Cosmic Queries – Science Epiphany

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There’s emerging research to suggest that the virtual particles that pop in and out of existence, they’re entangled, they’re quantum entangled.

And if we think of that entanglement as with their connectivity being provided by mini wormholes, it may be that these mini wormholes is the literal fabric of space time itself.

Damn.

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

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries edition, fan favorite.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Chuck Nice, of course, is right across the way.

Yes.

All right, Chuck, you’re…

That’s right.

You’re dialing in from your hometown of…

You live in Hoboken?

Where do you live?

I’m in Hoboken, New Jersey, right here.

I’m the Sarah Palin of New York.

I can see it from my house.

Okay, you can see New York from your house.

I can see New York from my house, and I literally can see New York from my house.

So, I call myself the Sarah Palin of New York City.

There you have it.

We got Cosmic Queries today, and it’s a grab bag.

So, I don’t know…

And I haven’t seen the questions yet, so…

No.

If you get a question I can’t answer, I’ll just say, I can’t answer it.

There it is.

Well, that’s not going to happen.

Well, you’re going to answer something.

If I don’t know, I’m going to still say something.

Okay.

We’re going to answer something.

It may not be the answer that we want, but you’re going to get an answer.

All right.

All right.

Let’s do it.

So, let’s jump right into this.

This is Corey Allen.

And Corey Allen says…

Or is it Alon?

Corey Alon, because it’s just A-L-A-N.

Okay.

So, I think Corey’s playing with my head.

He says, hey, Ola, Neil, and Chuck.

There’s two people, Corey, Ann, and Allen.

Yes.

It says, hailing here from the Twin Cities, Minnesota, what would a wormhole actually look like?

Would you just see through it to the other side?

Would it be completely void of light?

Would it be extremely bright?

I would love to get your take and love, love, love the show.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

So let’s back up a little.

So in the 1960s, when we were more fully exploring the mathematics of spacetime, and you get a black hole out of that, it turns out there’s another solution that would come out of the equations that was the mathematical opposite of a black hole.

And so we would call that a white hole.

So a white hole would be the opposite.

So a black hole absorbs everything, nothing comes out.

A white hole, everything only comes out.

So when people hypothesize that these are two solutions in the equations, maybe they’re connected.

Maybe a black hole connects to a white hole.

Because where is it going if it’s going in a black hole?

In a white hole, where is it coming from if it’s coming out?

So if they’re connected, what might connect them?

We’ll call it a wormhole.

So some of the earliest ideas about wormholes started that way.

In modern times, however, we can make wormholes on paper that don’t require a black hole or a white hole for them to exist.

So in order to make a wormhole, you’re prying open the fabric of space and time.

When you do that, you’re doing the opposite of what gravity would normally do, which would compress it back.

So to pry it open, you can do this mathematically, but you need a substance that would pry it open.

You need some anti-gravity magic substance that will do this.

And when you do that, then you got to pack it right so that it prys open the hole.

And it would be a hole between where you are and some other place in space-time.

And because it’s a three-dimensional hole, a brain doesn’t have…

has a hard time conceiving of three-dimensional holes.

If you think of a hole, it’s like a circle, and you jump in and fall through.

Okay, like a utility hole cover, you fall through.

This is a hole no matter which direction you approach it.

So that’s a little weird.

That’s awesome.

That’s awesome, right.

Right, you go around the side, it’s the same hole coming through.

Right, right, right, right.

So if you pride a hole to some other space and time, then every direct…

As far as I can tell, every direction you look at it would get…

would see exactly the same thing, because it’s the same hole that you’re looking through.

And they try to represent this in Rick and Morty, and in who’s the dude that does this with his fingers, the magic wand.

Dr.

Strange.

Dr.

Strange.

Not Dr.

Strange Love, Dr.

Strange.

So Dr.

Strange uses magic to open up a hole through the space-time continuum.

But Rick uses actual science.

I just want to make that important distinction between the two.

Yes.

The guy with trash cans for engines on his spaceship is using actual science.

Yeah, I’m just saying.

I don’t want to, you know, overstate the obvious.

Right.

So yeah, it would be quite fascinating to accomplish this.

And we say that it’s through space time, not just through space, because, for example, Superman, when he was launched from his home planet just before it was destroyed, he was launched Moses style, right?

Basically in some kind of a basket.

And then he arrives on Earth, and he’s the same age.

All right, now you know this, babies, you know, two months or what, you know, at baby’s age, you know it, okay?

It’s the same baby.

So it traveled this vast distance basically instantly, whereas where we are is not available to Krypton in that same time frame, because it takes light time to get there.

