Cosmic Queries – Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking with Charles Liu

27:51If they're preserved, then we know it was because of redshift. If they're not preserved, then we think, oh, there's something physical going on in the star that made that color change.

28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:You know what else happens? A star can sit behind an absorptive gas cloud, a cloud with dust in it, and it could shift a white star, the color that you'd see for a white star, into a regime that makes it look red. Big, big challenge for us. Do we really know what's in our sight line that could be messing with the star itself? So what you're saying is you're looking through this dust cloud at the star, but basically you don't know it. It's like a little screen. You try to understand the dust cloud, and sometimes you forget that they're there. And Charles, wasn't there a huge discovery made about the Big Bang?

28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:but because they didn't correct for the reddening in our own galaxy of the cosmic microwave background. There was some paper that had to be retracted because they – You don't retract it not because it was fraudulent. It was just they had to say, we messed up. They were wrong. Yes, that's right. Yes, because the cosmic microwave background as it currently exists today produces the same wavelength of microwave radiation as dust of a certain composition at a certain temperature. And so that dust turns out to envelop our Milky Way galaxy at different thicknesses or different densities, depending on which direction you look.

29:32And so if you were unable to get that signal cleared away from the cosmic microwave background, That interference will completely mess up your interpretation. I was going to say, it's like the tear function on a scale. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Excellent point. That's what it is. Very good. Yes. So being able to see that. How do we, A, make it go away, and if it's not possible, how do we navigate through this sort of natural filter that's there? Neil, do you want to tell them about extinction curves or do you want me to do it? No, we got you on here. You the geek in chief. All right. I'm just a geek deputy.

30:12It's a great question, Gary, and it's actually pretty complicated. But I'll try to make it as simple as possible. Essentially, the effect of dust in making things look dimmer and redder is known in astronomy as extinction. Okay, not the kind where like dinosaurs go away because they're hit by an Earth is hit by an asteroid. Right. But the kind of extinction that says that your light has been extincted or extinguished because of this dust. What you have to do is, A, actually understand what dust does. And so there's a whole branch of astrophysics that is done in a laboratory where you make dust that might approximate what interstellar dust looks like, is made of, what shape, things like that.

30:53and then you shine light through it. And then you see what that dust does to the light that you might expect coming from a star or something like that. And then the second thing you do, you just have to measure where dust is throughout your lines of sight from earth out into deep space. See how much dust and what kind is in that line of sight. And everything you see in that direction has to be corrected for this extinction. And so there's something called an extinction curve, okay? And every kind of dust has a different extinction curve. So you look in a direction, say I look at a galaxy that's in that direction, far away.

31:36I first have to ask, okay, what does the galaxy's light look like from my telescope? And the second thing is I have to ask somebody who did measurements of extinction. say, hey, what is the dust capacity? What is the dust density and the dust variety in this line of sight? And then that person will say, oh, that line of sight was measured to have this much extinction and these kinds of gases and dusts. And then you go, okay. And then you make a correction to make your galaxy light what it would have looked like had the dust not been there.

32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh my God. It's a complicated step. That's insane. So the universe is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. We have to figure this stuff out. That just sounds awful. Although it sounds awful in one way, yes, it makes our ability to understand those distant galaxies that much tougher. It's also a blessing in disguise because it allows us to understand dust in the universe. If we want to know what we humans are created out of, literally, stardust. Stuff that came off of stars, cooked in the hearts of stars, and then spewed out into the universe in the Milky Way galaxy. So if we want to know where we came from as human beings or as life forms or even as planets, right, we need to understand that dust.

32:54So the combination of being forced to be able to compensate for that dust and to be able to know what's behind that dust has given us the opportunity to study the dust itself, which I think is pretty awesome. That is pretty awesome. But I will also say when you were talking about the discovery of the that the paper had to be retracted at first, I was just like, God, man, what you know, these guys really screwed up. Now I'm like, yeah, I'm on their side. Like, you know, basically, I'm surprised anybody's able to find anything. That's right. Like, basically, every other week, a paper should come back.

