StarTalk Radio - Are We The Universe’s Way of Knowing Itself? With Brian Cox

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

What is truly foundational to the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice welcome particle physicist Brian Cox for a discussion about emergence, particles, consciousness, and the very fabric of spacetime. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/are-we-the-universes-way-of-knowing-itself-with-brian-cox/Thanks to our Patrons Kyrie Diantonio, Brandon Zimmerman, Blane Sibille, Eva Dis, Micheal Bejarano, Z A N, Bart, Aaron Gannon, Chad McJannett, I'm here for the Knowledge Fight!, Daish, Jim, Zachary Casey, Nasry Al-Haddad, Mackrobin Bille, Rebecca, N, Tom Roughley, COrry Pogue, Matthew McNabb, Christian Kendall, Robert L Eberle, Alan Harris, Dayne Mauney, Christopher Moore, Shaq-q, David Maurice, Edmund Prieto, Dan Central Jersey Is Real Alles, Tony Isaacs, Erik Gregemar, Galaksee, Kellen, Amr Saleh, Mystery Jay, MisteryJay, Crosley Duckmann, Jim Hudson, Michael Mustillo, Tony Bacon, John Ordover, Jordan Senerth, MARK LOFTIS, CodyDon, Reader, elliott C, Andrs Larsen, San Anderson-Moxley, Nex Gen Pools LLC, Hayden Quinlan, Aaron Corn, ryan hurst, Tressa Eubank, David Heckert, Matteo ADD Ideas, JCampos Entertainment, Gavin K Chase-Dunn, Olexander Samoilenko, Alexandre Deme, Oyunokata, Natasha Johnson, Julianne Gray, Julia Whitted, Jani Jaikala, Justin Kupsick, peppertree73, chuck Kessler, Jay Goldberg, Cody Moore, Rose, Logan Kuehl, Charles Wayman, and Quantum Crusader for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chuck, we've got Brian Cox. Yes. Yes. I'm preparing to be confused. No. No. He's going to take us inside the Adam and out. That's right.

Oh, yeah. And we graphed that onto the universe. There's nothing left that we didn't touch in that cosmic queries coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Got with me Chuck Knight, Chuckie, baby. Hey, hey, Neil. All right, all right. What's happening? So, you know what we got today? Yeah. We got an old favorite. Yes, we do.

Someone who is, I will say, just as popular in the world of science as you. No, no, he's way more popular. No, I'm not going to have that. I'm sorry. I know you. I know he's here. No, no, there's objective evidence for what I just said. Really?

Yes. And what would that happen? I'll bring it up. Can I introduce the man first? We're talking about him like he's not here. I'm enjoying this. Brian Cox. Welcome back, dude.

Thank you. Yeah, you've been here long ago when we were on TV with National Geographic. Yeah. When Stark Talk was... I thought you still were. I've been misled. Well, not on TV. We're still vibrantly podcasting.

So you are Professor Particle, physics at the University of Manchester. Yeah. And that's outside of London? Where's that? Or it's in Manchester? Manchester. It's in Manchester. The best way I can describe it is near Liverpool. Near Liverpool. It's roughly where the Beatles came from.

Yes. Yes. Yes. You've got very popular podcast which I've been on once, maybe twice, the Infinite Monkey Cage. Yes. It just makes me laugh every time. Yeah. I wonder whether it's a good title, actually, because it's not got science in

So if you don't know what it is, you have no idea what it's going to be. And you know that it's addressing the probability of phenomena happening with an infinite number. Wouldn't people worried that you were actually caging monkeys? We did have some complaints because it's a BBC show. You know, the British people are very good at complaining in letter form. Right. In green ink. You probably get some of that.

It's usually green ink. And that means that this letter is going to be exceedingly unpleasant. Yes. And someone did complain. complain about it being cruel. Although we pointed out that an infinite cage is roomy. And it's not...

Arguably, the universe is an infinite monkey cage with monkeys in it. And the monkeys don't complain about being contained in the universe. So they were tripping on the word cage there. Yeah, monkey in cage. Infinite.

They missed the infinite part. Right. And Brian, you're just coming off of a tour that puts you in the... the Guinness Book of World Records. Oh. That is crazy fact.

