Chuck, have you recovered from this conversation with Brian Greene? I'm surprised that I can even speak to you right now to be honest. You look like you blew a couple of gaskets in there. It's more than a gasket. This was mind-blowing beyond mind-blowing. I mean... Who's like blood coming out of your high-smok? You're brain-set. I can't handle this. Well, when you and Brian get going, man, I've got to tell you it's tough to keep up. I don't know.
Alright, welcome to StarTalk. You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck, baby. Alright, you know what you're going to talk about today? I do not. The only way to talk about physics is to talk about physics with Brian Greene. That is true. You got to...
Yeah, it's empty. On the other hand, you have Brian Greene in the conversation. Absolutely. And he's just up the street up in Columbia. You're a dual professor, professor of physics and professor of mathematics. Wow. You get paid twice for that. But I go to no faculty meeting. I'm always having an other department. That's pretty cool. I'm sorry, I can't... I'm math today.
So, your author of several books until the end of time was at your more recent one? That's in my frustration. And it came out how long ago? 2020, right? That's a pandemic. What a moment. Have a book called until the end of time. And the one I think most people know if they know you at all, the elegant universe. There's nothing the fabric of the cosmos? Yeah. Absolutely. That's the next one. Hidden reality. That's about multiple universes.
Right. Man, so he's all up in it. I believe the fabric of the universe is a tweed. A tweed. A satin wreath. So welcome back to the show. This is like you're more than a three-piece, I think, at this point. Yeah. Oh, God. And you're involved in a lot of things. You're writing the other than being a professor. You're writing the books. And are we in the 15th year of your world science festival?
Yeah. I mean, years have you been doing it? That's right. You started 2008. So if you just subtract, it's even a little bit more, but the pandemic, changing things. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we're coming up to probably the 15th live event. Congratulations on that. Although it's a little audacious to hold it in New York and call it the world science festival. But we don't only have it in New York. We also have it in Australia. And we've had events in Amsterdam, in Moscow.
No, I got nothing. I can't Italy, Spain. I know. I try to. I try to. And by the way, New York is the world. Yeah. Let's be honest. I mean, for anybody out there listening, I'm sorry, you go to Paris, you find Parisians, you know, you go to England, you find the Brits, but you come to New York, you find everybody. Potatious would have been like the cosmic science. Yeah. Yeah. You know, then you would have had a point.
Congratulations on bringing it to the world. Thank you. We're taking it to the world. And what I enjoyed most about the several that I've attended is the effort to bring the arts into it. Yeah. Meaningful way. There is, you know, there are many artists who I would later learn or are not rare who are inspired by science and universe and discoveries. And they will compose dance and music. And and you have a mixture of these sessions.
We do. We do. I mean, the goal is to have science feel connected to everything that matters to us. And of course, culture is a big part of it. Culture arts matters. Everybody. In fact, now with AI, we're doing a program on the arts in the age of artificial intelligence. So how is AI changing how artists approach their work and how
scientists think about art? More unemployed artists. Yeah. Well, it's a funny thing. People say not paid. But when every new technology comes along, like the camera, people like, OK, now you know, need artists anymore because anyone can just click, but there are artists who use the camera to create things that your mortals can. And there are painters who actually take a picture and then they actually paint the picture as opposed to having someone sit for a portrait.
But that wasn't the biggest. The biggest thing. The biggest force operating was you no longer needed the artist to portray reality. Yeah. And of course, the camera capture that freedom off. Freed the artist to put to portray impression on reality. Exactly. It's not on. It's not on. It's what the scene feels like. It's interpretation. That has that matters. And huge.
I mean, that's what is the magic in so much expression. Right. It's what we do with it as opposed to just literally depicting what's out there. So there are many people who project that AI is going to create, you know, a new kind of art. Yeah. Just the way they came right. Just the way the camera is. So we still have to shake out. Yeah. I think AI will just accelerates creativity.
It doesn't replace it because what happens is you you have associations that are being made at a level that you as a human being would maybe eventually over a course of years, you might make those associations, but the computer can do it almost instantaneously. Right. And then you take that and you say, hmm, what does that mean to me? Okay. So it pushes you along. Yeah.
The flip side of that is if you have a computer creating so much, there's a lot of chaff, you know, that you have to separate out. So true. So yeah. Just chaff people and people. Yeah. You're born and raised in New York City. Yeah. Right across the street from where we are sitting right now. New Stuyveson High School, which is a selective high school that specialized in science in the way the Bronx High School of Science, especially in fact, they're rivals. They're like intellectual rival.
Why do you think that we've wrestled each other? I always lose them. You would not like a book if it didn't have equations. It's true. That's true. This is weird. Yeah. That has changed. I should say. That's a level. That's right now. And then, uh, it meant you thought more deeply about math than you thought about words. Yeah. But, but the one change I would make to that statement was it was when it came to books for a science class.
If the book was chock full of words, I feel like, oh, no, there's a lot of interpretation that's going to go into this particular science class. But it was chock full of equations. I was like, no, this is rigorous. This is going to be specific. And it's going to be something that I can nail because I don't have to interpret. I can just really engage with the equations. Wow. So in a history class or literature class, you, you, you would have been in tears. Well, for the past.
