The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull

What happens when physics meets the big questions of philosophy? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice sit down with Elise Crull, philosopher of physics at CUNY and author of The Einstein Paradox, to explore physics, philosophy, and how thought experiments shape real science.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, why is it every time we have a show that goes to the frontier of science, you need an edible?

• 0:04Chuck Nice?

  Uh, because that is how I cope with science. Some people don't need to cope with science, I need to cope with science, and so...

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The frontier of philosophy, quantum physics, and physics, coming right up.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, Neil?

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, love it when I look over and I see you there.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you know, the feeling's mutual.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  It's almost like I'm looking at myself.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're doing something we haven't yet done on this show.

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna do the philosophy of physics.

• 0:59Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  That's why we haven't done it.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we had somebody right up the street.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  In the hood.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, literally in the hood, up in Harlem, and this is Elise, can I pronounce your last name?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Kral.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kral.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Elise Kral.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Elise Kral, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're a professor of philosophy in the philosophy department.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  That's right, yep.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a CUNY.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you authored a book just last year came out, but it was like a very serious academic tome, The Einstein Paradox. This is a very seductive title, okay? Einstein, paradox, the debate on non-locality and incompleteness?

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, come on, oh, in 1935.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  So, the title actually comes from Schrödinger. He had a folder in his archives.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Schrödinger?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Schrödinger.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of cat fame.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  And in fact, the cat was born in this correspondence with Einstein that he had labeled in German, The Einstein Paradox. And so, we translated those letters into English, many of them for the first time, and it's all the famous physicists talking to one another about what this physics is.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, why can't regular people read this?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  They sure can. It's just that the primary literature in particular, just reading the way that Einstein and Schrödinger and Heisenberg and Bohr talked to one another.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They had their own language.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  They did, and they had their own...

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  Like twins.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just have their own thing.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Twins that get their own language?

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Except in this case, their own language was often German.

• 2:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Some cases, Danish. But their own...

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Danish would be for Neil's bore.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right. But they all had a really nuanced stand, like they had different ideas about what was problematic about quantum mechanics.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. Quantum mechanics is just being born.

• 2:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At that time.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  It's about 10 years in at this point.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  And what precipitated this was Einstein, well Einstein had had conversations with two guys, Podolsky and Rosen, about what he felt was an issue that quantum mechanics was correct, but it wasn't finished yet, it wasn't complete.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  And guess what? He was right.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still isn't complete. So, that book is by Cambridge University Press, which has quite the catalog of astronomy and physics books for the public.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, the book is intended for people who are interested in learning from the physicists at that time themselves. Their philosophical and physics sort of worldviews, and learning about this history.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  I don't understand the use of philosophical when it comes to their physics.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let's start right there.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, good.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are a professor of philosophy specializing in the philosophy of physics.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is the philosophy of physics in modern times? Because I know what it was in the day. Because in the day...

• 3:49Speaker 02

  What's the day? Antiquity or the Renaissance?

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, post Galileo.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Newtonian worldview.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, back then...

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Scientific revolution.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Back then, philosophers were physicists. I mean, they were one and the same.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, in fact, Newton's greatest work has the word philosoph, the word physics isn't even in the title.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  That's right, the Principia doesn't even have equations in the first part.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, that the title is, well, in Latin, but the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  That's right, natural philosophy.

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  Natural philosophy.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, natural philosophy was physics. It's the deep thinking about how nature works. Okay.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got that. But into the 20th century, you get quantum physics where you can't deduce from an armchair, and you have the expanding universe.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who thought that up, right? And so all this...

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  And the confirmation of all these things that were mathematically postulated and then proven to be the actual case.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what I've noticed...

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that there was a sort of... A separation of the turf.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the philosopher couldn't really contribute to physics unless they were actually a physicist. You could still think philosophically, but you needed to be in the lab. You couldn't just sit back and observe and think deep thoughts.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Well, Einstein was never in a lab.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but he was a physicist, not a philosopher.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I don't think he would make that distinction.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me say it differently.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was trained as a physicist, not trained as a philosopher.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the distinction I'm making.

• 5:25Chuck Nice?

  So here's the real test.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is, that is the distinction I'm making.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  If Mel Brooks were doing a sketch with him, would he say to Einstein in the philosopher unemployment line, "Did you bullshit today? Did you try to bullshit today? Are you planning on bullshitting in the future?"

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that from History of the World?

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  History of the World.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 5:45Chuck Nice?

  That's History of the World.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the actual quote. Yeah, so I'm distinguishing between people who go to school to be a philosopher and then attempt to contribute to the physical sciences. Whereas that, you could do that in the day. And I don't see that happening today, unless you're busting that wide open in your existence

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the world and in this office right now.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, a couple of comments.

• 6:08Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  First of all, in the German university system in which Einstein and Schrödinger and Bohr and all these guys were trained, they learned a hell of a lot of philosophy.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And even Einstein into his post-

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not saying people didn't have philosophy chops. I'm saying if you go to school to be a philosopher in the 20th century-

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You became less and less useful to the moving frontier of the physical science. That's the only point I'm making. Now go. Unless you go bust that open.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing is, I don't accept your premise that in order to do what I do-

• 6:39Chuck Nice?

