Cosmic Queries – Proving Einstein Right

0:00Hey, StarTalkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

0:38This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today's topic is proving Einstein right. Chuck, I needed you for this one because you're the man. I don't know how you need me because I never knew Einstein was wrong. So I'm trying to figure out where's the controversy. Where's the controversy? Well, to talk about that controversy, I'm bringing in a friend and longtime colleague, Jim Gates. Jim, welcome to StarTalk. Well, Neil, it's good to be back in the presence of a star. James, please. It's okay. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you.

1:26I would leave that one at that. So, Jim, you've been at this for a long time. Well, you've been an Einstein fan for sure, but a theoretical physicist. And you're director for the Center for Theoretical Physics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. And that's a title. How long have you been doing that? So when I was 66, Neil, I was recruited from the University of Maryland to Brown. I went around telling my friends, asking friends, why do you think you want an old car? No, it's not the age, it's the mileage, okay? Actually, it's clear. We know this. One of my friends said, Jim, you're not an old car, you're an antique car.

2:05Oh, there you go. A preservable antique. They hold their value. I'm going to go one better than your friend, James. You are vintage, my friend. You are vintage. Vintage, there you go. Vintage gets you even more money than antique, as they say. Okay, well, I switched after 33 years at my previous university. I came here and— Where was the previous university? University of Maryland College Park. Wow. And are you still on speaking terms? Because I would be kind of angry after 33 years that you just up and leave me. Just leave our marriage after 33 years. Well, I don't know if marriage is the right analogy.

2:48But independent of debating that particular, we did part on good terms. Excellent. In fact, I'm an emeritus professor there. And as an emeritus professor, I have taught two consecutive years courses on public policy. Nice. Evening courses. Yep. So I'm on good terms. So if I remember correctly, you were on Obama's Advisory Council for Science and Technology, right? That's exactly right, Neil. I served seven years on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, PCAST, the acronym. PCAST, that's right. That's right. But you were in the current administration. They didn't invite you back in there, huh?

3:32I thought we were going to try to keep everything. Okay, I just want to. All right. I'm up here. We'll leave it at that. Thank you. That's all right. I was invited to be on this current administration's advisory council on writing jokes about technology. There you go. So if you're director of the center, that's not necessarily an academic title. That's a job title. So you're also professor of physics. Indeed. I'm an endowed professor here at Brown University. The endowment is the so-called Ford Professor of Physics. I'm also an affiliate mathematics professor. And on top of that, I'm a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute for Public Affairs and International Affairs.

4:17Wow. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. Nice stuff. So you're like, we should bring you back for seven other excuses, seven other reasons. Forget the theoretical physics. We've got some policy we've got to figure out here. So what we're going to do is we're going to structure this program. We're going to spend the first segment just talking about why was Einstein proved right or why did he need to be proved right. And then we'll go to Q &A. We go to our cosmic queries. And Chuck, you got cosmic queries for section two and three? I have the questions right here. And I have to say, these are some, man, people are excited that you're here, Professor.

4:54They are excited that you're here. Excellent. We got some great questions. There's no one that triggers more questions than Einstein and relativity. And we got the man for it. Well, I would say Einstein, Relativity, and Tyson. And what? And Tyson. Both. Okay, right on. Okay. All right, so Jim, you published a book in 2019 called Proving Einstein Right, and let me get the full title, The Daring Expeditions That Changed How We Look at the Universe. Sure. And do you have a co-author? Who was that? I do have a wonderful co-author. Her name is Kathy Pelletier. She lives in Allagosh, Maine, which is just right across walking to Canada.

5:36And this book is not what people expected. Usually, you know, Neil, your first book, as I recall, was partly autobiographical, right? Well, that was one of my first, my fourth book, yeah. Okay, fourth. So what I wanted to do with this was to do something I had never seen done before with physicists. Usually people talk about the wonder and the majesty of looking at nature and the struggle and what have you. But what I wanted to do, and I had wanted to do this for a decade, is to write a book about the interior lives of the people who do the science. And so this book is actually dedicated to eight astronomers and Albert Einstein.

