Cosmic Queries – Grabby Aliens with Charles Liu

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Gary, you jumped into quantum soup on this one.

We did.

Add some flavor to it.

Add some flavor.

And I learned a little more.

You know, we had our geek and chief with us.

Yes.

Yeah.

We always learned something.

We got the geek in chief.

I learned that it's delicious with crackers.

Coming up on special edition.

Welcome to Star Talk,

your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk Special Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

And it being special edition means we got Gary O'Reilly.

Gary in the house.

Hey, yes, in the house.

In the house.

Yes.

Former soccer pro.

Love your wiki page with your sexy legs.

You're looking too much.

Stop it.

Excellent.

Chuck, nice.

Always, man.

Hey, what's happening, guys?

Yeah.

All right.

So we brought in our geek in chief for this.

Our returning hero.

Charles Lou.

Charles, welcome back.

Thank you so much.

You've got your own podcast.

Yes.

The Luniverse.

The Luniverse.

That's clever.

That's clever.

Does that a play on Luna as in Moon too?

I mean.

I can't take credit for it.

No, no, no.

I'm sitting at the table for dinner, right?

And we're like, well, what do we call this podcast?

And our youngest kid says, the Luniverse, of course.

And I was like, what?

And that's it.

Don't overthink it.

Okay, so compared to your kids.

Wait, you and Chuck went like this.

It's a dumb idea.

And then he named it the Luniverse.

I said no such thing.

I just sort of said, wow.

So I happen to know your wife is really smart.

So it sounds like your kids are even smarter than both of you at this point.

I am so pleased that my wife and my children are all way smarter than I am.

Yeah.

And it is a great privilege to be in the room.

You know what Michael Dell said?

What?

The day you wake up and you're the smartest person in the room, change what you're doing.

Exactly.

Very, very better.

Gary, before you introduce the show, Chuck, what are you wearing?

Today I

feel like I'm on the worst red carpet ever right now.

What are you wearing?

And your hand was in your groin a half a second ago.

Could you pull your smartphone out of your groin?

That's not my smartphone, Neil.

Here we go.

What?

So we were playing a little baseball, softball earlier today.

And

I don't believe in showering.

I do that once a week, and that's it, baby.

And that's only if necessary.

And so, you know, you guys changed.

And so I'm like.

You did not change.

I'm not changing.

We look clean.

Yeah, you look clean.

And, you know.

You still got your leg braces on?

Those aren't braces.

Those are,

what do you call them?

Augmentations that were placed in me by DARPA.

Yes, it's the military.

You are now a superior, augmented human being.

That's right.

You said,

don't ask me to jump up and get nothing off the roof because I can do it.

That explains why you were tearing around the bases so fast.

It's amazing.

And DARPA, Defense Advanced Projects, Research.

Agency?

The

Defense Advanced Project.

Authority?

So this is a branch of the military

that people might not know where there's a subset of budget that goes to very high-risk projects that probably won't work, but if they do work, they'll be amazing.

Yeah.

And

nothing is higher risk than Chuck Nice.

So they expect a high percentage of the proposals to actually

not work to fail.

And they don't care.

Because the idea that the one that works

is going to make us badass.

Darkbach.

Gary, what you put together for Duck.

All right.

So these are questions from our Patreon listeners.

And as you know, they have a curiosity that is almost endless.

Boundless, yes.

Yes.

So let's kick it off.

So this is Cosmic Queries.

For sure.

It's a Cosmic Query.

Yeah, it's a grab bag.

And

we had 42 pages of questions.

Well, we better shut up and get it.

All right, but they're not all on there, but thank you so much for your curiosities.

Right, let's start with Danielle's.

Hello, Neil, Dr.

Lou, Gary, and of course, Lord Nice.

Could quantum particles possibly be connected in a higher dimensional space and only appear to be separate particles in three dimensions?

I love that.

Would a connection like that affect quantum entanglement?

Over to you, gentlemen.

Oh, my God.

I thought you were going to take that.

Oh, yeah.

I'll see how well you do.

Well, let me, I'm going to, I'm going to defer to Charles, but I'm going to introduce this.

Keep Charles up.

Because we see particles popping in and out of existence and tunneling through space and time, and we're trying to make sense of it, but I don't see why a higher dimension wouldn't help that out.

For example, suppose we all lived in just a plane, a flat with two deep people, okay?

You know some of my friends, I see.

They have no depth.

Yeah, no depth at all.

So we're here, and then like a dot shows up, and we all gather around the dot.

And then the dot sort of becomes a circle, and it slowly grows.

And we get our top scientists to analyze this.

Where did this come from?

What is it?

What's happening?

And then it shrinks back to a dot and then disappears.

We would invent a whole quantum physics to try to understand this when all it is, is somebody passing a sphere through the two-dimensional plane in which we live.

Because the first contact is the point, and then there's this circle.

As you go through, it maximizes at the diameter, comes back out.

But here we are touching.

We're thinking there's something magical.

