Cosmic Queries – Dimensional Leaking

Is the whole universe actually a jinn particle? Neil deGrasse Tyson and cohosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly hang out with astrophysicist Charles Liu to answer questions about the nature of gravity, dark matter, and why we don’t actually know how the solar corona gets hot.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary's in the house, that must mean a StarTalk special edition is not far away.

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This time Cosmic Queries.

• 0:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boy, we went everywhere.

• 0:09Chuck Nice?

  Everywhere.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black holes.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  Yup, white holes.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  White hole, parallel universes.

• 0:14Chuck Nice?

  And all the questions, I gotta tell you, were just awful.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 0:18Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. You people need to step up your game.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 0:22Chuck Nice?

  No, that was, that was amazing.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tune in and find out what the hell Chuck is talking about on StarTalk.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk special edition, a Cosmic Queries variant on that. Why is it a special edition Cosmic Queries? Cause we have Gary in the house, Gary. Hey Neil. Where there's Gary, there is special edition. Because Gary is special. Yes, as everyone knows.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, always good to have you. Chuck?

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in the saddle.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doing some Cosmic Queries. And, and this is, this is Grab Bag.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  Grab Bag, now we used to call this Galactic Gumbo, guaranteed.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You used to call it that?

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  That's right, now come on down here and I'll put you in a little, get you some air too thick. And then we gonna move on and get you that little good gumbo.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know who else was in the hood was, all hail to the Geek and Chief, Charles Liu.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All hail. All hail. Oh, you guys are sweet. All hail to Charles Liu, uh, visiting from the College of Staten Island of the CUNY system. Yes. Thanks for coming by my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. Always so much fun to be here. Do people know that he was involved when we opened this place? He was part of the scientific staff here. Wow. That helped write exhibits and design things and, and it's all there, so. Very cool. Yes, I just wanna, we're now at our 25th anniversary of the opening of the Rose Center. Wow. And I just wanna say thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you for giving me the chance to do it. And we co-authored a book at the time. Ah. Called One Universe at Home in the Cosmos. Yes, with Robert Irian.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Robert Irian, that's right, he was a science writer, uh, the three of us, and it was a celebration of how we were bringing science down to earth in this facility. So we got the band back together. Two thirds of the band out together. So this is a, a special edition.

• 2:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grab bag. And I see we've broken it up into three categories. First one is black holes.

• 2:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then the next one is just mixed bag.

• 2:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, and then the third one is more mixed bag.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More mixed bag. Thank you, thank you.

• 2:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Because we ran out of ideas.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, both Charles and I might know the answer simultaneously.

• 2:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he's our gee-ke.

• 2:54Charles Liu?

  In that case, science battle.

• 2:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 2:58Charles Liu?

  Two scientists enter, one scientist leaves.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never cross the beams.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I defer to Charles on so many counts.

• 3:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I will sit here and just admire what comes out of his mouth. Okay?

• 3:12Gary O'Reilly?

  That's easy to do.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's do this.

• 3:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Having said all of that, we'll see.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll see, go.

• 3:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, Tom Sturgill said hello Chuck, Charles and Neil. He's in Florida. General relativity tells us that gravity is not a force, but a reaction of spacetime to mass. Okay. Quantum theory tells us there may be parallel universes. Instead of dark energy, might we be seeing the effect of the mass of these other universes on our spacetime?

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, we got badass.

• 3:41Charles Liu?

  What a great question to start.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man!

• 3:44Charles Liu?

  Excellent.

• 3:45Chuck Nice?

  That's a well thought out question.

• 3:47Charles Liu?

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, does that mean we have to like up our game? If that's who's watching our show?

• 3:51Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Gary O'Reilly?

  How, how do you want me to phrase this?

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  Or, or is it, or is it that there's another astrophysicist is out there just like, let's see him deal with this.

• 4:01Chuck Nice?

  Get these a-holes to see if they really know what they're talking about.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So start with the idea that is, is gravity really a force? I want to hear what you think about that.

• 4:08Charles Liu?

  That's wonderful. Uh, Tom, you're absolutely right that the general theory of relativity is a superseding theory that covers, uh, includes, I should say, Isaac Newton's original universal theory of gravity. And that is that. On small scales, like scales of the Earth, scales of a solar system, for example, you cannot tell the difference.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Small things, like the solar system.

• 4:32Charles Liu?

  Yeah, exactly. You cannot tell the difference between acceleration and the curvature of spacetime gravity.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got you.

• 4:41Charles Liu?

  So they will look almost exactly the same, and they should look exactly the same on very small scales. So there have been experiments done to show whether or not gravity is a true force, or it is truly a curvature of spacetime. And so far, the two of them follow that so-called equivalence principle.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's both.

• 5:01Charles Liu?

  It is both on the scales.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Circumstantially.

• 5:04Charles Liu?

  Right, in the circumstances that we are.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Circumstantially, they're both.

• 5:07Charles Liu?

  So the exceptions come in extreme environments, when you're not looking at sort of Earth-like or local environments. One example is a black hole.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 5:15Charles Liu?

  Where you might indeed have a circumstance where you can tell the difference between a gravitational activity, curvature of spacetime gravitational activity, and a force that measures out exactly like that curvature.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how much of this is just semantics? Like, who cares whether it's curvature or Newtonian?