6:15And yes, we tell the scientific story. But what we really want to do is get inside of their heads and tell the story of what they were feeling as they went through this almost decade-long struggle. So the book surprises people. Okay, so the book was published in 2019. And if I remember my history, that's basically the centennial of this big experiment that showed that Einstein was right. That's right. But let me back up a little bit. So most people, I mean, physicists know Einstein for both, for many things, of course, but for special relativity and general relativity. I think often when people think of Einstein, they think of the effects of sort of ordinary relativity, like time dilation and this sort of thing.

7:00So that would all happen in 1905. That's correct. So why, if that's all happened and it worked and it was, you know, it was smoke and effective at explaining our understanding of the universe, why didn't everybody say, yeah, Einstein is the man? Why did it have to wait another 10 years for them to prove some other thing that he did? So let me talk about Einstein in 1905. And thank you for giving me this opening. As you know, Neil, in 2005, there was the so-called Einstein Year of Physics and there were celebrations all over the world. I gave 37 talks on six continents on Einstein in that year.

7:35I thought there were only five continents. No, I guess there were seven. I get my numbers confused. Yeah, thank you. You left out Antarctica. Yeah, okay. Because that's the one I've never been to. But the penguins will welcome you with open arms. And happy feet, yes. But the point was, yes, you're right, Neil. In 1905, he came up with some amazing things about space and time and how they bend and warp and what have you. But do you know that in 1907, he was still in the patent office? People think that as soon as he came up with his wonderful theories, the world beat a path to his door saying, Hosea, Hosea, you know, whatever.

8:13But no, no, no, no, that's not what happened. It's Hosanna. No, wait, Hosea. Whoops. Yeah, Hosea is the prophet, but Hosanna is the praise. But we knew what you meant. Well, this is what happens when you go off script, guys. Sorry. But anyhow, but you're right. But the point was that he did this great piece of work, but it took two years for the physics community to recognize what he had done. Wow. While he was in that patent office still trying to figure out how to get a job as a physics professor, he looked out the window one day and he saw some workmen on the roof. And he had this sort of story coming to him that if one of the guys fell, he wouldn't feel his weight.

8:57And so that started Einstein thinking about gravity. He's thinking of the death of someone working on a roof next door. I did not know this. Well, not the actual death, but the process that would lead to it. Just his fall to imminent death. Yeah, that's right. Just the imminent fall. I did know Einstein had this morbid side of him. Yes. However, let me just say, I totally get it, because I think about the death of the guy that blows that leaf blower outside my bedroom window every Saturday morning. And so Einstein started thinking about gravity. And so this is like, in fact, he calls this the happiest thought of his life.

9:35Wait, so wait, so Jim, this is like Newton's apple moment. Yes. He sees the apple falling and then he sees the moon and then there's a Eureka moment in there. And that's what happened with Einstein in 1907. So the thing that's curious about Einstein is although people think about him as this mathematical genius, every time he did something, he actually had to learn more mathematics. So he didn't actually have the mathematics to realize what his intuition was. And he didn't get it right until 1915 or 16. You know, Jim, that happens to me all the time. I have thoughts I have to invent new math to, you know, that's just a thing.

10:16Well, you know, some of us actually do that, Neil. No, that's another whole story. And I'll tell you about that one later. But anyhow, so he had this idea that took him almost a decade to get it down to the mathematics. And when he finished it, it was the theory of general relativity. It's the piece of thing that tells us that there was a Big Bang. It's the piece of mathematics that lets us know we live in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. And so that came from that 1917 epiphany. Wait, no, I mean 1907. 1907. Right. Right, right, right. Now, remember, it's all math. It's all math. So if it's all math, how do you know he got it right?

