Inside The Big Bang Theory, with Simon Helberg and Bill Prady

Dive into The Big Bang Theory – the hit TV show and the beginning of the universe – with Neil deGrasse Tyson, TBBT co-creator Bill Prady, TBBT actor Simon Helberg, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and astrophysicists Charles Liu and Janna Levin. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/inside-the-big-bang-theory-with-simon-helberg-and-bill-prady/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Welcome.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The hit TV show portrays scientists as its main characters, but also the giant explosion that gave birth to the universe. So, let's do this. Comedic co-host tonight, Jack Nice. My man! Hello, everybody. Always my man! Always good to see you. And joining us is my friend and fellow astrophysicist and Stark Talks resident geek-in-chief, Charles Lu. Yeah! All right. He's a professor at the City University of New York on Staten Island. And you're a fountain of knowledge, of all things science and pop culture. That is true. If you don't believe me, do just you watch.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we'll be tapping your geek expertise, uh, tonight as we discuss the portrayal of science and scientists in the hit TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. So, of course, in science, Big Bang Theory describes the origin of the universe. Yes. On TV, Big Bang Theory follows a group of sort of nerdy scientists, and it draws its humor from the science of the universe itself. So, we have a clip from the show to demonstrate this fact. Check it out.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  How would you determine the ground state of a quantum system with no exact solution?

• 1:26Speaker 03

  I would guess a wave function and then vary its parameters until I found the lowest energy solution.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Hmm. Do you know how to integrate x squared times e to the minus x without looking it up?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  I'd use Feynman's trick, differentiate under the integral sign.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles.

• 1:52Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you ever in your life imagine that you would hear the phrase differentiate under the integral sign as the punchline in a sitcom?

• 2:02Charles Liu?

  I figure sooner or later some talented comedy writer would figure it out.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I wouldn't. No.

• 2:06Charles Liu?

  Really? No, no, no, that's true.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a lie.

• 2:09Charles Liu?

  Let me say this, okay? That show clearly showed its Southern California bias because very few people outside of Caltech call that Feynman's trick. It's usually called Leibniz's rule. Almost everyone in the universe, well, on Earth, almost everyone on Earth uses it, calls it Leibniz's rule, but there it was like, I'd use Feynman's trick.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:28Charles Liu?

  Nah.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  I love geek humor.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the main characters of The Big Bang Theory include two physicists, an astrophysicist, a neuroscientist, a microbiologist, and an aerospace engineer. These are the main characters.

• 2:43Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like a party.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the character who is trying to prove his scientific worthiness in that clip, as an aerospace engineer, his character, he's played by Simon Helberg. So I nabbed Simon for a StarTalk interview when I was last out in LA.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was cool. And so I asked him about his own scientific roots. So let's check it out.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have any geeky memories as a kid? Science teachers you either loved or hated, or were you picked on? Were you bullied?

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Well, those are separate, not by science teachers, if that's what you're asking. They always were pretty nice to me. But I, yeah.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are some bullying teachers occasionally.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yes, that's true. I had a good, the science teachers were always the cool ones. Like, we had one that was like definitely a hippie and had a ponytail despite not having a lot of hair, and, which is maybe that's a science thing. I don't know how he did that.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the last gasp.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then he.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's better than a comb over when you don't have a lot of hair.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  That's true. Well, yeah, he had to be kinda, he had to be cool. So ponytail despite, no, I was impressed by science immediately. And then he let us do open book tests, which I thought was.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Revolutionary in the day, maybe?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  It was revolutionary. They always, they were always the ones that did a little outside the box. I had another, in 7th grade, a really cool science teacher. So I was very interested in science right off the bat.

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  The cool thing was he was talking about ponytails and comb overers and that whole deal, which brings me to a...

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It scares me when you pull out your little 3x5 card.

• 4:14Chuck Nice?

  Because I realize that science hair is a thing.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a thing.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Science hair is something.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles?

• 4:24Charles Liu?

  Yes?

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have... You teach?

• 4:26Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have any quirky teaching styles?

• 4:29Charles Liu?

  I use...

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Open book tests?

• 4:31Charles Liu?

  I give open internet tests.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 4:34Charles Liu?

  What is the point of higher education today? It's so that you can be better than a search engine, better than the app on your phone. Otherwise, who would want you to be part of their team?

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they can get anybody to run the search engine or an app.

• 4:47Charles Liu?

