Just Another Really Good Episode with Brian Greene

Chuck Nice
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Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Chuck, have you recovered from this? I have not. Conversation with Brian Green.

Chuck Nice
I'm surprised that I can even speak to you right now, to be honest. You look like you blew a couple of gaskets in there. It's more than a gasket. This was mind blowing. Beyond mind blowing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I mean, it was like blood coming out of your eye socket. Your brain said, I gotta. I can't handle this. Well, when you and Brian get going, man, I've got to tell you, it's tough to keep up. I don't know.

All right. Welcome to Startalk, where science and pop culture collide. Startalk begins right now.

This is startalk. Neil degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck. Nice with me, Chuck, baby. What's up, Neil?

All right, all right. You know what you're going to talk about today? I do not. The only way to talk about physics, okay. Is to talk about physics with Brian Green in the house.

Chuck Nice
That is true. Thank you. You gotta, you know, you can't. It's empty. It would be unless you have Brian Greene in the car conversation.

Absolutely. And he's just up the street. Up at Columbia. You're a dual professor? Professor of physics and professor of mathematics.

Brian Greene
That's right. Wow. You get paid twice for that. But I go to no faculty meeting. I'm always pretty cool.

Chuck Nice
I'm sorry, I can't. I'm math today. So you're author of several books until the end of time. Was that your more recent one? That's my most recent.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And that came out how long ago? 2020. Right. At the pandemic. What a moment to have a book called until the end of time.

And the one I think most people know, if they know you at all, the elegant universe loses another one. The fabric of the cosmos. Yeah, absolutely. That's the next one. Hidden reality.

Yeah. That was about multiple universes. Right? Man, so he's all up in it. I believe the fabric of the universe is a tweed.

A tweed? A satin weave.

So welcome back to the show. This is your more than a three peat, I think, at this point. Oh, God. And you're involved in a lot of things. You're writing the book.

Other than being professor, you're writing the books. And are we in the 15th year of your world science festival? How many years have you been doing? That's right. We started 2008.

Brian Greene
So if you just subtract, it's even a little bit more. But the pandemic changed. Yeah. We're coming up to probably the 15th live event. Congratulations on that.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Although it's a little audacious to hold it in New York and call it the World Science Festival. But we don't only have it in New York, we also have it in Australia, and we've had events in Amsterdam, in Moscow. No, no, I got nothing. I can in Italy, in Spain. I know.

I try to. And by the way, New York is the world, let's be honest. I mean, for anybody out there listening, I'm sorry, you go to Paris, you find Parisians. You know, you go to England, you find the Brits, but you come to New York, you find everybody audacious. Would have been like the cosmic science fashion.

Brian Greene
Then you would have had a point. Well, congratulations on bringing it to the world. Thank you. Or taking it to the world. And what I enjoyed most about the several that I've attended is the effort to bring the arts into it in a meaningful way.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
You know, there are many artists who I would later learn, or not rare, who are inspired by science in the universe and discoveries, and they will compose dance and music. And you have a mixture of these sessions. We do. We do. I mean, the goal is to have science feel connected to everything that matters to us.

Brian Greene
And of course, culture is a big part of it. Culture and arts matter to everybody. In fact, now with AI, we're doing a program on the arts in the age of artificial intelligence. So how is AI changing how art artists approach their work and how scientists think about art. There'll be more unemployed artists.

Yeah, well, but it's a funny thing. People say it's not paid, they won't be unemployed, they just won't be paid. Yeah. Whenever new technology comes along, like the camera, people are like, okay, now you don't need artists anymore. Cause anyone can just click.

But there are artists who use the camera to create things that mere mortals can't. And there are painters who actually take a picture and then they actually paint the picture as opposed to having someone sit for a portrait. But that wasn't the biggest, the biggest thing, the biggest force operating was you no longer needed the artist to portray reality because of course the camera captured that. So that freedom of freed the artist. To portray impressionistics reality.

Chuck Nice
Exactly. It's not what the scene looks like, it's what the scene feels like. It feels like interpretation that matters. It's huge. I mean, that's what is the magic in so much expression.

Brian Greene
It's what we do with it as opposed to just literally depicting what's out there. There are many people who project that AI is going to create a new kind of art just the way the. Camera did, just the way the camera is. So it has to shake out and still need to see. I think AI will just accelerates creativity.

Chuck Nice
It doesn't replace it, because what happens is you have associations that are being made at a level that you as a human being would. Maybe eventually, over a course of years, you might make those associations, but the computer can do it almost instantaneously. And then you take that and you say, hmm, what does that mean to me? Okay, so it pushes you along. Pushes you along.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah. But the flip side of that is if you have a computer creating so much, there's a lot of chaff, you know, that you have to separate out. So true. So, yeah, is chaff even when people do it. You're born and raised in New York City.

Brian Greene
Yeah. Right across the street from where we are sitting right now. You went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a selective high school that specialized in science in the way the Bronx high school of Science specialized. In fact, they're rivals. They're like intellectual rivals.

Why do you think that? We've wrestled each other now and then. I always lose. You would not like a book if it didn't have equations in it. That's true.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's true. This is weird. Yeah, that has changed, I should say. So. You've read a novel.

Brian Greene
That's right now and then that meant. You thought more deeply about math than you thought about words. Yeah, but the one change I would make to that statement was it was when it came to books for a science class, if the book was chock full of words, I feel like, oh, no, there's a lot of interpretation that's going to go into this particular science class. But if it was chock full of equations, I was like, nah, this is rigorous. This is going to be specific, and it's going to be something that I can nail because I don't have to interpret.

I can just really engage with the equations. Wow. So in a history class or a literature class, you would have been in tears. Well, for the science, it was mostly just for science. But you're absolutely right.