  That's how you start an argument. I think we're-

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you start and win an argument.

• 6:43Chuck Nice?

  We're welling our way into a philosophical debate.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your premise is invalid. Okay, go.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Well, a premise can't be invalid. Only a whole argument can be valid. But I'm being an asshole on purpose because it's funny. The, the idea that what I need to do is be useful. To science to be important or worth doing as a human endeavor is a pretty narrow view.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except that's how it used to be. And that's, that's.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  How what used to be?

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philosophers were useful to the moving frontier. You have Kant thinking up stuff that the nebular hypothesis was kinda cool. And you had.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  So Einstein's own ability to get the theory of special relativity had to do with his taking a study, a different approach than Lorenz and Poincaré and others who were looking for a similar theory.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  He said, let's step back. That is a philosoph, like that is a choice to step back and say, we have these data. Let's understand them a different way.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not saying.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Now, if you're saying it's about how we specialize into different disciplines, yes.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  That is something that naturally occurred as our measuring apparatuses and our technology got better.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  We were able to be like, and you go to a conference in astrophysics nowadays, how many talks do you even are interested in talking like? Hyper specialized. Fair enough.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I published a paper, a hundred people in the world will understand it. Or, no, a hundred people in the world will care about it.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  For me, it's like maybe six.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, this works.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  They're my buddies, you know? Okay, yeah. It's like when people are like, oh, how do I find you in the internet? Like, Google Elise and philosophy of physics, because I think I'm the only one.

• 8:17Chuck Nice?

  Let me just, let me back up as a layperson and kind of broaden the view here. The intertwining that Neil was talking about that existed at one point.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:29Chuck Nice?

  That you now say has kind of dissolved because of highly specialized training.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:37Chuck Nice?

  Where does that intersection happen now?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Good. Yeah.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good question.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  That's great. And I think that's exactly the question we wanna, um, so you're asking, am I gonna, am I gonna blow it open now?

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  I think the fringe, like the edge of, the edge of science right now is in this place. So you're talking about people who are looking for a theory of, in this place.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this place.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  In this place metaphorically and intellectually.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Right now.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It happens here and now.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Localized entirely in this room.

• 9:06Chuck Nice?

  We're in the room where it happens.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  We're getting beyond our means to empirically test. And you know, as a cosmologist and astrophysicist, there's a limited amount of data that we-

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that frontier, yes.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  On that frontier. And that's true also in looking for quantum gra- theories of quantum gravity.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all of that.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, we haven't yet found conclusive evidence for the Lambda CDM model. That is only for the Lambda CDM model of cosmology. It's the best we have right now.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the cold dark matter and, and dark energy. It's just-

• 9:39Speaker 02

  The concordance mo- like, the model we think is the best model of the universe right now.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catch people up. So, we, we know the universe is accelerating in its expansion. And what's causing that, we call dark energy. We just call it that. Yeah, right. We don't know-

• 9:52Speaker 02

  But it's a black box, quite literally.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, dark matter- Right. Is a mysterious source of gravity in the universe. In fact, it's 85% of the universe's gravity. And we don't know what that is either. But if we assume it's a thing, because we measure it- Right. And then, we can calculate with it. And with some assumptions about the behavior of matter, we get a sort of a, kind of our own standard model of how the universe works. It's called Lambda CDM. Lambda cold dark matter. And we, we work with it. It gets us some understanding-

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does some good work for you.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's some good, yeah. It's, it's a workhorse. But it's not a complete- It's not a complete picture. A complete theory, okay.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Right. So, this is true in a lot of arenas of physics. And so, what philosophers of physics can do, although I think there are many ways to be a philosopher of science. It's not just, like, you're trained in philosophy, but you sort of ask philosophical questions of science itself.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many philosophers of physics are there?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  I don't know. More than five, but less than 200?

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Wow.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  No, maybe there's more than 200. I, it's hard to say, I-

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you're the first one I've ever met.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I've met philosophers, but just think about everything. Right. You know?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Well, it's a small field, to be fair. And I will also say, back to your earlier point, most of us- Have training in physics as well.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Because that's important to us. Like, what I do-

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're undergraduate.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  My undergrad is physics, but then I also continued, I mean, I wrote my doctoral thesis on quantum decoherence. So like, I was learning about the models that people are using-

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, physics chops. Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  But you have to-

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So was that in the physics department or the philosophy department?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Um, so I was in the philosophy department, but I was part of a history and philosophy of science program, but I also took a number of physics courses.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the physics department? Okay, so you just, you just blend in all of that?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  All the things.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just put it all together.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  However-

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we need for someone that busts out.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  That's a great way-

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To bust a move.

• 11:43Chuck Nice?

  That's a great way to make sure that you get an A.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 11:49Chuck Nice?

  Because-

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, what is, how does that correspond to getting a good grade at all?