  So I'm not going to tell someone, "Hey, tell me on a test, regurgitate a fact like the diameter of a planet Jupiter, okay?" I'm not going to do that, because you can just look that up. Instead, I'm going to tell you, "Here's a planet. Here's a certain size of planet. Tell me what you think the center is made of. Tell me what you think how much of it is atmosphere, and tell me why."

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Abraham Lincoln said, "Never memorize anything you can look up on the internet."

• 5:14Charles Liu?

  Well, it's 100% true.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So create a TV show about sc...

• 5:19Chuck Nice?

  You got me, you got me.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you create a TV show about science nerds, you probably should have some science geek street cred yourself, okay? So not only had I interviewed Simon Helberg, I sat down with co-creator of The Big Bang Theory, Bill Prady, and I asked him about the origin of the show. Let's check it out.

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Big Bang starts with Chuck Lorre, who I created the show with, and we began talking about people that I knew in my previous career in computer software. And I was a programmer and...

• 5:55Speaker 01

  In the early days of microcomputers. And we started talking about those people and Chuck felt that he hadn't seen people like that on television. And I agreed because the, you know, for lack of a better word, the nerd, you know, kind of character was portrayed in a very homogenized way. And I knew from being in that world that this was, you know, that this was, you know, this was Darwin's finches. There's a lot of different kinds of nerds and geeks and, you know, and all of that. And it's, in fact, it's a, it's a rich kind of community. It's a much more tolerant.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, if it weren't rich, you couldn't write 10 years of stories.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. But I knew this from living in the world and, you know, people, people who are, for lack of a better way of saying it, wired a little differently, whose, whose outlook on the world is a little different. So when we were talking about characters like that and that they weren't depicted on television, and we really wanted to get back to a world of sort of pure intellectual exploration. And we started talking about, um, what are those fields? And Chuck and I are both science nerds. And at that point, it was very clear that we'd found exactly what we were looking for in terms of a profession for the characters.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, do you realize that if you Google Big Bang Theory, your show comes up first and the creation of the universe comes up second?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so I also had to ask Bill Prady, how does he make sure every episode that he gets the science right? The writers get the science right because they know that if they're trying to put on a science show and they get some of the facts wrong, that we would call their stuff out. They know this. And so, let's see how they deal with this challenge. Check it out.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  We are the only television show, we think in history, that employs a physicist on staff. So Dr. David Salzberg of UCLA is our consulting physicist. And he is there, he is, except-

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he writes the equations on the background?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  He writes the, he writes the equations on the board. But more than that, he will help us, um, you know, whether, sometimes it's a small piece of dialogue and we're just gonna say, you know, Sheldon had a bad day at work and what's he complaining about? But sometimes he'll work and will really integrate something into a story because we wanna say, well, what are the guys working on at work now? What's, what's happening? And Sheldon was working on a graphene problem.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A new form of carbon.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  A new form.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even, I think, was awarded a Nobel Prize for its discovery.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  It was later that year.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's carbon in a plane, a flat plane of carbon, yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has its own properties to it, yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It has different properties from other arrangements of carbon atoms. And it winds up being very useful for things. And two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize. And in their Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, they played a clip from The Big Bang Theory, with Sheldon working on the graphene problem. But this goes back to a thing that we talked about when we started doing Big Bang Theory, which is, if we're gonna give them a job, let's have them do the job right. And let's have it be that if somebody is familiar with what they're doing, that, we're not gonna get it perfect, but let's see.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  The threshold was, scientists shouldn't throw their shoes at the television.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, we'll check out my own little cameo appearance on The Big Bang Theory. When StarTalk returns.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We're talking about the TV show, The Big Bang Theory. And I asked Big Bang Theory star Simon Helberg if he was surprised that a sitcom about scientists would actually work. Let's check it out. When you audition for the show and you see the first few scripts, are you saying, okay, this'll flop, no one is gonna get this? Who cares about scientists?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  No, I think that, I think I, no, I did not think.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is way back in '07 now, or '06.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  This is, yeah. No, I didn't, I didn't think that the show would flop. But by this point, I actually had gotten to a very sort of zen place with it, where I didn't think much about it. I just assumed, I just took it as that.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is your next gig.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  I just said, I'll do the pilot. And, and, and I will be able to do another pilot if this pilot doesn't. Because that was kinda how I lived, was. Pilot to pilot, failed pilot to failed pilot. But at this point, I thought, eh, this is, it's a, it's a, it's a very, very good script, and I will just commit to this week of work. And then, when we shot it, that, that was the moment that I realized, oh, this audience, this audience is, something kind of spectacular is happening here, where it, that nobody, the hardest thing about shooting a pilot is nobody knows these characters, and nobody knows the world, and generally, to set up characters in a, in a world, you need more than 22 minutes.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  It's really, really hard to do, and, and if you, if you don't-