33:30My bad. It was dust. It was dust, guys.

33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:stop there's another feature of that there are i would call them ambulance chasing theorists who saw these results saw these results and said i can explain that with a new model of the big bang and that there were people who published papers on these false results oh so yeah so that's that's a that's an important reality check yeah on the front the moving frontier but that's what we do In science. Charles, this sounds like an awful lot of man hours to log, chart, and then tabulate all of this information. Surely this is perfect for AI. Yes. People spent entire careers doing these kinds of maps.

34:17I'm sure, Neil, you'll remember Schlegel did a lot of this. Bruce Drain did a lot of this. Some of the giants of our field are remembered for their legacy of making these maps happen. The problem with using an AI to try to make those maps is that you have to have the AI interpret just as the question was saying. How do you tell the difference between what dust is causing and what the light is causing from behind it? AI isn't sophisticated enough to tell that difference yet. It just sort of chooses the best option and sticks it in. So there's that human need to be able to disentangle these two effects, which something like a large language model is still not quite able to do.

35:03So AI eventually will be extremely helpful in refining maps that we had found a long time ago and used optimal methods to figure out what they were. But they won't be able to make maps on their own because they don't have the decision-making capability yet to distinguish between the different things that are causing what we think dust might be causing. Okay.

35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. At least that's my opinion. And you're sticking to it. Okay. For now. All right, bring on another. Are we ready for the next one? Okay, April Walsh. Hello, Sir Neil, Lord Chuck, and Sir Charles. I'm April Walsh. Yes, and you're right, April. This is an easy one to pronounce. My 16-year-old son and I are obsessed with StarTalk. Well done. We absolutely love it, and thank you for making it great. My question is, when all of the matter, here we go again, dust, gas, et cetera, in the universe, was condensed into something smaller than a pinhead at the Big Bang, How did that not immediately create a black hole?

36:07Interesting. Wonderful question.

36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wonderful question. Get out of that one, Charles. It turns out that we don't have to get out of that one because the universe got out of that one for us. When the universe was the pinhole sized, it actually wasn't that massive. We think of the Big Bang or think about the Big Bang as rolling back the history of the universe and making it smaller and smaller and smaller. But at the moment of the Big Bang, the mass of the universe was, well, at 10 to the minus 43 second after the Big Bang, we'll call that, that plonk time, the mass of the universe was less than a glass of water. And it's actually not enough to have turned it into a black hole at that time.

36:54Something further happened to inject the universe with so much energy that that inflation happened that you probably have heard of where at the nearly the beginning universe, you wind up inflating the universe beyond its regular expansion rate by factors of many, many trillions. And then you wind up with all this extra energy in there, which then condenses into matter and becomes the galaxies and stars and planets and black holes that we have today. So there was a period of time early on where black holes didn't even do. Where'd that energy come from? Where that energy come from is still 100 % unclear.

37:38Oh, no. But there are some guesses. We know where it came from. Came from Jesus. came from Jesus. That's part of the problem, right? A lot of people do in fact have a problem with that Big Bang cosmology at that early time, because there seems to be no way for us to explain that injection of energy any way other than some sort of divine supernatural activity. But if we were to do that, then we'd just be like, oh, okay, we've given up on science. We're not going to try to figure out how it actually works. Let's just go home and have a drink and forget about it. So we refuse to sort of give up and just say, oh, it was something that we'll never be able to understand.

38:22It was some divinity or it was some supernatural thing. So if we try to think about nature, then the way you can actually inject energy has to do with something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Neil, have you told our distinguished Patreons about the fundamental forces in the universe? Assume no. Assume no. Yeah, okay. Assuming no. Currently, we think that the universe has four forces in it that sort of determine all of the transfer of energy and material and so forth around the universe. There's something called the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity.