There is a different mindset that you bring to a history class or an english class, which I did not have a full appreciation for when I was younger. That's absolutely true. And as I got older, and especially, there's a moment when I graduated college and I said to myself, I think I just got a technical education as opposed to learning about the world and life and humanity. And I went into kind of a tailspin for a little while because I was like, what did I do? And that really then changed it all for me.

And words have become vital to the way I engage with the world. You think? I mean, it's four best selling books. Yeah. Words matter.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
If you want to talk to other people who are not physicists, and if. You want to really get the essence of what someone's about, as opposed to quantifying some quality of abstract or objective reality. Okay. Yeah. All right.

I think that's a. That's an enlightened posture. Yeah. Gotten there. Took me a while.

So what I want to do is follow up. There was a question to our cosmic queries that I didn't have an answer to. Oh, no. Here we go. Okay.

And I said, you know, I don't know. I gotta. We're gonna have to get Brian Green. We gotta get the big guns in here. All right.

If I remember the question, it was, what happens if a quark falls into a black hole? You have a quark pair. Yes. And we've only ever found them in cork pairs. Okay.

And in a normal lab, if you take them and pull them apart, the strength, the force that wants to bring them together grows. Which sounds weird when you're used to gravity and other things where distance makes something weaker, but they're, like, really creepy. Identical twins, like, you ever meet identical twins that are, like, super creepy? Where they sort of talk to you. They got their own language.

Brian Greene
Yeah. Okay. But it's kind of like a rubber band. As you stretch a rubber band, the force is greater. Yeah.

The gluonic force between them. The gluonic force. Cause it's held together by gluon. Okay. So now, as I pull it apart, there will be a point where it snaps.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
As I understand my nuclear physics, it snaps with the exact amount of energy you put in. So that out of that energy creates two other quarks. So now I have four quarks. Quark antiquark. Pairs.

Brian Greene
Pairs. Thank you. Okay. Pairs. Okay, so now.

So you wanna see what happens now? You send a pair of corks down the black hole. It gets split. We make two other quarks. Yeah, you do.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wait. Thank you. That was very good. And you keep doing this. And they.

So wouldn't the quarks eat the entire gravitational field of the black hole? And that you wouldn't have a black hole left. You just have a ball of quarks. You have to realize, number one, that we still don't know the physics of the singularity of black hole well enough. Invite you into this office now.

Brian Greene
So. Well, I wish one day, one day I pray that I'll sit here and tell you what happens at the singularity of the. Bring the person who knows next time. But here's the thing. There is nobody on planet Earth who knows the answer, unfortunately, yet.

Okay, when we follow the mathematics to the actual singularity of a black hole. Using Einstein general relativity. Using Einstein's general relativity, and even some of the modifications that have come from more recent thinking, we're still not there yet to truly understand what happens. But I should say there are ideas. There are ideas of things, I don't know if you've heard of them, called fuzzballs, where there isn't actually a singularity, and the black hole is actually a more fuzzy collection of matter that.

So there are ideas that people. That makes your math come out okay. Makes the math come out okay. But that's right when they say black holes at work, the singularity at the center of a black hole is where God is dividing by zero. Yeah, that's a Stephen Hawking quip or something.

I think it is. You know, do you remember if you divide by zero, it's not right. And it's actually, in a sense, it's literal. Because if you calculate what's known as the scalar curvature, which is a number that characterizes how warped a region of space is, it does go to infinity as you go to the center of a black hole, just like when you divide by zero, it goes to infinity. In fact, it goes to infinity as the 6th power of your distance.

So we know very well how badly behaved the center of a black hole is. So it goes to infinity fast. It goes to infinity fast. That's crazy. Yeah.

And so if you ask what really happens if something is just being crushed at the center? We can't really answer yet. So is it possible that as a quark antiquark pair goes, that the tidal forces will create additional quark antiquark as. Sure. And then you have.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
But there's a limitation of quarks making me some sounds. Yeah. So there may be a cloud and there may be some sort of cloud that forms just before it hits it. Ultimately, we believe it hits the singularity, whatever that means, because we don't really know what the singularity is. If it's a fuzzball, you can have a fuzzball of quarks, possibly, or the.

Brian Greene
Fuzzball may have a slightly different impact on the quark anti quark pair, maybe before. Influence. Influence on it. Yeah, yeah. Impact.

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So it's a really good question, but it will have to fully await a full understanding of what truly is. Okay, so me not being able to answer it wasn't just my personal ignorance, it's a total ignorance of all humans on earth. Yeah.

And there are. So I don't feel so bad. And I should say there are many, many questions like that that we're still struggling with. Like, we believe that when any information falls into a black hole, we believe that information does not get destroyed. But for a while, Stephen Hawking thought, no, any information ultimately hits the singularity and leaves our universe.

He changed his mind later in life, which just. Was that with Kip Thorne? Yes, that's right. So they bet, I think, an encyclopedia, you know, the source of information that we humans have created. So there kick Thorne was a.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
One of the executive producers on interstellar, interstellar, and he sort of spearheaded the effort, among others. But he was the exponent to build the laser interferometry gravitational wave observatory, Ligo, that detected colliding black holes. And he won the Nobel prize for that. So he's significant in our field, and I have at least a few books by him on my shelves. And he was clearly on a level of geekdom where he bets encyclopedias.

Brian Greene
Yeah, but in terms of his book, he wrote in an encyclopedic book on gravity and black holes, which is about 1200 pages, just filled with equations. Therefore, I loved it when I was. A kid with the. Mizner, Thorne, Wheeler. Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. I have two copies of that in my office. Two copies? Yes. You want to cross reference?

