Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Philosophy of Physics with Elise Crull About this episode What happens when physics meets the big questions of philosophy? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice sit down with Elise Crull, philosopher of physics at CUNY and author of The Einstein Paradox, to explore physics, philosophy, and how thought experiments shape real science.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, why is it every time we have a show that goes to the frontier of science, you need an edible?
0:04 Chuck Nice? Uh, because that is how I cope with science. Some people don't need to cope with science, I need to cope with science, and so...
0:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The frontier of philosophy, quantum physics, and physics, coming right up.
0:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck, nice with me, Chuck, it baby.
0:42 Chuck Nice? Hey, what's happening, Neil?
0:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, love it when I look over and I see you there.
0:46 Chuck Nice? Oh, you know, the feeling's mutual.
0:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, thank you.
0:49 Chuck Nice? It's almost like I'm looking at myself.
0:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, we're doing something we haven't yet done on this show.
0:56 Chuck Nice? Alright.
0:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're gonna do the philosophy of physics.
0:59 Chuck Nice? What?
1:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know.
1:01 Chuck Nice? That's why we haven't done it.
1:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we had somebody right up the street.
1:08 Chuck Nice? In the hood.
1:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, literally in the hood, up in Harlem, and this is Elise, can I pronounce your last name?
1:14 Speaker 02 Kral.
1:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kral.
1:15 Speaker 02 Elise Kral.
1:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Elise Kral, welcome to StarTalk.
1:17 Speaker 02 Hey, thanks for having me.
1:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so you're a professor of philosophy in the philosophy department.
1:21 Speaker 02 That's right, yep.
1:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is a CUNY.
1:23 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you authored a book just last year came out, but it was like a very serious academic tome, The Einstein Paradox. This is a very seductive title, okay? Einstein, paradox, the debate on non-locality and incompleteness?
1:41 Chuck Nice? Ooh.
1:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, come on, oh, in 1935.
1:44 Speaker 02 So, the title actually comes from Schrödinger. He had a folder in his archives.
1:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Schrödinger?
1:50 Speaker 02 Schrödinger.
1:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of cat fame.
1:53 Speaker 02 And in fact, the cat was born in this correspondence with Einstein that he had labeled in German, The Einstein Paradox. And so, we translated those letters into English, many of them for the first time, and it's all the famous physicists talking to one another about what this physics is.
2:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, why can't regular people read this?
2:10 Speaker 02 They sure can. It's just that the primary literature in particular, just reading the way that Einstein and Schrödinger and Heisenberg and Bohr talked to one another.
2:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They had their own language.
2:20 Chuck Nice? Wow.
2:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay.
2:21 Speaker 02 They did, and they had their own...
2:23 Chuck Nice? Like twins.
2:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They just have their own thing.
2:25 Chuck Nice? Twins that get their own language?
2:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
2:27 Speaker 02 Except in this case, their own language was often German.
2:30 Chuck Nice? Oh, okay.
2:32 Speaker 02 Some cases, Danish. But their own...
2:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Danish would be for Neil's bore.
2:37 Speaker 02 That's right, that's right. But they all had a really nuanced stand, like they had different ideas about what was problematic about quantum mechanics.
2:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting. Quantum mechanics is just being born.
2:47 Chuck Nice? Right.
2:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At that time.
2:49 Speaker 02 It's about 10 years in at this point.
2:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
2:51 Speaker 02 And what precipitated this was Einstein, well Einstein had had conversations with two guys, Podolsky and Rosen, about what he felt was an issue that quantum mechanics was correct, but it wasn't finished yet, it wasn't complete.
3:04 Chuck Nice? And guess what? He was right.
3:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's still isn't complete. So, that book is by Cambridge University Press, which has quite the catalog of astronomy and physics books for the public.
3:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I mean, the book is intended for people who are interested in learning from the physicists at that time themselves. Their philosophical and physics sort of worldviews, and learning about this history.
3:29 Chuck Nice? I don't understand the use of philosophical when it comes to their physics.
3:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But let's start right there.
3:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, good.
3:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You are a professor of philosophy specializing in the philosophy of physics.
3:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what is the philosophy of physics in modern times? Because I know what it was in the day. Because in the day...
3:49 Speaker 02 What's the day? Antiquity or the Renaissance?
3:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, post Galileo.
3:55 Speaker 02 Newtonian worldview.
3:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
3:56 Speaker 02 Okay, got it.
3:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, back then...
3:57 Speaker 02 Scientific revolution.
3:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes. Back then, philosophers were physicists. I mean, they were one and the same.
4:05 Speaker 02 That's right.
4:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, in fact, Newton's greatest work has the word philosoph, the word physics isn't even in the title.
4:13 Speaker 02 That's right, the Principia doesn't even have equations in the first part.
4:16 Chuck Nice? Okay.
4:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, that the title is, well, in Latin, but the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.
4:23 Chuck Nice? Okay.
4:23 Speaker 02 That's right, natural philosophy.
4:24 Chuck Nice? Natural philosophy.
4:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, natural philosophy was physics. It's the deep thinking about how nature works. Okay.
4:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So we got that. But into the 20th century, you get quantum physics where you can't deduce from an armchair, and you have the expanding universe.
4:38 Chuck Nice? Right.
4:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who thought that up, right? And so all this...
4:41 Chuck Nice? And the confirmation of all these things that were mathematically postulated and then proven to be the actual case.
4:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, what I've noticed...
4:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
4:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that there was a sort of... A separation of the turf.
4:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the philosopher couldn't really contribute to physics unless they were actually a physicist. You could still think philosophically, but you needed to be in the lab. You couldn't just sit back and observe and think deep thoughts.
5:12 Speaker 02 Well, Einstein was never in a lab.
5:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, but he was a physicist, not a philosopher.
5:17 Speaker 02 I don't think he would make that distinction.
5:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me say it differently.
5:21 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He was trained as a physicist, not trained as a philosopher.
5:23 Chuck Nice? Oh.
5:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's the distinction I'm making.
5:25 Chuck Nice? So here's the real test.
5:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is, that is the distinction I'm making.
5:28 Chuck Nice? If Mel Brooks were doing a sketch with him, would he say to Einstein in the philosopher unemployment line, "Did you bullshit today? Did you try to bullshit today? Are you planning on bullshitting in the future?"
5:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that from History of the World?
5:44 Chuck Nice? History of the World.
5:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, yes.
5:45 Chuck Nice? That's History of the World.
5:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the actual quote. Yeah, so I'm distinguishing between people who go to school to be a philosopher and then attempt to contribute to the physical sciences. Whereas that, you could do that in the day. And I don't see that happening today, unless you're busting that wide open in your existence
6:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in the world and in this office right now.
6:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, a couple of comments.
6:08 Chuck Nice? All right.
6:09 Speaker 02 First of all, in the German university system in which Einstein and Schrödinger and Bohr and all these guys were trained, they learned a hell of a lot of philosophy.
6:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sure.
6:17 Speaker 02 And even Einstein into his post-
6:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not saying people didn't have philosophy chops. I'm saying if you go to school to be a philosopher in the 20th century-
6:27 Speaker 02 Fair enough.
6:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You became less and less useful to the moving frontier of the physical science. That's the only point I'm making. Now go. Unless you go bust that open.
6:34 Speaker 02 Well, the first thing is, I don't accept your premise that in order to do what I do-
6:39 Chuck Nice? That's how you start an argument. I think we're-
6:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How you start and win an argument.
6:43 Chuck Nice? We're welling our way into a philosophical debate.
6:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your premise is invalid. Okay, go.
6:49 Speaker 02 Well, a premise can't be invalid. Only a whole argument can be valid. But I'm being an asshole on purpose because it's funny. The, the idea that what I need to do is be useful. To science to be important or worth doing as a human endeavor is a pretty narrow view.
7:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except that's how it used to be. And that's, that's.
7:08 Speaker 02 How what used to be?
7:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Philosophers were useful to the moving frontier. You have Kant thinking up stuff that the nebular hypothesis was kinda cool. And you had.
7:20 Speaker 02 So Einstein's own ability to get the theory of special relativity had to do with his taking a study, a different approach than Lorenz and Poincaré and others who were looking for a similar theory.
7:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
7:34 Speaker 02 He said, let's step back. That is a philosoph, like that is a choice to step back and say, we have these data. Let's understand them a different way.
7:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not saying.
7:40 Speaker 02 Now, if you're saying it's about how we specialize into different disciplines, yes.
7:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
7:44 Speaker 02 That is something that naturally occurred as our measuring apparatuses and our technology got better.
7:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Got it.
7:50 Speaker 02 We were able to be like, and you go to a conference in astrophysics nowadays, how many talks do you even are interested in talking like? Hyper specialized. Fair enough.
8:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I published a paper, a hundred people in the world will understand it. Or, no, a hundred people in the world will care about it.
8:07 Speaker 02 For me, it's like maybe six.
8:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, this works.
8:09 Speaker 02 They're my buddies, you know? Okay, yeah. It's like when people are like, oh, how do I find you in the internet? Like, Google Elise and philosophy of physics, because I think I'm the only one.
8:17 Chuck Nice? Let me just, let me back up as a layperson and kind of broaden the view here. The intertwining that Neil was talking about that existed at one point.
8:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:29 Chuck Nice? That you now say has kind of dissolved because of highly specialized training.
8:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:37 Chuck Nice? Where does that intersection happen now?
8:40 Speaker 02 Good. Yeah.
8:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good question.
8:41 Speaker 02 That's great. And I think that's exactly the question we wanna, um, so you're asking, am I gonna, am I gonna blow it open now?
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
8:48 Speaker 02 I think the fringe, like the edge of, the edge of science right now is in this place. So you're talking about people who are looking for a theory of, in this place.
8:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In this place.
8:59 Speaker 02 In this place metaphorically and intellectually.
9:03 Speaker 02 Right now.
9:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It happens here and now.
9:04 Speaker 02 Localized entirely in this room.
9:06 Chuck Nice? We're in the room where it happens.
9:13 Speaker 02 We're getting beyond our means to empirically test. And you know, as a cosmologist and astrophysicist, there's a limited amount of data that we-
9:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On that frontier, yes.
9:21 Speaker 02 On that frontier. And that's true also in looking for quantum gra- theories of quantum gravity.
9:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, all of that.
9:26 Speaker 02 Uh, I mean, we haven't yet found conclusive evidence for the Lambda CDM model. That is only for the Lambda CDM model of cosmology. It's the best we have right now.
9:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the cold dark matter and, and dark energy. It's just-
9:39 Speaker 02 The concordance mo- like, the model we think is the best model of the universe right now.
9:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Catch people up. So, we, we know the universe is accelerating in its expansion. And what's causing that, we call dark energy. We just call it that. Yeah, right. We don't know-
9:52 Speaker 02 But it's a black box, quite literally.
9:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then, dark matter- Right. Is a mysterious source of gravity in the universe. In fact, it's 85% of the universe's gravity. And we don't know what that is either. But if we assume it's a thing, because we measure it- Right. And then, we can calculate with it. And with some assumptions about the behavior of matter, we get a sort of a, kind of our own standard model of how the universe works. It's called Lambda CDM. Lambda cold dark matter. And we, we work with it. It gets us some understanding-
10:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, it does some good work for you.
10:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's some good, yeah. It's, it's a workhorse. But it's not a complete- It's not a complete picture. A complete theory, okay.
10:31 Speaker 02 Right. So, this is true in a lot of arenas of physics. And so, what philosophers of physics can do, although I think there are many ways to be a philosopher of science. It's not just, like, you're trained in philosophy, but you sort of ask philosophical questions of science itself.
10:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How many philosophers of physics are there?
10:51 Speaker 02 I don't know. More than five, but less than 200?
10:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Wow.
10:56 Speaker 02 No, maybe there's more than 200. I, it's hard to say, I-
10:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You, you're the first one I've ever met.
11:01 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
11:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I've met philosophers, but just think about everything. Right. You know?
11:06 Speaker 02 Well, it's a small field, to be fair. And I will also say, back to your earlier point, most of us- Have training in physics as well.
11:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
11:13 Speaker 02 Because that's important to us. Like, what I do-
11:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're undergraduate.
11:15 Speaker 02 My undergrad is physics, but then I also continued, I mean, I wrote my doctoral thesis on quantum decoherence. So like, I was learning about the models that people are using-
11:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, physics chops. Yeah.
11:25 Speaker 02 But you have to-
11:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So was that in the physics department or the philosophy department?
