The Value of Science, with Brian Cox

Neil deGrasse Tyson compares notes with British physicist and TV host Brian Cox about wormholes, lightsabers, science literacy and more. Also featuring futurist Jason Silva, Dr. Janna Levin, and co-host Maeve Higgins. Plus, Bill Nye extols the value of “Looking Up.”

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we are featuring my interview with Professor Brian Cox. Brian Cox is like famous all throughout the UK. He's perhaps as famous, if not more famous, in the UK than Carl Sagan ever was here in America. And if you've never heard of him, you gotta know about this guy. We talked about everything, under the sun and in the universe. Because most things in the universe are in fact not under the sun. Not our sun at least. We talked about lightsabers from Star Wars. Are they real? We talked about time travel, wormholes.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We talked about everything. So, let's do this.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As usual, I have co-hosts. We have a comedic co-host, Maeve Higgins.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maeve, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the one and the only, Jason Silva. We all love you as host of Brain Games on, of course, the National Geographic Channel.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, give it up for Brain Games.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is fun. And, what's the, you've got a YouTube series, Shots of Awe?

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Shots of Awe, yeah.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  YouTube, what's that about?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  So, basically, you remember that line by Carl Sagan when he says, "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy"?

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I try to communicate that ecstasy when talking about big ideas related to technology, creativity, the human condition, science.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  That's all.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Technology, human condition, and science.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Everything. What it means to be human, yes. So, yeah, that's like my passion project.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, excellent, excellent.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I tell a lot of jokes about my cat. So, I think it's a pretty good matchup here.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I think it's gonna be great.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Well, in there is this intersection of science and pop culture. Definitely. Because you're reaching in this medium that pop culture absorbs. If you're a comedian, you can't be funny unless you know how to bring pop culture into that context.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Oh, that's what I've been doing.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in my interview with Brian Cox, he actually comes from pop culture. Most scientists I know come to us hatched out of the egg as a scientist. Not him. He comes from the world of music. And so I had to ask him, how did this transition occur? Right. So let's check it out. All right.

• 3:03Brian Cox?

  I was on my way to university, actually, to do electronic engineering and not physics. And I took a year off, we call it a gap year in the UK, to go and be in this band. And the band got a deal and recorded two albums, rock albums, here in the States. Toured with Jimmy Page, the band Europe. And just for four or five years had this sort of life in a rock band. Left that band because we had a fight in a bar, the real rock and roll. Went to university then to do physics at the University of Manchester. And in between that, accidentally joined another band, who then had a number one hit.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you get to say, "A fight in a bar changed my life and I became a physicist."

• 3:45Brian Cox?

  Yeah, yeah. It's the best way to, best entry into physics I can think of, actually. The thing is, I'd always been interested in astronomy, confirmed really, actually, by watching Cosmos. The first Cosmos, which was 1980, I think.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 80 it premiered.

• 4:02Brian Cox?

  So I was 12 years old then. So you're a young astronomer, you're into that. You get 13 hours of Carl Sagan on television, and that was it for me.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, first of all, he had a number one hit song in the UK. Called, what is it here? Things Can Only Get Better. So he's a literal rock star.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Turned physicist.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I love that story.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jason, so Carl Sagan apparently was an influence on him in his early years. Was Carl Sagan an influence on you as well?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny because when I grew up in Venezuela, I didn't catch, you know, the original series of Cosmos, but I was a fan of the book Contact. I loved the movie Contact. I loved the Ellie Arroway character. I loved that he described her as a wonder junkie, literally addicted to the mystery, addicted to the question. And then I rediscovered him through a remixed YouTube series called The Sagan Series, where they took a bunch of his little snippets, audio snippets and speeches, and set them to beautiful imagery, as they've done with some of your riffs. And I just fell in love. Again, I felt the guy was drunk on awe, literally. So hearing Brian talk about that as well, I was like, you know what? Like, he's spot on. I can relate to that feeling.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so for my next clip with Professor Brian Cox, I just asked him, what does he do to keep sort of relevant? To keep the science relevant?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he's always got projects that he's bringing forward. I just want to know, what is his formula or recipe? Because we're kind of just comparing notes.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From across the pond.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 5:34Brian Cox?

  We do live shows in the UK, which also involve music and stand-up comedy and entertainment. We have actors there, all celebrating science. There's a very strong link between science and comedy. And I wonder whether you can philosophize or think about why that may be. Stand-up comedians are great observers. That's part of their job. Scientists are observers. So there's an analytical element to stand-up comedy. So it may be there's some commonality there. I'm not sure. I think it might just be that there happens to be a set of people who are interested in science and want to push forward, not only deliver the ideas, but have an agenda. And I don't think we should be afraid. I know you're not afraid of it. I don't think I am either of having an explicit agenda, which is to make the world a more scientific place.