One of them is mine, and the other one belonged to my wife, who has a PhD in mathematical physician. Oh, that's so cool. We met in relativity class. Really? Taught by John Wheeler.

Brian Greene
Really? Yes. You took relativity from Wheeler? Yes, I did. That is amazing.

Wow. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So John Wheeler is one of the authors of this.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler and Misner taught physics at University of Maryland. Charles Misner. Charles Mizner. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So I want to think of it as a quark catastrophe that would happen in the center of the black hole. The trouble with quarks, they're like tribbles. By the way, there's a previous. If we're physics geeking out here, right, there's a previous time, was it 110 years ago, with something called the ultraviolet catastrophe?

Do you remember that? I remember it well. I wasn't there, but I've learned about it. Yeah. This is the start of quantum physics.

Brian Greene
Yeah. It had to predate 1900. It predated Planck. Max Planck, because there was an equation that would show how much energy would come from glowing objects. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And how much energy of a certain wavelength of light and then another wavelength, and so there'd be the spectrum of what it gives you. And if you follow that equation to higher and higher energies, it blows up. And what's called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Now, we knew that's not happening in the actual universe, but we had no theoretical understanding of why the actual universe was not doing what our equation said. So we knew something was missing.

Chuck Nice
Okay, and what was mister? Max Planck comes along. Finish the story. Yes. And Max Planck comes along, and he suggests an idea that he never fully believed.

Brian Greene
This is interesting. He suggests that maybe the energy only comes in packets of certain quantized sizes, and therefore, your calculation of the amount of energy was biased by assuming that energy could come in arbitrarily large or small amounts. If you assume it only comes in packets of a minimum size, then the total energy inside that cavity and drops off, and it agrees with experiments. Right. But the weird thing is, and he had an equation.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
The equation is like, holy shit. That this would come out of someone's head to make this happen. It's got an exponential. And an exponential has interesting properties where it goes up and then it comes down again if it's a negative exponent. I mean, there's a fun math in there.

Brian Greene
Exactly. And was it just a fitting function, or did he actually have deep physics insight? He had a model in mind. He really quantized the energy. He broke it up into little bits and redid the calculation, and that's what came out.

But then later on, he never fully believed that energy in light, in photons, as we now call it, did come in little packets. Right. He said, sure, the math seems to describe it, but. But I'm not willing to go to that next of describing a full reality to it. And so it's really Einstein who came along and came up with the idea of photons, more particularly with the photoelectric effect.

And that's how he wins the Nobel Prize. Many people think he won the prize for special relativity or general relativity. No, my boy could have had eight Nobel prizes. His Nobel prizes are for what he's least famous for, right? Yeah, right.

Chuck Nice
Perhaps that's straight up.

Exactly. There are people winning Nobel prizes for discovering things that he predicted. So if you add everything he predicted to the Nobel Prize count, plus what? Everything. If they gave out Nobel prizes for everything you did, I give him eight Nobel prizes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
What would you give him? Well, certainly gravitational waves, although, again, he didn't fully believe it. But it comes right out of his 1916 and 1918 page. If you give him a Nobel Prize for everything people discovered based on his. Stuff, well, then it's kind of everything.

Persons on the Nobel Prize receiving. I said, nope. Right. It's like that. Bugs Bunny first base.

Chuck Nice
Bugs Bunny second base. Bugs Bunny third base. Every Nobel Prize. Albert Einstein. That's the answer right there.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And so, of course, since if energy is quantized, thus is born the branch of physics called quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics. And that probably has had the greatest impact on life as we know. That was the year 1900.

Brian Greene
Yeah, well, 1905 is when Einstein writes his paper on the idea of photons. But Max Planck, you're right. 1900. Clean nitrogen. Starting a new century.

Chuck Nice
Yeah, before they even had calculators. Oh, was that really. Was it that far back?

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
We're old enough to remember when the United States lost the most powerful collider in the world. This superconducting super collider, which they already there was money allocated, they started digging a hole, was a 200 miles circumference or something huge and superconducting. It was going to use superconducting magnets, which had very powerful magnetic fields because that was coming of age at the time. It was going to push the frontier. My analysis, if you read the report, well, there were cost overruns and we have too many other priorities here.

So we're going to zero the budget for this superconducting super collider. And you read the report and say, well, we have other priorities. Plus this was going to be built in Texas. And if we're going to build the space station, which is based in Houston, Texas, is already getting a chunk of change. You know, when all this happened, like, between 1989 and 1992, when the debates.

And then they zeroed the budget. What else was happening over those years? Let me think. Oh, my gosh. Peace broke out in Europe.

No longer do we need the physicist to protect us from the evil, godless communists. That's what I think was the subtext of that story. Am you, Harmony? Because no other particle accelerator was ever canceled for any reason that was designed, conceived, and built in the 20th century. Yeah.

So if you grant me one conspiracy theory, that's the. Grant me that. But then you think they kept the space station because that was the place where the new battles might be waged. I mean, possibly. So what we're looking at right now, when you think about it.

Brian Greene
Yeah, yeah. With the space force and everything else. So that's where I am on that. But I say this only to note that once that got canceled, the center of mass of particle physics went across the pond to Europe and then CERN. The European.

European center for Physics. Nuclear research. Somewhere in there. Yeah. It's a french acronym.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
When the words are in the french order or something. Gotcha. It goes there. And I think our lawmakers don't really understand that if we don't do the physics, someone else can and will. We don't own all access to future discoveries of science.

And so now Europe does it. And so they went ahead build a large had drawn collider, and they successfully found the Higgs boson. The big holy grail. July 4, 2012. Look at that.

