Are We The Universe’s Way of Knowing Itself? With Brian Cox

What is truly foundational to the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice welcome particle physicist Brian Cox for a discussion about emergence, particles, consciousness, and the very fabric of spacetime.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we got Brian Cox.

• 0:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  I'm preparing to be confused.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, he's, he's gonna take us inside the atom and out.

• 0:09Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. And we graft that onto the universe. There's nothing left that we didn't touch in that cosmic query is coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  What's happening?

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know what we got today?

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got an old favorite.

• 0:44Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do. Someone who is, I will say, just as popular in the world of science as you.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, he's way more popular.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm not gonna. I'm sorry. I know you, I know he's here.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's objective evidence for what I just said.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  And what would that?

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll, I'll bring it up. Can I introduce the man first?

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  We're talking about him like he's not here.

• 1:11Brian Cox?

  I'm enjoying this.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian Cox.

• 1:15Brian Cox?

  Yes.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back, dude.

• 1:16Brian Cox?

  Thank you.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you've been here long ago when we were on TV with National Geographic.

• 1:20Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk.

• 1:21Brian Cox?

  I thought, I thought you still were. I've been misled.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not on TV, we're still, we're still vibrantly podcasting. So you are Professor Particle Physics at the University of Manchester.

• 1:32Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and that's outside of London? Where is that? Or is it in Manchester?

• 1:36Brian Cox?

  Manchester.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in Manchester.

• 1:37Brian Cox?

  The best way I can describe it is near Liverpool, if you're that.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Near Liverpool.

• 1:42Brian Cox?

  It's roughly where the Beatles came from.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes. You've got a very popular podcast, which I've been on once, maybe twice, The Infinite Monkey Cage. Yes.

• 1:53Chuck Nice?

  It just makes me laugh every time.

• 1:56Brian Cox?

  I wonder whether it's a good title, actually, because it's not got science in it. So if you don't know what it is.

• 2:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:01Brian Cox?

  You have no idea what it.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know that it's addressing the probability of phenomena happening with an infinite number. Wouldn't people worried that you were actually? Caging monkeys?

• 2:13Brian Cox?

  We did have some complaints because it's a BBC show. A lot, you know, the British people are very good at complaining in letter form.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:19Brian Cox?

  In green ink. You probably get some of that.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  Green ink?

• 2:22Brian Cox?

  It's usually green ink.

• 2:24Chuck Nice?

  And that means that you're, that this letter is going to be exceedingly unpleasant.

• 2:28Brian Cox?

  Yes.

• 2:28Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:29Brian Cox?

  And someone did complain about it being cruel. Although we pointed out that an infinite cage is roomy.

• 2:36Chuck Nice?

  You think?

• 2:37Brian Cox?

  Arguably, the universe is an infinite monkey cage with monkeys in it.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty awesome.

• 2:43Brian Cox?

  And the monkeys are complaining about being contained in the universe.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so they were tripping on the word cage there.

• 2:49Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah, monkey in cage.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:51Brian Cox?

  Infinite, they missed.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  They missed the infinite part, right.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Brian, you, you just coming off of a tour that put you in the Guinness Book of World Records.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is crazy fact. So what, what are the details of that?

• 3:06Brian Cox?

  The, the world record, which admittedly, I'm not sure how much competition there is for the, the biggest science tour. And it's probably just.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science tour in the world, okay?

• 3:15Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 3:16Brian Cox?

  It was, yeah, it went on for quite some time. It went on for about four years in the end. And I think the number was something nearly half a million people came.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:25Brian Cox?

  Which was a wonderful thing for the people to come and listen to.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Taylor Swift would do that in two concerts.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Not yet.

• 3:30Brian Cox?

  Exactly.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Actually, she does that in the parking lot.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Parking lot?

• 3:33Brian Cox?

  Exactly, so if she decides to start speaking about cosmology, astronomy, she will beat that record. I feel, I'm happy to lay down the gauntlet and say, go on then, break that record.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring on the challengers, yeah, yeah. So it was counted as one tour because it was the same topic?

• 3:50Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it, well, it actually changed a lot because as you know.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same title.

• 3:54Brian Cox?

  It's another complaint we get actually on a BBC show. It's like, you scientists, you keep changing everything.

• 3:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:59Brian Cox?

  We make new discoveries. So over that four years, it's been remarkable.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you ought to stay current with the science.

• 4:04Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me the title of that? I actually saw that show.

• 4:07Brian Cox?

  That was Horizons.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horizons, yes.

• 4:08Brian Cox?

  I saw an early version of it, I think.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. You've hosted multiple BBC shows.

• 4:13Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With lofty titles, right? Like you'd taken on the whole universe. The solar system.

• 4:19Brian Cox?

  We've done, we've done a solar system type. Show three times.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:23Brian Cox?

  Did struggle with the title because the first one was called Wonders of the Solar System. It was initially, by the way, going to be called Seven Wonders of the Solar System.

• 4:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 4:31Brian Cox?

  There's a very famous broadcaster called David Dimbleby. I don't know if you know him.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 4:35Brian Cox?

  But he's he's an institution and he had something else. I think it was called Seven. Seven Wonders of the World or something like that. It was all at the same time. And and people thought that there might be some confusion. So they turned into have this wonderful history show about the development of the the British state or whatever it was, like, you know, over a thousand years. And they get me talking about planets. So they they just crossed the seven because I was the junior.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:58Brian Cox?

  So they became Wonders of the Solar System. And then we did it again, um, you know, about 10 years later and called it The Planets.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very simple and direct.

• 5:05Brian Cox?

  And then we did it again. And then we thought, well, we've done Wonders of the Solar System. We've done The Planets. So it got called Solar System. So we're starting to. So I don't think we can do another one just purely because.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ran out of titles. Yeah. Okay. And you also had a cosmology show, right?

• 5:19Brian Cox?

  Yeah. So we've done, um.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wonders of the Universe, I guess.

• 5:22Brian Cox?

  But it's interesting to me that usually the solar system shows do the best. And I don't know why.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the objects that are in it.

• 5:30Chuck Nice?

  Or also people know it already. They know.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The moon, the sun, the planets. And, you know, your first science project in elementary school is is ball, you know, styrofoam balls that you paint to mimic the planets. It's deep within us.

• 5:46Brian Cox?

  And someone said that to me, you know, even when you're you're little, you know, you have those things over your

• 5:50Chuck Nice?

  Even your mobile.

• 5:51Brian Cox?

  When you're two, yeah. And so so maybe it's something about the planets, I think. And also it's easier to film, you know, as you'll know, as a TV show, if you're talking about the volcanoes on Io, you can go to a volcano. Whereas if you're talking about a supermassive black hole, it's difficult to decide what to.

• 6:07Chuck Nice?

  Kind of hard to send a film crew.

• 6:09Brian Cox?

  What to point the camera at.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So so this is that's important sort of tap roots to your visibility, your popularity, not only in the UK but worldwide. So now you're saying, all right, we got this Guinness Book of World Records record. Uh, let's keep going.

• 6:27Brian Cox?

  Well, I wanted to do.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This next topic, emergence.

• 6:30Brian Cox?

  Emergence, yeah.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 6:32Brian Cox?

  I I really, I I love doing the live shows and I really enjoy writing them. And the Horizon show that you mentioned earlier had been written, you know, what, five or six years ago because we start developing the graphics a long time in advance. So I'd had all these ideas for a very new. Show partly or actually inspired by Kepler, so Johannes Kepler. You probably know, he wrote a very beautiful little book called The Six-Cornered Snowflake, which you can get today, it's still in print, you can get it on Kindle. It was about an experience he had in 1609. He writes, it was New Year's Eve, 1609, so I think he's embellished it a bit. It's a beautiful story though.

• 7:15Brian Cox?

  He was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague from the observatory to his patron's house for a party on New Year's Eve. And he realised he hadn't bought his patron a present. And then he noticed snowflakes landed on his arm. And he looked at them and he got interested in why they're all six-cornered. His book's called The Six-Cornered Snowflake. So what is the origin of this symmetry of the snowflakes? And so he went to the party and he said to his benefactor, I have brought you the gift of almost nothing, because I know how fond you are of nothing. But he said, in that gift of almost nothing, which is the snowflake, you can read the entire universe, which is a beautiful line. And so in this book, he speculates.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you, that's the worst fricking gift that I have ever. If you showed up at my house with a melted snowflake, I have bought you almost nothing. I'd be like, no, you bought me nothing, not almost nothing.

• 8:10Brian Cox?

  He knew this. It's a very funny book, so you get this insight into Kepler as a really witty kind of person. So he obviously knew that.

• 8:17Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 8:17Brian Cox?

  But the thing is, it's a very modern way of thinking, because he's saying that the symmetry of the snowflake has some, there's some cause. He says, there's a quote, there's something like, I cannot believe that this symmetry, this six-cornered nature can exist without reason, because they're all six-cornered. So there's a reason for it. And obviously, we now know it's the water molecule. He didn't know about molecules. So he starts thinking about bee hives.

• 8:42Chuck Nice?

  Way later, way later.

• 8:44Brian Cox?

  Really a 20th century discovery.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 8:46Brian Cox?

  So he talks about bee hives and pomegranate seeds. But what's.

• 8:50Chuck Nice?

  Bee hive with a hexagon, in the beehive, yeah.

• 8:52Brian Cox?

  So he says, what's that, what's the reason for that? Which again is quite complicated, to be figured out in the 20th century. Different reasons. But for me, it's wonderful, because you see this mind, this modern mind, asking a very modern question, which is, what is the origin of this symmetry that we see? And I think it's a really beautiful book. And at the end, by the way, he says, the translation I have is, I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry. Now, I don't know whether that word was around at the time, that's the translation.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alchimy was there, for sure.

• 9:22Brian Cox?

  Yeah, he said, "I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry, but I don't know enough, so I leave it to you, dear reader."

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 9:29Brian Cox?

  It's an absolutely magnificent book.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, that, it would be one of many examples of emergence.

• 9:36Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because I have a very limited list of what I know as emergence. One of them, and you correct me if I'm wrong, you know, you can study a bird all you want and know everything about it, but you would not know from that that a bunch of birds will flock together.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  And in syncopation, change direction, all at once.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's, you don't get that from studying the physiology of the bird.

• 10:01Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's an example, that's a fine example, is it?

• 10:04Brian Cox?

  Yeah, emergence, I mean, even.

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know what, before we go any further, what is emergence?

• 10:08Brian Cox?

  Well, at an even deeper level, you could say consciousness is an emergent property. That's probably the most famous one that people discuss.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Brian Cox?

  Because it's a property of some atoms and molecules in a particular configuration. We can discuss, you know, I mean, some people don't think that, but that's the scientific view is that's what it is. And so, but also there's this idea that it's not, that there's a more fundamental description in a sense of a better description of this complex thing, as you said, like birds flocking. There are different levels of description that are appropriate in nature. So biology, you could, you could try to say, well, if you knew all about particle physics and the theory of everything, then you could predict, you know, a human being, but of course you can't.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  You can't.

• 10:49Brian Cox?

  So in all science, there are different appropriate levels of description. Nuclear physics would be another one. You don't do nuclear physics, at least at the moment, by doing particle physics. So I suppose emergence is, to my mind, most simply, the question of how does this complexity that we see in the world emerge or appear from the simple underlying laws?

• 11:11Chuck Nice?

  And that is layered depending upon what you're observing in terms of biology or physics or, and like, or the bird.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the end, would you say it's just all physics?

• 11:23Brian Cox?

  Well, no, I think, I think that's, I think the modern view is, is.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm asking a physicist that.

• 11:29Brian Cox?

  Of course. Yes, yes and no. So, so yes, in the sense that the thing, the complexity that we see has the origin, has an origin, of course, in the laws of nature that we understand. But scientifically speaking, the correct way of.

• 11:45Brian Cox?

  You know, the best way of being a biologist, trying to understand complex biological systems, is not to be a particle physicist. It's a completely different discipline.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if you are foundational to everything that's happening, it's pretty useless at the level of the biology.

• 12:00Brian Cox?