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  Here's how it works for getting a good grade.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Oh, good, I'm listening.

• 11:55Chuck Nice?

  You have your philosophy people, they don't know crap about physics. And your physics people, they don't know crap about philosophy. So you're just like, "Yeah, you're gonna have to take my word for it."

• 12:04Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. We're all just pretending, right?

• 12:09Chuck Nice?

  No, go ahead.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  So this ties into your early question. It's like, something about the, um, extreme specialization has meant that, in particular, the way we train physicists in the US, even at high, in high school, is so divorced from the deep questions about, "But why? And but how?" It's about following a scientific method.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you study abroad?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  No, but I, um, when I, um, I've studied, I've looked at education policies, uh, in other countries and sort of- It's, it's no surprise that our-

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we're messed up.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  We're not, you know, our, we're still the best, best place to go for STEM at the graduate level.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Um, but that's, we're losing that.

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  And there was a history about that. In particular, there were decisions made in the Cold War era to train people in science in a particular way that was gonna get technologies built, that was gonna be good for industry-

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Results-oriented.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  And for the Department of Defense.

• 13:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:04Chuck Nice?

  Weaponry.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  And it became- Not just not in vogue, but like it became-

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I have the original document in this office.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Of the NSF creation of-

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I have that document. Can I reach for it?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, show it to us. Let's have a visual here.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what you were talking about.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Vannevar Bush-

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's let our people at home-

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Making a case for why America needs to preserve and fund science.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think that was an easy case to make because it was physics that won the war. Well, that definitely helps an argument. I'm just saying.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  This is good. This is funny. That's funny.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Science: The Endless Frontier."

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Ah, yes.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A report to the president.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is 1945. Oh, wow. This established- So this went to the president, this right here? This, he, Vannevar Bush, was basically the first science advisor to a president. Right. Okay, and he's advising-

• 14:05Chuck Nice?

  I don't need one of those. Nobody knows more about science than I do.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  That's really good.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  I'm getting angry over here.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you know it. So here's what I want you to do. Just read the chapter, the section headings there. Read them. Read them.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Introduction.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Well played. Excellent. The War Against Disease. These headings, you mean, are like-

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  "Science and Public Welfare," "Renewal of Our Scientific Talent," "A Problem of Scientific Reconversion,"

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  "The Means to an End: Responsibilities for the Government."

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, "The Means to an End," okay.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this, so everything I know and think of about how science happens in the United States, when I pull up this original document, it's all there. And so I have, maybe, is it a bias? I say, "That's how you do science." But-

• 15:01Speaker 02

  It's how you do-

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you suggesting there's another way to do science?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  I'm suggesting that when you get to the level of how we educate, when you divorce, you understand science is a thing that's about usefulness and application.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, right.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  That is one very small color from a spectrum of colors. And I'm also suggesting that when we look at people who are trained in the history and philosophy of science, along with the science itself in high school, they're testing off the charts. And there's something about like being able to answer that or ask that, why? Why are we using this equation to solve for the energy level of a hydrogen atom? Why are we understanding?

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That never showed up in any of my classes.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's absent.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Were you taught, you were taught, it's amazing to me that-

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was taught physics as a thing, not as a way of thinking. I had to like realize that it was a way of thinking and bring to it the bit of philosophical meanderings that I had engaged in my life. I had to bring that to the physics. That was not there when it was taught.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  And you're told not to have it there, right?

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not explicitly. It's not encouraged and it's not rewarded.

• 16:16Speaker 03

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

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let me ask this. So what is it about asking these big questions?

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The why questions.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  The big why questions. What is it about that that contributes to the guiding principles of science itself?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Because there's no one recipe for how to do good science.

• 16:58Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, okay.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it is true. When I go to my different, everybody's got their own angle on science. It's true. There was no centralized approach.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Right. Well, but even if there were-

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're telling me that this centralized our approach, not to our greater good?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I think it did in some ways to our greater good because, I mean, Vannevar Bush wanted the inner core of funding for NSF to be pure science. He thought there was always supposed to be a part of it that wasn't-

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever funding's left of it.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Let us hang our heads in a moment of silence.

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  Do I get a plane from the NSF?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  But did you know that if you drop a magnet into a glass of water, it loses its magnetism?

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he said that.

• 17:46Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said that.

• 17:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and by the way, I'm still right. But it has to be avion one.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  Sorry, I'm sorry.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why you keep disrupting the lady?

• 18:06Chuck Nice?

  I know, I'm so sorry.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  This is like real world out there, right? It's like we're trying to do scholarship and then things. But also, let me ask you this, Neil. Would you have been interested in doing science if it was just told, if it was taught to you as like following a recipe?

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Like the scientific method, like boo, right?

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My philosophical interest in the universe was self-driven. It did not come from any book that I was taught.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and my writings today, I don't want to say they're dripping with philosophy, but they, they take an angle on the content where it's not just here, learn this. It's think about it in this other way.