Was it July 4? That's sticking it to us. Wow. It really was. And, you know, they really found it on, like, June 28.

Chuck Nice
You know, they found it on June 28, and there, like, guys, we're gonna sit on this for a few days. Yeah. But. But there are a lot of Americans involved in the large, but just to say. But.

Brian Greene
Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah. Even Peter Higgs. Is he american?

Peter Higgs was Scottish, I would think. You know, I think he's from Edinburgh, although I think he was Edinburgh, but I don't think he was Scottish. Maybe he was English. You know, I don't 100% know. Edinburgh, maybe, but, yeah, you know, he predicted its existence, and then it was discovered, and at the announcement, saw tears welling in this man's eyes, who'd been waiting decades for this idea that, at first, nobody believed ultimately was accepted theoretically, but it was proven experimentally, finally.

Chuck Nice
And what is the Hicks boson, exactly. Of the particle categories? One of them is bosons. Okay. And bosons are force mitigating particles.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay. Okay. So, when we think of a force action at a distance. There's a way to think about that in terms of the particle that in the category particles is a boson. One of the bosons is this Higgs boson, which has what properties?

Brian Greene
Well, it has. Was I right? Yeah, it's very good. Thank you. We said I was very good.

Can I answer? Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian. Please. Okay.

It's what endows other particles, even itself, actually, with mass. Interesting. Now, where does. Where does that come from? Well, just to take Neil's idea, it starts with the idea of a field.

That's how you get rid of this idea of action at a distance. You imagine that space is filled with. Stuff, you know, invented fields. I really don't. Michael Faraday.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah. Oh, really? Well, that makes sense. He's the first. Yeah.

Brian Greene
Magnetic field. And think what a leap that is. Yeah. That huge. Yeah.

It's an insane. There's nothing there. Yeah. You're looking at nothing. You're seeing, and yet you're positing that there is something, and that's an amazing thing.

But he was talking electric and magnetic fields. Right. What Higgs is talking about is a new field called the Higgs field, which he didn't call it that, but that's what we call it. So it's his field that fill space. And as particles that otherwise would be massless, as they try to go through space, they have to burrow through the Higgs field, and that creates a kind of drag force on them, which is what imparts the mass that they have.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay. And that's the field. Now, what's the particle? Well, if you have this field, in principle, if you hit it hard enough, like hitting the surface of water, you can cause little particles of the field to spray out. And that's what the large hadron collider did.

Brian Greene
It slammed proton against proton, and that way jostled the higgs field and caused a little droplet of it to break free. And that's the hygiene. And then we got the. Oh, my God. So you're seeing an actual piece of the field.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. Oh, my God. So the higgs field generated via equals Mc squared. Yes. Its own particle of its own.

Chuck Nice
That's amazing. That's right. Or you can say it's a quanta. To go back to the other language, it's a quanta of the Higgs field. Like the photon is the quantum of the electron magnetic field.

Brian Greene
All right. That's amazing. Some stuff. So, okay, now I get it. So it's not the particle that you're actually seeing.

Chuck Nice
It's not the particle that is imbued with mass itself. It is the thing on which the particle is traveling the field, the medium itself. Boom. It kind of splashes apart for a quick second, and then that itself becomes a particle and has mass. Holy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wait, so. That's amazing. That is amazing. Chuck just blew a gasket. Oh, my God.

Chuck Nice
That's crazy, dude. That is insane. Call the doctors. This is the first time I've actually really understood. Call the doctors.

Brian Greene
Oh, my God. That's so freaking crazy. Oh, my God. A week later, he's there in bed, still, eyes this big. That is fantastic.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So, my favorite analog to this is when I explain the Higgs field to people. I say, it's like a Hollywood party. Okay, so there are people in the party. All right. The bar is at the back of the wall.

Chuck Nice
Okay. Okay. And if no one knows you and you walk into this party. Okay, that's my experience, you have near. Zero resistance to movement through that party.

True. So you have a very low, if not zero, party mass. Exactly. Okay. Cause you have no.

You get into the bar right away. You get in the bar right away. Right. So your inertia, it knows no resistance there. Exactly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Whereas, if beyonce walks in, everybody will crowd around here. She can only make very small steps towards the bar. Right. She has a very high party mass. Is that fair?

Brian Greene
That's it. That's the party field. The party field. And then if you slap all those partygoers, you can slap off one of them. That's the party.

Oh, there it is. All right. So I have learned. Not from you. And I'm disappointed.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Cause I thought you would have told me the whole story. Yes. I come to you for these frontier conversations, that the Higgs mass that a particle would have is only for free particles. If a particle is in an atomic, it's not getting its mass. I told you this in the past, though.

Brian Greene
I absolutely have. But you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. So if I'm a fat proton in a nucleus, I'm not getting my mass from the Higgs field. No.

And that's why it's a really misleading notion that many people have. They think that all mass comes from the Higgs field. It is just the fundamental particles. And here's the thing. If you were to go up into your particle data book, which I know you have a few copies lying on.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Course, particle data, it's very good. If you look up the masses of the quarks, the up quark, and the down quark, that make up a proton. Up, up and down. Add up their masses. He said that quickly.

Chuck Nice
Up and down. The nucleons have three quarks in them all bound together, making up the proton and the neutron. But they're different combinations of three quarks. This is good. Tell them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So quarks have charges. Fractional charges. Yes. So watch, watch this. Okay.

Proton has a charge of plus one. All right. How do you get that from three quarks? Yeah. How do you do that?

So give me, give it to me. You gotta have a two thirds and a two thirds and a minus one third. Two thirds, two three, minus one three. So two thirds. Two thirds is one and a third and then a minus charge to bring it down.