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the world, it's the world created in the show.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe of the show.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Exactly, not, yes, and if you can do, if you can do it in 22 minutes, usually you don't get to the joke until the last minute, because you have to set it up for so long, so it's not funny usually either, and somehow, they were with us again from the moment we started, they understood who, who these characters were, and when I entered, and Kunal and I entered into it, literally knocking on the door, the audience applauded, applauded us, and it didn't even make sense, we, they didn't know who we were, and it, it was like, I remember, someone said, I think Chuck Lorre said, they were so excited that there were more nerds, there were more characters to, to identify with, and I, so there was something in the zeitgeist, some, there was some hunger to connect-

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, interesting point. Because usually, the nerd is just the one character.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, historically, there was the one gay character.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one Asian character, and they're there for, as a token-

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reference.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  This was like, all sidekicks, you know, like, usually, yeah, you get the, the door, I played sidekicks, a nerd, now here's a show where they're the star, and I think people, people related to that, and in the live audience there, the 200 people that night, they, they kind of went crazy, and I, I had, I had a moment then, thinking, this show is gonna be, it's going to be on the air, and I think that people might actually kind of quietly and secretly watch it, and, and like it, because-

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slowly come out of their geek closet.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's, we, we were never gonna be friends, we were never that handsome, so, but then, it kind of became that, that anti, anti-friends, or, or just friends, but with, with bad haircuts.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Tral.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think fans can identify with geeks more than with sort of good-looking, popular characters on shows like Friends?

• 13:13Charles Liu?

  Of course.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why?

• 13:15Charles Liu?

  We all have our insecurities. We all see ourselves as different. Even if we make ourselves up and strut ourselves around as being popular, or famous, or pretty. In the end, we all are human, and we like to see people who are human, right? The best sitcoms are the ones who take the stereotypes, the caricatures, and then slowly but surely show that they are human just like all of us.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they can't be too beautiful, is what you're saying?

• 13:39Charles Liu?

  If they are, they're just not as real. That's right.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, talk about weird characters. One of the main characters on The Big Bang Theory is a socially awkward theoretical physicist named Sheldon.

• 13:48Chuck Nice?

  Sheldon didn't like you in your scene. Now, I don't know if that was real or not, because you... Well, check it out. Check this out.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  I'm quite familiar with Dr. Tyson. He's responsible for the demotion of Pluto from planetary status. I liked Pluto. Ergo, I do not like you.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I actually didn't demote Pluto. That was a vote of the International Astronomical Union.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas. Think about that, Dr. Tyson.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, actually, I did go home and think about it deeply.

• 14:30Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will offer a reflection on that exchange now.

• 14:35Charles Liu?

  Okay, please do.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sheldon, get over it.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pluto had it coming.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So up next, we'll take your questions about the real Big Bang Theory when StarTalk returns.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom named after the origin of the universe itself. An actor, Simon Helberg, plays an aerospace engineer on the show. But in real life, he had a question for me about the real Big Bang. Let's check it out.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm sure you can answer this really quickly. But, and I know there are theories about the moments before the Big Bang, not the pilot. Moments before The Big Bang Theory pilot, I was on a show called Studio 60. I'll answer that question. No, moments before the actual Big Bang. What can I, is there a way to intellectually wrap my mind around what was going on before the Big Bang?

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've tried.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the best discussions today, which have cogent arguments for why we should think this, is that our universe is part of a multiverse.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you're part of a multiverse, you can step back in a higher dimension and say, oh, here's the universe that Simon Helberg and Neil Tyson are in. And that just expanded, it just began right there, that's its Big Bang.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it expands, and then comes the TV show Big Bang Theory. And that's that universe. Here's another universe, began a little later, another one began a little earlier. Some universes don't expand forever, they might collapse. Some have slightly different laws of physics, life does not begin in those.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some might have even better laws of physics for a more interesting form of life than perhaps what formed in ours. And so maybe the multiverse complex is what's eternal.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that doesn't have a beginning, or maybe...