11:27 Speaker 02 Um, so I was in the philosophy department, but I was part of a history and philosophy of science program, but I also took a number of physics courses.
11:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From the physics department? Okay, so you just, you just blend in all of that?
11:37 Speaker 02 All the things.
11:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just put it all together.
11:39 Chuck Nice? However-
11:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what we need for someone that busts out.
11:41 Chuck Nice? That's a great way-
11:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To bust a move.
11:43 Chuck Nice? That's a great way to make sure that you get an A.
11:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why?
11:49 Chuck Nice? Because-
11:49 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, what is, how does that correspond to getting a good grade at all?
11:52 Chuck Nice? Here's how it works for getting a good grade.
11:54 Speaker 02 Oh, good, I'm listening.
11:55 Chuck Nice? You have your philosophy people, they don't know crap about physics. And your physics people, they don't know crap about philosophy. So you're just like, "Yeah, you're gonna have to take my word for it."
12:04 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. We're all just pretending, right?
12:09 Chuck Nice? No, go ahead.
12:10 Speaker 02 So this ties into your early question. It's like, something about the, um, extreme specialization has meant that, in particular, the way we train physicists in the US, even at high, in high school, is so divorced from the deep questions about, "But why? And but how?" It's about following a scientific method.
12:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did you study abroad?
12:32 Speaker 02 No, but I, um, when I, um, I've studied, I've looked at education policies, uh, in other countries and sort of- It's, it's no surprise that our-
12:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That we're messed up.
12:43 Speaker 02 We're not, you know, our, we're still the best, best place to go for STEM at the graduate level.
12:48 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:48 Speaker 02 Um, but that's, we're losing that.
12:50 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
12:50 Speaker 02 And there was a history about that. In particular, there were decisions made in the Cold War era to train people in science in a particular way that was gonna get technologies built, that was gonna be good for industry-
13:02 Chuck Nice? Results-oriented.
13:02 Speaker 02 And for the Department of Defense.
13:03 Chuck Nice? Right.
13:04 Speaker 02 That's right.
13:04 Chuck Nice? Weaponry.
13:05 Speaker 02 And it became- Not just not in vogue, but like it became-
13:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In fact, I have the original document in this office.
13:12 Speaker 02 Of the NSF creation of-
13:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, I have that document. Can I reach for it?
13:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, show it to us. Let's have a visual here.
13:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is what you were talking about.
13:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, Vannevar Bush-
13:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's let our people at home-
13:25 Speaker 02 Making a case for why America needs to preserve and fund science.
13:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I think that was an easy case to make because it was physics that won the war. Well, that definitely helps an argument. I'm just saying.
13:46 Speaker 02 This is good. This is funny. That's funny.
13:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? "Science: The Endless Frontier."
13:51 Speaker 02 Ah, yes.
13:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A report to the president.
13:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is 1945. Oh, wow. This established- So this went to the president, this right here? This, he, Vannevar Bush, was basically the first science advisor to a president. Right. Okay, and he's advising-
14:05 Chuck Nice? I don't need one of those. Nobody knows more about science than I do.
14:11 Speaker 02 That's really good.
14:15 Speaker 02 I'm getting angry over here.
14:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's how you know it. So here's what I want you to do. Just read the chapter, the section headings there. Read them. Read them.
14:24 Speaker 02 Introduction.
14:27 Speaker 02 Well played. Excellent. The War Against Disease. These headings, you mean, are like-
14:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
14:32 Speaker 02 "Science and Public Welfare," "Renewal of Our Scientific Talent," "A Problem of Scientific Reconversion,"
14:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
14:40 Speaker 02 "The Means to an End: Responsibilities for the Government."
14:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
14:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, "The Means to an End," okay.
14:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so this, so everything I know and think of about how science happens in the United States, when I pull up this original document, it's all there. And so I have, maybe, is it a bias? I say, "That's how you do science." But-
15:01 Speaker 02 It's how you do-
15:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are you suggesting there's another way to do science?
15:04 Speaker 02 I'm suggesting that when you get to the level of how we educate, when you divorce, you understand science is a thing that's about usefulness and application.
15:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, right.
15:14 Speaker 02 That is one very small color from a spectrum of colors. And I'm also suggesting that when we look at people who are trained in the history and philosophy of science, along with the science itself in high school, they're testing off the charts. And there's something about like being able to answer that or ask that, why? Why are we using this equation to solve for the energy level of a hydrogen atom? Why are we understanding?
15:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That never showed up in any of my classes.
15:40 Speaker 02 That's right.
15:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's absent.
15:41 Speaker 02 Were you taught, you were taught, it's amazing to me that-
15:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was taught physics as a thing, not as a way of thinking. I had to like realize that it was a way of thinking and bring to it the bit of philosophical meanderings that I had engaged in my life. I had to bring that to the physics. That was not there when it was taught.
15:59 Speaker 02 And you're told not to have it there, right?
16:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, not explicitly. It's not encouraged and it's not rewarded.
16:16 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.
16:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
16:36 Chuck Nice? Okay, let me ask this. So what is it about asking these big questions?
16:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The why questions.
16:44 Chuck Nice? The big why questions. What is it about that that contributes to the guiding principles of science itself?
16:54 Speaker 02 Because there's no one recipe for how to do good science.
16:58 Chuck Nice? Hmm, okay.
16:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, it is true. When I go to my different, everybody's got their own angle on science. It's true. There was no centralized approach.
17:09 Speaker 02 Right. Well, but even if there were-
17:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're telling me that this centralized our approach, not to our greater good?
17:18 Speaker 02 I think it did in some ways to our greater good because, I mean, Vannevar Bush wanted the inner core of funding for NSF to be pure science. He thought there was always supposed to be a part of it that wasn't-
17:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whatever funding's left of it.
17:31 Speaker 02 Let us hang our heads in a moment of silence.
17:34 Chuck Nice? Do I get a plane from the NSF?
17:38 Speaker 02 But did you know that if you drop a magnet into a glass of water, it loses its magnetism?
17:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he said that.
17:46 Chuck Nice? I love it.
17:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He said that.
17:47 Chuck Nice? Yeah, and by the way, I'm still right. But it has to be avion one.
18:04 Chuck Nice? Sorry, I'm sorry.
18:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why you keep disrupting the lady?