• 6:17Brian Cox?

  Why? Because I think it will be a better place. And the more... Diverse people you get there, the bands, the comedians, the actors. I think the more that science, knowledge, education, looks like a club that you would wanna be a member of as a young person. And that's also important, I think, to see, to see ideas as being cool. The ideas are interesting thing. You can be, you can be a person that's not only identified with a, this sports team, or this, this music, or this band, but this, this, this, this philosophy, if you like. You know, that would, that's a rather nice thing.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the next thing, you need people overturning cars after one of these.

• 6:56Brian Cox?

  Yeah, just saying, I do, this is a Nietzsche car. I don't want the Nietzsche people, I'm a Kant person, you know that?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Street, street rallies over what philosopher you follow.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I love that idea, and I think it's true, when you're like a young kid and you're a teenager, you actually do feel that. And then you lose it along the way somewhere if it's not encouraged.

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he mentioned that he, he saw parallels between comedy and science, would you agree?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, with the curiosity, yes. But then, it's like, sometimes when I'm talking to scientists and when I do shows with you, I feel like, oh my god, it's just like, I decided what the answers were in my head, but you went and figured them out.

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And I don't know which is better. Uh, no, I, I do. But I think the curiosity is both, like, similar, and I feel like, maybe, um, the open-mindedness. Because what I love about scientists is that they, they're never like, that's definitely it, like, good scientists.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, unless it actually is definitely it. Because, there are some things that are def, like, Earth definitely goes around the sun.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's arguable, let's not get into that.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth is definitely round, but from the frontier.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we are in the act of discovery, stuff can go any way.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's where the real sincerity and honesty and candor about your uncertainty.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comes from.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's beautiful to hear him be such a celebrator of ideas.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And part of the, one of the things you celebrate is the uncertainty of science, and we went there.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Oh, wonderful.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the conversation, let's check it out.

• 8:36Brian Cox?

  The way that scientists think, which is for me, is a celebration of uncertainty, actually. It's the opposite, in many ways, of the way that popular culture is going, certainly in the UK, where you get people... There was a great political essay written recently in the UK about the narcissism of politics and popular culture. The fact that society is very focused on people's opinions and feelings. When actually, science is... To be a scientist is to be trained to be the opposite of that, I think. I would take great delight if someone turned up tomorrow and said, "Actually, the universe is not 13.8 billion years old, it's 6,000. We actually made a mistake. There's this new evidence

• 9:21Brian Cox?

  has come in, and it turns out that's all nonsense." I would actually genuinely be very excited, but I don't think it's going to happen. But it would delight me. It would not be an assault on my very being. Indeed, it would confirm... That my excitement would confirm to me what I think of my being as being, right? It's someone who delights in intellectual challenge. And I think that's trained, to an extent, and it's part of the scientific training. But it's also a wonderful way to be. Imagine that every... A science book start, "Well, of course, we may be wrong, but..." That's implicit in every science book. It should be probably explicitly stated, "Of course, this might be wrong." Imagine if every book,

• 10:03Brian Cox?

  if every philosophy, if every religious document began with that. Imagine if the Bible started, "Of course, we might be wrong, but in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was that form of void and darkness on the face of the..." That would be rather refreshing, I think. It's a refreshing position to take. Certainty is the enemy of science. It's the enemy of the... I think that's what we... Well, I'd ask you the question. For me, it's one of the things I fight in my presentation. What do I want people to understand about scientists? It's the embrace of uncertainty, I think.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. My typical response there is, you read most articles that report on a new scientific result, and they'll say something like, "Scientists have to go back to the drawing board now." And I say, "No, you're always at the drawing board."

• 10:53Brian Cox?

  Yeah, never let...

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The scientist, this befuddles the scientist. We're always befuddled. Unless, if you're not, you're not on the frontier. So, yeah, there is a mismatch between what people think is going on in the science lab and what's actually going on.

• 11:08Brian Cox?

  And I'm very conscious, actually, of having this conversation. It can sound, and it's not intended to sound, it can sound like you're trying to say, well, scientists are somehow breed apart, which I don't think is true. And I, often, you asked earlier about going into schools and talking to younger children about being a scientist. And I say to them, it's not, I don't think there's such a thing as a natural scientist. There's the odd, there's genius everywhere. So Einstein, people like that. No one's going to think Einstein or Feynman or Newton. But the majority of working scientists are just people who are interested. Don't have any special ability in mathematics or physics or biology, what it is. Just we're interested and then you can be trained to be that.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  You know what's beautiful about that?

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Right off the bat, like, he's basic, I mean, we know that science has gotten us farther than any other tool we've ever had at our disposal.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anything, of anything.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Certainly farther than religion. So, to hear him say that, I think that that's probably why science has triumphed, because of that wonderful humility. That willingness to change course, that willingness to find new evidence that turns everything on its head and allows us to update, correct, and upgrade.

