Cosmic Queries – Grabby Aliens with Charles Liu

Gary, you jumped into the quantum soup on this one.

We did.

Add some flavor to it.

Add some flavor.

And I’ve learned a little more.

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

Yes.

We always learn something, we got the geek in chief.

I learned that it’s delicious with crackers.

Coming up on Special Edition.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Special Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

And it being Special Edition means we got Gary O’Reilly.

Gary, in the house.

Hey, yes, in the house.

In the house.

Former soccer pro, love your wiki page with your sexy legs.

You’re looking too much.

Stop it.

Excellent.

Chuck Nice, always, man.

Hey, what’s happening, guys?

Yeah.

All right.

So we brought in our geek in chief for this.

A returning hero.

A returning…

Charles Liu, Charles, welcome back.

Thank you so much.

You’ve got your own podcast.

Yes.

The Lunaverse.

The Lunaverse.

That’s clever.

That’s clever.

Is that a play on Luna as in moon too?

I mean…

I can’t take credit for it.

Oh, you didn’t take credit for it?

No, no, no.

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

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

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

And I was like, what?

And that’s it.

Don’t overthink it.

Okay, so compared to your kid…

Wait, and then Chuck went like this.

It’s a dumb idea.

And then he named it the Loonaverse.

I said no such thing.

I just sort of said, wow.

So I happen to know your wife is really smart.

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

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

Yeah.

And it is a great privilege to be able to say that.

You know what Michael Dell said?

What?

The day you wake up and you’re the smartest person in the room?

Right.

Change rooms.

Change rooms.

Very, very better.

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

Today, I am mostly wearing…

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

What are you wearing?

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

Could you pull your smartphone out of your groin?

That’s not my smartphone, Neil.

What do we got?

What’s…

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

And I don’t believe in showering.

I do that once a week.

And that’s it, baby.

Only if necessary.

And that’s only if necessary.

And so, you know, you guys changed.

And so, I’m like…

You did not change.

I’m not changing.

We look clean.

Yeah, you look clean.

And you know…

You still got your leg braces on?

Those aren’t braces.

Those are…

What do you call them?

Augmentations that were placed in me by DARPA.

Yes, that’s the name.

You are now a superior augmented human being.

I am.

That’s right.

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

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

That’s amazing.

And DARPA, Defense Advanced Projects Research…

Agency?

Defense Advanced Projects Research.

So this is a branch of the military.

Yes, it is.

But people might not know, where there’s a subset of budget that goes to very high-risk projects that probably won’t work.

But if they do work, they’ll be amazing.

Yeah.

And nothing is higher risk than Chuck Nice.

So they expect a high percentage of the proposals to actually…

Not work to fail.

And they don’t care.

Because the idea is the one that works is going to make us badass.

Gary, what did you put together for them?

All right.

So these are questions from our Patreon listeners.

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

Boundless, yes.

So let’s kick it off.

So these are Cosmic Queries.

For sure it’s a Cosmic Queries.

It’s a grab bag.

And we had 42 pages of questions.

Well, we better shut up and get to it.

But they’re not all on there, but thank you so much for your curiosities.

Right, let’s start with Danielle’s.

Hello, Neil, Dr.

Liu, Gary, and of course, Lord Nice.

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

I’d love that.

Would a connection like that affect quantum entanglement?

Over to you, gentlemen.

Oh, my God.

I thought you were going to take that.

Oh, yeah.

I’ll see how well you do.

I’m going to defer to Charles, but I’m going to introduce this, okay?

Teach Charles up.

Because we see particles popping in and out of existence and tunneling through space and time, and we’re trying to make sense of it.

But I don’t see why a higher dimension wouldn’t help that out.

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

You know some of my friends, I see.

They have no depth.

Yeah, no depth at all.

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

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

And we get our top scientist to analyze this.

Where did this come from?

What is it?

What’s happening?

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

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

Because the first contact is the point.

And then there’s this circle.

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

But here we are touching, we’re thinking there’s something magical.

And from three dimensions, it’s completely simple.

So Charles, this question sounds like, let’s up the game.

Can we explain all this mystical, magical, quantum spookiness by just its ordinary people in four dimensions playing marbles?

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

It’s called string theory.

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

And interactions on those other dimensions like the sphere with that particle, but imagine two spheres interacting not on our two-dimensional world.

And bingo, you have additional weird things happening.

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

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

Now, the problem is…

How do you test for that?