So what are the details of that? The world record, which admittedly, I'm not sure how much competition there is for the biggest science tour. The biggest science tour in the world, okay? I got you. It was, yeah, it went on for quite

some time. It went on for about four years in the end. And I think the number was something, nearly half a million people came. Okay. Which was a wonderful thing. It is. Right. No, Terl Swift would do that in two concerts. Exactly. Actually, she does that in the parking.

In the parking lot. Exactly. So if she decides to start speaking about cosmology and astronomy, she will beat that record. I feel I'm happy to lay down the gauntlet. And so you go and then break that record. You bring on the challengers. Yeah, yeah. So it was counted as one tour because it was the same topic.

Yeah, well, it actually changed a lot. But it had the same title. It's another complaint we get actually on the BBC show. It's like, you scientists, you keep changing everything. Oh, yeah. We made new discoveries. So over that four years, it's been remarkable. Because you ought to stay current with the science.

Yeah. Remind me the title of that? I actually saw that show. That was Horizons. Horizons, yes. You saw an early version of it, I think. You've hosted multiple BBC shows with lofty titles, right? Like, you'd taken on the whole universe.

Solar System. We've done a Solar System type show three times. Okay. It did struggle with the title. Because the first one was called Wonders of the Solar System. It was initially, by the way, going to be called seven. seven wonders of the solar system. There's a very famous broadcaster called David Dimbleby.

I don't know him here. But he's an institution. And he had something else. I think it was called Seven Wonders of the World or something like that. It was on at the same time. And people thought that there might be some confusion. So they turn into have this wonderful history show

about the development of the British state or whatever it was, over a thousand years. And they get me talking about planets. So they just crossed the seven. Because I was the junior person. Okay. So they came wonders of the solar system. And then we did it again, you know, about 10 years later

and called it The Planets. Very simple and direct. And then we did it again. And then we thought, we've done wonders of a solar system. We've done the planet. So it got called Solar System. So we're starting to. So I don't think we can do another one just purely because I...

Ran out of titles. Yeah. Okay. And you also had a cosmology show, right? Yeah, so we've done... Wonders of the Universe, I guess. But it's interesting to me that usually the solar system shows do the best. Is there a tangibility to the objects that are in it?

Or also people know it already. They know about the planets, the planet, the planet. And, you know, your first science project in elementary school is ball, your styrofoam balls that you paint to mimic the planet. It's deep within us. And someone said that to me, you know, even when you're little, you know, you have those things over your bed when you're too, yeah. And so maybe it's something about the planets, I think.

And also it's easier to film, you know, as you'll know, as a TV show, if you're talking about the volcanoes on I-O, you can go to a volcano. Whereas if you're talking about a supermassive black hole, it's difficult to decide what to... Yeah, it's hard to send a film crew. Yeah, what to point the camera at. Yeah, so this is, that's important sort of tap roots to your visibility, your popularity, not only in the UK, but worldwide. So now you're saying, all right, we got this Guinness Booker World Records record.

occurred. Let's keep going. Well, I wanted to do... And I love this next topic. Emergence. Emergence, yeah. Oh my gosh. I really, I love doing the live shows, and I really enjoy writing them. And the Horizon show that you mentioned earlier had been written, you know, what, five or six years ago, because we start developing the graphics a long time in advance. So I'd had all these ideas for a very new show, partly or actually inspired by Kepler. So, Johannes Kepler.

you probably know he wrote a very beautiful little book called the Six Corners Snowflake which you can get today it's still in print you can get it on Kindle it was about an experience he had in 1609 he writes it was New Year's Eve 1609 so he's a thing he's embellished it a bit it's a beautiful story though there was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague from the observatory to his patron's house for a party on New Year's Eve and he realized he hadn't bought his a present. And then he noticed snowflakes landed on his arm. And he looked at them and he got interested in why they're all six-cornered. His book's called the six-cornered snowflake. So what is

the origin of this symmetry of the snowflakes? And so he went to the party and he said to his benefactor, I have brought you the gift of almost nothing, because I know how fond you are of nothing. But he said, in that gift of almost nothing, which is the snowflake, you can read the entire universe, which is a beautiful line. And so in this book, he speculates. I gotta tell you, that's the worst pricking gift. I have ever. If you showed up at my

house with a melted snowflake, I have bought you almost nothing. I'd be like, no, you bought me nothing. Not almost nothing. He knew this. It's a very funny book. So you get this insight into Kepler as a really witty kind of person. So he obviously knew that. Of course. But the thing is,

it's a very modern way of thinking, because he's saying that the symmetry of the snowflake, has some cause. He says that there's a quote that's something like, I cannot believe that this symmetry, this six-cornered nature

can exist without reason because they're all six-cornered. So there's a reason for it. And obviously we now know it's the water molecule. Right. You didn't know about molecules. So he starts thinking about beehives.

