The Limits of Knowing with Elise Crull

Speaker 1 It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technologies biggest sale of the year. Enjoy the lowest prices of the year on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel Core Ultra processors.

Speaker 1 And with built-in advanced features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster. Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee and expert support.

Speaker 1 They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals.

Speaker 5 Hey, you wondering how you can invest in yourself and work towards a goal that will last?

Speaker 8 Rosetta Stone makes it easy to turn a few minutes a day into real language progress.

Speaker 7 You've heard me talk about Rosetta Stone in the past, and you know that I love the anytime, anywhere bite-sized lessons that allow me to go ahead and continue to learn Spanish so that I can know exactly what my mother-in-law is saying about me.

Speaker 3 Maybe you're gearing up for a trip to another country, or maybe you're going to reconnect with family roots, or maybe you just want to impress people with the fact that, yeah, you know another language.

Speaker 7 Well, now Star Talk Radio listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off.

Speaker 5 Visit RosettaStone.com/slash Star talk to get started and claim your 50% off today.

Speaker 9 Jas Laodern Miamigos, RosettaStone.com/slash Star Talk.

Speaker 3 Chuck, we got some more philosophy in the house. Yes.

Speaker 13 Along with physics.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And they're the Reese's pieces of science.

Speaker 3 They belong together.

Speaker 3 Maybe physics and philosophy are entangled.

Speaker 3 Ooh.

Speaker 3 More on that coming up.

Speaker 3 Welcome to Star Talk.

Speaker 3 Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Speaker 3 Star Talk begins right now.

Speaker 3 This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
Got with me Chuck Knight, baby. Hey, hey, hey.

Speaker 3 Lord of Comedy.

Speaker 5 You know, that sounds so

Speaker 3 pretentious. But people call you Lord Nice.
And so why not run its course? Yeah, I am the, because it sounds like I should say, I am the Lord of comedy.

Speaker 14 Like when people are like, Lord Nice, that sounds kind of cool.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? It sounds like

Speaker 15 a term of endearment more so than a title, the way they say.

Speaker 3 Oh, I got you, I got you.

Speaker 15 But when I say it, it's just like, bow down before me.

Speaker 3 Bend the knee. Exactly.
Will you bend the knee before the Lord of comedy?

Speaker 16 Laugh not, I say,

Speaker 3 but capitulate.

Speaker 3 We're revisiting the the philosophy of physics. All right.
All right.

Speaker 14 Couldn't get enough the first time.

Speaker 3 It triggered a lot of interest. Okay.
More than I expected or anticipated.

Speaker 3 And so. A lot of people like philosophy.
I think so. It's bullshit today.

Speaker 14 Are you planning on bullshitting?

Speaker 3 Well, we have an authentic philosopher in the house once again, at least crawler. At least welcome back to Star Talk.
Hey, everybody.

Speaker 3 Have you bullshitted today yet?

Speaker 17 Yes, but not about philosophy.

Speaker 3 All right. All right.
Good answer. So let's remind people.
Good answer. So you're an associate professor of philosophy at CUNY, City University of New York, City College.

Speaker 3 My father was an administrator there many moons ago. And

Speaker 3 your background is entirely in physics and philosophy. And I think there's some math in there too.
Is that right?

Speaker 3 There's some history.

Speaker 17 Oh, history. I was one class away from getting a minor in math, and I decided to take tap dance instead.
and no looking back, man.

Speaker 3 No, nice, right.

Speaker 3 No, you got to move that body. Move that body.
And so I love this. And you have a specialty in the history of quantum physics.
Is that

Speaker 3 physical? And philosophy and quantum physics. Yeah.
Because there's a lot of room to philosophize there. Let me tell you.
Yes. Because

Speaker 3 I'm happy to just calculate, but somebody's thinking about why.

Speaker 3 And I'm glad that's not me. Somebody else is doing that.

Speaker 3 And so part of why we have you you back on, I'm reminded by not only my producers, but the comment thread that I might have been, or was certainly over exuberant in my

Speaker 3 conversation with you, way beyond what is normal. Maybe I had like a lot of thoughts and feelings and, and, but you're the guest.
That's hard to believe. No, no.

Speaker 3 Hard to believe that I.

Speaker 17 Look, I'm going to choose to understand it as, I mean, you guys have a great rapport.

Speaker 17 And what I do is intrinsically interesting.

Speaker 3 So it gets... We were all in it.
We were in it.

Speaker 3 I was totally in it. But I want to make sure, because I'm an educator first.

Speaker 3 And I want to make sure that people

Speaker 3 come into this conversation

Speaker 3 more thoroughly informed and so that they can become enlightened.

Speaker 17 I appreciate that, Neil.

Speaker 3 Thanks.

Speaker 3 So let's just, at the risk of sounding too pedantic, tell us what philosophy is

Speaker 3 let me be more precise okay what is philosophy today compared with maybe a hundred years ago 200 300 years ago back to to aristotle and the famous sort of

Speaker 17 greek philosophers right so i i hope i won't be repeating like the same stuff

Speaker 17 i only have like three jokes and i think i did two of them last we got other jokes coming here we're good we're good fresh um but that's maybe actually to the point um some people have famously said that everything is just a footnote to Plato.

Speaker 17 Like, it's all been done. All of the questions have been asked.

Speaker 17 But one of my favorite definitions of philosophy comes from philosopher of science, Bas Ven Fraßen, who also has...

Speaker 3 What's the name?

Speaker 17 Van Frasen.

Speaker 16 Baas van Fraßen.

Speaker 3 It sounds like a Hagen-Das ice cream.

Speaker 17 Well, you know what? Hagen. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They made that up. The unlots on the run.

Speaker 17 Like, they're like, let us sound European, just our pecan ice cream.

Speaker 3 I know they're made a jersey.

Speaker 17 But Van Frasen is legit Dutch, which is like part of my heritage, right? But he says that philosophy, it might be asking similar questions, but every time you ask it, you're in a new context.

Speaker 17 New scientific context, new cultural context, new political context. And you're a different person asking it.

Speaker 17 And so there's a way that every time it's done, it's done anew.

Speaker 3 And you could be a different person from yourself, having asked the question even just a year or two earlier.

Speaker 17 I think one thing

Speaker 17 we tend to look really hard for coherent thought across a person's lifetime, but why should we expect that?

Speaker 17 We shouldn't, right? People change their minds and people who think hard are the ones who change their minds the most because I think there's a bit of humility there. So yeah, people.

Speaker 17 Aristotle defined metaphysics right after his book, Physics. And for him, there were similar things.
They're asking about what kinds of things we encounter in the world,

Speaker 17 what their behaviors are, what the patterns are that we see. And that's still a decent way of talking about what science is.
It's explaining natural phenomena, like physical phenomena, right?

Speaker 17 Understanding their relationships and their behavior and their patterns and all this stuff.

Speaker 17 So they started together. As the professions became a bit more

Speaker 17 specified, they started.

Speaker 3 Specialized.

Speaker 17 Specialized, yeah, thank you. That's the word.

Speaker 17 They teased apart a little bit, but even into the early 1900s, you have all these really famous philosophers like Ernst Mach and Einstein and Pierre Doueme and Poincaré and Lorentz, who

Speaker 17 was a major.

Speaker 3 Speed of sound in a medium, yeah. Absolutely.
That same Mach.

Speaker 17 That same Mach.

Speaker 17 They were philosopher-physicists.

Speaker 3 Go before them. Tell me, coming through Newton and Hooke, because they...