• 18:46Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  So, I mean, here's a metaphor, if you like. Um, I mean, a lot of people can follow recipes and make really good dishes, really tasty dishes. So there's something wonderful about that. But the truly inventive chefs are the ones who say, well, or, or even the better cooks, I'm a terrible cook, but like are the ones who say, but why do I melt the butter to this temperature? Why do I add the salt at this stage? Or why is this, these flavors work together? Expertise is something that our country is not, has a very interesting tortured relationship. Yeah, that's right.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this. Often, philosophy is thought of as a belief system. Okay. But in science.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Less so in the sciences.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  Right, that's what I'm saying. But in science, you definitely don't want to be biased by your beliefs.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point.

• 19:36Chuck Nice?

  So the one thing you want to do is divorce yourself so that whatever results you get, you're able to accept irrespective of how you feel about them or what you believe. How is that reconciled?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Good.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me add something to that.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Ooh, there's a lot of good questions.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go back to Kepler, who was. Dare I say philosophically driven to think that the orbits of the planets could be nested in such a way that they resembled the platonic solids.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Nested spheres, which always makes me think of Tupperware for some reason.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what he knew was that geometrically in mathematics, there are only five what are called platonic solids. These are solid shapes where every surface is the same two dimensional shape. So a cube is such a thing. Every side is identical and has six sides. Pyramid is the same, okay, four sides. So you have four triangles and they can all be equilateral triangles. So there are five of these shapes. He saw that there were six planets and he thought to himself, maybe there's a divine connection between the two. Because the planets, it's the universe. It's where God lives, right?

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then we're just mere mortals here. God surely knows what he's doing and math is perfect, right? Math is badass. So he nested these in different ways to try to find out whether the separations of the planetary orbits could match what these solids would be if they were nested Tupperware style.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  He was also thinking in terms of harmonic resonances, but yeah.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and so my question to you is, he, I don't want to say he wasted 10 years. He devoted 10 years to this point of view and it took him that long to abandon it in favor of something that was not so philosophically beautiful. So in that case, getting back to Chuck's point, the philosophy prevented him from seeing the answer because he was driven by this concept of divine perfection.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  So there's a couple of different ways we're talking about philosophy, right? There's the philosophy of just, I mean, if you go to a philosophy section at Barnes and Nobles or whatever, what they have there in the metaphysics section is some weird, new-agey stuff.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  It has nothing to do with what academic philosophers are doing.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  And academic philosophers are asking questions about what is the nature of personhood? What is knowledge? Do different people reason in different ways? What are ethical questions? Like, what is the philosophy of law, philosophy of science? These sorts of things. We have specific tools that we bring to bear on that. When scientists think about it, I think they're understanding not philosophy as a discipline, but they're thinking about like a worldview. And we come to everything with a worldview, with a lens.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  That's inescapable. Now, you're right that part of what scientists want to do is sort of shield, maybe not shield for that, or at least normalize it in some way. We want to think about whether our comments are value-laden, and I don't just mean value in an ethics way, but maybe also, do I privilege certain epistemic values like beauty or

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And many do.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Similarity, and many do.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many do. But I can tell you this, to the extent that I can understand myself, I leave all philosophical preconceptions at the door.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  You can't do that, though.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, "to the extent that I am able." I'm self-aware that I could be constrained by a philosophical thought, so I remain open to anything I see, and anything I measure, and what that could possibly mean, and without discounting it. And the reason why I'm going there is, I had an issue in Hamlet.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the lines is, "There's more betwixt heaven and earth than a dreamt of in your philosophy."

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I never understood that comment, ever. Because as a scientist, if a ghost shows up, I'm fine! Let me make some measurements! I have no issue with that. So why does that sentence make any sense at all, until I realized that people who are deeply into a philosophy of belief...

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do close off their access to things that fall outside of their understanding.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a good scientist has no philosophy. Otherwise, they're gonna miss stuff. Bad scientists will have a philosophy and they'll miss everything.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Your choice to set aside some world, like, so that you can be neutral.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Is itself a philosophical position.

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Oop, okay.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  That's a very good point.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a what?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Ineliminable. That you are going to walk in with some interpretive framework.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Ineliminable.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Cannot be eliminated.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cannot be eliminated.

• 24:41Chuck Nice?

  Ineliminable.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I've got some big words here.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say that the philosophy that I have no philosophy is a very mild version of a philosophy.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  The point is that you cannot.

• 24:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, she's about to tell you.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm listening.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  No, she's about to say, that's like being a little bit pregnant.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:04Chuck Nice?

  You can't be a little bit pregnant.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we hear the lady? Okay, go.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so, when you're, when you walk into the lab or whatever.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  It's not like you take off your religious hat, or you take off your culture. Like, you're an integrated whole person. And how you were trained, and what you were thinking about that morning, and what you're predisposed to look for in the equations themselves, those things play a role. Now, there's a huge conversation in the philosophy of science about whether certain things are more or less appropriate when you bring in. But that you bring something with you, that is how we do. Science is a, is a, is a personal and social endeavor.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, all I did say, I think, was, I reduce it as much as I knowingly can.

• 25:51Chuck Nice?

