The Beginning of the Universe with Brian Keating

Could the Higgs field vary across space and time? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer fan questions on cosmic inflation, quantum fluctuations, and the earliest moments after the Big Bang with cosmologist Brian Keating.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, love me some cosmology.

• 0:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yes, without a doubt. It makes me look good every day.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmetology?

• 0:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's, oh, that's right. We're talking about cosmology on this show. Yeah. It's a good one, too.

• 0:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to just look at what, how people used to think of the universe. I want to know what's going on right now, and that's what we did.

• 0:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, we got it all.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that episode, coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We're doing cosmic queries today, and guess who brought them all? Chuck, nice, Chuck, man.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Hey, that's right. I bought the goods.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You brought the goods.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I did. We got the, we got all the, we got everything that you ever wanted to know, and I'm going to read four of them.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Because that's how many we get.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I think, but they're very fleshy replies.

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  Listen, I, the way I look at it is, we have a reservoir of inquiries, and that gives us fodder for discussion, and eventually, all of these questions will be answered.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and these questions are all from our Patreon supporters, which we love them.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  We love.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going to do cosmology today.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  Yo.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I did my hair very special today, so I'm very happy about that. I'm glad that we're doing cosmetology.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmetology, yeah, that's what it is. So, we've got with us today, one of the most active scientists in that space, the space of cosmetology.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian Keating. Brian, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  It's nice to be with you in person, finally.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yes, yes. You, you're active on social media, and I was honored to be a guest on your podcast.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, two-time guest, yeah.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two-time guest, and what's the name of it?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  It's called The Into the Impossible Podcast, named after Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Did he realize that once you get into the impossible, it is the possible?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be too rational about this, Chuck.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been thinking about cosmology, especially...

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Signatures of the Big Bang.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your whole career.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is what I've been doing. I'm dedicated my life to understanding, you know, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang. Can you answer that question? I'm not really sure.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me get your pedigree out of the way here.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you're chancellor's distinguished professor of physics in the Department of Physics, UC San Diego.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are you the student's distinguished professor?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Ah, you know, well...

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't care what the chancellor thinks of you.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I just teach to him.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, you go to his office, you get private lessons.

• 3:00Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're also a principal investigator in the Simons Observatory.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got a whole Simons thing down here in the city.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the Flatiron Institute.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. Jim is a titan of the city. Fortunately, he passed away last year, age 86.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim Simons.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Jim Simons, yeah. He's a philanthropist, a mathematician. He was, had multiple careers. He worked for the government. He broke codes during Vietnam.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said philanthropist and mathematician, but not in that order.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Not in that order, and also I forgot. I left out one thing. I left out one thing. Hedge fund manager, 26 richest person in the world. But one thing that's most important I left out is that his wife, Marilyn Simons, has a distinction and honor, not only of having an asteroid. I mean, a lot of people have asteroids, but we got an asteroid named after Jim.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anybody's got an asteroid.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  But Marilyn...

• 3:45Chuck Nice?

  Let's be honest, the solar system is littered with them.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  They're basically space garbage.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Garbage, that's right.

• 3:52Chuck Nice?

  Let's be honest.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Can't give a boy.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a man who does not have an asteroid.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Join me, join. You and me both. I don't have one either. But Marilyn has the honor, the distinction of being my, one of my first babysitters. So she got experience, early experience with dark matter.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did she change your diapers?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  That's right. Dark matter is where she got her experience with...

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 4:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Age two or three, yeah.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so you guys go way back.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Way back, before the, before the birth, before my own personal Big Bang, as Chuck said nine months earlier.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's up with the Simon Observatory? What's your relationship to it again?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  So I'm the, what's called the principal investigator. Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of it along with your friend David Spiegel.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And Mark.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We came up together in graduate school and yeah. David Spiegel is on an earlier episode of StarTalk. As the Chair of the Committee Representing NASA Investigating UAPs. Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  And he's also.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our archives.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  He's also, he took over from Marilyn Symonds as a president of Symonds Foundation.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  So he had to kind of withdraw from the Symonds Observatory otherwise in conflict of interest.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conflict of interest?

• 4:56Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that a thing now?

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Really? For people like David, yeah. Okay. So, um, so in 2014, in this very city, there was published in the, in the, uh, front page of New York Times on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day was published article that said, "Space ripples herald the origin of the universe." And it was an announcement that the BICEP2 experiment had detected what are called gravitational waves.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Primordial waves of the ripples of spacetime.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So BICEP, uh, that's an acronym. What's that acronym for?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I created the acronym. It was a background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Checking is bicep.

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  I don't describe it.

• 5:39Chuck Nice?

  What's it looking at? Space guns.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guns? Okay. Give me back the acronym.

• 5:45Chuck Nice?

  The Space Gun Show.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Background.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Background.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization. Now, why is that so clever? Why is that not just a dad joke? Well, the signal that we're looking for is called polarization. And that polarization pattern, if you were to be able to see it with special polarized glasses, we'll get to in a few seconds, you would see a swirling, twisting or curling pattern. So I wanted to make bicep the muscle that does curl. And I got away with the dad joke even before I had kids.

• 6:13Chuck Nice?

  I see what you did there.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what you did there?

• 6:16Chuck Nice?

  That's not bad.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The curl. Is only exercises one muscle.

• 6:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no other muscle. Curl is the bicep.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, very good.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what were you on that project?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  I was, well, I founded the previous predecessor experiment called. Creatively, bicep one, you know, first incarnation of it. And just like with your iPhone, every couple of years, you upgrade it, you get more pixels, you get more data. But the cool thing about it, literally, is that the-

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in orbiting?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  No, it's in the South Pole, Antarctica.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  So it's at the very bottom of the world.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I knew that.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Um, and so-

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Penguins would call it the top of the world, but, okay.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  That's right. I don't want to be too, you know, polar bear specific, yeah, eccentric. So we, uh, so I created that experiment, along with my late, great, um, colleague and mentor, Andrew Lang, uh, tragically took his own life soon after we got our first data from the second version of the experiment, but that's another podcast. Uh, but that experiment was, was built intently to do nothing else but measure these waves of gravity if they existed. And we thought, oh, we'll never detect it, it's, it's miniscule. We're looking for signals that are one billionth of a Kelvin above the CMB's average temperature, which is 2.7 Kelvin.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  So it's as miniscule, we didn't think we'd do it, we had to try it though.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the challenge there scientifically is to see a signal that low-

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given the fluctuations that are already there.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  And the earth.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And the atmosphere, yep, exactly.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All radiating into the, into the experiment.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  That's right, exactly, yep.