Speaker 3 They didn't call themselves physicists. They were natural philosophers.
So take me through that era before you land in the 1800s.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so again, Newton is building on Descartes. And Descartes

Speaker 17 was sort of the worldview that was building on Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, but doing so in a way that wouldn't piss off the Catholic Church. So it's kind of a weird thing.
But he wrote

Speaker 17 his magnum opus, his great work, is called The Principles of Philosophy. And Newton is criticizing that particular book when he writes

Speaker 17 the mathematical principles of natural philosophy. Wait, did I get the title right? I only just called the Principia, so it's forgotten by you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying saying is Newton's famous work post-dates

Speaker 3 Descartes' famous work, and he's

Speaker 3 is he poking fun at the title and making it more of a product?

Speaker 17 He's trying to replace it.

Speaker 3 Replace it. Right.

Speaker 17 This is what they build on it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so let me get the right title. So Principia Mathematica

Speaker 3 Naturalis. So

Speaker 3 in English, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. That's the full title.

Speaker 17 In Principles of Philosophy, there's four books, Descartes, right? There's four books. The first one is setting up his philosophical worldview, his epistemology, which is theory of knowledge.

Speaker 17 How do we know anything in the first place? And then his metaphysics, like, what is there that exists for certain? And that is considered the first thing to do before book two, which is his physics.

Speaker 17 So in order to even get to the physics, you have to talk about when do we know something.

Speaker 3 Which book has the I think, therefore I am?

Speaker 17 That is in the meditations, which was published a few years before.

Speaker 3 Oh, in 48 years. He He was already trying to go with it.

Speaker 17 So book one of the principles is like a polished version of the meditations.

Speaker 17 And that's what starts his philosophical worldview is the first book, and then his physics and his celestial mechanics, and then onwards. The Principia begins with definitions, which

Speaker 17 arguably Poincaré argues are

Speaker 17 not helpful, and there's a way that that's true.

Speaker 17 And then there's the general scolium, which means explanation. And the general scolium is where he gives his philosophical arguments for absolute space and absolute time.

Speaker 17 And it is after that philosophical framework is established that he derives the three laws of motion.

Speaker 3 And gravity would come in there. And gravity is even later down the line.
Right, right.

Speaker 17 But the first thing that they considered having to do was

Speaker 3 talking about how we know.

Speaker 17 Okay, so. And then do you know that you know what you know? And is it important to know whether you know if you know you know?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I would say,

Speaker 3 which is great

Speaker 3 did he give the right answer to that

Speaker 3 yes okay so through that period the various folks who are trying to do physics are are fundamentally conjoined with philosophical foundations of why they're thinking that way at all right okay so now

Speaker 17 fast forward or slow forward into the 1700s now take us to the 1800s scientific revolution time also actual revolution time for a variety of countries um also Merkel.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Merkel.

Speaker 3 Merke and

Speaker 3 of course France.

Speaker 17 France.

Speaker 3 Liberté. Fraternité.
Liberté. That's right.

Speaker 3 Tobacco.

Speaker 3 I don't know how to say tobacco in France,

Speaker 17 which is probably a good thing.

Speaker 7 Keep your stinking Fritom fries.

Speaker 17 Because we didn't like the idea of a monarchy. That's our history.
Rebelling against a monarchy.

Speaker 17 Anyway,

Speaker 3 I see what you did there.

Speaker 17 They're writing to each other and corresponding and setting up experiments.

Speaker 17 Boyle, Gassendi,

Speaker 17 Newton, Leibniz,

Speaker 17 the people who were still philosopher physicists in the 1700s and 1800s. They're also now working with Newton's Principia.
And it's known pretty early on that the Principia doesn't answer everything.

Speaker 17 Like the law of gravity is action at a distance because it just says, if, I mean, imagine a universe with nothing in it, if two masses just popped into existence, they would somehow immediately feel the force between the two, right?

Speaker 17 Okay. And there's no like time for the force of gravity to travel and say, hey, other planet, this is what you should feel toward me.
No, it's instantaneous. So people knew there were issues.

Speaker 17 And one of the main people was Emily Duchatelet, who wrote a book called The Foundations of Physics.

Speaker 17 Right. So before, you know, maybe...

Speaker 3 When was that? I'm going to pick that up.

Speaker 17 She's in the mid-1700s. Thank you for that.
And she's experiencing a renaissance right now. For us, a long time she was just known as like Voltaire's lover and mistress, and she hosted many salons.

Speaker 3 Salon.

Speaker 3 This is how I feel about...

Speaker 3 I don't really want to say French things.

Speaker 3 I want to make sure the timeline is established here. So Newton's greatest work was done in the 1600s, 1680s,

Speaker 3 Spilling into

Speaker 3 early 1700s. Voltaire comes around mid-1700s.
A little earlier, yeah. A little earlier.
I think. And so, and you're...

Speaker 17 And Du Chatelet is the same time.

Speaker 3 Du Chatelet. And so they're coincident in time.
That's right.

Speaker 17 Yes. And so she's hosting a lot of the intellectuals of the time.
And they're having an interesting conversation. But she's also in charge of teaching her kid, her son, physics.

Speaker 17 And she's disappointed with all the textbooks. And she does what many people do.
She writes her own.

Speaker 17 And the first thing she does.

Speaker 3 As one does.

Speaker 3 You did that with your kids, too.

Speaker 15 You see all the textbooks my kids are reading.

Speaker 3 They're all wrong because I wrote it.

Speaker 17 You put it as like the byline is like lord of comedy,

Speaker 3 comma, your father.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Anyway,

Speaker 17 she, before writing this book of foundation, which again starts with a philosophical framework and goes from there.

Speaker 17 It starts with the principle of sufficient reason and the law of non-contradiction and the rule of like sort of proper reason.

Speaker 3 Law of. Do they declaring that it's a law?

Speaker 17 It's an axiom. Okay.
You have to start somewhere.

Speaker 3 Okay, so you're laid out some rules. That's right.
Rules and regulations.

Speaker 17 Yeah. And you've got to bite the bullet somewhere.

Speaker 3 And what follows derives within those constraints. Yes, okay, gotcha.

Speaker 17 So, but she's also the one who translated the Principia into French. And I guess like...

Speaker 17 Current French physicists still read her translation, but she didn't just translate the Latin into French. She filled in gaps.
Like she wrote a thick commentary. Wow.

Speaker 3 And so it was her physics that has trained.

Speaker 3 Pull out Newton. Say, Newton, you need help.

Speaker 15 Here's what you left out, Newton.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 17 And so it was people kind of got it. Like, he's not telling us everything.
He's given us some parameters, but there's more work to be done if we want to really know why things work the way they do.

Speaker 3 And how many lady physicists existed at the time?

Speaker 17 Hard to know because, again, this physics philosophy split isn't totally there. So while there were just a few women, maybe, who were doing experiments of any kind, I'm not sure I know any.

Speaker 17 There are a lot of women doing philosophy. Wow.
Corresponding with Leibniz, corresponding with Hume, interacting, like writing, influencing Leibniz's thought.

Speaker 3 It's interesting, because I have a book which is Leibniz's letters.

Speaker 3 And there's all manner of people that are on the other side of those letters. I'll take another look at them.
Why we all know Leibniz today. Just double check.

Speaker 17 Newton both developed calculus more or less at the same time, which I'm sure you woke up this morning saying, you know what? I'm dying to know who invented the calculus at the same time as Newton.

Speaker 17 But anyway,

Speaker 17 he thought that space was not a substance. It wasn't a thing.
It was just the relationships between stuff, a relational view. And so he objected to...

Speaker 17 the idea of Newtonian absolute space and absolute time, which is not really a stuff either, but it exists independent of matter. So it's like a thing in Newton's ontology.

