Cosmic Queries – Origins of the Universe, with Janna Levin

21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what chapters are we missing today thinking we have full access to all the data, yet we don't? And that's funny because I lose sleep because I normally drink vodka before bedtime. You've got different reasons for losing sleep. Okay. We should, yeah, we should have little shots for our, like, if you get the cosmic query wrong.

21:51So, you know, there's so many possible things. So, Janet, do you not worry about whether we're missing something? I totally do, but I think this is a really interesting question because people say things like, if there's no way to observe the multiverse, then it's not a scientific question. I think that's false. For instance, in the far future, if people say there's no way to observe other galaxies, and I don't know why, and one person pontificates, maybe it's because the universe was expanding so rapidly that they're now beyond our view, they'd be right, but it's technically untestable for them.

22:19So I do think it's a scientific question, even if you can't resolve it observationally. So yeah, there are things like if the universe has extra spatial dimensions and right now they're really small and we're really big, maybe that's something we can't test right now, but maybe in the far, far past it was technically testable.

22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, so Chuck, she's saying one day a new dimension is going to grow out the side of your body. Believe me, since the pandemic, that has already happened. Mercifully, we're all like filmed from here up.

22:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Chuck has six legs. We got to take a quick break. When we come back, Jana, you're here for us. We're going to take questions from our Patreon members when StarTalk returns.

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27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm Brian Futterman and I support star talk on Patreon. This is star talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

27:53we're back StarTalk Cosmic Queries

27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:this is a celebration of the release of the second StarTalk book called Cosmic Queries inspired by this spinoff of our show one of our more popular formats of the StarTalk portfolio and Chuck I got you here for this of course that's right and we're doing chapters 3, 4, and 5 and I got their titles written here. How did the universe get to be this way? How old is the universe? What's the universe made of? And Chuck, you've been collecting questions. Let me just lead off. Jenna, I've heard people say the universe is designed just for us, okay? Just so that we can have life. But that seems really inefficient if life as we care about it, human life, has been around only for a couple hundred thousand years and the universe has been around for 14 billion.

28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:That just seems really inefficient. So if you want to say, you know, everything's set up for us, that's a pretty big waste of time and space. Yeah, especially if we're just here to make plastics for a little while and then we're going to go on and leave the plastic behind, you know. The plastic will survive us. It's like a George Carlin skit. He's like, the planet just wanted us to make plastic for it and then be gone. Right. Because there's no known thing that dissolves plastic, right? Yeah. Right. Not yet. So, Chuck, give me some questions, dude. All right, here we go. Let's... All from Patreon.

29:24Oh, everybody's from Patreon. And this is Richie Damani. Richie Damani says, firstly, Jana, Neil, Chuck, thanks for taking my question. So, we know about the LHC at CERN, which has made huge discoveries in particle physics. But do you have any knowledge of a larger project that it is in consideration that will further our knowledge of the quantum world?

29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, Jana, is there another particle that people think is out there and now we need something bigger than the Large Hadron Collider to find it? Well, dark matter. So the Large Hadron Collider has been very successful. It's very exciting. it discovered the Higgs particle, which explains why anything has mass at all. Did you say Higgs particle or Higgs particle? Higgs. I thought you said the Higgs particle. The Higgs particle is a little different. The Higgs particle explains why you eat possum. Very culturally insensitive. Yes, exactly. The Higgs particle is just like, I believe I'm on a quantum level, y 'all.

30:35Barbecue that possum. Oh, well, so, you know, it's called The God Particle in like sort of colloquially, but it was originally called The Goddamn Particle by Leon Letterman, the Nobel Prize winner. He wanted to write a call, his book, The Goddamn Particle, because they hadn't found it yet. And his publisher made him change it to The God Particle, which he said ended up alienating two groups, those that believed in God and those that didn't. So it's since stuck. It's since stuck. Yeah. But the LHC could have detected dark matter, and that would have been really like, that would have just been what everybody had mostly hoped for.

31:14And it hasn't. So could we go higher energy and higher energy? If you think of the energy of the Large Hadron Collider, it's from a very early era in the universe's history. And you'd expect to be able to make kind of everything. The earlier back you go, the more you can make, more kinds of particles you can make.

31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:I never thought of it that way. you're telling me the LHC is a kitchen. Yeah. It's a cosmic kitchen. And so if you, whatever energy you hit, you just look on your cosmic scale and say, I got you back to three seconds in the Big Bang. Exactly. And then higher energy, I got you back to one and a half seconds. Yeah. So where, what, how much more energy are you going to need to get to the formation of dark matter in the early universe? Like 10 million times higher. Oh, okay. That's all. That's all in the collection. Yeah. We got that. We got that. It's not a problem. Right? And so that's really high.