• 7:38Chuck Nice?

  It's, it's literally like a string with a bell on it.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  But the crazy thing is, in, in 2014, you know, we announced we did it. We saw this kind of needle, you know, in a, it's actually like a piece of hay in a haystack, you know, it's so-

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you find the hay in a haystack?

• 7:53Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Piece of hay. You know what you do with the needle? You, actually, Iron Man said this in, in one of the movies, but we all knew this.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, if you want to find a needle in a haystack, just burn down the haystack.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the needle's left.

• 8:09Chuck Nice?

  And then that saw that, right, because needles don't burn.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or take an electromagnet, and, yeah, you'll find the needle like that.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  So this experiment was designed to do one thing only, and we never thought we'd do it, if we detected it, we'd be, you know, kind of, uh, the onus is on the experimentalist. You know, you want to know enough-

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  -that you can detect it, but you have to, you know-

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  -not fall victim to the most pernicious of all scientific fallacies, which is confirmation bias.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  You're looking for something, oh, you found it, you're a reca.

• 8:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, because that's what-

• 8:33Speaker 02

  That never happens, right? But we did, we found it. And I remember telling my wife, you know, this is gonna win somebody a Nobel Prize, you know. Spoiler alert, you know, my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so- Wasn't, wasn't this guy. Um, and it wasn't any of us because it was retracted later on, as Neil mentioned, we had to do, go through the humiliation of after being on the front page of the New York Times, press conference at Harvard, you know, a real show all around the world, CNN, everybody.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what was your academic affiliation at the time?

• 9:00Speaker 02

  So I was a professor at UC Sandy.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you are now.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yep, correct. I've been there 21 years.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they probably were running with this.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. We were on the front page of the, the most, the most important paper of record, the San Diego Union Tribune, which.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Union Tribune.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I was on the cover of it. Uh, yes, exactly. So that discovery launched into motion, what would become the Simons Observatory, because that day I got a call from Jim Simons. He'd already been funding a predecessor experiment of mine called the Simons Array, which is a small grouping of telescopes.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Meant to also look at the same signals, but other signals too. And he called me up in that distinctive voice, uh, after, you know, smoking Merritt cigarettes without filters, you know, for 60 years. He started smoking when he was in his, you know, late teenage. Don't, don't do that out there. Right. Doctors about, yeah, he was a chain smoker. Hey Brian, how are you? Exactly what he sounded like. My chest and ch- I just got done. Chuck Moore, Boston. Oh, I can't do Boston.

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  Plus it doesn't sound good in Boston.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Oh, that's wicked.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  Like, you know.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wicked.

• 9:54Chuck Nice?

  Like, yeah, that's the diner waitress voice.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we left off.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Last.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your, in your complicated life where you had the bicep two experiment that reported what would later be determined to be an erroneous detection. Meanwhile.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim Simons, seeing what you're seeking, wanted to participate in that, puts you ahead of an early version of the Simons Observatory, some variant, Simons Array. But then the Bicep 2 result comes out.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  Which is not good for him.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  Because Bicep 2 is leading the world to, well, we think has, has discovered this, these, these ripples.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  But, but really they haven't, but he doesn't know that.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:13Chuck Nice?

  So he's like, "Bro, what's up with my money?"

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I want it back. So he calls me up and I'm like, I don't know what to say because I knew in the back of my mind, there could be problems with the result and we might need to confirm it with another instrument, which later turned out to be the case, or that we were actually right. And yeah, maybe I might have to say, "Look, you gotta, I gotta give you back your money. I gotta have some integrity and, you know, and refund your money," so to speak. And I was going crazy because where do you get, you know, $10 million and give it back to?

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's when my, let me tell you something, that's when I just ran out of integrity. Ran out of money and integrity at the same time.

• 11:46Chuck Nice?

  Ten million dollars, no more integrity.

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then, how was it determined?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I remembered this. I wasn't close to it, but it was, it was happening. It was a very important, it was an important episode.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In science.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, okay, so now, tell, tell.

• 12:08Chuck Nice?

  Let me say why it's important first. And can I, before you even get there, can you tell me exactly what was missing from the discovery that invalidated?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Let me take one giant step back. Why are we doing any of these projects to begin with? So looking for gravitational waves, take yourself back to 2014, right? We hadn't detected, LIGO had not made its detection of gravitational waves.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Obama was president.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Ukraine had not been invaded the first time.

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  Hold on guys, give me one second, I'm staving off. Once he said Obama was president, I'm like, "Oh God."

• 12:39Speaker 02

  The elevator had not been ridden, escalator.

• 12:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  How to annoy Chuck. Uh, so. So at that phase, we had not detected gravitational waves directly as LIGO had.

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  We had indirect evidence that they existed, but there was a theory that had been promulgated since the early 1980s by Alan Guth. So the inflationary theory is the answer to the question, what caused the Big Bang? What made the Big Bang bang? And the partial is that there's a so-called quantum field that filled the whole universe that fluctuated out of nothing and the universe became, came into existence.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As quantum quantum do.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do stuff out of nothing all the time.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  They are the magicians of the universe.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Everything quantum.

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  Watch me pull a universe out of my hat.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We burnt the universe over there on a fluctuation.

• 13:28Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  So this discovery, if it were true, if it were confirmed, would be tantamount to discovering the Big Bang itself, which it was done not far from here by Penzias and Wilson, discovery of the CMB, the cosmic microwave background, which is what butters the bread around the Keating House.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Penzias Wilson at Bell Labs in Jersey.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Exactly, not too far from here.