Right.

We can’t have any good experiments.

Because we can’t access those dimensions.

And there are so many…

And we never will, thinking that way, Chuck.

Don’t be such a downer.

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

So we don’t want that.

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

So that’s what’s going on here.

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

Generally speaking, that’s right.

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

Just the philosophical…

I’ll tell you exactly what he said.

He said, multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity.

Right.

That’s the actual quote from Occam.

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

Right.

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

That’s only a philosophical idea.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s not exactly confirmed in every instance.

Nature doesn’t have to obey you in that regard.

So in this instance, that’s right, it could well be that that helps to explain quantum entanglement.

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

And we’re still working on that.

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

Yeah, but there’s still many, many questions about it.

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

Or it could be like when Einstein did general relativity, where he was solving some other problem, and bada-bing, the mysteries of Mercury’s orbit were solved overnight.

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

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

And so, it became a side benefit of it.

And one thing about your negativity, okay?

I feel a read coming on.

So, I was on the Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox in London.

That’s your stop in, Greg.

How many monkeys are in an Infinite Monkey Cage?

Let me guess.

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

It was a radio show.

And so, we were talking about wormholes.

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

And he jumps in and says, well, wormhole is not stable.

It’ll collapse immediately.

So, we need to think about it.

Someone from the audience, a Brit, said, that’s what distinguishes Americans from us Brits.

They’re always so positive about what can be solved.

We’re always saying what can’t happen.

And that shut them up.

That’s culturally accurate.

Not always, but on a number of occasions, you will find an American positivity against a British, mm.

Yeah, so we go there.

I mean, it has its drawbacks, you know, when it’s just like, I’m the biggest, the best.

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

Keep going.

All right, Chuck, you want to hit the same question?

Chuck’s got them too.

This is Ryan Harris, who says, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nice, Geek and Professor Liu, and Gary, Ryan Harris from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

Given the laws of science, if they hold true, when it comes to quantum entanglement, staying on the subject, would there not be some sort of energy slash force being exerted slash used by entangled particles?

And can it be qualified as of present?

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

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

They’re connected.

Something’s got to, some clock is ticking.

Something should be measurable from that.

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

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

But that’s a classical bias.

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

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

But I have to clarify, we understand that it happens and we can measure that it happens.

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

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

Because this person…

Just because you don’t know, don’t assume everyone else in our audience doesn’t know.

Okay, well, somebody should tell me then.

It’s a perfectly legitimate question because even if you ask, say, 50 quantum physicists, you might get 51 different answers as to what quantum entanglement really is.

Okay, that I did not know.

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

Same sort of situation, but the fundamentals, biologists know what life is when they see it.

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

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

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

You’re just stretching it.

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

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

They are still the same particle.

And that’s a quantum thing that you’re describing, not a classical thing.

Because classically, there’s nothing between them.

But I’m speaking with a classical brain to say that.

And we all do that.

It’s very, very hard for us, even those of us who have done a lot of work in quantum physics, to think that way.

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

So they have, each side took out some features of that same particle.

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

It sounds like you’ve done that.

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

That requires an additional assumption about classical physics of twin butts.

Yeah, interacting with quantum butts.

And then you have some real issues.

Do we get to the point where we say the universe is one single particle, and that’s just all of a sudden done its thing and it’s…

Great question.

We are definitely not all one particle, but the universe could be one single entity that contains a multitude of very, very small, more complex parts.

This is something that happens a lot.

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

But then we’ve learned since…

Well, the Greeks thought that.

Right.

We’ve learned since that atoms…

Atom means indivisible.

That word in Greek means indivisible.

We’ve learned since that atoms are made up of…

The Greeks any good at anything?

The Greeks sucked.

Those idiots.

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

No, they won the European Championship a few decades ago.

And that democracy thing is overrated.

You know.

Hello, I’m Finkie Broke Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’ll jump into the next question.

Let’s go for it.

Ezekiel Reeves.

Hello, Neil, Chuck, Gary and Lord Liu.

My name is Ezekiel from Wawa, Ontario.

I love this already.

It’s not Lord Liu.

It’s Geek and Chief Liu.

Okay, I accept.

No.

Any title.

No, I would just adjudicate titles here.

Okay, doctor.

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

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

Don’t you have four hours left?

I did not see that coming.

Oh, yeah.

No, no, no.

That’s great.

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

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

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

Now I want one.

Now you say it.