It was mostly just for science. But you're absolutely right. There is a different mindset that you bring to a history classroom English class, which I did not have a full appreciation for when I was younger. It's absolutely true. And as I got older and especially there's a moment when I graduated college and I said to myself, I think I just got a technical education as opposed to learning about the world and life and humanity.
And I went into kind of a tailspin for a little while because I was like, what did I do? And that really then changed it all for me. And words have become vital to the way I engage with the world. I mean, you know, for bestselling books, words matter. If you want to talk to other people who are not physicists. And if you want to really get the essence of what someone's about as opposed to quantifying some quality of abstract or objective reality.
Okay. All right. That's, I think that's a, that's an enlightened posture. Yeah. Got in there. Yeah. So I want to do a follow up. There was a question to our, our cosmic query and a cosmic queries that I didn't have an answer to. Oh, no. Here we go. Okay. Yeah. And I said, you know, I don't know what I got it. We're going to have to get Brian Greed to get the big guns in here. All right. If I remember the question, it was what happens if a quark falls into a black hole?
You have a quark pair. Yes. And we've only ever found them in quark pairs. Okay. And in a normal lab, if you take them and pull them apart. The strength, the force that wants to bring them together grows, which sounds weird when you use to gravity and other things where distance makes something weaker. But they're like really creepy identical twins. Like camera, maybe identical twins that are like super creepy.
They're like, they're on language. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Right. So, but it's kind of like a rubber band. Yeah. Because you stretch the rubber band, the force is greater. Yeah. The gluonic force between them. The gluonic force. Yeah. This is held together by gluonics. Okay. So now, as I pull it apart, there will be a point where it snaps. As I understand my nuclear physics, it snaps with the exact amount of energy you put in so that out of that energy creates two other quark.
Yeah. So now I have four quarks. Quark Antiquark pair is perfect. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now. So you want to see what happens. Now you send a pair of quarks down the black hole. It gets split. We make two other quarks. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And you keep doing this. And so wouldn't the quarks eat the entire gravitational field of the black hole? Yeah. And that wouldn't have a black hole left. You just have a ball of quarks.
You have to realize number one that we still don't know the under the physics of the singularity of black hole well enough. Why else did I invite you into the office? Yeah. So, so why would one day one day I pray that I'll sit here and tell you what happens at the singularity of black hole. But here's the thing. There is nobody on planet Earth who knows the answer unfortunately yet. Okay. When we follow the mathematics to the actual singularity of a black hole using Einstein general relativity.
Using Einstein general relativity and even some of the modifications that have come from more recent thinking we're still not there yet to truly understand what happens. And I should say there are ideas. There are ideas of things. I don't know if you've heard them call fuzz balls where there isn't actually a singularity. The black hole is actually a more fuzzy collection of matter that yeah. So there are ideas of people that make your math come out. Okay.
Make some math come out. Okay. But we're not sure what they say. Black holes that work. The singularity of the center of black hole is where God is dividing by zero. Yeah. That's a Stephen Hawking quipper. So I think you know, do you remember why if you divide by zero, it's not a. Right. Yeah. And it's actually in a sense it's literal because if you calculate what's known as the scalar curvature, which is a number that characterizes how warped a regional space is. Okay.
It does go to infinity as you go to the center of a black hole just like when you divide by zero, it goes to infinity. In fact, it goes to infinity is the sixth power of your distance. So we know very well how badly behaved the center of a black hole is. So go to infinity fast goes to infinity fast. That's crazy. Yeah. And so if you ask what really happens is something is just being crushed at the center.
We can't really answer yet. So is it possible that as a quirk anticorporic pair goes that the title forces will create additional quirk anticorporic. Sure. And then you have a public relation of course making me some sounds. Yeah. So there may be a cloud and there may be some sort of cloud that forms just before it hits. Ultimately, we believe it hits the singularity. Whatever that means because we don't really know what the singularity is.
If it's a fuzzball, you can have a fuzzball of quarks or or the fuzzball may have a slightly different impact on the quirk anticorporic pair. Maybe before influence on it. Yeah. Yeah. Impact. Yeah. That's right. Exactly. So it's a really good question, but it will have to fully await a full understanding of what truly happened. So the answer it wasn't just my personal ignorance. It's a total ignorance of all humans on earth.
Yeah. And there are many, many questions like that that we're still struggling with. Like we believe that when any information falls into a black hole, we believe that information does not get destroyed. But for a while, Stephen Hawking thought, no, any information ultimately hits the singularity and leaves our universe. He changes mine later in life, which just goes to show.
The thing is bet with. Yes. That's right. So they bet. I think an encyclopedia, you know, the source of information that we humans have created. So there. Thorne was one of the executive producers on interstellar. And he sort of spearheaded the effort among others, but he was the exponent to build the laser into a ferometry gravitational wave observatory like the detective colliding black holes, anyone the Nobel Prize for that. So he's significant in our field.
And I have at least a few books by him on my shelves. And he was clearly on a level of geek them where he bets encyclopedias. Yeah. But in terms of his book, he wrote in an encyclopedic book on gravity and black holes, which is about 1200 pages just filled with equations. And I loved it when I was a kid. But with the, the Mr. Thorne Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Got two copies of that in my office. Two copies. Yes. One across reference. One of those mine and the other one belonged to my wife.