Now, now, neutrons have charged quarks inside of them, but they don't have any charge. So how do you get them? How do you get them? Let's hear it. Oh, it must be up two thirds.

Down one third. Down one third. Yeah. So if you have an up and then a down and a down down, then you got a two thirds. Minus one third.

Brian Greene
Minus one third. Minus one third. Now canceling out. And so as a neutral thing, even though what's inside of it has charges. Right.

But here's the thing. The point I want to make, though, is if you add up the masses of those quarks, they're much less than the mass of the proton. So what's going on here? They make up the proton and yet the proton's much heavier than its ingredients. Right.

Answer is there's another contribution to the mass which has nothing to do with the higgs field, which is the thing we were talking about before. The energy in the glue holding the. Corks together, the gluonic force. There's energy holding them together equals Mc squared. There's mass associated with that energy.

And most of the mass of the proton is coming from the glue that's holding the quarks together. That's insane. So let's take a neutron, which has a half life in minutes, like 15 minutes, memory serves. And after that amount of time, half the neutrons will have decayed into a proton. And if, let's say if it's a regular proton and then an electron, an.

Electron and an antineutrino. And an antineutrino. If you add up the masses of those, don't you recover the mass of the proton? As long as you're taking kinetic energy into account. And all this, too, because they fly away.

But, yes, but, yes. So the energy budget is all there. It's all there. Okay. Look at that.

Chuck Nice
Okay, so everything is conserved all the time. And, in fact, the way the neutrino was predicted was from looking at these particle decays and finding that the energy budget was not adding up. And so the idea was, maybe there's an invisible particle that's carrying away some additional energy. Was this Enrico Fermi? Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So what I like about this is he's like, look, folks, I can't explain this. Let's make some shit up. Yes, but geniuses make up shit. That's right. There is a quote.

That's a bumper sticker right there. That's it. I'm getting a t shirt. I'm getting a t shirt.

Chuck Nice
That's awesome. That's great. That's what Carl Sagan was famous for saying. They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at all these people with these great ideas.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And he said, they also laughed at Bozo the clown. Just cause people laugh doesn't mean they're gonna be wrong. He makes it up, and then everyone starts looking for it, and it's this highly elusive particle that has no charge, because we knew all the charges had already balanced in the lab. It's got no charge, but it's carrying away energy, and no one has detected it. And he was italian.

Right? So neutrino is like little neutron, little neutron, little neutron, little neutral one, I think is. Oh, that may be right. Little neutral one. Little neutral one.

Brian Greene
Yeah. Right. And so that's the only thing that allows me to. Okay, I'm not gonna get in your way. When people say dark matter, it's some elusive particle that we can't detect, right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's accounting for the extra gravity. And it's a particle. We haven't found the particle yet. And I'm thinking that's intellectually lazy, but it's no different than the neutrino. Than the neutrino.

So that's why I cut it some slack. More slack than I otherwise would. Now, we still need to find it. We still haven't found if it's a particle. We haven't found.

Brian Greene
Yeah. Right. So what's your betting, man? Is it a particle, or is it something else? Look, I'm relatively conservative when it comes to these things, so I think that it's likely to be a particle.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
But just because we've been down that. Road before, we've been down that road before, it fits in so well to our theoretical framework. It doesn't require you have a slot. For a dark matter particle. Well, the amazing thing is, and here's where you're going to come back at me and say, this should undercut my confidence when you look at a theory called supersymmetry that I've spent a long time working on.

Chuck Nice
Okay? Within this theory, which goes beyond what we know about particle physics for reasons that are well motivated, because that's ordinary symmetry. That's right. It takes the symmetries that we have, and it takes them one step further, and it's the only step further that you could possibly go. So, of course, nature must make use of this final symmetry principle.

Brian Greene
Why else would it exist? That's the thinking that we've had. Wait, just let me. Let me back up for a minute. So, as I was learning particle physics, I was intrigued to recognize that you have your electron, you have your photon, you have your neutrino, and these other sort of basic particles, and they exist in our world that we experience.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay? If you up the energy knob, other particles manifest. There's a version of the electron that manifests only in these higher energy levels, and it's called a muon. Okay? And so there's a whole layer of particles sitting above the ones that are in our world.

Chuck Nice
Right? So there's three of these layers. And tell me, the three electrons, you. Get the electron, the muon, and the tau. The tau, yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay. And there's an electron neutrino. There's a muon neutrino. There's a tau neutrino. So now I have three layers here, and you have access to them in your particle accelerators because it takes a lot of energy and you can get there.

Yeah. Okay. Now, what does supersymmetry do? Supersymmetry says, this package is. Is beautiful and confirmed.

And tell me the three force carriers. We have a photon. You got the photon, then you got the gluons. And the W and Z bosons are the weak nuclear force. And those are the.

Discovered by. Bozo. Bozo. Bozo. Actually, Bose.

Bose is an indian physicist. Yes, absolutely. And then for the quarks, you got the up and the down that we spoke about. You got the charm, the strange, you got the top and the bottom. Right?

Brian Greene
So again, they come in three pairs. Of pairs of quarks. Supersymmetry says, take all of those particles and double them. Another shadow version of all of those particles. So shadow governed for the electron.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
We are the puppet master. This is the deep state. This is a deep state. They are the puppet masters. Quantum deep state.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. So I didn't know this. The entire set of particles would have a counterpart in this super symmetric place. So, for the electron, you have the super symmetric electron. For the quarks, you have squarks.

Brian Greene
For neutrinos, you have neutrinos. People just making chinese apps cartoons. But here's the thing. This is all mathematically motivated by a completely compelling rationale. So this is not pulled out of thin air.