Way late. Way late in there. Really a 20th century discovery. Exactly. So he talks about beehives and pomegranate seeds. Beehive with a hexagon in the beehive.

He says, what's that, what's the reason for that, which again is quite complicated that we've figured out in the 20th century, different reasons. But for me, it's wonderful because you see this mind, this modern mind, asking a very modern question, which is what is the origin of this symmetry that we see. I think it's a really beautiful book. And at the end, by the way, he says, the translation I have is I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry. Now, I don't know whether that word was around at the time. That's the translation I have.

there for sure. I said, I'm knocking on the doors of chemistry, but I don't know enough, so I leave it to you, dear reader. Wow. It's an absolutely magnificent book. Yeah. So that, it would be one of many examples of emergence.

Yeah. Because I have a very limited list of what I know is emergent, one of them, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, you can study a bird all you want and know everything about it, but you would not know from that that a bunch of birds will flock to

together. And in syncopation, change direction, all that wants. Exactly. You don't get that from studying the physiology of the bird. Yeah. And that's an example, that's a fine example, is it? Yeah, emergence. I mean, even...

Well, you know what, before we go any further, what is emergence? Well, at an even deeper level, you could say consciousness is an emergent prophecy. That's probably the most famous one that people discuss. Yeah, well. Because it's a property of some atoms and molecules in a particular configuration. We can discuss, you know, I mean, some people don't think. that but that's the scientific view is that's what it is and so but also there's this idea that it's not that there's a more fundamental description in a sense of a better description of this complex

thing as you said like birds flocking there are different levels of description that are appropriate in nature so biology you could say you could try to say well if you knew all about particle physics and a theory of everything then you could predict you know a human being but of course you can't so in all science there are different appropriate levels of description. Nuclear physics would be another one. You don't do nuclear physics, at least at the moment, by doing particle physics. So I suppose emergence is, to my mind, most simply, the question of how does this complexity that we see in the world emerge or appear from the simple underlying laws. And that is layered depending upon what you're observing in terms of biology

or physics or the bird. But in the end, Would you say it's just all physics? Well, no, I think that's true. I think the modern view is... I'm asking a physicist there. Of course, right? Yes, and no. So yes, in the sense that the thing,

the complexity that we see has the origin, as an origin, of course, in the laws of nature that we understand. But, scientifically speaking, the correct way of, you know, the best way of being a biology to try and understand complex biological systems is not to be a particle physicist.

It's a completely different discipline. Even if you are foundational to everything that's happening, it's pretty useless at the level of the biology. Yeah, the standard model of particle physics. There's no point in trying to understand the brain by starting with a standard model of particle physics. You will get nowhere and probably never will. Gotcha.

I'm Oliver. on Hemorrhage, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. All right, so you built a whole public show, stage show on this one topic. Well, it starts with Kepler, because one of the things I like doing with live shows is developing graphics and, you know,

just sort of spending time working with people. So it starts on the Charles Bridge. with a snowstorm, and I tell that story. Just to be clear, this is with a video wall. Well, yeah, by video wall. That's the other cool thing, because I get to, and the big shows, I believe the video wall we're going to have is 100 feet wide by 50 feet high.

So it's just the biggest LED wall that you can thick in an arena. But it starts with that, but pretty quickly, we go into the snowflake and then journey inwards initially. so the modern understanding of the snowflake with the water molecule but why is the water molecule with that particular angle was it 109?

108 degrees, yeah, 108 degrees. So then you have the oxygen atom, hydrogen atom. There's the angle between the two hydrogen atoms coming off the oxygen, okay? Which is the origin of the symmetry of the snowflake ultimately. And then you go to protons and we go into the proton. I mean my PhD was broadly speaking on the structure of the proton.