And from three dimensions, it's completely simple.

So Charles, this question sounds like let's up it again.

Let's up the game.

Can we explain all this mystical magical quantum spookiness by just it's ordinary people in four dimensions playing marbles?

Not only can we do it, some people have already tried.

It's called string theory.

The idea is that every particle we see in three or four dimensions here might actually have many more dimensions attached to them.

And interactions on those other dimensions, like the sphere with our particle, but imagine two spheres interacting, not on our two-dimensional world, and bingo, you have additional weird things happening.

So you, Danielle, are right on the cusp of exactly what physicists have been trying to figure out for decades.

Is there perhaps another explanation where we can say the reason this thing is acting so weird is because there's connection elsewhere.

Now the problem is...

How do you test for for that?

Right.

We can't have any good experiments

accessible dimensions.

And there are so many.

Don't be such a downer.

There are so many different ways to think about it that you can have essentially an infinite number of solutions to a finite number of questions that we see or phenomena that we observe here on the world.

So we don't want that.

So the more a theory is simple and the less it requires additional pieces attached to it to explain observed phenomena, the more likely it is to be something that we can test and confirm.

So that's what's going on here.

And history says the more likely it is to be right.

Generally speaking, that's right.

I mean, the famous term Occam's razor, right?

Just the philosophical.

I'll tell you exactly what he said.

He said, multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity.

Right.

That's the actual quote from Occam.

Right.

And that we convert that to just his Occam's razor.

Right.

The simpler idea is more likely to be true than the more complicated idea.

That's only a philosophical idea.

Yeah, exactly.

That's not exactly confirmed in this.

Nature doesn't have to obey you.

So in this instance, that's right.

It could well be that that helps to explain quantum entanglement.

But entanglement is yet another phenomenon, which is a little bit odd.

And we're still working on that.

I know right now it's a hot topic and a lot of people talking about it.

Yeah.

But there are still many, many questions about it.

So we could relate it to entanglement, but it's not yet there enough for us to be able to answer that question, yes or no.

Or it could be like when Einstein did general relativity, where he was solving some other problem, and bada bing,

the mysteries of Mercury's orbit were solved overnight.

Mercury's orbit was not behaving the way Newton would have it go.

And all of a sudden, Einstein's general theory of relativity explained it without even trying.

Without trying.

And so it became a side benefit

of it.

And one thing about your negativity.

Okay.

Okay.

Uh-oh.

I feel a wreath coming off.

So I was on the infinite monkey cage with Brian Cox in London.

Okay.

And that's your

stop and grang.

How many monkeys are in an infinite monkey?

Let me guess.

So that's the name of his show, his podcast.

It was a radio show.

And

so we were talking about wormholes.

And I said, well, the wormhole, you could do this and travel through.

And he jumps in and says, well, wormhole is not stable it'll collapse immediately so we don't need to think about it someone from the audience a brit said

that's what distinguishes americans from us brits they're always so positive about what can be solved and we're always saying what can't happen that's funny and he that shut him up that's culturally accurate

on a number not always but on a number of occasions you will find an american positivity against a British

yeah wait so yeah so we go there I mean it has its drawbacks you know, when it's just like, I'm the biggest, the best.

Many people don't realize I'm the most positive.

Keep going.

All right, Chuck, you want to hit the sale?

Chuck's got him, too.

This is Ryan Harris, who says, Dr.

Tyson Lord and I is geek and professor

Lou.

Ooh.

And Gary, Ryan Harris from Burnaby, British Columbia.

Canada.

Given the laws of science, if they hold true, when it comes to quantum entanglement, staying on subject,

would there not be some sort of energy slash force being exerted slash used by entangled particles?

And can it be qualified as of present?

I am trying to understand how two particles across vast distances are influenced by each other instantaneously and if there are some sort of exotic, scary, or otherwise force that has been associated with this phenomenon.

So what I would say, how can a thing happen at all without there being an active draw on energy or some other thing that we can measure changing for them to be permanently connected or while they're connected, they're connected.

Something's gotta, some clock is ticking, something should be measurable from that.

This is one of the big differences between quantum physics and classical physics.

We are

We're conditioned.

We're trained to think that there had to be something exchanged back and forth, energy, a particle, whatever, between two things.

That's a classical

bias.

Quantum entanglement, again, as we said earlier, is still not completely well understood.

In fact, we don't even know if it's a special thing or if it happens all the time.

We understand that it happens, and we can measure that it happens.

So what you're saying is we don't understand why.

But you know what?

That's a very important distinction.

Before we go any further, before the why and all that, somebody ought to tell somebody who might just be joining us, what is quantum entanglement?

Because this person, just because you don't know, don't assume everyone else in our audience doesn't know.

No.

Okay, well, somebody should tell me that.

It's a perfectly legitimate question because even if you ask, say, 50 quantum physicists, you might get 51 different answers

as to what quantum entanglement really is.

Okay, that's not.

Because I did not know.

It's kind of like if you ask 100 biologists what life is, you'll get 101 answers.