  The standard model of particle physics, there's no point in trying to understand the brain by starting with the standard model of particle physics. We will get nowhere and probably never will.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so you've built a whole public show, staged show, on this one topic.

• 12:41Brian Cox?

  Well, it starts with Kepler, because one of the things I like doing with live shows is developing graphics and, you know, spending time working with people. So it starts on the Charles Bridge with the snowstorm, and I tell that story.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, this is with a video wall?

• 12:58Brian Cox?

  Well, yeah, by video. That's the other cool thing, because I get to, in the big shows, current, I believe the video wall we're going to have is 100 feet wide by 50 feet high. So it's just the biggest LED wall you can stick in an arena. But it starts with that, but pretty quickly, we go into the snowflake and then journey inwards initially. So the modern understanding of the snowflake with the water molecule, but why is the water molecule with that particular angle, 109 and 180 degrees?

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  108 degrees.

• 13:31Brian Cox?

  108 degrees. So then you have the oxygen atom, hydrogen atom.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the angle between the two hydrogen atoms coming off the oxygen.

• 13:37Brian Cox?

  Yeah, which is the origin of the symmetry of the snowflake ultimately. And then you go to protons, and we go into the proton. I mean, my PhD was a... Broadly speaking on the structure of the proton, I worked at a lab in Germany called Daisy, an accelerator called Hira.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Daisy has great graphical representations of physical phenomena.

• 13:58Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Brian Cox?

  Daisy Collaboration. Very famous lab, Daisy. And so we were looking at the structure of the proton, really mapping the structure of the proton. So we're getting to the proton and then into quarks and quarks. So a proton made most simply as two up quarks, with two up quarks and a down quark, which as far as we can see are point like things. They may well not be point like, they probably aren't, but we don't have a powerful enough microscope. So we just see this point. But then there are all sorts of other things in the proton, gluons and strange quarks, anti strange quarks and things like that. So it gets complicated. So we zoom into that and then we go a bit more speculative and zoom into maybe what are the building blocks of quarks? Is it superstrings? Is it string theory or something like that?

• 14:40Brian Cox?

  So there's an element of a journey inwards and then a journey outwards again. So the show works, particularly in the second half, actually physically with our intellectual journey. Because if you think about it, Kepler, you could say, you'll have comments on this, you could say that's the beginnings of modern science around 1600.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, definitely. Well, this near simultaneous invention of the telescope and the microscope.

• 15:05Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They came out within 10 years of each other. And we're off and running in both directions. Once you have that, yeah.

• 15:10Brian Cox?

  Yeah. And it's, so you know, you're post Copernicus, but Kepler's a contemporary of Galileo, pre Newton. So in 400 years, we've gone from essentially the same view of the natural world that we had in ancient Egypt or Greece. Yeah, I always think if you took an ancient Egyptian from 3000 B.C. and put them in Greece, about 0 A.D. or so, they wouldn't be too surprised. There wouldn't be much they didn't understand.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:39Brian Cox?

  Whereas from 1600 ish, 1550, 1600.

• 15:43Brian Cox?

  The whole modern world has developed in 400 years because we worked out how to do science, I would argue. I mean, some historians will be watching, it's a bit more than that, but I think.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where science as it is now practiced took its tap roots in that era.

• 15:59Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, where you have an hypothesis, you test it.

• 16:02Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't just say something's true because it feels like it should be true.

• 16:05Chuck Nice?

  Right, it has to be repeatable.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even something so obvious as the sun goes around the earth, that's so obvious, why even test it? But you test it, right? And so, so this idea of testing, and we can't give short shrift to the, what's your institute in?

• 16:22Brian Cox?

  The Royal Society.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Royal Society, yes, of London.

• 16:26Brian Cox?

  We just call it the Royal Society.

• 16:28Chuck Nice?

  Excuse me, of course.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:30Chuck Nice?

  But that's very British.

• 16:32Brian Cox?

  It is the Royal.

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  It's the Royal Society, as if there were another.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 16:37Brian Cox?

  So part of the show, although we're going inwards as far as we can go, outwards as far as we can go, talking about a lot of images from the James Webb Space Telescope, I think, because they're so spectacular, Vera Rubin Observatory now, so those latest images, and the problems they're raising, by the way, is an aside, about the early universe, development of early galaxies and so on. But ultimately, there's a thread, which is, this is a remarkable 400 years. And in the end, so the Voyager spacecraft actually starts to take quite a, became a character in this show, because there's this thing, which is, its 50th anniversary is, what is it, 2027?

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it was 1977.

• 17:16Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was launched, yeah.

• 17:17Brian Cox?

  So, so it's kind of as our first emissary to the stars, I suppose, as Carl Sagan would say, as it begins to leave the stars.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Emissary to the stars.

• 17:26Brian Cox?

  That's how you say it, isn't it? So, there's something, I think, quite current about how we learn to acquire reliable knowledge about the world, and how that has changed everybody's lives in a way that they never changed before. So you could go for a thousand years, or two thousand years, or three thousand years, nothing changes, really. We don't discover antibiotics, we don't discover medicine.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:49Brian Cox?

  And then just 400 years from people like Kepler, and Copernicus, and Galileo, the modern world appears. And now we stand on this threshold, I think, at almost a decision point, and it's our decision, what we do with this power that we have. Do we go forward to the stars following Voyager? So is Voyager the first explorer and many will follow? Or does it become some kind of museum, you know, with the golden record? Does it become, is it the last thing that we end up sending out of our solar system? So there's an element of that, I think, just reflecting on the position we are with so much.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna be bumming some people out if you take that path.

• 18:29Brian Cox?

  Well, no, because I'm an optimist.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:31Brian Cox?

  But I think that we're at a stage now where the potential, the possibilities are so great. But the risks are also great at the moment.

• 18:40Chuck Nice?

  Well, part of the risk being raised or intensified is because of the technological advances and scientific advances that we have made. You know, they actually put us further at risk. So we are all at once, the beneficiaries and the people harmed by our own advancements.

• 18:59Brian Cox?

  Yeah, I think we've talked about this before, haven't we? That it's our knowledge exceeds our wisdom. So we have power, power to do things like build nuclear weapons, for example, power to change the climate intentionally or unintentionally. And maybe we don't have the wisdom to control that power.

• 19:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bumming us out, dude.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well.

• 19:19Brian Cox?

  But I'm an optimist. We've done well so far.

• 19:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:24Brian Cox?

  Yeah, we've had the power to destroy ourselves.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've done well in spite of ourselves, really.

• 19:27Brian Cox?

  We've had the power to destroy ourselves since the late 1940s.

• 19:32Chuck Nice?

  I think, what do you feel about this? I mean, this is more philosophical, but for both of you. I think the amount of information that inundates the average person around the world now, thanks to, you know, phones, places us in a position where there's more information available, but also more misinformation and abuse of information than ever before.

• 19:59Chuck Nice?

  So that, I think, raises the stakes in terms of us destroying ourselves.

• 20:05Brian Cox?

  Yeah, that's why I use the term reliable knowledge. And I think that's one of the skills that we are, we all of us, our citizens, are going to have to learn. Because we're awash with information, as you say. And now the trick is to try to find trusted sources. And it's not easy, clearly. And I don't necessarily blame, well, I don't, I don't blame individual citizens. To go back to Carl Sagan, you know, one of my favorite books is The Demon Haunted World. And I love the first, I think it's the first chapter where he tells the story of being in a taxi here in New York, actually, in a cab. With a cab driver, he says, you're the astronomer on TV. What do you think about UFOs? What do you think about Atlantis? What do you think about the, and all of these things?

• 20:49Brian Cox?

  But Carl Sagan, I think, with great wisdom, said that he didn't think, oh, God, this guy, you know, he's talking to me about Atlantis. He thought we have failed, that society has failed. This is a person who's curious. Yeah, because this is a person who's curious and interested and fascinated by the mysteries.

• 21:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:09Brian Cox?

  But the real mysteries.

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  Right, the ones that are truly fascinating.

• 21:13Brian Cox?

  Yeah, hasn't had access to them, which is a failure of education and society's fault.

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  It's you two. The two of you. You guys have screwed us.

• 21:25Brian Cox?

  You know what I mean, though? I think it's really, it's really important that because, you know, I, obviously, I meet people online especially, but also just in everyday life. Who are sort of, we've got, you know, this thing, this comet, when we will talk about the Atlas III I comet that's going through at the moment. A fascinating thing, but maybe what current estimates, maybe seven, eight billion years old. Has come from a distant star system.

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Older than our solar system, which is only four and a half billion.

• 21:51Brian Cox?

  Born before the Earth formed. An unprecedented opportunity to observe material that's coming from a distant star system. And yet, you see people go, it's aliens. You know, that, that, that's, I think this is what Carl Sagan meant, the, the reality of it, that this is something that formed before the Earth formed.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:11Brian Cox?

  And it is visiting our solar system and going back out into interstellar space is more interesting than trying to say that it's some kind of completely useless. By the way, if it's an alien spaceship, it's not spending much time. It misses the Earth by, what is it? Nearly two astronomical units.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 22:26Brian Cox?

  Goes flying through the solar system, flying off again. It's been traveling for something like probably about seven billion years or something like this. Can you imagine if anyone is sat in that?

• 22:36Chuck Nice?

  And you missed your exit.

• 22:37Brian Cox?

  Going, oh, no.

• 22:38Chuck Nice?

  Seven billion years.

• 22:39Brian Cox?

  We'll go, we'll go around again. We'll make a course correction and go around again. I'm sure it'll be fine. Not much will have changed in seven billion years. I, I mean, it's not, it's in a hyperbolic orbit, right? It's not, they don't even have the chance to come back.

• 22:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:53Brian Cox?

  But yeah, so that is a good example, though.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, hyperbolic, there are like several categories of orbit.

• 23:00Brian Cox?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And well, it's actually three orbits we can speak of.

• 23:03Brian Cox?

  And which are they?

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One would be a circle.

• 23:05Brian Cox?

  All right.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nothing is in a circle because there's always something going on. So most are ellipses.

• 23:09Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you keep making the ellipse bigger and bigger.

• 23:13Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a point where it sort of opens up to the outside and you get a parabola.

• 23:18Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's a very specific form of a hyperbola.

• 23:22Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so hyperbola is just, it comes in and goes out and it never moves back around.

• 23:26Brian Cox?

  You're not going to see it again.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:27Brian Cox?

  I mean, I suppose, actually thinking about it, probably it's in a bound orbit in the galaxy.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's always something, but not the sun.

• 23:34Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's not the sun.

• 23:35Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's hyperbolic to the sun, right, not to something else. Give us more examples of emergence, just so we can get in the bathtub with you here.

• 23:45Brian Cox?

  The, the one that's always talked about, that we mentioned, is consciousness, I think. And it's becoming very topical because of course AI and the, the potential development of artificial general intelligence. We're not there yet, but AGI raises this question of, of what intelligence, what the experience of being human is.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:04Brian Cox?

  And so there, there were different, I think there are two categories of emergence people speak of. Actually, Sean Carroll, they've had him on the show.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we have, yeah.

• 24:12Brian Cox?

  He's got about five in a recent paper. He's got loads of category two A and three B or whatever. But broadly speaking, people think of weak and strong emergence.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:20Brian Cox?

  So weak emergence is what I think virtually every scientist would. Certainly physicists would would say consciousness is, which is is very complicated. The most complicated emergent phenomena we know of in the universe, I would say. But it's it comes from the underlying laws. So so you could you could model it with a sufficiently powerful computer. You could imagine modeling how the human brain works. I think most people would accept. There is also strong emergence, which is somehow the the phenomena you see is not. You can't simulate it from the underlying laws. There's something else going on. Now, I would not subscribe to that.

• 25:03Brian Cox?

  So I would say consciousness is interesting because it's weakly emergent. It emerges from this thing, the brain. How, we don't know.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about the gas laws that we learn about in chemistry class?

• 25:14Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you can't derive from just looking at the movement of gas particles as individual. It's a macroscopic understanding of what's going on, highly accurate and very predictive. But I don't think you can derive them from just looking at how a molecule moves in a gas.

• 25:33Brian Cox?