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  By mistake too.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, it's across the Hudson River. That makes it far.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I know you're in here from San Diego.

• 13:50Chuck Nice?

  Don't, don't, don't listen to this guy. He's a Manhattan.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  I'm a New Yorker.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He lives in New Jersey.

• 13:57Chuck Nice?

  That is true.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have Long Island roots?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What town?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Stony Brook, yeah.

• 14:00Chuck Nice?

  Stony, oh my God!

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where Jim and my dad were.

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's why that would be the case.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So, so inflation, so we claim that we discovered this. So that's why everyone said this is going to win a Nobel Prize because they won a Nobel Prize for discovering just the heat left over from the Big Bang, all the more so for discovering what ignited the spark that ignited the Big Bang.

• 14:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  So that was why I designed Bicep originally, then it became Bicep 2, like the iPhone gets new detectors, cameras, we upgraded it. So we ended up building this telescope and then when I got this call from Jim Simons, I was in this pickle, right? Cause I don't know what to say. I kind of invented, I was kind of the father of the predecessor experiment to Bicep 2, Bicep 1, and you know, was definitely the father of that. And, and then I was involved with this new project that he was funding. Now, what ended up happening was we had relied on data not from our own instrument. Actually, someone had taken a picture of a PowerPoint slide from our arch nemesis, the Planck experiment. So the Planck experiment is a billion euro experiment. Bicep was a mere $10 million US dollar.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  European Space Agency.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Europe, out at L2 of Lagrange Point, orbiting around the sun and the earth, farthest, coldest, deepest, darkest, incredible team, a thousand people working.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Earth, Sun, L2.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Earth, Sun, L2.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where JWST is.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It was one of the first, the second one after.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  They're hanging up. They're just parked there. Yeah, that's right. Like they're on Stakeout. Two cops on Stakeout, sitting there at L2. You said you go for coffee this time. I went for coffee last time.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is true, because they're like parked there. As Earth orbits the sun.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Think about getting a validation out there. I mean, that is not easy. So Jim calls me up, what's going on and what to do next? So we ended up discovering that we didn't see this pattern that would be the imprimatur of the Big Bang. We didn't see this cosmic swirling curls from the Big Bang.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who determined you didn't see it?

• 15:45Speaker 02

  We, along with our competitor, the Planck teams, that we worked together to find out that actually what we saw was nothing more than some cosmic schmutz.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Some dust.

• 15:54Chuck Nice?

  It was, yeah.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do people study dust?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll call it schmutz.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 15:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To them, it's their livelihood.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  One astronomer's dust is another astronomer's lost Nobel Prize. So it wasn't a blunder, Chuck. It wasn't like we left, you know, put our thumb over the, over the camera or something like that. We actually measured exquisitely, precisely, this signal that is astrophysical in origin at the millions of degree Kelvin level. I mean, it's an exquisite.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but it's a local signal, not a Big Bang signal.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  It happened to be a different signal.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 16:22Chuck Nice?

  That's all.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So congratulations on the precision of the measurement.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  It is.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's you idiot interpreting it the wrong way?

• 16:28Chuck Nice?

  However, what it did was, it's like, oh, this thing works.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  It's the most precise measurement of what's called an astrophysical foreground. Something in the foreground, in the space between you and the cosmos, that is made in the astrophysics. It's actually the same material that makes up meteorites, and I brought some meteorites for you guys here. So dust is ubiquitous, and the same type of dust that obscured our measurement and prevented me from winning a Nobel Prize is actually the same stuff that the planets are made of. And so it's identical to that. Happens to be magnetic, and it produces radiation and heat. And so we saw it, and we misinterpreted it as a signal from the big.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this is infrared.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Infrared and microinmission, yep. So Jim Simons, upon hearing this, he's like, well, what do we do? And then when we retracted the claim that we had detected inflation, humiliating. This was not like an easy thing to do.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Still, he said, I want to go for the signal more than ever now, but we have to remove the dust. So it's a good thing, like you said, Chuck. It's actually a good thing. When you make a mistake, you say, oh, I got to refine what I do. It's like you go out to your car, there's dust on the windshield, I got to clean the windshield.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, except you're not going out to the galaxy and removing the dust. You're removing the dust signature in your data.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. So how do you do that without a vacuum cleaner or a dust devil?

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need ways to do that.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. So what Jim was wise about, and what David Spiegel had figured out, because he was one of the ones that killed off the bicep interpretation. He figured out we need to have multiple colors of light. Bicep 2 only had one color of light. We couldn't see multiple colors. And when you have multiple colors, you learn about the spectrum, you learn about the characteristics. So what Simons Observatory now does, and why Jim funded that, is it can see the cosmic signal. If it's there, we have to assume it may not be there, just because we want it to be there, but it can also see the dust. And when you have the signal, you have the cosmic signal plus the dust signal. We have a telescope that just measures dust.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your one band of light.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could not distinguish the cosmic signal from the local signal. In two bands of light, they each will show up differently in two bands. And now you'll be able to identify. And now you've been able to take it out.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not what I remember most about this episode. I remember the ambulance chasing theorists who came behind this false result, thinking it's real, coming up with an explanation so they can get their Nobel Prize too.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I remember. There's like 100 theorists, how many theorists?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Well, there's 1,800 papers published about it. My most cited paper, embarrassingly enough. But yeah, so, so it was, it led to, so this, this, this disaster in some sense led to the, you know, initiation of this new, most powerful instrument ever made to do the cosmic microwave background.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's, that's the Simms Observatory now, of which you are P I.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congratulations.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you very much, yeah.