32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:1.22 gigawatts of energy. That's what we need. No, like, here's what's going on. 1.21 gigawatts. And we're going back in time, too. So, yeah. So in the recipe book that Neil's looking at that tells you, if I cook at this temperature, I'm going to have this number of particles, that's just based on as much as we understand. And as much as we understand between the energy of the Large Hadron Collider and the very, very, you know, the earliest second of the micro, tiniest little fraction of the second in the Big Bang is like 10 million higher in energy, but it doesn't mean we're right. So there could be like a bunch of stuff that starts to appear that we had no idea about.

32:43Other stuff. Other stuff. Other stuff. Not just like dark matter might appear in there, you know? And other stuff might, maybe dark matter isn't alone. Maybe there's like a whole dark sector, a whole dark reality, and we start to discover tons of dark matter, particles and forces, dark forces.

33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:So Jenna, I love this. You're saying a more powerful collider could just open up a whole new door. So what's going on in the universe? Cooking with particles. Oh, dear. Now, we do know that we can't, we will never hit certain scales with usual technology. Like you would have to have all the resources in the solar system in a particle collider the size of the solar system. So that's why we do astronomy. You need 1.21 gigawatts of power. I think that's the benefit of astronomy is that stuff happens at higher energy scales than human beings can engineer. And so we know we have high energy particles hitting our atmosphere from supernova explosions or solar systems that are at higher energies than the Hadron Collider.

33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the universe is a better Hadron Collider than our large Hadron Collider. That's right. It just requires, you know, it's harder. You can't manipulate it. You can't force it to do what you want. You have to wait until it makes what you want. Right. Exactly. The part that bites you in the ass is, okay, I guess you exist. It's basically like being an actor. Don't call us. We'll call you. Exactly. Just got to wait for it to roll up. All right, so that's good. I like that. But I want to emphasize a point you made before we go to the next question. What you're saying is, in our life experience, if something lasts three minutes or five seconds or one second, that's not very much time, and who cares about the difference?

34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:But in the early universe, there are things that lasted a trillionth of a second and then a quadrillionth of a second. And we say, oh, that's just less than a second. But each of those are huge differences in the energetics of the early universe. Is that a fair way to think about it? Absolutely. I mean, there's stuff that can be created in the first, you know, trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second that very quickly decay away into other stuff and will never be made again. because the energy scale required to create a single particle with that mass, even though the mass itself is objectively not a lot compared to, you know, a coffee cup, it's a lot for one particle.

35:11And it will never be made again probably in the history of the universe.

35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:So anything that was born in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second and dies a trillionth of a second later, lived for a trillion of its own lifetimes. Yeah. That was a full life. Right. Man, that's a full life. That was its life expectancy. Wow. Look at that. Okay. So we do think like you could make, in fact, it's possible that one of the heaviest single particles that ever could be made is a microscopic black hole. And that it was made not by dead stars, not by collapsing matter, but it was made as like a quantum particle in the very early universe. and that it was the weight of like a little pile of flour, but it was incredibly smaller than a nucleus.

36:05So it's tiny. Very dense to be a black hole.

36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:Exactly. It's very spatially tiny, but heavy for its incredibly small spatial size. And if I lost my keys into a microscopic black hole. Don't reach in to pull them out because that ain't going to work. Could I get them back? Don't do that. Chuck, I'll get you another pair of keys, another set of keys. That's like chapter three in Black Hole Survival Guide. Sweet. So you know what this reminds me of, Jana? I forgot which book, forgive me, but the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, one of his novels, he says, this is the last sentence ever spoken by humankind. It was one scientist speaking to the other and says, let's try it the other way.

36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's the end of all civilization. Right. So let's see if we can make a mini black hole. Last word ever spoken. Well, so there was some discussion, serious discussion about whether or not the Large Hadron Collider could make one of these. A mini black hole. A mini black hole. And we usually think, no, you really couldn't until you were at the much, much, much higher energy. But it does turn out that the universe does have extraspacial dimensions and they're of a certain size. you could actually manipulate the strength of gravity. If you think about it, gravity dilutes when you have more dimensions, like more volume, it gets more dilute.

37:34So if these dimensions, you start to notice, it brings the scale of making black holes down in energy because gravity is getting into your range because of these extra dimensions.