  Well, you could in principle. That's the that's the point, in principle. If you had a very, very, very, very.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you could model a bajillion particles, okay.

• 25:42Chuck Nice?

  If you could keep track of every single particle and then track them.

• 25:46Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Then you would be able to then in principle determine.

• 25:50Brian Cox?

  Yeah, which which actually goes back to what we talked about earlier, though. It'd be pointless. As you say, you know, gases, you can understand them with pressure and volume and temperature.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, macroscopic objects, macroscopic entities, yeah.

• 26:01Brian Cox?

  Why would you bother? You know, having a supercomputer track the motion of all and the momentum of all these things. It'd be a silly thing to do.

• 26:08Chuck Nice?

  And does it matter if there's? Okay, I don't know how to say this properly, so I'll just ask. Does it matter if there are levels of emergence? Because when you say consciousness, animals are also conscious. There are dogs, they are clearly conscious. Chimpanzees, I'm sorry. Let's go down to monkeys. A capuchin helper monkey is definitely conscious. But it's not conscious on what we would consider the level that we are. We don't know if it's pondering its existence and all that kind of stuff. Whales are definitely dolphins. So but does it matter that there are levels of consciousness?

• 26:44Brian Cox?

  No, I mean, they would just be one of those remarkable properties of atoms.

• 26:51Brian Cox?

  Was it again, Carl Sagan again, didn't he say that a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about hydrogen atoms? Which is a great definition of physics.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great quote. I never heard that. I'd have heard it at that level. I heard humans are a way for the universe to know itself. That's also great. I've heard you say that. That's a little higher up than hydrogen atoms. That's pretty cool though. That's another great quote.

• 27:14Brian Cox?

  There's another example, you know, in cosmology, about three or four minutes after the big bang, you have 75% hydrogen, 25% helium, bit of lithium, maybe, not much else, tiny bit of beryllium, I think, and that's it. And then you go, so there's also that story, which I tell in the show, of how you go from that, which we have a very good picture of, let's say 10 minutes after the big bang, how you then go to this, 13.8 billion years later, which is stars and planets, yes, but us as well. It's a remarkable story, but it's understood in broad sweep.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Greatest story ever told.

• 27:51Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that is not true. We all know that the greatest story ever told is Jesus. Please stop.

• 27:58Brian Cox?

  Well, he's an emergent thing too.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So true. I mean, so true. Tell me about the wetness of water. What should we be thinking about that?

• 28:11Brian Cox?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's another good example of something that's appropriate. Talk about liquids and they're wet and what's it mean to be wet? Yeah, but actually at the lower level, it's just a load of, a load of molecules, oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which don't have the property wet. So again, it would be another example.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 28:30Brian Cox?

  So, so, I mean, really, I mean, you can read by the literature.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't point to a molecule and say that's wet.

• 28:38Brian Cox?

  No.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But an ensemble of them, then you can measure it and see, okay, is it wet, is it not? Interesting. Okay.

• 28:46Brian Cox?

  Yeah, so, I mean, basically, I mean, in a sense, almost everything's emergent, right? That we, I mean, clearly, you know, we observe the universe at our particular scale, so sizes of things that we can see and we, and we're a particular size.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 29:00Brian Cox?

  You could argue that everything that we understand and perceive as human beings is emergent, right?

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  But is it really? Because is there a doesn't emergence have to have some special characteristics that otherwise would not be if you just did the same thing over and over again? For instance, the noise that happens after the cellular division of a sperm and an egg coming together. That starts a certain kind of noise that biologists don't know what, but they know that split, split, split, split. And then that keeps going until there's a person and then none of those people are the same, none of them. So like that to me is truly emergent, whereas when you talk about water,

• 29:47Chuck Nice?

  like that is the connection of these, you know, this hydrogen, this oxygen. And I don't care, you just keep connecting them that way. And guess what? You're always going to get that. You're always going to get water. So is that truly emergent?

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 30:00Chuck Nice?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you're saying in some cases it's a precisely repeatable thing?

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas in sperm and egg, you got billions of different people.

• 30:10Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. And so the true nature of the emergence is in the uniqueness of those separating characteristics as opposed to something that is just repeatable.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't it come down to just how many variables you're working with?

• 30:24Brian Cox?

  Yes, a really beautiful way of thinking about it. I hadn't thought about it in that way, but yeah.

• 30:28Chuck Nice?

  I made Brian Cox think differently. Hello.

• 30:33Brian Cox?

  And you could say, as Neil was just about to say, you could say it's just the number of variables you have to keep track of.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 30:40Brian Cox?

  I think you're right. There is something that feels very different between just wetness. As an example, you're a liquid.

• 30:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:48Brian Cox?

  That's an emergent behavior. But you're right, that when you get to life, I mean, life is surely the most.

• 30:56Brian Cox?

  Remarkable example of that. And actually, some of the work that we see, I was listening to some, there's a paper just been published, I've forgotten the name, it's from a Google research group, about essentially seeing replicators, which is what we're talking about here, living things emerge, that behaviour emerge, just from random code. So it's a very beautiful paper, I wish I could remember the name, maybe on the strap line here when we do this thing.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean in human-written code?

• 31:27Brian Cox?

  Yeah, so you just do a very basic computing language, and essentially, the concept of a Turing machine, which now I'd have to explain, but this idea that you can, a computer is essentially just a tape with like, characters on it, or you could have just ones and zeros on it, and something that goes along and can change those zeros into ones and ones into zeros, it can read and write on the tape, and a few other properties. And Alan Turing, back in the 1930s, wrote a very famous paper, which showed, which introduced the concept of a universal Turing machine, so all computers are equivalent to each other, essentially.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 32:04Brian Cox?

  And so, but there's some work been done on seeing how you can just start with no coding, really, just randomness, and a couple of rules for computing, and you leave it, and over time, you get, you essentially get code written that can replicate. So you get coding sequences that can copy themselves, which is what you need.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's an economic counterpart to this, okay? So you can go to the street corner, and say, "I need milk," and there's milk there, "I need eggs," and the eggs are there, and they'll sell you the eggs, okay? You didn't set up the shop, you didn't do anything, it's just there for you, and you can say, "There must be some cosmic law that is serving my needs, here and now, this must be some magic force." And then you realise, it is very simple economic forces operating.

• 33:00Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Buy it, sell it for more. The laws of supply, demand and profit. Exactly, and get a product someone wants, okay? That's it! Everything else falls into place. So that would be not very many variables that lead to high complexity down the line.

• 33:18Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah, and the complexity... Emerges is that word from really some very simple laws.

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  That's really cool, actually. No, think about it.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because I want to, I want to get rich.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I want to find something you want and I'm going to sell it to you.

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm going to sell it at a profit so I can get rich.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And an entire economy unfolds out of that.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  And that emerges out of this simple transaction that one person thinks, oh, it's there for me. And the other person is like, oh, I have to do that so that, you know, I can profit from that.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it depends how big your ego is to think the whole world is configured for you.

• 33:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, listen, I'm in therapy.

• 33:55Brian Cox?

  And it's interesting because it raises, and this is not my field of expertise, but it raises questions about what life is.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:01Brian Cox?

  Because you could say that life is just, it's about information. It's really computing is what life is.

• 34:07Chuck Nice?

  Holy moly.

• 34:09Brian Cox?

  So it's not really, what you're saying there really is biology, the, the nature, the physicality that we think of as life. We think of biological systems with DNA and all those things.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:20Brian Cox?

  But you can, you can argue that that's not the really interesting bit. That, that's just the way that it's realized.

• 34:26Chuck Nice?

  That's an expression. It's an expression of the true thing, which is the computing, the computing. Which if that is the case, then we have stumbled into the creation of life that will replace us. Which is, if we ever get to artificial general intelligence and what you're saying is an emergent property of computing, which is also an expression of life, then it's only a matter of time before that particular computing becomes a life form, which of course will outthink us, outlive us, out everything us.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Terminator.

• 35:02Brian Cox?

  Well, yeah, and, and this is, you know, again.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't smile while you're agreeing with him on that.

• 35:07Brian Cox?

  No.

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I see a sad face for once on your, on that mug?

• 35:11Brian Cox?

  Well, one of the things I've been involved in, I'm involved at a research institute called the Francis Crick Institute in London, which is a biosciences. It's a wonderful place. It's a temple to curiosity. I love the place. There's a great Nobel Prize winner called Sir Paul Nurse, who's a good friend of mine, who won the Nobel Prize for cancer research, actually by looking at yeast cells. So it's a remarkable, fundamental study of life. But he really pioneered the building of this institute, or inspired it, in his image, which is about curiosity.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Francis Crick co-discovered the DNA double healing.

• 35:45Brian Cox?

  Oh, okay. That's why it's called the Crick Institute.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:48Brian Cox?

  But we did some podcasts called The Question of Science, actually, which are around. And we just did them at the Crick Institute, and with panels of experts. And so it was wonderful for me, because I just chaired it and asked the questions. And it was mainly audience questions, actually. But one of them was on AI. And there was an interesting split in the panel between the neuroscientists and the computer scientists.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 36:11Brian Cox?

  So the neuroscientists really felt that, for example, large language models, which is what we have at the moment,

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 36:19Brian Cox?

  were just symbol-shuffling things, and the brain is fundamentally different to that. So we are not large language models.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I kind of feel that way about them as well. I kind of feel that way, too. It's just rearranging statistical juxtapositions of words. Right. And... It's seeing all the probabilities, that's all. I don't feel like it understands anything.

• 36:41Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I interact with a large language model. It's like there's this vacuous eyes staring back at me, and there's no soul behind it.

• 36:49Brian Cox?

  Yeah. Well, the argument, what one of the panelists gave was that, imagine that you're immortal, so time doesn't matter to you. But we could be in this room, if we were immortal, and someone could start putting little symbols in under the door. And if we put the right symbol out, we'd get some food, right? So we'd soon learn what the right symbol was. And then they put two through the door, and we'd do the same thing, and then three. And ultimately, if we had a huge amount of time, kind of a near infinite amount of time, we'd end up having a conversation.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:17Brian Cox?

  And we'd do it right. But at no point would we have any clue what was going on. We would not have any understanding at all of what we were doing.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a transactional exchange of simple information that itself

• 37:31Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is not anything more than just

• 37:34Brian Cox?

  There's no understanding.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no understanding.

• 37:36Brian Cox?

  That's, that's one of the points of view that were expressed. But

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that the neuroscientist?

• 37:42Brian Cox?

  That was a neuroscientist who said, I think it goes back to this philosopher called Searl. I think there's an argument he made a long time ago about symbol shuffling, Searl's argument, so similar to that. But one of the computer scientists said, no, that irrespective of what you think about that, that's what we are. So we don't know what we are. We don't know what consciousness is. So it could be that that's all we're doing. We're really, and it's true, I suppose, at the cellular level, at the level of a neuron.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 38:09Brian Cox?

  There's no understanding.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't tell me that. I don't, I don't want to think, I don't want to believe that. Now that you mention it.

• 38:15Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are acoustic stimuli coming from your mouth, entering my ear, hitting my brain, and now I process that and some other response comes out. And maybe I'm not conscious of anything.

• 38:30Brian Cox?

  No, you're just like chatting.

• 38:33Chuck Nice?

  You're a information processing and response machine.

• 38:36Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Chuck Nice?

  It's very possible.

• 38:38Brian Cox?

  And I think that this debate is quite live, actually, amongst people, among many people who all know what they're talking about, and there are different views, which just shows you it's complex, a complex emergent phenomenon.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense. And that is why a lot of like, and these aren't like neuroscientists, computer scientists, but there's many in the AI world who feel like, given enough time, you just train the AI on everything. If you have enough time and enough computing power, they will definitely be truly thinking. They're like thinking the way we consider thinking.

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially when you think of thinking in that way.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And it reminds me of a New Yorker comic, I think it was. There were two dolphins swimming, right, in this water park, and there are humans up walking on the, on the walkway. And one dolphin says to the other. They open their mouths and noises go between them, but it's not clear they're actually communicating.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I get that there's emergence in these complex systems. But what is this talk I hear of emergence from the standard model of particle physics? What's going on there? I thought that's a pretty straightforward grid of what exists and what should exist or how they interact.