• 12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But at some point, this willingness to update, correct, that knowledge of uncertainty somehow doesn't intersect with how people want to think about the world.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like with, say, something as basic as global warming, there's somebody going to be like, you can't say that 100% sure. And then the scientist is like, well, no.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it means people don't know how to think about uncertainty.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jason, you have very successful shows and you're, in Brain Games. You spend all this time showing how our brain, we should just leave our brain at home. Half the time I see your show, I say, my brain is unworthy, I can't.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  We do tell you.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think I've ever seen your show where at the end I said, boy, I feel better about my brain today. No, I want to trade it in.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  But think about what we're saying, right? We're playing with the idea of subject and object, right? Because we're telling you, yeah, these are certain loopholes in your brain, and we're speaking as if the fact, this is the science up until now that tells you this. But what it's actually telling you is that your perceptions of the world might be wrong. So we're telling you an objective fact about the fact that your subjectivity is misperceiving reality.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm there, but how many people understand that?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  You have to smash people's reality tunnel every once in a while.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so why is it?

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Ooh!

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Sorry. Very good-looking.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here's what I want to explore when we come back from commercial. Here's what I want to explore. The fact that there are people who embrace science and there are people who reject science. But at some level, everyone can just accept the fact that spider webs come out of someone's wrist.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  In a movie?

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a movie, yeah. Somehow the movies are okay, no matter what else is going on. More on superheroes in physics when StarTalk continues.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk from the Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Natural History. So we're featuring my interview with Professor Brian Cox. And he's Professor of Physics at University of Manchester in the UK. And you have both origins from other countries. You have some roots in Ireland, then roots in Venezuela. And of course, Brian is from the UK. And, you know, countries are different. Different cultures, different priorities, different mission statements. And I just, I wanted to know what's different in the UK, in his world, relative to America. And one of the things that just rose up, just as I thought of that question, was we have superheroes and they don't.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out where that goes. Is there any tradition, forgive my ignorance here, of British superhero? Or is it really an American phenomenon?

• 15:14Brian Cox?

  It's a good question. A British superhero. There must be one. I'm gonna get.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see, then there isn't. If you have to say, "I wonder, there surely..." No, then there's none.

• 15:24Brian Cox?

  Sherlock Holmes. Is that a superhero?

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No!

• 15:27Brian Cox?

  He's got, he's almost...

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has powers of deduction. He doesn't have physical other powers.

• 15:33Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of our superheroes can do something no other human on earth can do. Where you can imagine being Sherlock Holmes.

• 15:41Brian Cox?

  Well, you can imagine Iron Man. There's an engineer.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 15:45Brian Cox?

  So, so he doesn't have superpowers in himself, does he? It's all...

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 15:49Brian Cox?

  So you could compare, could you?

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, but just give me one from British culture. So if it's not, then it's interesting to me that that is an American phenomenon.

• 15:57Brian Cox?

  King Arthur.

• 16:00Brian Cox?

  He's waiting, isn't he, in suspended animation?

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, King Arthur.

• 16:03Brian Cox?

  To rise up.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He pulled the sword, but that's it. Right?

• 16:06Brian Cox?

  Yeah, he's not very impressive. He's not Spider-Man. But he, but he... But he's been around for...

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can he fly? Can bullets bounce off his head?

• 16:15Brian Cox?

  No, but he's Captain America.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm probing here, for the first time, is trying to understand what is in the American psyche that we generate superheroes by the dozens. And here we have a culture as near to American culture as exists in the world, in the UK, and there isn't this tradition of superheroes saving the day. Or supervillains to go against the superheroes.

• 16:39Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I, I'm curious what's behind that.

• 16:42Brian Cox?

  Maybe that's part of the American culture that's to be celebrated, that you have this idea. You know, from Kennedy's speech, I've always thought, actually, that, that, that speech that Kennedy made was, for me, is the image of America that I have. Which is, "We choose to go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard." You know, that, that, we build a rocket, our materials have not been invented to do that. You know, that, that wonderful thing. And it seems to me to be quite a uniquely, certainly 20th century American ideal, that you'll, you can do this, and you can walk on the moon before this decade is out. That's a superhero thing to do, isn't it?

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:16Brian Cox?

  So maybe it's to be celebrated, just thinking about it, that that's maybe part of the American psyche.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Might we not have gone to the moon if we didn't have superhero mission statements?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Good question. Yeah.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, I think he's got no superheroes.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I feel like...

• 17:35Speaker 02

  James Bond is kind of a...