So it beat the light beam to get here.

Okay, and in fact, in Action Comics, what’s the number is that Action Comics?

Yeah, here it is.

Action Comics number 14.

Wow.

Action Comics number 14.

Sweet.

You know about this?

You don’t know about this comic?

No.

You don’t know about this one?

Chuck.

I see Superman’s on there.

Yeah, Superman’s on.

It’s a Superman comic.

You don’t know about this, Chuck?

How could you not know about this?

Let me show you the page.

I’ll just show you the page.

It’s in the back.

Yeah, here it go.

Let me see.

Dude, that’s insane.

Yes.

Well, first of all, anybody who’s listening right now, if you’re listening and you’re not watching, then it is actual cartoon depiction of Neil deGrasse Tyson standing with Superman, and you know for a fact that it’s Neil and no other black man on Earth because he is wearing the Neil deGrasse Tyson vest with the stars on it and the moons and the planets.

And the moons and the planets.

So here’s the thing.

So when I say I’ve met Superman, people say, oh, which Superman did you meet?

So I met Superman.

In Action Comics 14, a Superman comes to the Hayden Planetarium to observe the destruction of Krypton.

That’s amazing.

The light from which was only just then reaching Earth.

Yet he got here right after birth.

So he beat the light beam.

That’s all I’m saying.

The only way he could have come here is via a wormhole.

By the way, if he traveled at the speed of light, he would not age, okay, because Einstein’s equations stipulate that.

However, he would have arrived with the light cone, okay, with the light beam.

And then he would not be old enough to have seen his home planet destroyed.

So I was happy to contribute to the Superman canon that way and identify what star in the night sky would be Krypton.

We would find Krypton, and it was a red dwarf star, that sort of thing.

The star was in the constellation Corvus, a southern hemisphere constellation, and Corvus is a crow, and Smallville’s mascot is a crow.

I’m just saying.

Is that by design?

No, no, they didn’t have a place.

I gave them the place.

Oh, you gave them the place?

Yes!

Oh, sweet.

I said the only way this can happen is if Superman arrived via wormhole.

I told this to the writers.

Right, I told this to them.

Is that what you’re doing when you’re standing next to Superman?

Are you Neil-splaining to him?

Are you Neil-splaining the fact that he had to come here through a wormhole?

He might not have known because he was a baby.

I’m just saying.

That’s so great.

A wormhole would be fascinating to look at and to travel through and to go back and forth.

Oh, by the way, I was on the Trucker channel on SiriusXM.

There’s a Trucker channel.

So we were having fun with the fact that the day will come if we discover this mysterious substance that’s the opposite of gravity to pry open wormholes.

If wormholes become ubiquitous, then you would not need trucks.

You would just open a wormhole from where you are to where the thing has to be and pass it through.

You wouldn’t need roads.

You wouldn’t need trucks.

You wouldn’t need drivers.

The back of your refrigerator would connect to the grocer.

The grocer would look through, oh, your milk is going bad.

Let me swap that out.

You need another dozen eggs.

Close up the back, and you’re done.

We appreciate having Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Trucker channel.

That’ll be all.

That’ll be all for today on the Trucker channel that Neil just destroyed, along with Superman.

Wait, and then the phone rings five minutes later.

Oh, this is the head of the Teamsters Union.

So we joked.

He was good about it.

He said we should get ready for the future where there’s picket lines saying, Truckers against wormholes.

The picket sign of the millennium.

That’s great.

That’s very cool, man.

More than our fellow wanted to know about wormholes right there.

Oh, no.

All right.

But there you go.

At least you know it’s going to be a hole that no matter where you are, from every direction you’re looking into that hole.

So that’s kind of.

All right, what else you got, Chuck?

We spent a lot of time on that question.

What else you got?

Whatever, it was fun.

This is Cherries Jubilee, who says, hello, Dr.

Tyson, what’s up, Chuck?

Autumn Rose here from York, Pennsylvania.

My first guru, Jay Lakahani, started his journey in religion after his mastery of astrophysics.

I had my own religious epiphanies during my studies of geology and botan.

Have you ever had a moment in your studies that made you feel like you were having a religious experience?

No.

And thank you for your question.

No, I based that on the fact that I’ve had people who’ve had religious experiences describe them to me, and I can say I’ve never had them.

I mean, I can say that pure and simple.

Based on the accounts that I have heard.

Okay, now I grew up with a friend who was very religious later in his life, born again, actually he’s Jehovah’s Witness, and he’s a witness, as they say.

They don’t even say Jehovah anymore.