• 5:34Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it accelerates an object.

• 5:36Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let that just be the force.

• 5:38Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are we even bickering over this?

• 5:40Charles Liu?

  It matters because when we are trying to understand these extreme situations, such as a black hole or the beginning of the universe, there are subtle differences that do come into account, and you have to take them into account in order to get the science right.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you get the wrong answer.

• 5:56Charles Liu?

  That get the wrong answer.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very good. Okay. But then, we learn, if you take physics class and chemistry, about these other forces, electromagnetic.

• 6:04Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force.

• 6:06Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, you know, we add gravity as a fourth force there, but you're saying we shouldn't add gravity?

• 6:13Charles Liu?

  The problem is that gravity is creating that very strange boundary condition. The standard model about particles that we use, you know, the quarks and the leptons and things like that, do not include a particle that moves gravity around. So if gravity is a fundamental force, there should exist a particle.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We expect there to be.

• 6:33Charles Liu?

  Uh huh. Called a graviton.

• 6:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on our understanding.

• 6:36Charles Liu?

  Because all other forces have these mediating particles. So a graviton must be detected, but...

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, hang on. So what propagates the electromagnetic force?

• 6:44Charles Liu?

  The photon.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what propagates the weak force?

• 6:48Charles Liu?

  The W and Z particles?

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's obvious.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What propagates the strong force?

• 6:54Charles Liu?

  Gluons.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gluons. So, there ought to be a keeping in the tradition of this sort of standard model of particles and their associated forces, the gravity should have a particle associated with it. And what would that be?

• 7:10Charles Liu?

  The graviton.

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Graviton.

• 7:11Charles Liu?

  Yes, that's right.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Photon, gluon, graviton, and vector bosons.

• 7:17Chuck Nice?

  So now, let me ask you this, though.

• 7:19Charles Liu?

  Sure.

• 7:19Chuck Nice?

  Photon has no mass, right?

• 7:21Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of the...

• 7:22Chuck Nice?

  Does a gluon have a mass?

• 7:25Charles Liu?

  Gluons do not have mass either.

• 7:26Chuck Nice?

  How about Y and Z?

• 7:28Charles Liu?

  Actually, the W and Z particles do have mass.

• 7:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's... There you go.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  So...

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 7:35Charles Liu?

  That is the fascinating part.

• 7:36Chuck Nice?

  What's going on about that?

• 7:37Charles Liu?

  These particles are still being studied. We're trying to figure out what they are and... Well, you know what? Maybe the concept of mass is in itself worth talking about for a moment. Because mass and energy are equivalent.

• 7:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:50Charles Liu?

  You can switch back and forth between them. So when we say we have a massless particle.

• 7:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:55Charles Liu?

  Right? We're not saying that it has nothing. We're saying that it can carry energy, which can be converted into mass under the right conditions.

• 8:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:03Charles Liu?

  Right? So, a photon, for example, can have as much energy as a baseball.

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 8:08Charles Liu?

  Some of the most powerful photons.

• 8:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:10Charles Liu?

  But they won't measure on a scale.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A baseball thrown by a pitcher.

• 8:14Charles Liu?

  Yeah, right. So...

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just a baseball.

• 8:17Charles Liu?

  That too. Wow. Equals mc squared, right?

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Implicit in your statement, it's a baseball thrown at 90 miles an hour.

• 8:24Charles Liu?

  Yeah. So you have this huge amount of stuff that's there even though there is no mass.

• 8:29Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 8:30Charles Liu?

  So given that, one of the mysteries of the standard model and how our subatomic universe works is indeed what has mass and why and what doesn't have mass and why.

• 8:41Chuck Nice?

  Right. So can you call energy potential mass?

• 8:44Charles Liu?

  You could.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  You could call it that.

• 8:46Charles Liu?

  Yes. But what happens now, we have to bring in Tom's concept of quantum physics. Right? General relativity and quantum mechanics.

• 8:54Charles Liu?

  Have a real hard time connecting with each other. That when you try to use these ideas of particles to explain gravity or the motion of things, you get stuck. The theory, the math doesn't quite match. And so this speculation that Tom has about, hey, is a black hole which has general relativity, blah, blah, blah. Could it be affected by quantum physics? And this idea of, in this case, the many worlds interpretation. Could it be? It could, but the math doesn't show it yet. So this is a, this is actually a frontier that we're trying to wonder. Some folks have speculated that you could actually use quantum physics to communicate within black holes.

• 9:37Charles Liu?

  So you go from the interior of one black hole and be able to transfer to the interior of another black hole. But it still wouldn't translate out into our universe. How would you ever find out? Because you can't get any information out of the black hole. So the math works in these speculative ways.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happens in a black hole?

• 9:57Charles Liu?

  As far as we know, right? The cosmic fight club.

• 10:02Charles Liu?

  We don't talk about the event horizon. Yeah, so stay tuned, Tom, is like, is what I would say. Odds are what you just speculated is not the case, but mathematically, people are still working on ways to make it possible. And then we have to figure it out. We have to test it to see if we can make these predictions actually manifest in observation.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think the day will come where we'll discover a graviton?

• 10:25Charles Liu?

