical in every way to the limits of all measurements?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I mean, well, because you can, you can measure it, right? So, yeah, every electron is exactly the same as every other electron. Every proton is exactly the same as every other proton. And the reason is, well, protons are a bad example, actually, but say electrons. The electrons are actually made of this thing called the electron field, which is an invisible fluid-like thing. It's all throughout the universe, and every electron is a little ripple in this same field. And as a result, when you hit, you hit the electron field, you make an electron, you make the same type of thing everywhere. So that's why they're identical. I mean, you could almost, you can always argue that every electron is the same thing. It's part of the same object. So every particle of a certain species is absolutely identical and indistinguishable. And that's really fundamental, actually, to our understanding of particle physics and

• 30:21Speaker 02

  quantum theory.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it a Borg like that?

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that is the Borg.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the members of the Borg, they're not individuals.

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  Conscious wise.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all, they're all one.

• 30:30Chuck Nice?

  They're all one entity.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Although electrons don't come along and try and turn you into an electron.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright. You're a Star Trek geek.

• 30:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. "I am locutus of electron. Resistance is futile."

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But part of the question was, how do you know? Because you haven't measured every electron in the universe, and you're saying you know enough about the field to know that there's only one kind of particle it can make.

• 30:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that case, and therefore you're gonna get the electron every single time.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  That is really cool.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man. Okay.

• 31:26Chuck Nice?

  This is Yazan Al-Hajari. And he says cheers from New Jersey.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 31:33Chuck Nice?

  I'm Yaz, an artist and filmmaker studying relativity. I'm fascinated by how Einstein's theory is applied to the Large Hadron Collider, where particles approach at the speed of light. Dr. Cliff, could you explain how relativity shapes our understanding of these high-energy collisions? And whether it might someday be possible to safely create a small black hole somewhere in the collider? And Neil, if that were possible, would you like to throw something into that black hole?

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally. Oh, yeah. We can make it like an amusement park game. Hit the black hole, and it just disappears into the singularity. That question reminds me of earlier in our conversation. So, Harry, you studied particles that decayed in a trillionth of a second. It seems to me that can be a trillionth of a second only at a certain speed. Because the faster a particle goes, the longer it would take to decay, because its timeframe has shifted relative to the observer. So, you can't just declare a trillionth of a second without specifying a speed, or is that particle at rest?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So, that trillionth of a second is from the particle's point of view. So, in the frame of the particle, so the particle's at rest, basically. So, if you were the particle, you'd live a trillionth of a second. But from our point of view in the lab, as you say, these things are going close to the speed of light, so they live way longer. So, they actually will travel, they live long enough because of this relativistic time dilation to fly a centimeter or so in the experiment, which if they just live a trillionth of a second, they wouldn't go anywhere near that far. So, you're absolutely right. I mean, like, relativity, special relativity, I should say, is fundamental to colliders, because what they basically do is they are E equals mc squared machines. They take E, energy, kinetic energy, in these accelerated particles. They bang them together, and they make m. They make new particles, new matter, effectively.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  So, like, it's absolutely fundamental to what we're doing. But the question about black holes, that's really general relativity. And there were some ideas back when the LHC switched on that... If there were extra dimensions of space, so extra directions that you can move in, that it would be possible to create microscopic black holes at the LHC. And this led to a load of tabloid stories about the LHC is going to create a black hole. It's going to swallow Geneva and then swallow the rest of the planet and we're all going to disappear. And so this caused such like a big storm in the British, the British tabloid press actually really got hold of this story. CERN had to create this health and safety report, which is the most exciting risk assessment you'll ever read. And it basically describes these various hazards, one of which is like a black hole that swallows the earth.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  The other is the creation of a bubble universe that expands to destroy the entire of reality. So they had this risk assessment where the destruction of the universe was one of the possible outcomes. And they basically said, this is very unlikely to happen and so it's all fine.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  And you still got money. They gave you, they still let you do it. Well, no one's going to sue you if you destroy the planet, right?

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. He's already thought this through. There's a YouTube video before the Large Hadron Collider was turned on, but there's a countdown to it. There's a YouTube video of the parking lot outside of CERN and you have the clock counting down and then it gets to zero and then the parking lot falls in.

• 34:52Chuck Nice?