Speaker 17 Like when he's listing the stuff that exists, space is there.

Speaker 16 Space is part of it.

Speaker 17 But for Leibniz, it just is how we understand the difference between the distance between matter.

Speaker 15 I'm confused here. There are two independent calculus

Speaker 3 and they both work?

Speaker 3 You know, they're different because all the notation is different.

Speaker 3 And in physics, we retain a lot of Newton's notations.

Speaker 3 But in pure math, it's all Leibniz's. You know, the integral signs and all these squiggly

Speaker 3 symbols. That's Leibniz.
Yeah, that's all Leibniz. And so Leibniz is a little more elegant than Newton's.
Newton was like, let's get in and get the job done and get out kind of thing.

Speaker 3 But I'm impressed that it would happen at this, basically the same time and independently.

Speaker 17 I love calculus. I don't know why people give it such a bad rap.
No, I didn't.

Speaker 15 No, that's the thing I never thought I'd hear this morning.

Speaker 3 When I woke up this morning, that's what I thought I'd never hear.

Speaker 3 Is that a bumper sticker on your car?

Speaker 3 I don't have a car. But if I did, that would be one of them for sure.
All right.

Speaker 7 Meet Saw.

Speaker 3 His fantasy lineup? Not so great. A no-name QB and an injured rookie running back.
But you know what is great?

Speaker 3 Getting a single-line unlimited plan for $35 a month and a free Samsung Galaxy A155G at Cricket Wireless. No injuries, just reliable service.

Speaker 3 Cricket may temporarily slow beta speeds if the network is busy. Must bring your number to Cricket on Select Unlimited Plan.
Pay $40 first month, new lines only.

Speaker 3 First month service charge and tax due at sale. Cricket 5G is not available everywhere.
Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See CricketWireless.com for details.

Speaker 17 What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future?

Speaker 17 When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow.

Speaker 17 Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today.

Speaker 17 Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

Speaker 3 Howdy, partner. Next time you get chicken at McDonald's, you won't have to choose between the creamy flavors of ranch and the tangy kick of Buffalo any longer.

Speaker 3 This time, enjoy all the flavors you love all at once. Try new creamy and tangy Buffalo Ranch sauce.
I participate in McDonald's for limited time.

Speaker 19 I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Speaker 3 So now we got them. Now take us now into the 19th century.

Speaker 17 As technology gets better, we get we're a industrial revolution. Yes.
And all these, like we start moving from talking about forces and inertia and stuff we can't fully analyze.

Speaker 17 And we start getting quantitative about conservation of energy and about like tweaking frog legs so we can understand how muscles work and psychology is coming into its own and sociology is coming.

Speaker 17 Like the different fields start to distinguish themselves. And at the same time, like universities are being built and growing and the different faculty at universities are getting set up.

Speaker 17 Professional societies like the Royal Society and the Paris Society of Scientists are growing.

Speaker 17 So now you have communities growing up where people share their findings and it's international, at least in the West,

Speaker 17 and so on.

Speaker 17 It's a long and interesting story, which other people could probably give a better version of, but it's this increasing ability to quantize and specialize.

Speaker 17 The more we learn, the more there is to sort of...

Speaker 17 You know, I was thinking the other day, wouldn't it be great if we lived at the time of the library of alexander because like you could really have said i've read all the books in the world yeah

Speaker 3 that's not possible i think at least i think that was true up until much later than that really like in rumor has it i've heard i'm heard told that up through the 1500s highly educated people could have claimed to have read everything that was ever written yeah well that's because it was all handwritten

Speaker 17 real slow yeah but some people like aquinas they had scribes they had like a room full of monks writing for them

Speaker 15 As they go into these communities, when does all of this lead to what we are? Because none of this stuff is cross-pollinating today.

Speaker 3 Well, I wouldn't say none of it is.

Speaker 17 I would say it's harder to do. Okay.
And I'd say people are still asking these questions.

Speaker 17 But we've built, and we touched on this last time. We've built up our universities in a way that we actively discourage people from staying as general as possible.

Speaker 17 Liberal arts training is being kicked like a poor little puppy, and it's like such an important thing.

Speaker 17 And then when you get to graduate school, it's all over. It used to be like you would try to stay general, even through your master's degree.

Speaker 17 You would take a little bit of like you would learn everything.

Speaker 3 Are you saying it's important because it just kept you loose? Yeah.

Speaker 17 It kept you learning a bunch of other stuff. Other stuff.

Speaker 3 Just appreciating the dimensions of life and of society.

Speaker 17 So, I mean, I'm going to jump all the way to the Cold War era. And if people are interested, like there is good history on this.
And one book in particular is The Physicists by Daniel Kevlas.

Speaker 17 It might be a little outdated by now, but it just talks about the history of physics in the U.S. and how it became

Speaker 17 so many different specializations and so on.

Speaker 17 But it was only after the Manhattan Project and after World War II that physics was properly considered a thing you could have as a career.

Speaker 17 It wasn't just something you learned as a young man at the university or one of the few women, but it was something you could have, you could... Bring home the bacon, right?

Speaker 17 If you actually did physics.

Speaker 3 But at that point, physics is making bombs.

Speaker 3 They're important for national security. And no one is talking about philosophy at that point.

Speaker 17 So that's when the transition kind of happens. It becomes in the U.S.
very pragmatic. It's about the shut up and calculate mentality.

Speaker 17 And that really dominates through the Cold War era because there's this, it's competition.

Speaker 17 But interestingly, in the 50s and 60s, James Connaught, who was the president of Harvard and a physicist and a chemist. I didn't remember that.

Speaker 17 Connaught fought really hard for even his physics students to know the history and philosophy.

Speaker 17 He understood it is so important that he built it into Harvard's program that even if you were just studying physics, it wouldn't be like writing down lab notes and doing calculations.

Speaker 17 You would also take a history and philosophy of science course.

Speaker 3 You're saying explicitly and implicitly that coming out of the 19th century into the 20th, especially post-war,

Speaker 3 the field of physics

Speaker 3 has borders

Speaker 3 in a way

Speaker 3 where other ways of thinking can't get in.

Speaker 3 And you're saying saying that's to the detriment of physics, not to the detriment of other fields. How would you characterize that?

Speaker 17 I think it's to the detriment of any field, not just science, when those walls become impermeable.

Speaker 3 I think walls are very good.

Speaker 3 Stop it, stop. Physics, as far as I can tell today,

Speaker 3 still suffers from this border problem.

Speaker 17 It makes sense because...

Speaker 17 We're on where we get hyper-specialized because we know so much and we're building on so much. We're asking just that many more questions.
And we have that much more technology to explore.

Speaker 17 So, I mean, the blossoming of many flowers is a good thing.

Speaker 3 So how do we use you?

Speaker 17 Well, maybe I don't want to be used.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay, sorry.

Speaker 17 Maybe I get to be exists in my own right because it's a beautiful and wonderful human endeavor.

Speaker 17 No, I know what you mean.

Speaker 3 How do you help us?

Speaker 17 Okay, we help each other when we share ideas, when we

Speaker 17 have conversations like we're doing now. So for instance, I was just talking about Mach.
He was an important influence in Einstein.

Speaker 17 When Einstein wrote an obituary that everybody read for Mach, he said, one of the reasons I hold this person in such high esteem as a physicist is because he kept asking about what is the proper goal of science.

Speaker 17 And that guided how he did science. But what is the proper goal of science is like a guiding principle.
It is itself a philosophical principle, the same as we might say

Speaker 17 at a more intimate level in physics, like that choosing something that's parsimonious or beautiful or simple or whatever.