Same sort of situation.

But the fundamentals, biologists know what life is when they see it.

The same is sort of true for quantum physics and quantum entanglement.

But boiled down to its most basic point, you can basically think of two entangled particles as being one particle that somehow gets separated.

But even if it's separated in space and in time, they are still the same same particle.

You're just stretching it.

So imagine if you have a little ball and you break it in half and then you're kind of moving it.

It's kind of like this quantum taffy or caramel almost that continues to connect them, even though there could be a huge amount of space or time between those two parts.

They are still the same particle.

And that's a quantum thing that you're describing.

That's right.

Not a classical thing.

That's right.

Because classically, there's nothing between them.

Yes.

But I'm speaking like a classical, with a classical brain to say.

And we all do that.

It's very, very hard for us, even those of us who have done a lot of work in quantum physics.

And just to be clear, these two particles, I like the way you're saying it's the same particle, but they have slightly different properties that complement each other.

Gotcha.

To make the whole particle.

Right.

So they have

each side took out some features of that same particle.

So is this like the twins, where if you slap one on the butt, the other one goes ow?

Sounds like you've done that.

I think that's...

I don't want to say that's true, but I think

that requires an additional assumption about classical physics of twin butts

interacting with quantum butts.

And then you have some real issues that...

Do we get to the point where we say the universe is one single particle and that's just all of a sudden done its thing and it's great question.

We are definitely not all one particle,

but the universe could be one single entity that contains a multitude of very, very small, more complex parts.

This is something that happens a lot.

We think of, for example, atoms as being some sort of indivisible piece of matter.

But then we've learned

that.

Right.

We've learned since

indivisible.

That word in Greek means indivisible.

We've learned since that atoms are made up of...

The Greeks any good at anything?

The Greeks sucked.

Those idiots.

They did pretty well in the World Cup back around 60 years ago, ago, right?

No, they won the European Championship

two decades ago.

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I'm going to put you on, nephew.

All right, um.

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

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We need snack wraps.

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It's the return of something great.

Snack wrap is back.

Hello, I'm Finky Brooke Allen, and I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Should we jump into the next question?

Let's go for it.

Start for it.

Ezekiel Reeves.

Hello, Neil, Chuck Gary, and Lord Lou.

My name is Ezekiel from Wawa, Ontario.

I love this.

Well, it's not Lord Lou.

It's Geek and Chief Lou.

Okay.

I accept

any title.

Never mind.

We should adjudicate titles here.

Okay, okay.

So quantum physics is rooted in observation and particles deciding which state they are in depending on probability.

Can this explain how we evolve the conscious mind and free will?

Wow.

Do you have four hours?

I did not see that going.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, no, no, no.

That's great.

The key question in my mind, based on your question, Ezekiel, is the word deciding, right?

The decision of something to go this way or that, that suggests that there was something behind the ultimate outcome, right?

When you and I decide to have a ham sandwich, or we decide to...

No, I want one.

No, you decide.

Yeah, right.

Or we decide that we're going to dive left for a penalty kick instead of dive right.

That has a whole bunch of stuff behind it.

And the causality of it is dependent on everything from the goalie's life experience to the muscular twitches of that very moment and everything in between.

So, when individual particles are switching or landing in certain states, Niels Bohr would have called it the wave function collapsing.

Yes, right?

Niels Bohr, a physicist from 100 years ago.

Yeah, when you have that kind of an interpretation, then you can ascribe, perhaps intention, right?

But we just cannot say.

Even now, we still don't really understand what free will is.

The definition of it varies from person to person.

The

philosophical idea is because people are still writing 500-page books on it.

Sure.

That's the evidence that we don't know anything about it.

Right, yeah.

Interesting.

But keep going there.

So we've got quantum probabilities.

Right.

So that a particle, quote, decides, is it going to decay or is it not?

And we know that probability precisely.

That's what's fascinating.

That's right.

Here's something that's completely probabilistic that we know with precision.

It's a weird combination of facts there.

So you're not prepared to analogize,

I love the thing, the goalie

leaning right or left to the particle decaying in one moment or another.

You're not prepared to

have your free will be a similar kind of expression.

That's right.

Because that's the problem, right?

If you decide that free will is something where, say, we humans decide to do a thing, right?

There's a whole host of events that happened before that moment that helped us to make that decision.

And there's also a number of events that lead up to the moment before the event that also influences that.

That's right.

Is that what he just said?

No, he was talking about immediately before the event.

Like.

It's okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

I'm saying that you can take that all the way down.

You can keep slicing those layers all the way down.

Turtles all the way down.

That's right.

Turtles all the way down.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

and there are those psychology experiments

where they put probes in the brain.

I'm going to mess up the details here, but the results are what I'm landing on, where

they can trigger you to stand up.

That's whether you want to stop.

Then you're standing up.

They say, why did you stand up?

And then they make up some reason for why they stood up when the neuro signatures, the neuro signals, already were prompting him to stand up.