I worked at a lab in Germany called Daisy, an accelerator called Hiro. Daisy has great graphical representations of physical phenomena. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very famous lab, Daisy. And so we were looking at the structure of the proton, really mapping the structure of the proton. So we're going to the proton and then into quarks and quarks. So a proton made most simply with two up quarks and a down quark, which as far as we can see a point-like thing. they may well not be point like

they probably aren't but we don't have a powerful enough microscope so we just see this point but then there are all sorts of other things in the proton glue ons and strange quarks and anti-strange quarks and things like that so it gets complicated so we zoom into that and then we go a bit more speculative and zoom into maybe what are the

building blocks of quartz is it super strings is it string theory or something like that so there's an element of a journey inwards and then a journey outwards again so the show works particularly in the second half actually physically with our intellectual journey. Because if you think about it, Kepler, you could say,

you'll have comments on this, you could say that's the beginnings of modern science, around 1600. Yeah, definitely. Well, there's a new simultaneous invention of the telescope and the microscope. Yeah. They came out within 10 years of each other.

And we're often running in both directions when you have that, yeah. Yeah, and it's, so, you know, post Copernicus, but Kepler is a contemporary of Galileo, pre-Newton. So in 400 years, we've gone from essentially the same view of the natural world that we had in ancient Egypt or Greece. Yeah, I was thinking if you took an ancient Egyptian from 3,000 BC and put them in Greece, about zero AD or so, they wouldn't be too surprised. There wouldn't be much they didn't understand.

Right. Whereas from 1600-ish, 1550, 1,500, the whole modern world has developed in 400 years because, We worked out how to do science, I would argue. I mean, some historians will be watching going as a bit more than that. But I think it's the story. No, where science, as it is now practiced, took its tap roots in that era.

Yeah. I mean, where you have an hypothesis, you test it. Right. You don't just say something's true because it feels like it should be true. Right. It has to be reputable. Even something's so obvious

as the sun goes around the earth. That's so obvious why you even test it. But you test it, right. And so this idea of testing, and we can't, give short shrift to the, what's your institute in... Oh, the Royal Society.

The Royal Society, yes, of London. What's that what they... We just call it the Royal Society. Excuse me. Of course. Okay. But that's very British. It is the Royal Society. As if there were another. Right, right.

So part of the show, although we're going inward as far as we can go, outward as far as we can go talking about the... A lot of images from the James Web Space Telescope because they're so spectacular. Vera Rubin Observatory now, so those latest images. And the problems they're raising, by the ways,

and aside, about the early universe and the development of early galaxies and so on. But ultimately, it's a thread, which is, this is a remarkable 400 years. And in the end, so the Voyager spacecraft actually starts to take quite a, became a character in this show, because it's this thing, which its 50th anniversary is,

what is it, 2027, isn't it? It was 1977. Yeah, yeah. launched, yeah. So it's kind of as our first emissary to the stars, I suppose as Carl Sagan would say, as it begins to leave the stars. Yes, I can say it, isn't it? So there's something I think quite current about how we learn to acquire reliable knowledge about the world and how that has changed everybody's lives in a way that they never changed before. So you could go for 1,000 years, or 2,000 years,

or 3,000 years, nothing changes really. We don't discover. antibiotics, we don't discover medicine. And then just 400 years from people like Kepler and Copernicus and Galileo, the modern world appears. And now we stand on this threshold, I think at almost a decision point,

and it's our decision, what we do with this power that we have. Do we go forward to the stars following Voyager? So is Voyager the first explorer and many will follow? Or does it become some kind of museum, you know, with the Golden

record, does it become, is it the last thing that we end up sending out of our solar system? So there's an element of that, I think, just reflecting on the position we are with so much. You're going to be bumming some people out if you take that test. Well, no, because I'm an optimist. Oh, okay. But I think that we're at a stage now where the potential, the possibilities are so great, but the risks are also great. Well, part of the risk being raised or intensified is because of the technological advances

and scientific advances that we have made. You know, they actually put us further at risk. So we are all at once, the beneficiaries, and the people harmed by our own advancements. Yeah, I think we've talked about this before, haven't we? Our knowledge exceeds our wisdom. So we have power, power to do things like build nuclear weapons, for example, power to change the climate intentionally or unintentionally.

And maybe we don't have the wisdom to control that power. Yeah. Buminous out, dude. Yeah, well. But I'm an optimist. We've done well so far. Right. Yeah, we've had the power to destroy ourselves.

We've done well in spite of ourselves, really. We've had the power to destroy ourselves since the late 1940s. I think, what do you feel about this? I mean, this is more philosophical, but for both of you, I think the amount of information that inundates the average person around the world now, thanks to, you know, phones, places us in a position. where there's more information available, but also more misinformation

and abuse of information than ever before. So that, I think, raises the stakes in terms of us destroying ourselves. Yeah, that's why I use the term reliable knowledge. And I think that's one of the skills that we, all of us, our citizens, are going to have to learn because we're awash with information, as you say.