Speaker 17 There's no reason why the earth should or why nature should give a damn about those principles.

Speaker 3 How about our aesthetics?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 In fact, that nature is uniform at all is something you have to assume to even think science is worth doing in the first place.

Speaker 17 So like there are moments you have to sort of buy into certain untestable principles to consider science worth doing. But the thing is, these are important things, but the concepts that we use too.

Speaker 17 So here's a good point.

Speaker 17 Space and time, the way that they're used in Newton, absolute space and absolute time, and whether or not they're important for his derivation of the three laws and his law of gravity and all this, was an important question to ask.

Speaker 17 But Mach and Einstein and others at the end of the 19 century are clear that electrodynamics isn't going to work.

Speaker 17 in absolute space and time. Like we, they knew things didn't fit together in the right way.

Speaker 17 and so they knew that one way to attack this to get to new physics was not just gonna be to push around the equations but to re-evaluate the basic concepts and just to be fair to Newton the whole electrodynamics

Speaker 3 the the

Speaker 3 physics that came to be understood that we call electrodynamics was not yet oh yeah there for Newton right so he's working in his own like you said you work in your own world you come up with what works later on we keep going yeah right so it you know,

Speaker 17 19th, late 19th century,

Speaker 17 there's tension between these different, like really, these pillars of physics, like thermodynamics, system mechanics,

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 17 I'm blanking, sorry, Newtonian mechanics, sorry, classical mechanics.

Speaker 17 And it's Einstein, Einstein says that it is not the physics in him, as it were, that allowed him to get to special relativity. It was that he said, what do we mean by this term simultaneous?

Speaker 17 And what do do we mean when we're talking about space and time

Speaker 17 in different frames of minds?

Speaker 3 These are not questions physicists typically ask.

Speaker 17 Well, they were back then. They were for the heroes of Einstein.
And the class of people who were philosopher-physicists

Speaker 17 was a significant class of people

Speaker 3 a century ago. Yeah.
That's right.

Speaker 17 So that it's not, that it wasn't for the last 50, 70-some years is

Speaker 17 partly because of, like, there are political reasons for it, like

Speaker 17 the intellectuals who came to the U.S. from Germany during the wars, the way that they entered into the academy and began to teach physics and philosophy and think about this stuff.

Speaker 17 There are whole classes at the graduate level you could teach just about why the Vienna Circle, a particular philosophical school, which was all scientists, influenced the way American philosophy and physics relate to one another.

Speaker 17 So it's a complex and interesting story, but the end point is that if we take Einstein's word for it, this going back and saying, are we really understanding this concept the way we should be?

Speaker 17 And this is what we're doing right now with gravity and trying to understand the quantities of gravity, and what we're doing right now with causality. Like, is there a quantum notion of causality?

Speaker 17 Or what does causality mean if space and time are even crazier than in a relativistic framework? So it's the re-evaluation of these basic concepts.

Speaker 17 And that is a philosophically motivated question and asking, how do we know? We talked about this a bit last time.

Speaker 17 We're getting into regimes in physics where we're beyond what is empirically testable, at least for the foreseeable future. What then do you use?

Speaker 17 What are your criteria for judging what is better or what is worth pursuing?

Speaker 17 Who do we fund? Where do we send our best graduate students?

Speaker 17 That is based on who has the framework that you find the most compelling, whose view about the nature of space and time, how general relativity and quantum mechanics fit together.

Speaker 3 So Brian Greene's best-selling book, The Elegant Universe, just in all fairness to him, that was not his original title. What was it? It was some more boring title.

Speaker 3 The publisher chose that, and that had a certain cachet with the public. Yeah, well, and but it implies that we as scientists are in search of beauty,

Speaker 3 majesty, and elegance in the universe, as though it's waiting for us to discover it.

Speaker 5 It's like the universe is going to a cocktail party, darling.

Speaker 3 Presumably, that's still okay to look, to have some

Speaker 3 prior

Speaker 3 expectation for the universe to guide your next questions. Well, you shouldn't,

Speaker 17 like, it's important and unavoidable as a guide, right? And we sort of talked about this framework, this worldview thing. Like, it's going to be there.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 17 elevating those guidelines to the level of dogma is when we get in trouble.

Speaker 3 Because then it affects who you hire into departments.

Speaker 17 Yeah, but it also affects what you consider the correct route to go.

Speaker 3 It shapes your whole outlook on how you're going to approach everything.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 15 You know, because you're like, well, can't do that because we've already made up in our mind that this is the way it's got to go.

Speaker 17 Right. Or, I mean, you have to bet on a pony, right?

Speaker 17 I mean, if you're choosing whether you're going to pursue like canonical approaches to quantum gravity, like loop quantum gravity versus covariant, like gauge theoretic, like string theory, like what Brian Greene does.

Speaker 3 What are you saying, please? I'm pretending that I'm not. I don't have no clear idea what you are talking about, right? Different approaches to solving a problem that you know exists.

Speaker 17 There are like two basic, this is this is a very crass way to put it, forgive me, but there are two big approaches to how to unite general relativity and quantum theory.

Speaker 17 Okay, that's one of the approaches is trying to build a theory of everything from the ground up. String theory is kind of like that.

Speaker 3 I heard that. Go ahead.

Speaker 17 The canonical approaches say we think quantum theory is the most fundamental theory. So we're going to try and bring GR into that framework.
Gotcha.

Speaker 17 But that is something we, that is something we can never empirically prove which is the right path to pursue.

Speaker 3 Okay, I tell you why I'm leaning that way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 no one has ever

Speaker 3 found a quantum physics prediction that was false.

Speaker 3 It is so correct that, oh my gosh. All right.
But now you go to general relativity. It has known limits.
It can't. calculate the center of a black hole.
It can't calculate the moment of the Big Bang.

Speaker 3 It fails.

Speaker 17 If you can't calculate, you know, stuff stuff about black holes, get out.

Speaker 3 No, no, get out of physics. No, no, no, no.
What I'm saying is

Speaker 3 not people.

Speaker 17 I'm not talking about people.

Speaker 3 I'm talking about abstract entities.

Speaker 3 What I'm saying is

Speaker 3 if you already know the limits of general relativity,

Speaker 3 and you don't know the limits. of quantum physics because you've never seen the limit.
So

Speaker 3 I'm thinking quantum is more bad.

Speaker 15 That probably goes in here, not the other way around.

Speaker 3 Or, of course, there could be a third entity

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 17 Yeah. So, and then there are some alternates to these approaches, and they're considered a little bit fringe, but that means like it's hard to get good grad students to come and build your pro.

Speaker 17 And like there are sociological factors, too. But yeah, back to this notion of guiding principles.
Some of them have been

Speaker 17 like huge issues in the history of science. And I talked about space and time, but one of them is like objectivity.
This idea that you ask the person on the street,

Speaker 17 what are the adjectives that describe science? And they're like, well, it has like a corner on truth, maybe. But science has like this corner on capital T truth.

Speaker 17 And there are some philosophers and scientists who continue to say things like this, but that's wildly problematic because that itself is a philosophical view.

Speaker 17 Like, how would you know, as one single person, even,

Speaker 17 that this is a special kind of truth? Now, it's true that we have

Speaker 3 empirical

Speaker 3 medium capital T?

Speaker 17 Like, the slash is somewhere between

Speaker 3 quasi t. We have different size T's to begin the word truth.

Speaker 17 I'm going to say like, you know, 50, 50, I don't know, like 20 proof.

Speaker 17 That is weak sauce. Anyway,

Speaker 17 objectivity is also one of the things that's supposed to make the knowledge and the truth that comes out of science a bit more untouchable.