  Yes, we're pretty close already. Okay. The, the reason we're close is because of the gravitational wave detectors that we found, right? There are some people making calculations and saying, well, if gravitational waves actually do exist, which we have now shown they do, then there must be a graviton. Right. So the implication that gravitons exist is there. Now it's a matter of actually detecting one. And that is the bugaboo. The graviton is so low energy. Right. And there are so many of them that being able to pick one out or to have enough data to show that these particles actually exist is extremely difficult. That is wild. All right. All right, man.

• 11:10Charles Liu?

  Wow, I wish I spoke math. You do just fine.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to Parker Man and he says, uh- Parker Man? Parker? Man. Alright Parker Man. "Greetings, Dr. Lou Tyson, Lord Naez from Ventura, California. Parker Man here, thinking about colliding black holes. I wonder what happens just prior to the merger of the event horizons. Consider a binary pair of black holes, slowly spiraling towards each other. Assuming the original stars were formed at the same time, they would have the same sense of rotation and revolution about each other. This would include the frame dragging around each body. Just before the horizons merge, the region between them will have a collision of sorts as the linear motions of frame dragging will be in the opposite directions.

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  What effect would this confluence of opposing frame motions have? Might the stress on spacetime increase Hawking radiation temporarily or even possibly trigger vacuum decay if the holes were massive enough?" Man, let me tell you something. First of all, don't be trying to get us to do your advanced physics homework.

• 12:46Chuck Nice?

  That's number one, alright? Number two- Make your question show up. Exactly. Holy crap. First of all, this is somebody who studies astrophysics. He knows, Tom. Hands down.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Tell us what frame dragging is.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  So, what's the deal? Yeah, frame dragging. Colliding black holes, frame dragging.

• 13:05Charles Liu?

  Very simple, yes. As you get closer and closer to event horizon-

• 13:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:09Charles Liu?

  And as you're moving-

• 13:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:10Charles Liu?

  Your time sense, the dilation of it, becomes very visible.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:16Charles Liu?

  So when you're in one direction- Compared to the other direction of rotation, or motion, or whatever you have, you'll actually wind up with a different view of the same object.

• 13:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:28Charles Liu?

  And that's sort of the basic general concept.

• 13:30Chuck Nice?

  Because it's all about frame of reference.

• 13:32Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:32Chuck Nice?

  It's all about frame of reference.

• 13:33Charles Liu?

  Because your frame of reference is being dragged by the gravitational curvature of spacetime.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  But wait, I mean, I think you have to show people what you're talking about, because I don't think people understand when black holes, you're talking about, you're actually talking about something that is tangible but not tangible, and they're moving towards each other.

• 13:55Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 13:55Chuck Nice?

  And they do this thing.

• 13:56Charles Liu?

  They spiral around and around and around, and then they hit each other, right?

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, hardly ever in the universe are two objects falling towards each other on exactly the same line for a collision.

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  It's not like two trains on the same track.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not, right, exactly. Exactly. So there's always some non-alignment. And when there's non-alignment, you have the opportunity for spiraling in.

• 14:17Charles Liu?

  Got you.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 14:18Charles Liu?

  So, this question, which Parker Man has done, wait, is Parker a new superhero? Parker Man!

• 14:28Charles Liu?

  Anyway, as Parker is saying here, Parker, you're saying it exactly right, right? You're wondering what the interaction is between two black holes as they spiral closer and closer. And the answer is gravitational waves. You get gravitational waves released, and you get this energy that comes off. And the way that the black hole collides does lead to differences in what kind of energy gets released, and in what quantity, and in what direction, and things like that. So, your question, the answer, the very short answer to that question, Neil, you can tell me if I am wrong, is yes, okay, to all those things, those are all possibilities. And then which individual collisions cause what kinds of things to squirt out?

• 15:12Charles Liu?

  That is still a subject of intense research.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And up to the geometry of what's going on.

• 15:17Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also, he did comment on something that I... Wish were true, but it's not the betting person's odds for it to be true.

• 15:26Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the dark matter.

• 15:28Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we call dark matter is ordinary matter in another universe whose gravity is spilling into our universe.

• 15:35Charles Liu?

  That was Tom's concept, right?

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm all for that, even though I know dark matter is probably some more exotic particle.

• 15:44Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that wasn't directly related to the black hole question. It was just a side point.

• 15:48Charles Liu?

  Right. It's a thing that would be cool, but like you said, there's certain mathematical possibilities.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it opens up so many. What I learned talking to Brian Greene about, was it Brian or the other Brian? Brian Cox? Brian Cox, Brian Greene. Yeah, I hang with both.

• 16:02Charles Liu?

  Brian May?

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian May as well.

• 16:06Charles Liu?

  Oh, wait, that's Freddie, sorry.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, just the guitar, I think.

• 16:09Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he follow what we're talking about? Brian May of the group?

• 16:16Charles Liu?

  The guitarist for Queen?

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For Queen.

• 16:19Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 16:21Charles Liu?

  He has a PhD.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, he's a physicist.

• 16:23Charles Liu?

  PhD in astrophysics.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just verifying that you're in this conversation that Charles and I are having.

• 16:27Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian May of Queen. Is it astrophysics? Has a PhD in astrophysics. And Brian Cox? Earned after he, after Queen dissolved. That's correct.

• 16:38Charles Liu?

  Queen hasn't technically dissolved, guys. Queen just keeps bringing in guests.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:43Charles Liu?

  But yes.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Foreigner.

• 16:44Charles Liu?