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Doesn't have a beginning.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe it does, but it is what spawned our universe.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  But what's the beginning? The very beginning, doesn't that just, when you think about it, don't your eyes just cross and you just...

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Go to sleep?

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a philosophical, intellectual, and scientific frontier.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, the universe never makes anything in ones. We thought Earth was special, no, it's one of eight planets. The sun, the sun is special, no, it's one of 100 billion suns. The galaxy, no, one of 100 billion galaxies. These are discoveries over the centuries.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have the universe.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would it only be one?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let it be many, and that would be just the next in the sequence of learning.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Rules of three in comedy, I guess the universe is the funniest of them all, like you said, sense of humor. But any more than three universes is not funny.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be sure to alert them.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, joining us now to help us get into the science of the actual Big Bang is theoretical physicist Janna Levin. Jana, welcome back.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's a professor at Barnard College at Columbia University. So how would you describe the Big Bang?

• 17:49Janna Levin?

  Well, I think it...

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How would you grade my answer?

• 17:52Janna Levin?

  I thought your answer was excellent, actually. So the idea of a scientific notion of the origin of the universe, we know dates back, not to Einstein himself, actually, but to people who were trying to solve his equations and realized that it was, the universe was really unstable to expanding.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unstable to expanding, meaning it's going to do that all by itself?

• 18:13Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's really hard to stop it. And if you run the movie backwards, there's this inevitable implication that everything was closer together. The entire universe was closer together, and as you imagine going further back in that movie, there must have been this catastrophically high-energy event. There's no other alternative.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now he asked what was around before then. Where do you land on that?

• 18:35Janna Levin?

  So I think if you start to say, "How long was it before the Big Bang? Where were you standing when you were waiting for the Big Bang to happen?" Then you're talking about spacetime, and then you're talking about the universe. So if there was a where and when and a place before the Big Bang, it was part of a universe, it was part of a spacetime. And that was what you alluded to, the idea that really our Big Bang is like a ginger root that was blown off of a larger spacetime.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful.

• 19:01Janna Levin?

  Yeah, and that it's just like a series of these ginger roots. But you also have to remember, because of the relativity of space and time, that when we look back at the Big Bang as being an origin in time, that for somewhere else in the spacetime, that might be a direction in space. So it's not easy to say that plume happened before this plume, or that Big Bang happened before this bang. I think it becomes a much more abstract proposition that we're just part of this stranger ecosystem. But I appreciate the question, which is, aren't we sort of punting? Where did that come from?

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:35Janna Levin?

  Right, where did the original plume root come from?

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even for the multiverse.

• 19:40Janna Levin?

  That's right, or has, are we back to Einstein's intuition, which was that it was always there? And maybe in some sense, there's always been a space-time and it's just our little, our little plume that's...

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you get across the concept of something that might not have had a beginning? That freaks people out.

• 19:57Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I mean...

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember when I was a kid...

• 19:59Janna Levin?

  Both are freaky. The idea that the universe has a beginning, it requires a lot of explanation. And the idea, they're both weird. Right, when all your options are weird, you know? It's like picking, you grab one.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been there.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just remember, I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and his funeral at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia, and they had this flame, and it was called the Eternal Flame. And how old am I? I'm like five years old, and I was like, eternal? Whoa, what does that even mean? But then I got all geeky on, I said, don't they have to put fuel in it?

• 20:39Janna Levin?

  Oh, you started early. Only there was Twitter about that.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was the concept of something that was not finite.

• 20:45Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, it was my first encounter with the non-finite. Yeah. And so the Big Bang is all about the non-finite. You gotta live in that. So Charles, how do you teach the Big Bang, any differently from Jana?

• 20:57Charles Liu?

  What I like to convey to my students is that we have to stop thinking of time as this one thing that we're all stuck on. Each universe, or sub-universe, or multiverse, has multiple directions in time, just as we can think of left, right, up, down, forward, backward. We can think of time as going forward and backward, but it'll be different times in different parts of the multiverse, if it exists.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm more confused now then.

• 21:20Charles Liu?

  Right. It starts getting confusing, but then it starts making more sense if you start realizing that you don't think of time as this thing where something has to be before it, something has to be in the present, and something has to be after it. That's only true in our universe.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are invoking wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

• 21:37Charles Liu?