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool, man. That's a great story.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we gotta write a book. We gotta get to, oh, he should write a book about it. We're all familiar with Polaroid sunglasses. And some subset of those who own them know what they're doing. But I think most people don't.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a type of sunglasses that you want. I always have polarized sunglasses with me in my backpack, just because you never know when you need to polarize.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  We need to hide from the paparazzi. And their flash might bounce off or something, so I need to, I need polarizing sunglasses to block out that bounce light.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so catch us all up on how my polarized observations work.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so light has three primary properties. It's color, spectrum, it's intensity, how bright the light is, and also something called its polarization, least familiar property of light.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And light is electromagnetic wave. So when a wave oscillates, the plane that it's oscillating up and down in, the electric field vectors are going up, down, like that, and the magnetic field vectors are going like that.

• 19:59Chuck Nice?

  So it's two waves, one's going up and down, but the other, I'm sorry, two.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 20:05Chuck Nice?

  One's going up and down, and the other one is going side to side.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magnetic part, electromagnetic wave.

• 20:10Chuck Nice?

  Electromagnetic, okay.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And when light interacts with matter, you see like a glare, you see a reflection there. Well, but polarized sunglasses do is that they oppress and suppress one of those.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oppress.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see, you're sitting between two people here, who take a different understanding of that word.

• 20:29Chuck Nice?

  I sure does know that one day, we's gonna be able to get through, see the mountain top.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Using the polarized sunglasses.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See the other side.

• 20:40Chuck Nice?

  You know, sometimes I just feel tired, like I'm tired light.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tired light.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Oh man, we gotta get all of this into the B-roll. Alright, good. The way that polarized sunglasses work is that they actually suppress one of the two polarization states of light. It happens to be the horizontal one, and that's why you want to wear them at the beach, or you want to wear them when you're driving, because you get that glare. Or skiing. Or skiing, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, when you're skiing. And that's why they're more expensive, because you have to add this film that has molecules that are actually made of polymers, that actually suppressed one of those two states of light, but let the rest in, because you don't want to be totally dark. Right. So polarized sunglasses suppress one of the two polarization states of light. They make light 50% darker, also in photography called neutral density filter. Neutral density filter. Exactly, yeah. So the film that's on these glasses actually knocks out one of the two polarization states of light, the one that is responsible for the glare that you see. For the glare.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  So that means if you have two of them, and if they are oriented just right... So here's some light coming through. Yeah. Okay. So this is a very expensive demo here. So this is actually knocking out half of the light in there, because only half, it's an unpolarized source, so half of it's polarized, one way, half is polarized the other way. The source is unpolarized. Right. And then if you put another polarized source in front of it, and as I rotate it, eventually the axis of polarization will be orthogonal, and that will block out 100% of the light. Perpendicular. Do you see it perpendicular? There it is. So now it's completely orthogonal, or perpendicular, as you would say. And then, as I rotate it slightly off-axis, now it lets in some light. It lets the light through. So that's how polarization works, that's why you can see through the glare, it doesn't affect your eyes, it doesn't hurt your eyes when you're skiing, as you said.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  And so that's what these instruments are doing. They're looking for polarization, not of optical light, but of microwave light from the Big Bang, the leftover heat from the Big Bang. So remember I said inflation? Inflation is this theory that there's this quantum field that fluctuated that produced everything that we know and love about the Big Bang. It would also produce what are called gravitational waves, waves in the fabric of spacetime itself. Those waves would perturb the electrons, the protons, early hydrogen atoms in the universe when the CMB, or cosmic microwave background, was produced about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. When light interacts with matter, as you see from the glare, it becomes polarized. That matter would be polarized, that matter and its orientation would change depending on how much gravitational wave... Energy was present when the CMB was produced.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  So it's actually a gravitational wave detector. We're using the photons of the cosmic background as a type of film, if you will, and onto which these waves of gravity, if they exist, and only if they exist.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They get a.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  They get a polarization to them, a curling, twisting, uh, pattern of polarization that called, we call it B-mode polarization.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  So it's a, it's a lot of logical steps, but actually it's, it's very well tested and very well theorized. It just hasn't been detected yet.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's quality physics. Go into that. Yeah.

• 23:27Chuck Nice?

  That's super cool, man.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, literally. And we have to use, we can't use, you know, we can't use an iPhone. We gotta cool our detectors down to my colleague Suzanne Staggs at Princeton. Uh, she's built detectors that operate at point one degree above absolute zero.

• 23:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Using isotopes of helium. Oh, she does incredible stuff. And they're superconducting detectors. They're basically little thermometers. So you know, you go outside, and not in New York, but in San Diego, you go outside, you can see the sun with your hand. You could basically detect where the sun is using its infrared and that your skin can absorb infrared heat. Well, so too, we can have detectors that can see microwaves and infrared radiation. And, but they have to operate where it's really cold. Otherwise, it's like building, you know, the biggest, you know, James Webb's telescope and putting it in Manhattan.

• 24:08Chuck Nice?

  And so what's the fluctuation of temperature that you're looking for between what the universe has cooled to? And what would have been present, uh, right at the Big Bang?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly what we're looking for. So there'll be deviations in about a part in a billion. So a nanokelvin. So in other words, if, if the universe on average is about 2.7 kelvin.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  It would be 2.7 plus a nanokelvin in that direction and 2.7 minus one nanokelvin. So you're looking at the ninth decimal place, right? So.

• 24:35Chuck Nice?

  A billionth of a degree.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Billionth of a degree.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Above absolute, uh, from.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Wait, wait, wait. And somebody gave you money to do this?

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That's insane.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me drive home. Why we need inflation?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because.

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you why, okay? Because we're going through a transition.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this direction. It's 2.7, what's the, give me a few more decimal places.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  2.726?

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 2.726 degrees in that direction in the universe.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I look in the other direction.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 2.76 degrees.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and how the hell do they know to be the same temperature as each other?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To a thousandth of a degree.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this room.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The temperature fluctuates by degrees.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By whole degrees in this corner, that corner.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over there, near a lamp. The whole universe is that.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:33Chuck Nice?

  Just one.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so what, what Guth said was, the way to get that to be the case, when the universe was small, and all talking to itself, in equilibrium, temperature equilibrium.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then it quickly expanded.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like so fast, it couldn't go out of equilibrium with itself. So it all has the markings of that same temperature from a bajillion years ago.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool. Hence, the justification for inflation.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 26:00Chuck Nice?