Oh, that's so cool. We met in relativity class. Really taught by John Wheeler. What? Really? Yes. You took it. Well, did you have any from? Yes, I did. That is amazing. Wow. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So John Wheeler is one of the authors of this Mr. Thorne Wheeler. And a missing her thought physics at University, Maryland. Charles, Mr. Charles, Mr. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I want to think of it as a quark catastrophe.
Yeah. That would happen in the center of the black hole. The trouble with quarks. They're like tribbles. By the way, there's a previous. And for physics geeking out here, right? There's a previous time. Was it a hundred years, 110 years ago? With something called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Yeah. Do you remember that? I remember it. Well, I wasn't there. But I learned about it. Yeah. This is this is the start of quantum physics. Yeah. It had to predate 1900. Right.
A predated plank max plank. Oh, okay. Because there was an equation that would show how much energy would come from glowing objects. Okay. And how much energy of a certain wavelength of light and then another wavelength. And so there'd be the spectrum of what it gives you. Okay. And if you follow that equation to higher and higher energies, it blows up. And it's called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Nice. Now, we knew that's not happening in the actual universe. Right.
But we had no theoretical understanding of why the actual universe was not doing what our equation said. So we knew something was missing. Okay. And what was the max plank comes along? Finish the story. Yes. A max plank comes along. And he suggests an idea that he never fully believed. This is interesting.
He suggests that maybe the energy only comes in packets of certain quantized sizes. And therefore your calculation of the amount of energy was biased by assuming that energy could come in arbitrarily large or small amounts. If you assume it only comes in packets of a minimum size, then the total energy inside that cavity is actually. And drops off and in degrees with experiments. Right. But the weird thing is.
He got an equation. The equation is like, holy shit. That would come out of someone's head. Right. To make this happen. Yeah. It's got an exponential. And an exponential has interesting properties where it goes up. And then it comes down again. If it's a negative exponent. I mean, there's a fun math in there. Exactly. And was it just a fitting function? Or did he actually have deep physics insight?
He had a model in mind. He really quantized the energy. He broke it up into little bits and redid the calculation. And that's what came out. But then later on, he never fully believed that energy in light in photons, as we now call it, did come in little packets. Right. He said, sure, the math seems to describe it. But I'm not willing to go to that next up of the scribing of full reality to it.
And so it's really Einstein who came along and came up with the idea of photons more particularly with the photoelectric effect. And that's probably wins a Nobel Prize. Many people think he won the prize for special relativity or general relativity. No. My boy, she could have eight Nobel Prizes is Nobel Prizes or for what he's least famous for. Right. Right. A prep. That's his guess. That's straight up.
But people winning Nobel Prizes for discovering things that he predicted. Right. So if you add everything he predicted to the Nobel Prize count plus what everything if they give out Nobel Prizes for everything you did, I give him eight Nobel Prizes. What would you give him? Well, certainly gravitational waves. Although again, which he didn't fully believe it, but it comes right out of his 1916 and 1919.
I give him a Nobel Prize for everything people discovered based on his stuff. Well, then it's kind of everything. Persons of the Nobel Prize were receiving Nobel Prize. It's like that, but it's funny. First, first, first, second, second, third, third, third, third, third, yeah. Every Nobel Prize is Albert Einstein. That's the answer right there. So of course, since if energy is quantized, thus we is born the branch of physics called quantum mechanics.
And that probably has had the greatest impact on life as we know. That was the year 1900. Yeah. Well, 1905 is when Einstein writes his paper on the idea of photons, but Max Planck, you're right. I was clean clean. I started a new century. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before they even had calculators. Oh, was that really? Was it that far back? Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support Star Talk on Patreon.
This is Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. We're old enough to remember when the United States lost the most powerful collider in the world. The superconducting super collider, which they already there was money allocated. They started digging a hole. It was a 200 miles circumference or something huge and superconducting. It was going to use superconducting magnets, which had very powerful magnetic fields.
Because that was coming of age at the time, it was going to push the frontier. My analysis, if you read the report, well, the recost overruns. We have too many other priorities here. We're going to zero the budget for the superconducting super collider. You read their points. We have other priorities. This is going to be built in Texas. If we're going to build the space station, which is based in Houston, Texas is already getting a chunk of change.
We want all this happen between 1989 and 1992, when the debates and then they zeroed the budget. What else was happening over those years? Let me think. Oh my gosh. Peace broke out in Europe. No longer do we need the physicists to protect us from the evil, godless communists. That's what I think was the subtext of that story. Because no other particle accelerator was ever canceled for any reason that was designed conceived and built in the 20th century.
So if you grant me one conspiracy theory, that's the grant me that. But then you think they kept the space station because that was the place where the new battles might be wage. Possibly. Yes. So what we're looking at right now, when you think about it. Yeah, with the space force. So that's where I am on that. But I say this only to note that once that got canceled the center of mass of particle physics went across the pond to Europe. And then Surn, the European center of physics.
Are you sure somewhere in there? Yeah. It's a French acronym when the words are in the French order or something. That's it. It goes there. And I think our lawmakers don't really understand that if we don't do the physics, someone else can and will. We don't own all access to future discoveries of science. And so now Europe does it. And so they went ahead, build a large Hadron collider. And they successfully found the Higgs boson, the big Holy Grail July 4th 2012. Look at that.