• 39:59Brian Cox?

  If I understand the question right, so there are things, there are quite basic things about particles that are difficult to derive from the standard model. So the standard model is, you know, the here is the quarks and the, so up quark, down quark, electron, electron.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an inventory.

• 40:16Brian Cox?

  So we have 12 matter particle, the Higgs boson, and then three forces that it describes.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an inventory.

• 40:23Brian Cox?

  Yeah, well, and then it tells us about the interactions, but it's got, so how particles interact with each other and through which forces do they interact.

• 40:31Chuck Nice?

  Can I ask this? I don't care if I feel stupid or if I seem stupid. Why do you guys call them particles when it seems like everything that I read, once I go anywhere in depth, that it's more like a field of, I don't know, I can't, it's just some kind of amorphous field. But you call it a particle, which makes me think like, little piece of something that's kind of floating around and it's a tiny little.

• 40:58Brian Cox?

  But they always are when we observe them.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  So it's really about the observation.

• 41:04Brian Cox?

  But you're right, the standard model of particle physics is a quantum field theory. So you're right, the, the, the objects in the standard model are fields. But maybe it's historic nomenclature, but it's true that when you, you always see, we detect in a particle physics detector, an electron.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:25Brian Cox?

  And it goes to a place and the detector.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, you detect the signature of an electron. You don't actually see the electron.

• 41:31Brian Cox?

  No, we don't see it, but we see it in the.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We see its path that it makes or, or other things that it has touched on its way through the system.

• 41:38Brian Cox?

  The track that it, yeah, we have magnetic fields and so the charged particles.

• 41:42Chuck Nice?

  So are you seeing a disturbance in the field that shows up as this singular kind of identifier?

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that, I think you have to say yes to that.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to, as a layman, get my understanding like on point here because sometimes when you guys talk, it makes, what happens is my physical association with the world kicks in and I'm like, well, that can't be because it's not that. And so, you know, that's why I'm asking this.

• 42:14Brian Cox?

  Yeah, and it's a good question about how, how are you to picture the existence of, you know, solid, solid this existence in terms of quantum fields, you know, it's a rather abstract underlying description. That's absolutely true.

• 42:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:29Brian Cox?

  But you're right, what you said, that they're just the, the particles that we'd say the excitations in the field.

• 42:35Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. All right. Very cool.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you start with the standard model and derive quantum field theory from it?

• 42:42Brian Cox?

  No. No, the standard model is a quantum field theory. So, and there are, there are lots of what we call free parameters. So that ultimately things are put in by hand. And there are a lot of them.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that make the standard model that much less satisfying to you as?

• 42:58Brian Cox?

  It's not complete. It's certainly not complete. I mean, for example, one of the most wonderful examples is that, so how many matter particles are there in the standard model? So there, so to make up you and me, so what's the minimal description of us? It's up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. That's it. And the up quarks and down quarks make the protons and neutrons, which is inside the atomic nucleus. And the electrons go around to make the atoms. And that's it, right? Three ingredients, basically. And there's another one called the electron neutrino, of which there are a lot streaming through our head now from the nuclear reactions in the sun. So the four things, that's it. Now,

• 43:40Brian Cox?

  it turns out that there are also two copies of that set. So there's a thing called the charm quark and the strange quark, and the muon, and a muon neutrino. So the muon, for example, is, is a heavy electron. It's identical in every way, except it's heavier. And then there's another set, the top quark and the bottom quark, and the tau, and the tau neutrino. So three sets of these things. Is it, so the one that makes up everything, and then another two. Why? We don't know. We don't know why there are three.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the particles of the universe are in triplicate. Except we are familiar only with that lowest energy regime with electrons and...

• 44:22Brian Cox?

  And then we discovered the other ones and we, with some very straight little caveats. We know there are no more than three.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not? How do you know there are no more than three?

• 44:32Brian Cox?

  Because it was, so the caveats are very weak, but so the LEP Collider at CERN, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, that that machine was, well, it was built in the 80s. It was run through the 90s.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And did you have a position at CERN for a while?

• 44:48Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah. So I worked on the, as we were building the LHC, I worked on some ideas for little detectors close to the beams and so on, on the ATLAS experiment. Before that, there was an electron-positron collider there called LEP, which was in the same tunnel. And that was really a factory to make things called z bosons, or z bosons, and I call them. And they're to do with one of the forces of nature, the weak force. And by measuring exactly the, what's called the lifetime, the behavior, let's say, of that particle, you can see how many things it can decay into. How many, because basically the general rule in particle physics is if you're very massive and you can fall to bits into lighter things, then you will.

• 45:31Brian Cox?

  And the more chance there is, the more things you can fall to bits into, the more rapidly you fall to bits, right, basically. So you can measure how many particles this thing can decay into. And so with some caveats about other generations, as we call them, being extremely heavy and you wouldn't see them, then you can, you can see how many different kinds of particle this thing can fall into. So it was a very famous measurement. So we're sure that there are three, there's three copies.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three and only three.

• 46:03Brian Cox?

  But that looks like the periodic table of the elements, right, Mendeleev, going back all those, all those years ago. So the pattern that you can see when you learn, that we all learn at school in the chemical elements. And there's an underlying reason for that, which is quantum mechanics and the way that everything works. But, so there will be a reason. Why? There are only those three families, but we don't know what it is.

• 46:27Chuck Nice?

  It's father, son and holy ghost.

• 46:29Brian Cox?

  It could be that.

• 46:30Chuck Nice?

  That's the reason.

• 46:33Brian Cox?

  So there's a lot of that in the standard model, right? There are a lot of things that we don't know. We don't fully understand the Higgs particle at all.

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 46:41Brian Cox?

  We've dissected this thing. It is.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got the Nobel Prize given.

• 46:45Brian Cox?

  Yeah, and it's a remarkable new property of nature, a new kind of thing in nature. But exactly how that works, whether and why? So we know that it gives masses to the fundamental particles, at least in the standard model, that's its job. But why it gives the masses to them, you know, so there's a, why is the electron the mass that it is? In the standard model, you say, because it interacts in this way with the Higgs field. And you go, why does it do that? And we say, we don't know why it does that. So there are, there are a lot of things in the standard model that you have to measure. And so it's not a theory of everything by any sense.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how come it doesn't contain gravity?

• 47:30Brian Cox?

  Well, so now you're asking about a quantum theory of gravity and Einstein.

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up with it.

• 47:36Brian Cox?

  Einstein spent a long, the last, what, 20 or 30 years of his life trying to find such a thing.

• 47:40Chuck Nice?

  Don't cop out on us now, Brian. Einstein tried this for a while, guys.

• 47:47Brian Cox?

  So, yeah, no, we don't know. I interviewed, I did great, it was an honour, actually. I interviewed Roger Penrose a few weeks ago and chatted to him about these things. And Roger Penrose is one of the greats of the 20th and 21st century. He got the Nobel Prize for his work on black holes for really a very famous paper from 1963, I think it was.

• 48:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  56?

• 48:08Brian Cox?

  Was it 60s?

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  60s, mid 60s, yeah, yeah.

• 48:10Brian Cox?

  Where he showed that with very minimal assumptions, a star, a sufficiently massive star will collapse to form a spacetime singularity, a black hole.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inevitably.

• 48:21Brian Cox?

  Yeah, inevitably. So Oppenheimer and Schneider did it in the 99, just before the Second World War, but with some assumptions about symmetry. And you could say, well, nothing collapses in a perfectly symmetric way, so you wouldn't form a black hole. But Penrose removed those ideas. But he's a great relativist. He's a great, you know, a real expert in general relativity. So he would not, you know, I suppose the fashionable way to think about this is general relativity comes from quantum mechanics, but we don't know how. And there's some support for that from the study of black holes. So, but there is another way of thinking that says, no, spacetime is fundamental. Relativity is fundamental.

• 49:03Brian Cox?

  And so I'm saying that because there's debate. It's not, it's not, I think most physicists would say quantum mechanics is the underlying theory, some kind of quantum description of nature.

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's on a roll.

• 49:17Brian Cox?

  And out of that emerges.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's on a roll for how successful it has been.

• 49:21Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In accounting for everything.

• 49:24Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean, so why doubt it at this point?

• 49:26Brian Cox?

  Yeah. So maybe we don't know enough to start. So I think I'm not misrepresenting him. He would, he would question whether you really need to have a quantum theory of gravity in the, coming from quantum mechanics. I think he would question that. So the reason I'm saying that is to say it's an open question. We don't know.

• 49:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what about the fabric of spacetime?

• 49:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that emergent?

• 49:53Brian Cox?

  Well, so the recent work in the study of black holes, which is the tiny bit of research I still do, I had a PhD student and postdoc working on this. It's called emergent spacetime.

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what is that?

• 50:06Brian Cox?

  So it's the idea that space and time are not fundamental. So spacetime is not fundamental. There's a, let's say a deeper description, which is basically a network of qubits. To put, to do the shorthand, the shorthand version. So qubits, quantum bits. So essentially it looks like a quantum computer. Not, absolutely not to say that we live in a simulation. Right? No one's going.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a little defensive there. Have you noticed that? He sounded, I don't really mean that.

• 50:36Brian Cox?

  Well, I don't know whether we live in a simulation. Nobody does, but I'm just saying it's not, it's not evidence for that.

• 50:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 50:42Brian Cox?

  But it's beginning to look like you can say, well, let's say a notion of distance.

• 50:50Brian Cox?

  Can emerge from a network, an underlying network, which doesn't have the notion of distance or geometry in it. So that's the

• 50:59Chuck Nice?

  That's you just described subspace from Star Trek.

• 51:05Brian Cox?

  Kind of.

• 51:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's like this underlying substrate where the laws of physics aren't necessarily in play, which is why you can go faster than the speed of light.

• 51:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, information goes faster.

• 51:16Chuck Nice?

  Information goes faster.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you communicate in subspace.

• 51:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a, in a, with witty repartee.

• 51:21Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 51:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though they're

• 51:22Chuck Nice?

  Even though they're half a galaxy apart.

• 51:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 51:25Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about this in another context, actually, because I, so there would be laws of physics, by the way, there'd be underlying laws.

• 51:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:34Brian Cox?

  And then our laws would emerge from them.

• 51:36Chuck Nice?

  Please forgive my inelegant description.

• 51:38Brian Cox?

  We call them effective theories, right? So it's an effective theory.

• 51:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:42Brian Cox?

  Which is, which works in the regimes we observe things, but

• 51:46Chuck Nice?

  Effective theory.

• 51:47Brian Cox?

  But I was thinking about this, and I have no evidence for this at all. So I might cause lots of people to write in it. But I think that that no causality, for example, cause and effect. Which is what you're saying when things, if things can go faster than light, then you can essentially build a time machine and go into the past. You can send messages back into the past if you can go faster than the speed of light, basically. My guess is that that's absolutely fundamental. And so that, so you wouldn't, just because you can skip, if you could skip beneath relativity, so to a deeper picture of spacetime, I still guess that causality will be there.

• 52:29Chuck Nice?

  Will still be there.

• 52:30Brian Cox?

  I, I

• 52:30Chuck Nice?

  Will be, wow.

• 52:31Brian Cox?

  Now, I'm not aware of any, anyone who's really, who's proved that, or I'm not aware of any, any, anyone's opinion on it. It is my opinion.

• 52:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Brian Cox?

  I don't have any, I don't think I have any evidence for that other than, like Stephen Hawking.

• 52:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is that different from Stephen Hawking's time travel conjecture?

• 52:50Brian Cox?

  Yeah, the chronology protection conjecture.

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry.

• 52:53Brian Cox?

  So it's called the conjecture because he conjectured it conjecture.

• 52:56Chuck Nice?

  It was conjecture.

• 52:57Brian Cox?

  And that was his conjecture, you're right. He said that whatever the underlying laws of physics are, they have to prevent time travel into the past, which is to say that causality.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Protecting causality.

• 53:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 53:07Brian Cox?