  Because all of that expansion, all at once.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rapidly.

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  It gives you the uniformity.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  Across the entire expansion.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 26:08Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I'm done.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we need to stop. It's a cause and queries.

• 26:13Chuck Nice?

  This is crazy.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come back.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  He's in L2.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's going to L2. On the stakeout.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  That's insane.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is insane.

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  That, I mean, that is literally, who thinks like this? Who thinks like this? Oh my God.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Wow, that's brilliant. I mean, that's, that's, that's really cool.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the inflation explains it, but then we needed a cause for the inflation.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had to pull that out of our ass. What was that?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Basically, I mean, it results, it's related to what's called the multiverse. Yeah, basically, without the multiverse, you don't get inflation in most models, according to most.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  And that's causes some people like.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a phase transition.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  There's a phase transition, yeah. And of the, the actual dynamics of it can be explained using quantum field theory, which is the theory everywhere in space. There's a quantum field.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay, you guys, right now, you sound. Like an episode of Star Trek.

• 27:05Chuck Nice?

  They love phrase based transitions.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get to the question now. Come on.

• 27:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right. Oh, man, I got so excited. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Keating, uh, 10 year old Ruben and six year old Eli here from Harrisburg, PA.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  If everything was compacted into one tiny dot, smaller than a speck of dust before the Big Bang, what indeed formed the dust? What was around prior to the Big Bang? Doesn't this mean that there was another universe that collapsed to form ours? So what's the deal?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  I wish that those young people would have said, I have a very simple question for you. You know, they're basically asking what caused the Big Bang? Cause the universe to start expanding in the first place. So the, the mark of a good scientist should be, we don't know, we don't know for sure. And there are alternative.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what he says when he doesn't know something is the mark of a good scientist. When he doesn't know.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  That's right. And my wife sends me to the grocery store.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the mark of a crappy scientist who should have known and doesn't.

• 28:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  That's why we call it research. You know, my PhD.

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you mean is it is not known in the field. Not that you don't know it.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But perhaps you should.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  We are trying to know the answer.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We is the full community.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  A community of scientists, but specifically on the Simons Observatory. Their very question is the question the Simons Observatory is in part designed to answer. Was there, was there any sense? Stephen Hawking used to say it's nonsensical to ask what happened before the Big Bang because time came into existence.

• 28:34Chuck Nice?

  Good to say.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  He said, it's like asking what's north of the North Pole, which we all know, Santa Claus, right? There's gotta be Santa Claus up there. But in reality, we can answer that question in the affirmative. As you actually hinted at, there could have been a universe that existed beforehand that actually collapsed in what we used to call a big crunch. Now we call it a bounce. There are actually some of the most eminent theorists on earth, including those that.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never liked crunch because that implies it's brittle and it makes a crackling sound.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  But it's serial revenue.

• 28:59Chuck Nice?

  And delicious. Anything with the word crunchy, it's gotta be good.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Captain, how do they punctuate that? So, uh, so the actual answer is we're trying to. To determine not what happened because in science you can't prove something happened like you can prove one plus one equals two. Or one times one equals two as he told our future friend Terrence. Uh, but, but in reality, we can't prove a, a physical fact, but we can falsify alternative models. So if we see this twisting, roiling, twisting pattern of polarization called curl modes or B modes. That will falsify the other models, that there was a big crunch, that there was a, a previous existing universe. In a cyclical model, so we can prove those wrong. And, uh, getting more data about this, if we do see it, that would be the death knell for the alternative models. And that would be a huge triumph in, in the history of cosmology.

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So you don't know the answer. Okay.

• 29:49Chuck Nice?

  All right. Glad we cleared that up. All right. This is, uh.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's good. It's good to know that floating ideas.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do have ways of being tested.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And rejected.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Cause some things you can just conjecture anything literally like thousands of theories did that are consistent after the fact. But the key thing is to do it before.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want a prediction, not a post-diction.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. Retro, retro.

• 30:10Chuck Nice?

  Good day, gentlemen. This is Matt from Oklahoma. My burning question about is about the origins of the universe. What exactly are we trying to gain by looking into the past? Will it help advance the population on earth in a technological standpoint? Or is it solely for the history books?

• 30:31Chuck Nice?

  I, I got a feeling that, uh, Matt D has a little problem with your work.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But as polite as that was.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's really questioning your existence.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I have to justify it to myself and the taxpayers as well. Um, and I don't mind that. And actually I want to ask you guys that as they're stepping, cause Matt's not here. Uh, what's the most, what's your favorite day on the calendar every year?

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  My favorite, my birthday.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Your birthday. What about you, Neil?

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the four cardinal points.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the calendar.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So what are those?

• 30:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The equinoxes and the solstices.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Okay. That's right.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  You know what? When, when he was like, I like the four cardinal points. I was like, Jesus, Neil.

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  But then I was like, oh my God, he actually does. Cause as long as I've known him, he's the only person that points those days out to you.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:17Chuck Nice?

  Like if we're texting on that day, he will point out to you.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:21Chuck Nice?

  Like all those days.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  I look forward to those days because that's when he's on Twitter. I know that's the only time.

• 31:25Chuck Nice?

  That's what I am.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  So you mentioned it and it's related to yours. So it's your birthday. What is a birthday? What is something like Christmas or anniversary, the kid's birthday, whatever you want. But it's a beginning. And why do you like that? Because you have no idea from firsthand evidence what happened before you were born, do you Chuck? You have to rely on other people's witnessed eyewitness testimony.

• 31:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, I had video.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I don't want to see that.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was reincarnated, so he has knowledge.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  He had his own big crunch too. So people want to know what happened before they came here. It's the ultimate in history. And that fulfills a need in us. Like, does knowing history create, you know, some excess GDP or something? No, but it's part of being a well-rounded, educated, civilized society. And knowing the answers to the big questions is what makes us different from the animals. We're the only people. Homo sapien means one who is wise. Not one who knows, it's one who is wise. So we have wisdom that is to ask questions that perhaps have no answer. But that's what makes us unique and different from all other species.