Chuck Nice
Thin air. We have our universe three ways. A three layer cake. And there's a whole other cake. Where does that live?

Brian Greene
With us. But we believe they're more massive, which is why we wanted to build a superconducting super collider to try to find them. Now, we've looked for these at the large hadron. Why can't. Why aren't they right here in front of our faces?

They typically have short lifetimes, so they'll decay into lighter particles. But the lightest of the supersymmetric particles would not decay, and therefore, it should be all around us. Tell them why the lightest one would not decay. If it's the lightest one, when it decays, the decay products have to be lighter than it. And so if it's the lightest one, subject to a certain.

Chuck Nice
There's no place for it to go.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's the same reason why you can have an energy field of any kind. And you will not make particles out of that unless the energy available is higher than the e equals mc squared of two electrons. Right. Because it has to make them in pairs. Okay, am I getting the charge compared to charge?

Because it's plus and a minus. An electron is the lightest physical particle, so nothing's happening. Lightest charge. That's why it's not happening around us right now. Yeah, it's the lightest charge.

Chuck Nice
Particles. Particles. So it has to talk. The electromagnetic field. There it is.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's why light coming from lights is not just making particles. It doesn't have enough energy. Right. But if it did, if x rays started coming out of there. X rays, high energy x rays, you can pop electrons into existence.

Chuck Nice
Cause they're stepping down. So they leave something. The energy of the field is big enough to create the electron, an anti electron, and so it will pair produce them. In fact, that's so wild. Electron microscopes are enabled by x rays creating them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And the wavelength of x rays is so tiny that you can see tiny detail. That's. It's tinier than the detail. You can't have resolution higher than the. Wavelength of light you're using to see it.

Right. Right. Now back to dark matter, just to finish this point. This is a whole massive other layer cake. And you're telling me that is the mass of the dark matter?

Brian Greene
Well, the lightest super symmetric particle would be stable, should be around us. That's when everybody's going to make it filling space. Right. And here's the beautiful thing. Here's the beautiful.

This will blow your mind. This will blow. Your mind's already blown. When you do the calculation of how much of this light is. Super symmetrical particle should be left over.

Since the big bang, it exactly matches what you need to be the dark matter. It comes in the right abundance bang, and yet we've not found it, and it may be the wrong answer. So, sometimes things that just seem so deeply compelling are wrong, but we don't know yet. So, do you know enough in the theory of these particles to predict how you should detect it? Yes.

Now, they can vary. Which is the lightest supersymmetric particle on the flavor of the supersymmetric theory you're looking at. But in any given version, yes. You know exactly how the particle interacts. Okay, so now you have everybody's favorite flavor.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
The theorists come out with their competing models, but still, they gotta have one of these particles. Okay, so now I'm gonna. I'm a. I'm an experimentalist, and it's a. Let me test for this one.

I don't find it. Let me test for that one. I don't find it. So it's not looking good. Yeah, I agree.

Okay. I agree. Okay. Wow. I agree.

Brian Greene
But yet, when I was a student, it was almost a foregone conclusion that you just had to look for it. You'd find it. This is a dark matter because supersymmetry also solves other problems, the so called hierarchy problem. It solved the dark matter matter problem. It's a beautiful idea.

That seems perhaps not to be right now. It's not fully ruled out yet, but that may be where we're going. Who's the one that said, the great tragedy in science, a beautiful theory slain by some facts. Somebody said, I forgot exactly what it may be.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
I have not been the same since we had lunch months ago. And you explained to me, and I've said it here, that there are ideas percolating, that the fabric of spacetime might be woven by wormholes that connect the virtual particle pairs that come in and out of existence. And that if they're connected by wormholes rather than just some field, then the wormhole is an actual structural texture of the universe. Yeah. In fact, the other way.

Chuck Nice
I'm sorry. First of all, I need some weed to even deal with this, because if I'm. I'm trying to figure out what you just said here. Cause it's so freaking. I mean, it really is just crazy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wait, wait. Let's back up. The vacuum of space, right, is not a vacuum, right? Because quantum physics requires what? There's all sorts of uncertainty.

Brian Greene
And that uncertainty means that there's fluctuations, and therefore there are particle antiparticle pairs. There's energy fluctuations, there's field fluctuations. It's a roiling mess out there in the. So there's no. Nothing.

Chuck Nice
There is no such thing as nothing that violates uncertainty. There's truly nothing. Right. There's truly nothing. We couldn't have uncertainty.

So the uncertainty is, you know, gives us the fact that we do have virtual particles. We know that they pop in and out of existence on what you're trying to tell me. I think it's not that we know they're there. No one denies it because no one denies it. Completely consistent.

Brian Greene
Well, I said, well, the Casimir force, where you actually put two metal plates in otherwise empty space, they should simply sit there. They're drawn together, and our best explanation is it's the virtual pairs of particles that you fluctuating. I feel like I have fallen into a Star Trek nightmare. So you take two exactly parallel plates. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay. And evacuate what's in between. In between them. That makes sense. The best vacuum you can muster, then you slowly move them together.

Chuck Nice
Right. There is a point within which a whole other force kicks in. That's right. And it's not the gravitational force. It's not electronic electromagnetic force.

Brian Greene
Rather, it's a force that comes from the Chazimer field, which is basically that. Got a Nobel prize. The Casimir. Well, 1948 is when it was discovered. Okay.

Chuck Nice
It got one in my book, but it should have. I just gave it once. Yeah, definitely deserve one. That's insane. But it's an imbalance between the fluctuations of uncertainty within the place and the fluctuations of uncertainty outside the place.

Brian Greene
And it's that imbalance creates a force. And puts them together. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So that's how we get the particles in the vacuum of space. Okay, so now. So now why a. What compels you to say wormhole rather than just a field? Well, because it really comes from the idea of quantum entanglement.