Yeah, right.

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

That has a whole bunch of stuff behind it, and the causality of it is dependent on everything from the goalie’s life experience to the muscular twitches of that very moment and everything in between.

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

Niels Bohr, a physicist from 100 years ago.

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

But we just cannot say, even now, we still don’t really understand what free will is.

The definition of it varies from person to person.

The philosophical ideas.

Because people are still writing 500 page books on it.

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

Interesting.

But keep going there.

So we’ve got quantum probabilities, so that a particle, quote, decides, is it going to decay or is it not?

And we know that probability precisely.

That’s what’s fascinating.

That’s right.

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

It’s a weird combination of facts there.

So you’re not prepared to analogize, I love the thing, the goalie leaning right or left, to the particle decaying in one moment or another?

You’re not prepared to have your free will be a similar kind of expression?

That’s right.

Because that’s the problem, right?

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

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

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

Isn’t that what he just said?

No, he was talking about immediately before the event.

It’s okay.

Yeah.

But, so I’m saying that you can take that all the way down.

You can keep slicing those layers all the way down.

Turtles all the way down.

That’s right.

And, there are those psychology experiments.

That’s right.

Where they put probes in the brain.

I’m going to mess up the details here, but the results are what I’m landing on, where they can trigger you to stand up.

Whether you want to or not.

Then you’re standing up, they say, why did you stand up?

And then they make up some reason for why they stood up.

When the neural signatures, the neural signals, already were prompting him to stand up, and he made up a reason after the fact.

So the signals were generated externally, but you internalize it and say, oh, I stood up for this reason.

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

That’s spooky.

It is.

You talked about probability and the certainty of probability.

What is it, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?

So where does that fit in, because you don’t really…

I’m not certain about that.

Well, I didn’t expect anything else.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that’s a great question, Gary.

It actually has a little bit…

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

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

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

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

Any measurement.

Not necessarily uncertainty about what’s going to happen, or what’s going to happen, or not going to happen.

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

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

Right.

Right?

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

And I think that’s what’s foundational.

That was so hard to accept by classical physicists.

Well, that’s hard to accept by anybody.

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

It takes time.

And we should allow ourselves that time.

Don’t feel like absurd.

It’s hard for me to quote, was it?

Yes, it was, it was Max Planck, was it?

Who said, no great new, I’m paraphrasing, no great discovery in physics gets accepted by the guard of the day.

They just get old and die.

And the next generation takes it on as though it has always been.

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

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

But anyway, go, what you got?

I’ll go with the next one, George Velakis, back for the Greeks.

Hey!

From New Jersey, can someone please tell me what a qubit is made of?

Aha!

Is it an electron stuck inside some type of magnetic box?

Is it an atom with multiple electrons frozen in multiple quantum states?

How is one made?

What a wonderful, wonderful question.

George?

George, great question.

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

What’s the title of it?

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

There you go.

There you go.

So we’re not going to answer your question.

Just go buy the book.

And we can go have a beer right now.

Okay.

Get that back.

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

Okay.

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

Yeah.

It’s not designed to be a textbook or anything like that.

If you have Q&A, you can do no stuff.

With a title like that.

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

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

A little guide for your quantum questions, as one would have.

Someone come along and hold your hand, walk you along.

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

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

Did they declare that?

Yeah, International Year of Quantum Physics.

Right in the middle of the decade, yes.

The whole decade goes to quantum physics.

It’s really quite amazing.

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

It’s a piece of information.

Let me make an analogy to regular bits, okay?

Bits are just pieces of information.

So for example, if you’ve got a 64-bit chip in your computer, all that is, is that it can carry or hold 64 pieces of information that are either 0 or 1.

If you have a bit, it’s just a piece of information and you can store it either electronically in a chip, you know, with a plus 5 volts or minus 5 volts or something like that.

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

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

So the bit…

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

Yeah, the little scan thing with the…

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

This is exactly what it is.

Yeah, because barcodes, are you white or black?

And how thick is the black?

That’s right.

And that’s all the information?

That just goes across the one dimension.

So I presume, because we added a dimension, the QR codes can hold way more information…

With the same amount of area.

Than a barcode.

So you have QR codes that have entire web addresses on them.

And they can be little things.

But in the end, it’s just squares.

So I’ll square that’s white or square that’s black, square that’s white, black next to each other.

And that is the information.

So the bit is the information.

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

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

It’s a quantum bit.