  On itself, wow.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the whole, it's, it's pretty funny. Terrifying.

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was going to say, it's funny if you're an astrophysicist. For the rest of us, it's not funny.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  I should, I should say, there is a reason why we knew this wasn't going to happen. And that's because the universe has been doing this experiment for billions of years where we have protons that hit the upper atmosphere, much higher in energy than the LHC. So if this was possible, every object in the universe would have been turned into a black hole. So we kind of knew for that reason that it wasn't going to happen.

• 35:23Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there's no greater particle accelerator than the universe itself.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, look at that. All right, all right. This is Viper who says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Cliff, Lord Nice. I am Sam from O'Fallon, Missouri. I am 16 and have been wondering about tachyons for a few years now. I would like to know. I would, I would like to know more about them. And if you guys can go into more depth explaining what is the deal with tachyons?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Oh. Wow, okay. Yeah, I mean, well, all I really know about tachyons is they're hypothetical particles that travel faster than light, but I don't think they're allowed to exist because they would violate causality, this idea that like one event leads to another and not the other way around. So they are, I think there are things you can kind of cook up in your equations, but they're basically forbidden. They turn up in Star Trek, I think, or like, you know, science fiction as a way of like facilitating time travel, but all the time. But I don't think that they're things that can exist in reality, but maybe Neil may know more about this than me.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's see what Merlin has to say about this. Dear Merlin,

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  what is a tachyon? Rick McFarlane, Dallas, Texas. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light, named for the Greek tachys, meaning swift, where we also get the word tachometer. Einstein's equations of special relativity bestow this particle with an array of bizarre properties. Here are the top five. One, the slowest a tachyon can move is slightly greater than the speed of light. Two, a tachyon can have infinite velocity. Three, when a tachyon loses energy, it speeds up. When it gains

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  energy, it slows down. A tachyon appears to travel backwards in time for some observers. If you send your friends a message with a tachyon, they can receive the message before you sent it. Tachyons have yet to be detected.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  There you go. And there's the end. That'd be useful for those emails that you forget to reply to, right, that sit in your inbox for weeks. And then if you could send them back in time, that would be amazing.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and my favorite tachyon account would be, you see someone walking down the corridor, and then they slip on a banana peel. But he's your friend, then you don't want them to be harmed. So you go to a tachyon texting app, okay, and you, because it's already happened, so you send them a text and say, watch out for the banana peel. So then they get the text before they step on the banana peel.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now the person's walking down the corridor, and they get a text. And they look at the text, and it says, watch out for the...

• 38:17Speaker 02

  And they slip on a banana.

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  Because of your text. Because of your text. Right. There it is. Chuck, we've got time for one, maybe two more questions. Actually, let's go with Jonas Dravland. And Jonas says, good morning, Dr. Cliff, Dr. Tyson, and Astro Lord Nice. Okay. Jonas, from the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina here. Is there any dark matter in my living room? Oh. Or, stated more seriously, is dark matter scattered throughout the universe? Or is it all in clumps around distant galaxy clusters? If it is present on Earth, does that allow one to search for it in settings such as your collider, sir? Oh, I love it. Well, thank you, Jonas. What a great question.

• 39:04Chuck Nice?

  When you live in the hills of the Appalachians, you've got a lot of time on your hands. Yeah, he's taking hikes and thinking about dark matter, you know? Yeah. So what you got there?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  I mean, there's definitely, there would be dark matter in your living room, yeah, for sure. Because we, well, this is actually really astronomy rather than particle physics. But the idea is that every galaxy, like our own, sits in this big spherical cloud of dark matter. And the galaxy is kind of in the middle of this cloud. So if there are dark matter particles floating around in the galaxy, they're floating through us and through the Earth, and then there'll be a few in the room. It depends on how massive they are as to how many there would actually be. But yeah, they'd be there. And that doesn't actually help us at the LHC, because at the LHC, we're trying to make them out of energy. But there are other experiments that go live down big mine shafts, where you have tanks of really cold xenon or other kinds of noble gases. And you wait for a dark

• 39:54Speaker 02

  matter particle to drift through the Earth, hit a xenon atom in your detector, and create a little flicker of light. And then you directly detect dark matter. So it's a bit like a poltergeist moving, you know, throwing some crockery around in your living room. That's kind of what we're waiting to see. But we've, these detectors are getting more and more and more sensitive. They still haven't seen anything, which is very frustrating. But hopefully, one day, they'll pick something up.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last question.