• 32:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay, listen, I think you defended yourself well.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, we'll give him that.

• 32:32Chuck Nice?

  So there you go, Matt.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me some more.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. This is Alan Rayer, who says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Keating. I always wondered how and when will CMB last in our frame of reference? When will radio waves kick in? Should I say CRB?

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that. Let me preamble that by saying, radio waves, at one point, in a not that distant past, included what would later be called microwaves.

• 33:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And microwaves are simply small radio waves, microwaves. And they're really like a few centimeters, but and radio waves are even longer than that. So, so historically, it's still radio waves. But, but since we have a word for it, we use it. The small radio waves, we call microwaves. Okay, pick it up from there.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  So the, the, the, if you go out into the universe and you make a little box and it's one cubic centimeter, okay? Inside of that box will be mostly nothing. There might be maybe, maybe, you know, a proton or neutrino. But mostly there'll be 419 photons from the big bang. And they all have an average wavelength of about two millimeters. On average, there's a spread, it's a black body. So that two millimeter wavelength over time has stretched from much, much shorter wavelengths in for, from, you know, before that it was infrared, then it was optical, then it was ultraviolet, and eventually it was gamma ray. When the universe came into existence, highly energetic.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that was a photon that you can describe that way moving through the volume before recombination, right?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, it wasn't. Yeah.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can think, can you?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking of the free photons since then.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a temperature from which it, but you're saying we're okay.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  We can extrapolate back to.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can go before that. It's just not a free photon.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  It's not, it's not a free, yeah, it's scattering.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a scattered photon. Okay.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Just as you did that video recently, it's beautiful, about how long it takes for a photon to get out of the sun.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes. Okay.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Tightly coupled matter and radiation, the universe been expanding and cooling. So eventually it will get into the radio waves, but you know, keep paying your taxes because that's going to take billions of years. Universe has to go expand by more than a factor of 10 from where it is now, which could take more than a factor of 10 times the age of the universe.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the wavelength 10 times bigger is basically when we start calling it a radio wave. Okay. So the universe has to be 10 times bigger.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's stretching into the universe.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yep.

• 34:54Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the answer is yes.

• 34:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  You're just not gonna see it, buddy.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  I don't know if you want to spend money on the trademark of that.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. But just to clarify, before it was the cosmic microwave background, it was the cosmic visible background.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or infrared background, then the cosmic visible, cosmic.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Optical.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, visible.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And then ultraviolet on the other side, and with a cosmic X-ray background.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then gamma ray background.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  That's right. Yep.

• 35:20Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:21Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 35:45Chuck Nice?

  This is Yogesh Jod, who says, hello, Lord Nice, Dr. Keating and my personal astrophysicist.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 35:52Chuck Nice?

  Yogesh from Nagpur, India. My question is, is the CMB anisotropy really random? For those who may not know, what is anisotropy?

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Means not isotropic.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense. And why would we and then not just, why isn't it just a?

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A.

• 36:12Chuck Nice?

  Acid drop. A acid, right.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 36:15Chuck Nice?

  Well, anyway.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so tell me about isotropy.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so isotropy is the feature that you have complete uniformity and things look the same. And they are the same, and homogeneity, it's similar in.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In every direction.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  In every direction that you look.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which way you point the telescope.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  No matter what.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you're ever flying in an airplane and you're in the clouds.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  You go through a cloud.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you go through a cloud.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that cloud, to you, when you look out the window, it looks perfectly isotropic. Anywhere you look out the window, and if you're in the cockpit.

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the same brightness.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  It's the same brightness, it kind of looks like you're inside of a ping pong ball. Everything is the same brightness and intensity, that's isotropic. That's perfect isotropy, the principle of looking the same everywhere. But anisotropy just means fluctuations from that, from that amount.

• 36:53Chuck Nice?

  So it's not that.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  It's not that.

• 36:54Chuck Nice?

  You look in one space, you'll see something different than you look in the other space.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  That's right. Now, if the universe were perfectly symmetric at earlier times, the amount of matter was the same everywhere, the amount of dark matter was the same everywhere, any exotic particles, everything was exactly identical, the universe would have no way to know where it should form a cluster of galaxies. A single galaxy, a planet, et cetera, et cetera, right? So if you had perfect isotropy, and Isaac Newton realized this 300 plus years ago, perfect isotropy is incompatible with our existence, because we don't see perfection wherever we look, we aspire to.

• 37:25Chuck Nice?

  We also know that, and that there's clumps of, of dark matter.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, we know that we exist.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  We know. So it's kind of what's called.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are clumps of matter.

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  We are clumps of matter, our cells.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  The question's, I guess, is asking, why, what is that significant of? And it's basically related to the fact that we formed in a region where there was an excess of dark matter.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Where did that excess of dark matter know where to coagulate, though? That's where inflation comes in, because all fields, all quantum fields, have tiny fluctuations in them, they're not, they are not isotropic either.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum physics enabled this universe.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  That's right, we are quantum fluctuation, we are the product of quantum, if inflation's right, we shouldn't presuppose that it is, we're looking to see if there is or not. So, yeah, so that, and those pools of dark matter knew where to coagulate because of the fluctuations in the quantum field.

• 38:11Chuck Nice?

  So now, these fluctuations, are they disruptions in the field itself? That create something pops out of the field and that's the so the universe itself is it just one big field?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  According to some, according to some that the that the universe is in a particular instantiation of these conditions of our quantum field in what's called the multiverse. When we were kids, there was just a universe, right? Now there's a multiverse, which some say should be more encompassing. Just as we know, we're just one star, one planet, there's one many, many billions of galaxies. There could be trillions or an infinite number of universes. But where do they inhabit? They inhabit the multiverse. The multiverse is the collection of all points in four dimensional spacetime and maybe higher spacetime that could, will or ever will exist. So, yeah, so we are a fluctuation in that greater space. You're absolutely right. And then within those fluctuations, it's like waves in the ocean. There are waves upon waves upon waves. And we are the manifestation of this infinite series of wave trains that perhaps dates back to the big bang itself.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, as insulting as it sounds, to accuse someone of being a fluctuation is actually quite the compliment. Cosmically speaking.