And he made up a reason after the fact.

So the signals were generated externally, but you

internalize him and say, oh, I stood up for this reason.

So you think you had free will to do it when, in fact, it was predetermined.

That's spooky.

Idiot.

You talked about probability and the certainty of probability.

What is it?

Heisenberg's uncertainty

principle.

So where does that fit in?

Because you don't really.

I'm not certain about that.

Well, I didn't expect anything else.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

That's a great question, Gary.

It actually has a little bit.

You're Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, once again, from 100 years ago.

Right.

Yeah.

It has a slightly different connotation because what we're saying is that we cannot measure things precisely with infinite precision.

That uncertainty describes how much you don't know no matter what.

So Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is actually describing a minimum amount of uncertainty in any measurement.

Any measurement.

Not necessarily uncertainty about

what's going to happen or what's going to happen or not going to happen.

And part of that is because the, yeah, I can know that you're sitting here and the measurement of that is completely sufficient for anything I might do to you or with you.

But when particles are involved, which is the whole world of the quantum, If you try to measure it, the act of measuring it changes what it is you're trying to measure.

Right.

Right?

the interaction with the particle confounds your ability to measure what that particle is doing with precision.

And I think that's foundational.

That's what's foundational.

That was so hard to accept by classical physicists.

Well, that's hard to accept by anybody.

Any step of science going forward, whether it be classical or quantum, has been hard to accept.

It takes time.

And we should allow ourselves that time.

Don't forget to say that.

Yes, it was.

Was it Max Planck, was it?

Who said,

no great new discipline, I'm paraphrasing, no great discovery in physics gets accepted

by the guard of the day.

They just get old and die.

And the next generation

takes it on as though it has always been.

Well, the cosmological constant might be an exception to that.

I know, but he predates the cosmological constant in that quote.

But hey,

go, what you got?

I'll go with the next one.

George Valakis, back for the Greeks.

Hey.

uh from new jersey can someone please tell me what a qubit is made of uh

is it an electron stuck inside some type of magnetic box is it an atom with multiple electrons frozen in multiple quantum states how is one made

i love one

wonderful thing thank you george but let me just

preface this by saying our geek in chief In the past year, published an entire book on quantum physics.

What's the the title of it?

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

There you go.

There you go.

So we're not going to answer your question.

Just come up.

Just go buy the book and we can go have a beer right now.

Okay.

Get that back.

Buy the man's book, and then we can all just have a beer.

Okay.

The handy quantum physics answer book.

Yeah.

Man.

Yeah, it's not designed to be a textbook or anything like that.

But just still.

If you have Q ⁇ A, you have to get a bunch of things.

That's just going to answer

with a title like that.

Well,

again, I cannot claim actually having made any of those discoveries.

I was just trying to put together a little guide for people who had questions and answers.

And they are

quantum questions.

Yeah,

as one would have.

Someone come along and hold your hand.

Just walk you along.

It's great, amazing stuff that our colleagues have done over the centuries.

And this year being, of course, the 100th anniversary as designated by the United Nations of International Quantum Physics.

Did they declare that?

Yeah, the International Year Quantum Physics.

Right in the middle of the decade, yes.

The whole decade goes to quantum physics.

It's really quite amazing.

So a qubit actually doesn't need to have a physical form.

It's a piece of information.

Let me make an analogy to regular bits.

Bits are just pieces of information.

So for example, if you've got a 64-bit chip in your computer, All right, all that is is that it can carry or hold 64 pieces of information that are either zero or one.

If you have a bit, it's just a piece of information and you can store it either electronically in a chip, you know, with a plus five volts or minus five volts or something like that.

Or you could say store a bit of information in a QR code, which is just a square that's white or a square that's black.

Or you can do a coin flip, whether it's heads or it's tails.

So the bit...

With the QR code, that's the little thing we scan.

Yeah, a little scan thing with a

I always thought of that as like as a two-dimensional barcode.

This is exactly what it is.

Yeah, because barcodes, barcodes are you white or black and how thick is the black that's right and that's all the information that's in the corner

dimension right yeah so I presume because we added a dimension the QR codes can hold way more information with the same amount of area than a than a than a barcode than a barcode

yeah so you have QR codes that have entire web addresses on this right and they can be little bit big things but in the end it's just squares so square that's white or square that's black square that's white black next to each other and that is the information so the bit is the information.

It's not the thing that it's stored in.

So George, your question, what is a qubit really?

It's a quantum bit, but it's a piece of information.

And you can store it in any kind of container that quantum systems can hold this information in.

Didn't Microsoft just bring out a quantum chip

in the last few days?

That's right.

It's the very beginnings of using quantum computing in regular computing that we used to.

But they are far, far away from a true quantum computer okay you just said that it's not a thing it's a it's information but now tell us the difference between a traditional bit which is a zero or one or a black or white and a qubit which is a statistical

occupation

of a so just go there okay well a bit

is either a zero or a one or

black and a white you know just a piece of information that is or is not so it's binary and so it's a binary piece of information.