He’s a witness.

Can I get a witness?

Jehovah’s Witness.

Okay.

Yes.

Of course, in science, eyewitness is the lowest form of evidence you can bring to the table, just given how rife it is with error and misinterpretation and the susceptibility.

Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What they should instead say, I need data.

Rather than I need a witness, I need some data.

Can I get some data?

Yes.

Every once in a while, you gotta look up and you gotta trust the data.

But is your data corrupt?

Is your data corrupt?

That’s what you have to figure out!

That’s the preacher.

The preaching scientist!

So that’s a whole TV series ight there!

So now I forgot what I was talking about.

Anyway.

We have talked about controbing needs regarding science I’ve been to a lot of different sites in religion, like our whole lives, my friend and I.

And I would describe to him, I would go to a mountaintop to observe the universe, and back in the day, it was an ordeal.

I mean, you would take trains, planes, automobiles, you would invert to live nocturnally, you would set up the telescope, your sunset was the beginning of your day, when it was near the end of everyone else’s day, and then it’s you, the telescope, and the cosmos.

In the eerie silence of the night, but there’s the din of the electronics driving the telescope juxtaposed with it.

And I would look up, and I would feel very deeply connected to the cosmos.

He was quick to say, that’s like a religious experience.

And so I said, okay, except I wasn’t thinking God, I was thinking this is a magnificent glorious universe that I have the privilege of studying.

But you beheld that scene with awe.

Yes.

You were in awe of the universe.

And I still been using all the same words, the awe and the majesty, and I was humbled in its presence.

I was, I wasn’t prostrate in its presence, but I was humbled.

So there’s a lot of overlapping vocabulary, but the, when I’ve heard people say they were brought to tears, or they gave, in that moment, they gave themselves to their religious figures, whoever that might have been.

And so I’ve never, it’s never been that.

Now here’s what I have found, that people with religious experiences, typically there’s something they experience that they cannot explain.

Right.

That’s normally the case.

That’s normally the case, correct?

Of any kind, okay, an apparition or this or that.

So I have seen things that if I did not know astrophysics, physics, geology, atmospheric sciences, and just basically the laws of physics, I probably would have rapidly called the police department to try to get somebody to investigate what I was looking at.

Or I would be on my knees in awe, wondering what mysterious mythical forces were operating.

So I don’t know whether my knowledge of what is possible in this universe has precluded me from having some religious experiences that others might have.

Okay, right.

I’m kind of thinking that-

I got one for you, I got one for you.

I think rational investigation could kill pretty much any religious experience.

It would stop.

A rational questioning of what’s going on in the moment would kind of squelch the experiences.

With methods and tools to investigate, right?

Tools to make the measurement.

So here’s one.

Seth MacFarlane.

Okay, potty-mouthed Seth MacFarlane.

Who’s actually highly scientifically literate.

There’s a lot of evidence for that.

If you’ve seen Family Guy, there’s a lot of science references in it.

He’s also a fan of Star Trek, and he’s had the Star Trek crew as cast members in the cartoon.

Also, he was co-executive producer of Cosmos.

It is because of him that we brought it to Fox that got the distribution far greater than anything it would have gotten on PBS.

Anyhow, okay, he’s out late one night.

He lives in Boston at the time.

He’s out late one night, and he wakes up in the morning, and he might be hungover, I don’t know, or whatever, and he missed his airplane.

That was the airplane from Boston that flew into the World Trade Center.

The towers?

Yes.

Damn.

That morning, he missed his airplane.

So everybody asked him, did you feel closer to God?

Did God feel like you were protected?

And he says, no, because many a morning, I have been hungover and missed the plane.

In that case, my new God would be Jack Daniels.

That’s my new God.

Who do you worship?

Johnny Walker?

Johnny Walker Black?

I don’t know.

He saved my life.

He saved my life.

I’m telling you right now.

Turn my life around.

Right.

So Seth MacFarlane is a rational person who approaches life with rational interpretations of what goes on around him.

So, and anyhow, what does that say for everyone else who died?

What?

Well, God didn’t save them?

I mean, you’re stuck with the moral conundrum of the people who did die versus those who didn’t.

So anyhow, so my answer is just no.

Look at that.

That’s, I mean, listen, that’s…

Maybe such a day will come.

And oh, by the way, was it Hume?

There was a philosopher commenting on miracles, and I’m going to mangle the quote, but he said something like, miracles are so unlikely, bordering on impossible, that if you do encounter something that you cannot explain not only from your own base of knowledge but is unexplainable given any base of knowledge yet acquired on Earth, it’s more likely that you simply discovered a new law of physics than that there is a divine miracle that was performed in front of you.