  But I think we're absolutely miles away. We're miles away. This might not be right, this idea of spacetime emerging, although it's quite a popular research field. It is interesting because quantum mechanics can seem to violate the spirit of that. So you probably discussed before on the show quantum entanglement.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, everybody wants to know about quantum.

• 53:28Brian Cox?

  Einstein spooky action at a distance, he called it, right? So he didn't like the idea that you can have these widely separated things that can appear to be correlated in such a way that something happens instantly. Now, we know John Bell and others showed, and it's been experimentally tested, that information can't travel faster than the speed of light. But still, the idea that some kind of colic configuration, that the quantum state can change instantly, seems to violate that somehow, doesn't it? So this is again.

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard from the other Brian. So I was having lunch with him and he said something that just blew my mind. What might be fundamental in spacetime is this sea of entangled virtual particles where the particles are entangled via what are essentially wormholes. Because a wormhole has instantaneous contact from one side to the other. And the wormholes then are the stitching of the fabric of spacetime.

• 54:33Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's called ER equals EPR, which is Einstein Rosen equals Einstein Fadolsky Rosen. So EPR is the spooky action at a distance paper. And ER is Einstein Rosen, which is 1935, I think, where they showed that the Schwarzschild metric, the eternal Schwarzschild metric, which is the description of a non-spinning black hole, which was discovered very early in relativity, has in it, if you extend it as far as you can, a wormhole geometry. So that was Einstein Rosen. So I think Leonard Susskind coined the term ER equals EPR.

• 55:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what does that mean to you as a thinker in this space? Can wormholes be the fabric of anything?

• 55:20Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's part of the answer. One of the answers for how information might get out of a black hole. So it's why it's called the black hole information paradox.

• 55:30Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's very cool.

• 55:31Brian Cox?

  Yeah, well, one of the, one of the pictures people have for that, very hand wavy picture, is that wormholes somehow connect the interior of the black hole to the external universe.

• 55:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But all the other virtual particles that fill the vacuum of space.

• 55:46Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are particle pairs that come in and out of existence.

• 55:49Brian Cox?

  Yeah, they're entangled.

• 55:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why wouldn't they be, they're entangled. Why wouldn't that also be in this wormhole discussion?

• 55:55Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's it, that's, so, so it seems there's some sense of a, a link. The, the reason it's, it came in, in, in the black hole context is the math. People did very complicated mathematical calculations about what happens to the Hawking radiation. So this is the, the radiation that is emitted from a black hole. From the, and it's really, one way to think about it is it's the event horizon of a black hole is disrupting these particles that you talked about, these entangled particles.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Brian Cox?

  They're, they're really the structure of the vacuum of space, right? And it kind of disrupts them. And so people were calculating how that radiation, which is entangled with the black hole, how everything behaves as the black hole shrinks. Because, because if you think about this, black hole is glowing, it has a temperature, losing energy.

• 56:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Through Hawking radiation.

• 56:45Brian Cox?

  Through the Hawking radiation. So not at the moment, because they're much colder than the cosmic microwave background. So they're, they're, they're cold things at the moment. But eventually in the universe, there'll be, there'll be hot things and they'll start, they'll shrink.

• 56:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be hotter than the background.

• 56:59Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so there'll be, that, that flow of energy is out.

• 57:02Brian Cox?

  Yeah. Hot is, I mean, we're talking about this point, na, na, na, na, na, whatever kelvin it is. But eventually they'll shrink. They're entangled with the Hawking radiation because of what you said, because of these pairs that are coming out of the vacuum. And so you get to a point where you get a crisis really, where the entanglement can't be supported. It's one way of thinking about one of the problems with the black hole information paradox. So it's all to do with entanglement and what happens. And then, so from that research, some calculations were done, which are just mathematical, that say that ultimately the Hawking radiation ends up essentially entangled with itself again. Right, is one way to think about it. Um, because, so, so you don't lose information.

• 57:48Brian Cox?

  But those calculations can be pictured with hand waving as representing wormholes, some sort of wormholes. They're not the Einstein Rosen wormholes, actually. So it gets very complicated. And people aren't clear on the interpretation. But that's where the modern resurgence in this idea has come from, I think. It's coming from these really very technical calculations about black holes and how information behaves in the presence of black holes. And wormhole-like structures

• 58:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 58:22Brian Cox?

  appears to be one interpretation of what's happening. But I'm choosing my words carefully because it really isn't fully fleshed out by a long way. It's interesting, isn't it?

• 58:31Chuck Nice?

  But it is really fascinating to think about.

• 58:33Brian Cox?

  It's this.

• 58:34Chuck Nice?

  This is how the... It's like an information tunnel just for that, for the purposes of getting it out.

• 58:39Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Brian Cox?

  Yeah. And then you go, why? And even, you know, you see the language. It's like for the purposes of, why is it that information is conserved? That looks quite basic. So it looks like another of these basic ideas. Information is not destroyed.

• 58:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 58:55Brian Cox?

  It becomes massively scrambled. So you can't in any conceivable future read the stuff.

• 59:00Chuck Nice?

  I was going to say, yeah.

• 59:01Brian Cox?

  It's, you know, the example that's often given is if you, if you burn, but it's the iPad. Let's say you set fire to the iPad. You might say, well, surely I destroyed the memory. But the idea is that you don't, if you could measure everything that came off somehow, all the photons and everything.

• 59:18Chuck Nice?

  The whole thing.

• 59:19Brian Cox?

  Then in there scrambled up, you could reconstruct.

• 59:23Chuck Nice?

  That would be the iPad, even though you set it on fire and all those atoms, like, and every particle that was in there, if you could get them all together, you would be able to say, oh, that was the iPad.

• 59:35Brian Cox?

  Yeah. And you'd have your photos in there, whatever it is, you know, you could in very principle, but really in principle, not practice, reconstruct. So you don't destroy information.

• 59:46Chuck Nice?

  You don't destroy information.

• 59:47Brian Cox?

  It's also a determinism. It's also... It's called unisary evolution in our language, right?

• 59:53Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 59:54Brian Cox?

  You don't destroy information.

• 59:55Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. So, energy and information, conservation of energy, conservation of information, can we think about them like that? Or is it not, is that a wrong way to think about it?

• 1:00:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's less about information, more about entropy, right? I mean, entropy, you can move from one place to another, and then you can measure that or think about it as an entity, whereas...

• 1:00:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I get that.

• 1:00:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The point we're raising before, obviously if I send a molecule that has structure, a DNA molecule, into a black hole, and it gets ripped apart, and then it comes out as separate atoms, I lost all that DNA information. However, that DNA became DNA at the expense of the sun or whatever other's input of energy.

• 1:00:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, the energy that went into it.

• 1:00:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 1:00:40Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 1:00:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so you draw a sphere around all the action.

• 1:00:45Chuck Nice?

  Somebody give me some weed! This is awesome! I should be high right now, man!

• 1:00:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, then you could talk about sort of entropy moving...

• 1:00:57Chuck Nice?

  Right!

• 1:00:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, without having to inventory the shape of the DNA molecule.

• 1:01:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, because the DNA molecule is a result of the energy...

• 1:01:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was taken energy from another system.

• 1:01:09Chuck Nice?

  From another source that put it in that made it.

• 1:01:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, yeah.

• 1:01:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow! Okay, this is great.

• 1:01:15Brian Cox?

  You're right, though. I mean, it's so fascinating, this work on black holes, black hole information paradox, emergence space-time.

• 1:01:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:25Brian Cox?

  But it's such an early stage that I don't think there are popular articles that really, you know, the language isn't there yet. It's just mathematically difficult.

• 1:01:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow, man.

• 1:01:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we are doubling up on this and adding a whole segment of Cosmic Queries, which is a branch of what we do here. It's beyond just conversations. People get to ask questions. And we tell them who the guest is gonna be, and they direct questions to that guest. You have been duly outed on our pages. And people, you have a whole fanbase out there, and they're eager and dying to hear from you. And we have some professional overlap, but in the questions that'll come in, it's not likely that I will ever need to jump in. And I look forward to basking in your brilliance in the face of these questions. But I'm gonna lead off, if I may.

• 1:02:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have to fork up $5 for the Patreon? I would like to have it. Okay, because it's Patreon supporters who... Which is good. They're the only ones who get to ask questions. Absolutely. So, this actually came in by a Patreon supporter. So actually, I'm channeling it. Alright. Alright. Quarks. You've never had an isolated quark?

• 1:03:02Brian Cox?

  No.

• 1:03:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Oh, I remember this question. I know! Yeah! I know, and I couldn't answer it! Yes! I couldn't, I said, "I need one of the Bryans here." Right! And we got one in front of us. We got one now. Excellent. Here it goes. You ready? So, as you pull two quarks apart, you're actually putting energy into the system by doing so, like pulling a rubber band apart. And at the point where the quark connection breaks, there's enough energy you just put in, so whole new quarks are created. So now you have two pairs of quarks.

• 1:03:35Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I might be simplifying it, but that's the idea.

• 1:03:37Brian Cox?

  Yeah, basically. We call it hadronization.

• 1:03:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hadronization.

• 1:03:42Brian Cox?

  In particle physics.

• 1:03:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:44Brian Cox?

  And we have models of it.

• 1:03:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, gotcha. So now watch. I now have a quark pair falling into a black hole. It's nearing the singularity. Tidal forces stretch it.

• 1:03:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Putting energy into it, it splits, makes two pairs of quarks, and they keep falling in. Will this create a quark catastrophe? Because the tidal force will continue to split the quarks and make a new pair of quarks. Will the singularity be overridden with quarks that were created from the tidal separation and the formation of brand-new quarks in the energy that was invested in it? Am I taking energy out of the black hole by making quarks with it? What's going on there? And I'd rather think of it as a, I want to think of it as a quark catastrophe because that's way more fun.

• 1:04:39Brian Cox?

  I mean, you're not, you're not taking energy out of the black hole because all this is happening inside the horizon. For a big black hole, anyway, I mean, I suppose you could say for a micro black hole.

• 1:04:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the separation is on the same scale of that. Okay, but why don't I just make a bajillion quarks as it falls towards the...

• 1:05:01Brian Cox?

  I mean, it's, I've never thought of it before. It's a beautiful picture.

• 1:05:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:05:06Brian Cox?

  Because clearly you'll, you'll do that. You rip matter apart. That's the way it's usually said. So people just say matter, everything gets ripped apart. Even the protons and neutrons and even the quarks get ripped apart when you go to the singularity.

• 1:05:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to rip apart a quark has consequences.

• 1:05:21Brian Cox?

  Yeah, and we don't know what, we don't know what the singularity is. I mean, other than it, it looks like a moment in time. It looks like the end of time, which we've discussed before, I think, which is also a difficult thing to think about. So there's a finite amount of time in there for the, for the quarks themselves when they're inside the...

• 1:05:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that's a way out of that. Or wait, just to be clear, was that what Penrose said? Because as you cross the event horizon, what was previously in front of you in space is now in front of you in time. Because Janet, we had Janet Levin here, and she's our resident, you know, up the street cosmologist. So the time in front of you is finite, so it can't keep splitting quarks forever.

• 1:06:03Brian Cox?

  No, you don't have forever. I mean, even in the, off the top of my head, even the big black hole, the M87 black hole, which is one we have a photograph of.

• 1:06:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the one that had, the ones that made the news.

• 1:06:13Brian Cox?

  Six billion solar masses or something like that, I think. And in there, I think you have about a day, it's about 24 hours or so, if you cross the horizon, before you go to the end of time. It's roughly speaking a day, give or take a factor of two. I can't remember exactly what it is. But it's something like that. So, so yeah.

• 1:06:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's freaking crazy.

• 1:06:33Brian Cox?

  So there's a finite, there's a finite amount.

• 1:06:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a day left before time ends.

• 1:06:40Brian Cox?

  Yeah, and you wouldn't notice.

• 1:06:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't know it.

• 1:06:41Brian Cox?

  No, you wouldn't notice. We could be, I mean, it's one of the fundamental properties of general relativity.

• 1:06:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't I notice it?

• 1:06:47Brian Cox?

  Well, you wouldn't notice until the tidal forces became important.