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is David Smith. He says, hello, Dr. T, Dr. C, Lord Nice. Dave Smith here, hailing from Naples, Florida.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  How do you know you have found antimatter if antimatter and matter cancel each other out? Is it the violence of the interaction, the aftermath, or the moment of ever so slight when you see the matter and antimatter just before their epic confrontation? So he made it into a boxing match. Like, he, yeah, he's the Don King of particles.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Particles in the octagon.

• 40:54Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Two particles enter, one particle leave.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, in this case, two particles enter, no.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  No particles leave. Oh, that's a real good fight.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brutal.

• 41:04Chuck Nice?

  That's a real good fight, yeah.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An antimatter particle out in the wilderness, can you identify it as such unless you then see it annihilate?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  You can, yeah. And actually, the way it was discovered originally was by Carl Anderson, American physicist, back in 1932. So he had this thing called a cloud chamber, which is this amazing instrument that allows you to see individual subatomic particles. They basically create these trails of water droplets as they go through the chamber, which you can see as little traces. And he had one of these chambers at Caltech in California, and he was seeing cosmic rays coming from outer space. And you see electrons, you see protons, and he had magnetic field on his chamber, and he saw one track that looked just like an electron. It had the same kind of form, but it was bending the wrong direction. So it was an electron with positive charge. And that was, that one photograph was enough

• 41:55Speaker 02

  for Anderson to say, I've discovered antimatter. So, but I mean, now at CERN, there's a really cool experiment called Alpha, where they actually make atoms of antimatter. They make anti-hydrogen, and they trap it in a magnetic bottle. So you can't obviously keep it in a bottle because it would annihilate the bottle. But if you have a really strong magnetic field, you can store these things and keep them stored for hours now. And then you can shine light on them and look at spectroscopy and do all kinds of really cool stuff. So we can actually kind of effectively store this stuff in very small quantities now.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anti-hydrogen would be an anti-proton with an anti-electron in orbit around it?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you get a chance to go to CERN, you should visit the Alpha experiment because it's awesome.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just in all, in all, in the interest of disclosure regarding Carl Anderson, the existence of antimatter had just been predicted.

• 42:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that was Fermi, correct?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Dirac, Dirac.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dirac, Dirac, thank you. There was some framework to even be able to interpret that result.

• 42:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and there was, yeah. Electron doing the opposite for its charge.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but otherwise was identical to the electron. Same mass, same everything.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was very cool.

• 43:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 43:08Chuck Nice?

  Who knew I had a twin?

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An evil twin.

• 43:11Chuck Nice?

  An evil twin. Why does that twin have a goatee?

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 43:15Chuck Nice?

  That electron has a goatee! What's going on?

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the comic strip.

• 43:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The antimatter comic strip that we need. All right, well, listen, Harry, thank you for being on StarTalk. We love what you do, and we love how you talk about it. And now that you're in arm's reach, I'd love to come back to you when we have particle physics questions.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. It was great talking to you, really good fun.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a presence on the internet? Do you have a handle that people can track you down?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. You can find me at my website, harrycliff.co.uk if you want to see what I'm up to. I'm also on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it, at Harry V Cliff.

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your latest book, The Mysterious Anomalies, Space Oddities, The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe.

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there aren't many books about what we don't know, and that's, this is just that kind of book. The things that are, that's odd, what's that?

• 44:08Chuck Nice?

  You know what, I could write that book.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could write?

• 44:11Chuck Nice?

  I could write a whole book on what I don't know, I'm telling you right now.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  But, you know, scientists love things we don't understand. That's, that's how science makes progress, and that's what the book's about. It's about all these like weird little effects that could be nothing, or they could be the clue to something really big, and we're sort of trying to figure that out.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're looking forward to it. At Penguin Random House.

• 44:28Chuck Nice?

  Whoa.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This year.

• 44:29Chuck Nice?

  Big time, buddy. Big time.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So we good here? So again, Harry, thanks for joining us.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 44:39Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's been yet another installment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Particle Physics Edition. Until next time. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, bidding you to keep looking up.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, bidding you to keep looking up.