Cosmic Queries – Before the Big Bang

0:00So Paul, it's not every day I get to think about infinities. Somebody asked about that. That was fun. Yeah. It's a little spooky. It's a little spooky, and it sort of keeps you thinking, and then you ultimately get to the point where you don't think that there's a definitive answer to the question about infinity. Or you give up on life. That's exactly right. And we had a little bit of a celebration of the centennial of quantum physics. Yes. This is the 1920s. And I hear there's a big pool party at your house to celebrate that. Not. So everybody's invited. Coming up, StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

0:42StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Today we're doing Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. And I've got co-host here, Paul Mercurio. Paul, welcome back. Great to see you. Oh, I love your work, man. Thank you. Yeah, I see you on the late show. Yeah. The occasions when I'm on, I see you warming up the crowd. But occasionally it gives you a slot. Oh, yeah. I've been on a bunch of times and I'm going to be going on again very soon. Okay. No, cool. We'll look for you. Yeah, it's always great. And there's like a Broadway show or a stage show, Permission to Speak.

1:26And we all know your podcast. Yeah. Inside Out with Paul Mercurio. Inside Out with Paul Mercurio. And you're on it. I think I've been on that a couple times. Yeah, absolutely. I still owe you money for that. So there's no categories here. There's no categories. This is loose, but I got to tell you. And you got pages and pages, dude. We got tons of, and they're all good. And they're varied. And they're from people all over the country and all over the world. And different age ranges, which you'll see. Okay, good. So it's really cool. Hit me. So this is Mancheno. Cheno, from the U.S. of A., had the SSC in Texas gone through, where would we be today?

2:00Do canceled projects like this set us back as a species? Also, what other major scientific breakthroughs have been made or halted? Ooh, made or halted. I like that. Sounds like he's digging. Yeah. So the SSC, the Superconducting Super Collider, which was, had I been in charge of naming it, I would call it the Super Duper Collider. I was going to say. I think of these more adjectives. That's what I know. The Gargantuan Super. They ran out of adjectives there. Oh my God, honey, look at the size of this collider. Yeah, so they missed out on that one, I thought. If you take certain metals and you reduce their temperature, there comes a point where they become superconducting, where electricity can pass through them and there's no resistance and they don't get hot and it just moves.

2:51We call that superconductivity. In the 1970s and 80s, there was research into, can we make superconducting materials at a higher temperature? In other words, as you lower the temperature of the material, can it become superconducting at a much higher temperature than previously enabled? Why is that important to seek it at a higher temperature? Because if you can find a room temperature superconductor, ooh, that would transform everything. Yeah, but then every average person is going to have it, and then we're going to have all these people with superconductors. With superpowers. And then all of a sudden, people are going to be turned into like little ants, like Ant-Man.

3:29What are you people, crazy? Is that how he became an ant? You guys can't put power like that in a hand. Okay, that's a very good point. You want to meet my brother-in-law? You don't want that guy to have. It should have some guardrails, right? Okay. So it came of age when higher temperature superconducting materials were becoming available. And why does that matter? For any collider, you're accelerating particles. The particles have an electric charge. and if you move an electric charge through a magnetic field you can accelerate it and you you adjust the magnetic field make it make it just right it can get very very fast the particles can go very fast hitting 99 percent the speed of what is the manifestation of that very fast moving particles look like is just is that the electric is that it's just a beam of particles like typically protons and you slam it into a target okay and that creates an a field of energy out of which brand new particles can form.

4:25And we harness that energy for what? No, no, it's not for energy. It's for what new particles exist in this universe that we didn't know about before we turned on the switch. We have enough particles. Why do we need new particles? Because you always want more particles. Come on. What are you doing with a new particle? We need more. Because a new particle might explain something we didn't understand. Oh, okay. So you're constantly in search of it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like what we were talking about on another show. So you never rest. Yeah, you never rest. So it came of age at that time. And by the way, it's still the Cold War, early 90s.

4:56So under Reagan, we say, yes, let's start this project. Superconducting supercollider. They dig the hole. By the way, it would be the largest and most powerful supercollider in the world. You dig a hole somewhere out there? Yeah, it's like I forgot the diameter, a couple hundred miles. I mean, huge. Yeah, it's the Meadowlands. Some states are not large enough to contain this collider, such as Rhode Island. All right? Which is where I'm from. You're from Rhode Island. That's my home state. Can the world stop making any small reference and compare it to Rhode Island? Can we all move on from that?