11:04Right, just because the math works doesn't mean it has to correspond to any objective reality. Exactly. And so when he finally gets his discussion together, In fact, even before he gets the right answer, he starts talking about it. He starts giving talks about it. And so very early on, astronomers realize, well, he realizes first, that astronomers would be critical to try to prove that his math is actually, as you said, Neil, something that happens in the real world. And he begins it by talking to this German astronomer named Irving Findlay Freundlich. I never heard it again. No one's ever heard of the guy.

11:46If I'd ever met someone named Irving Fenley-Fornglick, I'd remember that. I'm pretty sure. Well, for your program, I've sent some photographs of all the people that we're talking about. That's the first guy that Einstein starts talking to seriously as, you know, I have a way to prove my man. And he first starts saying, if you look at starlights, could you show that starlight bends when it passes near? Jupiter? And the astronomer says, you know, no, that doesn't quite work. Then he starts asking questions about, well, suppose we were looking at the night sky in the morning or early morning or late afternoon.

12:23Could we see bending starlight around perhaps Venus or something? And the guy says, you know, the astronomers go back, no, no, that won't work. And so finally, by this set of discussions with Frunlich, he hits upon the idea that if you could watch starlight during an eclipse, it might be able to see the light being bent by the sun. Because you can't otherwise see a star in broad daylight. Exactly. So, you know, it's a very special circumstance. And so that starts the race. Okay, so this bending of starlight would have been the first experimental verification of his general theory of relativity.

13:00Yes. Okay. And so now, so what year did that happen? Was that conversation? This is, these conversations around 1912 or so that he starts telling other people about these items. Okay, and that's how you get the creativity of other people to help you figure out how to make it work. Bingo, and that's what our book is about. It's about the other people. It's not really about Einstein. Okay, so what's all this we hear about his wife possibly being a big engine to his creativity? A lot of people have—well, there's this one book, Einstein's Wife, I think is the title. There are a lot of people who have posited that as having been important.

13:39But from my reading of the history, she was certainly his partner as he was working through, in Bern as a poor patent examiner, trying to do physics. She was certainly a partner. So Bern, the city in Germany. The city in Switzerland. Oh, Switzerland, excuse me. Right. So she certainly was his partner there. But in the actual settling of the special theory of relativity, from, and I've read over a dozen books trying to get this straight in my own head. The preponderance of evidence is that he worked it out with a friend of his on a tram ride thinking about the clock tower in the city of Bern. So, I mean, it's a fantastic story.

14:25So I tell you - What you're saying here, Jim, is had Einstein been a loner and not traveled anywhere, he wouldn't have come up with any of his ideas. how much life exposure is the right amount to fully realize your your your creativity that can be expressed i tell people all the time that being a scientist means that you swim in a sea of information and that information comes from your colleagues and so you cannot be i mean i know the archetype and stereotype view is that as a scientist, you go off in the corner and you sort of think big thoughts. But that's not what actually happens. I've lived this life for over 30 years, and you are constantly in conversation with your colleagues.

15:13And you use them to hone and to refine your thoughts and distill your thoughts and curate your thoughts. So Jim, the active word there is that you are swimming in these influences, not drowning. I was going to say, yeah. Yeah. So that's where I, with Kathy Pelletier, we wanted to talk about these people that basically were using what Einstein inspired them to do, but to swim towards this discovery of whether his math was an accurate description of nature. Wow. Do you think Einstein had any doubts about whether it was all true? From my reading, no. he sort of says things like, if the theory of general relativity had failed to receive experimental and observation support, that he would have felt sorry for the good Lord.

16:09Because that was a really brilliant idea. Right. Which is kind of a way of saying, like, I'm smarter than God. It definitely says that. No, it doesn't. No, Jim, you're lying. Jim. No, I'm not lying. If you read a lot about Einstein, you find out he's a very, very complicated character. And with respect, and if, Chuck, since you brought up the issue of God. Okay. And you did bring it up. I did, yeah. I mean, to me, when somebody says that statement, it kind of sounds like, you know, I'm smarter than God. No, no, but you see, Einstein, although you can interpret that statement that way, that's not really what Einstein felt.