  That's what you said. So, what she's saying is, there's no extent to which you can actually know. Because the holistic person that you are, you are inexorably tied to your philosophy.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except.

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  Even when you try to divorce yourself.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except, in the movie.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  So, you guys are talking about a philosophy like, like, like, and I think this is fair because I think a lot of people do this. Like, like it is a political position. But I'm talking about something, not just a, I'm talking about the way you view the world.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now watch.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  More comprehensively.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this show, do you remember the show?

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  I like that.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The X-Files.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  I like that.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Of course, man. Best show ever. X-Files.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The X-Files.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm watching the show.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and there's like the skeptic, science.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Scully.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scully. And then Mul- Mulder.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Mulder.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mulder, Mulder.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Mul Tao? Mul Tao?

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, Mulder, Mulder. And I've watched them interact, and I'm thinking, no, no. Okay, there was some glowing mass in a, in a vestibule, okay? And Mulder says, oh, this must be an interdimensional. He just goes right to, to the most wild explanation for it. And Scully is saying, uh, this can't possibly be real. It must be a projected. And she's all discounting of it because it doesn't fit her philosophy that that can't exist. And I'm telling.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  You're making my point for me right here, right?

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Good.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  It is the chemistry of those two perspectives that leads them to certain, certain discoveries and so on.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You call that, they look pretty immissible to me. How's that for a chemistry word?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you remember immissible?

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  Immissible.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oil and water, immissible.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, don't, don't mix.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know how to missile, missile them?

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  I do not.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you take a little bit, uh, because when you're making, um.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Are we talking about Scull- Scully and Mulder?

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  How do we do it?

• 27:39Chuck Nice?

  How do we get the vinegar?

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I learned this in, I learned this in chemistry class, and then I applied it at home. So you have oil and vinegar.

• 27:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you shake it, and it'll still separate.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's together for like for a few seconds.

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  Four seconds.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, but you can get an emulsifier to put in there, and it'll connect chemically to both sides and bring them together.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  How?

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so I think.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  I don't want to know the answer.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little bit of egg yolk will do that.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Egg yolk is an emulsifier. That's right. I know that from baking.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  Believe it or not, and yeah, I was gonna say, that's, egg yolk is used as an emulsifier in a lot of, a lot of cooking.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it brings it together. So they needed egg yolk.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Fair enough. But I mean.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  But I like what you're saying. You're saying, this is not philosophy in terms of, I believe, blam, blam, blam.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  It is philosophy in terms of.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  How do you know what questions are good questions to pursue? How do you know when your apparatus is measuring what you want it to measure?

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's, let's anchor this back in time. Please compare for us the philosophies of the two greatest physicists.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There ever were. Okay, so you said this. I was gonna say, so he's talking, so one of them has gotta be Isaac Newton. That's gotta be one. Newton Einstein.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me, because you've, clearly you've studied this, because you're writing about the man and everything.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and I love the fact that we share sort of access to history.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what that means in the present.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just wanna know, how would you characterize Newton's philosophy relative to Einstein's philosophy? And I have, he, hang on. Before I earned enough money to buy an actual book from Isaac Newton's days, I got this paperback called Newton's Philosophy of Nature.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Ah. Little paperback. Selections from his writings. And so, and it's, it's not only from his great books, but also his writings.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so. May I? No. Oh, that's just a paperback. I thought, I was thinking of. It's not your original. I thought it's my original Newton.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  He's holding it like it's a teddy bear or something. This means something to you.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but see, I've been all, I've been in. You've been up in it. You got every, all the pages are dog ears. I've had it since, uh, middle of high school.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Good.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So, me and Newton go back, and don't you badmouth Newton in this office.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  No, I'm not gonna badmouth Newton. I love Newton.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  I, he's a primary source in my Philosophy of Space and Time class, because students.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a class you take.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  It is.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't wanna take that class.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  I would love to have you. I'm teaching it in the fall. Also, Einstein is philosopher, is a course I'm teaching in the fall.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Anyway, Newton was motivated, at least in developing, by many things, but in developing in particular his theory of gravitation in an essay called De Gravitatione, I don't know how to pronounce the Latin, but there it is. He's responding to Descartes, who had three laws of motion. But Descartes thought that all motion was relative. And so it is in developing his response to Newton, uh, to Descartes' theory of motion, entirely on philosophical grounds, he is reasoning from his armchair how he can understand motion in these different ways.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He must've had a badass armchair. Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  He did, he also invented the calculus from that same armchair. Einstein is responding to Newton. He was bothered by the fact that in a fully physical worldview that Newton said he was presenting, you nevertheless had a background spacetime that was not, that was influencing matter, but not itself, able to be influenced by matter. This asymmetry of dynamics.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Bothered him.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me restate what I think you said. That Newton is describing a universe embedded within space and time.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Sort of a theater, yeah, background in which matter.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Theater set.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so whereas Einstein wanted the theater set and the players in the theater to interact with one another.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  And in particular, Newtonian mass is inertial mass. It's it's an intrinsic, in the old school philosophy tradition. It is a property that belongs to the thing in virtue of the thing itself. This also mass.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just remind people, you know, Weight Watchers is really mass watcher. Right. Let's just go to the moon. Yeah, go to the moon.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  There you go. Thanks, Oprah.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot of ways to weigh less. And so.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  But how do you get the money to go to the moon in the first place? But yeah.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just want to just clear. So when you're when you reduce your number of fat cells in your body, giving it up to energy. Then you're reducing, it's a mass you're you're cutting from yourself.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  It's supposed to be some deep essential, probably meaning essence of the thing. This also bothered Einstein. He didn't think that things should have innate properties in this way.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And so one of the things that motivated in going from special to general relativity was a paper he wrote in 1913, where he predicts gravitational waves, by the way. So he didn't want mass to be something that just belonged because God decreed it thus. And so he developed a he developed a way of accounting for mass that was also dynamical. We give something inertial mass because it's following a geodesic. It's following a particular path through spacetime. And that is why we call something having inertial mass. It is not an intrinsic feature of the thing itself.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A geodesic on Earth is a path that you would take where if you sliced. Through that path, your slice goes through the center of the earth.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it turns out if you do the math, it's the shortest distance.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  The shortest distance, that's right.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's why you see on a map, you see these loop, the plane map. They have arcs.