But it’s a piece of information.

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

Didn’t Microsoft just bring out a quantum chip?

They tried, yes.

That’s right.

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

But they are far, far away from a true quantum computer.

You just said that it’s not a thing, it’s information.

But now tell us the difference between a traditional bit, which is a zero or one, or a black or a white, and a qubit, which is a statistical occupation.

So just go there.

Okay.

Well, a bit is either a zero or a one.

Or a black and a white.

A piece of information that is or is not.

So it’s binary.

And so it’s a binary piece of information.

The qubit is binary when you read it.

But before it becomes red, it is not yet settled.

So it can be somewhere between zero and one.

And the complexity of the amount of zero-ness or one-ness a qubit has fluctuates and varies until such time as you read it.

Right.

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

All right.

So we want our computers to switch from zero to one or one to zero.

The speed of the computer is better than that.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

So the moment you read it, all that’s over.

That’s right.

Because probabilistically, you are now back to the binary.

That’s right.

It either is or it is not.

That’s right.

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

Why can’t I make a VR code qubit that has a gray scale in it?

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

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

The black and the white.

On a gray scale.

That would be amazing.

That would be awesome.

That would be amazing.

But we’re not anywhere near there yet, but the technology is getting us there slowly but surely.

It’s called black and white photo.

It’s all it is.

Yeah.

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

And it’s because all of those possibilities, you could actually figure out, Manifest it.

Manifest it inside of those qubits, kind of all at once.

That is very similar.

Yes.

You have right now, the way we keep our internet connections secure is through a particular kind of algorithm or strategy.

That strategy can be broken according to the theoretical calculations if you have a quantum computer.

It’s an encryption.

Right.

The only thing is, once that code can be broken, can we make another one that can’t be broken?

That can’t be broken.

Right.

So there will always be this race.

So now you’ve got quantum encryption.

That’s right.

Okay.

And this and the back and forth.

Those are some really interesting stuff.

Yeah, George, thank you for that.

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

James Kovacs.

Hello, gents, from Detroit, Michigan.

We said it right.

Detroit.

I know.

I’m getting there.

He said it like a black man.

But did you say Kovacs?

Probably didn’t say Kovacs.

Kovacs, yes.

Sorry.

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

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

You may disagree.

You may not.

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

Is there a similar mass limit?

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

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

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

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

The speed limit.

It is relative.

Everything is relative.

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

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

The answer is no.

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

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

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

Okay.

And not be a black hole.

And not be a black hole.

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

Great, great point.

A singularity is defined as something that has no volume, but infinite density because it has non-zero mass.

However, a black hole…

Just to be clear, so density has volume in the denominator.

Right.

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

And there you go.

There you go.

And that number doesn’t exist in our mathematical system.

And so now, this is what I’m going to say.

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

About what?

Y’all everything.

Okay.

Sorry, dude.

No, I’m joking.

That’s a joke.

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

The black hole itself gets bigger.

Inside the black hole’s event horizon, you could have an incredibly massive object or a singularity or something like that.

But we will not be able to know because information cannot pass through that event horizon, at least as far as we know now.

The Cosmic Blood Brain Barrier, that’s what I call it.

Very organic of you.

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

Depends on who you are.

All right, keep it going.

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

My question is, how would we study the universe if light traveled at infinite speed?

Yeah, I knew you’d like this one.

I love me some infinite speed.

Okay.

It goes on.

There’s more.

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

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

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

If the speed of light were infinite, we would know nothing about the history of the universe.

Oh, because we couldn’t.

Okay, the Big Bang would be forever lost in time because there’s no time lag from things that happened 14, 13 billion years ago.

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

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

That would be a sad universe.

The universe wants us to know.

I, ooh.

Wow, look at that.

This is deep, and you got your white robe on here.

Yes.

I’m not actually sat in this chair, I’m actually levitating just a bit out of this seat.

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

Charles, you have any other insights here?

I don’t know how sad it would be.

It would be different, that’s for sure.

Our ability to tell time would be essentially wiped out.

That’s what Neil is saying, and that’s kind of a trouble.

Well, tell history time.

Yeah, right.

I can know it’s two in the afternoon, I can know that.

The causal time gets messed up.

But it’s just us as a species that registered the concept of time?

Not at all.

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

Yes.

Right.

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

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

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

There would be an ability to see things that are happening.

But the way that we measure them is dependent on how fast that information gets around the universe.