16:51because, in fact, he talks also about the illimitable spirit. That is a spirit without limits. So it's clear that if you can use a phrase like that, you're not putting yourself above such an entity. Okay. All right, that's a very good point. He didn't use that phrase in that sentence, though, but okay. Not in that sentence, though. In that moment, he felt badass is all I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not, yeah. because it is you know Jim before we go into the second segment and solicit our our cosmic queries just give me a minute or two I know it should be hours or two but give me a minute or two on the idea that math is just something we invented as humans yeah and it works what's up with that there's no reason that it should work at all you know Neil this is one of the most this is the only piece of magic that I've ever experienced and seen in reality.

17:54I'd love that. I'd love that. It's magic. It's a piece of magic, but it happens to be a part of our reality. I don't know of any other form of magic for which I can say this. And this is human-created magic. We create something and it magically describes reality. It enables you to predict and understand and extend. It acts like a third eye for those of us who are scientists. It lets us see things that are not seeable otherwise. I was, I made a presentation at the New York Academy of Sciences about three years ago, two years ago, and it's precisely on this point of the magic ability of mathematics.

18:37It's an hour-long interview, so I'm not going to bore you with it, but I would... Wait, is it on YouTube or something? Yeah, it's available on YouTube. Well, forgive me. I'll go find it. I'm going to find it. Okay, the New York Academy of Sciences, is a long venerated institution. Absolutely. And I was there with Margaret Wertheim and we discussed this magical thing, this thing about mathematics. And at the end of the day, one of the things I said about it is that mathematics, as people like me use it, it's the only human language that we know accurately allows us to describe nature. However, any other conscious being that could produce mathematics will have access to this knowledge.

19:22So hence the idea that if we meet up with aliens, we might start with this symbolic representation of what is and is not. Sure. And math could be the only way we can prevent ourselves from getting our brains sucked out by the evil ways. Many of us think that that's right. So when we come back, more of this edition of StarTalk, where we're talking about proving Einstein right, We're going to go straight to our Cosmic Queries version of that when we return.

20:01I'm Joel Cherico, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

20:20We're back. Star Talk. Proving Einstein right. Ooh. Chuck, thanks for being there. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. And we got Sylvester Jim Gates, a longtime friend and colleague who's an Einstein expert, a theoretical physics expert. He's all the kind of expert you need for this. Absolutely. for this incarnation of StarTalk. And we're going to devote this segment to Cosmic Queries. Jim, your presence on our show was announced to our fan base, and they got completely excited by this prospect. Oh, my goodness. So I have 5%, no, I have 3 % overlap with Jim's expertise in this subject. So if I can find a 3 % way to add, I will, but basically this is all going to Jim.

21:10Okay. So, Chuck. Excellent. Do it. Not that it needs to be said, but I have 0 % overlap with Jim, which is why I'm reading the questions. So here we go. All right. Let's start. You know what? Before we start, let me just quickly, can you, Professor, give us a quick breakdown between the special and the general when it comes to relativity? I think that might be a nice framework for anybody who didn't ask a question to be a part. Thank you, Chuck. So let me start with special because it's simpler. You know, if you were standing by a road and there was a car that was speeding towards you with its horn blaring, what would you actually hear?

21:55It would go something like, oh. Right. Right, because you would hear that dip in the tone. That sounded like you were dying. I was going to say. I could do better than that. Here you go, right? No. Okay. No. Okay, so we'll go with that. Let's work with that. Nothing's dying. We'll work with the cat sound. By the way, in his spare time, Neil does sound effects for Warner Brothers. And so the point is that effect is because sound changes its frequency if it's moving towards you. That's when it's high-pitched. But if it's moving away from you, this pitch goes down. Exactly. So the point is light actually does the same thing.