Brian Greene
What we find is that entanglement, which normally we think of as particle pairs, but now we're finding that the vacuum of space may be stitched together by the threads of quantum entanglement itself. So deep down within the substrate of reality, it may all be stitched together by quantum entanglement. And then other work shows us that quantum entanglement, connecting two particles is just like a wormhole going from one to the other. Because what happens in one happens to the other instantly. Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And that means they're touching each other. Connected in some weird way. And entanglement is one language, but we believe wormholes may be the general relativistic version of that quantum language. So it's like a little quantum net holding the whole universe. Exactly.

Brian Greene
Right. Because. Because we find. We find mathematically, if we cut the threads of quantum entanglement, which we can do mathematically, space falls apart. It discretizes into little tiny pieces and then just disappears.

Chuck Nice
I gotta go. I gotta go. No, Chuck. I need you to the end of this. Chuck.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Chuck. Oh, my God. Dude, that's insane.

It's not just that there's a field there. It's the fact that they were quantum entangled that makes the wormhole model compelling. Yeah, but I would say you don't even need the particles pairs. It's as if the entanglement is entangling regions of space. So space itself has a fundamental substrate woven by these threads of quantum connection.

Brian Greene
Now, look, it's mathematical, but it comes out of our cutting edge ideas. It all makes sense. It just makes sense. He's saying he's not pulling out of his ass, right? Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
He's saying, the math get to him. And he started out saying, my boy loves the math. So, now, last thing. Yeah. Explain why you need more than four dimensions for your string theory universe.

Brian Greene
Well, it's a very concrete explanation. When we look at the equations of string theory, there's a consistency equation where something must equal zero or the math doesn't work, that something is a product of two things. One term is really complicated. It's never zero. The other term is the number of dimensions minus ten.

The only way to get it to be equal to zero is for d to be equal to ten. That's it. I am not joking. This is where the constraint of extra dimensions comes from. In string theory, the math is forcing our hands, forces your hand, and then you say, well, let me take this math series.

One thing you could say is, well, if it's not, d equals four, three space in one time, throw the theory away. Others of us will say, hey, let's. Consider the possibility of the universe. Short. Yeah, exactly.

So why should these three dimensions of space be the only ones? Right? Big enough that we can be directly aware of them with these really faulty sensors that we have. Right. If it's only your senses that limit that awareness, why not, in principle, can we build something that can gain access to these higher dimensions?

Yeah. So there are experiments on the table. Some have been carried out, but more precise ones may be done where you study Newton's law of gravity. Why does Newton's law go like one over r squared? Why do we teach our kids geometry?

Mm. Over r squared? It's a geometric. Geometric sphere in three dimensions of space. Yes.

Look at that sphere in four or five or six dimensions. And the two in Newton's law won't be a two. No, it'll be a bigger number. The falloff will be differently. Right.

And so, look at the gravitational force on very small distances. Look for a deviation from the one over r squared that Isaac Newton told us about in the late 16 hundreds. Because that's only in our dimensional measurement of it. Yes. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Cause I'd asked you again over that same lunch. Yeah. Why do we have lunch? I forgot. We were just.

Brian Greene
We were hungry. No, we were just catching up. You know, it's my annual fix my animal Brian Greene infusion. It was. Could dark matter be ordinary matter with ordinary gravity in a parallel universe?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Because for reasons I don't understand the math of the field theory equations of. You were telling me that. That electromagnetic energy cannot escape our space time, but gravity can in a certain. Model called the brain universe, where our brane, it comes out as a membrane. Yeah, it's a membrane.

Brian Greene
So our universe is like a four dimensional membrane floating in a higher dimensional universe that might have other membranes. Higher dimensional membranes, yes. And those other membranes, like, parallel to us, like two slices of bread and a big loaf of bread. I like it. So one slice of bread is some other membrane universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ours is this one, but it's one multigrade, and so gravity could leak out of one into the other, or it. Could just be the. Yeah, that's right. So the gravity. That's what I'm getting.

So if the other universe has six times. Nobody. See, this is where you corrected me, because I was thinking, because we have six times as much force of gravity operating in the universe as matter and energy can account for it. Okay. Factor of six.

Right. So I'm saying, why isn't it just a parallel universe that has six times the mass and it's leakage into our universe? And we're trying to feel the elephant, trying to figure out what it is, but it's just regular matter in another universe whose gravity leaked. But then you said if it's in another membrane, it's going to be dropping off faster than one over r squared, like one over r cubed, or some higher dimension. And if that's the case, it has to be way more than six times.

Brian Greene
You could imagine rigging it so that it would have the right amount. And people have studied this, and it's hard to make these theories work, indeed, detail and build. But in principle, it's an idea that's absolutely worthy of investigating, because that's one way to make it invisible. Just put it in somewhere else. Exactly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And then where we can still calculate with it, it's not a problem. Right? Yeah. That's crazy. Man, oh, man.

All right. I don't know what to believe about anything. Nothing is real. Nothing is real, man. Dark energy.

I'm curious about this because it was a natural arithmetic element of Einstein's equations. It's like an integration constant. As I understood it. You talk about the cosmological constant, the. Cosmological constant in his equations that enabled Le Matre to calculate that the universe is either expanding or the universe is not static.

And so there's a term, there's. And if youve had calculus, you might remember theres a constant of integration. Often its just zero, and you can ignore it. But when we were in graduate school, im a little older than you. When we were in graduate school, we always recognized, we paid homage to that constant, but said, lets assume its zero.