18:06 Chuck Nice? I know, I'm so sorry.
18:10 Speaker 02 This is like real world out there, right? It's like we're trying to do scholarship and then things. But also, let me ask you this, Neil. Would you have been interested in doing science if it was just told, if it was taught to you as like following a recipe?
18:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I had to.
18:23 Speaker 02 Like the scientific method, like boo, right?
18:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My philosophical interest in the universe was self-driven. It did not come from any book that I was taught.
18:32 Speaker 02 Right.
18:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and my writings today, I don't want to say they're dripping with philosophy, but they, they take an angle on the content where it's not just here, learn this. It's think about it in this other way.
18:46 Chuck Nice? That's very cool.
18:47 Speaker 02 So, I mean, here's a metaphor, if you like. Um, I mean, a lot of people can follow recipes and make really good dishes, really tasty dishes. So there's something wonderful about that. But the truly inventive chefs are the ones who say, well, or, or even the better cooks, I'm a terrible cook, but like are the ones who say, but why do I melt the butter to this temperature? Why do I add the salt at this stage? Or why is this, these flavors work together? Expertise is something that our country is not, has a very interesting tortured relationship. Yeah, that's right.
19:18 Chuck Nice? So let me ask you this. Often, philosophy is thought of as a belief system. Okay. But in science.
19:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Less so in the sciences.
19:28 Chuck Nice? Right, that's what I'm saying. But in science, you definitely don't want to be biased by your beliefs.
19:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good point.
19:36 Chuck Nice? So the one thing you want to do is divorce yourself so that whatever results you get, you're able to accept irrespective of how you feel about them or what you believe. How is that reconciled?
19:52 Speaker 02 Good.
19:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And let me add something to that.
19:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
19:54 Speaker 02 Ooh, there's a lot of good questions.
19:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's go back to Kepler, who was. Dare I say philosophically driven to think that the orbits of the planets could be nested in such a way that they resembled the platonic solids.
20:11 Speaker 02 Nested spheres, which always makes me think of Tupperware for some reason.
20:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what he knew was that geometrically in mathematics, there are only five what are called platonic solids. These are solid shapes where every surface is the same two dimensional shape. So a cube is such a thing. Every side is identical and has six sides. Pyramid is the same, okay, four sides. So you have four triangles and they can all be equilateral triangles. So there are five of these shapes. He saw that there were six planets and he thought to himself, maybe there's a divine connection between the two. Because the planets, it's the universe. It's where God lives, right?
21:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then we're just mere mortals here. God surely knows what he's doing and math is perfect, right? Math is badass. So he nested these in different ways to try to find out whether the separations of the planetary orbits could match what these solids would be if they were nested Tupperware style.
21:21 Speaker 02 He was also thinking in terms of harmonic resonances, but yeah.
21:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and so my question to you is, he, I don't want to say he wasted 10 years. He devoted 10 years to this point of view and it took him that long to abandon it in favor of something that was not so philosophically beautiful. So in that case, getting back to Chuck's point, the philosophy prevented him from seeing the answer because he was driven by this concept of divine perfection.
21:53 Speaker 02 So there's a couple of different ways we're talking about philosophy, right? There's the philosophy of just, I mean, if you go to a philosophy section at Barnes and Nobles or whatever, what they have there in the metaphysics section is some weird, new-agey stuff.
22:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
22:06 Speaker 02 It has nothing to do with what academic philosophers are doing.
22:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
22:11 Speaker 02 And academic philosophers are asking questions about what is the nature of personhood? What is knowledge? Do different people reason in different ways? What are ethical questions? Like, what is the philosophy of law, philosophy of science? These sorts of things. We have specific tools that we bring to bear on that. When scientists think about it, I think they're understanding not philosophy as a discipline, but they're thinking about like a worldview. And we come to everything with a worldview, with a lens.
22:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
22:41 Speaker 02 That's inescapable. Now, you're right that part of what scientists want to do is sort of shield, maybe not shield for that, or at least normalize it in some way. We want to think about whether our comments are value-laden, and I don't just mean value in an ethics way, but maybe also, do I privilege certain epistemic values like beauty or
23:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And many do.
23:01 Speaker 02 Similarity, and many do.
23:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Many do. But I can tell you this, to the extent that I can understand myself, I leave all philosophical preconceptions at the door.
23:12 Speaker 02 You can't do that, though.
23:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I said, "to the extent that I am able." I'm self-aware that I could be constrained by a philosophical thought, so I remain open to anything I see, and anything I measure, and what that could possibly mean, and without discounting it. And the reason why I'm going there is, I had an issue in Hamlet.
23:33 Speaker 02 Okay.
23:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One of the lines is, "There's more betwixt heaven and earth than a dreamt of in your philosophy."
23:42 Speaker 02 Right.
23:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I never understood that comment, ever. Because as a scientist, if a ghost shows up, I'm fine! Let me make some measurements! I have no issue with that. So why does that sentence make any sense at all, until I realized that people who are deeply into a philosophy of belief...
24:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do close off their access to things that fall outside of their understanding.
24:10 Speaker 02 So, yeah.
24:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, a good scientist has no philosophy. Otherwise, they're gonna miss stuff. Bad scientists will have a philosophy and they'll miss everything.
24:22 Speaker 02 Your choice to set aside some world, like, so that you can be neutral.
24:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
24:27 Speaker 02 Is itself a philosophical position.
24:29 Chuck Nice? Oop, okay.
24:30 Speaker 02 That's a very good point.
24:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In a what?
24:33 Speaker 02 Ineliminable. That you are going to walk in with some interpretive framework.
24:38 Chuck Nice? Ineliminable.
24:38 Speaker 02 Cannot be eliminated.
24:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cannot be eliminated.
24:41 Chuck Nice? Ineliminable.
24:43 Speaker 02 I've got some big words here.
24:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would say that the philosophy that I have no philosophy is a very mild version of a philosophy.
24:54 Speaker 02 The point is that you cannot.
24:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I was gonna say, she's about to tell you.
24:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm listening.
24:59 Chuck Nice? No, she's about to say, that's like being a little bit pregnant.
25:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
25:04 Chuck Nice? You can't be a little bit pregnant.
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can we hear the lady? Okay, go.
25:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, so, when you're, when you walk into the lab or whatever.
25:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right.