  I'm actually boking string theory. When we go to 11 dimensions, some sort of supersymmetric bulk, you can think of universes or versions of universes with more than one time dimension or different time dimensions altogether. So our universe only began when time began in our universe, it started to tick.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jenna, what's he talking, he says more than one time dimension, I can't wrap my head around that.

• 22:01Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that, that, I mean, I think the idea of there being extra spatial dimensions in general is really what string theory forces on us, but it's not specific only to string theory. I mean, as soon as we started talking about spacetime, people in 1915, 1920 were asking, "Why three, why three dimensions?"

• 22:17Charles Liu?

  Excellent point.

• 22:18Janna Levin?

  Yeah, it's not, it's, it's...

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not six or 10 or anything?

• 22:20Janna Levin?

  Why not six or 10, so that became a question, that became a scientific question you could ask, which is kind of funny.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  So why not turn it up to 11?

• 22:25Janna Levin?

  Why three dimensions? So crank it up to 11!

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 11, all the way.

• 22:30Chuck Nice?

  Crank it up to 11, that's all I'm saying.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jenna, how do you, how do you communicate what was around before anything was around?

• 22:39Janna Levin?

  Well, I think this is exactly the question, that if you're asked, if you're saying "before", you're making a temporal comparison.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there had to be a spacetime to enable that?

• 22:48Janna Levin?

  Either, you know, the, the kind of classic response is, if you're on the earth and you want to go north of the North Pole, you go south, right? So you, if you're sticking to the earth, if you're sticking to that constraint, you go south, so there is nothing north of the North Pole, the question's poorly phrased. But I don't think we think like that anymore, so we can't say, "What's before the Big Bang", the question is poorly phrased if our universe is the only universe.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 23:10Janna Levin?

  But if it's not, in the sense that you're describing of the multiverse, then we can't say, "Oh, there is a space and a time prior", but, you know, they might not look at the Big Bang as being in the future, they might look at it as being in a spatial direction.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it that our feeble existence in this universe prevents us from possibly even knowing how to ask the right question.

• 23:28Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, our StarTalk fans have their own questions about the science of the Big Bang, which takes us to the fan favorite section of StarTalk called Cosmic Queries! Yes!

• 23:41Chuck Nice?

  So Chuck, you got the question. Go for it. Here we go. This is Tim Commie on Instagram who says, "What exploded? And what did it explode into?" Janet.

• 23:53Janna Levin?

  Yeah, this is a classic question. Well, let me start with the second part. Because, so when a star explodes, we can point to the center of the explosion and we watch the material plow out like a snowplow. And so there's a center of the explosion and you can clearly see it. That is not our model of the Big Bang. There was no center. Every place in the universe as far away as we can see was once the center, as were we. There, so it's not the explosion of something in spacetime. It is sort of the eruption of spacetime itself being created in that moment and stretching.

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Tim just answered that. I don't know what you're talking about. No, no, it was good. That was a beautiful explanation, actually. That was beautiful. It was very eloquent.

• 24:38Janna Levin?

  One thing that I really like to think of sometimes is like if you made a map of the universe and you just imagined focusing on the legend. And the legend, the map was static. You know, it was telling you the distance between us and Andromeda, the distance between us and a different galaxy. And the legend is telling you that that distance is increasing over time. The universe is expanding. If we run it backwards, every single point in space gets closer and closer together. But it's only happening at the level of the legend. So nowhere on that map, imagine it's infinite and you slide it around. Nowhere on that map can you point to the center. It's just that every place collapses to nothing.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, very cool. All right, Jacob Casey from Buffalo, New York says, "What are some questions about the Big Bang that we hope to answer with the new James Webb Space Telescope?" Charles.

• 25:22Charles Liu?

  James Webb allows us to see literally to the beginning of the formation of stars and galaxies in our universe. So... Whereas

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's tuned for that.

• 25:31Charles Liu?

  Yeah, we are, it's designed so that we can see the era when matter is first coming together and shining light through the universe that we can observe. So those questions that can be answered by figuring out the origins of structure of the universe, stars, galaxies, planets, eventually people, that's what James Webb is going to try to address.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And also in later, in the later years, because it took a long time to design and build, and it's not even launched yet, that they've added other kind of objectives for it, including looking deep into gas clouds to explore the formation of stars and planets themselves.

• 26:10Janna Levin?

  And possibly the formation of the supermassive black holes, which would be

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, in the centers of galaxies, yes.