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does he fly? No. Robin Hood, does he fly? No. Do bullets bounce off his chest?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would an arrow not penetrate his rib cage?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were it not shot into him?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  The American superheroes are like transhumanists.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, they're transhuman. Even the ones that are human do transhuman things.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, for me, what was interesting, I've got a fellow physicist in my office,

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brian Cox, and we started talking about superheroes. And then you can't help but wonder about sort of the physics of superheroes. And just superheroes just as they connect to science as we know it.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, right now, we're gonna enter the part of StarTalk we call Cosmic Queries. These are questions drawn from the internet, and I have not seen these questions before.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Okay. This first question is from Mr. Awesome via Twitter. He says, "Mave, your hair looks great. Thank you."

• 18:36Speaker 01

  He says, "Is something like Tony Stark's arc reactor possible?"

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Arc reactor?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the thing in his chest?

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's my take on it. If you're producing that much energy in such a small place, either his chest or in some energy-generating place in his building, as much energy as that is, you're gonna be creating heat. Fundamental laws of thermodynamics would indicate this. And that heat would melt everything, vaporize everything. One of the great challenges of localizing energy and then distributing it where you need. This is the big challenge of power plants.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Nuclear.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any kind of power plants. They all need coolant. And if you're gonna make it, you gotta make it as it's being used because it's really hard to store it without melting where you store it. So there's some laws of thermodynamics acting against it.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I, but I'd like, I love it though. And I love me some Tony Stark. Because he's a superhero with his ingenuity.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Right, with his technology.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With his technology.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you have to pick somebody.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  I would pick him as my favorite.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, me too, me too. Over Batman too, because they're both human.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're both human. They both use technological exoskeletons.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exo, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Which I think, yeah, I think they're the most appropriate to who we are.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly, I agree, I agree.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Okay, Brady Burkinmayr from Vancouver. In one of the DC animated movies, there is a death ray headed towards Earth from the sun. The Justice League is trying to quickly come up with ideas to save the world and Superman says, "Maybe I can move the Earth out of the way." To which Batman responds,

• 20:13Speaker 02

  "If I had a week,

• 20:16Speaker 02

  I couldn't explain why that won't work."

• 20:18Speaker 01

  So what are the reasons that that wouldn't work?

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a good voice, I think.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  It was, yeah.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so, uh, first of all, if something is headed towards Earth.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would rather move the other thing, whatever it is that's coming. Like the, you move the asteroid out of the way so it doesn't hit Earth.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  You can't make the Earth move.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you can make the Earth move, but it would be really bad for things on Earth if you did that.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, everyone would fall off.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes, yes, we're all sitting here, okay? Now, are you seatbelted to Earth? Because what's about to happen, if, if you just take Earth and just shove it in an instant, then, and you're not otherwise connected to Earth's surface?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna fly! This is, this is bad for everything, but people would just go fly. Just, that would just be bad! Okay.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Brian and I were not finished talking about the physics of

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Superheroes.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crazy stuff. When we come back on StarTalk, we will rejoin my interview with Professor Brian Cox. Will you hear us argue about lifesavers? On StarTalk.

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Featuring my interview with the British physicist Brian Cox. So, I had to bring up the fact that he and I had like a Twitter argument over the physics of lightsabers.

• 21:56Brian Cox?

  Aha.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I just had to bring it up and just open up old wounds.

• 22:00Brian Cox?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out how it went down.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't remember how this happened. I think I tweeted something about lightsabers, then you jumped in, and then people just wanted to fight.

• 22:13Brian Cox?

  What was it?

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A good geek fight. I think I said, "If lightsabers are made of light, then they could surely do damage by cutting things, but they would not stop one another the way two swords would in a swashbuckling encounter." That's all I said.

• 22:31Brian Cox?

  There's a process that I've studied, actually. It's photon-photon, our gamma-gamma scattering, we call it.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:37Brian Cox?

  So it's a measured process at particle accelerators. So very high energies, very high energy collisions. There's a probability that photons will kick off each other, bounce off each other.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than just pass through.

• 22:48Brian Cox?

  Yeah, so it's remarkable, a remarkable property of particle physics, that they don't interact. So I can look at you and all these other ones that are flying across there, don't mess up this view of you. But actually-

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Radio waves and microwaves too.

• 23:00Brian Cox?

  Same wifi all over the place, nothing's colliding. But actually, when you go up high energies, then the probability that photons will collide with each other increases. And one of the interesting things in cosmic ray physics that you might know about is that there's a cutoff.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. A spooky cutoff.

• 23:16Brian Cox?

  Yeah, where the cosmic rays can be at such high energy that the probability they'll bounce off the photons in the cosmic microwave background becomes high. So my point was just a technical one, that photons do have a... There's a probability they'll collide together. And if you had this high-energy, ultra-high-energy lightsaber-

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would have to be really, really high-energy lightsaber. And so now this would come into the regime that you're describing, and they would come in contact, and you would feel this-

• 23:42Brian Cox?

  Yeah, they'd interact with each other, just like these things interact.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:47Brian Cox?