Now, I mangled that reasoning, but what I said is the bulk of what he was getting at.

And I don’t even remember if it was Hume.

I think it was Hume.

But philosophers have thought this through.

And so, yeah, there are new laws of physics that are doing weird things.

And do you pray to God or do you say, no, no, there’s phenomena that you’ve never experienced.

Do you pray to God for it or do you investigate it and find out you just made a scientific discovery?

So that’s the interesting frontier of this whole exercise, this science, religion exercise, as you go forward.

Right.

I mean, and then there are certain things that are just a violation of the laws of physics like Jesus walking on water.

There’s no way around that.

Either he walked on water and that’s a miracle, or there’s something else going on, whether it’s the testimony…

He was behind water skis.

He was skiing on his feet.

That could have been it.

No, there are people who are trying…

Like, for example, there’s a Jesus spider.

There’s a spider or a Jesus lizard?

Jesus lizard that can walk on water.

Yes, I’ve seen that.

It runs on the top of the water.

But the Jesus lizard is walking on water because of surface tension, and plus it’s propelling itself so that part of the effort gets it back out of the little bit of water that it’s sunk into.

It doesn’t weigh very much.

So I would say that’s an insult to Jesus because the lizard is using laws of physics to do it.

Whereas Jesus had to violate the laws of physics.

Correct, in order for that to be the miracle.

In order for that to be the miracle, yeah.

Correct, correct.

Either that or he had really cool sandals.

Styrofoam sandals.

So does the person, what’s the person’s name?

Does he or she, who was it that asked the question?

This was Autumn Rose from York, PA.

Oh, Autumn, yeah.

So does Autumn actually describe her experience that she had?

No, no, just says that…

No, no, I can’t reflect on it.

Just says that somehow it was related, though.

So, you know, his guru actually was some form of astrophysicist.

Is Autumn a he?

You said his guru?

I don’t know.

Oh, Autumn, probably a woman.

I don’t know.

Autumn didn’t share with you the pronouns, and so you assume it’s a he.

That’s true.

That’s what I’m saying.

I’m going to say they.

I’m going to call Autumn they.

There you go.

There you go.

That settles that.

That would have been more fun to hear what that experience was, but I’ll tell you something.

In my book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, there’s an entire chapter of me communicating with people who had religious experiences or deep thoughts at the intersection between religion and science.

There’s a whole chapter on that.

And one of the people who wrote in is a niece of mine, or second cousin niece, however that works, or second cousin once removed, however that works, who, her father died, she went to identify the body in the funeral parlor and had an entire conversation with him.

So, I mean, I’m going to say that he wasn’t dead if that happened, and maybe…

But the man is flat on the slab.

So she, knowing she has a cousin who is an astrophysicist, says, Neil, what do you think happened?

And I said, either you had an acoustic hallucination, normally we think of hallucinations as sight, but any of your senses can be hallucinated, right?

You get the feeling that someone is touching you, you can taste something that really isn’t there.

There are a lot of things that can happen.

You can have an acoustic, so either it was an acoustic hallucination or he was actually communicating with you from the other side.

So what I told her was, next time, don’t have the perfunctory conversation you did.

Oh, dad, how are you?

Oh, I’m fine.

Is everything okay?

Yes.

And how are you?

No, no.

If this is actually happening as not a hallucination, do not lose the opportunity.

Say, and I gave a list of questions.

I said, dad, where are you?

Right.

Are you wearing clothes?

Right.

Okay?

Is mom there?

How old are the two of you?

Are you in your 30s or 20s at your prime?

Or are you old and shriveled and near dead after your half stroke that you had a year ago?

Ask questions.

Do you eat?

Where do you get your food?

Is there a barbecue?

Just ask stuff, and then you try to get meaningful answers from the other side.

Yeah, see, I’m skipping all that.

I’m like, hey, dad, listen, I miss you already, but put Jesus on the phone.

Put Jesus on the phone right now.

Talk to the man himself.

I need to talk to Jesus right now.

Okay?

You put Jesus on this phone.

Okay, I’ll see you.

Now that I’m talking to you, I know I’m going to see you later.

So let’s get to what we need to get to.

Put Jesus on the phone.

So just when you have these experiences, since we want to know more about them, of course, try to get a checklist of things you might say or do when that’s happening.

In fact, the people who say they are dying in their hospital bed and they lift up and they see themselves, they look back on themselves from above.

That’s a very common experience.

Very common.

You got the experiment for that.

You got the experiment.

You set up a ledge above the bed.