37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what you're saying is if you have extra dimensions, then the gravity has more space to dilute into. Yeah. Yeah. But that means that your thresholds of gravity, bad stuff is lower, is lower. So you might make a black hole at the Large Hadron Collider if that's the case. And so there were injunctions taken out by people to try to stop the Large Hadron Collider from turning on because there was this anxiety. Well, if you're going to make a black hole, it's going to like digest, you know, it's going to consume the earth and the... It's going to kill us all. Yeah. But the argument, which might not be very soothing because it is theoretical, is that they would evaporate too quickly.

38:25They would just go off like firecrackers.

38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:So you're saying you would possibly make them and they would consume the Earth except that Hawking radiation protects us. That's right. And we look, black holes are not as dangerous as people portray. There's a black hole in the center of our galaxy. We orbit that black hole. It dominates the entire behavior of the galaxy. And it's not a vacuum cleaner, right? Chuck, says the person who wrote the book, Black Hole Survival Guide. Right. No one writes a book. If you want to survive, just stay here, basically. No one writes the book, The Puppy Survival Guide. No, you write survival guides with stuff that's going to eat you, okay?

39:07Yeah.

39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's funny. It's the kitten survival guide. No, no, black hole survival guide. It's explorer's peril, yeah. All right. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries when StarTalk returns.

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43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. You are celebrating the release of the second StarTalk book, Cosmic Queries. inspired by this format. By the way, we're going to have different guests for the different kinds of chapters that are in the book. And right now, we've got some very deep questions about what's the universe made of and how did the universe get to be this way? Jan 11, always good to have you. Always fun to be here. You're a good friend of the show. And by the way, that place behind you, it looks like a bunker. But it looks like a chill place to never be found. So where are you right now?

43:40So I am also director of sciences is at a cultural center in Brooklyn called Pioneer Works, which is largely originated in the arts. And I've been doing science events here and bringing science into the community. It's very much an attempt to -

43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:That is just so Brooklyn cool. You know, I'm jealous. I have to say, what I love about this place, it's free and it's open to all and it's a donation-only model. And we really bring amazing people here to talk about science, to talk about art, to have exhibitions. and it's really important to us that the doors are open for everybody. And the intersection between science and art is much greater than anyone ever thinks about or imagines and you're there in the middle of that. So keep up the good work. All right, so Chuck, give me some questions for our cosmologist in the house. Here we go. Tovi Sonnenberg says, hey, Dr.

44:30Tyson and Dr. Levin, sometimes physicists say that the existence of a particle such as the axion is predicted by a theory or completes a theory. What do they mean by this? Ooh, good question. Well, that's, okay, so let's, you know what the best example of that is, is the Higgs, which we already mentioned. So we looked at the standard model of all the matter in the universe, and there was just like one thing missing because there was, we couldn't make sense of why particles had masses, essentially. unless the Higgs was proposed. So what the Higgs does, it's basically, again, it permeates. The Higgs was a person.

45:18Peter Higgs. Higgs was a person who proposed the theory. And the idea of the Higgs particle was that there was this field that permeated all of space, kind of like what we think about dark energy. So some people wondered if dark energy itself was like the Higgs permeating all of space, but the numbers didn't quite work out. But it could be something like that dark energy. It could be something like this field that permeates all space. And as we move through this field, because of our interactions with the Higgs, it creates a kind of inertia. We get sticky. We get gluey. It's like viscous moving through it.

45:51And that's what gives us mass, right? Mass means I'm harder to push around than a thimble, but I'm less hard to push around than a car. There's inertia. And this difficulty pushing around has to do with our interaction through the field. That's the idea.

46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the Higgs particle was filling a gap. That's right. So that's different from discovering a particle that nobody ordered. That's true. So like Robbie said, it's a great quote, the physicist Robbie said, who ordered that when he began to discover more particles? So the Higgs was predicted to fill a gap, which is exactly what the question was about. And lo and behold, there it was. This can make all y 'all very proud of yourselves, right? because it means you understand not only the physics that we've discovered, but the physics awaiting to be discovered. That gives you pretty good confidence there.

46:43That's the best. Although I have to say, everyone really hoped that something like the Large Hadron Collider would discover something we had never predicted. But if people don't understand about physicists, we don't want to wrap it all up in a bow and be done. We want more. And so it would have been incredibly exciting if they had discovered something that nobody had ordered. So you look forward to being steeped in ignorance. Yes, we look forward to the questions. The questions are the fun part. In fact, Robbie, who you're quoting, his mother used to say to him, did you ask a good question today?