25:11 Speaker 02 It's not like you take off your religious hat, or you take off your culture. Like, you're an integrated whole person. And how you were trained, and what you were thinking about that morning, and what you're predisposed to look for in the equations themselves, those things play a role. Now, there's a huge conversation in the philosophy of science about whether certain things are more or less appropriate when you bring in. But that you bring something with you, that is how we do. Science is a, is a, is a personal and social endeavor.
25:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so, all I did say, I think, was, I reduce it as much as I knowingly can.
25:51 Chuck Nice? That's what you said. So, what she's saying is, there's no extent to which you can actually know. Because the holistic person that you are, you are inexorably tied to your philosophy.
26:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except.
26:03 Chuck Nice? Even when you try to divorce yourself.
26:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except, in the movie.
26:06 Speaker 02 So, you guys are talking about a philosophy like, like, like, and I think this is fair because I think a lot of people do this. Like, like it is a political position. But I'm talking about something, not just a, I'm talking about the way you view the world.
26:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now watch.
26:19 Speaker 02 More comprehensively.
26:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In this show, do you remember the show?
26:21 Chuck Nice? I like that.
26:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The X-Files.
26:23 Chuck Nice? I like that.
26:23 Speaker 02 Of course, man. Best show ever. X-Files.
26:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The X-Files.
26:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm watching the show.
26:29 Chuck Nice? Okay.
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, and there's like the skeptic, science.
26:33 Speaker 02 Scully.
26:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Scully. And then Mul- Mulder.
26:36 Speaker 02 Mulder.
26:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mulder, Mulder.
26:37 Speaker 02 Mul Tao? Mul Tao?
26:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excuse me, Mulder, Mulder. And I've watched them interact, and I'm thinking, no, no. Okay, there was some glowing mass in a, in a vestibule, okay? And Mulder says, oh, this must be an interdimensional. He just goes right to, to the most wild explanation for it. And Scully is saying, uh, this can't possibly be real. It must be a projected. And she's all discounting of it because it doesn't fit her philosophy that that can't exist. And I'm telling.
27:12 Speaker 02 You're making my point for me right here, right?
27:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
27:15 Speaker 02 Good.
27:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Fine.
27:16 Speaker 02 It is the chemistry of those two perspectives that leads them to certain, certain discoveries and so on.
27:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You call that, they look pretty immissible to me. How's that for a chemistry word?
27:26 Speaker 02 That's good.
27:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you remember immissible?
27:27 Chuck Nice? Immissible.
27:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oil and water, immissible.
27:28 Chuck Nice? Yeah, don't, don't mix.
27:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know how to missile, missile them?
27:30 Chuck Nice? I do not.
27:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You, you take a little bit, uh, because when you're making, um.
27:34 Speaker 02 Are we talking about Scull- Scully and Mulder?
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, yes.
27:37 Speaker 02 How do we do it?
27:39 Chuck Nice? How do we get the vinegar?
27:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I learned this in, I learned this in chemistry class, and then I applied it at home. So you have oil and vinegar.
27:45 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you shake it, and it'll still separate.
27:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it's together for like for a few seconds.
27:49 Chuck Nice? Four seconds.
27:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, but you can get an emulsifier to put in there, and it'll connect chemically to both sides and bring them together.
27:58 Speaker 02 How?
27:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, so I think.
28:00 Speaker 02 I don't want to know the answer.
28:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A little bit of egg yolk will do that.
28:02 Speaker 02 Egg yolk is an emulsifier. That's right. I know that from baking.
28:05 Chuck Nice? Believe it or not, and yeah, I was gonna say, that's, egg yolk is used as an emulsifier in a lot of, a lot of cooking.
28:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it brings it together. So they needed egg yolk.
28:14 Speaker 02 Fair enough. But I mean.
28:15 Chuck Nice? But I like what you're saying. You're saying, this is not philosophy in terms of, I believe, blam, blam, blam.
28:21 Speaker 02 Right.
28:22 Chuck Nice? It is philosophy in terms of.
28:23 Speaker 02 How do you know what questions are good questions to pursue? How do you know when your apparatus is measuring what you want it to measure?
28:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's, let's, let's anchor this back in time. Please compare for us the philosophies of the two greatest physicists.
28:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There ever were. Okay, so you said this. I was gonna say, so he's talking, so one of them has gotta be Isaac Newton. That's gotta be one. Newton Einstein.
28:49 Speaker 02 Okay.
28:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, tell me, because you've, clearly you've studied this, because you're writing about the man and everything.
28:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, and I love the fact that we share sort of access to history.
28:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what that means in the present.
29:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, I just wanna know, how would you characterize Newton's philosophy relative to Einstein's philosophy? And I have, he, hang on. Before I earned enough money to buy an actual book from Isaac Newton's days, I got this paperback called Newton's Philosophy of Nature.
29:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? Ah. Little paperback. Selections from his writings. And so, and it's, it's not only from his great books, but also his writings.
29:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, so. May I? No. Oh, that's just a paperback. I thought, I was thinking of. It's not your original. I thought it's my original Newton.
29:37 Speaker 02 He's holding it like it's a teddy bear or something. This means something to you.
29:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but see, I've been all, I've been in. You've been up in it. You got every, all the pages are dog ears. I've had it since, uh, middle of high school.
29:48 Speaker 02 Good.
29:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. So, me and Newton go back, and don't you badmouth Newton in this office.
29:52 Speaker 02 No, I'm not gonna badmouth Newton. I love Newton.
29:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
29:55 Speaker 02 I, he's a primary source in my Philosophy of Space and Time class, because students.
29:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a class you take.
30:00 Speaker 02 It is.
30:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't wanna take that class.
30:01 Speaker 02 I would love to have you. I'm teaching it in the fall. Also, Einstein is philosopher, is a course I'm teaching in the fall.
30:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Got it.
30:07 Speaker 02 Anyway, Newton was motivated, at least in developing, by many things, but in developing in particular his theory of gravitation in an essay called De Gravitatione, I don't know how to pronounce the Latin, but there it is. He's responding to Descartes, who had three laws of motion. But Descartes thought that all motion was relative. And so it is in developing his response to Newton, uh, to Descartes' theory of motion, entirely on philosophical grounds, he is reasoning from his armchair how he can understand motion in these different ways.
30:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He must've had a badass armchair. Yeah.
30:39 Speaker 02 He did, he also invented the calculus from that same armchair. Einstein is responding to Newton. He was bothered by the fact that in a fully physical worldview that Newton said he was presenting, you nevertheless had a background spacetime that was not, that was influencing matter, but not itself, able to be influenced by matter. This asymmetry of dynamics.
31:02 Speaker 02 Bothered him.
31:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So let me restate what I think you said. That Newton is describing a universe embedded within space and time.
31:12 Speaker 02 Sort of a theater, yeah, background in which matter.
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Theater set.
31:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
31:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so whereas Einstein wanted the theater set and the players in the theater to interact with one another.
31:26 Speaker 02 And in particular, Newtonian mass is inertial mass. It's it's an intrinsic, in the old school philosophy tradition. It is a property that belongs to the thing in virtue of the thing itself. This also mass.
31:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, just remind people, you know, Weight Watchers is really mass watcher. Right. Let's just go to the moon. Yeah, go to the moon.
31:46 Speaker 02 There you go. Thanks, Oprah.
31:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a lot of ways to weigh less. And so.
31:52 Speaker 02 But how do you get the money to go to the moon in the first place? But yeah.
31:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just want to just clear. So when you're when you reduce your number of fat cells in your body, giving it up to energy. Then you're reducing, it's a mass you're you're cutting from yourself.
32:06 Speaker 02 It's supposed to be some deep essential, probably meaning essence of the thing. This also bothered Einstein. He didn't think that things should have innate properties in this way.
32:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
32:17 Speaker 02 And so one of the things that motivated in going from special to general relativity was a paper he wrote in 1913, where he predicts gravitational waves, by the way. So he didn't want mass to be something that just belonged because God decreed it thus. And so he developed a he developed a way of accounting for mass that was also dynamical. We give something inertial mass because it's following a geodesic. It's following a particular path through spacetime. And that is why we call something having inertial mass. It is not an intrinsic feature of the thing itself.
32:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A geodesic on Earth is a path that you would take where if you sliced. Through that path, your slice goes through the center of the earth.
32:59 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
32:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it turns out if you do the math, it's the shortest distance.
33:02 Speaker 02 The shortest distance, that's right.
33:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's why you see on a map, you see these loop, the plane map. They have arcs.
33:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
33:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you made that a sphere, that would be the shortest. We call that a geodesic, meaning earth, but now you're taking it and using it for the whole universe.
33:15 Speaker 02 Right, because another thing he was doing in this 1911, in these papers, when he's developing what's called the entropia, like the in-between theory between general and special relativity. He's working toward general relativity. Publishing along the way. And he's realizing that the effects due to acceleration are the same as the effects due to gravity. So acceleration and gravity are like two sides of the same coin.
33:34 Chuck Nice? So, as, even every time I hear it, I'm like, this is so brilliant.
33:38 Speaker 02 It's bananas.
33:39 Chuck Nice? It's awesome.
33:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's simple and brilliant.
33:41 Speaker 02 But he was motivated by Newton's account not answering his why questions. This asymmetry between like space and time being this God-ordained theater in which things happened, but the things themselves couldn't affect spacetime, was a principal motivation for his wanting to dig deeper and come up with a theory of space and time and gravitation that didn't, sort of, wasn't ordained on high, but sort of...
34:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Didn't he apologize to Newton?
34:09 Speaker 02 I have no idea.
34:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody...
34:10 Speaker 02 Did Einstein apologize to Newton?
34:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I...
34:13 Speaker 02 Perhaps in jest.
34:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I have a memory because his, his whole understa-, general theory of relativity supplants Newton's gravity.
34:24 Speaker 02 That's right.
34:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I think he apologized at some point.
34:28 Chuck Nice? Like...
34:28 Speaker 02 Well, it's gotta be one of those sorry-not-sorry.
34:30 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I was gonna say, is it like the way you apologized to Pluto?
34:34 Speaker 02 It was like, you could also apologize to somebody while saying, "But I did a better job," right? Like, he's still clearly appreciating...
34:42 Chuck Nice? Sorry for blowing you out of the water.
34:44 Speaker 02 It was like, you have, but also, you know, we're building on the people who came before us in developing our viewpoints of the world. So he owed a great deal to Newton, but...
34:54 Chuck Nice? So this started with Descartes, is what you're...
34:57 Speaker 02 Descartes himself took three laws of nu-, um, motion from Kepp-, like, oh, Kepler's... This, this thing had, this game had been going on for a while. Yeah.
35:05 Chuck Nice? Wow.
35:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:07 Chuck Nice? From a philosophical standpoint, all of these are philosophies.
35:12 Speaker 02 If you mean it in the sense that they're trying to ask the deeper questions of, "Why do the things that I observe behave the way they do?" Yeah, yeah, yeah.
35:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why does Newton have only three laws of motion and not four? Or two, or 10.
35:27 Speaker 02 He thought that three laws of, he describes this in the general scolium at the beginning, which is all philosophical arguments for why he thinks absolute motion can be differentiated from relativistic motion, and he needs relative motion.
35:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm talking about Newton.
35:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, Newton's scolium, the general scolium.
35:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You said relativistic.
35:44 Speaker 02 I meant relative motion, I'm sorry, from Cartesian or Descartes' relative motion. He thought that that's what he needed to give all of the account of all the motion.
36:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We come out of Newton, we go through Einstein, and these are still, they still make sense, even if they're weird. You can still see why they make sense mathematically. But you go into the 1920s, and then quantum physics descends, and nothing makes sense. But it works. It works. You can make predictions. The understanding of the periodic table of elements, of molecules, of atoms, all clicks into place, and everybody's scratching their head. So what does a philosopher do then?
36:50 Speaker 02 All the things. It's so much fun. Yeah, so.
36:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just like it when we don't know what we're doing.
36:55 Speaker 02 No, no, I think we would say that all of physics involves interpretive moments, but they're particularly painful, in the case of quantum mechanics, and it's fascinating, let's go play. Like, let's go talk about it.
37:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a word for that. It's called sadomasochism.
37:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's particularly painful. Yeah, let's get it.
37:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I mean, but it's also like, these are the questions that keep you awake at night. There's pain, but joy.
37:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, so.