  What I loved about that, though, as you said, was I loved the fact that there's an audience for that kind of interaction that we had, and it's really geeky.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:55Brian Cox?

  It's just talking about lightsabers and the physics of the lightsaber.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Appreciate how much people would geek out over that.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so he taught a new one in me, right there.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  And with a smile on his face, too. So gentle.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, if I had to be wrong, I wanted to be wrong to him in that moment.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I was like, "It's actually kinda great, but you were totally wrong."

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great, brilliant imitation.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  And were other people on Twitter, like, piping up with what they thought it was?

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, they were like, "Fight, fight." You know, nerd fight, nerd fight. It was like cheering it on, you know?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Well, but interesting also that he was commenting... He was commenting on how delighted he was that there would be an audience that would be so interested in knowing the physics of an imaginary weapon, which testament to the power of science fiction to make people, like, you know, excited and aspire and so on.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, so, in your, in your sort of...

• 24:56Speaker 02

  My world.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With people who know who you are,

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how have you used Twitter to serve an audience?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I use it as a broadcasting tool for interestingness, basically. So I, I follow other people and I leverage their brains as curators of interesting content. And then I use my own brain as a filter to pay it forward and broadcast what I think is interesting.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so part of your task, which you've done so well, is, is synthesize philosophical ideas, some of which are very deep and in some cases intractable to, to normal vocabulary. And then, and you parse it out in very, very tasty bits.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Do you use emojis?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I just, I just think, I think that we need other ways to enter complicated ideas. If we're not academics, if we're not reading the treatises or the full paper, show me another way in, you know? Like, I'm not a scientist by training, but I'm fascinated by scientific ideas. But I need you to explain it to me in a way that blows my mind.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe the fact that Newton did his best work before he was 26.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Darwin did his best work before he was 26. Einstein did his best work before he was 26. Really? Maybe after that, you gotta like pay bills and earn a living. And all of a sudden, the bandwidth for awe narrows because life kicks in. Life gets in the way, I would say. So, getting back to my interview with Brian Cox in my office, because I nabbed him as he came through New York. We couldn't resist. You know, it's two, an astrophysicist and a physicist walk into an office. What happens? We had to talk about wormholes. Yeah, we love wormholes. Who doesn't love wormholes? We'd love to use some wormholes. Let's see how that went down.

• 26:54Brian Cox?

  Not to name drop, but I talked to Stephen Hawking about this, actually. Recently, I asked him a question, and he pointed me to a paper he'd written in the 70s, I think, or 80s, called the Chronology Protection Conjecture.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know this paper.

• 27:08Brian Cox?

  The problem with wormholes is that it looks like you can build time machines, because you can get back into the past.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can beat a light beam, you can go back in time. And a wormhole would beat a light beam.

• 27:20Brian Cox?

  Yes. So, he proposes that that's not the way the laws of physics work. It's a conjecture. So, it's an axiom almost. So, what it's doing in technical language is it's putting causality as an axiom. The idea that cause and effect can't be reversed. So, wormholes seem not to...

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if he's right, then they're impossible.

• 27:42Brian Cox?

  Yes, so he would say that if you take that conjecture seriously, then when we have a quantum theory of gravity, so when we understand gravity in more detail than Einstein's general theory of relativity gives us, then there will be some physical process that does not allow wormholes to exist. So, maybe, I mean, because already you need different forms of matter, as I understand it, which you need some strange forms of matter or configurations of fields that are not known to exist.

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that never stops an American mind dreaming this stuff up.

• 28:12Brian Cox?

  But the idea that you can't build a time machine, you could actually put central, you could say any sensible physical theory will respect causality.

• 28:21Brian Cox?

  And in fact, not wishing to promote my own books, but the book I wrote, I wrote a book called Why Does E = mc squared years ago, which is really a

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love equals mc squared. In fact, one of these chairs, I have to read on the back, was an award for an essay I wrote on equals mc squared. I got a chair and $300 or something.

• 28:39Brian Cox?

  Did you? That's a nice, that's a nice chair.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Brian Cox?

  But in that book, we actually, this is a side I wrote with a friend of mine. We do special relativity, Einstein's theory of special relativity, the standard way. But then we do it a different way, a geometric way, and we impose causality. And we show that if you're going to have something called spacetime, and you want a theory to respect cause and effect, you end up with a universal speed limit, which you can call, you don't get the number, but you get something, the speed of light, something that massless things have to travel at. And things that have mass must travel slower than.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're prepared to say that You're prepared to say that our life experience, where there's a cause that precedes an effect, may be fundamental to the universe and not just simply our life experience.

• 29:24Brian Cox?

  Yes, and that's the content of Hawking's paper, not proved, we should say.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd just be really cool if an effect, if a cause followed an effect. That would just be an awesome universe.

• 29:38Brian Cox?