  Yes. Right, but it.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I learned from him, which made complete sense, is for every dimension you add to the strength of a force emanating from a point, the strength of that force is diluted by the power of R to that dimension.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So, in other words, if it's just flat.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can ask, how quickly does a cone spread out? And that goes one over R. Squared. If it's flat, the area of the cone grows as one over R. No, no, there's no area, there's just the surface. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah, if you're talking perimeter. Yeah, it's just the perimeter, that's the strength at the perimeter. So, on a flat surface, the strength drops off as one over R. Gotcha. If you are a... Volume? So that's two dimensions, right? And in a three-dimensional volume, the strength drops off as the surface of the sphere gets bigger, that's R squared. Mm-hmm. If you have four dimensions,

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there's some dimension going out of this uni- spatial dimensions, going out of this universe, into the next universe. Has to. That's a, that's a higher dimension. Right. And that's the dimension through which their gravity would leak. Right. So... So the power of their gravity would drop off precipitously at one over of... One over of, one over R to the third power. Third power, which is way faster Right. than ordinary gravity in this universe, which means that currently, dark matter in our universe is five-sixths of the source of all gravity expressed in this universe. Right, correct. Is dominating this universe. Right. So it's already dominating this universe, and it's dropped off by the third power of distance in a fourth dimension. Which means, we can never go where it does.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's some hell of high gravity in the other universe. We can never go there. Right, right, so I'm having, I'm eating lunch and I almost like choked. Eating lunch with, I think it was Brian Greene. Yeah. And it was like, wow, I had not thought of that. Because it has to come out of their dimensionality Right. into this other dimension to reach us. If that's the way dark matter works. Yeah, but he's a, he's a particle. That's really cool, though. Yes. That's kind of cool, because it's basically this universal pressure that we're feeling from this other universe, and it's really just for them, a leaky pipe.

• 19:18Charles Liu?

  So, man, my bathroom has got water all over the floor. And it's messing the whole universe.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I hope they don't, because we all fly apart. Oh, my gosh.

• 19:27Gary O'Reilly?

  What if that can come through, what else?

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm not, I'm not an expert on where in quantum physics you learn just how all these forces propagate. But I am told by those whose knowledge I trust and value that the other forces cannot exit their spacetime, but gravity can. And they get, and it's been explained to me more than once, and I try to follow, and I just nod. But, but they said it very casually. It's not like, guess what? It was like, of course, the people in the know know this.

• 20:02Charles Liu?

  For Parker and for Tom also, I would recommend you look up something called Randall Sundrum Theory. Okay, which suggests that gravity's leakage from another spacetime dimension could indeed lead to the things that we're talking about right now. Lisa's book.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lisa, Lisa Randall, yeah, so she wrote a book called Warped Passages, which is an exploration into higher dimensions. So, yeah, she's, she's a friend, because she's a contemporary of ours. We came up together in graduate school.

• 20:32Charles Liu?

  Oh, not, not me.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so she's a professor up at Harvard, the Department of Physics.

• 20:41Gary O'Reilly?

  So, stronger gravity moves, migrates to our dimensions, our spacetime becoming very weak.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, but it's more biological.

• 20:52Charles Liu?

  More of like a tunneling rather than a diffusion.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, that's better.

• 20:55Charles Liu?

  But to, to be continued. Yeah, guys, look it up. It's really kind of cool.

• 20:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 21:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's jump into our mixed bag.

• 21:01Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 21:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Matt Coda.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt Coda.

• 21:04Gary O'Reilly?

  M A T.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Matt?

• 21:06Charles Liu?

  Matt.

• 21:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, from Paris, Paris, France, rather than Paris, Texas.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Did he say that?

• 21:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, he does. I was gonna give him the credit for it.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he not think that we're cultured enough?

• 21:16Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I think he wants to make the.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To know that there's a Paris across the ocean?

• 21:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, yeah, I think he wants to make the difference playing.

• 21:21Chuck Nice?

  If you're in France, believe me, you don't want to be associated with Texas in any way. Let's be honest, you know? Dexos.

• 21:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, recent supernova data is revealing something mind bending about our universe. Instead of mysterious dark energy, scientists found evidence that time itself flows at different rates throughout space. Faster in the vast empty voids, slower where matter clumps together. I think that's a scientific term. Like Einstein's time dilation, but on a cosmic scale. Are we witnessing our generation's Copernican moment? Where our basic understanding of the cosmos needs to be rewritten? If this new model is right, what does it mean for the fate of our universe?

• 22:03Charles Liu?

  Interesting.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 22:05Charles Liu?

  Yeah, Charles. Get us out of that. I have not read those papers. So I cannot tell you whether it is actually a Copernican revolution right now or not.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I think he's referring to is that may be a way to interpret the data, but another way was that Einstein's cosmological constant can vary.

• 22:25Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From one time in the universe to another. Whereas in his equations, it is a constant. Okay? So something has to give here and...

• 22:36Charles Liu?

  Well, in his original equation, it was just lambda, right? But lambda as a function of time has been built into equations after he first proposed it. So lambda of t is certainly something that is mathematically possible.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but his theory did not allow for that. So if his theory is an accurate description of the world, then what we're saying is then the world can't have a time-dependent lambda. And if the world does have a time-dependent lambda, then his theory is not complete.