• 26:14Janna Levin?

  Yeah, why are they these black holes that are four million times the mass of sun, a billion times the mass of sun?

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just lurking in the middle of every galaxy we've ever had the opportunity to see.

• 26:23Janna Levin?

  Right, they're basically sculpting the universe on the largest scales, and that was not at all foreseen. So where did they come from, and how are they influencing the, the formation of the entire large landscape of the universe?

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool, Chuck, keep it coming.

• 26:37Charles Liu?

  All right, here we go.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was supposed to hit the bell.

• 26:40Charles Liu?

  This from Starfish Skies on Instagram says, "What color was the Big Bang? Was it the color of love?"

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Janet, what color was the Big Bang?

• 26:53Janna Levin?

  It's interesting that, well, presumably, oh, see, I would have said white, which is all colors.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but it would be very hot.

• 27:00Janna Levin?

  It would be very hot.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Going through all colors, so then you get blue, yeah.

• 27:04Janna Levin?

  But, so there is an interesting question about, about when it was right in the optical that we could actually talk about blue or red, right? So there was a moment in the universe's history when the light left over from the Big Bang was in the optical range

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Janna Levin?

  that human beings could see. So I don't remember exactly when it was. Do you know, Charles, like a million, billion?

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, what moment are you talking about?

• 27:24Janna Levin?

  But when the mic, when the light, microwave background was not microwave, but was optical.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, it was formed, it was 3,000 degree glowing plasma.

• 27:33Janna Levin?

  Right, so there's a time between then and now that it passed through the optical. So, so there would have been a time where there was no night sky. Where had we had a plan.

• 27:41Charles Liu?

  3000 Kelvin is already infrared, so it had to be before.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, we got there.

• 27:45Charles Liu?

  Like 6000 Kelvin, redshift 2000, 2000 or so.

• 27:47Janna Levin?

  So it's super early.

• 27:48Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Janna Levin?

  Super early then.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's less than that.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  This is really what they do.

• 27:53Chuck Nice?

  No, seriously, this is it. Now, you know, that's why I just sat here, I'm like, I'm gonna let this keep going.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, next question.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. All right, this is from Llamis Piso on Instagram.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sure that's not how that person pronounces their own damn name.

• 28:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm sure they don't either, but guess what? Your name is now Llamis Piso.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 28:18Chuck Nice?

  Where is all the antimatter? And why do we think it was created with the Big Bang?

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Janet, give me some of that.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  That's a good one.

• 28:26Janna Levin?

  Oh, this is beautiful, because the fact that the universe is made of matter is a fluke. We could very well have had an entirely antimatter universe. But what was more likely is that there were equal proportions of matter and antimatter, and when matter and antimatter get together, they genuinely annihilate into light, and there's nothing left but light. So the real question isn't, is it matter or antimatter? But why isn't it perfectly equal proportions?

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is there any matter at all?

• 28:50Janna Levin?

  Right, why is there any excess of either? It happens to be matter.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just doesn't matter!

• 28:58Janna Levin?

  So it's crazy, it's tiny. It requires a tiny, tiny asymmetry in the very early universe to allow us to have galaxies and planets and stars. And this is something that is still debated. I mean, this is why we still have jobs. We don't know the answer to that question.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a mismatch of matter and antimatter.

• 29:15Janna Levin?

  Yeah, we don't know why that asymmetry exists.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have this excess, the excess is everything we know and love as matter.

• 29:19Janna Levin?

  That's right. And, and you would think by rights that the universe would be created in equal proportions, that symmetry is favored, and so that there would be nothing.

• 29:27Chuck Nice?

  I hate science.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. And we're talking about the portrayal of science and scientists on the TV show The Big Bang Theory. Let's check it out.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's always a challenge to tell stories about flawed characters and respond to a hope that all characters be portrayed without flaws.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  When you talk about a difference, say, in Penny's experiences as a sexual human being and Leonard's experience as a sexual human being, one of the things that we've said about these people is that Penny was more social and Leonard was less social. And it's kind of a mathematical truth that people who are more social have more opportunities for sexual experiences than people who are less social. The... I will defend the portrayal of Leonard and his sexuality with this pathetic explanation, which is for the first season, Leonard's sexual history was my sexual history.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  His awful...

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we cut there?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But I'm just gonna say, his awful... I brought, you know, we all bring to our writing, especially writing comedy, we bring the pain of our own personal lives and...