47:15Ooh, I like that. Not did you learn something. Basically, you guys are just never satisfied is what you want to say. That's right. Yeah, it's a weird job. Like, the more questions you answer, you're getting yourself out of work. Sweet.

47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:Sweet. You want job security. All right, there it goes. All right, let's keep it going. Let's do a lead-in up to a lightning round. So let's do a little faster, and then we'll pick up the pace and see how far we can get. Well, that's a perfect segue into John Swellbox's question because John says this. Hi, Jana. Please tell me, what is string theory in two sentences? Oh, he wants it in two sentences. There you go. Okay, yeah. He's right on time. Okay, go for it. String theory is actually so compelling because it can be summarized in two sentences. When we look at the microscopic universe, we used to think we saw little fundamental particles.

48:11It's possible that if we zoom in on those fundamental particles, all of which are different, there's a lot of them, quarks and electrons, that when we zoom in, we realize that they're each tiny loops of string, the same kind of string, and they're playing different harmonics on the string to express as a different particle. so an electron is simply ringing at a different note than a quark but they are fundamentally the same that was more than two sentences but it was fast that was good that was good listen that was

48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:good so you're saying everything in the universe could be made up of strings that's right even light photons even the higgs everything how about dark matter all of it would be the same fundamental string playing different notes wow wow so the string could be playing notes that we can't detect, such as dark matter, dark energy. That's right. That we can't see. Right. So we think of particles as just their identity in terms of whether they interact in certain ways. And so all of those features, it's like a short list of numbers, are harmonics on the stream. So the universe is nothing more than one big version of name that tune.

49:13And this is the one we're in. We're in this tune.

49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're stuck in this one. We're stuck in this one. We got this one going. All right. Give me another one. Short answer, Janet. That's so funny. Best short answer ever. If somebody else is able to observe us, but we can't observe them, could you imagine? They'd be like, God, what a shitty song.

49:35All right. So this is Woody. Woody says, is a quantum vacuum possible in intergalactic space or anywhere else? And would an area of absolute nothing be a hole in space-time? So if you can actually get to nothing, did you punch a hole in space-time? Well, there's a lot of stuff going on there. But the quantum aspect is the most important. To some extent, you can never have a quantum completely vacuum. Nothing. You can't have a complete quantum vacuum. And that's because the Heisenberger Uncertainty Principle says, you know, I can't ever really precisely state that a particle is there or not there.

50:21It means I can't say nothing exists because I have the same uncertainty. It's an uncertainty for things to not even exist. Listen, let me know.

50:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, you got to be easy on Chuck. You got to be easy on Chuck. Chuck had a hard night last night. Yeah, exactly. You're laying this on him now. I drank last night. You should let me know. Dang. Yeah, so, you know, to say there's nothing means you have zero uncertainty that there's nothing. Right. And you cannot have that at the quantum level. It doesn't exist. There is no, it's not just that there's a problem with the human knowledge. There is no meaning to saying it's exactly, precisely empty. So you're saying that nothing can't exist is basically what you're saying. There can't be, there can't be a nothing.

51:06That's just because, no, no, no, no, no, no.

51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's not that there can't be a nothing. Nothing isn't. Be sure that there's nothing. Well, nothing isn't quite as empty as you might imagine. Right, exactly. The most nothing you can get might be. So this is why people talk about the dark energy as being the energy of the vacuum. The most nothing you might be able to get is this kind of frothy quantum things, a cloud of possibilities. And that has an energy associated with it. And you can calculate the energy associated with it. And so far, we keep getting the number wrong. If I look at quantum mechanics as I understand it and I calculate the energy of the vacuum, I either get zero or I get something absolutely enormous.

51:48What I don't get is dark energy. So you could say dark energy is not mysterious. What's mysterious is why it's so low, why it's either not zero or huge. And that's what the real mystery is, is how do we make the energy of the vacuum tuned just to where what we observe, and nobody knows how to do that.

52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, I cry foul here. So what you are taking as a given that everything you're describing is happening in the space-time that we've come to know and love. But back to the person's question, if you did find a place where the quantum laws don't apply, have you opened up a rip in the very fabric of space-time where possibly other rules of quantum behavior apply. Well... Or no rules at all. Yeah, I would say that to do such violence as to have a hole in space-time, so you have to think of space-time as being formed, responding flexibly to matter and energy, and so you can't make a hole without having tremendous other phenomenon going on.