  It would, yeah.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean, it's in an inverted way, but that's, I'm open to that possibility. I don't have a problem.

• 29:46Brian Cox?

  It's very interesting, actually, and there are problems in quantum mechanics that you can point to. Our understanding is not complete of these things.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because imagine, so you go back in time and you give yourself a message about how to go back in time, okay? So you go back in time and someone prevents you from giving yourself a message. So then, how did you go back in time to, right, so you get these paradoxes. But maybe when something has to happen, you actually have to do it. No matter what you do, you will make that happen. That'd be interesting, that that would completely get rid of free will.

• 30:29Brian Cox?

  Well, yeah, well, I, yeah, I have problems with free will, actually.

• 30:35Brian Cox?

  Well, in Einstein's theory, it's called the block universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity gives you this thing called the block universe, where the future and the past are there, in a sense. So it's an unsolved problem, how time operates and how this universe could perhaps build up. There's a friend of mine that works on granular sort of structures that build, so you build up the future, the future does, because in Einstein's theory, the future is there. And we travel in, we travel across the surface of spacetime at the speed of light, actually, that's what we do. I should say, spacetime at the speed of light.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:09Brian Cox?

  Not through space at the speed of light. So we're flying up, the idea now is we're at rest, we're stood there, we're not moving relative to each other, so we're both flying up the time dimension at one second per second, which is the speed of light. So the future's there in that sense. So I share your worries about free will.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're just occupying a coordinate that is waiting for us to visit it.

• 31:31Brian Cox?

  Yeah, we'll be there, our world line will go into second.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In one second, we will be one second up the timeline.

• 31:37Brian Cox?

  Yeah, across the surface.

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's waiting for us, yes, yes.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk returns, we're going to explore the implications of the physics of wormholes and what it has to say about free will.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk is back. We are here, under the sphere of the Hades Project, for which I serve as director here at the American Museum of Natural History. So this is my place, y'all in my place.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Your house.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. So, Jason, we just came out of a clip, we're talking about wormholes and how they could interfere with causality.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is our understanding of life.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  The whole thing, right?

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You studied philosophy and you're a deep thinker on these matters.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have thoughts about causality?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Well, I'd be very interested in this notion of, once you start playing with causality, what does that say about everything?

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything, because a wormhole... It all allows you to beat a light beam. If you beat a light beam, you can disrupt your own past.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Right, so normally we think of things beginning, middle, and cause-effect, right? Can an effect be a reason that a cause happens? I mean, is that what he's starting to play with?

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  So then what is, then it goes into the whole question that like, everything is pre-mapped? Or can we move inside of that space?

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying, I think, is that if an effect

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  can

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  cause a cause.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, can cause its own cause.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can cause its own cause.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  It's the snake eating its own tail.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If an effect can cause its own cause.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  It's Escher's hands, the hand drawing the hand that's drawing it. It's paradoxical.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a, if a, if an effect can cause its own cause, does that require the absence of free will?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Because it's gonna happen anyway.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it has to happen.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Well, it, it's a necessary paradox. So it tells us that free will doesn't exist, but yet, from the point of view of subjectivity, we feel free and that's all that matters because subjectivity is all we ever get to know anyway. So it's one of those things where, yeah, it's all predetermined if that's true and free will doesn't exist, but it doesn't really matter because I feel free and I feel like I make decisions every day and that's all that really matters.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a friend and colleague of mine, Janna Levin, who is professor of astronomy and physics at Barnard College of Columbia University. She's got a lot to say because she does a lot of thinking about free will and cause and effect. So I've just been told that we've got her on video call like right now. So let's go find out what she has to say on these topics. Jenna, are you there?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Hey, yeah, Neil.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey! So you study cosmology, this is what you do. And, and the big questions in the big picture. So I gotta hear from you, what you, what your reaction is to all this.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Well, once Einstein started to put time on a map, we could start to look and ask, is that aspect of the map always there? You know, north is always there, whether or not we travel in that direction, or, you know, there are certain aspects of the idea of having a map that make you think it's prominent. And so there is this sense in which we can wonder whether or not the future and the past are always there. And we simply move through this spacetime like a bead on a wire. And that's unclear. I mean, there's a lot of confusion about this question, actually.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're thinking, if you analogize time, in which, as far as we know, we are prisoners of the present, eternally in motion between the past and the future, that if time, if we think of it as a coordinate like any other, that we have access to all directions within it, that perhaps time is just another one of these, and if it is, it completely removes the concept of free will in our lives?

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I mean, if time really exists, meaning right now the past exists in some sense and the future exists in some sense, then that does raise questions about whether or not it's already written. There are people, though, who think, you know, look, time is different. I can show you a picture of the past, but I cannot show you a picture of the future. And, you know, I can move north, but I cannot turn around and go backward in time. I mean, there are certain things we know we cannot do in time, and maybe time is genuinely different. So some people argue that maybe it's only the present that exists, and the past genuinely does not exist, that the map is just an analogy to something.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean the past doesn't exist? I have photographs of my past.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  It did exist. Doesn't exist anymore.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, doesn't exist anymore?