Was it July 4th? That's sticking to us. Look at that. Really was. And you know, they really found it on June 20th. You know, they found it on June 28th. And they were like, guys, we're going to sit on this for a few days. Yeah. But there are a lot of Americans involved in the lot of things. But just to say, but yes, exactly right. Yeah. Even Peter Higgs, is he American? Peter Higgs was Scottish. I would think, you know, I think it's a man, but although I think he was at a
man, but I don't think it was guys. Maybe it was English. You know, I don't know. But yeah, you know, he predicted its existence. And then it was discovered. And at the announcement, he saw tears welling in this man's eyes who've been waiting decades for this idea that at first nobody believed right ultimately was accepted theoretically, but it was proven experimentally finally. And what is the Higgs boson exactly of the particle categories? One of them is bosons.
Right. Okay. And bosons are force mitigating particles. Okay. Okay. So, and when we think of a force action at a distance, there's a way to think about that in terms of the particle that in the category particles is a boson. One of the bosons is this Higgs boson, which has what properties? Well, it has. Was I right? Yes, very good. Thank you. Yes, it was very good. No, no. It's okay. Can I answer?
Can I answer? Can I answer? Please. It's what endows other particles, even itself actually, with mass. Interesting. Now, where does that come from? Well, just to take, you know, the idea, it starts with the idea of a field. That's how you get rid of this idea of action at a distance. You imagine that space is filled with stuff. You don't invent a field? I really don't. Michael Faraday. Oh, really? Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
I think what a leap that is. Yeah, it is. It's an insane leap. Right. If you're laughing, there's nothing there. Yeah. You're looking at nothing. You're seeing. And you're causiting that there is something there. That's an amazing thing. But he was talking electric and magnetic fields. Right. What Higgs is talking about is a new field called the Higgs field, which he didn't call that. That's what we call it. So it's just feel that fill space. And as particles,
otherwise would be massless. As they try to go through space, they have to burrow through the Higgs field. And that creates a kind of drag force on them, which is what imparts the mass that they have. Okay. And that's the field. Now, what's the particle? Well, if you have this field, in principle, if you hit it hard enough, like hitting the surface of water, you can cause little particles of the field to spray out. Right. And that's what the Large Hadron Collider did.
It slammed proton against proton. And that way jostled the Higgs field and caused a little droplet of it to break free. And that's the Higgs particle. Oh my God. So you're seeing the actual piece of the field. Yes. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. So the Higgs field generated via E. Coles MC squared. Yes. That's its own particle of its own. That's amazing. That's right. It's the old quote. Or you can say it's a quantity to go back to the other language.
It's a quanta of the Higgs field. Like the photon is the quanta of the electric magnetic field. Yes. That's amazing. It's amazing. So, okay. Okay. Now I get it. So it's not the particle that you're actually seeing. It's not the particle that is imbued with mass itself. It is the thing on which the particle is traveling, the field, the medium itself. Boom. It kind of splashes apart for a quick second. And then that itself becomes a particle and has mass. Holy. That's amazing. That is amazing.
Chuck just blew a gas. Oh my God. That's crazy. That is insane. This is the first time I've actually really understood. Call the doctor. That's because. Oh my God. That's so freaking crazy. Oh my God. A week later, he's there in bed still. I was this big. That is fantastic. So my favorite analog to this is whenever I explain the Higgs field to people, I say it's like a Hollywood party. Okay. So there are people in the party. Right. And the bar is at the back of the wall.
Okay. And if no one knows you and you walk into this party. That's my experience. You have near zero resistance to movement through that party. So you have a very low, if not zero party mass. Exactly. Okay. Because you have no. You get into the bar right away. You get in the bar right away. So your inertia, it knows no resistance there. Whereas beyond say walks in, everybody will crowd around here. And you can only make very small steps towards the bar. Right. She has a very high party mass.
Is that fair? That's it. That's the party field. The party field. And if you slap all those party doors, you can slap off one of them. That's the party. Somebody from the behind. Somebody from the behind. Yes. Party door. Oh, there it is. All right. So I learned not from you. And I'm disappointed because I thought you would have told me the whole story. Yes. I come to you for these frontier conversations that the Higgs mass that a particle would have is only for free particles.
If a particle is in an atom, that I have not getting its mass from the field. I have told you this in the past, though, I absolutely have. But you're absolutely right. Absolutely right. So I'm a fat proton in a nucleus. I'm not getting my mass from the Higgs field. No, and that's why it's a really misleading notion that many people have. They think that all mass comes from the Higgs field. It is just the fundamental particles. And here's the thing.
If you were to go up into your particle data book, which I know you have a few copies lying around in here. Yeah. If you look up the masses of the quarks, the up quark and the down quark that make up a proton up up and the down, add up their masses. He said that quickly, about the down, that the nucleons have three quarks in them all bound together, making up the proton and the neutron. But they're different combinations of three quarks. This is good.
Tell them, so the quarks have charges, fractional charges. Yes. So watch this. Okay. So proton has a charge of plus one. All right. How do you get that from three quarks? Yeah, how do you do that? So give me. Give me. I have a two thirds and a two thirds and a minus one third. Two thirds, two thirds minus one third. So two thirds, two thirds is one and a third. And then a minus charge to bring it down one. So now, now, neutrons have charge quarks inside of them, but they don't have any charge.
So how do you get them? How do you get them? Let's hear it. It must be up two thirds down, one third down one third. Yeah. So if you have an up and then a down and down down, then you got a two thirds minus one third minus one third. Now, canceling out and so as a neutral thing, even though what's inside of it has charges. Right, but here's the thing. The point I want to make those, if you add up the masses of those quarks, they're much less than the mass of the proton. So what's going on here?