These are people who had near-death experiences.

They sold themselves and then they went back.

You set a ledge up above the bed, and then you write something, a simple saying like roses are red or the sky is blue.

You put that on top.

Don’t tell the person who is dying.

When they say they went up and saw themselves, they would see this thing that you wrote and get them to tell you what it said.

That would be evidence.

That’s what I’m saying.

That would be evidence that they actually came up and looked above their body.

They came out and they were looking down physically on their own body.

Yes, yes, exactly.

On their own body and the bed.

That’s right.

So they’re experiments you can do.

And by the way, there’s a history of this.

Did you know that in the late 1890s, was it?

Nineteen, or at the turn of the century, Wilhelm Röntgen, you realize he discovered X-rays.

We call them X-rays.

In Germany, he’s German, they call them Röntgen rays.

Okay, as you’d expect.

Okay.

They see through your body.

What people were doing back then was, oh my gosh, if it can see through the body, maybe if I X-ray you the moment of your death, I will see the soul rise up out of your corporal existence.

So they did these experiments.

I mean, why not?

You got a new tool of physics.

If the person is already dying, they don’t have to worry about the radiation, that’s for sure.

Yeah, up the dose.

Turn it up to 11, guys.

Turn it up to 11.

So, but no, they didn’t see anything coming out of the body.

So, there it is.

There you have it.

All right.

Very cool.

Everybody, thanks for wasting your time.

Hey, I’m Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

All right, this is Mahi, and Mahi says, hi, this is Muhammad from Columbus, Ohio.

I wanted to know if it is possible to get to absolutely nothing.

And I mean, like, eliminating every atom.

So, more than that, let’s go down to it.

If you can blow apart every atom, but then you got particles, because that’s what atoms are made up, but then you blow apart all the particles, but then you got the bits that made up the particles, is it, at what point can we get to nothing?

Like, literally nothing.

Okay, so, in a book published just months ago called To Infinity and Beyond, which I co-authored with our senior producer, Lindsay Nix Walker, there’s a whole conversation about the search for nothingness.

Because there was a day when air is nothing, right?

If there’s something there, I wouldn’t be able to see you.

So, clearly, air is nothing.

And then you learn, no, air is not nothing, all right?

They’re like molecules, what’s a molecule?

We have to figure all this out.

This is the search for our understanding of our place in the universe, reaching what at one time felt like infinity.

Then you get there, and then there’s like more infinities beyond.

So, let’s remove all the molecules.

And what’s left?

Well, there’s space between the molecules, all right?

Well, is there nothing between the molecules?

Well, no, because quantum physics tells us that even where there is nothing, there are fluctuations that introduce what we call virtual particles.

You can Google them, virtual particles.

They pop in and out of existence in the vacuum, in the vacuum.

So, they’re particle-antiparticle pairs.

They pop into existence, and then they recombine, and there is an energy associated with this field.

And we’re thinking it might be the dark energy that everyone has been talking about, but it’s called the vacuum energy of the universe.

You cannot escape that.

By everything we know about all the laws of physics, it is inescapable.

So…

It’s amazing!

So, now, let’s get deep.

Are you seated?

You ready to get deep?

Okay.

All right.

Let’s say you could suspend the laws of quantum physics and not even have any particles there, any virtual particles there.

Here’s a question for you.

If the laws of physics still apply, does that area of nothingness contain nothing?

So, we’re not accounting for virtual particles.

We’re just looking at the nothing.

Yeah.

Looking at the nothing.

Right.

If laws of physics still apply in that nothing, is there nothing there?

Right.

But how could the laws of physics apply if there’s absolutely nothing there?

They have to apply to something.

Well, they could apply to the fabric of space-time.

And, by the way, recently told to me by my friend and colleague, Brian Greene, up at Columbia, that there’s emerging research to suggest that the virtual particles that pop in and out of existence are connected, they’re entangled, they’re quantum entangled.

And if we think of that entanglement as with their connectivity being provided by mini wormholes, it may be that these mini wormholes is the literal fabric of space-time itself.

Because it’s happening everywhere where you don’t otherwise have particles.

So that would be the substrate on which all particles and energies unfold.

So if these quantum entangled virtual particles, if the wormhole that connects them is the fabric, then it’s meaningless to then think of empty space without it.

Because there is no such thing as empty space.

Because the space is granted in existence because of it.

Exactly.

That blew my mind.

I’m having lunch with Brian Greene, that blew my mind.

That’s an insane thought, by the way.

And I hope I recounted it accurately.

I think we might get Brian back on and get him to say it.

Yeah, that’s incredible, though.

I mean, just to think about that.

That’s incredible.

Yeah.

Wow.

There you go, Mahi.

Thanks.

That was a great question.

And the answer is no.

So…

Here we go.

My partner, Mike Parker says, Hi, Dr.

Tyson.

Hello, Chuck Nice.

Mike Parker here from Richmond, Virginia.

I was just there.

I was just in Richmond, Virginia.

I was just there visiting their fair town.

Very nice.

He says, Do you think AI has the ability in the near future to make a major scientific discovery?

Ah, if so, what area do you foresee the AI having the greatest impact?

This influence.

So, we’re training AI.

What happens when it looks at data and then says, I’m just going to come up with my own finding?

Okay, so, first of all, that’s been happening in my field for decades.

So, let’s just nip that in the bud right here.

Look at that.

Every bit of power the computer brings us, we say, bring it on!

And we have the computer do stuff faster, better than we ever could.

So, for example, we had AI, and with machine learning AI, learn how we extract the signal of planets orbiting other stars from the data.

Okay?

Right?

Because there’s something called the transit method, where if you happen to see the star system edge on, then the planet could pass in front of the star, gently blocking out the light of the star, and then the light of the star recovers from that, because it’s just blotted out briefly.

And then you wait long enough and you watch it repeat, you say, got a planet on our hands.

Okay.

So, this is very hard to find, because the planet doesn’t dim the star by very much, there’s a lot of noisy data.

We did the best we could.

We trained AI to do this.

We set it loose onto the data.

It found another 51 planets that we could not have otherwise found.

So, AI is most excellent in that way.

Where I’m an AI skeptic, but I’m happy to be proved wrong one day, is whether AI will come up with a new idea.

A new idea.

Now, big AI fans are certain we’ll get there, but I’m not.

For example, Chuck, let’s say we uploaded your brain into the Internet, and now it’s powered by AI.

All right?

That’s going to be the end of the world.

Are you going to be a super villain, Chuck?

That’s the end of the world, baby.

So, now you go to the Bahamas, and you meet someone new that you make good friends, and you discover a new kind of mollusk on the seashore.

And then you write a letter to a colleague of yours who’s an expert in mollusks.

Is this a new mollusk?

They say, yes, that’s a new species.

We shall call it Lord Chucknicium.

Okay.

Or, no, that would be an element on the periodic table.

Chucknicidae, whatever.

They have ways that they specify names.

Okay.

And it turns out that new shell opens up a whole new understanding of shellfish.

Okay?

Or mollusks, let’s say.

I’m making this up.

But just imagine this.

AI would know nothing about it because it only knows what’s on the internet, and you sent a paper letter handwritten to your colleague.

You discovered a whole new branch of the Tree of Life, and AI has no idea it even existed, and it never will until you put it on the internet.

And AI can’t make that new friend you just made.

AI knows nothing about that relationship because you didn’t put it on Instagram.

So, in fact, I think the only way to keep AI in check so that it doesn’t become our overlords is to do shit we don’t put on the internet.

Yeah.

That’s all you got to do.

All we need is pen and paper, people.

It’s like millennials.

All you have to do is write something in cursive.

They have no idea what it is that you’re talking about.

What’s that a squiggle?

I don’t get the squiggles.

Why is it all squiggling?

I don’t understand.

Writing a code, secret code for the next World War.

So anyhow, I don’t see the…

Now, okay, AI found a new strategy when playing the game Go.

That’s that territorial board game that was…

Right.

It’s common and very popular in the Far East.

But many people play it, and it found a new strategic way where it can win, and it’s something that no one had thought of before.

But it still started with this game that we invented.

Yeah.

And honestly, you would have to…

It’s just, at that point, running a bunch of simulations and making associative comparisons.

So it’s…

With the rules we created.

With the rules that you created.

Now, what would impress me is if it took the game Go and created an entirely new game and said, here’s the game I created.

That would be amazing.

And if it knows what we like about playing board games and then it becomes the most popular game there ever was.

The most popular game in the world.

You know what else I wanted to do?

Right now, Milton Bradley is like, get me AI.

On the phone right now.

Get AI on the phone.

I’m sorry, Dave.

I can’t do that.

So, we’ll see.

We’ll see how AI shakes it.

I want you to know and the world to know that in my field, we use AI at any turn we can to help us interpret, analyze and obtain data.

Especially given the volume of data that comes about.

There’s no way we’d be able to do it otherwise.

And there are different levels of AI.

There’s the AI that scares everybody, which is AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, where it just learns anything at all times.

It can do anything.

Cook your coffee and solve your calculus homework and write your term paper.

Right?

We’ll see.

Okay.

We’ll see.

I mean, there you go.

However, we learned from our friend Michio Kako the last time we had him on the show that the true potential of AI will be realized when we have a quantum computer.

Oh, yes.

Very good point.

Yeah.

Right.

He’s all into the quantum, as am I.

I’m delighted and terrified by what it will be able to compute for us.

Yes.

It’s a new world.

Exactly.

A new world order, I would even say.

Right.

Yeah.

That’s crazy.

All right.

Here’s our question for Charles.

I think it’ll be our last question.

That’s all we have time for.

Our last question?

Well, Charles, you get the last word, Charles.

Mm-hmm.

He says, Hey, Neil.

Hey, Chuck.

Charles here from Houston, Texas.

Planet Houston.

Both of you guys are…

Planet Houston.

We have a problem.

You have to know why I call it Planet Houston.

You know why?

No.

Okay.

In the first Superman movie…

No, second Superman movie.

The second one…

.

where the criminals come back out of the Phantom Zone, which is a two-dimensional prison floating through space.

Right.

One of the coolest things ever.

That Phantom Zone got broken by a nuclear explosion that Superman cast into space to save Earth because terrorists were going to blow up the Eiffel Tower.

And so he takes it, throws it into space.

The blast wave, which you can’t have in the vacuum of space, but it’s a cartoon, it’s a movie, it shatters the Phantom Zone, re-releasing these three criminals.

There’s Zod and the two others.

All right.

There’s a meme with me.

I’m just in sequence to him, right?

So I’m before Zod and Zod is after me.

So Neil before Zod.

It’s a meme someone put up ten years ago.

So they come to the moon.

They get closer to our sun, which is a yellow sun, which gives them powers.

Okay.

They get to the moon and they see astronauts there.

And the astronauts are looking through their spacesuit and they just see these people, but they’re like Superman type people, but they don’t need suits, right?

Spacesuits.

They’re spacesuits.

And he asked them, what planet is this?

And the astronaut said, Houston, Houston.

And he said, oh, this is planet Houston.

He thought the guy was answering his question, but he was just radioing back to Houston that we have a problem on the moon.

So that’s why I say planet Houston and all that.

Also, of course, Houston is the very first word ever spoken in comments from the moon.

Actually, the very first word is contact, but contact light.

But those weren’t comments yet.

Those were diagnostics.

Then when they landed, Houston, comma, tranquility base here, comma, the eagle has landed.

There it is.

Look at that.

Okay.

There you go.

So he says, you guys are my hero.

My two-year-old daughter is obsessed with the solar system.

Now, in the age of social media and constant distractions, despite having all the knowledge of our species in our pockets, what do you think is the best strategy to foster the love of science and curiosity in a young person?

Ooh, there you go.

Nice.

What a nice question.

Get out of her way.

Oh, wow.

Look at that.

Yeah.

Why you got to be so hard on the guy?

He was just asking a question about his daughter, man.

Like, get out of her way.

That’s what you could do.

You’re a lousy dad, Charles.

We spend the first years of their life teaching them to walk and talk, and then we spend the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So children are born curious.

Get out of their way.

That curiosity will be maintained until the day arrives when you squash it.

And so I’ll give an example.

We’ve all had toddlers or younger.

They discover the pots and pans in the cabinet.

Pots and pans are usually low.

They’re not high up.

So they drag them out onto the ground, and they start banging on it with the wooden spoon and the aluminum ladle and the steel spoon.

And what do you say as a parent?

Cut out the racket.

Cook me something.

That’s what I said.

While you’re there.

While you’re down there.

Do something practical.

Stop the racket and you’re getting the dishes dirty.

Stop that noise.

And you have squashed an entire experiment in acoustics.

Right.

Because that’s what they’re doing.

They’re doing sonic experiments.

Correct.

And so children, yes, they make a mess of things, but you didn’t have children.

You didn’t have your kids so that you maintain a neat house.

That’s not how this works.

No, I had them as basically a retirement plan.

What, your kids?

My kids, I’m like, well, I got three.

I got hoax from maybe one of them.

So.

Anyhow, just watch what they do.

If they reach for an egg that you haven’t cracked yet to make an omelet, they just can just barely reach the counter surface.

What do you typically say at that point?

No, no, no.

No, no, put the egg down.

You might break it.

When you could let the kid have the egg, and you know it’s going to break, but then they’re going to see what’s inside the egg.

And there’s like the albumin and the yolk.

And then you tell them that might have been a chicken.