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no comedy without pain.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  There's no comedy without pain. And Leonard's misbegotten inability to function with women and specific episodes from my sad, sad experiences, I gave them in the first season to Leonard. And so, I will say that if the audience takes issue with the portrayal of a nerdy guy as being inexperienced sexually and unsuccessful with women, then all I can say is, "Well, yeah, but I lived it."

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's a defense, but it certainly is true.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, is there no comedy without pain? Is that a true thing?

• 31:58Chuck Nice?

  Did we all just laugh at his pain?

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you agree?

• 32:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:05Chuck Nice?

  Nobody wants to hear anything.

• 32:08Chuck Nice?

  There's, "Hey, my life is great." That's not funny.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not funny, okay. So Jana, is, would you, I mean, it's a sitcom.

• 32:15Janna Levin?

  I'm nervous.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we got you here.

• 32:18Janna Levin?

  I have this line of reasoning.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, so it's a sitcom and they're fictional characters. But do you, do you feel, I mean, you emanate from a nerd community, a nerd culture, I should say, then, do you see it as an unfair treatment of the geek set that they're portraying nerdy scientists who are socially awkward?

• 32:38Janna Levin?

  I don't think it's terribly interesting if everything we do is incredibly balanced and has a perfect, you know, that's anodyne. And it is fun sometimes to focus on the disastrous extrapolation of the extreme. And, and it amuses us because I think we all see a little bit of ourselves in it. We'd like to think we're not, you know, emblematic of that particular extreme, but we see a little bit of ourselves.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's a taste of it.

• 33:03Janna Levin?

  Just as the writer did, yeah.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just enough to say, whoa, that's a little hitting home a little too. And in fact, for him, it was hitting home exactly for Bill Brady.

• 33:10Janna Levin?

  Right, but that's the role of fiction too, to allow us to indulge in the extreme. That's right.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, we release the inner geek in us all when StarTalk returns.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, Hall of the Universe. We're talking about the mega-hit TV show, The Big Bang Theory. I asked actor Simon Helberg why he thinks a show about geeky scientists is so popular. Let's check it out.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  I think there are much more, many more closeted geeks and scientists and lovers of the universe than we might have expected because I think there are times where we'll be rehearsing scenes and we'll all, we're actors, so we pretend to be smart and we all think, what are we talking about? What, and who, or we will figure out kind of, we'll have to bend over backwards to understand the logic and we think the audience will never get this and we get out in front of the audience on a Tuesday night and they're with us from the moment we start speaking.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're laughing in all the expected places.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, you know, we truly are not smart and just play, play geniuses on TV or, or it's just, the subculture is not so much a subculture as it is, it is the culture. It's just been kind of hidden or, or just untapped. I do, I do believe, I do believe that it was, it was just an untapped, beautiful thing sitting there and we came along and...

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A ripened, a ripe fruit.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  A ripened fruit that we have splattered across the world.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, do you think geek culture has become geek chic?

• 35:10Charles Liu?

  I'll take it one step further and say geek culture has always been the culture. Have you ever imagined whether Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci were cool kids? They probably weren't, but today that's all we talk about when we think about the Renaissance or the beautiful works of art or the amazing discoveries of the past. So the answer is yes, geek culture is the culture and it always will be the geek culture.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask the two of you, each of you, what advice would you give to shy geeks who are either in the closet or otherwise sort of suppressing their inner geekitude? It gets better.

• 35:53Janna Levin?

  I think that we're acknowledging that there's something really beautiful in people who are intensely focused on something they're profoundly curious about. And that lack of a filter, you know, the awkwardness of these characters, a lot of it is just the filter, there's no false fronts, right? They just are.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no facade.

• 36:13Janna Levin?

  There's no facade, and there's something about that that's incredibly lovable. So here are all these people watching this and loving these characters. I think the advice is, you know, having no false front is lovable. Go for it.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, another lead character on The Big Bang Theory is a scientist played by actress Miam Bialik. And she's also a scientist in real life and a former guest on StarTalk. She's a neuroscientist professionally. And this is a fictional character, but who happens to be a real scientist. That's just a curious fact. I'm wondering, Janet, were you influenced by any fictional role models?

• 36:51Janna Levin?