37:22 Speaker 02 So it didn't come out of nowhere, right? I mean, there was an old quantum theory that Bohr and Zomerfeld, who was a physicist in Munich, had been working on in the 1910s to account for atomic spectra.
37:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Zomerfeld or Sommerfeld?
37:34 Speaker 02 Zomerfeld.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Zomerfeld, yes.
37:35 Speaker 02 Zomerfeld. I pronounced it in a German way.
37:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excuse me.
37:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I saw an S there, so I just said Sommerfeld.
37:42 Speaker 02 Sommerfeld.
37:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I had one of his books, yeah.
37:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. He was really important. He was also the doctoral advisor of Heisenberg and Pauli and a lot of these guys who went on to be important progenitors of the new quantum theory. But they were trying to understand these empirical data, right? The spectrum.
38:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, every one of these people got a Nobel Prize. Oh, yeah. Every one of them down the list.
38:05 Speaker 02 Einstein's Nobel Prize was not for relativity.
38:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know.
38:07 Speaker 02 It was for the photoelectric effect, which was dealing with quantum.
38:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Brownian motion.
38:11 Speaker 02 And Brownian motion, yes, that's right. Brownian motion, which is to do with getting microscopic about quantum effects.
38:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
38:18 Speaker 02 But, yeah.
38:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Brownian motion, you suspend a particle.
38:23 Speaker 02 Like a pollen grain, like pollen.
38:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, you put it in a fluid.
38:26 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
38:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it just bounces around.
38:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that wasn't fully understood. Like, what's going on?
38:32 Speaker 02 It looks like it's random motion.
38:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right. And then you have to calculate there's particles hitting it. Right. That are smaller than it, that are hitting it. And you realize there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world's oceans. And we didn't have insight into that until Einstein explained Brownian motion, to understand what the hell is going on in there.
39:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, we don't know inside, like, the insides of atoms very much, yeah. Like, there's so little known about the structure of atoms. And so that's probably what they're debating. And part of what allowed Heisenberg and Pauli and some of the people working at the forefront in the 1920s, they were looking at these descriptions. You remember Bohr's planetary model of the atom, right?
39:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's part of why we call them orbitals. Right, yeah, because he made it look like. Yeah.
39:23 Speaker 02 But there are huge mysteries with this model. It doesn't account for all the spectrum, the data of the spectra they're seeing. I'm using all the right Latin plurals here, I hope. But also, how is it that it jumps from one energy level to the next? And it does it discreetly? That's right. It does it quantum, like, there's no actual physical motion from one place to the other.
39:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What does the philosopher say about this? Yeah.
39:46 Speaker 02 Well, they were Bohr and Sommerfeld in the old quantum theory.
39:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've been here, sitting here for half an hour.
39:50 Speaker 02 I'm about to deliver.
39:53 Speaker 02 The crude graph. If you would shut up. All due respect, sir. Finish him. They were trying to describe the electrons using classical terms for particles. Position, momentum. Heisenberg said, what if we use totally different things to describe the electron? What if we tried to write down instead of equations of motion in this classical way? We think about the electron in terms of way, like by writing down the intensity, by writing down the amplitude.
40:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like a wave?
40:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, sort of. But he didn't use quite that language, but he said, let's look, he used what's called Fourier, like F-O-U-R-I-E-R, another French term, Fourier analysis, to look at it. And he got these equations out that worked. And it was only by sort of stepping back and saying, the language we're using is presenting to us a world that is a classical world.
40:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a philosophical pivot.
40:40 Speaker 02 It was a new, it was a new approach. It was a new lens for looking at the problem. It was a new lens for attacking the problem.
40:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, because if you, if you believe, or you think that these other metrics are what actually matter.
40:53 Speaker 02 Right.
40:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if they don't actually matter, you're going to get the wrong answer.
40:56 Speaker 02 And Schrödinger continued to argue, like he developed wave mechanics in 26. Heisenberg did this in 1925.
41:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 1926, yeah.
41:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, right on the heels of this, Schrödinger gives a description in terms of waves, and everybody knew, we love waves, we see waves everywhere, sound waves, water waves, we understand how waves behave at the macroscopic level. And so when Schrödinger gave a version of quantum mechanics that was all written down in terms of waves, people said, I can visualize that, I can understand how to model that. But it didn't quite do all the things Heisenberg's matrix mechanics did. But they were arguing about these viewpoints in a philosophical way. Like, what do we need when we have a full scientific theory? Do we need to be able to visualize in space and time what's going on? Or do we need the right equations?
41:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so they did their duty. And we're now 100 years later.
41:44 Speaker 02 We are, 100 years on.
41:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are certain quantum questions that the layperson sees unanswered over that entire century. How can two particles be entangled? What does that even mean? Right. And how is it you observe it over here and then instantly, it's not even the speed of light, it's instant.
42:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And people wanna wrap their head around this.
42:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you have not given us an answer to it. Yeah, at least.
42:10 Speaker 02 We haven't figured it out yet. It's an ongoing puzzle. It's an ongoing conversation.
42:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, maybe it's not something to be figured out, it just is.
42:21 Speaker 02 Here's where this matters.
42:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, I'm just, I'm saying, maybe you're trying to bring a classical sensibility to something that has a different reality.
42:32 Speaker 02 I agree with you. And I get a lot of shit for that in the philosophy community. I think a lot of the interpretations of quantum mechanics that are proposed are trying to tell a story about how we get from a probabilistic set of solutions to an actual solution. And I think the world just makes a choice. There are some dynamic considerations in there. It's a much more nuanced story than what I'm giving you right now. But I think you're right, that we're still like very much moored to these classical.
42:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We, because we, because classical.
43:00 Speaker 02 Pictures of the world.
43:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Classical pictures make sense in an armchair. But you start saying, particles pop in and out of existence, the tunnel, they do this and that.
43:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and I, as a, as a scientist, as an astrophysicist, I accept what quantum physics does for me to understand what the universe is doing. And, and I've learned to not lose sleep over trying to understand why.
43:25 Speaker 02 If you were working in quantum cosmology, you would want to know, because we don't have a theory yet that brings together, that brings together general relativity.
43:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When the large was small.
43:36 Speaker 02 And quantum mechanics.
43:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
43:38 Speaker 02 And in fact, most of these interpretational debates are happening with respect to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But we know that the final theory, we think, will be relativistic. It'll be a relativistic quantum field theory.
43:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you foresee philosophers helping the physicists?
43:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Towards this goal.
43:55 Speaker 02 I don't, I mean, having a conversation with, I would say, and I would say the physicists are also having this conversation.
44:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
44:02 Speaker 02 So for instance, there's a, there's a real question as to whether certain inflationary paradigms that are thinking about how we get to effectively classical like field modes for the different parts of, you know, gravitational field modes or, you know, matter field modes, whatever you want. But we think the initial state was a quantum one. So we need to know a story about how we get from a quantum state to what looks like-
44:22 Chuck Nice? To what we are now.
44:23 Speaker 02 That's right.
44:24 Chuck Nice? Because you're saying that if there is a model that makes sense, it started with the field. It started with kind of like what we would call nothing, but really it's everything all at once being nothing. And then out of that, pop, and then boom, and then all of this.
44:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it's everything everywhere all at once.
44:42 Chuck Nice? Oh, I'm sorry.
44:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You must have one of those.
44:44 Speaker 02 I gave a talk on entanglement that was about that, like had that title, but I watched the movie on the flight and had to cross that title out. It was like, oh, it's not quite what they're doing there.
44:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if I understand you correctly-
44:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We went from a quantum state to a macroscopic classical state.
44:59 Chuck Nice? Right.
44:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there had to be a transition somewhere in there that allows us to bring these sensibilities together-
45:04 Speaker 02 That's right.
45:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In a coherent understanding.
45:06 Speaker 02 Well, even when we're trying to understand what the universe looked like in those early stages before we got to the big asymmetric distribution of matter we have now, those are stories that rely on our understanding how we get classical field modes, classical values for field modes out of a quantum soup. And so these questions show up there. Here's another-
45:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But are they being answered by your brethren or by?
45:29 Speaker 02 They're not being answered by anybody.
45:30 Chuck Nice? Anybody.
45:31 Speaker 02 We're talking about them together. And there are, you know, some cosmologists who want to understand like these early, they're asking whether or not we can have, whether we could find residue of entanglement from this early state. And that's where I say, even as a philosopher, no, because entanglement relations are going to be so damped down by interactions with the gravitational field mode and all these others that we could never measure them. But that doesn't mean they're not a part of the story. So- We're having conversations with one another about these things because the answer is unclear.
46:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
46:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, there's still all these mysteries. You better get back to work.
46:07 Chuck Nice? Give me my gummies. Give me my edibles, please. Give me my edibles right now, because damn.
46:14 Speaker 02 You know, I'm a philosophy professor. I should be on, but like, I have the worst, I've had the worst experiences. I just can't do it. People around me just...
46:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are no edibles in this office.
46:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, there we go. People are like, is your color red the same as mine? And I was like, yeah, Hobbes thought about that tooth out. Like, who cares? You know, let's go on from that.
46:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Leviathan Hobbes? Is that Hobbes?
46:33 Speaker 02 That same Hobbes. Yeah, we all thought about that.
46:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not Calvin and Hobbes.
46:37 Speaker 02 That's the Hobbes, that's, Hobbes is, Calvin is named after John Calvin, which is, you know, John Calvin. And Hobbes is named after Hobbes, the...
46:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Calvin as in Calvinist?
46:46 Speaker 02 Calvin and Hobbes is named after John Calvin, the reformed theologian.
46:49 Chuck Nice? Right.
46:49 Speaker 02 And Hobbes is named after the philosopher, the philosopher and political theorist, Hobbes.
46:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And how about the, the tiger?
46:55 Speaker 02 The tiger is Hobbes.
46:56 Chuck Nice? The tiger is Hobbes.
46:57 Speaker 02 The tiger is Hobbes.
46:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I'd forgotten that.
46:59 Speaker 02 This is super important.
47:00 Chuck Nice? Now, who is Marmaduke named after?
47:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you, that's the one.
47:04 Speaker 02 This is beyond my realm of expertise, y'all. This is beyond my realm of expertise.
47:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, we gotta land this plane, but this has been highly confusing.
47:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Simultaneously enlightening and confusing, is that possible?
47:15 Chuck Nice? I have to say.
47:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you have a word for that? To be enlightened and confused at the same time?
47:19 Speaker 02 To be a philosopher.
47:23 Speaker 02 Oh, hey, hey.
47:24 Chuck Nice? That was the way, that was, that's how you do it. Full circle.
47:27 Speaker 02 Well, let's keep talking about it at some point.
47:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
47:29 Speaker 02 Not now. You have other things going on.
47:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, that brings us to a close. Sorry we didn't fully answer everybody's questions.
47:38 Chuck Nice? Well, there are none. The, the, the answers, the answers are out there, Scully. No.
47:45 Chuck Nice? The answers aren't known yet.
47:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, you know what it is?
47:47 Chuck Nice? That's the beauty of it.
47:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Seek, and you probably won't find.
47:53 Speaker 02 Seek and you will find what's maybe not the case.
47:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's a good one.
47:56 Speaker 02 It's popular.
47:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Seek, and you may find the answer to the question you have not yet posed.
48:01 Speaker 02 There you go. Ooh.
48:02 Chuck Nice? Oh, wow.
48:03 Speaker 02 That's juicy.
48:03 Chuck Nice? Let me tell you something. Jesus is happy he didn't say any of those things. People would have checked right out.
48:10 Speaker 02 Like, antsy.
48:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. What fascinates me most about the frontier of science is to do it right. Yes, you gotta keep at least one foot in the perimeter where we at least think we know what's going on, and then you put the other foot outside and test the waters for new ideas, new perspectives, new ways to think about how the universe works. But for me, it may be a specious goal to believe that the more you do research, the more you understand
48:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? about the universe, because what remains true is that as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. And if that's true, that might mean that science is indeed the endless frontier envisioned by Van Halver Bush in 1945. That is a cosmic perspective. Thank you, Elise Crull.
49:22 Speaker 02 Thank you.
49:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, thanks for coming down to share some of your vision and expertise with us here.
49:29 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it was great.
49:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man.
49:31 Chuck Nice? Always a pleasure.
49:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This has been StarTalk, the quantum philosophy edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always bidding you to keep looking up.
Previous Fixing the Internet with Harleen Kaur (Bonus Minisode) Next The Science of Revenge with James Kimmel Jr. Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