They make up the proton and yet the proton is much heavier than its ingredients. Right. Answer is there's another contribution to the mass, which is nothing to do with the Higgs field, which is the thing we're talking about before the energy in the glue. Oh, that's the core. The glue on the core. The glue on the core. The energy holding them together equals MC squared.
There's mass associated with that energy and most of the mass of the proton is coming from the glue that's holding the quarks together. That's insane. So let's take a neutron, which has a half life in minutes, like 15 minutes of memory serves. And after that amount of time, half the neutrons will have decayed into a proton, if let's say if it's a regular proton, and then an electron. And an anti-neutrino. And an anti-neutrino.
If you add up the masses of those, don't you recover the mass of the proton? As long as you take in kinetic energy into a cat and all this, too. Because they fly away, but yes, but yes. So the energy budget is all there. It's all there. Okay. Look at that. So everything is conserved. Yeah, for all the time. And in fact, the way the neutrino was predicted was from looking at these particle decays and finding that the energy budget was not adding up.
And so the idea was, maybe there's an invisible particle that's carrying away some additional energy. Was it a megal Fermi? Yes. So what I like about this is, these like, look folks, I can't explain this. Let's make some shit up. Yeah. But geniuses make up shit that's right. That's a clope. That's a bumper straight there. That's it. I'm getting a T-shirt. I'm getting a T-shirt. That's awesome. That's great. That's what Carl Sagan was famous for saying. They laughed at Einstein.
They laughed at, you know, all these people with these great ideas. And he said, they also laughed at Bose, oh, the clown. Just because people laugh doesn't mean they're going to be wrong. Right. He makes it up and then everyone starts looking for it. And it's this highly elusive particle that has no charge. Because we knew all the charges had already balanced in the lab. It's got no charge but it's carrying away energy and no one has detected it. And he was Italian, right?
So, neutrino is like little neutral neutral neutral neutral. It was a neutral one, I think. Oh, that means you're right, little neutral one. Yeah, right. And so that's the only thing that allows me to, okay, I'm not going to get in your way. When people saying dark matter, it's some elusive particle that we can't detect. That's accounting for the extra gravity. And it's a particle we haven't found the particle yet. And I'm thinking that's intellectually lazy, but it's no different than neutrino.
And then neutrino. So that's why I cut it some slack, more slack than I know otherwise would. Now, we still need to find it. We still haven't found it. Yeah, yeah. It's a particle we haven't found. Yeah, right. So, what's your betting man? Is it a particle? Is it something else? Look, I'm relatively conservative when it comes to these things. So, I think that it's likely to be a particle. But look, we've been down that road before. We've been down that road before.
It fits in so well to our theoretical framework. You have a slot for a dark matter particle? Well, the amazing thing is, and here's where you're going to come back at me and say, this should undercut my confidence. When you look at a theory called super symmetry that I've spent a long time working on, within this theory, which goes beyond what we know about particle physics, for reasons that are well-motivated. Because that's a ordinary symmetry. That's right.
It takes the symmetries that we have, and it takes them one step further, and it's the only step further that you could possibly go. So, of course, nature must make use of this final symmetry principle. Why else would it exist? That's the thinking that we've had. Wait, just let me back up for a minute. Yeah. So, as I was learning particle physics, I was intrigued to recognize that you have your electron, you have your photon, you have your neutrino, and these other sort of basic particles.
And they exist in our world that we experience. If you up the energy knob of their particles manifest, there's a version of the electron that manifests only in these higher energy levels, and it's called the muon. Right. And so, there's a whole layer of particles sitting above the ones that are in our world. Right. So, there's three of these layers. Tell me the three electrons, you get the electron muon in the tau. The tau. Yeah. Okay. And there's a neutron neutrino. There's a muon neutrino.
There's a tau neutrino. So, now I have three layers here, and you have access to them in your particle accelerators, because it takes a lot of energy, and you can get there. Yeah. Okay. Now, what is super symmetry with this packet? Super symmetry says that. This package is beautiful and confirmed. And tell me the three, the three force carriers, we have a photon. You got the photon, then you got the gluon, the W and Z bosons, or the weak nuclear force. Okay. And those are the three force.
Discover why both of them are. Right. Yeah. Actually, both. Yeah. It's an Indian physicist. Yes, absolutely. And then for the quarks, you got the up and the down that we spoke about. Right. You got the charm, the strange, you got the top and the bottom. Right. So again, they come in three pairs or two. Two pairs or two. Yeah. Super symmetry says, take all of those particles and double them. And then another shadow version of all of those particles. A shadow governing system. For the electron.
No. This is the dip state. This is the dip state. This is the dip state. This is the dip state. This is the dip state. This is the dip state. The puppet master. The quantum leap state. Yeah. Where were it? So I didn't notice the entire set of particles would have a counterpart in this super symmetric place. So for the electron, you have the super symmetric electron. For the quarks, you have squarps. For neutrinos, you have neutrinos. People just making sure they don't get a little bit of that.
You run out and you have to have the white cartoon. But here's the thing. This is all mathematically motivated by an completely compelling rationale. So this is not pulled out of thin air. We have our universe three ways, a three layer cake. And there's a whole other cake. Where does that live? With us, but we believe they're more massive, which is why we wanted to build the superconducting super collider to try to find them. Now we've looked for these at the large high-trot massive.