22:47When a light source is coming towards you, it appears to be bluer than it actually is. When it's moving away from you, it is appearing to be redder. And that is one of the primary effects of special relativity. It's about the relative motion of you and the source of the light. And my car analogy, it's this motion of the car either towards or with you. So that's what special relativity is all about is if I'm moving and you're not, how do I perceive things? How do you perceive things? That's the simplest. That's my five-minute class on special relativity. Cool. We good? No, general. Can you juxtapose that against the general and the distribution of mass and all that stuff?

23:28So the general theory of relativity is something very, very, very different. And what the general theory of relativity is about is, what is gravity? You see, in the special relativity, Einstein wasn't thinking about gravity. He was just thinking about how things would look if I'm moving. But in the general theory of relativity, the question is, what actually is gravity? It's a very deep question that even Sir Isaac Newton didn't get the answer to. And the answer that Einstein teaches us through his mathematical wizardry is that gravity is the space which we move through and time which we experience durations in are combined to this like thing he called space time and gravity is the bending of this thing.

24:19So that's my short course on general relativity. Cool. Well, there you go. All right. That was great. That was great. Okay, let's go to Izzy Rohr, who says, Izzy Rohr, Neil, Chuck, Jim, this is your friend Violetta, the astrophysics-loving kid here in Birmingham, Alabama. My mom. Oh, you know her? Okay, cool. We've been in contact. Excellent. My mom and I have many discussions, have had many discussions about this. Scientists like to describe Einstein's general relativity as being incompatible with quantum mechanics. They say things like they mathematically don't work out or don't work together.

24:57So our question is, why the heck is that? Yeah, Jim. Yeah, what's up with that? Okay, so let me give you a second here because I got to phrase this without the mathematics. So the idea— That is so funny, by the way. Okay, let me just say, that may have been the most physics thing I've heard in a very long time. I've got to figure out a way to say this without the mathematics. Well, you see, I don't know if you focus. It's like, I'm sorry, me no speak English, me speak mathematics. Let me speak English. Chuck, you may not know this, but Neil can tell you this. often at the end of my email messages, I ask forgiveness for spelling and punctuation errors because my first language is mathematics.

25:48Ooh! Oh, snap! English is my second language. Oh, my gosh. So I'm at a disability when people ask me to talk. Listen, I've never heard a person admit a fault that makes you better than most people.

26:09I don't know about that. But it causes me difficulties, Chuck, on many, many occasions. Okay. Okay, but... Back to quantum. Back to quantum. Okay, so what essentially happens is if you believe the universe is quantum mechanical, then it forces you to forget about things like electrons. Because electrons we think about as little tiny balls. That's the classical picture that you're taught. And in fact, quantum mechanics says, no, that's not the way it works for electrons. You have to think of these things that are more like waves, except when they act like particles. So that's the first thing quantum mechanics.

26:47It gives you this really weird thing that you have to give up an idea, except sometimes, right? Right. Okay, so now when you, so there's a piece of mathematics around this called Schrodinger's equation. So I got to bring that in. And it tells you how to calculate it. If you're going to bring up Schrodinger, you can't leave out his cat. Exactly. So just keep going. Or that litter box, which hasn't been changed in God knows how long. Schrodinger's litter box. That's what I'm about. Schrodinger's litter box. You can also go back to Neil's rendition of a car horn as it approaches you. No. But anyhow, so you have a piece of mathematics around giving up the idea of particles.

27:29and when you now give that piece of mathematics up and try to do gravity, you find out you just get into a total mess that you cannot calculate answers anymore that take into account the quantum behavior and that's the mess. So that's the disconnect there is that Schrodinger's equation, once you remove anything, none of the gravity stuff works. Wow. Because the way that Einstein and Newton and all those folks thought about gravity has the idea of particles embedded in it. That's the problem. All right, so at the end of the day, who's got to give? Good question. Is gravity going to bend to quantum physics?