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  And these are really debated topics. I mean, these are things that people really wrestle with. And some people think that it's the key to really understanding.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but I didn't call other people, I called you. So what do you think about this?

• 36:39Speaker 05

  Well, I would fall in favor of saying there probably is no free will.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No free will, wow. Well, Professor Levin, thank you for helping us out here with the free will question. And it's very late for you there, so, thanks.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jan Levin. When StarTalk continues, we will rejoin my conversation with Professor Brian Cox. And we'll be talking about the influence of politics on science. And also exploring what it means to go on a one-way trip to Mars. When StarTalk returns.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the hall of the universe. I love saying that.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jason, Maeve, again, thanks for being on.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, we've been featuring my interview with Brian Cox. And so, I had to ask him, just because it's been in the news, would he go on that one-way trip to Mars? I just, I like collecting people's opinions and views.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Is it because he's like your UK competition? So you're like...

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would he go or would he not? I don't know.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Why don't you go to Mars, Brian?

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go to Mars and don't come back.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's check it out. So there are plans for people to take a one-way trip to Mars. Are you going to sign up?

• 38:07Brian Cox?

  No. Why would you do that? Why would anyone want to do that?

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thousands of people have lined up to go on this one-way trip to Mars.

• 38:14Brian Cox?

  I know, but that wasn't ever the trick. The great thing about Apollo was the return of the thing. It was always a Kennedy speech, wasn't it? It was to go to the moon and come safely back to Earth. That's a difficult bit.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the key word safely, yeah.

• 38:27Brian Cox?

  Yeah, it's not particularly difficult, I think. It wouldn't be difficult to go on a one-way trip to the moon, I think, even now.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 38:32Brian Cox?

  You could do it. But it's getting back off the moon again.

• 38:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's not as technologically challenging as the full round trip. But the idea of just pitching tent on another planet?

• 38:46Brian Cox?

  It doesn't appeal to me. I don't think there's much to do there.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like Earth too.

• 38:51Brian Cox?

  There are very few restaurants on Mars. There are very few... Yeah.

• 38:57Brian Cox?

  But it is interesting, and it's interesting that the framework is a reality TV show essentially. And is that what exploration has become? Is that what we want exploration to be? A reality TV show? I'm not sure. Actually, well, I am sure. I don't think that's what exploration is.

• 39:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want it to be that?

• 39:19Brian Cox?

  No, I don't. I don't want that to be the way that we have to resort to funding, essentially killing a load of people, which is essentially what it is, on television. That's really what it is. Is that really the way we want to fund the expansion of the frontiers of our knowledge? I'm not really sure.

• 39:37Brian Cox?

  He has a good point.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you time how long it took him to say no? After I asked him the question?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  So polite. Like, "I'm not sure, maybe." I feel like he'd almost be on the shuttle before he was like, "No."

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I was like, "No, no, no, no. Why would anybody do this?" Jason, you, part of you, from what I've seen of your work, you count yourself, I think, among those who would call themselves futurists. So how would you... Is this in our future?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  To go to Mars?

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And stay, yes.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  You know, the first generation... Yeah, I think the first generation are taking a gamble, I think. But I do think that advances in nanotechnology, or even like terraforming and crazy stuff like that, will eventually allow us to make whatever we set up in Mars a luxury hospitable situation for ourselves. But the way it feels like it's gonna be now, yeah, I would not go.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but... In order to have a second generation of one timers, you need a first generation. Somebody always has to do it first.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Pioneers.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so not you?

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Old men. Not me, not me.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, science is, it's not just all awe. Somebody, you have to find a way to fund it. You need some, and in this case, it's TV. It's reality TV selling eyeballs to advertisers. And in my conversation with Brian, he talked about the Royal Society, a storied institution in the UK, where basically it's the birth of the modern communication of science among researchers. And he said he noticed something interesting there. That it was worth sharing.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Related to how science gets done, let's check it out.

• 41:28Brian Cox?

  You think of it, and rightly so, as a scientific institution, it's interested in research, the pure acquisition of knowledge. But if you look back at the books, they're being funded by the king at the time, by the crown. And the books will say, "We're going to go on an expedition to past India, through into the Orient, and number one, we'd like to acquire knowledge about the flora and fauna and peoples that are there." And then it say, "Number two, how many deep-water ports are there? Number three, how many raw materials are there and how could we get access to them?" So you see that even 300 years ago, the scientists, you get a sense, were playing the political game.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the flip side of what science is happening. It's, yes, go explore, oh, by the way, claim land for the crown.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Fair enough, but don't you think that there's a trend now, you know, on the back of information technologies? We have a new generation of young, ambitious entrepreneurs that have become billionaires in the digital economy and now feel a sense of wanting to make a legacy and make an impact. You have the Elon Musks of the world, you have Larry Pages of the world. Musk wants us to go to Mars. Larry Page created Calico, California Life Extension Company, to literally cure aging. These guys are putting their billions into world-transforming technologies. They're investing in this kind of science so that we don't necessarily need to depend on the government and on the politics.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're doing it because they can make a buck off of it.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Eventually, but I think right now, Google has their successful business models with search and all these moonshot projects are...