5:31If I hear blankety blank twice the size of Rhode Island, I'm going to create my own super collider and zap you. I didn't know it was that sensitive. Rhode Islanders carry issues. We have size issues. You have issues. As it were. Okay. So Texas is clearly big enough. So it's in Waxahachie, Texas. Okay? They acquired the land, started digging the hole. Right. And the years go by. And around 1989, 1990, the government takes another look at the contracting, the budgets. And they judge that there are cost overruns that we cannot afford. And they zero the project. that's different from canceling it, but it's the same thing.

6:22From what I read, the project was fairly far along. Yes, it was. Yes, it was. The research, the engineering, and then they zeroed the project. And once that happened, the center of mass of particle physics would no longer be in the United States. But just because you don't do it doesn't mean some other folks can't or won't. Right, right. And the European Center for Nuclear Research, CERN, which is located in Switzerland, but it's a European consortium, an international consortium, I should say. They said, all right, you're not going to do it. We're going to do it. So then they built, as part of their facility, the Large Hadron Collider.

7:04You might have heard of that, the LHC. That became the detector that found the mythical Higgs boson, the god particle. The particle whose field grants mass to other particles. That's badass. If you're going to be a particle, that's the particle you want to be. That's what you want to be. There's a book called The God Particle written about the Higgs boson. That was written decades ago because we knew it should be there. We don't have an accelerator that can detect the energies where we would find it. And that's the particle that kills his brother, the other particle, who thinks he's cheating. He's Fredo.

7:42he kills his brother Fredo oh I'm sorry I got this mixed up with the godfather go ahead continue

7:50so so in all seriousness why couldn't the community the scientific community in America convince the federal government and the people funding this that this was a mistake because they didn't call it a super duper collider that's my answer those idiots would have understood the significance okay so watch there is a report that talks about the budget that we can't afford it I have a different view. No time in the 20th century when we had the power to make particle accelerators did anyone complain if there were cost overruns. You don't even know if there were cost overruns. Maybe there were no cost overruns.

8:26I didn't check the budget on every single particle accelerator in the country in the 20th century. There's Brookhaven. There's Stanford Linear Accelerator. There's outside of Chicago, Fermilabs, okay? All over the country. And they're all under the auspices of the Department of Energy, by the way. So a budget serves this. All right. This gets canceled. Wait a minute. What else happened in 1989? Oh. Peace broke out in Europe. Yeah. Peace broke out. Right. The Berlin Wall came down. And within three years, four years, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Oh, there was cost overruns we can't afford. If you're threatened with your life and your way of living, there are no cost overruns.

9:24That's not. And how can you. That's exactly right. Okay, I don't mean to. I'd be blunt about it, okay? Here's a blank check. Keep me alive. Keep me alive. Yes, yes. Right? Keep me alive. And by the way, very clever to put it under the auspices of the Department of Energy instead of the DOD so that it can look like it's - It looks like just a science project that we don't care for. We're going to better our energy out. Correct. Correct. But 20th century was the century of the physicist from beginning to end all the way through. Yeah. And no Cold War? I oh by the way President Clinton comes in in the 1990s and it's the first time that anybody remembers the budget is balanced for the United States and so they want to take credit for balancing the budget except there's no Cold War anymore okay so he takes office there's no Cold War so yeah let's be real about budgets right all right let's understand this right and I write about this it's speculative there's no document that says this.

10:29The document says cost overruns we're zeroing the budget. We have other priorities. There's others that said that when the space station was coming online the space station would be primarily served through NASA's Houston's NASA Houston. Right. Okay. The Johnson Space Center. Others declared that the politics of it were you can't have two major projects in the same state that would get that much attention from the government. Yeah but you can move one to another state. No, you can't move the hole in the ground, the accelerator. You can't move the other. No, no, Johnson Space Center. You can't move that.

11:04Do it in Florida. No, Florida already has a space center. But that's not where the astronauts. See, it's this kind of negative thinking that kept the super-duper collider from existence. In Florida Space Center, they don't train the astronauts there. The astronauts are trained in Houston. NASA has 10 centers strategically put. All right? This is. Listen, my friend. You just said it a minute ago. If we were on the verge of a brink of war, they'd find a way to have both of those. There are no cost overruns. They're both of those programs to exist. So I wrote about this in my book from a few years ago.