  You know, I don't think I was that much. I wish there were better fictional role models that I either knew about or had easy access to. I think I was very influenced by real scientists. And it took me a while, and we talked about Carl Sagan, you and I have talked about this before. I mean, it sounds really corny, but I used to love to talk to my dad about Carl Sagan. And we would make fun of the way he spoke, we'd make fun of the way he said billions.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billion, billion.

• 37:16Janna Levin?

  But it was this affectionate teasing. We were totally consumed by it. And we used to read his books together. But I swear to you, it never occurred to me at any time as a child, even then, that I would be a scientist. It came later. I didn't self-identify.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Later, like when?

• 37:34Janna Levin?

  College.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  College?

• 37:36Janna Levin?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Late bloomer. Oh, my God.

• 37:39Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I was midway through college. And when I discovered physics, it was answering these tremendous questions, and it felt transcendent, it felt true for everybody, and that it wasn't, it felt true for somebody in a remote part of the planet and a remote part of the world.

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you got me worried that there might be others who didn't have that revelation who could have been great physicists as you have become. Who are we missing?

• 38:01Janna Levin?

  Yeah, I think about that a lot.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're bumming me out. So, Charles, do you think the pop culture presence of The Big Bang Theory? Is helping people release their inner geeks like it's a it's an enabling force?

• 38:13Charles Liu?

  Absolutely, it's helping to break that stereotype. I mean, it's long since time.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:18Charles Liu?

  For that stereotype to break. Athletes can be smart, priests can be scientific, and scientists can be open, happy, and sexy.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did you get that that priests can be scientists? How did you get that one?

• 38:38Charles Liu?

  The person who taught me theoretical cosmology in graduate school is a Jesuit priest.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:44Charles Liu?

  He was thinking about.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Jesuit priest, yeah.

• 38:46Charles Liu?

  But a priest nonetheless.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Not just any priest.

• 38:50Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the academic order of the.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, the Jesuits are the ones who love science.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, Jesuits are like the science badasses.

• 38:55Charles Liu?

  The Jesuit priest. And he was discovering and working seriously, mathematically, understanding the origins of the universe. And he was doing it perhaps to reveal the greater glory of whom he believed was God. But nevertheless, he was very much scientific.

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, motivation actually doesn't matter as long as you're you are driven to be curious and to solve the problem.

• 39:15Charles Liu?

  And he really helped me learn a lot and understand a lot about cosmology. So I have no problem with that.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, do you think shows like The Big Bang Theory will improve the urge for people to want to hang out with scientists?

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 39:29Charles Liu?

  That's it, I'm out of here.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so in this final clip, I asked Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady, if making science more popular was his goal all along. Check it out.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Our goal wasn't to promote science. Our goal wasn't to promote NASA. Our goal wasn't to promote physics. We're in the silliness business. Our goal was to present, you know, 30 minutes of comedy that you would come back to and laugh and enjoy. But because we put these guys in the world of physics, one of the things we've come to learn about over the last decade is an increase in the number of people choosing the hard sciences vocationally. And for a lot of people, they pointed to The Big Bang Theory saying, "I didn't know that science class, which I enjoy in school, I didn't know that's actually a job you can have in life."

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And an unintended thing, but kind of a wonderful thing.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'm old enough to remember when there was a scientist on television, or especially in a movie. I'm going back decades now, many decades. Who was that person? It was a person usually with wiry hair, lab coat, behind a slab. And the main characters who you actually cared about might have to get some answer from that scientist. Is the radiation safe? Or is the giant bug going to kill us all? So they'll run into the room, speak to the scientist. The scientist, "Everything will be okay, just do this." They'll say, "Thanks, doc." And then they move on and the camera follows the main characters leaving the doctor behind. Leaving the scientist

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  without any other kind of developed character. You would never know, and as a result, you would never even care. Is that scientist married? Does the scientist have children? Are they sad that day? Are they in love? All the emotions that were handed to everybody else in a story. So I, for one, am delighted, even proud, to live in a moment where the number one show on television was about scientists, though they be caricatures. And I don't even care if a movie gets some science wrong. It's got science in it at all.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got people talking about the science because science is mainstreaming. There are artists reaching out to scientists to have science infuse their creativity. There are people recognizing that scientists might know some stuff that might prolong your life, that might produce wealth, that could bring security to this nation and to the world. And so scientists can be major figures in sitcoms, in movies, and in real life.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been a Cosmic Perspective. From StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Join me in thanking once again Chuck Nice, Charles Luke, Jen Levin.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, I bid you to keep looking up.