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, moonshot projects, okay. So like Elon Musk doing his fast train and...

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Which is amazing.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. When we come back to StarTalk, we will revisit Bill Nye, commenting on the topic of the day when StarTalk returns.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk. I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, I got Jason Silva, I got Maeve Higgins, of course. Thanks for being with me on StarTalk. We've been featuring my interview with Brian Cox. And I want to go straight to my friend, Bill Nye. I don't know where he's gonna be, but he's gonna tell us that knowledge is everywhere, you just have to look. Let's check it out.

• 43:55Bill Nye?

  You've probably used the expression, busy as Grand Central. Three quarters of a million people pass through here every day, and very few of them ever look up. If they do, they're treated to a beautiful rendering of the night sky. Even as we travel beneath our streets, it's always up there. Just imagine what our world would be like if we didn't know the stars, if we didn't know the cosmos. Our ancestors would not have been able to reckon the seasons and raise their crops, and then raise their children. We wouldn't have been able to navigate on the high seas and produce the commerce that makes our world go round. Today, you can take out your mobile phone and tell which side of the street you're standing on because we have satellites orbiting in space.

• 44:40Bill Nye?

  So next time you're here, take it all in. It's an image of an October night sky. But it's whimsical because the constellations are in reverse order. They're backwards. But you can know that because you can look at the ceiling here and compare it with your own observation with the real night sky. You can tell, this is art and the cosmos is science.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grand Central Terminal, Bill Nye.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I didn't know the constellations are backwards on the...

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they're backwards. One of them is actually forward and all the rest are backwards.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  By accident?

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think they messed up, actually. Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  But then he ends it with, "And that's why this is art and the cosmos is science."

• 45:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Like dismissing art, like whatever.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  They're wrong and crazy and we're good and learned.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, had they paid a little closer attention to actual star maps, they would have got it right. That's all I'm saying.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my interview with Brian Cox, I wanted to get some summative remarks from him, just to reflect on the value of science. Let's find out what Brian Cox tells us about knowledge.

• 45:51Brian Cox?

  We need to rediscover our ambition. And America is not the only country that I perceive to have lost it. Europe lost it a long time ago, it had lost it before America went to the moon. Right, so, but these cultures, these scientific and engineering cultures, as you said, these superhero cultures essentially that we have, need to just rediscover that confidence. But not just because we want to do things that seem ridiculous, like going to Mars, but because you can argue that that confidence in this country, in the 50s and 60s and 70s, admittedly perhaps led by some perceived threat from the Soviet Union etcetera, but anyway, there was a confidence there. That investment led to so much that we take for granted today.

• 46:37Brian Cox?

  And if we're not going to do it, who's gonna do it?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  He has a different tone on America's ambition and then he was like, "Yeah, a little competition with the Soviets, but really it was our dreams and our ambitions." Slightly different opinion.

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he's downplaying the role.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he knows, because he read-

• 46:54Speaker 01

  That narrative is like more exciting.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but he read the backstories in the Royal Society.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, he knows. I think he doesn't want to-

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -display it.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know it and I try to put it up- Right, display it. You'd know it, but you keep it on the down low.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  No, no, I recognize the fact that conflict has led to innovation because it acts as an incentive for people to get their game on, to beat the rival, so to speak. But going to space now on the back of private enterprise could have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  So I think that those trends will continue because of exponential technology. So, maybe inspiration is enough to inspire the next young kid to become a billionaire and fund the next mission to the next planet.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, but it's like kinda gross that they feel like they have to become a billionaire first. Do you think?

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is that gross?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  I just wonder if that would like, you know, if that would like get in the way. Cause like lots of people are like, I'm gonna do this first and then I'm gonna go back to my sense of wonder and awe. But first I'm gonna make my money and I'm gonna, you know.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Well, I recently sat down with somebody who had a different definition of billionaire that we could all aspire to. He said, "A definition of billionaire could be to positively affect the lives of a billion people." "That's the ambition to become a billionaire. That's the kind of billionaire you wanna be."

• 48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jason, that cannot be followed with any further commentary.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Great.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  You're here.

• 48:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us all go forth and positively influence the billions.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Billions.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of our species. You've been watching StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I, as always, bid you to keep looking out.