Speaker 17 But objectivity is where... the development of quantum mechanics gets you in trouble.

Speaker 17 Because if you mean objectivity to be something like, when we do science, we can rope off this realm or this system and we can poke it and prod it and study it and ask lots of questions, blow it with hot air, like see what comes out.

Speaker 17 And that's how you do physics. Like you have to assume that there's some divide between your apparatuses that are measuring the thing and the thing itself.
This is a very old problem.

Speaker 17 I think it's even Aristotle. It's a measurement problem.
It is.

Speaker 17 And it's an old one, except in the sense that like Aristotle, I think, or somebody said, like, if you want to study a bird, you can watch it flying around in its habitat and singing and all that, but you also like need to dissect it and look at it, but you can't have them both really, because if you've dissected the bird, you...

Speaker 15 You can't fly around anymore.

Speaker 3 You don't want that happening, right? I thought that was Feynman had

Speaker 3 a whole lecture on birds.

Speaker 17 Oh, then I really don't want to quote Feynman for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 3 But I like what you said, where if you really want to know what a bird is, you're going to have to open it up, cut it open, and then it's not the bird that you were studying.

Speaker 3 You just influence the thing you were trying to understand.

Speaker 17 So we know how to sort of quotient out that engagement in classical theories to a point that we can get very nice predictions of like football trajectories.

Speaker 3 Hence the idea of an objective truth.

Speaker 17 Right. But what happens in quantum mechanics and Bohr and many others were realizing this already in 100 years ago, right in 1925 when it was first developed.

Speaker 3 100 years ago, we're in the centennial. That's right.

Speaker 17 It is the 100th anniversary of the 2008.

Speaker 3 We did a whole live show at Beacon Theater celebrating this centennial.

Speaker 17 There's been a lot of celebrations. It's the International Year of Quantum.
I'm just going to have, like, I'm going to have to sleep for all of 2026.

Speaker 17 But that's when wave mechanics was developed and new physics went down.

Speaker 3 Every year. And Hubble discovers that we're not the only galaxy.
Wow.

Speaker 17 1826. There's always something to celebrate, right?

Speaker 3 1926. Right.

Speaker 17 There's a way when you're talking about quantum systems,

Speaker 17 like photons and electrons and these things, that you cannot avoid interacting with a system in a way that cannot be quotiented out.

Speaker 17 And so this is something that Einstein continued to look for. In particular, he thought that when a physical theory is complete, that means that you can give a mathematical state bijectively.

Speaker 17 That means there's a mathematical state that corresponds to some real system in the world.

Speaker 3 Did you just use the word bijectively?

Speaker 17 Yeah, sorry about it.

Speaker 3 That's a word?

Speaker 17 It just means in both directions, like that you can read from the math to the world or from the world to the math.

Speaker 3 Interesting. That's a

Speaker 3 nice

Speaker 3 correspondence beard. Bijectively.

Speaker 17 Cool. And I think somewhere else Schrödinger says, yeah, Einstein, he likes a map with a little flag on it saying, here's this system and here's the system, right?

Speaker 17 And because in Schrödinger's wave of mechanics, you can't do that anymore.

Speaker 17 Because once

Speaker 17 two subsystems have interacted quantum mechanically, and we pull them apart, and even after interaction has ceased, Einstein says, you should, if you have a complete theory, you should be able to give a state, a description mathematically of this guy over here that doesn't make reference to this guy over here.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 17 that's they're totally separable.

Speaker 3 That's kind of an issue, right? It is.

Speaker 3 It is. It can't be a little bit of a trend.

Speaker 17 Because entanglement can be understood as non-separability.

Speaker 17 In fact, it means after there's a quantum interaction and it's a new kind of thing that it's not mechanical, it's not thermal.

Speaker 17 You don't even have to like. It's a new thing.
It's a new thing. And it's not just a new thing.

Speaker 17 It is, according to Schrödinger, the thing that causes the departure between classical theories and quantum theories.

Speaker 17 When systems interact, something weirdly different happens, and you can no longer talk about

Speaker 17 the physics of one without

Speaker 15 considering the other or referencing. That's right.

Speaker 3 Because, wow, that's wild. It is wild.

Speaker 3 I love it. Okay, but in all fairness to the objective truth people, they're really, I don't think they ever intended to to include quantum systems in it.

Speaker 3 Just talk about the macroscopic classical physical world, right? Well,

Speaker 3 can you have both?

Speaker 16 I mean, can you just isolate the one for those circumstances and then have the question of the other, like philosophically and I'll say physically.

Speaker 17 Is that possible? It is, but even Einstein realized right away that quantum theory,

Speaker 17 if it's about the really small stuff, what is the big stuff made of?

Speaker 3 Well, yes, a bunch of the really small stuff.

Speaker 17 So there's a way that Schrödinger's description, mathematical description of the quantum stuff that means you can't separate out systems, that's part of it, should also apply at the macroscopic scale.

Speaker 17 So there becomes this whole issue of how do we explain, first of all, what this theory of small stuff is doing, and then what happens when we get to this level, because at this level, it doesn't look like you and I are entangled or anything like that, right?

Speaker 17 And we can give really good physics explanations now for why that's the case. But a lot of people like mistakenly think that the

Speaker 17 Copenhagen interpretation, like Bohr and the others, that were so intent on recovering objectivity so we could talk about quantum science

Speaker 17 made a sharp and fast distinction between the classical world and the quantum world. Like you have your measuring apparatus and that is a classically sized thing so that we as humans.

Speaker 3 It's a blunt instrument. It's a blunt instrument.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 17 And then you have the quantum system that it's interacting with.

Speaker 17 But in order for them to interact, we have to talk about them in the same theory.

Speaker 3 However, aren't you allowed to say macroscopic objects, all these wave equations, average out

Speaker 3 to get to this classical result?

Speaker 17 But we know better than it's not just averaging out. It's a process called quantum decoherence.

Speaker 3 Decoherence.

Speaker 17 What is it? Entanglement. Yeah, entanglement itself.

Speaker 17 Well, it's the same problem about objectivity. But first of of all, I just want to clearly, like, Bohr never, in his post-World War II

Speaker 17 popular lectures and stuff, he sometimes talks about a classical world, but he never, ever, there's no evidence that he believed there was some really separate realm. Like it's a continuous situation.

Speaker 17 Thank you, Chuck. You're my friend.
You're here for me. It's a continuous situation.

Speaker 17 And he's like, okay, it's continuous, but we still have to, we are physicists and we go into the lab and we look at a machine with a pointer. We have to be able to talk about that.

Speaker 17 So there's this pragmatic aspect of what he's saying, this pragmatic objectivity.

Speaker 17 It is the failure of our being able to give this hard and fast divide between the object we're studying and the world around it that accounts for why we can't see things as quantum mechanical.

Speaker 17 It's because the things, the quantum systems we're looking at, are in fact interacting with lots of other stuff.

Speaker 20 A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated, and it just feels so good.

Speaker 20 Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car,

Speaker 21 suddenly it seems quite practical. The all-new 2025 Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats, it only feels extravagant.

Speaker 8 I want to start a business, and you know, you can do the same.

Speaker 5 When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to-do list keeps growing every day with new tasks, and that can easily begin to overrun your life.

Speaker 5 Finding the right tool that not only helps you out but simplifies everything can be such a game changer.

Speaker 9 For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify.

Speaker 11 Certainly is from a friend Karen.

Speaker 9 Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

Speaker 11 from household names to brands just getting started. Get started with your own design studio.

Speaker 11 With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style.

Speaker 5 And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shopping to processing returns and beyond.