If this term existed, it would mean there was a force operating in the universe opposite that of gravity, depending on. The sign of the cosmological constant. But yes, because it could have either sign. Okay, it would either work with gravity or against it. Exactly.

But if we had a static universe, it would be something just holding up the universe against the collapse of gravity. Which is why Einstein. And we didn't have any reason to think so, it could be zero, and we just. But we always had to go through that portal. We say, here it is.

We set it to zero and move on. Exactly. Okay. Then it gets discovered. Okay, dark energy gets discovered.

In 1998, it gets the Nobel prize using quantum physics, which has done so well by us. Perhaps the most successful theory ever about anything fails in its attempt to predict the amount of dark energy in the universe. Yeah, and it fails badly by a factor. What's up with that, Brian, of a Google? Wow.

Brian Greene
By a factor of bigger than a Google. Ten to. It's like ten to 123 or something. The Google is ten to the hundred. It gets the wrong answer by the biggest amount ever.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
In a mismatch between theory and observation. Where are we with the dark energy theorists? Well, look, what this is showing us is that quantum mechanics is incredibly successful when you apply it to the electromagnetic force, to the weak nuclear force, to the strong nuclear force. But we've long known that when you apply it to gravity, something goes wrong, something changes. This is the motivation for string theory, and this is the motivation for trying to go beyond conventional approaches.

Brian Greene
And so you're absolutely right, this is the clearest signal that something is wrong. Now, here's. I think our best is wrong. That's actually a good thing. Well, it's an opportunity.

Opportunity, yeah, it's a huge opportunity. The press always says, oh, scientists are angry or this. No, we're delighted. If something breaks. Oh, my gosh, it's a new thing.

That's right. And so I would say my guess where we're going is, and many of my colleagues agree with me, that you can't quantize gravity the way you had to quantize Faraday and Maxwell's electromagnetism or the way you had to quantize the weak or strong nuclear forces. It may be that gravity and quantum mechanics are already so intimately connected that it's a completely different mindset when you approach them. You don't take the rules of quantum mechanics and slap them onto gravity. That gets you the wrong answer.

That's the wrong approach. In fact, this idea of entanglement and wormholes suggests that gravity, quantum mechanic, they're already in there. They're already there. They're already there. That makes sense.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
They already have the shotgun wedding. Exactly. And you just was in the tent. Exactly. So you just need to understand that melding better.

Brian Greene
And when you do, perhaps you'll be able to do a calculation of the cosmological constant and get the right answer. Right. Yeah. Now, another answer might be maybe the cosmological constant is not a constant. Right.

There's recent, they're working on that now. Maybe it's changing over time and so you don't actually calculate the number. You just need to understand the dynamical process. However, doesn't the math in general relativity require that it be constant? No, that's how it came out of the integral.

There can be a constant, but it doesn't have to be the only contribution that looks like that constant. And the other contribution can change over time. What do you say there? It can be a constant, but, but it doesn't have to look like. And then, no, it's not the only contributing to that term.

So you can have a feel that slowly varies over time and that field may dominate. Meta to that equation. Yes, it is meta to that equation. Absolutely. So Einstein did not talk about that field.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, he wasn't there. You're right. And he did talk about the constant because you're right. It's just an integration constant. Right there.

It's a constant. It's a constant. So if, if in fact it needs to modify. Because that's how they reconcile. There's tension in the age of the universe.

Yes, because the age of the universe, there's, in my day, we didn't know it by a factor of two. Now people are. There's a 10% difference. So it's more than 6000 years is what you're saying. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Yes, yes, yes. When Noah's flood took place. So to relieve the tension as we describe it, this was a 10%, some single digit percent uncertainty in the age of the universe. Actually, not uncertainty. These two methods have very small, tight uncertainties that do not overlap.

That's why everyone is freaking out. And as I learned recently, you can resolve that by allowing the cosmological constant to vary in some way. But that's a meta variation on top of. Yeah. Now, this Hubble tension that people are struggling with today is exactly something that also may point toward a dynamical value.

Brian Greene
So we'll see. But, yeah. Yes, they're true. Tests of a version of gravity that you fully understand, with quantum mechanics. Included, would be a calculation of the cosmological constant and get enough.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Are you and your people smart enough to get this figured out? I don't think so. And that's our show.

Good answer. Because, you know, I've dragged you over the coal. We have come full circle because I've told her, I said, look, you know, Einstein came out with general relativity in ten years by himself. You strength theorists, there's dozens of you been working on this for decades. Either you're all wrong or you're all just too stupid to figure it out.

Brian Greene
And it's probably a combination. Love you, man. Brian, thanks for coming back. My pleasure. Starting always.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Good, Chuck. So great, Chuck. We'll find you in the hospital. Yes, you will. I'm completely fried right now.

I'm fried just to take us out. Let me remind us all, we are in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. The cosmic crib. The cosmic crib. And after this conversation we just had, I delight in realizing and celebrating the fact that just a few pounds of organic matter inside of our heads can and not only contemplate, but figure out how the universe works.

And yes, we still have a long way to go, and we don't even know how long a way to go remains in front of us. But the distance we've come thus far gives us. Everything that we call civilization is the power of mind over the mysteries of the universe. And that is a product of the eternal curiosity expressed by our species, beginning in childhood, continuing for some into adulthood. We call them scientists, those who never lost that childhood curiosity.

Brian Greene, of course, among them. So I'd like to just give a shout out to our species for all it has wondered as we looked up at night, all that we have discovered and all that we have yet to figure out. That is a cosmic perspective. I'm Neil degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

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Just Another Really Good Episode with Brian Greene

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1. Introduction: Casual Start

2. Delving into Physics

3. The Role of AI in Culture

4. Quantum Mechanics and Reality

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