Right.

The qubit is binary when you read it.

But before it becomes read,

it is not yet settled.

So it can be somewhere between 0 and 1.

And the complexity of the amount of zeroness or oneness a qubit has fluctuates and varies until such time as you read it.

Right.

So if you have a computer nowadays, we want to make a bit switch as quickly as possible.

All right, so we want our computers to switch from zero to one or one to zero.

The speed of the computer is fast as you can.

Right.

With a qubit, you might want to slow it down a little tiny bit.

And while that stuff inside the qubit is settling out, it may actually be able to make calculations.

You can actually ask the qubit using various electronic inputs to give you a number doing some sort of a calculation or some sort of a figuring that you you could not do in real time at high speed.

And because the quantum time frame is so fast, even if we slow it down, you still wind up being able to do certain calculations way faster than any classical calculation.

So why?

So probabilistically, you're no longer bound by the binary.

That's during the time in between the zero and the one, you've got a chance to really mess with it and really gain some new knowledge that you couldn't have done before.

So the moment you read it,

all that's over.

That's right.

Because probabilistically, you are now back to the binary.

It either is or it is not.

That's right.

And so what you're trying to do when you're creating a qubit with technology is to figure out how you can sustain that qubit, how you can make it last for a tiny fraction of a second longer than it otherwise would, or what you can make that qubit do a calculation for you, which you can't watch.

Why can't I make a VR code qubit that has a grayscale in it?

Eventually you could, but right now we don't have the technology.

Because that would be everything between between the zero and one.

zero and right.

Yeah.

So the black and the white.

On a grayscale.

That'd be amazing.

That would be awesome.

That would be amazing.

But we're not anywhere near there yet.

But the technology is getting us there slowly but surely.

It's called black and chocolate.

That's all it is.

Yeah.

But this is why they say like encryption ends when we have a quantum computer.

And it's because all of those possibilities you can actually figure out,

manifest it inside of that, inside of those qubits, kind of all at once that is uh very similar yes you have right now the way we keep our internet connections secure is through a particular kind of algorithm or strategy that strategy can be broken according to the theoretical calculations if you have a quantum computer

encryption right the only thing is once that code can be broken can we make another one that can't be broken that can't be broken right that so there will always be this ratio so now you've got quantum encryption that's right okay and this and the back and forth.

Those are some really interesting stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, George, thank you for that.

I think we've learned a lot from that answer.

James Kovacs, hello gents from Detroit, Michigan.

We said it right Detroit.

I know.

I'm getting there.

He said it like a black man.

But did you say Kovacs?

Correct.

Probably didn't say Kovacs.

Kovacs, yes.

Sorry.

Mangling.

So we know speed and mass cause time to slow down.

In the case of speed, we know the universe's speed limit is the speed of light.

You may disagree, you may not.

Time stops altogether at the speed of light, and nothing can surpass that speed.

Is there a similar mass limit?

Is there a point at which you have so much mass that time stops?

Let me make first just a tiny bit of adjustment to the question.

The assumption is that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.

It's not that time will stop if you are moving very fast or at the speed of light, right?

That speed limit.

It is relative.

It is.

Everything is relative.

So that question has a little bit of a nuance to it.

But to answer that basic question, is there a mass limit of objects?

The answer is no.

You can make an object of arbitrarily large mass in the universe, and that would be totally fine.

But there is a limit because if you have too much mass in any given location in the universe, you create a Schwarzschild radius, which is the outer boundary of a black hole.

So the way to think about a maximum mass in the universe is to think about the maximum amount of mass that can fit inside a limited volume.

Okay.

And not be a black hole.

And not be a black hole.

I was going to say, because don't black holes, isn't the idea of a singularity as unlimited volume inside of no limits on volume?

Great, great point.

A singularity is defined as something that has no volume, but infinite density

because it has non-zero mass.

However, a black hole...

Just to be clear.

So density has volume in the denominator.

Right.

And if the denominator goes to zero, you're dividing by zero.

And there you go.

There you go.

And that number doesn't exist in our mathematics.

See, and so now, this is what I'm going to say.

What have y'all been lying to us all these years, man?

But what?

Y'all, everything.

Okay.

Sorry, dude.

No, I'm joking.

That's a joking.

The situation really is that if you add more mass to an object and it's already at its black hole mass limit, it just gets bigger.

The black hole itself gets bigger.

Inside the black hole's event horizon, you could have an incredibly massive object or a singularity or something like that, but we will not be able to know because information cannot pass through that event horizon, at least as far as we know now.

Yeah.

All right.

The cosmic blood brain barrier.

That's what I mean.

Excellent.

Very organic of that.

Yeah.

But does that mean our brain is inside the barrier or outside the barrier?

It depends on who you are.

All right.

That was good.

Keep it going.

Next one up comes from Raluka Alexandrescu, formerly of Bucharest, Romania, but now living in Toronto, Canada.

My question is,

how would we study the universe if light travels at infinite speeds?