Why can't they, right here in front of our faces? They typically have short lifetime. So they'll decay into lighter particles. But the lightest of the super symmetric particles would not decay. And therefore it should be all around us. Tell them why the lightest one would not decay. If it's the lightest one, when it decays the decay products have to be lighter than it. Okay. And so if it's the lightest one subject to a certain. It's not a regular.
No, no, no. It's the same reason why you can have an energy field of any kind. And you will not make particles out of that. Right. Unless the energy available is higher than the E equals MC squared of two electrons. Right. Because it has to make them in pairs. Okay. Because it's a charge. It's a charge because it pluss in the rightness. Right. And so an electron is the lightest physical particle. Right. So nothing's happening. That's what's not happening around us right now.
Yeah. It's the lightest charge particle. So it has to talk the electromagnetic field. There it is. That's why light coming from lights is not just making particles. It doesn't have enough energy. Right. If X-rays started coming out of there, X-rays, high energy, X-rays, you can pop electrons into existence. Right. Because they're stepping down so they leave something. The energy of the field is big enough to create the electron and anti-electron. And so it will pair, produce them.
In fact, electron microscopes are enabled by X-rays creating them. And the wavelength of X-rays is so tiny that you can see tiny detail. That's, it's tinier than the detail. You can't have resolution higher than the wavelength of light that you're using to see it. Right. Right. Now back to dark matter, just to finish his point. So this is a whole massive other layer cake. You're telling me that is the mass of the dark matter. Well, the lightest super symmetric particle would be stable.
Should be around us. That's what it was. So make it filling space. Right. And here's the beautiful thing. Here's the beautiful, this will blow your mind. This will blow your mind. This will blow your mind. This will blow your mind. When you do the calculation of how much of this lightest super symmetric particle should be left over since the big bang, it exactly matches what you need to be the dark matter. It comes in the right abundance. Hey. And yet we've not found it.
And it may be the wrong answer. So sometimes things that just seem so deeply compelling are wrong, but we don't know yet. Wow. So do you know enough in the theory of these particles to predict how you should detect it? Yes. So do you know what the theory is? What is the lightest super symmetric particle on the flavor of the super symmetric theory you're looking at? But in any given version, yes. You know exactly how the particle interacts.
Okay, so now you have everybody's favorite flavor of the theorists come out with their competing models. But still, they've got to have one of these particles. Okay. Yes. So now I'm an experimentalist. And it's how many tests for this one. I don't find it. Yeah. Let me test for that one. I don't find it. So it's not looking good. Yeah, I agree. Okay. I agree. But if you're a student, it was almost a foregone conclusion that you just had to look for it. You'd find it.
This is a dark matter because super symmetry also solves other problems, a so-called hierarchy problem. It's of the dark matter problem. It's a beautiful idea that seems perhaps not to be right now. It's not fully ruled out yet, but that may be where we're going. Who's the one that said, the great tragedy in science, a beautiful theory, a slain by some fact? Yeah. Somebody said I agree. Yeah. Friday is a jack-loaded maybe. I have not been the same since we have lunch months ago.
And you explained to me, and I've said it here, that there are ideas percolating that the fabric of space time might be woven by wormholes that connect the virtual particle pairs that come in and out of existence. And that if they're connected by wormholes rather than just some field, then the wormhole is an actual structural texture of the universe. Yeah. In fact, the other way. I'm sorry. The first of all, I need some weed to even deal with this.
Because if I'm trying to figure out what you just said, because it's so freaking, I mean, it really is just crazy. Well, when it's back up, the vacuum of space is not a vacuum. Because quantum physics requires what? There's all sorts of uncertainty, and that uncertainty means that there's fluctuations, and therefore there are particle antiparticle pairs, there's energy fluctuations, there's field fluctuations. That's a roiling mess out there in the space. So there's no nothing.
There's no such thing as nothing. That's why it's uncertainty. That's why it's really nothing. There's truly nothing. We couldn't have uncertainty. So the uncertainty is, gives us the fact that we do have virtual particles. We know that they popped in and out of existence. Well, what you're trying to tell me. I think it's not that we know they're there. No one denies it because it's completely consistent.
Well, I said, well, the chasmere force, where you actually put two metal plates in and otherwise empty space, they should simply sit there. They're drawn together, and our best explanation is it's the virtual pairs of particles that the fluctuating fillers have fallen into. Well, she starts refnighting there. This is a wonder. So you take two exactly parallel plates. Okay. And evacuate what's in between them. In between them. The best vacuum you can muster. Then you slowly move them together.
Right. And then you have to point within which a whole other force kicks in. That's right. And it's not the gravitational force. It's not a electromagnetic force. Rather, it's a force that comes from the chasmere field, which is basically- They come to the price? The chasmere? Well, 1948 is when it was discovered. Okay. But I just gave it a lot. Yeah, definitely deserve one. That's insane.
It's an imbalance between the fluctuations of uncertainty within the place and the fluctuations of uncertainty outside the place. And it's that imbalance. Great. It's a force. Yeah. Okay. So that's how we get the particles in the vacuum of space. Okay. So now, why a- What compels you to say wormhole rather than just a field? Well, because it really comes from the idea of quantum entanglement.