• 1:06:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:06:52Brian Cox?

  Which is what you're referring to.

• 1:06:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then again, ripped apart, right.

• 1:06:54Brian Cox?

  Yeah, so when you, when you cross the horizon, when you, so this room, we could be falling across the horizon. In Einstein's picture, purely in Einstein's picture, we could be falling across the horizon of a supermassive black hole. Wouldn't not notice.

• 1:07:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:07:07Brian Cox?

  So from our perspective, everything's normal. Ultimately, you'd feel the tidal forces.

• 1:07:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you get closer to the singularity.

• 1:07:13Brian Cox?

  I think it's within the last few seconds for these, if I remember rightly, very big black holes. And then you feel it, and then it's tidal forces, but you wouldn't have time to react, really. You just go, that's a bit.

• 1:07:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but so you're not going to make an infinite number of quarks?

• 1:07:27Brian Cox?

  No, no, you won't make an infinite number of quarks.

• 1:07:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because time stops it.

• 1:07:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:07:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You actually get to the end of time.

• 1:07:33Brian Cox?

  Having never thought about it, that's probably the answer.

• 1:07:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's a really, that's so cool.

• 1:07:38Brian Cox?

  I mean, also, I mean, energy's conserved as well, so you can't, you couldn't make an infinite number of massive things.

• 1:07:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe it could evaporate the black hole.

• 1:07:46Brian Cox?

  So you'd be increased.

• 1:07:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could turn the whole black hole into quarks.

• 1:07:49Brian Cox?

  Well.

• 1:07:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's pulling energy out of the, out, the.

• 1:07:53Brian Cox?

  Well, no, the mass of the black hole will stay the same. So that process of hadronization.

• 1:07:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get, I get that the mass will stay the same, but that mass-energy budget is slowly getting converted into quarks. Because the quarks will keep making new quarks, because you keep trying to rip them apart with your tidal forces.

• 1:08:12Brian Cox?

  So you.

• 1:08:13Chuck Nice?

  You're saying that the quarks are a drain on the emissions bill.

• 1:08:17Brian Cox?

  So you're saying that spacetime would un-warp? Because the energy.

• 1:08:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will be completely converted into.

• 1:08:24Brian Cox?

  Converted into.

• 1:08:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have one giant quark. The quark catastrophe.

• 1:08:31Brian Cox?

  That's not what happens, isn't it? But it's.

• 1:08:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you know that's not what happens?

• 1:08:34Brian Cox?

  It's a brilliant question because we see black holes.

• 1:08:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, OK.

• 1:08:39Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's the answer.

• 1:08:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. OK, that's it. But I can't argue.

• 1:08:44Brian Cox?

  So they haven't, the geometry is not unfolded.

• 1:08:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To that, so then you're left answering why it did not happen.

• 1:08:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:08:52Brian Cox?

  That's. Yeah, and I, I think you're, I suspect the answer is because of the, the finite time you have in there.

• 1:08:57Chuck Nice?

  That's so.

• 1:08:59Brian Cox?

  You know, so.

• 1:09:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. There's some weed for you, though.

• 1:09:03Brian Cox?

  It's also important to say that we don't know what the singularity is.

• 1:09:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:09:07Brian Cox?

  So, so we really.

• 1:09:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't calculate with it or anything.

• 1:09:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because you can't get inside a black hole to see what exactly what it is.

• 1:09:14Brian Cox?

  Well, the theory.

• 1:09:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you for that. That was from an earlier Patreon question.

• 1:09:17Brian Cox?

  It's a great question.

• 1:09:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll know, I'll know.

• 1:09:20Brian Cox?

  I never thought of it.

• 1:09:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that was, that came from one of our listeners.

• 1:09:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of our people.

• 1:09:24Chuck Nice?

  One of our, one of our Patreon patrons, which by the way, you can be one for $5 a month as the entry, just to let you know.

• 1:09:30Brian Cox?

  It deserves more than, it deserves the money back for that question. It's a great question. Refunds.

• 1:09:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop the expert. We get a month free, buddy.

• 1:09:40Chuck Nice?

  That question was so great. That's funny. Yeah. So Raoul starts us off, Raoul, and he says, hello, Lord Nice, Dr. Tyson, Professor Cox, I'm Raoul, a new Patreon manager. From a couple of streets north of where you guys are right now, I'm Central Park. I wanted to know if there was any thinking discourse on whether dark matter and dark energy, affectionately dubbed as Fred and Wilma by Dr. Tyson, are emergent phenomena resulting from the curved manifold of spacetime. In the case of dark energy, could it be that geometry of space allows for peaks and troughs for the accelerated expansion of space? And we just happen to be observing the expansion phase? Thanks for all that you continue to do for science.

• 1:10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have to explain Fred and Wilma here before I begin.

• 1:10:28Chuck Nice?

  OK.

• 1:10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had taken issue with the terms we have invoked to describe dark energy and dark matter. Because it implies that it's energy and matter. And I said, we don't, what we know is that it's dark gravity. That's exa- that is what it is. We don't know if it's matter. Maybe it is, probably it is, but we don't know.

• 1:10:47Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And dark energy, is it energy? We don't know.

• 1:10:49Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, we should just call them Fred and Wilma.

• 1:10:51Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that way there's no bias associated with the label.

• 1:10:56Brian Cox?

  Yeah, and that's how I was gonna answer the question is in that there are different, so dark energy, what, so as you said, observationally, and we already mentioned Brian Schmidt, who is one of the people who discovered that the universe is accelerating. There is, in Einstein's theory of general relativity, a thing called the cosmological constant, which you could just put in, and it does that job. But what, whether that's what we're seeing is a good question, and we don't know the answer. So it could be that you're seeing some kind of quantum field, which we talked about earlier. So, for example, inflation, which is the idea that before the universe was hot and dense, so before what we call the hot big bang,

• 1:11:39Brian Cox?

  then space was stretching extremely fast, driven by something which we call the inflaton field, which is one of these quantum fields we talk about. And then that field changes and decays away. That's the end of inflation and the heating up of the universe, which we call the hot big bang. So it could be that dark energy is something like that. It's one, it's a, some kind of quantum field that's doing it. That may mean that it changes, and it could change over time, and indeed

• 1:12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it could go away.

• 1:12:13Brian Cox?

  So it could go away. And I think that one of, so there's a, in the current data, which is associated with the, the early universe, that there's a tension in between the, the, the things we measure, like the Hubble parameter and things like that, from the early universe, from the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the measurements from the later universe, which is from seeing supernova explosions and so on, seeing the expansion of the universe that way. And there is some sort of almost, probably not handwaved, but preliminary ideas that you could be seeing that something was present in the early universe that is not present now, or vice versa. So something's changed.

• 1:12:57Brian Cox?

  So it is true that inflation would be an example, if it's correct, of one of those quantum fields which then changes and goes away. And that's associated with what we used to call the origin of the universe. So it could be that dark energy is something like that. And also, actually, to add to that mystery, there's the Higgs field. So the Higgs field is what's called a scalar field, which is technical jargon, but it's of the same type of thing that we think the inflation, the inflaton field is, and possibly the dark energy is. So these, but the Higgs field doesn't appear to cause the universe, well, it doesn't, it does not cause the universe to accelerate in its expansion,

• 1:13:42Brian Cox?

  or at least not in the way that we would expect. We'd expect it to blow the universe apart, and it doesn't. So there's something in there, many of my colleagues think, that associated with these things called scalar fields and the way they interact.

• 1:13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that something that's going to pop out of a future run of the Large Hadron Collider?

• 1:14:01Brian Cox?

  No, no, I don't think so. I think it's more theoretical advances. That we, but, you know, precision measurements of the way the universe is expanding and has expanded, the expansion history of the universe. Because these things are all encoded in there somewhere. So I think it's that, so the answer is, to the question is, we don't have a model. Well, we don't have, we have lots of models of what dark energy might be, but none of them are agreed upon or more convincing than the other, right? We don't have enough measurement, I think, precision measurement. So it's a very good question. And same with dark, you know, dark matter, we do have more evidence that it's some kind of particle. And some of that comes from, so I mentioned it, the cosmic microwave background.

• 1:14:44Brian Cox?

  I should say what it is, is the afterglow of the Big Bang. It's often described, the oldest light in the universe. So there are photons emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, which we can detect. So it is a measurement, there's a satellite called Planck that made the highest. Resolution pictures of this that we have at the moment. And so in there, you can model the way that that image looks. It's actually sound waves moving through the universe before 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So what you're seeing is sound waves in the plasma that was the early universe. We're seeing an imprint of those sound waves at that time. Yeah, so we see the imprint when the light got released, when the plasma went away.

• 1:15:29Brian Cox?

  Essentially, what happens is- So there wasn't an actual bang? No, I mean, that's what Fred Hoyle used the term, you know, because he thought he was so stupid. It's not a bang. Right. I mean, as I described it, it's the end of inflation, so whatever. We don't... But so these are sound waves. But we have a very good measurement. We had that photograph which shows us in there is the information about the sound waves. And that allows us to model what the plasma is and what's in it. And the dark matter is a very important component of modeling the way those sound waves behave. So it's often presented as something that people invented because they don't understand how galaxies rotate or interact or something like that. That's a real thing.

• 1:16:12Brian Cox?

  But you can see it in many different ways. So it is true that the way our theories of galaxy formation require it. This is the thing of the cosmic web that you've probably talked about before. But there's also independent measurements from the sound waves in the plasma of the young universe. And that requires them. And you can do, actually, my postdoc actually did it. It's one of the things that's in the show, not that I'm always plugging these tickets for the new show. But one of the things I do in the show is we, by we, I mean my postdoc, Ross, really is great, developed a real-time calculation tool of the way the sound waves work in the plasma. And what's cool about it is you can sit there with an iPad on stage and you can just go,

• 1:16:56Brian Cox?

  "I'll change the recipe. I'll make the dark matter go to like 15% rather than 25% or whatever it is." You know, like play around with those things. And when you do that, the data goes completely, it doesn't match the data, the prediction drifts completely. From what we see in the data. So it's highly sensitive.

• 1:17:16Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:17:17Brian Cox?

  It's a beautiful demonstration of how accurate astrophysics is now.

• 1:17:21Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, very cool.

• 1:17:22Brian Cox?

  Cosmology is. So yeah, so we I'm pretty, I would be very surprised if dark matter isn't some kind of particle.

• 1:17:28Chuck Nice?

  Particle, except.

• 1:17:29Brian Cox?

  Because there's multiple.

• 1:17:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:17:31Brian Cox?

  Multiple different independent observations that suggest it is. Dark energy, we don't have precision.

• 1:17:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:17:37Brian Cox?

  The precision, I think, to discriminate between the models.

• 1:17:41Chuck Nice?

  Cool, man. And you thought I'd give long answers?

• 1:17:43Brian Cox?

  Ah. Well, it's a very good question. All right. I can see that we have to speed up. I'll speed up.

• 1:17:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm I'm good for I'm good for long answers from either one of you. I don't care.

• 1:17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it going.

• 1:17:54Chuck Nice?

  Donita Bukait or Busait, one or the other. And she says, hey, Neil, Brian, Chuck. Uh, Donita from Southern Utah. Help, I need visuals. How does the curvature of spacetime cause tides? I've read explanations, but since I think in pictures, I need some visuals to report on this.

• 1:18:14Brian Cox?

  So imagine the earth and if you try to explain the tides in the ocean.

• 1:18:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:18:18Brian Cox?

  By just having a static picture of the earth and the moon just standing still.

• 1:18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As is drawn in textbooks.

• 1:18:24Brian Cox?

  As is drawn in textbooks. Then it's hard to figure out what's happening because as Richard Feynman said in the Feynman lectures. If everything's just standing still, if the moon and the earth are just standing still, they'll just be pulled towards each other and squashed into each other.

• 1:18:37Chuck Nice?

  Like when you set them down on a table and they whap, come together.

• 1:18:40Brian Cox?

  So of course, the reason they don't do that is because they're in orbit around their common center of mass. So they're orbiting. And actually, you need to know that the earth is actually orbiting around the center of mass of the earth moon system. As is the moon in order to fully explain the tides. And so you get a good explanation. So there are centrifugal forces at work as well because you're in this frame of reference that's spinning around and so on. So it's actually relatively easy to describe, but not as easy as it presented in. On television, usually.

• 1:19:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You go into an argument with a producer on this.

• 1:19:14Brian Cox?

  Yeah, so I said, I can't do it without talking about the fact that when there is a centrifugal forces. It's basically because the centrifugal force exceeds the gravitational pull of the moon on one side of the earth.

• 1:19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:19:26Brian Cox?

  And is smaller than it on the other one. It's that kind of effect, but it's beautifully described in the Feynman lectures, which are freely available online.

• 1:19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 1:19:34Brian Cox?

  You can get them, I think they're free.

• 1:19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I spent real money on mine.

• 1:19:37Brian Cox?

  Well, the books you have to get.

• 1:19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have hardcover, I got them in the, when did I get them?

• 1:19:41Brian Cox?

  They're beautiful.

• 1:19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1981, I bought them.

• 1:19:43Brian Cox?

  Yeah. But it's in there, you can download, I think they're freely available now.

• 1:19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's three volumes, right? So classical mechanics, E and M, and then quantum.

• 1:19:51Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's in volume one. It's really lovely explanation of it.

• 1:19:54Chuck Nice?

  So there you have it, Donita. And also, you can check out the explainer that Neil did on Title Bulges, that might help you too.

• 1:20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I forgot about that.

• 1:20:01Chuck Nice?

  It's correct.

• 1:20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember all of our, all of our explainer.

• 1:20:04Chuck Nice?

  Why you think I do this job?

• 1:20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:20:06Chuck Nice?

  All right. I get a free education.

• 1:20:11Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Alyssa Feldhaus, Feldhos, sorry. Alyssa from Tucson, Arizona here. Question for Dr. Tyson and Dr. Cox. Do you think the concept of a particle will still be meaningful once we fully unify quantum mechanics and gravity? Or will it vanish like the idea of a flow just done did in chemistry?

• 1:20:34Brian Cox?

  It'll be meaningful. We've been talking about emergence a lot, so different levels of description. So, so yes, it may well be that there's a theory of nature that, I mean, we have it, it's quantum field theory, that just quantum fields. And there may be a deeper level in terms of qubits or whatever those things are, Planck scale things. But there will always be a level of description that where particles are the right thing. When you think about an old, an old fashioned TV, cathode ray tube, where you have a beam of electrons and the beam of electrons goes through a magnet, a magnetic field, and it jiggles the beam around and you get the picture on the TV. There's never going to be a better description of that than a beam of electrons.

• 1:21:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So maybe a deeper part of that question is, if we come to understand that everything is strings, then we don't need the language of particles.

• 1:21:28Brian Cox?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or once again, is it just a convenience?

• 1:21:31Brian Cox?

  You will need the language of particles to explain things that are happening in this room, these energies and temperatures.

• 1:21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. That's how it manifests.

• 1:21:41Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's just pointless.

• 1:21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:21:43Brian Cox?

  Why, you wouldn't talk about these phenomena that only become important for your description of the world, energies, you know, trillions of a second after the Big Bang.

• 1:21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:21:57Brian Cox?

  I mean, just to say, quarks, right? Quarks are not, you don't need those to describe nuclear physics.

• 1:22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:04Brian Cox?

  You, you, you want protons and neutrons.

• 1:22:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:22:06Brian Cox?

  Those are the things that you need.

• 1:22:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:22:08Brian Cox?

  And so the quarks are hidden inside. You don't feel that, them, you don't perceive them, you know, that's why we didn't discover them until 1968, I think.

• 1:22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. It was pretty late. You were on the way to the moon and we don't yet know that quarks are real. Yeah.

• 1:22:26Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 1:22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 1:22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 1:22:28Chuck Nice?

  We're stupid. Okay. This is David Vilasmil, who says...

• 1:22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The best you can do with these people's names.

• 1:22:36Chuck Nice?

  Hey, listen.

• 1:22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 1:22:37Chuck Nice?

  That's his name now.

• 1:22:43Brian Cox?

  Vilasmil. Vilasmil.

• 1:22:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Brian Cox?

  Vilasmil.

• 1:22:45Chuck Nice?

  Vilasmil, okay.

• 1:22:46Brian Cox?

  He made him friends.

• 1:22:48Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying. That's his name now, Vilasmil. So, anyway, he says, hello, Dr. Cox, I've been a fan forever.

• 1:22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 1:22:56Chuck Nice?

  Dr. Tyson and Dr. Tyce, you guys are awesome. Anyway, how do particles know it's time to decay?

• 1:23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that question.

• 1:23:05Chuck Nice?

  That's a great question.

• 1:23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Chuck Nice?

  Sorry about your name, David, because since you asked such a great question.

• 1:23:10Brian Cox?

  Um, so what's the best way of describing that is time? So they have a lifetime, which is, as I said before, is to do with, can you decay into something lighter? So there might be a reason you can't, right? Because things are cons, like electric charge, for example. Electric charge is conserved. So, so you can't take a positive charged thing and have it decay into a lighter negatively charged thing, because you'd be, you'd be inventing, you know, you, you can't destroy and create electric charge. You, you have to do it in pairs, it's conserved. A very important example.

• 1:23:48Brian Cox?

  Is the neutron and the proton. So the neutron is a bit heavier than the proton. So the neutron can change into a proton.

• 1:23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And does.

• 1:23:59Brian Cox?

  And does in about 10 minutes.

• 1:24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought it was even quicker than like six minutes.

• 1:24:03Brian Cox?

  Is it or eight minutes?

• 1:24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's like you can count it out and wow, what?

• 1:24:08Chuck Nice?

  And watch it happen.

• 1:24:10Brian Cox?

  If it's on its own, it'll do that and to conserve charge, there'll be a positive thing will go as well. And so you'll so basically it can do it. And the lifetime is really proportional to the difference in mass between the neutron and the proton, which is very tiny. So if it was really big, if it was much heavier, it'd decay quicker. So you've got there's the mass difference and then there's the number of things you can decay into, the number of ways you can do it.

• 1:24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's just a statistical average. The decay time, that's the that's the half life.

• 1:24:49Brian Cox?

  Yes, half.

• 1:24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's a we fill out the time with some of them are decaying sooner or longer. So it's not just as simple as you described where how much difference is there in the energy of the mass of what it is and what it can be. Because there's a variation in there and I interpret that question is how do you get that variation?

• 1:25:11Brian Cox?

  Oh, well, that's that's quantum mechanics. So it's statistical.

• 1:25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't say that's the answer.

• 1:25:16Brian Cox?

  Well, no, but you're right. It's a very deep question.

• 1:25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Brian Cox?

  It's like and that bothered immensely the early founders of quantum mechanics. So people like Rutherford and those people who are Niels Bohr and all those people and Einstein, it bothered a lot. God does not play dice with the universe. That's essentially what you're saying. You're saying, why does God play dice, as Einstein put it? So the reason.

• 1:25:42Chuck Nice?

  He was late on the mortgage for the universe.

• 1:25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he plays dice to get some extra cash on the side.

• 1:25:47Chuck Nice?

  Papa gotta make this money.

• 1:25:50Chuck Nice?

  I think it was. Papa gotta make this money, baby. Come on.

• 1:25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but Brian, I realized, just while you were speaking, that you did answer her question precisely. Because she said, you know, because why does some take longer than others?

• 1:26:08Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the difference in how many options it has coming out the other side.

• 1:26:13Brian Cox?

  And the mass difference.

• 1:26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the mass difference. So that's, that'll say why one will decay in five minutes or 10, or 10 hours. You can get that.

• 1:26:20Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Given that, what is going on at the instant that it decays?

• 1:26:28Brian Cox?

  It's another, it's another question.

• 1:26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that could give me insight into why some will decay sooner and some will decay later. So that it averages out to that half-life.

• 1:26:36Brian Cox?

  So what's going on? So you can, it, it's called the weak nuclear force that's changing these things. So that's part of the standard model. So what actually happens when a neutron turns into a proton? So, so a down quark turns into an up quark. So what happens is the down quark, you can think of it as emitting a particle. Force carrying, or a force carrying particle comes off. It's a W minus, W minus. Which then goes to an electron and a thing called an anti-electron neutrino, actually. But it goes, so if the W minus goes off, and then you get a down quark, which is a charged plus, plus two thirds.

• 1:27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:27:15Brian Cox?

  So you get a, you get a minus one thirds quark going to a plus two thirds quark. And then you get an electron that comes off. So all the charges are conserved. So you haven't invented electric charge.

• 1:27:26Chuck Nice?

  You have, right.

• 1:27:27Brian Cox?

  And also when we. The sum of all the charges at the end are the same.

• 1:27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got it. And when we think of a neutron decaying to a proton, all that's the in, the engine process going on. That's the gear, the gearing that's happening that you just described.

• 1:27:41Brian Cox?

  So it's, it's the same kind of picture as why does an electron bounce off another electron? So we'd say, well, because they've got negative charge and negative charges repel. But the particle physics picture of that is that a photon is exchanged between the electrons. So in this case, it's this, it's not the electromagnetic force. It's called the weak nuclear force. Basically, the down quark is changing into an up quark with ultimately the emission of an electron, a neutrino, and the W minus is the particle.

• 1:28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in the end, when that happens, it's statistical. We gotta deal with that. Are we hiding? Our awareness of objective reality by dusting it into the bin of probability?

• 1:28:25Brian Cox?

  No, it's so it's not the same. That that that randomness is not the same as the randomness because we don't know everything. So in in terms of a gas, let's say, you know, there are things, things are jiggling around. We don't keep track, we spoke about it earlier, we don't keep track of the billions of molecules in the gas. So there's some statistics comes in because we're averaging over loads. Quantum mechanics is not like that. As far as we can tell, the statistical nature of it is inherently, it's built into the theory, it's built into nature. And that bothered everybody.

• 1:29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Einstein was just wrong?

• 1:29:02Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:29:03Brian Cox?

  Well, Einstein didn't like it. It is true that how to interpret that, then it's a whole other episode, right? So you've probably talked to people about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Now, that's all, that's this thing. That's all in this. How do you interpret those statistical predictions?

• 1:29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without invoking a statistical description?

• 1:29:28Brian Cox?

  Yeah, I mean, so it seems that it's a fundamentally, it's a fundamental part of the theory.

• 1:29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know my favorite part of particle decay?

• 1:29:35Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 1:29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you accelerate them?

• 1:29:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then they take longer to decay.

• 1:29:40Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 1:29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Einstein's special theory of relativity.

• 1:29:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's so badass.

• 1:29:45Chuck Nice?

  Going closer to the speed of light, so time literally is slowing down for them.

• 1:29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so decay, it takes longer to decay.

• 1:29:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a beautiful thing.

• 1:29:53Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool, man.

• 1:29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow, all right.

• 1:29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time for a few more.

• 1:29:57Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is John, and he says, hello, Lord Nice and Dr. Tyson, Dr. Cox, John from Arkansas here. You've both explained what a Planck length is and how we will likely never get more accurate measurements beyond this supposed limit. I am wondering if light can have a wavelength that small and if energy would be measurable? Or could that be another infinity we need new physics to explain, much like the singularity in a black hole? P.S. Love the show, and Chuck, I figured I'd mention you first for a change. Anyway, yeah.

• 1:30:30Brian Cox?

  There is an answer to this.

• 1:30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd love this question.

• 1:30:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would not have been able to answer this question.

• 1:30:35Brian Cox?

  The answer is that. So the smaller you make the wavelength of a photon, the higher the energy.

• 1:30:42Chuck Nice?

  Higher the energy.

• 1:30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:30:44Brian Cox?

  So.

• 1:30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there should be an energy associated with the wavelength that is a Planck length.

• 1:30:49Brian Cox?

  Yes, and you find out that that's the that energy density makes a black hole. What? So I think. Oh my fucking god! And then so you think about it, the more you try to probe smaller, and then the black hole would, I think Len Susskind calls it the UV IR connection, I think that's what he calls it. So the the upshot is that if you try to put more and more energy into a small and smaller space to see smaller things, the size of the black hole you make increases, it grows.