• 39:16Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. All right, good question there.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time for just a couple more.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Brandon Christian. Brandon Christian says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Dr. Keating. This is Brandon from New Jersey. My question today is, do we have any idea what could possibly be on the other side of the CMB? Would it be considered a part of our universe if we were to discover it? Or would it be something else altogether?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Ah, okay. So the CMB is the shell of photons. It's a fictitious shell of photons that are coming to us from a particular event in time.

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is fictitious? Why does that word show up in your sense?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Well, because it's an artificial, it's a non, there's no place you can go where the CMB is, which is what the question is asking, right? The CMB is a representative of an event that occurred. It's the event at which the very first electrons fused with the very first protons, making the very first atom, hydrogen. When that happened, the universe became transparent to those waves of light that were existing beforehand. Those waves of photon then can free stream and come towards our telescopes. They come in all directions. So it's a moment, as you look back in space, you're looking back in time. So it's a moment in time and it looks like a shell to us. We look out and we see a shell of photons, a little bit hotter. Here a little bit colder there, but on average 2.726 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  There are tiny fluctuations in that. So beyond that just means earlier in time. So yes, there were things earlier in time. But it was a pretty boring life. It was a pretty boring before that.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's nearly 400,000 years before that.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for 400,000 years, there was nothingness except for there was protons and neutrons and plasma and so forth and electrons. But there was no cosmic event. There's no place. There's no there there.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the universe is glowing at these different temperatures.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was a plasma. It was almost uniform plasma.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Expanding, cooling, and then shifting and waveling, red shifting and waveling.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Wow. Super cool. This is 1701 Kara who says, greetings from Tennessee, Dr. Tyson and comrade Nice. Why you gotta make me Russian?

• 41:13Chuck Nice?

  I have a cosmic query regarding the Higgs field. Is the current model of the Higgs field evenly distributed? Or could there be areas in spacetime where the field is more dense?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  This is a great question.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. Could that mean that it's giving different masses to particles over here than over there?

• 41:33Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't that be wild?

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be a messed up universe.

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What mass are you? Today or yesterday? Right?

• 41:42Speaker 02

  So a good friend of mine, Matt Strassler, guys should have him on. He wrote a wonderful book about this called Waves in an Impossible Sea. And it's all about the Higgs field. I'm glad that.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just like that impossible word.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  I know. I love it. You'd be surprised how many books have the word impossible. So the Higgs field is what, and that's why it's impressive. Most people talk about the Higgs boson. That's not what's so fundamental. The Higgs boson is just one instantiation, one creation moment of a particular fluctuation of this field called the Higgs field. Yes, it could vary from time to time. And the most exciting thing is that it's what's called a scalar field. I don't want to get too technical. But there's only, that's the first and only scalar field that we know about. The other one that's postulated but not known yet to exist, we hope we can, you know, shed some light on it, no pun intended, is the inflaton field. Those are scalar fields. They don't have what are called vector properties. They don't have property. They only have a value, like the temperature in this room is a scalar. It's a point. Every point in space, there's a value, you know, 30 degrees Celsius. It's kind of hot over here.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  You know, I'm talking it gets even hotter. But the point is it's a number at every point. But the Higgs field is a special case like that. The other types of field like fermions, quarks and other types of fields in photon fields, they are not. They have a sort of direction at each point in spacetime. So the

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a gravitational field has a value and a direction that it wants to pull you.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so, so this just has a value.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yep, so she's

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why do we care about that?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Um, so if it did vary, it could be connected the two, the Higgs field and the inflaton. So that would be really exciting. It would say that the particle, the field that is responsible for giving inertia and mass to massive particles was in existence and coupled somehow to the origin of the universe itself. So maybe there's some connection between the masses of all particles that were, are, or ever will be and, and this in the initial phase of the universe called the inflation.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something we haven't figured out yet, because the, the, all the masses look pretty random.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we have no fundamental theory that predicts.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of, of the masses of particles in the universe.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. That's a great question.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  All right, Eric Venus, eh, and he says, yes, like the planet and the goddess.

• 43:39Chuck Nice?

  He says, I understand that as we look further into the universe, we're looking further back in time. What have we learned so far about the early universe that we can expect to impact life on Earth in the near future? So is there anything looking back that we can use looking forward?

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, we, we, there's a lot of mysteries that we still don't know about. We don't know how the very first galaxies formed out of nothingness that was left over from the CMB. We don't know exactly how they went through this transition. It's called the cosmic dark ages. So just as we learn about history, we learn about, you know, the, the actual medieval dark ages that impacts decisions that we can make as a society. So too, I think, well, learning about how the early universe evolved, the types of physics that were in play. And yes, if there is, as some hinting, uh, there are some hints that actually some of the bulk properties of the universe, most particularly dark energy, is evolving. We need to know that. We need to know, was it different in the past? Was dark energy, uh, different value than it has today? Was the Hubble constant?

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you thought it was constant for the whole universe, and you'd later, and we now might be true that it has changed in the past, it could change in the future.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  And that could in, involve the properties of the space-time itself, what's called vacuum energy of, of the universe itself. And that could lead to, again, you know, a different scenario for the end of the universe. Everyone always talks about the beginning of the universe, the big rip, the big crunch. We don't know what would happen, but, you know, as I say, keep paying your taxes, because it could be another trillion years before we find the answer.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I had another fast bit to that. It's not as dramatic as your answer. But I came of age when we had catalogs of peculiar galaxies. And they were called peculiar, we didn't know what the hell they were. Only in the era of computing were we able to simulate what Must have happened to ordinary galaxies to make them look like that because they're colliding with each other. Train wrecks. And so, once we learned that that had happened in the past to create this catalog of peculiar galaxies, we now say, hey, wait a minute, we're headed towards Andromeda. We're gonna be one of these simulations that somebody else says, hey, Dave.