• 33:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you made that a sphere, that would be the shortest. We call that a geodesic, meaning earth, but now you're taking it and using it for the whole universe.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Right, because another thing he was doing in this 1911, in these papers, when he's developing what's called the entropia, like the in-between theory between general and special relativity. He's working toward general relativity. Publishing along the way. And he's realizing that the effects due to acceleration are the same as the effects due to gravity. So acceleration and gravity are like two sides of the same coin.

• 33:34Chuck Nice?

  So, as, even every time I hear it, I'm like, this is so brilliant.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  It's bananas.

• 33:39Chuck Nice?

  It's awesome.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's simple and brilliant.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  But he was motivated by Newton's account not answering his why questions. This asymmetry between like space and time being this God-ordained theater in which things happened, but the things themselves couldn't affect spacetime, was a principal motivation for his wanting to dig deeper and come up with a theory of space and time and gravitation that didn't, sort of, wasn't ordained on high, but sort of...

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't he apologize to Newton?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody...

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Did Einstein apologize to Newton?

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I...

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Perhaps in jest.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I have a memory because his, his whole understa-, general theory of relativity supplants Newton's gravity.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think he apologized at some point.

• 34:28Chuck Nice?

  Like...

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Well, it's gotta be one of those sorry-not-sorry.

• 34:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, is it like the way you apologized to Pluto?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  It was like, you could also apologize to somebody while saying, "But I did a better job," right? Like, he's still clearly appreciating...

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Sorry for blowing you out of the water.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  It was like, you have, but also, you know, we're building on the people who came before us in developing our viewpoints of the world. So he owed a great deal to Newton, but...

• 34:54Chuck Nice?

  So this started with Descartes, is what you're...

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Descartes himself took three laws of nu-, um, motion from Kepp-, like, oh, Kepler's... This, this thing had, this game had been going on for a while. Yeah.

• 35:05Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:07Chuck Nice?

  From a philosophical standpoint, all of these are philosophies.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  If you mean it in the sense that they're trying to ask the deeper questions of, "Why do the things that I observe behave the way they do?" Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why does Newton have only three laws of motion and not four? Or two, or 10.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  He thought that three laws of, he describes this in the general scolium at the beginning, which is all philosophical arguments for why he thinks absolute motion can be differentiated from relativistic motion, and he needs relative motion.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm talking about Newton.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Newton's scolium, the general scolium.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said relativistic.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  I meant relative motion, I'm sorry, from Cartesian or Descartes' relative motion. He thought that that's what he needed to give all of the account of all the motion.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We come out of Newton, we go through Einstein, and these are still, they still make sense, even if they're weird. You can still see why they make sense mathematically. But you go into the 1920s, and then quantum physics descends, and nothing makes sense. But it works. It works. You can make predictions. The understanding of the periodic table of elements, of molecules, of atoms, all clicks into place, and everybody's scratching their head. So what does a philosopher do then?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  All the things. It's so much fun. Yeah, so.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just like it when we don't know what we're doing.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  No, no, I think we would say that all of physics involves interpretive moments, but they're particularly painful, in the case of quantum mechanics, and it's fascinating, let's go play. Like, let's go talk about it.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a word for that. It's called sadomasochism.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's particularly painful. Yeah, let's get it.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, but it's also like, these are the questions that keep you awake at night. There's pain, but joy.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, so.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  So it didn't come out of nowhere, right? I mean, there was an old quantum theory that Bohr and Zomerfeld, who was a physicist in Munich, had been working on in the 1910s to account for atomic spectra.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zomerfeld or Sommerfeld?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Zomerfeld.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zomerfeld, yes.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Zomerfeld. I pronounced it in a German way.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw an S there, so I just said Sommerfeld.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Sommerfeld.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had one of his books, yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He was really important. He was also the doctoral advisor of Heisenberg and Pauli and a lot of these guys who went on to be important progenitors of the new quantum theory. But they were trying to understand these empirical data, right? The spectrum.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, every one of these people got a Nobel Prize. Oh, yeah. Every one of them down the list.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Einstein's Nobel Prize was not for relativity.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  It was for the photoelectric effect, which was dealing with quantum.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Brownian motion.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  And Brownian motion, yes, that's right. Brownian motion, which is to do with getting microscopic about quantum effects.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  But, yeah.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Brownian motion, you suspend a particle.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Like a pollen grain, like pollen.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you put it in a fluid.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it just bounces around.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that wasn't fully understood. Like, what's going on?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  It looks like it's random motion.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And then you have to calculate there's particles hitting it. Right. That are smaller than it, that are hitting it. And you realize there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world's oceans. And we didn't have insight into that until Einstein explained Brownian motion, to understand what the hell is going on in there.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, we don't know inside, like, the insides of atoms very much, yeah. Like, there's so little known about the structure of atoms. And so that's probably what they're debating. And part of what allowed Heisenberg and Pauli and some of the people working at the forefront in the 1920s, they were looking at these descriptions. You remember Bohr's planetary model of the atom, right?