What we find is that entanglement, which normally we think of as particle pairs, but now we're finding that the vacuum of space may be stitched together by the threads of quantum entanglement itself. So deep down within the substrate of reality, it may all be stitched together by quantum entanglement. And then other work shows us that quantum entanglement connecting to particles is just like a wormhole going from one to the other. Because what happens in one happens to the other instantly.
Yes. And that means they're touching each other connected in some weird way. And entanglement is one language, but we believe wormholes may be the general relativistic version of that quantum language. So it's like a little quantum net holding the whole universe together. Exactly right. Because we find, we find mathematically, if we cut the threads of quantum entanglement, which we can do mathematically, space falls apart. It discretizes into little tiny pieces and it just disappears.
I gotta go. I need you to the end of this. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's not just that there's a field there. It's the fact that they were quantum entangled that makes the wormhole model compelling. Yeah, but I would say you don't even need the particle pairs. It's as if the entanglement is entangling regions of space. So space itself has a fundamental substrate woven by these threads of quantum connection.
Now look, it's mathematical, but it comes out of our cutting edge ideas. It all makes sense. It just makes sense. He's not pulling out of his ass. Right. He's saying the math. The math works. And he started out saying, the man boy loves the math. So now, last thing. Yeah. Explain why you need more than four dimensions for your string theory universe. Well, it's a very concrete explanation.
When we look at the equations of string theory, there's a consistency equation where something must equal zero, the math doesn't work. That's something is a product of two things. One term is really complicated. It's never zero. The other term is a number of dimensions minus 10. The only way to get it to be equal to zero is for D to be equal to 10. That's it. I am not joking. Where the constraint of extra dimensions comes from in string theory. The math is forcing our hands. Forces your hand.
And then you say, well, let me take this math here. Is it one thing you could say as well? If it's not D equals four, three space and one time throw the theory away. Others of us will say, hey, let's consider the possibility of a short. Yeah, exactly. So why should these three dimensions of space be the only ones? We only are aware of them because they're big enough that we can be directly aware of them with these really faulty sensors that we have.
If it's only your sensors that limit that awareness, why not in principle, can we build something that can gain access to these higher dimensions? Yeah, so there are experiments on the table. Some have been carried out, but more precise ones may be done where you study Newton's law of gravity. Why is Newton's law go like one over R squared? Why do we teach our KGM over R squared? It's a geometric sphere in three dimensions of space.
Yes. Look at that sphere in four or five or six dimensions and the two in Newton's law won't be a two. No. It'll be a bigger number. The fall off will be differently. And so look at the gravitational force on very small distances. Look for a deviation from the one over R squared that Isaac Newton told us about in the late 16 hours. Okay, because that's only in our dimensional measurement of it. Yes. Okay, because I'd ask you again over that same lunch. Yeah. Why do we have lunch? I forgot.
We're hungry. We're just catching up. It's my annual fix with my annual Brian Green infusion. It was, could dark matter be ordinary matter with ordinary gravity in a parallel universe? Because for reasons I don't understand the math of the field theory equations of, you were telling me that electromagnetic energy cannot escape our space time, but gravity can. A certain model called the brain universe where our universe, it comes out as a membrane. Yeah, it's a membrane.
Our universe is like a four dimensional membrane floating in a higher dimensional universe. Okay. It might have other membranes. Higher dimensional membranes. Yes. And those other membranes like parallel to us like two slices of bread and a big loaf of bread. I like it. So one slice of bread is some other membrane universe. Yeah. Hours is this one, but it's one. It's one membrane. It's one membrane. Gravity could leak out of one into the other. Or it could just be the, yeah, that's right.
So the gravitational pull, yeah. So I'm getting it. So if the other universe has six times, nobody see, this is where you corrected me. Because I was thinking because we have six times as much force of gravity operating in the universe as matter and energy can account for it. Okay. It's a factor of six.
Right. So I was saying why isn't it just a parallel universe that has six times the mass and it's leakage into our universe and we're trying to feel the elephant trying to figure out what it is, but it says regular matter in another universe whose gravity leaked. But then you said if it's in another membrane, it's going to be dropping off faster than one over R squared. Yeah. Like one over R cubed. There's some higher dimension. Yeah. And if that's the case, it has to be way more than six times.
But you could imagine rigging it so that it would have the right amount. Yes. And people have studied this and it's hard to make these theories work in detail. But in principle, it's an idea that's absolutely worthy of investigating because that's one way to make it invisible. Just put it in another membrane. And then we can still calculate with it. It's not a problem. Right. Yeah. That's crazy. Oh, man. All right. I don't know what to believe about anything. Nothing is real.
Nothing is real man. Dark energy. I'm curious about this because it was a natural arithmetic element of Einstein's equations. It's like an integration constant as I understood it. You've had the cosmological constants? The cosmological constant in his equations that enabled the Monterey to calculate that the universe is either expanding or with the universe not static. And so there's a term there.
And if you've had calculus, you might remember there's a constant of integration often at just zero and you can ignore it. But when we were in graduate school, I'm a little older than you. When we were in graduate school, we always recognized we paid homage to that constant but said, let's assume it's zero. If this term existed, it would mean there was a force operating in the universe opposite that of gravity.