39:07Okay. Now, gravity is its own strange beast because there is a hypothesis that gravity as a force actually has more to do with the structure of space-time than the transfer of little particles back and forth. But electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force are now separate forces. They have different mathematical explanations, and they behave differently depending on where they are and what size and scales and so forth they're around. It makes sense to hypothesize that right around the time of the Big Bang, there were not four forces, but there was only one. And something happened at the quantum level to break forces off from one another.

39:54And that break is called a spontaneous symmetry break. Okay. So when I was saying spontaneous symmetry breaking, you can imagine something breaking. and from the inside of that break that used to be symmetric, this one beautiful force that followed all of its math, now is two or now is three or now is four. And the resulting chaos, it's almost like unleashing to some extent that entropy we were talking about when we're trying to boil water. But now we're unleashing just straight up energy in such huge densities and such huge amounts that it will propel the universe to grow at such a rate and such a speed that we pass the black hole thresholds and then you have to start all over again and turn that energy into matter and then make black holes thousands or even millions of years later.

40:45Wow, that's pretty wild. Okay, so how do you feel about, we didn't have her on the show, but we were supposed to. I believe her name is Sabine Hoffin something. She's - Hoffin something. It is, I mean, I don't know. But you guys know who I'm talking about. Hassenfelder. Okay. Now she says that anything, anyone who tries to surmise what happened at the big bang is only telling a story because we don't have, and we never will have data that will allow us to make a conclusion. How do you feel about that? Oh, that's a great philosophical point of view. I would answer all of physics, all of astronomy is trying to tell a story, right?

41:44The hypotheses of every explanation as to why something happens in our universe is a story. The difference between a story that is non-scientific and a story that is scientific is that the scientific story seeks to find ways to confirm or refute that story. And so we're always pushing in that direction. If you could tell a story that can be falsified, that can be shown to be untrue based on observations or experiments or something like that, then you are trying to do science. We have forever thought that, oh, we would never be able to see like the origins of our earth. And yet here we are able to understand planets because we kept asking questions and finding ways to look further and further back in history.

42:38We used to think we could never understand how our solar system was formed. It must have been supernatural, it must have been divine. But no, now we know because we looked and we found ways to find a hypothesis that we could test. Now we're going further and further back. How can we find the formation of galaxies? How can we find the birth of black holes? And now to the point of the Big Bang itself. The recent results from the DESI group, Dark Energy Survey group, are remarkable. They are looking at echoes of the imprints of matter and energy in the large-scale structure of our current universe that were put in there very, very close to the Big Bang, before even the cosmic microwave background was established.

43:24We're talking about ripples in a pond that have been imprinted in the galaxy distributions of our universe for the past 13 and almost 14 billion years. And we're seeing that imprint, which itself is long past the beginning of the universe, but maybe that's fossilized information that could tell us about things like the Big Bang, which we just can't see anymore. Damn. So it's a philosophical point. That's what science is so cool about.

43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:And you have to watch out to presume that just because we have ideas about something that it'll never be tested. There was one of the more boneheaded predictions made by a philosopher in the 19th century was, I love this. I'm paraphrasing. I love this field astronomy. We can know where the stars are. We can know what colors they are. But we will never know what they're made of. That is forever beyond our reach. And he's presuming to know what something's made of, you have to go there and take a sample. This is like 10 minutes before spectra, as applied to astronomy, was invented. And with spectra, as Charles said earlier, you can find out what are the chemical components of stars.

44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's one of the great triumphs of 19th and 20th century modern astrophysics. But the fact that we didn't know and someone got clever and figured out how to know, we are never stopped on the frontier just because we don't know how to do something yet. But we'd still be in the caves if that's how we function as scientists. Yeah. And that's why I always tell everybody that the questions are more important than the answers because we can't get all the answers now. But if we ask the right questions, someday we will be able to answer them. The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his book, Letters to a Young Poet, I hope I don't mangle this too badly, that one of the poems ends, be patient with all that stirs within your heart.