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's part of why we call them orbitals. Right, yeah, because he made it look like. Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  But there are huge mysteries with this model. It doesn't account for all the spectrum, the data of the spectra they're seeing. I'm using all the right Latin plurals here, I hope. But also, how is it that it jumps from one energy level to the next? And it does it discreetly? That's right. It does it quantum, like, there's no actual physical motion from one place to the other.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does the philosopher say about this? Yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Well, they were Bohr and Sommerfeld in the old quantum theory.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been here, sitting here for half an hour.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I'm about to deliver.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  The crude graph. If you would shut up. All due respect, sir. Finish him. They were trying to describe the electrons using classical terms for particles. Position, momentum. Heisenberg said, what if we use totally different things to describe the electron? What if we tried to write down instead of equations of motion in this classical way? We think about the electron in terms of way, like by writing down the intensity, by writing down the amplitude.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a wave?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of. But he didn't use quite that language, but he said, let's look, he used what's called Fourier, like F-O-U-R-I-E-R, another French term, Fourier analysis, to look at it. And he got these equations out that worked. And it was only by sort of stepping back and saying, the language we're using is presenting to us a world that is a classical world.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a philosophical pivot.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  It was a new, it was a new approach. It was a new lens for looking at the problem. It was a new lens for attacking the problem.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because if you, if you believe, or you think that these other metrics are what actually matter.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they don't actually matter, you're going to get the wrong answer.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And Schrödinger continued to argue, like he developed wave mechanics in 26. Heisenberg did this in 1925.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1926, yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, right on the heels of this, Schrödinger gives a description in terms of waves, and everybody knew, we love waves, we see waves everywhere, sound waves, water waves, we understand how waves behave at the macroscopic level. And so when Schrödinger gave a version of quantum mechanics that was all written down in terms of waves, people said, I can visualize that, I can understand how to model that. But it didn't quite do all the things Heisenberg's matrix mechanics did. But they were arguing about these viewpoints in a philosophical way. Like, what do we need when we have a full scientific theory? Do we need to be able to visualize in space and time what's going on? Or do we need the right equations?

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so they did their duty. And we're now 100 years later.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  We are, 100 years on.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are certain quantum questions that the layperson sees unanswered over that entire century. How can two particles be entangled? What does that even mean? Right. And how is it you observe it over here and then instantly, it's not even the speed of light, it's instant.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people wanna wrap their head around this.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have not given us an answer to it. Yeah, at least.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  We haven't figured it out yet. It's an ongoing puzzle. It's an ongoing conversation.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe it's not something to be figured out, it just is.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Here's where this matters.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I'm just, I'm saying, maybe you're trying to bring a classical sensibility to something that has a different reality.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  I agree with you. And I get a lot of shit for that in the philosophy community. I think a lot of the interpretations of quantum mechanics that are proposed are trying to tell a story about how we get from a probabilistic set of solutions to an actual solution. And I think the world just makes a choice. There are some dynamic considerations in there. It's a much more nuanced story than what I'm giving you right now. But I think you're right, that we're still like very much moored to these classical.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, because we, because classical.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Pictures of the world.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Classical pictures make sense in an armchair. But you start saying, particles pop in and out of existence, the tunnel, they do this and that.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and I, as a, as a scientist, as an astrophysicist, I accept what quantum physics does for me to understand what the universe is doing. And, and I've learned to not lose sleep over trying to understand why.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  If you were working in quantum cosmology, you would want to know, because we don't have a theory yet that brings together, that brings together general relativity.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When the large was small.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  And quantum mechanics.

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  And in fact, most of these interpretational debates are happening with respect to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But we know that the final theory, we think, will be relativistic. It'll be a relativistic quantum field theory.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you foresee philosophers helping the physicists?