Speaker 13 Turn your big business idea into sales with Shopify on your side.

Speaker 11 Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Star Talk.

Speaker 5 Go to Shopify.com slash Star Talk.

Speaker 4 That's Shopify.com slash Star Talk.

Speaker 13 Cold mornings, holiday plans.

Speaker 9 This is when you just want your wardrobe to be simple.

Speaker 10 Stuff that looks sharp, feels good, and things you can actually wear.

Speaker 11 That's where Quince comes in.

Speaker 5 And the bonus, Quince pieces make great gifts too. This season, the lineup is smart but simple and easy with Quince.

Speaker 10 $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like everyday luxury, equal parts stylish and durable.

Speaker 11 I'm so happy that Quince is a sponsor of Star Talk because I've been a customer for quite some time.

Speaker 5 Last year I had a cashmere Christmas and pretty much my whole family is walking around in Quince Cashmere right now.

Speaker 13 This season, give and get timeless holiday staples that last with Quince.

Speaker 10 Go to quince.com/slash Star Talk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

Speaker 7 Now available in Canada, too. That's q-u-in-ce-e.com/slash star talk.

Speaker 12 Free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com/slash star talk.

Speaker 9 Tell them Chuck sent you.

Speaker 3 Einstein said God doesn't play dice with the universe famously.

Speaker 3 Are philosophers landing in a place where

Speaker 3 there is objectivity in quantum physics? It depends. Sorry, are they handed to a place? Is that a goal at all?

Speaker 17 Well, if you mean objectivity as intersubjective agreement, like that we could go into each other's labs and agree on the results of what each other see, then clearly, yes, that's a part of what we're doing.

Speaker 3 Okay, of course, because otherwise there's no science without that.

Speaker 17 But I mean, I was at the 100th anniversary of quantum like Helgoland conference.

Speaker 17 Helgoland is the little island in the North Sea where Heisenberg went to do a wee bit of cocaine and to finish how to do.

Speaker 3 Where do you get all the scoop on people?

Speaker 3 And I'm going to tell you. I read their letters.
All the letters.

Speaker 3 Because not in their books. Yeah.
Right. Let me just say this one thing to make a a correction there.

Speaker 7 There is no such thing as a wee bit of cocaine.

Speaker 17 You can't do a quantum.

Speaker 17 So they got a bunch of physicists together. They had a panel session with a number, like four recent Nobel laureates in physics.

Speaker 17 And they're talking about the Bell experiments, which test entanglement. and show that they're not communicating faster than the speed of light or anything like that.

Speaker 17 And it's something we call non-locality, which I would characterize as like the physic, like the signature that we can measure, the signature of entanglement. That's a poetic way of putting it.

Speaker 17 These physicists won the Nobel Prize for designing experiments to test this, and they could not agree on stage what non-locality meant about the world.

Speaker 3 Okay, so tell us what non-locality means.

Speaker 17 I'm not going to be able to supply an answer if Tube Bell knows. Lori,

Speaker 17 I think it's just

Speaker 17 indicating that systems are

Speaker 17 quantum interaction is a kind of interaction we have never studied before.

Speaker 3 Okay, so non-locality means these two particles that are entangled cannot be described independently

Speaker 3 of each other.

Speaker 3 So this is not local, it is connected.

Speaker 17 So it's not just that, because we could do that classically, right? If Chuck always wore different color socks,

Speaker 17 and I saw just one of his socks on a given morning, I was like, he's wearing a brown sock. I could know something without measuring his other sock.
I would know that it would be non-brown.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 17 Okay. That's purely classical, not interesting.
What makes it very

Speaker 17 non-classical is the idea that once these systems have, for all purposes we believe, stopped interacting, they're not communicating, there's no information going between them, nothing is exchanged.

Speaker 17 If we go, while they're in flight, we can ever, over at our measuring device for this guy, set it to measure some quantity or other.

Speaker 17 spin with respect to some angle or something.

Speaker 3 Measuring a quantum property of that

Speaker 3 entity, yes.

Speaker 17 Yeah, some property of that entity.

Speaker 3 And the other one will know

Speaker 15 what it is that was measured and what state the other thing is.

Speaker 3 So therefore, it's not local.

Speaker 17 So that is the non-local class. So it's not just that there's a correlation between the two.
We have lots of classical correlations that we love.

Speaker 17 But it's that these correlations cannot be explained.

Speaker 17 The correlations exceed like just statistical randomness. Can you

Speaker 17 and yet they can't be talking to each other?

Speaker 3 Can you one day?

Speaker 8 That's what, there you go.

Speaker 17 They can't be communicating unless you want to ditch the speed of light. And most people are happy to say, did you, like, Chuck woke up this morning and said,

Speaker 17 I'm happy with the speed of light being what it is.

Speaker 3 But at least, why not go

Speaker 3 Fulmonte here and say the two particles are connected via a wormhole?

Speaker 17 So there are, we could give alternate explanations, but wormholes are way, they would have other effects, wouldn't like they wouldn't.

Speaker 3 Wow, who knows?

Speaker 3 It's an entanglement wormhole. I mean, who knows? With a wormhole, you're not moving faster than the speed of light.
You're just cutting through the space-time continuum instantaneously.

Speaker 17 I think it would be hard because entanglement, non-locality,

Speaker 17 is so ubiquitous.

Speaker 17 I think it would be

Speaker 17 not impossible, of course, and this is where your guiding principles come in, but to just think that wormholes occur whenever. But also, entanglement

Speaker 17 can happen with respect to different properties of a thing, and it can change over time, and it can be multiple systems depending on those degrees. So it is a really complicated relationship.

Speaker 3 Okay, so now I measure one of the particles, the other one manifests itself with the complementary properties, and now I've just D,

Speaker 3 they're no longer coherent.

Speaker 17 Yeah, they're no longer entangled after you've done that measurement.

Speaker 3 Now they're local particles.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and in fact, the measurement that you do, the physics that we're doing is all local over there, right?

Speaker 17 But yet there's this thing we can't explain all right so my question to you is

Speaker 3 is it the physicist who's taken a little bit of philosophy that'll help them address all of these questions or is it the philosopher who's taken a little bit of physics who might get us out of these conundrums i think we could use all the help we can get

Speaker 3 all hands on deck all hands on deck i mean the so

Speaker 3 i'm sorry i'm because i'm still you guys were moving very quick and i'm the guy sitting here without any PhD of anything.

Speaker 3 So, because

Speaker 3 you don't have a PhD? Yeah.

Speaker 17 Give this man an honorary degree.

Speaker 3 I know, yeah. Who invited you?

Speaker 3 Okay. So,

Speaker 8 based on what you just said, because I'm running it back in my head, is it the actual measurement at the time of measurement that makes the entanglement?

Speaker 3 Or

Speaker 3 if there, is there ever a decoupling at all?

Speaker 15 Or are they measured and then tangled and then forever entangled?

Speaker 17 All of those things can be true. Like, so we could, we've developed ways to do weak measurements, which sort of lightly tap the system.

Speaker 17 It's like in ways you can gather some information, but not fully decouple it. Um, but

Speaker 17 and again, the degree matters, like, there are some limits on how entangled certain numbers of states can be with respect to some.

Speaker 17 Like, so it's this is why we can use entanglement as a resource and like to help us explore different like

Speaker 17 topologies and in in in holography, which is you know, ADS, uh, like Andy De Sitter space and how it relates to conformal field theories, which I don't really know about.

Speaker 17 And I want to figure out, like, I gotta get a front, but they're using entanglement as a way to probe unmeasurable stuff.

Speaker 3 Okay, we gotta land this plane. So, the way I want to land the plane is to get you super cool, man.