• 1:31:28Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 1:31:29Brian Cox?

  So the more the more you try to see smaller things, the less you can see the small things, because the the the black hole gets bigger.

• 1:31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is diabolical.

• 1:31:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:31:39Brian Cox?

  So it stops you, so you can't.

• 1:31:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:31:42Brian Cox?

  You can't probe it.

• 1:31:43Chuck Nice?

  So black holes are in the cosmological witness protection program.

• 1:31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't get in there.

• 1:31:48Chuck Nice?

  You just can't, no matter what you do, you're not going. That's amazing. What a great question, bro. That was a that was awesome.

• 1:31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and just remind us briefly about a Planck length, just put that on the map here.

• 1:32:00Brian Cox?

  So you can construct units, fundamental units, from things that so from specifically the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and Planck's constant. So if you take those things and put them together, so you get meters out, you'll get the Planck length. So it's Planck who figured out that it would be good to make units of measurement out of things on which everyone would agree. If you think if you make meet an alien, for example, then there's no point in talking about a meter, because what is it? It's the length of your arm or something like that.

• 1:32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, it's one ten millionth the length of. A quarter of the Earth from the North Pole to the Equator through the Paris Observatory.

• 1:32:45Brian Cox?

  Is that what it is?

• 1:32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:32:46Brian Cox?

  Right, okay.

• 1:32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why.

• 1:32:47Brian Cox?

  Right.

• 1:32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The circumference of the Earth is forty million meters.

• 1:32:50Brian Cox?

  Ah.

• 1:32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is, and make that kilometers, it's forty thousand kilometers.

• 1:32:53Brian Cox?

  Right, so it comes from...

• 1:32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why, that's why it's that even.

• 1:32:56Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the French did that. But you're Brits, so you don't care what they did.

• 1:32:59Brian Cox?

  Yes, they're all arbitrary things that's due to our planet or our bodies or whatever.

• 1:33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:04Brian Cox?

  But then, you could say, well, but the speed of light, Planck's constant, and the strength of gravity, everyone would agree on.

• 1:33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even aliens, yes.

• 1:33:13Brian Cox?

  Because you can measure those. So whatever units you measure them in,

• 1:33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:16Brian Cox?

  you can put them together to make something that looks like a length.

• 1:33:20Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 1:33:21Brian Cox?

  And that's the Planck length. And it happens to be very, very tiny relative to us.

• 1:33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:33:25Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 1:33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can there be a fabric of spacetime that, in other words, you, if you were to quantize general relativity, you would have to, the Planck length would be fundamental to that, is that not right?

• 1:33:39Brian Cox?

  Yeah. So we, yeah, so we think that's telling us something deep about the, about the universe itself.

• 1:33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:33:45Brian Cox?

  So these are properties of the universe, these things.

• 1:33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:48Brian Cox?

  That's the thing, not properties of planets or...

• 1:33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 1:33:51Chuck Nice?

  Very, very cool.

• 1:33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have two, maybe one more. All right, what do you got?

• 1:33:55Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Big Stu. And Big Stu says, "Hey, what it do? My name is Big Stu from Austin, Texas."

• 1:34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 1:34:03Chuck Nice?

  "I've heard Dr. Cox talk about how information that falls into a black hole might not actually be lost, but what is that information exactly? Does Hawking radiation somehow contain the same atoms that went in? Or does the universe just eject some cosmic thumb drive full of data? I'm trying to wrap my head around this, man. Help me."

• 1:34:24Brian Cox?

  Cosmic thumb drive full of data, yes.

• 1:34:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Brian Cox?

  So the idea is that the, the Hawking radiation ends up...

• 1:34:34Brian Cox?

  Yes, the description that what was, who was asked the question?

• 1:34:38Chuck Nice?

  Stu.

• 1:34:38Brian Cox?

  That Stu said is basically right. So in more technical terms, you end up with this Hawking radiation. You'd have to collect it and do some operations on it with a quantum computer to kind of extract the information. So it's all, no one's ever going to do it. It's impossible to do in practice. But that's the idea. In a very fundamental sense, it's in there. In the same way that, I suppose, the information, if you were to, I suppose, ask the question, how is the information from this photograph I took with my phone encoded in the memory of the phone? It's quite complicated, actually, and it's got error correction in it and all sorts of things like that. And it's that idea, really, but at a quantum mechanical level.

• 1:35:23Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 1:35:24Brian Cox?

  So it's not physically the physical stuff, but it's the, it's the data.

• 1:35:31Chuck Nice?

  Cool. Very cool. Time for one more. All right, this is Wayne Rasmussen, and Wayne says, hello, star nerds.

• 1:35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nerds unite, nerds of the world.

• 1:35:43Chuck Nice?

  Does Newton's third law hold true in quantum mechanics? Wayne from Northridge, California.

• 1:35:50Brian Cox?

  To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yeah.

• 1:35:54Chuck Nice?

  That was simple.

• 1:35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good enough for me. I mean, so let me broaden that. Allow me to broaden it. So quantum physics and relativity has shown that the applicability of Newton's laws has limits. F is not always ma in that simple form. You need Einsteinian extensions on these constructs.

• 1:36:17Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So even with his gravity equation, you have to modify it. And it was hard earned to learn that Newton's laws fail. So does every action is an equal and opposite reaction have a point of failure where we need a deeper understanding or an updated understanding of how the universe works?

• 1:36:38Brian Cox?

  No, so... So for example, it's easier to explain the first law, everything continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. That is to do with the symmetries of spacetime, right? So that is true in relativity as well. So if you're talking about special relativity, and it's one of the examples we teach actually in our first year undergraduate course, you can show that if something's traveling in a straight line in one frame of reference, it's traveling in a straight line in a different frame of reference, under both Galilean transformations, which are the Newtonian

• 1:37:22Brian Cox?

  picture, and Lorentz transformations, which are the special relativistic picture.

• 1:37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both of them, okay.

• 1:37:27Brian Cox?

  And you could actually phrase that as one of Einstein's postulates, because Einstein's two postulates from which special relativity emerges. The speed of light's a constant for all observers, and the laws of nature take the same form in all inertial frames of reference. Newton's law that says that something's going in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force, it'll still carry on going in a straight line, is one of those laws. I mean, if you think about the consequences, otherwise you'd be able to change between different points of view, moving at the same speed relative to each other, and something that was going along in a straight line according to one person would be doing that, would be in orbit or something.

• 1:38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're intact there.

• 1:38:12Brian Cox?

  So yeah, so they're a representation of the, ultimately of the, and there's a very deep question as to why is that the case? And I remember again Feynman, who we mentioned earlier, talking about it, why is that the case? And he said it's because it's one of the fundamental properties of our universe. So we don't know why that's the case.

• 1:38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just is.

• 1:38:35Brian Cox?

  That is the way our universe is built. It is. The posh way or whatever the fancy way of saying it is the symmetries of spacetime. But that's one of the fundamental properties of our universe.

• 1:38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to end with something completely irrelevant.

• 1:38:49Brian Cox?

  Okay.

• 1:38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you mentioned the Galilean transformation.

• 1:38:51Brian Cox?

  Yes.

• 1:38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a game played by the Seattle Seahawks.

• 1:38:54Brian Cox?

  Correct.

• 1:38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm in like email.

• 1:38:56Brian Cox?

  With Pete Carroll.

• 1:38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Pete Carroll, okay? So I'm on his radar, he's on my radar, and their quarterback.

• 1:39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did a lateral on the field that was being challenged by the opposing side.

• 1:39:13Chuck Nice?

  I say illegal forward pass.

• 1:39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Illegal forward pass. He's already passed the line of scrimmage and he's going to his running back, tosses it to the running back, running back catches it and they get a first down and they would ultimately score. And he said to me, Neil, I think what we did was legit. What can you help me here? And I looked at it and I looked at it and so I posted online that it was a legitimate Galilean transformation. So here's what's happening. He and his running back are running down the field. He is ahead of his running back. He pitches to his running back. He's ahead of his running back when he let go of the ball. He's ahead of the running back when the running back caught it.

• 1:39:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:39:55Chuck Nice?

  And he lets go of the ball before the line of scrimmage.

• 1:39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's after the line of scrimmage.

• 1:39:58Chuck Nice?

  No, that would be an illegal forward pass.

• 1:40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm getting, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:40:01Chuck Nice?

  No, he has to let go of the ball before the line of scrimmage.

• 1:40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:40:05Chuck Nice?

  The receiver caught it after the line of scrimmage.

• 1:40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 1:40:08Chuck Nice?

  That's the only way this can work.

• 1:40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 1:40:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let me hear you.

• 1:40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please, please. They both are well past the line of scrimmage, both of them. He's ahead of his receiver, pitches it backwards to him.

• 1:40:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you mean they're running together?

• 1:40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a different story. Go ahead, go ahead.

• 1:40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pitches it back to his running back.

• 1:40:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The whole time he's in front of him.

• 1:40:30Chuck Nice?

  That's correct.

• 1:40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're running so fast.

• 1:40:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That from the reference frame of the gridiron.

• 1:40:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ball actually went forward.

• 1:40:37Chuck Nice?

  No, that makes sense.

• 1:40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:40:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, this is a Galilean transformation. You cannot penalize football players for running fast. You can't do that.

• 1:40:48Chuck Nice?

  Should have been two white players.

• 1:40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in race therapy. He's getting out of it. He's gotten much better, by the way.

• 1:40:55Chuck Nice?

  That's funny. That was funny.

• 1:40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was two black players, by the way.

• 1:41:01Chuck Nice?

  They're fast. What can we say? Okay, go ahead.

• 1:41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it turns out that they let the call stay that it was a legitimate lateral. Even though according to the field, it was a forward pass.

• 1:41:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, it would have looked like it. If you're running fast, that's what it would look like.

• 1:41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so. So that that was a Galilean transformation where whatever else is happening, your reference frame is moving and everything is happening in that moving reference frame. Very cool. Galilean transformation. Awesome. Yeah. Science. You know, we did it on a explainer once. Have you ever been on a on the highway? And there are these cars racing each other around you? Oh, yeah. Okay, it feels really dangerous. Right. But in fact, as far as they're concerned, you're just standing still. Right. And they're just darting around you. Yeah. And so they're in their own reference frame. Right. And you're just blockage.

• 1:41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so there's. We're all going forty miles an hour in slow traffic and they're going seventy miles an hour around us. Right. And it's less dangerous than it looks, is all I'm saying. But don't do it, Pete. Okay, follow the laws of the road. Brian. And buckle up. Delight to have you visit. Always a pleasure. Our humble city, my humble office. Don't be such a stranger. But you're a busy guy, so we allow this. Yeah. And we'll look forward to your emergence tour. I assume it's another international book tour.

• 1:42:18Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it comes to, yeah, it comes to the US and I think the tickets are on sale for the end of next year and the start of twenty seven.

• 1:42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, the boy's got his calendar.

• 1:42:26Brian Cox?

  The the the New York date, the East Coast dates are not yet on sale, actually, but they will be.

• 1:42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay. Do you want to come back to the Beacon Theater, which is where I last saw you?

• 1:42:35Brian Cox?

  I think so.

• 1:42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he's gonna say I'm coming to Yankee Stadium.

• 1:42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Giant stadium. Madison Square Garden this time, buddy.

• 1:42:44Brian Cox?

  We did the town hall as well.

• 1:42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, town hall's a good place. Town hall's a nice.

• 1:42:46Brian Cox?

  I love that.

• 1:42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great venue. It's a little more intimate. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:49Brian Cox?

  I'm not sure which one.

• 1:42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Town Hall's a venue in New York City. Yeah. Called Town Hall. They're both great venues. They're both great venues.

• 1:42:55Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been a delightful, I think, long overdue episode with my friend and colleague and partner in crime, trying to educate the world of everything cool in the universe and especially in the world of particle physics, Brian Cox. Thank you, Brian.

• 1:43:15Brian Cox?

  Thank you.

• 1:43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.