53:02It just, we know what the solution would be. It would be nice, smooth, empty space time. So you make a hole by doing something like a black hole, like doing some real intense violence with energy and matter to create that hole. So I would say, I would say maybe closer answer to our listeners' question is that it might be quite the other way around that quantum mechanics creates space time. And that is a new idea that's been kind of people have been flirting with maybe for decades, but that it's not that you have these two separate things, gravity, space-time, quantum. It's that things like a black hole emerge from the quantum phenomena and not the other way around.

53:47So you don't even have space-time unless you have quantum mechanics. I get it.

53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:So you can't even pose the question, what happens if there's no... Exactly. You can't separate the existence of space-time from the quantum phenomena that operate within it. Exactly. If that's true. If it's created in the first place. If that's true. So one way to think of it is like embroidery. So embroidery, like let's say you're embroidering something. Each thread is like a quantum phenomena. And from far away, it might look like a black hole. But on closer inspection, you realize it's a bunch of intertangled quantum threads. Exactly. Wow, that's cool. That's a really cool concept. It's pretty cool.

54:27All right. Okay. I'm just saying, I can't wait to go to a party with a bunch of theoretical physics and do whatever drugs they are doing. We'll sign up, Chuck. Exactly. Okay. Fast lightning round. Let's do it. Okay, here we go. My name is pronounced Frederick. If the universe with everything expands, does that mean that quarks grow too, or is it just the space between them? Very good question. Very good question. Lightning round, go. Yeah, here I am in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. Famous reference to Annie Hall. So locally, I'm bound to the earth. I'm not expanding with the expansion of the universe because locally, the earth is more important to me.

55:08Also, my atoms are bound together by different forces, and they're stronger than the expansion rate of the universe. Presently, I'm not being torn apart. If that's maintained in the future, remains to be understood. It might be that the expansion gets faster and faster, and eventually, indeed, Brooklyn begins to expand. And that's just something we don't know about the fate of the universe.

55:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:And in fact, the final chapter of the Cosmic Queries book takes you there. The Great Rip. The Great Rip, the runaway where not only does everything get ripped apart from everything else, the very structure of particle matter itself breaks apart. It can't even hold itself together. That scared me. I lost sleep that night. It doesn't scare me. I've been in that position many times in my life. Well, I just can't hold myself together. You can't hold yourself together. I just can't hold myself together. Chuck, we're actually out of time, but I want to get one more question in here. All right. Hey, Jana.

56:08Hey, Neil. I love you both. Big fan for a long time. and thank you both for instilling me with a cosmic perspective. In our universe, we observe virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. Could this phenomena be compared to that of a 3D object passing through a 2D flatland? I love that. It's very interesting. Well, it is possible. So I said string theory. I only had two sentences, which I already overused. But it is possible that there aren't just strings, but there are membranes, higher dimensional surfaces. And so imagine, you know, so we started with particles, points, And then we went to strings, one-dimensional objects.

56:41Now, maybe there's like a membrane, a two-dimensional object. And maybe there's higher dimensional objects as high as you can fit in the higher dimensional space time. So one of the ideas is imagine we live on like a three-dimensional membrane. And when we see a point particle, it's really the endpoint of a string stuck to our membrane. It's not exactly the question asked, but it's related. But it is the intersection of dimension. That's so cool, though. So that I see a point particle moving around in my space time because I can't see that it's really connected by a string to somewhere else. And also imagine how that allows for what would appear as an illusion to be faster than light travel.

57:20Because I could have this thing that's actually connected and it's doing something, you know, synced up. But that's because it's fundamentally connected and I don't realize it. That's amazing. So it's like having the point of a pencil down on the paper. And the point is what I'm seeing on the paper. But then there's a whole pencil connected to that point. That's some freaky, freaky stuff, man. That's freaky Friday stuff. And so when we calculate the energy of the vacuum and try to find the dark energy, we have to calculate all of these kinds of objects that might be in the universe and what they're contributing in their quantum energy to the vacuum.

57:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. Damn. We got to close it there. I'm not going to sleep for three days.

58:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:Janet, thanks for showing us your digs and pioneer works. And Chuck, you tweet at Chuck Nice Comic. Yes. Always good to find you there. Thank you, sir, for saying it. I just love that Janet has pioneer works. And Janet, we see your pioneer works, your swan song accomplishment. to science. And Chuck, you tweet, you tweet, right? You're on Twitter, You're on Twitter. And Chuck's on Twitter. Okay, fine. Oh, snap. All right, so we just encourage you to check out Cosmic Queries, the second StarTalk book, National Geographic Press. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And of course, I bid you to keep looking up.

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