So there’s lots of interesting, cool results.

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

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

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

I remember him.

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

He wrote a very good insight that I saw in one of his books.

And that is, if the speed of light were infinite, night would always be day.

Good point.

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

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

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

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

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

But wouldn’t an expanding universe still dilute the light, even if it traveled?

If the expansion rate is finite and the speed of light is infinite, then it doesn’t matter.

It will never catch up.

That’s right.

So there would be no night.

So light outraces everything all the time.

If it were infinite, that would be it.

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

Yes.

I’m sorry, you’re a lot.

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

Some constants are combinations of other constants.

So the fine structure constant.

It gives us information about the formation of energy levels inside of atoms.

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

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

But we have to bring Geek and Cheap back for that.

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

And no one knew why 137 was this magic number.

And today we know that that was actually an approximation.

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

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

Isn’t it one over 137.16 or something?.00 blah, blah, blah.

Oh, it is that clean.

Very, very, very close.

Okay.

Yes, yes.

But just another thing.

So it could mess with other stuff as well.

Because the speed of light shows up in our calculations.

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

Oh, I see what you’re saying.

You change everything.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, that’s so wild.

Just saying.

You’re blowing stuff up now.

Yeah, you really have to…

You blow up the system.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

That’s right.

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

Right.

Because if it’s infinite, the relativity doesn’t even make sense.

It’s no longer relative.

Albert Einstein’s theories.

You’re welcome.

It’s no longer relative.

It’s no longer relative.

That’s right.

Right.

And Simultaneity would be real.

You actually would have had a Simultaneity at the same time.

Because we all experience it.

Wow.

We’ve just put the notes down for a screenplay for another movie.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

What’s kind of fun, though, to think of the whole universe bathed in light, though.

Yeah.

The entire universe would just be…

Well, we kind of already are, but it would be more intense than your…

Yeah, it would just be…

Yeah.

You’re right.

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

Yeah.

That’s ours.

Let’s start tomorrow.

You know who you’re talking to.

So, Gary, a couple of minutes left.

All right, Mahawi Gerezia, apologies if it’s mispronounced.

Time is impacted by extreme-

Chuck never apologizes when he mispronounces.

Because it’s a privilege to have me mispronounce the name.

Better be happy I even said it.

Anyway, go ahead.

Mahawi’s from Dallas, Texas.

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

Do these things have something in common?

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

And that’s why they both impact time.

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

Just set it up again.

So, two things can slow down time.

The strength of your gravity field and how fast you’re moving, relative to observer.

They feel different, but are they different?

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

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

Because time is the same for the observer.

That’s right.

In both cases.

In both cases.

So, in fact, what’s going on is the effect is on space time.

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

So, you have the same effect if you’re moving faster.

You experience time more slowly.

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

The effect is on space time overall.

And Albert Einstein.

Which is why it literally slows down in the measurement.

Okay, which is why, if I get this right, please help me out.

Particles actually decay slower as they approach the speed of light.

So, it’s not the perception of time.

It is a literal slowing down for the object that is approaching the speed of light.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yes, yes.

So, it’s space-time.

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

It is your place in the space-time continuum.

Your location and the rate that you’re changing out of that location, otherwise known as speed.

That’s crazy.

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

Yeah, because a particle has an expected decay time and very precisely measured.

You accelerate that puppy, takes longer to decay.

Something happened inside there.

Yep.

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

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

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

So that has their time tick faster.

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

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

Than the speed itself.

Than the speed.

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

So we have the time that is our space time, the surface of the Earth, not this space time up in middle Earth orbit.

Without regular…

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

They calculate.

We got top people.

We got people?

I got people.

All right.

Hey, Harry, listen, something’s wrong with which calculations, man.

Neil, just for future reference, middle Earth orbit is what you go around like orcs and dwarves and…

Yeah.

What about second breakfast?

Medium orbit, medium Earth orbit is what you get.

Middle Earth.

I think middle is better.

I’m sorry.

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

Well, instead of medium Earth orbit.

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

Oh, good one.

I like what you did there, John.

I got to tell you.

Okay, so I have to say medium or Earth orbit?

It would be better.

I’ll just say me-o.

There’s Leo and me-o.

Me-o.

It’s Leo, me-o and G-O.

Leo, me-o and G-O.

I knew you’d get this in the math.

I knew you’d cover it.

The triplets.

Here’s why I don’t have a problem with it.