11:32When was it? 2017. Accessory to War, the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military. And I talk about this two-way street between the frontier of modern astrophysics, particle physics in there as well. Because particles, we learn about the Big Bang and the needs of the military. So that became the most obvious accounting for that to occur. We lose the center of mass. It goes to Europe. Europe eventually discovers the Higgs boson, Nobel Prizes all around. Our accelerator was, depending on the beam, three to six times more powerful than the most powerful settings of the LHC. so we would have discovered the higgs boson decades ago and perhaps either at that time or in in the resulting decades other things well thank you other things perhaps other things right once you get there now you ask the next question right it's a new place to stand never stop and you have a proscenium looking beyond what else exactly right it's never about the question you even know to ask so that's the question you haven't thought of yet right because there's a place you will soon stand that will give you a view that you didn't even know was possible.

12:51And based on that perspective, the setback is almost exponential in a way, right? Because we don't know what we don't know, and that's a shame. You don't know what you don't know, correct. And that's deep and important and real. They're trying to boost the energies of the LHC to go to the next level there. So that was getting back to the specifics of the question. The discovery of the Higgs boson was delayed decades because of that decision. But science is science. It's not about the creativity of an individual. If Beethoven did not compose the Ninth Symphony, if Van Gogh did not paint the Starry Night, no one who will ever be born in the future will compose or paint that.

13:35Right. Whereas in science, you can be very creative and be ahead of everybody, but eventually everybody catches up and we move beyond it. Because what decides what is true is not the public's voting on, oh, we like your artwork. It's nature, which is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner of your idea. And if you don't want to do it in the United States, another country does it. By the way, it's international. So we had Americans who were part of that collaboration, but we didn't lead it. That's all. And I'm American. I'm American. I'm a 20th century American, but we led everything. And now I'm going to, well, what you got over there, guy?

14:13Can I look over the fence? I had that. We almost had that. It's like you're looking over the fence and your neighbor's got an in-ground pool and you've got an above-ground. America's a country when it comes to that with the above-ground pool. Well, that was a great question and a tremendous answer. I think it was a long answer, but it was great.

14:45I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil Degras Tyson.

15:03I love this person. This is Rupesh. Hi, my name is Kriti. I am 11 years old. I'm in the sixth grade. I live in Cary, North Carolina. In my school, we are doing a passion project, and my topic is astrophysics, as I find this topic very interesting. I have also recently been reading - This person is 11 years old? I know, right? Been reading - No, no, you're lying. So it's not 22? No. Okay, fine. It says 11. I know how to read. I've also been reading your book Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry by the way could you come up with a longer title Jesus I have a question for you and I'd love if you could answer it for me as that question would be added into my project plus your answer so speaking of truth this kid's asking you to help her cheat is the question very basic what existed before the Big Bang oh I can answer that you can yeah yes okay go ahead we had no idea okay next question this is why people find scientists annoying we want some generalize to everybody else just because we want some definitive answers in our life just because in this moment you find me annoying here's i got two things that existed before the big bang ready yeah lint maybe and a single sock it started all with a single sock is that the sock that is missing from the laundry that single sock was lost in space floating around in time in time we don't know for sure and we wouldn't even know how to experimentally verify our ideas but there are some ideas and when you run the equations back through time of general relativity einstein and quantum physics by the way we are in the centennial decade of the discovery of most of the important tenets in quantum physics so i feel it gives me yeah goosebumps actually and not only that that's the decade where edwin hubble hubble was a person before before a telescope that didn't work it works now was he as defective as a person as he was as a telescope mama didn't so so uh in in the mid 1920s he discovers that the spiral fuzzy things in the night sky spiral nebulae were whole other galaxies like the milky way this is freaky was there speculation as to what it was before he just just spiral clouds yeah there were other fuzzy clouds that weren't spiral so they were like but there were telescopes that existed before his no but you have to know the distance to things right you can't just pace it out by walking it all right if you find the distance to a spiral nebula and it's a hundred times farther away than other nebulae then the sitting outside of your galaxy.