45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Learn to love the questions themselves. See, that's what I tell my wife when she's like, where were you last night? I'm like, sweetie, you need to learn to love your questions. The answers are not really the whole issue here. How'd that work for you? Not probably what people were saying, but you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we're dealing with here is known unknowns rather than known unknowables. so to try and get ourselves into the position where we do know different thinking again because we've used our own thinking that we brought historically so i mean it's not quite the change of angle of approach but a different way of thinking about the same conundrum subject yes how do we go about altering our thinking as to provide us with an answer for this well the history of science is not linear, nor is it continuous, right?

46:37What we found over the centuries is that people ask a question and they can't answer it. And then you wait sometimes a really long time. And then somebody just goes, hey, how about this? And then someone goes, wow, that's neat. Most people go, well, that's crazy. We can't ever figure that out. And then somebody else says, you know what? We probably could. I'm thinking, of course, of general relativity, right? You know that famous story. People are trying to figure out gravity forever and how light travels through the universe. And then over about a 15-year period, Albert Einstein first devises the special theory of relativity and then the general theory of relativity.

47:21And people are like, oh, space bends and curves. That's very interesting, Albert, but how are we ever going to figure that out? And a guy named Arthur Eddington says, I know how we can figure this out, and organizes an expedition to see a total solar eclipse and take photographs. and sure enough, he was able to measure with his colleagues that very amount of curvature in space-time that Einstein had predicted. And so people had been thinking about gravity ever since Newton's time. And then within that short 10, 15-year period, boom, we figured it out. But then we had to wait another long period of time to the next thing and the next thing.

48:04Just to clarify, the eclipse itself

48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:is not what Eddington looked at. He needed the eclipse to darken the sky to see starlight from far away in the universe, its path moving to the side of the sun. The sun is the most massive thing we have available to us. So if gravity is going to distort the fabric of space and time, the sun is our best chance at this. So he waits for the eclipse. Perfectly said, Neil. Yeah. And then the starlight comes across very near the edge of the sun. He measures where it is. with great accuracy, then waits six months till the sun is on the other side of the sky, goes back to that same area and measures where the stars are on his frame.

48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:And they had all moved in the presence of the sun, having their path lengths go by the limb of the sun relative to six months ago. So that whole project took six months to confirm. And there was an eclipse in 1918 that he really wanted to use. But the world was still at war. And so that was a lost opportunity. It was delayed until 2019. Sorry. Delayed until 1919. 19. 1919. Right. Now, yeah, you're completely right, Neil, in what you've said. The key there, Gary, to sort of circle back to your point, wasn't the eclipse, but it was to use the eclipse as a way to measure the curvature of space and time.

49:37and thus the motions that are different. And then going back in six months, you've got a constant because the stars will be the constant and you're working. Yeah, I get it. That's fine. Thank you for that explanation. So when he looked at the light from behind the sun, then the movement meant that the light had to bend in order for him to see it the way he saw it. Correct. I got you. Got you. That's it. And the only thing that could have done that would have been the actual mass of the sun, because the sun is so massive.

50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the way to affirm that is wait six months. Now the sun is on the other side of the sky. Go back. Well, that is, first of all, I, Jesus Christ. No, these are smart people. These are smart people. I mean, here's what's, but it's so simple, but it's so brilliant. Oh, I feel so dumb. Why was that boy so dumb? Oh.

50:37No, Chuck, I feel like that all the time. It really is amazing how smart all of our predecessors have been.

50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. And we live in a time where people say, I'm just scientists. What do scientists know? I'm going to look at my YouTube video and I'll figure it out. You know, what do you think we do? It's all we do. It's trying to figure stuff out. So Charles, that information was always there. It didn't just appear because Eddington showed up with some calipers and measuring stuff. So it's looking at things and thinking, what information is here that we are not thinking or seeing or identifying? Gary, one of the prevailing and persistent definitions of genius is the genius is the person who sees what everyone else sees, but thinks the way no one else has thought.