• 23:11Charles Liu?

  He knew his theory was not complete when he designed it.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true.

• 23:14Charles Liu?

  That's the whole point, yeah. This is, I think, exactly what Mutt is describing, right? Is it time to supplement a longstanding theory with something new, right? And so whether it's a Copernican moment or not, I think there are probably other interpretations that would be simpler to follow Occam's razor and not necessarily have to require brand-new physics. Right? For example... If we have a big clump of matter, we know that it acts like a gravitational lens.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:46Charles Liu?

  And gravitational lensing will cause, for example, the light coming from a distant object behind the lens to appear to have curved around it. Right? And so that result could much more easily explain these observations of these supernovas, that it's more a gravitational lensing effect or some more complicated thing that we don't understand than the need to bring in a whole new varying cosmological constant kind of physical pattern.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I would add a point that recently in an explainer that I did with Chuck,

• 24:17Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  titled "On Being Wrong",

• 24:19Charles Liu?

  Ah.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where Copernicus himself was wrong. And you have to ask, well, do we throw out the entire idea that the sun is in the middle of the universe?

• 24:28Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or do we look for some adjustment to this basic idea? And 50 years later, Kepler would discover...

• 24:36Charles Liu?

  Ellipses as opposed to...

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perfect circles. And so there are aspects of his idea that needed modification,

• 24:42Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  without throwing out the whole idea. So I'm with Charles on this, that it could be an important scientific moment, but not on the scale of a Copernican moment.

• 24:49Charles Liu?

  So Matt, you know, even if you are wrong, that's not necessarily bad.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 24:54Charles Liu?

  This is a, I think, what science helps us understand. If we understand that science is a process of learning what's right and wrong, we're not demanding that I am right, you go home. But rather, I'm right in this aspect, you're right in that aspect, and together we reach something that's more complex than either of us could have achieved.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are the world.

• 25:13Charles Liu?

  Yeah. We are the children.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 25:17Gary O'Reilly?

  They're singing again.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, the fact that this person, his name?

• 25:23Charles Liu?

  Matt.

• 25:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Matt.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt.

• 25:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Matt.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Known us from Paris, France.

• 25:27Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Means he, as a Parisian presumably, has not been offended by your imitations of Parisians, of French people.

• 25:36Charles Liu?

  Well, let's hope not. Because, quite frankly, my bad imitation of French people is pretty spot on.

• 25:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Ooh la la.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And 100% of them are smoking a cigarette.

• 25:49Charles Liu?

  Yes. The French have the best lungs in the world.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently.

• 25:52Charles Liu?

  Because they can all withstand smoking, you know? My lungs are so obnoxious

• 25:59Charles Liu?

  that this smoke does not stand a chance.

• 26:03Charles Liu?

  Sorry, Matt. Sorry about that.

• 26:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I'm sorry, that was funny. I don't care what y'all say.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was funny.

• 26:12Chuck Nice?

  That was funny.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was funny. Dude, we're taking too long to answer these questions. Let's speed it up.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  All right. Okay, here we go. This is Trisha Lynch. Hello, Dr. Tyson. Trisha Lynch.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  And she says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Lou, Lord Nice Gary. Trisha from Beaverton, Oregon here. If there really is life under the water of Europa, or one of the other moons, will there be any way for us to observe it without possible cross-contamination?

• 26:45Charles Liu?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You probably have more about this than I do.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we did a whole episode on the Europa Clipper mission.

• 26:51Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in our archives. Check it out.

• 26:53Charles Liu?

  Yeah, NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection.

• 26:56Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 26:57Charles Liu?

  And its primary goal is to make sure that cross-contamination does not happen.

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  By saving us from Thanos.

• 27:05Charles Liu?

  For example. There's a very famous short story, award-winning short story written by physicist David Brin called "The Giving Plague", where we bring back a pathogen from Mars.

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ew. Not "The Giving Tree", by Shel Silverstein.

• 27:19Charles Liu?

  Right, different, different book. The number one most important thing is to make sure that our spacecraft don't crash. Right? We want to make sure that their orbits are solid, that they have enough boosting situation. And at the end of the mission, we dispose of the spacecraft in a way that will not contaminate any potential environments. This is what happened with both the Galileo Space Probe and the Cassini Space Probe, around Jupiter and Saturn respectively.

• 27:42Chuck Nice?

  But we crashed Cassini purposely.

• 27:45Charles Liu?

  And we crashed Galileo purposely as well.

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  And did we?

• 27:48Charles Liu?

  But we crashed them into the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  In such a way that we know that they would all burn up?

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:54Charles Liu?

  Exactly. Instead of landing somewhere and contaminating the space, they would all just be burnt up.

• 28:00Gary O'Reilly?

  We're not so careful about our own space junk, are we?

• 28:03Charles Liu?

  Sadly, no. We have an issue in our local near-Earth orbit ecosystem. We are quickly approaching the point where astronomy being done from Earth is being very badly affected by all of the stuff that's going on.

• 28:18Chuck Nice?

  Because you get a bunch of reflections and a bunch of crossings and...

• 28:22Charles Liu?

  Streaks, all kinds of things.

• 28:24Chuck Nice?

  Streaks, all kinds of terrible things that mess up your information.

• 28:27Charles Liu?

  That's right. It makes it quite difficult. But... Fortunately, that is not yet the case as far as we know in places like Europa. So, once you make sure your spacecraft isn't going to crash, the next thing you do is you find remote sensing strategies. So, for example, we can look through the ice on the crust of Mars to see what's down there. Right? So, we can, in fact, do the same thing without landing something on there through things like the kind of radar that we use.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What crust of Mars are you talking about? What are you talking about, crust of Mars?

• 28:57Charles Liu?

  There's ice.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, you mean at the poles?

• 28:59Charles Liu?

  At the poles, yes. In fact, there are continents full of mar- uh, you know, ice. There's a lot of it.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, ice penetrating radar?

• 29:06Charles Liu?

  Yes. So, in the same way that we have here, even the- our weather radar, which penetrates clouds.

• 29:12Chuck Nice?

  Now, can we see the big machine that melts the ice that made the former Martian atmosphere? Are we able to see that?

• 29:17Charles Liu?

  If it's there, we could see it. If it's there, we could see it.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Martian technologies?

• 29:20Charles Liu?

  Yes, exactly. Yes.

• 29:22Chuck Nice?

  React, start the reactor.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get to the job.

• 29:26Charles Liu?

  Total, total recall. Ay, ay, ay. One of the most traumatic science fiction movies I've ever seen. But, but the book about that, right? We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, written by Philip K. Dick. That's kind of a cool book to read sometime.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you know this?

• 29:42Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, that's so wild, so wild.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We only just know the movie.

• 29:46Charles Liu?

  It's a thing.

• 29:47Chuck Nice?

  Charles knows things.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine. I forgot to remind, that's why we have him on the show. Okay, did we answer the question, was it?

• 29:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 29:56Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 29:56Chuck Nice?

  Is it possible to do it without cross-contamination?

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, so.

• 30:00Chuck Nice?

  The fact is, we've already done it.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so with the ice penetrating radar, it probably won't see microorganisms, but if there's a macroscopic fish, it'll see it, right?

• 30:08Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 30:09Charles Liu?

  And then therein lies the next point. Let's say we do find beautiful blue whales or something, you know, or gigantic whale shark fish type things down there. What do we do next? How do we study them and communicate and so forth? Right, are they edible?

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is not my first thought, Charles.

• 30:27Charles Liu?

  Then, then the Office of Planetary Protection really has to think hard. Are we gonna put a submarine, right, that goes down there? Do we want something that goes below the surface? And in that case, how do we protect the ecosystem? Do we have any idea?

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the good thing about Europa is the ice cracks, water comes up and refreezes. So, there's a suggestion that if we just pitch tent on the surface.

• 30:51Charles Liu?

  Let it slowly sink.

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could dig up some of the material that came up and froze and then thaw it out and possibly see.

• 31:00Charles Liu?

  Without having to cause problems.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or fish that happened to get caught up in it.

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  We could do what we do in Alaska, and that is cut a hole and just drop a pole.

• 31:09Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 31:10Chuck Nice?

  A line.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean, "we do"? What, you Inuit? We do like, there's something like, you do this.

• 31:16Charles Liu?

  I may have done.

• 31:17Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying.

• 31:38Gary O'Reilly?

  So hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Liu, and I am assuming Chuck and Gary, and assumed you have. Right. I am Lily Rose from Virginia. My question is, what data can the recent probe flying close to the sun give us? How can we use this mission in the future to explore the nature of other stars in our galaxy? I was very curious about the goals of this mission. Thank you all for that and all for what you do.

• 32:03Charles Liu?

  Lily Rose, thank you. Great question.

• 32:06Chuck Nice?

  That is a great question.

• 32:07Charles Liu?

  Did you do something about the Parker Solar Probe recently?

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did, we did, we did an explainer on it.

• 32:12Charles Liu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was more, just to put it in context for people who've never heard of it, I don't know how deeply we went into the science that would come of it. We just know that it went faster than any previous spacecraft, closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft, got hotter than any previous spacecraft. It's going to study the solar wind, of course, solar flares, the particle fluxes, this sort of thing.

• 32:34Charles Liu?

  I see. Well, solar science has a number of amazing questions, which surprisingly, we still don't know the answer to, even though the sun is so close to us, right? Only 93 miles away. One such question is, the transition from the surface of the sun, the photosphere, which is about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, out to the corona.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  11,000 degrees.

• 32:55Charles Liu?

  Yeah, 11,000.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he just started here. Give him a chance.

• 32:58Charles Liu?

  Out to the corona of the sun, which is millions of degrees.

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  Millions.

• 33:04Charles Liu?

  Right. It has to actually, you'd imagine that the further away you get from the sun, the colder it gets. But no, after it gets colder and colder and colder, suddenly, right in that boundary, roughly where the Parker's.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gets less and less and less warm.

• 33:17Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not colder. There's no part of the sun that's cold.

• 33:20Charles Liu?

  Fair enough, fair enough. As you get to that boundary, suddenly, right in the area where the Parker Solar Probe is starting to probe, it has to heat up again. What energies are being transferred? What kinds of mechanisms are growing your temperature again from 10,000 to millions?

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  So now, wait, is there a cooling? Or is it literally, we see a decrease in temperature?

• 33:46Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  Then all of a sudden-

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the surface.

• 33:48Chuck Nice?

  To the surface.

• 33:49Charles Liu?

  From the center.

• 33:49Chuck Nice?

  From the photosphere, but then we get to the corona, and all of a sudden it pshh, it heats.

• 33:54Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between, between the photosphere-

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  Between this photosphere and the corona. Now, but is there any reaction that we can, like, identify that might be making something like this happen?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence the solar probe.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, I came up with an idea!

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  Why don't we send something to investigate?

• 34:15Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 34:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this temperature change completely around the circumference? Or is it isolated pockets?

• 34:21Charles Liu?

  Piece by piece.

• 34:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Really?

• 34:22Charles Liu?

  It's kind of like an envelope, but the envelope has holes in it.

• 34:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 34:26Charles Liu?

  So it's inhomogeneous, heterogeneous, shall we say? And also, there is actually a layer there between the photosphere and the corona. It's called the chromosphere. And that area is very mysterious to us. So, all of our hypotheses here on Earth about how that heating happens and what the energy transfer is from the surface of a star out into space, need to be tested with data. So the Parker Solar Probe helps us understand how stars transfer that energy outward. And that affects everything that's orbiting those stars.

• 34:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Charles Liu?

  Such as planets.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, which is what's called space weather, right? And, so just to put a little molecular talk in here. So, temperature is the average vibration speed of molecules. So you get to the surface of the sun, and there they are vibrating. And now, something happens where, now they're vibrating faster.

• 35:16Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so something's flinging them out. Some energy source is pumping it. But the, the corona is very rarefied. So, would you, holding aside the radiation of the sun itself?

• 35:29Charles Liu?

  Sure.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're in a bath of a million degrees, with only like a molecule hitting you here and here, what would that feel like to you?

• 35:36Charles Liu?

  It wouldn't feel like much. The, the irony is, although the temperature of the corona is millions of degrees, if you put a potato in the corona-

• 35:46Gary O'Reilly?

  In the corona.

• 35:46Charles Liu?

  It really wouldn't bake. Because the amount of heat in this plasma is tiny per unit volume. So in the volume of a potato, you wouldn't actually have enough heat in there to bake the potato. But with the energy flowing through it over long periods of time, you would fry that potato and dissolve it into atoms like in due course because the energy is so flow is strong. The energy density is low. And so these are the kinds of contradictions that we need to get data on that the Parker Sol probe can help us understand.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just so we're on the same page, a cup of coffee is hot. But an iceberg has more heat, more total heat.

• 36:34Charles Liu?

  Than a cup of coffee.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the heat is the total added vibrational energy of all the molecules. And a cup of coffee, the temp, you put a thermometer will read something different, but the total energy is different.

• 36:44Charles Liu?

  Got it.

• 36:45Gary O'Reilly?

  How are we getting information back?

• 36:46Charles Liu?

  It gets transferred through radio and things like that.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's got a shield, by the way. So I said it got hotter than anything before. The shield actually keeps the electronics quite cool.

• 36:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so what's the time?

• 36:57Charles Liu?

  Eight minutes.

• 36:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Only eight minutes?

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And 20 seconds.

• 37:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Of course.

• 37:02Chuck Nice?

  Because it's the same as, it's the same as all light.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Eight minutes and 20 seconds equals how many seconds?

• 37:12Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't know, I'm not gonna sit here and...

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  500 seconds. It's a nice round number.

• 37:16Charles Liu?

  That's cool.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Just so you know.

• 37:19Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm better for the knowledge.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you'll never forget that.

• 37:21Gary O'Reilly?

  My word, thank you.

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Oleksandr Samolinko. Samolinko.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oleksandr.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Oleksandr.

• 37:33Charles Liu?

  Sounds Ukrainian.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds Eastern Bloc.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Uh, listen, he says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Luchuk, Gary. I'm Oleksandr from, oh, Kiev.

• 37:42Charles Liu?

  Hey.

• 37:43Chuck Nice?

  Ukraine.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles is on the case.

• 37:46Chuck Nice?

  It was a wild guess.

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I just said eastern block. That's all I said.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  He says, here's my question. Can it be that our entire universe exists in its own time loop? Big bang happens, then we appear, develop science, find out all underlying building blocks of the universe, then ignite a new universe when this one starts to fall apart. Uh, let there be light, as a matter of fact. So our universe is sort of a gin particle.

• 38:14Charles Liu?

  Uh, let me point you, Alexander, thank you for this great question, to a short story written by Isaac Asimov, that Isaac himself said was his favorite amongst everything he wrote. It's called The Last Question.

• 38:28Chuck Nice?

  The Last Question?

• 38:29Charles Liu?

  Yes, and this was Isaac's own way of trying to figure out this very question that you described. In fact, cosmologies all throughout the world.

• 38:37Chuck Nice?

  Tell us the story!

• 38:38Charles Liu?

  No. Buy the book. It's, it's a short story. It's very quick. I'm not going to spoil a single thing about that story.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  We gotta, we gotta, yeah, now you gotta go read, look at it.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's a brilliantly written, clean story. By the way.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Look at Chuck, Lou giving us homework.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I know.

• 38:54Charles Liu?

  It's the professor in me, I'm sorry Chuck.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm trying to sneak out the answers here.

• 38:59Charles Liu?

  Nope, nope, nope, nope.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's slapping me down.

• 39:02Charles Liu?

  Nope, nope.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Isaac Asimov, I don't know if you know, he'd never flew anywhere, for whatever reasons, and he was a native New Yorker. If you ever heard him speak, that would be obvious. And he was a, a friend of this museum.

• 39:14Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, most of the research done on his physics, astro and biology, novels and, uh, nonfiction books were researched out of our library here at the American Museum of Natural History.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  Very, very.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have an annual panel debate in his honor, the Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel.

• 39:33Charles Liu?

  And let me give a shout out to his late wife also, Janet Jepson Asimov, who was a writer in her own right.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  Wow, look at that.

• 39:40Charles Liu?

  Yeah. So what's the deal? The deal is very simple. Could we be a gin particle? We could, but we don't have the evidence to confirm that yet. This is a speculation that's gone on in cosmologies all around the world for all of human civilization.

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but how would we end?

• 39:55Charles Liu?

  I don't know.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless we recollaps and then start again.

• 39:57Charles Liu?

  Well, we wouldn't end. We need...

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But right now, it doesn't...

• 40:00Charles Liu?

  The point is, we need new physics, right? The physics as we have it, if it's complete...

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not happy with the physics we already produced?

• 40:04Charles Liu?

  Oh, I'm very happy with it, but I also think it's incomplete. If there is no more physics to be had about the expansion of the universe, it will just go on forever and that's it. But if there were...

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the big rip.

• 40:16Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's scary.

• 40:16Charles Liu?

  But what if there were something else? And we're not sure that that's the case yet, right? If there is something like vacuum decay, which I know, it's just a word I just threw around, I'm so sorry. The idea that our vacuum energy level in the universe is a false vacuum, and in fact, there is still energy hiding in there, and some cataclysmic event could cause that energy to be released. We have a rift. This is all physics that has mathematical roots, but does not have experimental verification.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Cosmic Queries, a StarTalk book, there's a whole section on this very topic.

• 40:52Charles Liu?

  That's right, there is.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's very spooky and scary.

• 40:54Charles Liu?

  It's very, very cool. It's not spooky and scary, it's cool. I think it's really neat. The possibility of it happening anytime in our lifetimes or even in the human species lifetime is miniscule. But the chances of it happening eventually, that's non-zero. And imagine if that is the way that our universe reignites itself. In fact, if the conditions before our Big Bang were such that it happened before, and this continues depending on the state of the universe, energy densities, matter densities, whatever, then indeed, this particular idea of a cyclical universe that continues and comes back, each time being a little bit different than the next time, but with the same laws of physics? Alexander, you know, you're not that far off from what a lot of theoretical physicists are thinking right now.

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would add, I want to give a little punctuation to his comment about this false vacuum. If you have a puddle of water sitting in a...

• 41:48Charles Liu?

  A puddle.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. So you have like a ledge and then a little sort of depression there.

• 41:55Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 41:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another ledge over here. So there's an area where water collects.

• 41:59Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can say, is that the lowest energy state the water can be in? Well, on the other side of this ledge, it can get lower. So we can be living in here thinking we're stable.

• 42:11Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not the most stable configuration of that puddle. The most stable configuration of that puddle is the entire puddle.

• 42:16Charles Liu?

  That other place.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This other place.

• 42:18Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lower, the lower part.

• 42:20Charles Liu?

  The lower part.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the quantum construction of the universe, it is possible for this puddle to tunnel through this barrier and then spill down and occupy this next place.

• 42:33Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the state of our universe is not at a stable base. There's the, for me, a fear factor that we can end up tunneling into some other place that has whole other rules and other, I don't know what'll happen, we all die.

• 42:47Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  Somebody's draining the pool.

• 42:52Charles Liu?

  We could, let me just make sure everyone knows that 2025 has been designated the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology by the United Nations. So.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, your book came out just in time then.

• 43:04Charles Liu?

  It did.

• 43:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The handy, the handy quantum physics.

• 43:08Charles Liu?

  Answer book.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Answer book.

• 43:09Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One in a series of three. You're like their main guy. You have one on physics and astronomy and.

• 43:15Charles Liu?

  And quantum physics.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum physics. Came out just in time.

• 43:18Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 43:18Charles Liu?

  So everybody, please enjoy this conversation we're having right now. I hope it's just the springboard of you all going out and checking out more of this.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why is it this year?

• 43:28Charles Liu?

  It's the 100th anniversary of what most people designate as sort of the firm foundational birth of quantum physics.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole 1920s, but you slap it right in the middle.

• 43:40Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got, you've got.

• 43:42Charles Liu?

  You've got the origin.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got the origin story of quantum physics. Charles, good to have you, man.

• 43:47Charles Liu?

  Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 43:49Charles Liu?

  It's so great to talk to everybody and your questions are marvelous. I love that.

• 43:53Chuck Nice?

  I just bought your book.

• 43:55Charles Liu?

  Dude, thank you.

• 43:56Chuck Nice?

  I just bought your book.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get one for each of us?

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get the camera?

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  I got one for each of you in the quantum.

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  So you'll have to tunnel and get my book.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Jeff.

• 44:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you buy me a shovel?

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, good to have you, man. As always, dude. Really appreciate it. Love to the family, everybody. Thank you, and you too. Gary? Pleasure. Always a pleasure. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here for another episode of StarTalk Special Edition. This time Cosmic Queries. Till next time, keep looking up.