Depending on the sign of the cosmological constant, but yes, because you have either sign. Okay. With gravity or against it. But if we had a static universe, it would be something just holding up the universe against the collapse of gravity. Exactly. Which is why Einstein. And we didn't have any reason to think it so it could be zero. And we just, we always had to go through that portal. We say, here it is, we set it to zero and move on. Exactly. Then it gets discovered.
Yeah. Okay. Dark energy gets discovered in 1998. Yeah. It gets the Nobel Prize using quantum physics, which has done so well by us. Yeah. And the successful theory ever about anything fails in its attempt to predict the amount of dark energy in the universe. It fails badly by a factor. What's up with that Brian? Of a Google. Wow. By a factor of a year than a Google. Ten to the, ten to the, ten to the, it's like ten to a hundred twenty three. A hundred. The goal is ten to the hundred.
Yeah. It gets the wrong answer by the biggest amount ever in a mismatch between theory and observation. Yeah. Where are we with the dark energy theorists? Well, look, what this is showing us is that quantum mechanics is incredibly successful. When you apply it to the electromagnetic force, to the weak nuclear force, to the strong nuclear force, but we've long known that when you apply it to gravity, something goes wrong. Something changes. This is the motivation for string theory.
And this is the motivation for trying to go beyond conventional approaches. And so you're absolutely right. This is the clearest signal that something is wrong. Now here's, I think, I think that's something wrong. That's actually a good thing. Well, it's an opportunity. Yeah. Opportunity, that's the way things are. Yeah, it's a huge opportunity. Yeah, the press always says, oh, scientists are angry or this? No, we're delighted. Right. Something breaks. Oh my gosh, it's a new thing. Exactly.
That's right. And so I would say, my guess where we're going is, and many of my colleagues agree with me, that you can't quantize gravity. The way you had to quantize Faraday and Maxwell's electromagnetism, or the way you had to quantize the weak or strong nuclear forces. It may be that gravity and quantum mechanics are already so intimately connected that it's a completely different mindset when you approach them. You don't take the rules of quantum mechanics and slap them onto gravity.
That gets you the wrong answer. That's the wrong approach. In fact, this idea of entanglement and wormholes suggests that gravity and quantum mechanics are already there. They're already there. That makes sense. They already have the shotgun wedding set. Exactly. So you just need to understand that melding better, and when you do, perhaps you'll be able to do a calculation of a cosmological constant and get the right answer. Right.
Now, another answer might be, maybe the cosmological constant is not a constant, right? There's a reason they don't know. Yeah. Maybe it's changing over time. And so you don't actually calculate the number. You just need to understand the dynamical process. However, doesn't the math in general relativity require that it be constant? No. That's how it came out of the integral. There can be a constant, but it doesn't have to be the only contribution that looks like that constant.
And the other contribution, but I can change over time. What do you say there? It can be a constant, but it doesn't have to look like, and then- No, it's not the only contribution to that term. So you can have a field that slowly varies over time, and that field may dominate- Is that field as meta to that equation? Yes. It is meta to that equation. Absolutely. So Einstein did not talk about that field. No, he wasn't there. You're right. And he did talk about the constant because you're right.
It's just an integration constant. It's an integration constant, right? It's an integration constant, right? It's a constant, right? Yes. So if in fact, it needs to modify, because that's how they reconcile this tension in the age of the universe. Yes. In my day, we didn't know it by a factor of two. Now people are- There's a 10% difference. Yes. It's more than 6,000 years. That's what you're saying. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yes, yes, yes.
When Noah's flawed, they're going to- So- To relieve the tension as we describe it, this was a 10%, some single digit percent. Uncertainty of the age of the universe. In fact, in not uncertainty, these two methods have very small, tight uncertainties that do not overlap. Yeah. That's why everyone is freaking out. And as I learned recently, you can resolve that by allowing the cosmological constant to vary in some way, but that's a meta-variation on top of- Yes.
Yeah, no, this Hubble tension that people are struggling with today is exactly something that also may point toward a dynamical value. So we'll see. Right. Yes, there's true tests of a version of gravity that you fully understand with quantum mechanics included would be a calculation of the cosmological constant and- Are you and your people smart enough to get this figured out? I don't think so. And that's social. Good answer. Because you know, I've- I've dragged you over the cold about that.
Because I've told- Look, Einstein came up with general relativity in 10 years by himself. You strength theorists as dozens of you have been working on this for decades. Either you're all wrong or you're all just too stupid to figure it out. And it's probably a combination. Oh. Love you, man. Brian, thanks for coming back. I'm just a start talk. It's good, Chuck. It's still great. Chuck, we'll find you in the hospital. Bless you, man. I'm completely fried right now. I'm fried.
Thanks for taking us out. Let me remind us all. We are in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. The Cosmic crib. The Cosmic crib. And after this conversation we just had, I delight in realizing and celebrating the fact that just a few pounds of organic matter inside of our heads can not only contemplate but figure out how the universe works. And yes, we slab a long way to go. And we don't even know how long a way to go remains in front of us.
But the distance we've come thus far gives us everything that we call civilization. And it's the power of mind over the mysteries of the universe. And that is a product of the eternal curiosity expressed by our species. Beginning in childhood, continuing for some into adulthood, we call them scientists. Those who never lost that childhood curiosity, brain green, of course, among them.
So I'd like to just give a shout out to our species for all it is wondered as we looked up at night, all that we have discovered and all that we have yet to figure out. That is a cosmic perspective. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Thank you for joining us.