• 45:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Future graduate student.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Future, in the future, say, hey, look at those two galaxies over there. Isn't that beautiful?

• 45:39Chuck Nice?

  Wow, why, look, they didn't always look like a sombrero. Why are there so many Kardashians in that galaxy? In Milk Drama.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, one more, last one.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Matt Newcomb says this, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Keating, Lord Nice, my name is Matt Newcomb, like Duke Newcomb, and I'm from San Diego, California.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  San Diego, that's your hometown. I mean, your current hometown.

• 45:59Chuck Nice?

  I'm curious about Simon's Observatory ability to detect new particles. How do you know what to look for and how does it collect that data? Cheers from a fellow science educator.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, can you discover things you're not looking for? That's a side light to that question.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Can you predict serendipity? So the CMB itself was discovered accidentally. They weren't looking for this glow of the big bang's aftermath. So it's actually great, but there are, what I love about the Simon's Observatory is that there are things we're swinging for the fences on. We don't know if inflation took place. If we see it, it could be the same hullabaloo as happened with BISA.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our international audience, when you swing for the fences, it's a baseball reference. And it means you're swinging for a very deep homerun. And so, you might strike out. When you swing that way, you might strike out. But if you connect all the way.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  So, yeah, for international listeners, think a cricket century. That's what.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's it.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll be even better. Look at that. So we're going for the cricket century, if you like. But there's things that are guaranteed to happen. They're guaranteed to know about. And that's the only particle of dark matter. Do you know that we've detected dark matter? There's dark matter detection. It's called the neutrino. Neutrino has every property of dark matter. It just doesn't make up enough to so-called, you know, make the universe flat and so forth. But we've detected dark matter. However, embarrassingly enough, shamefully enough for physicists, with their 17 elementary particles, we don't know the mass of three of those 17. We know the mass exquisitely accurately for the other 14, the higgs boson, the electron.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What don't we know?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  We don't know the mass of the three types of neutrinos, the three neutrino flavors. We have a lower bound and we have an upper bound. We don't have a measurement. It's like someone looking at Chuck and saying, "Oh, you're somewhere between, you know, one inch tall and 1,000 feet tall." Like, it's interesting, but it's true.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's not true, but not useful. That's a beautiful way to phrase it. So what we're going to go after is the, because we can take these early images of dark matter and the composition of the universe that is affected by them, we can effectively weigh the neutrino by getting enough of them together. They're very light. They're a million times less massive than the electron, at least. They could be even less. We can, for sure, constrain their properties, weigh them, if you will, but only by collecting them on the universe's most grand scales. Literally, to weigh enough of them, you need to measure a huge fraction of the universe's volume. And that's what we're gonna do. So we're guaranteed to make an imprint on that and detect, not new particles perhaps, but we could possibly detect new particles. We just don't know if they're out there. And that's why serendipity is so hard to predict.

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. That sounded like one of Yogi Bear's predictions. It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  When you come to a fork in the road.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take it, yeah.

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This conversation about the beginnings of things reminds me just of how interesting that question is.

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can spend all our lives studying what is what already exists, what will become of what already exists.

• 48:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What makes that scientifically accessible is that you can find some other object that's like it and do a different experiment on that to check for what properties it has, check for how it will respond to whatever you do to it, to see what it becomes in the future. We can do all of this. That's what most of science is. But there's a subset of scientists that are not content with knowing what something is or what it will be. They want to know where it came from. What are its origins? Sure, we did it for the Earth. There was a day we didn't know where the Earth came from, or the Sun. We found other

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  planets. We found other stars. We see them being born. And our star looks like that? We say that's probably how our star was born. Okay, how about the galaxy? Well, we've got JWST helping us there. How did galaxies form? There's a point in the early universe where all that would have happened. We got top people working on that. But you keep doing this and you reach a point where, well, how did the universe begin? Is there another universe to compare it with? No. Is there some, some, no. What do you do? We say, well, maybe there's a multiverse. That would account for a beginning of our universe. But then,

• 50:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  all that does is push the origins question back one more notch in the past. Fine. You can tell me how this universe got here. Now tell me how the multiverse got here. And whatever made that, tell me how that got here. That's what makes questions of origins so challenging and so fulfilling when you finally arrive at those answers.

• 50:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a cosmic perspective. This has been a Cosmic Queries CMB edition.

• 50:56Chuck Nice?

  That's what it is.

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it was, that's what it is, and that's what it will be. Brian, thanks for coming.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and we can find you online, where?

• 51:03Speaker 02

  BrianKeaton.com/StarTalk. I've got some special giveaways from your listeners as well.

• 51:08Chuck Nice?

  Whoa.

• 51:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Not Mars meteorites, but other types of meteorites.

• 51:11Chuck Nice?

  What? He's the only guest that comes here and leaves swag. That's amazing.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  I love what you guys do. Seriously, I love what you guys do.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, thank you.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  You do the most important thing, which is to teach the audience, teach the public how important science is to realize.

• 51:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And also, your book that you...

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Losing the Nobel Prize.

• 51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Losing the Nobel Prize.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Into the Impossible: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner. And then in the fall, coming out on my birthday, September 9th, is Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. It's a self-help guide for STEM nerds like me and Neil and maybe like you.

• 51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds like the publisher's milking that subtitle there. Go through life like a Nobel Prize winner.

• 51:46Chuck Nice?

  Right. Drive like a Nobel Prize winner.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cook breakfast like a Nobel Prize winner.

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  Exercise like a Nobel Prize winner.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  You gotta give me ideas. I gotta franchise here. Thank you, guys. You guys can do the blurbs on the back.

• 52:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you need to come up with one that says, "Lay on the couch and watch TV like a Nobel Prize winner." That one will be a bestseller, I guarantee you. I guarantee you that.

• 52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, Brian, always good.

• 52:12Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 52:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until next time, this has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries edition. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.