Yeah, I knew you'd like that.

Okay.

So

it goes on.

If we lived in a universe where the speed of light was infinite and we did not have the benefit of seeing back back in time as we look into deep space, how would the study of the universe change?

Would other laws of physics be changed if light traveled at infinite speed?

Let me tee this off and I'm going to pass it off, pass the baton.

If the speed of light were infinite,

we would know nothing about the history of the universe.

Oh, because we couldn't.

Okay,

the Big Bang would be forever lost in time.

because there's no time lag from things that happened 14, 13 billion years ago.

We need the finite speed of light to know anything about our past.

It would be like in geology where anything just got in sedimentary rock, it just dissolved or disappeared and removed all record of anything that had happened before.

So the universe wants to sad universe.

So the universe wants us to know.

Ooh.

Wow.

Ooh.

Look at that.

This is deep.

And you got your white robe on here.

This is very.

I'm not actually sat in this chair.

I'm actually levitating.

Just

a bit out of this seat.

So

that would be sad to me if we lose all of that knowledge and information.

Charles, you have any other insights here?

I don't know how sad it would be.

It would be different, that's for sure.

Our ability to tell time would be essentially wiped out.

That's what Neil is saying.

And that's kind of a trouble.

Well, tell history time.

Yeah, right.

I can know it's two in the afternoon.

I could know that.

The causal time gets messed up.

But it's just us as a species that registered the concept of time.

Not at all.

We know that there are many species that can tell different speed day and night, for example.

Yes.

Right.

And they actually age and they know when to spawn and when to come back to the stream.

So they do measure time, but not in the way that we understand it as ticking and so forth, right?

But clocks here on Earth, if the speed of light were infinite, would also run funny.

There would be

ability to see things that are happening, but the way that we measure them is dependent on how fast that information gets around the universe.

So there's there's lots of interesting, cool results.

I don't know if they'd be sad, but it certainly would be very, very different.

But I'm going to focus on something that's slightly different.

And I got to give credit to our former colleague, Ken Croswell.

I remember him.

Yeah.

Ken Croswell wound up writing a number of books about astronomy, also a very talented astronomer.

He wrote a very good insight that I saw.

in one of his books, and that is if the speed of light were infinite, night would always be day.

Good point.

Because the light from distant parts of the universe would get to us immediately, as well as stuff close to us.

As a result, every single spot in the sky would be covered somewhere by a star.

So all the lines of sight in the universe would be brightly lit.

And so we would never have a sky that we could look at night and see what's out there.

So that's the most fundamental difference in our study of the universe.

Wait, wait, wait.

Wouldn't an expanding universe still dilute the light, even if it traveled infinitely?

If the expansion rate is finite and the speed of light is infinite,

then it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

It will never catch it.

You can't win.

That's right.

That's right.

So there would be no night.

Light out races everything.

Yes.

All the time.

If it were infinite, that would be it.

And if memory serves, the fine structure constant has the speed of light in it.

Yes.

I'm sorry, you lie.

Okay, so the universe has among its several constants, the speed of light is one of them.

Some constants are combinations of other constants.

So, the fine structure constants.

Structure constant, it gives us information about the formation of energy levels inside of atoms.

Okay.

And so, if that were infinite, what does that mean?

All right, we got to do an explainer on the fine structure constant.

But we have to bring Deacon Chief back for that.

Well, it actually has a really interesting history because for a period of time in the history of quantum physics, the fine structure constant was measured to be exactly one divided by 137.

And no one knew why 137 was this magic number.

And today we know that that was actually an approximation.

It's off by a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.

But that's something fun to talk about in the future and about the advancement of history and how we tried to create ideas.

Isn't it 1 over 137, 0.16 or something?

0.00, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, it is that clean.

It's very, very flat in there.

Yes, yes.

That's another thing.

So it could mess with other stuff as well.

Okay.

Because the speed of light shows up in our calculations.

And if it's infinite, what does that do to the calculations?

Oh, yeah.

And our understanding of the problem.

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

You change everything.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so wild.

Just saying.

You're blowing stuff up now.

Yeah, you really have to.

You blow up the system.

Oh, my God.

That's right.

And it almost doesn't even mean anything to say the speed of light is the limit.

Right.

Because if it's infinite,

relativity

doesn't even make sense.

That's no longer relative.

Albert Einstein's.

Albert Einstein's theory.

You're welcome.

It's not useful.

It's no longer relative.

It's no longer relative.

That's right.

Right.

And simultaneity would be real.

You actually would have things happen.

Sometimes we've all experienced it.

Wow.

We just

put the notes down for a screenplay for another movie.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

What's kind of fun, though, to think of the whole thing of light rain.

It's speed in life, though.

Yeah.

The entire universe was very much.

Well, we kind of already are, but it would be more intense than yours.

It would just be.

Yeah.

You're right.

That's a screenplay that we got to work on.

Yeah.

That's ours.

Let's start tomorrow.

You know who I'm talking to.