Speaker 18 I'm telling you, it's very cool.

Speaker 3 It's unbelievable. Yeah.
Get you to tell me what the future of this creative thinking will bring to quantum physics.

Speaker 3 Will it is the goal state to turn quantum physics into something as intuitive as classical physics?

Speaker 3 With a pathways of understanding, that's obvious that it should do that. This particle pops in and out of existence, of course.

Speaker 3 Or will it just remain statistically mysterious? And

Speaker 3 like Einstein said, God does not play dice with universe, but maybe God does.

Speaker 3 My answer's done.

Speaker 3 Maybe God is a gambler and just deal with it. Yeah.

Speaker 17 People have different questions about that.

Speaker 17 So here's another, like, if you're a physicist who does quantum theory or you're an experimental quantum physicist and you believe that the universe is not statistical, then you're going to design tests that try to get beyond that.

Speaker 17 But if you think the world is ultimately indeterministic, then at some point you're going to move on.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 17 But I've already said, I think this is just my guessing, again, from conversations I have with practicing physicists, but thinking about

Speaker 17 quantum mechanics is never going to be intuitive the way classical mechanics is, because we as evolved creatures the way we are started doing science in terms of position and like with things we could see and measure and apples and arrows and we didn't evolve in a quantum state.

Speaker 17 No, in fact, you could very easily argue that knowing quantum theory is evolutionarily maladaptive because it's a bunch of nerds like myself sitting around doing problem sets and here comes the saber-toothed tiger.

Speaker 17 So it's good for us to be

Speaker 3 summarily removed from the gene pool. Yeah,

Speaker 3 I think it's a good idea.

Speaker 3 It's a good thing for physicists. A classical understanding of the saber-toothed tiger wins every time.
Yes.

Speaker 17 If that's the only thing that the audience takes away, that's a good one.

Speaker 17 For those who live near saber-toothed tigers, they're extinct, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Biology is not my area of expertise.

Speaker 10 But I got news for you.

Speaker 16 The regular tigers,

Speaker 3 they're in the tiger. They're the regular tigers.
They're good enough.

Speaker 3 They'll eat you too. Plus,

Speaker 3 they're on the list for becoming de-extincted, the saber-toothed tigers. The fact that we can do that now.
Phew. So cool.

Speaker 17 So there's a way that quantum is never going to be intuitive to us the way it is.

Speaker 17 But that's why engaging with these philosophical questions, we're going back and asking, what are we doing when we do this test?

Speaker 17 When we do tests, are there loopholes in the logic of how we're doing this? Are there things we can be testing we haven't thought of yet?

Speaker 17 Are we using the word causality or space or time or background? Like, are we using these in a consistent way when we set up our experiments?

Speaker 17 Are we testing our assumptions? Like, these conversations as well, we're so wedded to the classical picture of things that understanding

Speaker 3 very natural, right um but it also means that we have to do a lot of work to continue unmooring ourself from that perspective i like that phrase unmooring yeah so so okay all hands on deck keep doing it no it makes sense i mean it's like you're what really it's kind of a you know an ossification that happens that's another really good word you know because of uh the practice the practice itself.

Speaker 15 And then what you have to do now is to, in order that we can become more elastic, this is where the philosophy comes in to help change the thinking altogether so that we can go in a different direction.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 17 And in the ideal world, there would be more cross-pollination, but also the way we train physicists would be, I mean, because there are a lot, there's lots of philosophy that doesn't really talk about physics or take physics as its input the way philosophy of physics does.

Speaker 17 You know, ethics,

Speaker 17 epistemology, social political philosophy.

Speaker 3 These are important areas of philosophy that we've Ethical philosophy, religious philosophy, even economic philosophy. Philosophy of law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 Philosophy of the emotions. Like, these things can stay pretty.

Speaker 3 Space law. That's another frontier where they need some philosophy.

Speaker 17 Every time I meet a lawyer, I ask if they're a maritime lawyer, because they're going to be the first ones who develop. They're going to be the ones who...

Speaker 17 Yeah, a good friend of mine.

Speaker 3 Has your satellite crash into another satellite?

Speaker 3 No, listen.

Speaker 3 You can get you what you deserve. That's not what we talk about by space law.
Actually, it's not not far away.

Speaker 17 I mean, look, there's a nearest trajectory between Earth and the moon.

Speaker 3 Who's going to police?

Speaker 17 Is there going to be toll booths along that? Like, who's going to police? My brother is co-founder of Carmen Plus, which is an asteroid mining startup. And they have a look at...

Speaker 3 Because everyone's brother would be. Yes,

Speaker 3 we all have.

Speaker 17 And what they do is super cool.

Speaker 17 But they have to think about these questions. Like, how do we...
Do we tax stuff that you mine from asteroids? Who owns this stuff? These are really important questions. So yes.

Speaker 17 But that physics training in the U.S. would involve some pausing and stepping back and looking at the history of the field and asking philosophical questions.

Speaker 3 Is there a country that's doing that now? And we're lagging behind them. I think there are.

Speaker 17 You know, I don't know at the university level.

Speaker 17 But this was what was really exciting at Helgoland is I met a lot of young, like early career folks in physics at these great labs all over Europe, in China and in South America and some in the US.

Speaker 17 Although, to be honest, most of the labs in Europe are hoping to get some of our best scientists who are leaving.

Speaker 17 This is a real thing.

Speaker 3 Phone calls have been made. Yes.

Speaker 17 We're losing some of our top scholars.

Speaker 14 I wonder what's going on with that.

Speaker 17 But the young generation

Speaker 17 wants to study this. They are interested in knowing these things because they understand how wedded it is to

Speaker 17 the edge of physics that they're asking. So I think if enough people ask for it, like vote with your dollar, right?

Speaker 17 Ask to be taught these questions when you're learning physics. And it will.

Speaker 3 A reminder that when you're young, you're a little more irreverent in your thoughts anyway. Yeah.

Speaker 17 You're a little bit less, like you haven't built a whole career in a particular groove. So you can sort of

Speaker 3 hop over. All right.
Yeah, yeah. Well, at least thanks for coming back.
Fascinating. Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker 17 I have a good time conversing with you all.

Speaker 3 And you're just up the street. I mean, you're

Speaker 3 right up there. City College is up in 138th Street, right up there in Manhattan, a few miles north of here.

Speaker 17 Can I ask one last question, Neil? I guess so, sure.

Speaker 17 I know you've said this is personal, so it doesn't have to go in the air if you don't want, but I know you've said a number of things about philosophy of science and philosophy in general in the past, but you're like, you seem really genuinely curious about these things.

Speaker 3 What's that about?

Speaker 3 I would say my

Speaker 3 comments on philosophy have been caricatured. Okay.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so I can be very explicit. Fair.
Okay. I have yet to see

Speaker 3 someone who has earned a PhD in a philosophy department in the 20th century contribute materially to our understanding of the physical sciences.

Speaker 17 Oh, it's been done already. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I just haven't, I haven't.

Speaker 17 But also, I mean,

Speaker 3 who was saying it?

Speaker 3 Is the purpose of that? Is the philosopher saying that, or is the physicist saying that?

Speaker 17 The physicists have said that.

Speaker 3 So there are contradictions. What is the single best example?

Speaker 17 Oh,

Speaker 17 single best. Adam's got one.

Speaker 17 You're here. Nope.

Speaker 17 I'm calling on my ask a friend.

Speaker 3 Okay, ask a friend. Phone a friend.

Speaker 14 I'd get a phone a friend.

Speaker 3 Phone a friend.

Speaker 17 So Abner Shimoni was a physicist at Boston.