That’ll freak them out right there.

And then they become vegan.

And that’s how you make a vegan.

That’s how you make a vegan.

So that could have been a chicken.

Plus they learn that something can be hard yet fragile.

Not many things in a child’s life are hard.

Practically anything that’s hard is rugged.

But an egg is hard yet fragile.

So that’s a new kind of concept for a kid.

And you learn it might have been a chicken.

Then you could take the clear liquid, heat it, and it turns white.

There’s a color change from transparent to white.

Oh my gosh.

All of these are lessons that would have cost you 50 cents.

How much a dozen eggs cost these days?

Somewhere between…

I have no idea.

Yeah, I mean, the price went up.

Three bucks.

They can be six dollars a dozen.

Between three and six dollars a dozen.

At most, it’s 50 cents.

It’s 50 cents worth of learning.

Now, if the kid just throws it against the wall and turns the other way, no, then you’d stop that experiment.

You have a vandal on your hands.

You got a vandal.

You’re raising a vandal.

If he just takes the egg, throws it against the wall, he’s like, yay!

He’s like, oh.

Yeah, and walks the other way.

But if they throw it against the wall and then analyze it, let that go.

So the point is, and then we got to wrap here.

So the point is, these are experiments.

And as long as it doesn’t kill the child, you should not worry that it makes your home messy.

Because that is the consequence of a free, that’s the consequence of a child performing experiments at every turn of curiosity that descends upon them.

As long as you don’t get in their way to that, they will become scientists through and through their whole lives.

There it is.

There you go.

So your home is their laboratory.

Deal with it.

Well, that sounds awful.

I’m just saying.

So there you have it.

That’s why kids who still have diapers, they play with their poop.

They’re experimenting.

This is all fascinating texture.

Let it go.

Yeah, and don’t scar them when they’re playing with their poop, because that’s going to lead to some serious problems later on in life.

Okay.

There are things, experiments they might do that could harm them, so watch out for those.

That’s all.

See, those are the ones I say let them do, because they will learn the quickest.

No, it depends if they lose fingers and stuff or they die.

Well, I’m just saying.

My kids were playing in the doorway.

Losing a finger and it’s over, right?

My kids were playing in the doorway.

I said, let me put an end to this right now.

Rather than tell them, don’t do that, you could lose a finger, I took a pencil, put it in the doorway, slammed the door, and the pencil snapped.

And then I showed them the two halves of the pencil.

That was gangster.

And then I showed them the mark in the doorway remained there for the rest of their lives where the pencil broke.

They never played in the doorway again.

Yeah, I would never use a pencil either.

God, that’s traumatic.

Yeah, me, I just let my kids stick…

I let my kids stick a fork in the outlet, you know.

They only did it once.

That’ll blow the circuit, and they’ll never do that a second time.

No, they’ll never do it again, and they’re totally fine.

They don’t get electrocuted.

Like you said, it trips the circuit.

It’s a spark.

It pops.

It pops.

They get blown back, and they never do it again in life.

Wait, there’s an ex-KCD comic.

This is where your life splits between will you become a scientist or not.

Okay?

So there’s a wire, and the person connects the two wires, and they get a shock, and they say, so I’ll never do that again, and then the other option is you do it, and it makes a shock, and it shocks you, and you say, I wonder if that happens every time I do that?

So scientists are checking for trends in nature, right?

That’s the difference.

There you go.

That’s great.

And by the way, if I could just give it a shout out again, the book To Infinity and Beyond is all about the efforts and the trials and tribulations invested in experiments by scientists and engineers and just curious people trying to make discoveries that don’t always work in the way they had imagined.

But the next person that comes along now knows what not to do.

So Icarus’ wings melted trying to, you know, fly.

And we say, we laugh at him, but the next person, all they have to do is say, I want to try to fly, too, but I know not to make my wings out of wax.

Right.

There you go.

That’s how that works.

Anyhow, Chuck, that’s all the time we have for it.

Oh, man.

Okay.

All right.

A lot of wisdom in this episode.

Yeah.

Good questions, people.

Like the universe and everything.

Thanks for bringing those questions in.

And for the low price of…

Yeah, you know, just $5 a month.

See us on patreon.com.

That’s what you get, man.

You get to write in your questions.

I’m delighted to have you guys as our support.

Can I say that?

As our support group?

No, that’s the wrong phrasing.

As our support group.

I kind of like support group even better, though.

Thanks for being our support group in time of need.

All good.

All right, Chuck.

Always good to have you.

Always a pleasure.

All right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson finishing yet another episode of StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

As always…

Always.