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So, Gary, a couple of minutes left.

All right.

Mohawi Gerezia, apologies if it's mispronounced.

Time is impacted by.

I've never apologized, what you're talking about.

Yeah, well, this time

it's privileged to have me mispronounce that name.

Better be happy I even said it.

Anyway, go ahead.

Mohawi's from Dallas, Texas.

Time is impacted by extreme gravity, like with a black hole, and extreme speeds.

Do these things have something in common?

For example, is the extreme gravity really just making things move faster?

And that's why they both impact time?

I think the question you're asking is indeed answerable thanks to Albert Einstein.

But let's just set it up again.

So two things can slow down time.

The strength of your gravity field and how fast you're moving.

Absolutely.

That's right.

Relative to observing.

So they feel different, but are they different?

The thing is, they're not actually slowing time for the whole universe.

It's just slowing the amount of time or the rate at which time is being experienced by the object that is either moving very quickly or the object that is in a gravitational field.

Because time is the same for the observer.

That's right.

In both cases.

In both cases.

So in fact, what's going on is it's the effect is

on space-time.

It's that gravity affects space-time in such a way that if you're in a gravitational field, you experience time more slowly than if you were not in in that field.

So you have the same effect if you're moving faster.

You experience time more slowly.

But the effect is not on you as the object or on time as the dimension.

The effect is on space-time overall.

And Albert Einstein.

And that's why it literally slows down in the measurement, okay, which is why, if I get this right, please help me out.

Particles

actually decay

slower

as they approach the speed of light.

So it's not the perception of time, it is a literal slowing down for the object that is approaching the speed of light.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yes.

Yes.

So space-time.

I like your angle on that because what that even says is it's not even what's happening inside you.

It is your place

in the space-time.

It is your location there.

Your location.

And the rate that you're changing out of that location, otherwise known as speed.

That's crazy.

But yes, your statement about the decay of particles was actually one of the most important confirmations, experiments that was done to prove that the special theory of relativity was correct.

Yeah, because a particle has an expected decay time.

Right.

And very precisely measured.

You accelerate that puppy, takes longer to decay.

Something happened inside there.

Yep.

Yep.

And a fun fact is we've said this before, but now it has...

foundational context.

Our GPS satellites are not on Earth's surface with us.

We are in a higher gravitational field than the GPS satellites.

So that

has their time tick faster.

However, they're also fast in orbit, which would have their time tick slower.

It turns out the gravitational well is a stronger effect on the time reckoning

than the speed.

And so that in fact, GPS time is ahead of us and it has to correct with Einstein's relativity before it sends to the cell phone towers.

So we have the time that is our space-time, the surface of the Earth.

Gotcha.

Not night space-time

up in middle-earth orbit.

Without regulation.

And is that an adjustment between the speed and the gravity?

Yeah, they calculate.

We got top people.

We got people?

I got people.

All right.

It's good to have people.

Hey, Harry, listen.

Something's wrong with calculations, man.

Neil, just for future reference, middle-earth orbit is what you go around like orcs and dwarves and mountains.

What's the second second bravest?

Medium orbit.

Medium Earth orbit.

What'd I say?

Middle Earth orbit.

I think middle is better.

I'm sorry.

I like it when I hear people say middle earth orbit.

Well, middle Earth.

Instead of medium Earth orbit.

Well, the Middle Earth orbit is reserved for the Hobbit Space Telescope.

Oh,

good one.

I like what you did,

I gotta tell you.

Okay, so I have to say medium orbit.

It would be better.

I'll just say Mio.

There's Leo and Meo.

Meo.

It's Leo, Mio, and Geo.

Leo, Mio, and Gio.

That's like you'd cover it.

The triplets.

Here's why I don't have a triple triplet.

I have three kids and they're triplets.

I go Leo, Mio, and Geo.

Really?

Yeah.

I would totally call them that.

I would call them Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

That's too old.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah, those are the chipmunks.

No, no, no.

I would call them.

Those are the ducks.

I would call them Dewey, Cheetum, and Howell.

Law firms.

Last question.

Okay, one more.

Okay, this is from Doug Dee in Danbury, Connecticut.

What do you think about

Doug D from Danbury in Connecticut?

Doug Dee from Danbury.

What do you think of the grabby aliens theory?

Is it similar to the Dark Forest Fermi paradox solution as depicted in the three-body problem books?

Do you think it's just one example of an opportunity for speculation?

Grabby aliens?

What is that?

What a great question to end this episode on.

I knew you'd like it.

The concept of the grabby alien, first of all, just to clarify for everybody, right?

Grabby

is a word that was invented for precisely this.

G-R-A-B-B-Y, as in aliens that want to grab things, not crabby aliens.

Okay.

Actually, they invented the word grabby, the people who sort of are trying to talk about this, so that they would not ascribe any kind of emotion or ethics or morals to these aliens.

It's just that they have a tendency to want to expand.

And wherever they go, they tend to want to take things, natural resources.

Here we go, we came.

If you

wear a colonization has one sentence.

Is that yours?

It's mine now.

Okay?

That's colonization.

There is a colonial imperial kind of connotation to this, right?

Because what do we say when we want to go live somewhere else?

We colonize Mars, right?

That's actually not what we would want to do in a moral environment or an ethical environment.

We might want to live there.

We might want to visit or explore or be immigrants or something like that, but we wouldn't want to colonize them.

But the point of grabby aliens is that they don't ascribe that kind of,

say, imperialistic or colonialistic kind of ideas.

It's just in their native.

This is in the nature of, say, human species.

If we go somewhere, we want to take a look and see what's there and use it and improve our society or improve our lives.

Grabby aliens are a version of the kind of aliens that would, for example, if they show up, take advantage of their environment and improve themselves as a result of it.

Okay.

That would mean that if your civilization actually interacted with a grabby alien civilization, you would have very little time between the time you found them and the time they showed up and took all your natural resources.

Okay.

So the interaction between grabby aliens and non-grabby aliens becomes a very interesting dynamic of science.

Should we, as a species, attempt to be grabby?

In other words, be open to the universe, send out explorers and pods and then establish ourselves as being, say, a dominant species in this part of the universe?

Or should we hide ourselves and be quiet and not let other aliens who are grabby find us and take our natural

grabby alien showed up here?

I'm kicking his ass.

that would be nice except most likely the grabby aliens that showed up would have superior technology to us now you know what's kicking wonderful

it's uh there's unless we have one

what's great about what you're talking about there's an alien where's your ass

so the three-body problem books and now tv shows and so forth are describing a scenario where they are so afraid, humans and other species, of being detected by other aliens that they hide themselves.

And the moment that they're detected, it's not that grabby aliens come and take their stuff.

It's that actually vicious, devastating, angry aliens want to remove them immediately from a threat.

So instead of trying to exploit them, they will wipe them out.

Preemptively.

Yes.

So it's not exactly, you know, without spoiling the series, it's not exactly the same thing as the three-body passage.

As of now, there's only one season

posted, right?

But without spoiling anything, the basic point is watch this and you can see one idea well uh look

that's we have ways that's another time he has ways it's best to think about how alien civilizations interact with one another from the sense of should we be quiet or should we be loud and grabbiness is just one aspect here's another a great movie uh on this subject but completely the antithesis of what you said and that's district 9 where they are super advanced and they come here and we're the grabbies yes without even we never left home, and we're still like total a-holes.

Isn't that something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So cool.

I learned so.

I never heard about grabby aliens.

It's funny.

I'm just, aliens, you come down, I'm gonna kick your ass.

You ain't taking my stuff.

I have no problem with grabby aliens.

If actually, just as a little point, sometimes you have to grab them by the aliens.

They let you do it.

They let you do it.

There are some very good YouTube videos about grabby aliens.

Not that kind of grabby aliens, but generally grabby types of aliens.

And so I would find.

I think it's a philosophical point.

Yes.

And you can find lots of discussions on motivations of species.

I think there's a channel called Rational Animations that has a whole series of them.

But just look.

So, Charles, thank you for illuminating.

It is always a pleasure.

I love being here with you guys.

Such great questions.

Congratulations for you guys for having such an amazing audience.

There it is.

So it's got me thinking if I might offer a

perspective on this, especially that last question.

Quantum physics, we're reminded that we can measure things, but we don't know what is really going on.

That frustrates so many of us.

And maybe aliens would know.

Are they more advanced?

And if they are, they probably do.

Maybe they have access to higher dimensions.

Grabby aliens, that

I'm going to kick the ass if they come down here.

But I can tell you this, that if aliens are grabby, and that is a feature of them all,

that is a self-limiting property of their behavior.

Because a grabby alien wants to grab everything they see.

And if they grab everything they see, that is the spread of the grabby aliens.

And then

they want to grab the same thing as each other.

as one another.

And they would then have wars, wouldn't they?

Because some other part of their grabby aliens grabbed something that the other grabby people wanted, and now it's not available for them anymore.

If it's so fundamentally part of their inner soul, of

their inner source of exploration and discovery.

So it seems to me, Grabby aliens scenario would implode just the same way the European

colonization scenario.

imploded where you had the Dutch and the British and the French and the Spanish and everybody trying to claim land on Earth's surface and there's a finite amount of land on Earth's surface.

Eventually they start fighting each other.

So I don't see grabby aliens as a stable future of the universe.

But I'm still kicking the ass if they come.

All right.

That

is a cosmic perspective.

It's a badass cosmic perspective.

This has been special edition.

Yeah, man.

Dude, thank you for putting this together.

Oh, you're welcome.

And thank you for our audience.

They're just brilliant with their questions.

And Geek and Chief, we're going to follow up on your quantum insights.

We're going to all get your book.

Give me the title again.

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer.

You can't want more than a title like that.

Come on now.

Right, right.

Chuck, good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

Always, this has been Stark Talk Special Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

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