If I have three kids and they’re triplets, I call them Leo, me-o and G-O.

Really?

Yeah, I would totally call them that.

I would call them Huey, Dewey and Louie.

That’s too old.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah, those are the chipmunks.

Huey, Dewey and Louie.

I would call them…

Those were the ducks.

I would call them Dewey, Cheetahman, Hal.

The law firm.

Last question.

One more.

Okay, this one from Doug D in Danbury, Connecticut.

What do you think about…

Who’s this?

Doug D from Danbury in Connecticut.

Doug D from Danbury.

What do you think of the Grabby Aliens theory?

Is it similar to the Dark Forest Fermi Paradox Solution, as depicted in the Three Body Problem books?

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

Grabby Aliens?

What is that?

What a great question to end this episode on.

I knew you’d like it.

The concept of the Grabby Alien…

First of all, just to clarify for everybody.

Grabby is a word that was invented for precisely this.

G-R-A-B-B-Y.

As in, aliens that want to grab things.

Not crabby aliens.

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

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

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

Oh, so they’re British.

Here we go again.

If you, we…

That’s, that’s the, the…

So, colonization has one sentence.

Is that yours?

It’s mine now, okay?

That’s colonization.

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

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

We colonize Mars, right?

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

We might want to live there.

We might want to visit or explore or be immigrants or something like that.

But we wouldn’t want to colonize them.

But the point of grabby aliens is that they don’t ascribe that kind of, say, imperialistic or colonialistic kind of idea.

It’s just in their native.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me tell you something, if a grabby alien showed up here, I’m kicking its ass.

That would be nice, except most likely the grabby aliens that showed up would have superior technology to us.

Now, you know what’s wonderful is, there’s a movie out there.

As long as they have one.

What’s great about what you’re talking about, there’s a-

Alien, where’s your ass?

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

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

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

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

Preemptively.

Yes.

So, it’s not exactly, without spoiling the series, it’s not exactly the same thing as the three-body problem.

As of now, there’s only one season posted, right?

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

Well, that’s another time.

He has ways.

It’s best to think about how alien civilizations interact with one another from the sense of, should we be quiet or should we be loud?

And grabbiness is just one aspect.

Here’s another great movie on this subject, but completely the antithesis of what you said, and that’s District Nine, where they are super advanced and they come here and we’re the grabbies.

Yes, without even, we never left home and we’re still like total a-holes.

Isn’t that something?

Yeah, yeah.

So cool, I learned something.

I never heard about grabby aliens.

It’s fine.

I’m just, aliens, you come down and kick your ass.

You ain’t taking my stuff.

I have no problem with grabby aliens.

If actually, just as a little plug.

Sometimes you have to grab them by the alien.

They let you do it, they let you do it.

There are some very good YouTube videos about grabby aliens.

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

Okay.

So it’s a philosophical point.

Yes, and you can find lots of discussions.

Motivations of species.

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

But just look.

So Charles, thank you for illuminating it.

It is always a pleasure.

I love being here with you guys.

Such great questions.

Congratulations for you guys for having such amazing audiences.

There it is.

So it’s got me thinking.

If I might offer a perspective on this, especially that last question.

Quantum physics, we’re reminded that we can measure things, but we don’t know what is really going on that frustrates so many of us.

And maybe aliens would know.

Are they more advanced?

And if they are, they probably do.

Maybe they have access to higher dimensions.

Grabby aliens, that, I’m gonna kick the ass if they come down here.

But I can tell you this, that if aliens are grabby, and that is a feature of them all, that is a self-limiting property of their behavior.

Because a grabby alien wants to grab everything they see.

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

And then they want to grab the same thing as each other, as one another.

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

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

If it’s so fundamentally part of their inner soul, of their inner source of exploration and discovery, so it seems to me grabby alien scenario would implode just the same way the European colonization scenario imploded, where you had the Dutch and the British and the French and the Spanish and everybody trying to claim land on earth’s surface, and there’s a finite amount of land on earth’s surface, eventually they start fighting each other.

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

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

That is a cosmic perspective, a badass cosmic perspective.

This has been a special edition.

Yeah.

Dude, thank you for putting this together.

Oh, you’re welcome and thank you for our audience.

They’re just brilliant with their questions.

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

We’re going to all get your book.

Give me the title again.

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer.

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

Come on now.

Right, right.

Chuck, good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

Always.

This has been StarTalk special edition.

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