Speaker 3 He was a physicist. So he's formally trained as a philosopher.

Speaker 17 Abner Shimoni has formal training in physics and in philosophy.

Speaker 3 But his PhD is in what? Both.

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 3 Well, there you go. He has two PhDs.

Speaker 17 That's the point. The point is when you read these papers, the reasoning is philosophical, logical reasoning.

Speaker 3 Just don't get me wrong.

Speaker 3 I'm not saying that physics can't be helped by philosophical thinking. I don't know any good physicist who isn't thinking on some level philosophically about what they do.
Great.

Speaker 3 And in the field of astrophysics as well.

Speaker 3 There's always a philosophical dimension. So the precision of my comment about philosophy has just been, what is the value to the physical scientist of someone who's spent their entire career,

Speaker 3 academic training in philosophy?

Speaker 3 And I compare modern times to how frequent those contributions came a century ago. And so if

Speaker 3 this is one guy, maybe there's more examples, but I'm just contrasting the utility. relative to what role philosophers played back in the day.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so I said this last time, and it's worth repeating.

Speaker 17 Saying that something is only important in as much as it contributes to science is a really dangerous point of view.

Speaker 17 That said, it still contributed to science, but it is worth doing in its own right. But this,

Speaker 17 it is worth doing philosophy of science in its own right.

Speaker 3 I'm not denying that either.

Speaker 17 And I don't think it's also very always quantitative. I don't think there's a hard and fast line between these disciplines, which is why they were for thousands of years the same

Speaker 17 pursuit, and why in some arenas we're seeing them coming back.

Speaker 3 But I never said it wasn't worth pursuing.

Speaker 15 It's just been shimonied.

Speaker 3 No, I never said it wasn't useful.

Speaker 3 I didn't say it wasn't useful as it's in its own field. I'm just talking about how useful it used to be to physics to have a philosopher in the room.
And

Speaker 3 that utility is now absorbed by physicists who are thinking philosophically rather than a person whose entire training is in the philosophical world.

Speaker 17 Have these physicists themselves been trained in philosophy?

Speaker 3 They might have, but not as of not

Speaker 3 very much.

Speaker 17 Have they taken philosophy classes?

Speaker 3 Probably, yes.

Speaker 17 I actually maybe in intro philosophy classes undergrads, but I'm willing to bet most of them have not taken a philosophy of science course.

Speaker 3 Probably most, but some have, sure.

Speaker 17 So there's a difference between like stepping back and thinking, which everybody should do if they're good practitioners of their, but there's just just different ways of viewing the world that, again, I do have training in science and good philosophers of science will have some engagement with the science itself and the people who are practicing it now.

Speaker 17 And when we have conversation, it's interesting. It's interesting and we learn things.
It is a dialectic.

Speaker 17 So it may be impossible for those fields to merge again, and maybe that's not the end game.

Speaker 17 But to have a conversation is very fruitful because I change the way I think about how physics is being done right now.

Speaker 17 I learn about what they consider to the interesting questions, how much progress we've made. It is all very interesting.

Speaker 3 So then

Speaker 3 we should promote more of that. I've been like four or five different academic institutions, and at no time is the philosophy department having lunch with the chemist, the physicist, and the biology.

Speaker 16 And we generalize the problem. Yeah.

Speaker 5 That's what she's saying.

Speaker 3 That's the problem.

Speaker 17 And then when we do talk to each other, I think, yes, you're going to find people like, well, they don't have anything to do with each other.

Speaker 17 And you're going to find philosophers of science who are saying a bunch of stuff that has no connection to real science at all. And it could still be interesting.

Speaker 17 But if you're doing philosophy of physics in a way where you're trying to engage, you have to actually engage.

Speaker 3 Maybe what I'm observing is the empirical fact

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 this doesn't happen.

Speaker 3 The philosophy departments don't have lunch with the physicists. We should.

Speaker 3 And so I'm observing that reality and commenting on it.

Speaker 3 So that's all it is. Yeah.
That's all. Because I'd love for the day.

Speaker 7 Now that you have observed it, that reality is now entangled for.

Speaker 3 So now it has to happen.

Speaker 17 Actually, that's the observing that would destroy the entangling.

Speaker 10 Oh, that's right.

Speaker 18 They can't do it anymore. Sorry.

Speaker 3 The comedic inversion of that.

Speaker 3 At least let me get you. Take us out with Einstein's comment on philosophy.
Do you remember it? Okay. He probably had several.

Speaker 3 Which one are you hoping for?

Speaker 17 The history and philosophy?

Speaker 3 No, no, it's not that deep. This was very, this is very off the cuff of him.
Sometimes when I think about philosophy, I feel like I'm chewing on something that's not in my mouth.

Speaker 17 Where's my book? Hand me my book. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 I want to read the quote.

Speaker 17 One quote from Einstein that's a legitimate question.

Speaker 3 Okay, but thanks for reminding me that the Einstein Paradox, this is an academic

Speaker 3 academic text.

Speaker 17 It does presume some

Speaker 17 acquaintance with quantum physics, but

Speaker 17 just, you know, a scooch.

Speaker 3 Quantum.

Speaker 3 The Einstein Paradox, the debate of non-locality and incompleteness in 1935. The originator is very quite the thesis.

Speaker 3 This is very, that's like a title of a thesis right there. This is intricate work.

Speaker 17 It is intense work. So this is Einstein writing in June to Schrödinger,

Speaker 17 trying to figure out what on earth quantum mechanics means. Dear Schrödinger,

Speaker 17 I was very pleased about your detailed letter dealing with our little paper. The actual difficulty lies in the fact that physics is a kind of metaphysics.

Speaker 17 Physics describes reality, he puts the scare quotes in, but we do not know what what reality is. We know it only through our physical description.
They are wedded together. Wow.
Inseparable.

Speaker 17 That's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 You call him Schrodinger, not Irwin?

Speaker 17 Didn't I say dear Irwin?

Speaker 3 No, you said dear Schrödinger. Oh, Dear Schrödinger.
No, no.

Speaker 17 Just like buddies. Like, if you're playing a sport, you don't say, hello there, Terrence.

Speaker 17 I have, in fact, played sports in my life, despite what that sounded like.

Speaker 3 Okay, there it is. All right, we've got to wrap this.
Well, thanks for this second visit.

Speaker 17 Yeah, we'll do it. Do it anytime.

Speaker 3 To my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. It's great stuff.

Speaker 17 It's good to be back with you guys.

Speaker 3 Yeah. This has been another installment of Star Talk.

Speaker 3 Let's call it the Physics of Philosophy Edition.

Speaker 3 Chuck. Always a pleasure.
You are

Speaker 3 Lord of Comedy.

Speaker 3 Yes, kneel before me.

Speaker 3 Until next time, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep looking up.

Speaker 3 I'm a high-note hitting songbird.

Speaker 22 But I'm also a bird-watching backpacker.

Speaker 3 Wood thrush, three o'clock.

Speaker 22 Walmart has a wellness side too, with tons of things I need to feel good, from electrolytes to help keep me hydrated to soothing cough drops for after every show.

Speaker 9 Oh, man, how about waterproof boots?

Speaker 17 Size 10?

Speaker 22 They've got half a billion things online, on the app, and in store.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 10 Who knew?

Speaker 4 Okay, was that you or the birds?

Speaker 17 Check out the wellness side of Walmart today.

Speaker 23 Extra value meals are back. For just $5, get a savory and sweet sausage, egg, and cheese McGriddles, plus hash browns and a coffee.

Speaker 3 Only at McDonald's. For limited time only, prices and participation may vary.
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery.