Science at Warp Speed: StarTalk Live!

Join me and my co-host, Sashir Zameda, in conversation with particle physicist David Salsberg, an astrophysicist and Star Trek science advisor, Aaron McDonald. Also joining us is special comedic guest, Pete Holmes. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk.

You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Live. The Novo Theater in Los Angeles, and we've got a show for you tonight. Thanks for coming out.

Tonight we're going to find out where the site is and the sci-fi. The science in the science fiction, and we'll also explore some of the most iconic science fiction stories that have ever been told.

But I want to first introduce my guests.

As you may know, StarTalk is a juxtaposition. It is a braid of science, pop culture, and comedy. And right now, I will introduce to you my comedic co-host.

“That is Sashir Zameda, Satsir. Come on out. Where are you?”

Comedian actress, a former cast member of Saturday Night Live. You had more hair back then. I didn't have more hair. Yeah, I think people think I'm a different person when I shaved my head. I shaved my head for the first time ever in college, and I lost half my friends over the summer.

They just didn't recognize you. I didn't recognize you, I didn't recognize you. Now, in addition, we will have two expert guests. Let's bring the first one out.

We have astrophysicist Aaron McDonald.

Aaron, come on out. Here you go. Hello. Oh, thank you. Where did we find Aaron McDonald?

She is the official science advisor to the Star Trek franchise. Whoa! I want that job. We all want that job. Thank you.

Everyone wants that job. Everyone wants that job. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

“You have your PhD in astrophysics from the University of Glasgow.”

Yep.

Specializing in, uh, what's the neutron stars?

Is that correct? Yep, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, and gravitational waves. So I'm excited to talk about this. Actually, and you worked a bit with LIGO. I did.

And remind us what LIGO stands for? Laser interferometry, gravitational wave, observatory. That's why we abbreviated LIGO. Okay, in addition to Aaron, we have David Solsver. Dr. David Solsver, come on out, David.

All right. David Solsver, professor of physics at astronomy, at UCLA right here in our backyard. You're an experimental particle physicist. Correct, yes. And this is like, that's a verified space.

There's a lot of people that I have to deal with. [laughter] That why is he on this panel? Because he is the science advisor to the Big Bang Theory TV show, as well as young children, and he advised Christopher Nolan in

Oppenheimer. Oh my gosh. So his job wasn't to, to edit the script that other people to do that, he made sure that all the set design did not really mess up for what was supposed to be there at the time and at the place. Mr. particle physicist, all right. Well, it wouldn't be a complete start talk show unless we round out.

We have one empty chair here.

“Oh, yes. So, Sashir, you brought a guest comedian with you, who might that be?”

Yeah, you know, as you said before, the show is about science, pop culture, comedy, and I don't want to be the only comedy arm on this on this panel. So I'm bringing a buddy who is the creator and star of HBO's crashing and the host of the podcast, you made it weird. Give it it for Pete Holmes.

Pete Holmes. Oh. Pete, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. I love your work. I love your portfolio. And we decided you are ideal for this show.

Well, I'm here to be confused. Be well-dored. Afraid. Wait, did it be which be well-dored? Confused. Not this time. I'm just here to represent the common person who doesn't know what dark matter is or anti-matter

So let's bring this around. David, you study matter, right?

“And Aaron, you study spacetime. Correct.”

That's kind of the whole universe right there. That's covers that. That's kind of covers it. And you've got the expertise in the Big Bang Theory. One of the most successful shows there ever was. And I have two cameos in that.

Season three in season eight. Bragg. We're deflated. If you were scientists, you might have a cameo. I don't know.

Just say it. Or a comedian or an actor, dammit. And we have the consulting for Star Trek. So when you think of astrophysics or astronomy in general, you think of telescopes and telescopes look up and they detect light.

And the first telescope detected visible light.

Of course, because our eyes see by definition visible light. Then we discovered other kinds of light.

“First described as unfit for vision by William Herschel.”

He had the spectrum laid out that Newton told him, the Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet from a prison. And he said, I wonder what temperature each color has. So he put it's thermometer in each color and put a control thermometer just outside of the red because there's no color there.

That's your control thermometer. And every experiment he did, the control thermometer was hotter than all the other colors. And then he put it somewhere like in his backyard and it went to a normal temperature. And he concluded there must be some extra light coming from the sun that you can't see that's below the red.

He called it light unfit for vision, the boy discovered infrared light in that experiment. That's just to even ask that question. So then we, then the race is on. We go, there's infrared, there's microwaves, there's radio waves, there's ultraviolet, gamma rays, there's x-rays.

That's the whole electromagnetic spectrum. And we have telescopes and detectors in each of those bands. But that's not enough. The universe talks to us in more bands than that. So you seek out other ways of detecting the universe, give me another way.

So for example, neutrinos travel in straight line just like light. But they're not light. So if we could particle, it's a particle instead of that's not a particle of light. Right, the nutritious particle. No, no, no, no.

It's the neutrino. It was named by an Italian little neutral one. Oh, an extreme. It's an neutrino. Why do I look my mama so mad? It's a little close.

Is that a little neutral? It's a particle with no charge. Right, that's right.

“And maybe the best way to think of them is it's like an electron that lost its charge.”

That's about its cost. Yeah, that's right. You have your Brendan Fraser moment. Get it back. Oh, emotional.

OK, and so you try to detect neutrinos. That's right. And where do you find them? So the experiments that I did were in Antarctica, we used the Antarctic ice as a giant lens or target of the collected them.

So this is like glacial ice. Glacial ice that's hundreds of thousands if not more years old. OK, I just waiting for us to incredibly clear to radio waves. So the idea is that neutrinos mostly pass through. But one will hit, and it will make particles that emit radio waves

that we could then detect from our platform. Awesome. OK, so how many neutrinos are out there? Well, through the sun, the most of them that were coming through us right now are from the sun.

And through our bodies right now, there's about 100 trillion per second going through you.

neutrinos. Yes. Oh, no. I didn't know about that. But only about one or a dozen will actually interact with you in your lifetime. Define in like a ride.

Yeah, yeah, define in a ride. Well, that's a good question because we, but let's just say it leads a little energy behind. Oh, or brings up your DNA a little bit. OK, well, that's a slush head. That's not bad.

So Erin, so not only are these particles, but there's also waves that are not electromagnetic, that are not part of that whole spectrum that I just delineated. And so predicted by good ol' Albert, give me some of that background there. So one of the things that Albert Einstein did was a general relativity, which was sort of describing the fabric of our universe.

If you've seen that bowling ball on a trampoline idea, that's kind of how gravity works that they figured out. Most of us learn Newtonian gravity to Apple falling from the tree.

But that only really, it's an approximation for gravity.

It turns out we didn't know at the time. We didn't know. Yeah. And so Einstein was the one who kind of introduced mass into this fabric that scientists had already been thinking about and saw that that works.

That described the gravity that we were struggling to describe at the time.

“And one of the things he did was like, well, what if the bowling ball explodes, right?”

What if two bowling balls crash into each other? And you can propagate that through the math and the trampoline will ripple. And so spacetime ripples when there's a change to it. And it travels at the speed of light. But Einstein was like, it's there, but it's so tiny, no one will ever detect it.

And scientists went, challenge accepted, and a hundred years after his prediction, we detected the motion of spacetime in our universe. And the best analogy I can give you, but really pay attention to what I'm saying. It is like hearing the universe. It is not hearing the universe sound doesn't travel in space.

But it is like, you know, if you just didn't have any light and you're just hearing the universe, that's a different sense. And that's effectively what gravitational waves are. They give us information in a different sense. And they ripple away from the incident.

Yes. And they move at the speed of light. Correct.

And LIGO detected its first, in 2016, if I remember.

Fifteen, they announced it in 16th. They announced it in 16th. It's a common mistake. I know, I know. What are you going to do in this game?

It's a little embarrassing. It's a little embarrassing. Twenty-sixth. No, right here. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Please, please, go, yes.

“When we're in fastening, when you're fastening,”

this is the guy who didn't know what you were saying. I do hope that it's a bowling ball in a trampoline that this was solved in like some trailer parks. And we're like a symbol in an above-ground pool. We're going to figure this out.

Yeah. When you say it's the sound of the universe, what is the subject of that? Wouldn't it be a more localized source? So everything that's moving in our universe is giving off gravitational waves.

So we're rippling space time as I'm waving my hands around. But they are incredibly small and hard to detect. So the only things that LIGO detects are extreme events, essentially two black holes crashing into each other, or a black hole and another compact object like a neutron star,

or a dead star that crashed into each other. And it's this huge ripple. Now, I say it's really big. But what we're detecting is changes in space time, one-one-thousandth the size of an atom.

So it's tiny. And that's the-- But LIGO's measurement. But they measured it with mirrors made of atoms, which blows my mind.

Like the physics-virtis. So it's important. Yeah. And they saw it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I held it. Guys, you're great. Yeah.

I'll get back your thoughts safely. Go, Ellie, Lakers. Oh, yeah. Nailed it. I'm sorry.

OK, no, I'm so excited. I've ever waited to think about it. Yeah. It is. I'm Stein in 1915 or 1615.

[LAUGHTER] Oh, I'm going to say.

“He predicts the existence of gravitational waves.”

Then a few years later, he describes a obscure quantum phenomenon called the stimulated emission of radiation. This is a research paper that obscures stimulated emission of radiation. A few decades later, that became the foundation

of the invention of the laser. Laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Wow. And we just got your Netflix fast word.

Oh, no. I'm sorry. That's so-- so then LIGO comes around.

The first-- the Ellen LIGO stands for--

laser. So we did-- so 100 years later, we detect gravitational waves predicted by Einstein using lasers that he laid the foundation for. Wow.

So Einstein was badass. That's all I can say. It's irritating how much stuff that I discovered. Like it is wild. It's irritating that your acronym is

made of another acronym. Yeah. Double acronym. Oh, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To the whole thing. The whole thing got-- I'm package. Tell our laser and then the rest of hers. Yeah, amplification by stimulated emission of radiation

from a tree gravitational wave of radiation. Oh, yeah, I am turned on right now. This is your vaccine. You're welcome. I love it.

All right, so we've got this window to the universe that can detect things that ordinary telescopes couldn't. We've got this other window to the universe. And there's another one I want to make sure

So cosmic rays are also particles that move through the universe,

but they would be things like protons or electrons. So for those parts of the universe-- Yeah, mostly yes, and nuclei. OK, so the problem with them is because they're charged when they go to the magnetic fields of the universe,

they bend. So the direction you see them coming is not the direction they came from. So it's really hard to do certain means of astronomy. Yeah, right.

So you might just see them spread up even if there's one source out there you'd love to study. It kind of rains down on you from almost all directions. So these come from what? We don't exactly know.

OK, the next thing-- [LAUGHTER]

By the way, science is like the only branch of human inquiry

where you can stand flatfoot in, say, I don't know. Ask yourself who else can say that. Who else does say that? Everyone's got to have an answer to something. Everybody.

And so in science, you're at the frontier at the precipice. It is. We don't know. God, became a weed out now. He doesn't want to be an eye on it.

[LAUGHTER] OK, but their high energy, so some high energy phenomenon must be driving them, right? And also, probably they have to be contained in some magnetic fields, so they can stay in a one-place long enough to get accelerated.

So we have the idea that it could be the remnants of Supernova. Exploding stars, yeah.

It could be active, galactic nuclei, which

are supernova, but Exploding stars keep going. Please get away, guys. Who'd you know? I'd go into the nuclei of Galaxia. It's good.

It's quite powered by a black hole, for example. But there's a lot of candidates, and we don't know which one yet is the real winner. OK. So these are three whole new windows to the universe that tell us what's going on out there that we had no idea before we had these other kinds of telescopes.

“If you want to think about them that way.”

OK. So now we use telescopes, and we look out in the universe, and we find that 85% of the gravity of the universe has no known origin. And we call that dark matter, right? Gotta say dark matter.

Say it, like you mean it's not really the greatest words. So it should be called the invisible matter, because if you don't see it, it's just not luminous and so people call it dark. See, what I would call it dark gravity, because that's what it literally is. Yeah.

You okay with that? It doesn't sound like he's okay with that. He's like, are you giving my answers and visiting them? OK. I'm a little bit not knowing what you're after, because there's dark energy, and there's

dark matter, and I wasn't sure what you're talking about. I'm saying dark gravity is something that's got gravity, and we don't know what it is. OK. So here's my question to you. We don't know what it is, but some of you are people.

Wow. Go on, go on.

“What do you have to say about the whites?”

What do you have to say about the whites? What do you have to say about the whites? No, we're outnumbered. OK. So the community of particle physicists, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail

to you. Chemical physicists are sure that dark matter, what we call dark matter, is some other kind of particle we have yet to detect. And that's the original idea. But it could be, for example, black holes left over from the early universe.

There's other, it could be a particle, and we have certain places it would fit in really nicely. We need a particle that does this, and by the way, it would also be the dark matter. So that's really great. But no one says that it isn't black holes, for example.

But what's cool is because gravitational waves don't rely on light to detect them. We can't see dark matter using that traditional electromagnetic radiation. But we see the gravitational effects of something there. And that could potentially, with gravitational wave detectors in the future, we're not that sensitive to them yet.

But that may start giving us clues as to what dark matter is because we really don't-- It's not invisible to you. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But it might be a particle.

“How would you detect a particle that doesn't interact with our particles?”

You kind of sort of already doing that with neutrinos. We have many ways that we're looking for a dark matter, dark matter particle, because you're a particle physicist. Right. And you're a hammer looking for a guy.

So I have friends that go, well, we really-- it's very small now. But-- I feel like I'm your lawyer. That's where the nail analogy is. He's looking for the truth. Yeah, I did leave the witness very young.

I like it. But for example, people go into very deep caves to get away from the cosmic rays, which

xenon and liquid argon.

“They make it as cold as they can, as low radioactivity as they can.”

They shield it as much as they can, and they wait for something to hit it.

A dark matter particle is race. Right. And this one might fit it. They just sit there, and this wait and wait until they see it. I'm Joel Cherico, creator of CosmicMugs, CosmicMugs.com, art that lets you taste the

universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. So Star Trek, I don't want to create fights in the audience, but Star Trek cares about real science.

Uh-oh. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests.

We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests.

We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests.

We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests.

We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. We don't hate on sequests. You can look at how we started learning more about genetics, like genetics showed up a ton in enterprise after they had mapped the genome, like all of these things.

So only recently has Star Trek kind of sprinkled in some dark matter stuff.

“In Star Trek discovery, so do you want to talk about the discovery of dark matter?”

Should I talk about the discovery of dark matter? So I can tell you, from here, yeah, you got it. But it's not like you don't have dark matter stories. So many. I'll tell you.

Sounds good. You'll queue 'em up and come back to you. So Franz Wiggy in the 1930s was able to look at sort of distant galaxies and see how they were moving and see how the stars and them were moving, and it appeared that there was more stuff there than how the stars were behaving.

And so that's kind of the first origin of that.

And then Vera Rubin came along and she was great woman as star physicist, and she was able to move. Yeah. Rubin. And map in our own galaxy is showing that the movement of the stars, like that there

is dark matter in our own galaxy, and I love Vera Rubin, Rubin head here. And in Star Trek discovery, we actually named a dark matter nebula after her, because it's called the Verubin nebula, and I was very excited to get that in there. I know. A little shout out.

Sounds delicious. I know shocking, but there's a lot of overlooked women in physics, so any opportunity to shine a light on them. Vera Rubin was awesome. All right.

So we have these things that are kind of mysterious and sci-fi-E, I don't don't ask me to spell that, but sci-fi-E things, and one of them is anti-matter.

And many people's first encounter with anti-matter was Star Trek.

Yeah.

“Because you have matter anti-matter drives, and what goes on there?”

So with anti-matter, it's one of those things you hear these technical words thrown around, and you don't really know what science and what science fiction anti-matter sounds like science fiction, but it is actually a real thing, but it has to do with particles. So I'll let you explain anti-matter. Anti-matter.

Give it to me. It was an interesting case where that was predicted before it was found, and we had Paul Drak, the 1930s, playing around with the equations, but that's two named Paul Drak. Yes. First name was Paul last name was Drak.

Because Paul Drak. Okay. The sister was Tesserac. He was playing around with the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics, and he had to take a square root, essentially.

And you know, the square root of nine is three, but it's also minus three. Yeah. Two answers. It's minus three times minus three. It's also nine.

Yeah. Right. So it has two answers. And that's kind of close to why he found two solutions when he combined these equations. And one was a positive charge, and one was a negative charge, that we now identify as the

electron, and it's anti-matter particle, the positron. Okay. So he, as I understand, he hypothesized that since we are regular matter, there might be a whole other place filled with anti-matter. And he also had this idea that there could be a entire sea of particles that correspond

to the anti-matter. And there, there the matter, and where the anti-matter is.

and you turn into pure energy.

So if you met your matter counterpart, and you shook hands you, energy. Yeah. So don't do that. So don't do that. Just be careful.

So this is 100% efficient. So if a positron meets an electron, they collide and produce pure energy. All the mass, all their mass, those disappears, and goes into energy by equals mc squared. Okay. So start trek uses matter and time and matter for what drives.

Yes. That is correct. So strap in, because it's awesome. So sheet of space time, right? You want to go faster than the speed of light.

You can't on the surface of space time. Just to be clear, if you went the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, and that's too much time for a TV show. Yes.

“So you've got to do that during a TV commercial, so how did I pull it off?”

There you go. Yeah, the nearest start of us is over four light years away, and if you have a five-year mission, it's boring. So, to go, there's lots of different ways you can sort of talk about that. But shut up.

I forgot about that. Yeah. That's a five-year mission. Five-year mission. Explore.

Strange new worlds. To boldly go. With no man has gone before. We activated it. I'm just kidding.

It's an alien. It's a five-year mission. But the show only lasted three seasons. I know. Well, that's a different topic of the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And why do they have all those clothes? I don't know. I told you.

I told you. Catch us up on the board drives. Okay. So the idea behind board drives is you can't go faster than light on the surface of space time.

Something that says that space time itself can't go faster than the speed of light. And so you wrap a bubble of space time around your ship and then at bubble pushes you faster than the speed of light. In order to do that, you need energy because E equals MC squared. If you don't have mass, if you don't have a bowling ball, you can use an equivalent amount

of energy. And in Star Trek, they get that energy from matter antimatter collisions. Most people will conflate dilithium crystals, thinking that those are powering the ships. But those are more like control rods for the matter antimatter reactions.

They like keep it stable. But there's lots of like, once we start poking holes in it, we're going to like, how can you contain antimatter, right? Like. So right.

If you put antimatter in a bottle and not an etty bottle, the positrons in the antimatter would see the electrons in the bottle and they would annihilate and give off a lot of energy. So how do you carry around antimatter? So one way we saw in the movie Angels and Demons. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

“The priest, what was who played the priest in that?”

You and McGregor. He's walking around with this vial, the Vatican has the only vial of antimatter. And I'm looking at, I'd say, damn brown did not take any physics in this entire life. The author of this story. So we make antimatter all the time in labs.

The Vatican does not have a particle accelerator in his face, but I assure you of that, okay? And so they're thinking that this is, but he's walking around with a vial. But that part, I think, was reasonable. They had magnetic fields made by superconducting magnets.

And the idea is that you, the anti-matter just spins in a circle and never touches any walls.

It just sits there in a vacuum and it's totally fine. How do you hold it in real life? Who have things traps, penning traps, paw traps, specific names, but they're basically magnetic or electric bottles. A magnetic bottle.

Right. Okay, so then it's just, it's season magnetic field, which is not matter. So therefore we'll not, in our whole exactly. Magnets, bitch. Right?

Do you get that reference? Yeah, that's not the word. Yeah, that. But it's not, okay.

“So next, I'll just, I got the wrong reference.”

The benefit of the audience, I just want to measure the scale of energy we're talking about here. So in Oppenheimer, the first atomic bomb, how efficient was that conversion of matter to energy. Right.

So there's, in the first atomic bomb, I'm sorry, it's kind of sad to talk about. But there's dozens of kilograms of uranium. Only about 1% of that uranium underwent fission, which is how you get the energy out. So 99% didn't even know it was in bomb. Of that 1%, only about 0.1% of the mass of the uranium is converted into energy by

equals MC squared, or by the fragments of uranium flying apart. So many other. As devastating as that bomb was, it's a fraction of the energy that it might have had.

It had it been used, how to use all the uranium, it would have been 100 times more powerful.

There's really no way with fission for the reactions that do happen, you just happen to get about 0.1%. Okay.

duterium and tridium and smaller, instead of taking large nuclei and atoms and breaking apart, you can also get energy out of combining small nuclei. You can do this all the way up to iron and both the rest. So how efficient is that going out from hydrogen? So that's a few percent more.

One of the things the ways of fusion bomb people don't always realize is that a lot of that

still fission, the fusion is making neutrons, and those neutrons are hitting uranium outside, and then those are fissioning, and probably about half the energy released is still coming from fission. Okay. So whatever these are, these are percentages, very small percentages, whereas matter antimatter

is 100 percent. Okay.

“So why don't we just have all antimatter energy sources in the world today?”

Well, I did say dozens of kilograms, right? So you would need... What is antimatter cost? What was it? How much you got?

Think about it. Think about it. Don't ask. On the dark web. There you go.

The dark web. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. We're fissioning now, boy. Oh. He's going to get antimatter on the dark web. Okay.

That was good. All right. What depends how you get it, because for example, your body is making antimatter right now. There's potassium in your bones, and about usually the case to electrons, but about

once every few seconds, there's potassium in your bones is producing a positron or antimatter. So that would be free, you just have to catch it. So one gram of this might cost so much.

“But if you had to make it at an accelerator, and it was $100 million accelerator, and”

you're making nanograms, we're talking a lot of... Really? You can say an astronaut. You're a physicist. I'm speaking to the quantifier.

Is that it? Not President Bush. No. No. Make with the data.

We just said 100 million divided by nano.

Okay. So that's 10 to the eight becomes 10 to the 17. So 10 to the 12. Yeah. So three volumes of those.

No way more than trillion. You were doing no one heard it. I loved it. That I was your I heard it. Well, it was what you showed me.

You were not. You were not going into it. You were not going into it. You were not going into it. I went up to the quadrillion.

I think. Of dollars per gram. Okay. So this is not there much money in the world. Okay.

And that's in my body right now. That's all I heard. Did you see me in the parking lot with a styrofoam cop in a lighter of this? How do I get it? So who's the buyer?

Where's the drop? There it is. So Aaron, what is I've heard in Star Trek they reference subspace. Yes. What is that?

Subspace is fictional. Yes. Subface is fictional. It's a web site that helps people get paid to write. Right.

So subspace is fictional. Dialisome crystals are fictional. Can't tell matters real. Subspace is the concept is real. It's just the fictional term isn't been a dot.

It's basically the area outside of the trampoline.

However, you want to think it out. Everywhere outside the trampoline is subspace.

“And that's how they communicate faster than light in Star Trek.”

Because again, if you want to communicate fast as you can go, send a signal at the speed of light. But they create subspace buoys that poke through the trampoline. And then talk to each other faster than the speed of light, which is awesome. But you're all clearly impressed by. No, no.

Yeah. Are we confused if that's real? Huh? We know that's not real. So the idea of additional dimensions would be a real concept.

We don't call it subspace. That's what Star Trek calls it. Yeah. And the physics of the idea of subspace buoys is solid. But it doesn't exist.

Okay. We don't know how to get out of our own universe into subspace. Yeah. Does that help? Yeah.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. So, Sashir, you had tracking to parents.

Yeah. And that spill out onto you. Or would you just have weird geeky parents and you with the artist in the family? I'm still geeky. Next generation was my show.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And yeah. And they gave the one black eye on the bridge. He had the full vision.

Mm-hmm. There were two black eye. Hope you're right. Sorry, thank you. Thank you.

So Jordi LaForge had that visor they called it, which is acronym time, who's got the acronym? - There, not. - Please. - Visual, integrative, sensor, sensor overload resource. - Optical. - Optical.

- Pulling out of your ass. - I did. - I've got a tree source. - I've got a tree source.

- Yeah, it was so close. - Lidard, assumption, symmetry.

- ER, George Cloney. - So, it's a self-driven acronym. So, he was able to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And so, was he one of your favorite people? - Well, he Goldberg was one of my... - Woopi!

“- Oh, Woopi! - Woopi! - What did you think about him?”

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Blue milk. - Yeah. - What does that mean? - What was blue milk? - Wrong franchise. - Nope. - Yeah, yeah, that's fair. - You're right. - I'd take it back. - I'd take it back.

- See you guys. - Maybe their milk. - Yeah. - We're having our milk. - We're having a thing. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Blue milk is, yeah, very Star Wars. - But yeah, my parents really, yeah. If it looks Star Trek was very much in our household.

And my mom would braid my hair while we're watching the show. And my dad, I remember asking one time, kind of why I asked him. I was like, "Where are you from?" Or like, "Where do you grow up?" or something. And he was like, "Yes, you're farther this."

- Yeah, we didn't know each of them, that well. - Okay. - Okay. - Okay. - Yeah, I was getting to know him. - Okay. - And he said he's a Vulcan. And he speaks Vulcan.

I never heard it, but... - When he does? - That's what he said. - Oh, wow. - You know, my parents divorced later. And my mom was like, "We are not like great communicating with each other."

“And I was like, "That makes a lot of sense."”

- It's been two consecutive sentences. That my father speaks Vulcan. - Yeah. - My parents divorced later. - This isn't that, this isn't that makes sense. How does it not track?

- That's the most convoluted. I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes. I've never heard it.

- And never come back. - Right, right.

- I speak Vulcan. - I was like, "We're not going home." - I was actually embarrassed to have a name from Star Trek. And I was a kid. I would tell people, "Oh, it's a crystal from far away." - Because it wasn't actual, the name of it.

- It wasn't even a character, no. So, after Kevin Kirk gave a rose to this friend's set. She was like, "We have something like this on my planet, except it's made out of crystal." - Is this an alien he had just boneed?

- He was trying about, who's courting? - Courting, okay. - Okay, gotcha. So, she gives him a flow. - Her a rose. - A rose.

- I guess a plant that was like a earth rose. - In earth rose, yeah. - And she was like, "We have something that looks like this on my planet, but it's made out of crystal." - And that's called the-- - Sashir.

- Sashir. - Yeah, that's so cool. - That's beautiful. - Yeah, that is. - It's a little rude.

Someone's like, "Look at my flower." He's like, "We got this, but it's better." (laughter) - It's kind of what this is. I was just fortunate.

- Yeah, that was some dice. (laughter) - So, do we have acts, I mean other than Star Trek, and hi-versivation, all this. Do we have actual anything on the books

that could get us going faster than light, Aaron? - It's all theoretical, but the math checks out. So things like wormholes, wormholes are-- - Let me see wormholes. - That means wormholes.

- Constructs. And that would allow you to short-cut a distance in space and time. - Love base and time. - Love base and time. - We do love wormholes.

- Yeah, yeah, we can, in principle, wormholes are makeable if we had negative gravity stuff, which we don't have. - Yes, and enough energy to bend it. But they may exist naturally. We just don't know how to find them.

We don't know what to look for, but again, the math checks out. - So that doesn't require engines or anything. You're just stepping through. - You're just walking through, yeah. - And what else do we have?

Tell me about tacky eyes. So there's particles that are called tacky eyes if a particle goes faster than the speed of light. We've never seen one. We don't know that such a thing exists.

- She's just making this a-- - That's just a word. So not me that I'm experimentalists are theorists. What to talk about a particle that you and your particle physicists have?

- Well, they just, 'cause the name it doesn't mean it exists. - Wow, that was some real theoretical physicists chain that you just threw down. - It's actually--

“- I think it's 10 somewhere, I don't know.”

- There's actually good reason particles don't go faster than the speed of light. Because as long as nothing can go faster than the speed of light,

we never violate what's called causality,

meaning that if I press a button, a light turns on. And any observer moving around the universe will always see me pressing the button before the light turns on. It might disagree about how far apart they were. We might disagree about the time difference between them.

But if A caused B, no one will see B happening before A. As soon as we start communicating with tacky eyes if they existed, that will go out the window. So you would lose causality. So I don't even know how you would live in a universe

that you have faster than light communication. - If you're going to detect them, you have they'll be detected before you turn the detector on. - Don't it be detected before they were sent?

- Right. - Which is like wild.

“And Star Trek uses tacky-- so you may have heard that word”

because Star Trek uses tacky eyes all the time. And that is another thing that is a physics concept and theoretical physicist over here. But we don't know how to detect them, but like you said the causality,

Star Trek is pretty consistent with how they use tacky eyes because any time they break causality through time travel when they break those rules tacky eyes show up. So like when Janeway came through the wormhole at the end of Star Trek Voyager, thank you.

They detected a surge of tacky eyes first and then this wormhole opened. And it was because they were violating causality because that Janeway does. - And of course tacky eyes.

So tacky eyes has the Greek root tacky eyes meaning fast. Like a te cometer. That's these are the same roots to that word. But I just want to clarify here.

According to Einstein, you cannot accelerate past the speed of light. But that doesn't stop a particle from being birthed faster than light.

So never had to cross the boundary.

- Okay. - So we're okay there. (laughter) You're okay. Don't look at me like-- like you would touch the camera.

It's on that. You are the killer. (laughter) It's season on CBS. (laughter)

- I don't know.

“I don't know how you get around the causality problem still.”

So here it is. You're walking down the road and you slip on a banana peel. And I say you're my friend. I don't want you to slip on the banana peel. So I invoke tacky on texting.

Okay. And I send you-- This is after it happened. So I send you a tacky on text. You get it before you slip on the banana peel.

And your phone alerts you. You look down at the phone and it says, "What's out for the banana peel?" And you're not looking where you're going. And you're slip on the banana peel.

- Oh, man. That is a close choice. - What you're really going to bake your noodles. What you would have broken it if I hadn't said anything. (laughter)

- Exactly. - Right? - Thank you. Make tricks later. - Yeah.

- Yeah. You're prominent African American science fiction character. I'm very sorry to bother you. (laughter) So to me that's my favorite tacky on example.

You actually cause the person to slip on the banana. - It's like a rival to that. - Yeah. - There's something like that. - Oh, the rival.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. - She was pretty tacky on me. - Yeah, but in her interpretations of the past present in future. - But she--

- Yes. - Whispers of thing to a guy that hadn't-- - Yeah. - Yeah, there was some of that. - Definitely tacky on some of that.

- Yeah, I got a definite. - Yeah. (laughter) - All right. So, and plus, there was a Mexican physicist named

"Ocubieri." - Yep. - Tell me about the "Ocubieri" drive. - Yeah, so-- - Which wasn't--

- In the United States, and they deported him. Is that what I have? Just-- - She's so nice. - Oh, no.

- Just, yeah. (laughter) - That's my duty as a comedian to join you in the rib. (laughter) - I must.

- Oh, no. - I can't leave you out there.

- By the way, one third of all Nobel Prizes

and the sciences that have been earned by Americans were earned by American immigrants. (applause) - Oh, yeah. - Yeah.

A third. - Yeah. - These are foreign-born nationals becoming American citizens earning the Nobel Prize for Merck.

- Merck. - Merck. - Merck. - A posh of E.M.U. - R.R.I.C.A.

- So, Mexican physicists-- - Yes. - Tell me about this drive. - So, he kind of motivated by Star Trek was like, well, could we build?

Is it a neat idea? Is this possible? And so, did the math to try to figure out if it was possible to have a warp drive using the manipulation of spacetime?

And the answer was yes.

“And that's what we call the Al Qubar Drive.”

And so, he published a paper about this and what was funny about it. - It was authentic physics paper. - It is a physics, the physics of warp drive checks out.

It checks out.

And he was sort of the first one to come up

with a good concept of how you make physics laws happy when you're doing this. And they did-- - But there's not to violate known laws of physics that apply.

So, you dance around that if you can. - Conservation laws are all those sort of things. And so, the issue with it is, remember I said earlier, like, if you want to bend spacetime,

but you don't have the matter, you can use the energy. So, the question is, well, how much matter and anti-matter are you going to need?

How much energy is going to be used to build this warp drive? And the first calculation that they did of this, the answer was all of it. - All of it.

- All of it. - Energy. - All of it. - So, energy matter. - Ever existed.

The number was so high that they were just like, "Uh-oh, that's not great." - Nobody needs to go anywhere that bad. - Exactly. And a lot of it was just because

of all the manipulation of spacetime. And so, they kind of like go back to the trying board. Is it where go through the equations

without breaking any laws of physics

with about the energy equivalent of a semi-truck being torn and like E equals MC squared. The masses of semi-truck, but as we talked about earlier, the amount of matter used for an atomic bomb

like multiply that to the side of semi-truck,

“and that's why Zephymcochern is hitting the juice.”

(laughs) I'm not going to strap myself into that any time soon, but that's our big limiter to how we don't have warp drive now. The math is fine theoretically.

It all checks out, but we just don't have any understanding of how to obtain and hold and manipulate all of that energy in order to do it. Detecting gravitational waves

is actually seeing the motion of spacetime. That's turning to get us there in terms of how do we start playing with spacetime. So this is all just things that I am front of us and they're just unknowns of how long it's going to be.

- What you say is we'll never have warp drives.

- You're sexy. - He's sexy. - He's sexy. - He's sexy. He is probably pushing it, but if we make a huge discovery in energy, maybe we do find a way to more efficiently capture anti-matter.

That's a different conversation. - I'm looking at his facial expressions while you see it. - I know. - They both as far away as possible. - Yeah, we kept them separate here.

(laughs) And the criminal is here. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - So we've also heard things about higher dimension.

I love me some higher dimension. (upbeat music) - I love higher dimension. - What? - It's just like the lazy.

(laughs) It's very casual.

- All right, so we live in three spatial dimensions

up, down, left, right, forward, back, right. And then there's a time dimension in there. And so these are our four dimensional realities. And if you're not completely comfortable with thinking that we live in four dimensions,

I'll convince you right now, okay. If someone comes up to you and say, I'll meet you tomorrow at Starbucks. We're time. (audience laughs)

That's a place, but it's not a time. You need the space, and if I say, I'll meet you tomorrow at 10 o'clock. Where? The four dimensions of our space time reality

are built into our language and our capacity to encounter one another, even if you didn't know it. And one thing that Zoom did during COVID is it broke that space time continuum? - That really checks out.

(audience laughs) - We've all had that made it. (audience laughs) All you needed, no think about it. It's called your world line where you are in space and time.

And if you want to meet someone, your world lines have to intersect.

“You have to be at the same place and the same time.”

You can cross a street where trucks have been, but you're not killed by the truck. You're in the same place, but at a different time. This I'm following. - Okay, we good. So, what Zoom did only required that you be at the same time,

not in the same place, and you still had the encounter. So, that I was deeply moved by this time. - Yeah. - Okay. So, this is how they felt about phone sex. (audience laughs)

You can get it anywhere. (audience laughs) Anyone pay phone? - That's a phone. - Call phone? - Pay phone? Who's doing it at pay? - Yeah.

- Okay. - So, this is the phone? - This is the phone? - This is the phone? (audience laughs) See, we're bound by the laws of yesterday. - So, what I'm saying is, so, so,

the universe, particle physicist, tell us, is more than these four dimensions. - Oh, maybe. (audience laughs) My students and I looked for extra dimensions

at the Large Hadron Collider. The particle is called a radion. - What? - Say that again? - A radion. It was another case of just because you name it, doesn't mean it existed.

We did find it. (audience laughs) But found it. We found that there'd be one more Nobel Prize in the denominator of your fraction.

- Okay. - Yep. - We didn't find it.

“But we look, and the idea is, remember how we talked”

about Paul Dirac was combining the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics? Well, it more modern physicists have tried to combine the full equations of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

It was a bit harder, and to make that work, they needed to add extra dimensions. Now, obviously, there's nothing more than we experienced in up-down left-right, et cetera, as you said.

So, the idea is that they'd be really small, so we missed them. And so, they started to convene it.

- Particle physicists.

- So, they started with the idea

that would be 26 extra dimensions,

“and then they said, well, that seems like a lot,”

but then they had this idea called supersymmetry, where every particle has a partner, just like matter and antimatter. Every particle would have a supersymmetric particle. We haven't found that yet.

That lowered the number of extra dimensions that we only need ten total dimensions. So, we're down to ten. - Ten, as long as this other symmetry exist, that we never found.

(audience laughing) Or we could just smoke some D.A.C. and be done. (audience laughing) - I have you considered that you were the particle, collidering.

(audience laughing) - So, here's my favorite example of inter-dimensionality, if I may. - You may. - Then you'll understand why I said,

some dimensions, okay? - I like it. - Okay, so, if we lived just in a flat plane, two dimensions, all right?

And all of a sudden, someone noticed a dot,

just appear out of nowhere, and then it grew, became like a circle. And then it shrunk back down to another dot, and then disappeared completely. We'd be scratching our heads, what is this?

You know what that is? That is a sphere moving through, a three-dimensional sphere moving through the two dimensions of your world. And it manifests as something that's not there

it appears and then disappears. So, when your particles pop in and out, quantum mechanically, I wonder, is there some higher dimensional existence that's passing through our spacetime?

And we just happen to get a glimpse every now and then. - Maybe. - Yeah. - That's your best answer, maybe?

- Yeah. - That's my whole poem. - I love it. - I love it. - I love it.

- I feel you. - Thank you. - I'm mad.

- I thought I could get more than one word answer.

- Yeah. - Well, I think you've got to make a,

“it's science, you have to make a prediction.”

And then, and then, and the more surprising the prediction, the better. - Yeah. - And then we will go look for it. And that's, the idea can sound great

at the idea that it has to be the way the world works. - Well, even I will work on it and we'll work on it. (laughter) But wait, if there are these other dimensions

that could be other versions of us, are they like other universes in a way? Because in the Netflix series, strange or thing, heard of it. - It's fifth season now.

It's, they have it upside down. What is that? Did you know what that, you, have you seen the show? - I have seen the show. I don't understand all of it,

but they do have upside down. And it's upside down. - So sure, I'm going to see it. - It's underneath. It's like, didn't you live where we're up here?

- Oh, we're up here? - And then they're, it's like, - It's like an alternate reality. - It's like a flip it around. (laughter)

- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Okay, so, show them quick. - So what do you mean? - I didn't think I would ever see that again.

- Thank you. - Really? - So, what's there in the upside down? - It's like a black, scary stormy. - Black?

- The trees are black. (laughter) - Black? - It's very dark. - Dark?

- Dark? - Dark? - Yeah. - Thank you. (laughter)

- What was, I mean, so straight? - So, what?

“- How did they get access to this upside down world?”

- They opened a portal to another dimension. - I would make communicate through like the Christmas light. - But I like the upside down idea because it is like they, you just multiply everything by minus one,

which is kind of the original multi-verse question, which was like, but what if goatese and evil? Like that was Star Trek, right? They had the mere universe,

which was just our universe. - Oh, yeah. - Just flipped upside down. - Yeah, yeah. - That means there's a possibility.

- Yeah, you were bad. - Yeah, there's another version of this podcast happening where we're all hanging like bats in my feet. - And we'll have goatese. - We have goatese.

- I haven't seen it, but it sounds like they, I heard they opened it with a particle accelerator, so that-- - Which one, right? - Stranger things.

- Yeah, I think they did, yeah. I think, but-- - I just say, you say black hole, particle, neutrino, you can kind of do whatever you want. Get to the demons, get to one owner rider.

(laughter) - We don't care. - We don't care. - We're good, right? - I mean, you care.

- That's your job too. - A little bit. Yeah. - We're so proud here going like, who cares? - Wait, so, but there's some mixed things here.

So, we have this upside-down world. Is it another dimension? Is it in the multiverse, right? So, we've heard a lot about the multiverse and Marvel has run with it in the multiverse.

- Right. - It has no missteps. It has start-treat picked up the multiverse. - Yeah, so they did, in the next generation, there was an episode where Warf is going through a quantum

just 'cause that's quantum doesn't, anyway.

And then sees all these different versions of like, what would happen, where, you know, he's married to Deanna Troy, and there's a birthday cake at one point. And like, there's all these different things. And so, we did in more recent seasons in lower decks,

season five, which yeah, like, that shows great. I'm biased, but it's a great show. But we brought that multiverse concept back, and they do a cool explanation with it. - What's lower down?

- Start track lower decks. - Oh, I'm sorry. - No. - And I made it first. - Okay.

- I'm afraid of start track upper decker, but I know. - Wait, so David, to boldly go. (audience laughs) - Let me split your infinitives on my stage. (audience laughs)

“Didn't they fix the split infinitives in the later?”

- To go boldly. - Yeah, no. - No, it's start track. (audience laughs)

- I thought they messed up it.

- In the future split infinitive, very different thing. So, David, we think of these multiversas as, "Oh, I have a go-t or not." War, somebody's married to someone else, but really, as I understand multiversas,

it's quantum forged, so that there be variations, not just in who you marry, but in the actual laws of physics, that we'd find in those universes, which would make it really hard to set up life again as you come to know it.

- Well, the last part you said is the key part as we come to know it. We don't know what else we would call life. - Damn. (audience laughs) - Maybe it's not made of atoms, maybe it's something else.

So you have lots of other chances in whatever that universe is that you've made in its own rules, is there gonna be some local collection of matter that locally lowers entropy at the expense of expense and heat,

which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here.

- Which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here. - Which is what we're doing here. - So maybe there'll be something that would satisfy our criteria. It's like a knot, it's all, it's other kinds of creatures.

- Sure, we're not atoms, but who are we? (audience laughs) - I think there's, there's- - Are we horny? (audience laughs)

- There's like different kinds of multiverses and I think that like different multiverses and one is where the laws of physics would just be different in one universe. And then there's that like genuinely infinite

concept of multiverses, where however it's structured, there is really hard to wrap your brain around the concept of infinite. That everything is exactly the same but one. - Because if you have an infinite number of those kind of universes,

any variation will exist. And you can find the universe for which that is true. - Right, there you go. - Right. - But those would have the same laws of physics in that context.

- Exactly.

“- In that concept, yeah, that's why they're kind of different theories.”

But I love the universe. (audience laughs) - Let's tackle the biggest topic here, which is the storytelling in science fiction. And this year, I heard you comment on,

when you saw some stuff, was it the Jetsons?

What does the Jetsons mean to you when you first saw them?

- Was it the Jetsons? - I don't know. (audience laughs) - I was just thinking how funny would it be if you didn't talk about this before?

(audience laughs) - That's what's happening. (audience laughs) - What are you talking about? (audience laughs)

- No, no, no, no. So it was, if you look at 100% of future sci-fi storytelling. - Oh, I know what you're talking about, okay. (audience laughs) - Well, what I watched the Jetsons, I was like,

where are the black people? Where are they? Where are they? Where are anyone but white people?

“And that is also like, how I felt about a lot of sci-fi growing up.”

We didn't really see brown people in the future, which makes it feel like we don't belong there. And I mean, it's definitely changing now, which is so wonderful to see more representation in stories about our future,

because we belong there. (audience applauds) So yeah, I guess I wasn't thinking that because just everybody is an out-of-you-one-it, that is hilarious. No, no, no, I'm just saying you gave 'em exactly what he was. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

No, no, no, no, no, no, just put up to kid. I'm just saying when I was a kid, it's just everybody on TV was white. So that was just that universe. Yeah. So I thought it was weird that, you know, today we have self-driving cars, but they didn't have self-driving cars in the jetzons.

Right, I thought that was. And why did Rosie the maid have to wear an apron? It's a cover of her vagina. Yeah, obviously you're gonna love the answer.

So in storytelling, in Star Trek, what I've always admired about it is each story was a bit of a morality

tale, a little bit of a mirror held up to whatever was going on back here on earth. And there was, I just sort of value when you can tell that kind of story. Otherwise, why do you do, it's just a fantasy in the future. Yeah. And for me, good literature, you can bring it home in some way and have it mean something to you and have it mean something to your society.

“Well, I think what's great about Star Trek 2 is that it is very explicitly humans on earth in the future.”

Like, as opposed to just some other universal galaxy or whatever thing, it is like, this is where earth is going to go. This is what people will be doing. And this is what it looks like. And these are the people who have jobs. And for 1966, it was a really big deal, not just having a shell nickels and I'm not undermining the importance of that by any means. Right, plus if you look at her title, her military title as Lieutenant means she is in the path of succession

to be captain. Yep, even though it's dead never happened.

The fact is, that was a real possibility to even have such a title and not be the, you know, the janitor. So, how do any of us feel, and you coming at this from the liberal arts? I'm curious. I'm a big fan of Mark Twain, as I'm saying, first get your facts straight, then distort the metric leisure. And to me, that should be instructions for the artist who has access to science. And so, do any of us, I'd like to get an opinions here, do you feel, how much science can or should be sacrificed for the sake of a good story that you want to tell?

So, you sound like, you got to always felt like my job was not to be the science police. My job was to be a resource to the people that were actually telling the story. So, I would tell them if something wasn't correct, but I wouldn't, and maybe give some other ideas. But it's the idea of what universe any particular story is. If I had consulted on back to the future, I might have told them, you know, we really don't know how to do time travel, and it would work. And then it would be, you would be inspired that afternoon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's a witty for his mother.

“You're ruining the story. How's he going to want to form his mother?”

The way I like to think of it is like science fiction is a huge spectrum between science and fiction. And every story is going to pick somewhere on that and say, this is where we're going to land. But I think, you know, I think that quote is perfect and really apt for how you integrate science into story is that you get the foundation or the backbone of science and then build the story around that. But when you're in those decision rooms and maybe the budget doesn't work or maybe we have to change something.

The story comes first, then the characters, then the science. I was talking with William Shattner about the transporter and he said, they invented that so that they didn't have to have lower ramps and land. And there's two costly. Yeah. To beam them in and get on with the show.

So there was a cost provision there.

But, but the problem is it murders the person and recreates them.

It's not great. It's not great. Now you're telling me this? Yeah. This is awkward.

I teleported here. So you don't exist and then you get reassembled on the other side.

“I think the information if I understand goes down, but not you.”

But what are you? I think they murdered you in Greek. Wait, wait. What are you if not the sum of the information that comprises you? Oh, you believe in a soul.

Sorry. Sorry, science guy. God, yes. That's my, these busted right there, too. So on one of my two cameos on the Big Bang Theory, my first one to two, there were, you have

the whiteboards throughout the show, right? And there are equations on those boards. And someone on set told me that you had found equations from my research to put them up there, but they were not my equations. There's someone else named Tyson in my modern astrophysics, the name is Tony Tyson.

I call him cousin Tony affectionately. And, but those were his equations. I thought I'd let him not buy in that. I remember finding your PhD thesis in using it.

Someone doesn't recognize their own thesis.

Oh. Too long in trailers and show business. We're not going to have war. Oh, I got Tony Tyson's thesis. Thank you.

Turn it up, universe there. We'll find out. Okay. How about our team of researchers? There.

According to Aaron, there is a universe in which you did it correctly. Let's imagine that that was it. And so just in terms of storyline in the final episode, I think it was, of the final season of the Big Bang Theory, Sheldon, who was like the smart one with multiple degrees,

“a team's up with his wife, Amy Fairfelller, who, in life, real life is my MDL.”

Who is a real life neuroscientist of Ph.D. He has a PhD in real life, plays a neuroscience scientist on the show. They collaborate with some new kind of physics that I couldn't follow. But did you advise on that? Yeah, I did.

It was actually one of the rare cases where they gave me a lot of warning. Usually it's like, we're doing a script tomorrow, but some science in it. They told me, we're actually, you're funny. That is nice. That's good.

That's good. Yeah. But this time, that's okay. You need some Nobel Prize where the discovery go. Well, you're like this.

And if I could, I'd have a Nobel Prize. I would waste it on your show. And I wouldn't retire a year before it was given. Oh no. Oh no.

That was Steve. That was Steve. Oh. You have it. Just tell people you have it.

We'll never look at that.

Thank you. Oh, sorry.

“I remember something like super symmetry.”

Instead of super symmetry. And we've been talking about supersymmetry. That's been a theory since before I was a graduate student. People have been looking for evidence of this theory forever. I looked it up.

There's about 10,000 papers with the title. Super symmetry. And another 10,000 carrying the title. Super symmetric. Oh.

But then it came to me. Super asymmetry. And I was like, oh. Is there any, zero papers with that title? Oh.

That was their new theory. Okay.

So that gave you, that gave you a space in which to operate.

Right. That was new. Right. Exactly. I can explain what I, in my mind, the theory was, but it's not Nobel Prize.

But it's been not for the show. Yeah.

“The idea is that we're in, in real physics is where are the supersymmetric particles?”

Where is this partner of the electron? We know it's antimatter partner. We can't find it's supersymmetric. So it's a symmetry that is broken. So people make the symmetry theoretically.

And then it's broken to explain why we don't see it. And the idea of their theory is that you don't, it doesn't. It's not symmetric and then broken. But it starts asymmetric. Can you just go, just clarify here.

I just clarify. Please don't ask me more questions. [LAUGHTER] Look, okay. The cover is something else.

What does it mean to break symmetry? So that implies that things are a certain way that you like. And then they're different. And you say they're broken. But if nature is that, what does it mean for nature to be broken if that is nature?

Maybe it's your understanding that's broken. [LAUGHTER] I like that. [LAUGHTER] He's got it.

He's got it. He has faith. I don't know. And we have broken symmetries all the time in just ordinary mundane physics. Like a magnet.

The laws of magnetism are have no preferred direction. But when you pick up a magnet, it does point a particular direction. It chose a direction. And once it started to form the magnetic field one way, it was reinforced. And that's the direction that the magnet has.

So we see symmetry breaking all the time in physics. We start with something symmetric, but the actual product instance we see are broken. Now drop your mic. [LAUGHTER] That's why they give it to you.

My favorite fact about magnets is there's a North Pole on a South Pole. You got that? OK. We together on that. OK.

I guess. OK. And opposite poles attract. Yep. I like that you're looking at me.

OK. [LAUGHTER] OK. So now you take the magnets suspended from a string. And the magnet, the North Pole of the magnet, will point to Earth's North Magnetic Pole.

So the fact that the North Pole of a magnet points to Earth's North Pole means Earth's South Magnetic Pole is in the North. OK.

“And our North Magnetic Pole is in the South.”

Yes. I like that. I didn't get it, but I like it. [LAUGHTER] I was waiting for you a few hundred thousand years.

They flipped and were overdue. Oh. Well, that's comforted. [LAUGHTER] We don't have enough on our plate right now.

I got to be waiting for it. The poles to flip. [LAUGHTER] Great. I'll tell that to my daughter next time I'm reading her a bedtime story.

Just tell, you know, we're overdue. Good night. [LAUGHTER] So tell me about, like, future tech.

Because I have a good authority that the first sort of flip phone by Motorola was inspired by the communicator in Star Trek.

It was a-- Thank you. You guys get a room, OK? [LAUGHTER] Not without you, Neil.

[LAUGHTER] So he just thought that was cool. It was an engineer with Motorola. And we had cell phones before that, but they weren't flip phones. And they weren't that small.

So this is, this is science fiction, inspiring design. Yeah, I had clam shells. [LAUGHTER] You don't think it came man, everyone. [INAUDIBLE]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Imagine. [LAUGHTER] So, you know the track order? Yep.

The track tell I know what the track order is. Yeah, so, well, the medical track order is what we commonly think of. But that's sort of like the medical device that they hover over and they go, like, oh, no, we have a problem. And so it's a touchless, diagnostic tool. Science-Rakey.

[LAUGHTER] And it's a thing that, like, we love Rakey. We've won it, it's so interesting. Rakey energy, yeah. So it's like--

Shit, I mean-- OK, but there's an x prize for the first track order. Yeah, so the x prize is money gathered, and it's given to-- And the people compete for a device that you can hover over a person, and it'll diagnose your-- get your vitals.

Yeah. So this prize that they offered, it was like, you had to-- I'm-- the numbers are approximate, but you had to pick up, like, five to eight vitals signs, and be able to diagnose a handful of ailments without touching someone, like, just with scanning it. And someone wanted, like, they have that ability--

It's a bit home, isn't it? [LAUGHTER] No, she didn't. Perfectly clear. [LAUGHTER]

There's a sniff, bro. Yeah.

“But what speed is that idea of necessity driving invention?”

And, you know, we went through a period where it didn't really want to be in close contact with a lot of really sick people. And so that sort of moves that machine. And just because it was invented, it's like that technology exists, but it's the size of a house and is, well, you know, so-- Somebody could have been motivated who's thinking about the future. Right.

And you have creative futurists doing just that. And storytellers that can have all of us participate in that. So I'm old enough to be the first track series, okay? Like Captain Kirk, that one. And so I--

The work drives check. Full time torpedo. Check. That's the future for sure. And I was just going down the list.

And then they just walk up to a door and just automatically open.

And I said, "No, that'll never happen."

So, don't ever take future predictions from me, right? Because that was the least believable thing. That's how old I am. Doors in order, Matt, you had to physically open the door yourself. And the first time you wrote this subway in New York, you're like,

[screaming] No, no, no. I'm not talking about-- I'm not talking about doors that do open automatically. I'm talking about doors that know you are approaching the door.

And then they open. That's the subway to know you're there. I understand, grocery store then. Yeah. But that's the perfect touch sense of the patch.

It had pads on the enterprise. It was just the same color as the carpet. The early old foods in space. So, I'm just wondering what the future might bring. What do we need out of it?

We want a molecule thing that makes a hamburger. Replicator. Replicator. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

“I think that's the one where closest to that we don't have yet.”

Really? Really? Because 3D printer technology has gotten so good and efficient and smaller.

And like, I never thought I would own a 3D printer.

Now I have 3 because I'm that type of person.

Now the first one printed the other.

[laughter] You missed it. It's once for every dimension. Oh, very good. There you go.

Yeah, exactly. But also the food science.

“And like things like discovering the protein responsible for--”

Can you do this? Like, what we're getting there in these advances that maybe one day we can print a burger that will take 25 hours and taste horrible. But like, it might happen. So anyway.

Okay, that's what you're after. It's what I'm excited about. Better than shaking. [laughter] I'm just thinking of all the things you're wishing for in the future.

You want to print a hamburger? I don't know. I think that. I'm wishing for more. What do you want the future?

I want radios that use dark matter to communicate. Nice. Oh, she know that's the thing. Nice. No.

You don't want a burger? No.

“You environmental implications of raising cattle.”

I said that right. This guy wants a walkie talking that works in different ways. [laughter] [laughter] So she'll grab the mic for me.

[laughter] So she'll, what do you want for his future? Um, I do want to teleport, but I don't want to be murdered. But-- [laughter]

Yeah, but he just gets some work quickly. Yeah, yeah. I got to land this plane. [laughter] Ooh.

Ooh. Ooh. Start talk with Neil DeGrasse. [laughter] Start talk.

He's real sassy. [laughter] Start talk. [laughter] Three dimensions.

Start talk. Check out the mentions. [laughter] Full random words out of this conversation. [laughter]

That's a matter. [laughter] [laughter] Fusion. All of the apps.

[laughter] Neil is horny, what do you think of the dead son? [laughter] [laughter]

Well, I'll never be asked that.

[laughter] [laughter] So, let me offer some parting thoughts here.

“I think you're here because you have some appreciation for science.”

As a minimum, your science adjacent, as the saying goes. [applause] You know that civilization tivots on the progress of science and what it can do for a health, our wealth, and our security. I relish in the creativity of those who tell stories about a future that could be.

Because it has me thinking beyond the moment and saying, "What do I have the knowledge, the power, the wisdom or the insight, to implement?" So, I can create a world like that. And there's this time-honored debate. There's art imitate life.

There's life imitate art. Well, I think we can elevate that to the next level. Does life imitate science fiction? Or does science fiction imitate life? Or maybe we are needlessly turning that into a binary question.

And perhaps as we go forward, it is the interplay of the two that will shape the future of civilization, a future world that we be proud to live in and not embarrassed that we created. And that is a cosmic perspective. No more theater, Los Angeles. And in the tunnel, David suffered.

Peas. So, see you in the middle. This has been start talk. What do you live on stage?

And as always, keep looking up.

He'll address science in everybody.