51:26Wow. Yeah.

51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ooh, that's pretty cool. Eloquent. It's not just looking, it's seeing.

51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:okay i'm not a look see guy you know i to me they're the same thing but that's fine oh no you you can look at things but you won't see what is really there no no that's like saying uh you you heard me but were you listening to me you know i mean i'm not i'm not a heard listen see i'm not that guy all right don't come to me for that no i'm not okay i'm i'm just you know as this discussion opens up, it makes me think, is the information we need there, we just don't quite know how to extract it right now? In many cases, yes. One of my colleagues right now is doing an amazing kind of theoretical work about quantum information.

52:18When you're trying to send information through, say, fiber optics or something like that, you lose information because there's noise in the system. But this guy is like saying, you know what? I can take that noise and learn, find information in there that we thought was lost and thus make my quantum communications that much better. And it's amazing. It's like thinking about dust in the solar system and the galaxy, blocking our view of things we want to see, but then turning it around and saying, you know what? that dust itself has information. I wonder what we can learn from that. It's that kind of thing that happens on every scale.

53:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're not talking about acoustic noise. We're talking about light noise. We have a light signal going through fiber optics. And so noise in physics is a general term for randomness of a signal that would interfere with your target signal. It's not just acoustic. It can be an interference. Interference, background, static, all that stuff. Imagine if you could figure out stuff from that. That just changes your whole dynamic of what you're trying to be able to transfer. The original discovery of the cosmic microwave background using horn antennas in New Jersey, they said they were working for AT &T, Bell Labs.

53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:And AT &T said, let's find out what the noise is in the background so that when we send signals through the air, we will be able to understand that noise and possibly correct for it. Okay, so they open up their antennas, and they look in every direction, and there was this residual noise everywhere they looked. And they said, okay, we're going to have to report this, but wait a minute, let's look inside the antenna. They looked inside the antenna. There was pigeon dung in the antenna. It's reported as a dielectric substance in the original research paper, which actually can be responsible for a noise level.

54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:So they cleaned out the pigeon poop in this antenna. Good job. And then they looked back and it dropped the noise level, but it didn't take it to zero. And so they reported excess noise every direction in the universe. And that was the cosmic microwave background. Nobel Prize winning discovery after they removed the pigeon poop. Now, first of all, the pigeon should have got the Nobel Prize. Got an assist. Should have got an assist. Okay. An assist. brought the pigeon to stockholm here is the dielectric substance that helped us find the cosmic microwave background

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58:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, let's see if we fit in some more questions here. We've been very luxurious with our answers. I think we can speed it up. They're good questions. This is Cary Manenberg. This is Dr. Tyson, Dr. Lude, Chuck Cary from Kalamazoo here. With observatories like Webb and Vera Rubin already pushing the limits of what's technologically possible, what scientific and engineering breakthroughs do you think the next generation of telescopes will demand? And what new discoveries might those future inventions unlock? That's not going to be a quick answer. Can we just pick like one thing? Go pick one. I'll pick one.

59:31Yeah, just pick one breakthrough. I mean. All right. But that's a tremendous question. Wonderful. Okay. The one breakthrough I think is going to be amazing is the ability to fly spaceships in formation. When you fly spacecraft that are basically going in lockstep with one another, not deviating by even a millimeter over thousands or millions of miles of travel. then you can use something called laser interferometry and shine and position the light and the detectors in such a way that we can find gravitational waves from space at a level that's hundreds or thousands of times greater than we can on the ground.

1:00:16So you're saying that these spaceships become an array? Is that what you're talking about? Okay. That's exactly what I'm talking about. And so that technological development is just the one that I'm going to mention this time around. But that will change the number of detections we have of gravitational wave events, colliding black holes usually, by a factor of 100 or even 1 ,000. And that's going to be able to let us map the universe like a well-struck gong. I think it's just amazing. Wow.

1:00:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. That's good. And I'm looking forward to more telescopes that operate that are sensitive to things other than light because we've got the whole spectrum mapped out. All right. We've got and gravitational waves is another version of telescopes that operate outside of light. It's using gravitational waves. But I'm looking for neutrino telescopes. There might be some other particles, dark matter telescopes, things that will see the universe in whole, not just different windows, but whole other buildings in another windows in another building for what is otherwise going on out there in the universe.

1:01:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:And this could be a new frontier opens up much the same way when we discover there's more than just visible light coming to us in the universe. Let's build a telescope to see in it. Oh, my gosh. All right. Our eyes were so feeble compared to what the universe is trying to tell us. And right now we got the whole light spectrum figured out. It's time for new frontiers in cosmic discovery. In NASA speak, we call that multi-messenger astronomy. Oh, interesting. Where the messenger is not just light waves or electromagnetic radiation of any kind. Didn't know they had a term for it. But these particles and exotic things.

1:02:02Yeah, yeah. Multi-messenger astronomy.

1:02:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Watch for it. Very cool. Oh, and by the way, Galileo's famous book from 1609, where he reported on his telescope observations of the universe, something no one had done before. The title of that book is Siderius Nuncius, translated from the Latin, Starry Messenger. The stars were the messengers. Hmm. Cool. Okay. Awesome. All right, go for it. Next one. Next one. We did that in like four minutes. I know. Okay, right. Yogesh Jog. Hello, Dr. Tyson Liu and Lord Nysh, your guest from India. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book actually created a lot of questions in my mind than it answered. Oh, wait, wait.

1:02:42Which book now again? Which book did this guest ask about? I'll say it slower. The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. What's handy about it? Oh, you mean this Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. That one. That one. Listen, everybody, I'm sorry. That was pretty self-serving, but I'm really proud of the book. It really is a great opportunity for me to say this. We are proud of the book for you. We are proud of you. Oh, you're so kind. Thank you. Here we go. Okay, please continue. Please continue. Does the Sianhorst effect imply that the universal speed limit is an environmental variable rather than a fundamental constant?

1:03:24If so, could an advanced civilization pump the vacuum to create local bubbles of infinite causality? And would this effectively turn the universe into a lossless energy distribution network? Answer is all yours. Amazing. Charles, you take this one. Amazing. I haven't heard about the Scharnhorst effect being asked in a very long time. A scientist named Scharnhorst, I think it was around 1990 or so, hypothesized that if you took two perfectly smooth metal plates and brought them within a millimeter or a millionth of a millimeter within one another, you would create zones because of the quantum fluctuations of the universe where the index of refraction was less than one.

1:04:19What it means, practically means, is that in those tiny zones that are only a fraction of an inch across, the speed of light could actually exceed the speed of light in vacuum. This would be a hypothetical. There's been no way to be able to test it, and the effect is tiny. All right. So it would be one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent faster than the speed of light in vacuum across this zone, which was less than a millionth of an inch across. loss. So it's this really neat effect that if we could test it, it would be neat to find. Unfortunately, we cannot create, at least as far as we know, if the Scharnhorst effect is true, these kinds of pumped spaces that our questioner is asking.

1:05:10Because the causality and the speed of light and the stuff like that at those micro levels cannot translate into a macro level thing like being able to draw energy from nothing. Okay. Now that said, and I'll just stop with the technical mumbo jumbo in one sentence, the concept of zero point energy, which is what the Sean Horst effect is talking about, is still highly uncertain. We would love to find out more about it. And maybe someday we could in fact tap it to get something cool out of it for our use.

1:05:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:Charles, is this related at all to the Casimir effect? We have two parallel plates with an evacuated space in between, but this has taken it up another level? Is that? Correct. That's exactly right. We have a cosmological phenomenon inside. That's right. A quantum cosmological phenomenon rather than just a sort of a laboratory thing. I mean, is that? Yes, that's right. The Casimir effect is exactly what we're talking about here. Casimir, everyone, in case you don't know, C-A-S-I-M-I-R. That sounds right. The scientist, Dr. Casimir, hypothesized it exists, and it was in fact measured to exist. That if you bring two plates of metal really, really close together, you actually wind up with energy that sort of magically, but not magically, scientifically because of quantum physics, appears when you didn't think there was anything there.

1:06:43Right. And so this is taking it to the next level. The Sean Horst effect would be like.

1:06:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:The two plates are attracted to each other by forces that are not gravity or electromagnetic. They're quantum. That's quantum attraction. That's quantum. That's insane. I love it. Yeah. All right, next one. Let's get one more in here. Great question. Chuck or Gary? All right, here we go. This is Nirav Shah who says, hello, astro gentleman. Nirav Shah from Arizona. my question is, can you point me towards some resources where I can learn more about the universe theoretically and practically? As an ardent receiver of starlight, knowledge from StarTalk, I often paint an incoherent picture of the universe.

1:07:21I want to learn more so I can ask better questions. Well, I got a book for you, man. It's called the Quantum, the Handy.

1:07:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, it sounds like he's not in a hurry. So my book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, that's not for him because he sounds like he's got time on his hands. Charles, how many pages is your book? Jeez, I don't know. Let's see. It looked pretty fast. I'm looking at everybody just so you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like 458 pages. Yeah, yeah. That's a commitment. Yeah. That's a commitment. Yeah, but not really because you got to understand Chuck's book is broken up so that it's almost like a resource. You don't have to read it straight through. You know, you can read about the scientists of quantum physics in certain parts.

1:08:22You can read like from the beginning, which is very good. The very beginning of the book is great for just like, what is a particle? What is quantum? So even though it's almost 500 pages, don't look at it like it's 500 pages. It's broken up in ways that you can digest it in chunks. Resource is a good word for it. It's a resource. You're very kind to say that. And your description is exactly right, Chuck. I wrote that book specifically to say, hey, you could take it in whatever size pieces you want and whatever level you want to go at it.

1:08:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Chuck was not being kind. He was being factual. Don't confuse the two. Now you're being kind, Neil. Thank you. If your book sucked and he said, you wrote a nice book, then he's being kind. You're very kind. Thank you very much. No, I would say if you want to go deeper into the mathematics, right, because the handy quantum physics answer book and many of the other books about these topics are usually talking about deep concepts and ideas. But those ideas arose from the mathematical and the scientific depths of really trying to wrestle with the equations that described how the universe works or the calculations or the measurements that would give us a clue about how the universe works.

1:09:45So if you want, I'll just mention this. There is a group called OpenStax, S-T-A-X, and it is free for anyone who wishes. It's basically a set of textbooks. These are textbooks that are legitimately for people who want to learn or to major in something or to do, but it's free on the internet. And I encourage anybody who wants to look at some of those things to see, like, get a little taste of what an actual textbook looks like and see if you want to go deeper into it. See if you want to drink deeply of that Stygian spring or if you would rather just have a little knowledge, which, of course, as Alexander Pope says, is a dangerous thing.

1:10:31And always remember, a mind is a terrible thing. Is that it?

1:10:40to waste or otherwise. That's right. That's the bad part. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Terrible. Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff now. I encourage everyone to take a look.

1:10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right. I think that's all the time we have. Well, Geek and Chief, we love you, but our fans love you even more. Yeah. I am very, very happy to be with you guys always, Gary, Chuck, Neil. Thank you. It's so much fun for me, and I really, really appreciate it. Glad you do. Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right, Gary. Thank you, Neil. And thank you, Charles. StarTalk Special Edition Cosmic Queries. And it's been a Geek in Chief grab bag. All right, guys. Good to have you. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

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