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Towards this goal.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  I don't, I mean, having a conversation with, I would say, and I would say the physicists are also having this conversation.

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  So for instance, there's a, there's a real question as to whether certain inflationary paradigms that are thinking about how we get to effectively classical like field modes for the different parts of, you know, gravitational field modes or, you know, matter field modes, whatever you want. But we think the initial state was a quantum one. So we need to know a story about how we get from a quantum state to what looks like-

• 44:22Chuck Nice?

  To what we are now.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 44:24Chuck Nice?

  Because you're saying that if there is a model that makes sense, it started with the field. It started with kind of like what we would call nothing, but really it's everything all at once being nothing. And then out of that, pop, and then boom, and then all of this.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's everything everywhere all at once.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You must have one of those.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  I gave a talk on entanglement that was about that, like had that title, but I watched the movie on the flight and had to cross that title out. It was like, oh, it's not quite what they're doing there.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I understand you correctly-

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We went from a quantum state to a macroscopic classical state.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there had to be a transition somewhere in there that allows us to bring these sensibilities together-

• 45:04Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a coherent understanding.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Well, even when we're trying to understand what the universe looked like in those early stages before we got to the big asymmetric distribution of matter we have now, those are stories that rely on our understanding how we get classical field modes, classical values for field modes out of a quantum soup. And so these questions show up there. Here's another-

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are they being answered by your brethren or by?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  They're not being answered by anybody.

• 45:30Chuck Nice?

  Anybody.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  We're talking about them together. And there are, you know, some cosmologists who want to understand like these early, they're asking whether or not we can have, whether we could find residue of entanglement from this early state. And that's where I say, even as a philosopher, no, because entanglement relations are going to be so damped down by interactions with the gravitational field mode and all these others that we could never measure them. But that doesn't mean they're not a part of the story. So- We're having conversations with one another about these things because the answer is unclear.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's still all these mysteries. You better get back to work.

• 46:07Chuck Nice?

  Give me my gummies. Give me my edibles, please. Give me my edibles right now, because damn.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  You know, I'm a philosophy professor. I should be on, but like, I have the worst, I've had the worst experiences. I just can't do it. People around me just...

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are no edibles in this office.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, there we go. People are like, is your color red the same as mine? And I was like, yeah, Hobbes thought about that tooth out. Like, who cares? You know, let's go on from that.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leviathan Hobbes? Is that Hobbes?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  That same Hobbes. Yeah, we all thought about that.

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not Calvin and Hobbes.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  That's the Hobbes, that's, Hobbes is, Calvin is named after John Calvin, which is, you know, John Calvin. And Hobbes is named after Hobbes, the...

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Calvin as in Calvinist?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Calvin and Hobbes is named after John Calvin, the reformed theologian.

• 46:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  And Hobbes is named after the philosopher, the philosopher and political theorist, Hobbes.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how about the, the tiger?

• 46:55Speaker 02

  The tiger is Hobbes.

• 46:56Chuck Nice?

  The tiger is Hobbes.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  The tiger is Hobbes.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'd forgotten that.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  This is super important.

• 47:00Chuck Nice?

  Now, who is Marmaduke named after?

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, that's the one.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  This is beyond my realm of expertise, y'all. This is beyond my realm of expertise.

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta land this plane, but this has been highly confusing.

• 47:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Simultaneously enlightening and confusing, is that possible?

• 47:15Chuck Nice?

  I have to say.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a word for that? To be enlightened and confused at the same time?

• 47:19Speaker 02

  To be a philosopher.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Oh, hey, hey.

• 47:24Chuck Nice?

  That was the way, that was, that's how you do it. Full circle.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Well, let's keep talking about it at some point.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Not now. You have other things going on.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that brings us to a close. Sorry we didn't fully answer everybody's questions.

• 47:38Chuck Nice?

  Well, there are none. The, the, the answers, the answers are out there, Scully. No.

• 47:45Chuck Nice?

  The answers aren't known yet.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you know what it is?

• 47:47Chuck Nice?

  That's the beauty of it.

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seek, and you probably won't find.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Seek and you will find what's maybe not the case.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  It's popular.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seek, and you may find the answer to the question you have not yet posed.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  There you go. Ooh.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  That's juicy.

• 48:03Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something. Jesus is happy he didn't say any of those things. People would have checked right out.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Like, antsy.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. What fascinates me most about the frontier of science is to do it right. Yes, you gotta keep at least one foot in the perimeter where we at least think we know what's going on, and then you put the other foot outside and test the waters for new ideas, new perspectives, new ways to think about how the universe works. But for me, it may be a specious goal to believe that the more you do research, the more you understand

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  about the universe, because what remains true is that as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. And if that's true, that might mean that science is indeed the endless frontier envisioned by Van Halver Bush in 1945. That is a cosmic perspective. Thank you, Elise Crull.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 49:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, thanks for coming down to share some of your vision and expertise with us here.

• 49:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 49:31Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been StarTalk, the quantum philosophy edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always bidding you to keep looking up.