17:51Right. All right? And so he discovered that in mid-decade. And then by the end of the decade, he discovers the expanding universe. That 1920s. Yeah. It's a roaring 20s. Yeah. Right before the market crashed in October 1929. And then, you know, people weren't so focused on science, unfortunately. It's like the science of eating and having food on your plate. When you run the equations back, you generate this entity that pumps out universes possibly an infinite number of universes it pumps them out and we call that the multiverse a term that's just been uptook by marvel by marvel and not only marvel but of course uh rick and morty right with all of these brilliant minds out there over the years.

18:42Why haven't, what is your theory as to what's keeping us from knowing what existed before the Big Bang? We've been figuring out other things like the origin of the earth and the origin of the moon and the origin of stars and the origin of, and now we're on the origin of galaxies. So the origin of the, give us a chance here. We have top people working on it. Yeah, but you're avoiding the question. Like I'm having an argument with my wife. You're avoiding the question. What I'm saying is science is more about knowing what question to ask than to have an answer for every question posed. Isaac Newton, my man.

19:18I have my little finger puppet over here next to my voodoo thing. I don't even know what that, that showed up in my office one day. I don't know where it came from. That is a little creepy. Yeah, I don't, I have no, this was just in my, I don't even know where it came from. Something's got to put some weight on. A little malnourished. We'll sit him there. Isaac Newton in his book, Optic. published 1704, wrote it in English so that like regular people could read it, not in the academic language, Latin for scholars. At the end of his book, he has a section called queries. By the way, that's where I get the word cosmic queries.

19:55It's not called cosmic questions, which would also kind of work. You get the alliteration, but cosmic queries. He has a section in the back called queries. This is just stuff that spilled off his dinner plate. One of them is, I wonder if the stars of the night sky are just like the sun, except much, much farther away. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Okay? Yeah. And that's like a scrap off the different plate. And this is the guy who utters this line. I'll mangle it only a little. He says, sometimes I feel like a child sitting on a shoreline, picking up one pebble for being shinier than another, when an ocean of undiscovered truths lay before me.

20:49Wow. It's Newton saying that. A man. So anyhow, so the multiverse is there for what might have been around before the Big Bang. But that just moves the question back, you know, where did the multiverse come from? Yeah, it just keeps going and going and going. Yeah, so that plagues origins questions. Right. And by the way, it somehow doesn't plague religious people. Well, I was just going to say, it's sort of, we're not even talking about the theory that God created everything. It's not science. Well, it's not theory. It's faith. Right. that says that. So what intrigues me is when I say, well, I don't know what was around before the big, but something had to be there.

21:34Something. We got top people working on it. We're working. It had to be God. Then I say, maybe the universe always was. No, it had to have a beginning. And so it's okay. Well, so what do you say? Well, it was God. And so then I say, well, who created God? God always was. God was always there. So they allow that within themselves. Right. to say God always was, but won't allow the scientists to say, maybe the universe always was. Apparently that's not allowed. But it's allowed when you're religious and you say that about God. So all I'm saying is, the origins questions will always be able to push it forward unless somehow it creates itself.

22:13And then you have a loop. But we're not there yet. It's a frontier. Give me some more. Yeah, you got it. Grab, grab me some more. Yeah, this is Umar Chima, Umar from Seattle. long time star talk listener i finally decided to get off my cheap ass and become a patron i love that yeah thank you umar for getting off your cheap ass okay okay save your money because t-shirts are coming patreon saints patron saints here's my first question we know that we can slow down our time relative to others by traveling at a super high speed or getting very close to a massive object in space but is there a way to accelerate our time instead of slowing it down can we accelerate our time and essentially visit the past or does it just mean we just get old super fast and if anybody knows about getting old

23:10see i'm proud of my age i'd like to believe that i have wisdom to show for it you do that's all I don't want to get old because they're not learning new things they're stuck in some previous time in their lives where they wish they were still on the football team or still on the cheerleading squad speaking of which that's why I don't want to go back to the past because I'm not going to ever win that 50 yard dash and then embarrass myself I couldn't get Mary Ferguson to go to the prom with me don't get me started you have issues you're bringing to the show you've got to leave those in therapy I can't.

23:46This is why I'm here. I need you. So can we accelerate our time and visit the past? I think you have to look at it differently. The guy's a paying customer. He can look at it any way he wants. It's true. Customer's always right. You're right. You're right. Whatever you're thinking, you're right. Just keep sending the money, people. Come on, send the money. You shouldn't look at it that way. You should look at it as your speed as seen by others. By the way, you don't feel this at all. It's only as measured by others. So if you go fast and time slows down for you, you're still ticking. To you, it's one second per second.

24:19To everybody else, it's one second per 10 minutes, one second per hour. I'm not following. I'd explain it. How is it observable by others, my speed? If I see you, oh, so I'm here, and I see you whiz by at some speed. Okay. So you walk down the hall. Well, I was thinking of a rocket ship, but sure. Okay. All right. A rocket ship. Okay. Walk down the hall at half the speed of light. Okay. which i can do all right i have an equation a formula that tells me the rate at which your time is ticking relative to me and i plug it in and i forgot the number it might be ticking a third or fourth my time is different than yours because you're stationary and this thing is moving that's almost the right way to say it your time is different from me because we are moving relative to each other as far as you're concerned you are stationary and i'm moving pass you at half the speed of light.

25:12We don't know. So you will look at me and say, oh, he's moving slow. And I look at you and say, oh, you're moving slow. Both of us will measure the same thing about each other if we are passing each other in the night at half the speed of light. One going one direction, one going the other direction. Correct. Why is half the speed of light a critical? It's not. I can say 10%. But it's not linear. so that the faster you go relative to the speed of light, the greater and greater the effects are. All right? So half the speed of light is not half the effects. Okay. It's a small fraction, and it grows rapidly.

25:49Okay. All right? It goes at like the square of your velocity as you get closer. How do I make your time go slower if you're going half the speed of light? I make you go faster. Now you go three-quarters the speed of light, 90 % the speed of light, and I can watch you slow down relative to me. How do I speed you up? Go slower. Go one-fourth the speed of light, one-tenth the speed of light. How slow can I get your time to go? Stop right in front of me. And that is the slowest we can make your time go. Which is the same time. And that happens to match my time. Correct. They want to go backwards. We don't know how to do that.

26:24Because I have to repeat my time poem. Please. If I may. Please. We are prisoners of the present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. That's exactly what I say to my wife when she asked if I bought pickles and I forgot. You know, you're bringing your issues into... Well, you make it very relatable to my life. Okay. And I have a lot of issues. And, you know, I love you, man. I love you. So the answer is... It's not your fault. It's not your fault. But there's this obsession in pop culture with this time travel. You want to go backwards in time. And do you think, do you just think, and I know, you never say absolutes, but like, why?

27:06It's dangerous because you start flirting with the past and you alter the future or whatever. Well, you can flirt with your own future. So if you went in the past, what would you change? You have to watch out for that because you don't know the full set of contingencies that would follow. Okay, who cares about anybody else? No, they don't. What would you change for you? If you go in the past and there's Hitler as a child, will you kill Hitler as a child? Would you do that? What you don't know is there's someone else that would rise up that would have been worse than him for the stability of the world in the 1930s and 40s.

27:36You don't know that. I'm keeping the past the way it is, not knowing whether having altered it. By the way, this was explored in an episode of Star Trek. They went back in time to the 1930s or late 30s. I forgot the exact year. And Bones, I think it was Bones, the surgeon, falls in love with a woman. You're not supposed to do that because they're, there's. You're messing with. You're messing with the time continuum. The space-time continuum. But as usual, men led by their whatever. That's a scientific fact. That is a scientific fact. Go ahead. No, on that subject, by the way, the first interracial kiss between a black person and white person was on Star Trek.

28:20And it was William Shatner. Oh, I remember that. It was kissing Lieutenant O 'Hourer. I remember that. Okay. they got all kinds of hate mail from the South on that. There was 1967, somewhere around there. Meanwhile, Captain Kirk can visit all these galaxies. There's a green woman, a blue woman. She's got a tumor over here, a horn over here. He can kiss them. They're clearly female aliens. He's kissing all up in them, but another human who has skin. He's kissing a woman that looks like a Kreller. That's fine, but not that black woman, damn it. We have standards. Bones falls in love with this woman.

29:00And she's a peace. She's into peace. She doesn't want war. She sees nations building up. And she tries to prevent the start of the Second World War. This is her motive and her mission. Meanwhile, she gets hit by a bus or a truck and dies. And Bones is distraught. He wants to go back in time again. To prevent. To prevent that, to save her. They go back in time again. That's when Spock does his research. He realizes she has to die. Because if she lives, she will successfully delay the entry of the United States into the Second World War, giving Germany, Nazi Germany, the leg up in creating the atom bomb.