And now the trick is to try to find trusted sources. And it's not easy, clearly. And I don't necessarily blame, why I don't. I don't blame individual citizens. To go back to Carl Sagan, one of my favorite books of The Demon Haunted World. And I love the first, I think it's the first chapter where he tells the story of being in a taxi

here in New York actually in a cab with a cab driver, he says, you're the astronomer on TV, what do you think about UFOs? What do you think about Atlantis? What do you think about the... And all these things. But Carl Sagan, I think, with great wisdom,

said that he didn't think, oh, God, this guy, you know, he's talking to me about Atlantis. He thought we have failed, that society has failed. This is a person with curious. Yeah, because this is a person who's curious and interested and fascinated by the mysteries. Right. But the real mysteries.

Right, the ones that are truly fascinating. hasn't had access to them, which is a failure of education. So it's you guys fault. It's you too. That's who of you. You guys have screwed us. To an extent, yeah.

You know what you meant that? I think it's really important that because, you know, obviously I meet people online especially, but also just in everyday life, who are sort of, we've got, you know, this thing, this comet when we will talk about,

the Atlas three-eye comet that's going through at the moment, a fascinating thing, but maybe what, current estimates, maybe seven, eight billion years old. It's come from a distant star system. Older than our solar system, which is only four and a half billion. Formed before the Earth formed.

An unprecedented opportunity to observe material that's coming from a distant star system. And yet you see people going out, it's aliens. You know, that's I think this is what Carl Sagan meant. The reality of it, that this is something that formed before the Earth

formed. Right. And it's visiting our solar system and going back out into in stellar space, is more interesting than trying to say that it's some kind of completely useless. By the way, if it's an alien spaceship, it's not spending much time. It misses the Earth by, what is it, nearly two astronomical units. Right, right. It goes flying through the solar system, flying off again. It's been traveling for something like probably about seven billion years or something like this. Can you imagine if anyone is saying that? And you missed your exit. Go on. We'll go around again. We'll make a course correction and go around again. I'm

Sure, it'll be fine. Not much will have changed in seven billion years. I mean, it's not, it's in a hyperbolic orbit, right? It's not, they don't even have the chance to come back. Right. So that is a good example, though. Just would you be clear, hyperbolic, there are like several categories of orbit. Well, it's actually three orbits we can speak of.

And which is a circle. Right. But nothing is in a circle because there's always something going on. So there's monster ellipses. Right. And if you keep making the ellipse bigger and bigger. There's a point where it sort of opens up to the outside and you get a parabola. Right.

But that's a very specific form of a hyperbola. Right. And so hyperbole, it's just, it comes in and goes out and it never moves back around. Yeah, you're not going to see it again. Right. I'm not sure, I suppose, actually thinking about it, probably it's in a bound orbit in the galaxy. So it's already something, but not the sun. Right.

Right. It's hyperbolic to the sun. Right. Not to something else. Give us more examples of emergence, just so we can get in the, bathtub with you here. The one that's always talked about that we mentioned is consciousness. I think, and it's becoming very topical because, of course, AI and the potential development of artificial general intelligence, we're not there yet, but AGI, raises this question of what

intelligence, what the experience of being human is. And so there are different, I think there are two categories of emergence people speak of. Actually, Sean Carroll, they've had him on the show. He's got about five in a recent place. paper, he's got loads of category 2A and 3B, or whatever. But broadly speaking, people think of weak and strong emergence. So weak emergence is what I think virtually

every scientist would, certainly a physicist would say consciousness is, which is very complicated, the most complicated emergent phenomena we know of in the universe, I would say. But it's, it comes from the underlying laws.

So you could model it with a sufficiently powerful computer, you could imagine modeling how the human brain works. I think most people would accept. There is also strong emergence, which is somehow the phenomena you see, is

not, you can't simulate it from the underlying laws. There's something else going on. Now, I would not subscribe to that. So I would say consciousness is interesting because it's weakly emergent. It emerges from this thing, the brain. How we don't know.

What about the gas laws that we learn about in chemistry class, that you can't derive from just looking at the movement of gas particles as individual. It's a macroscopic understanding of what's going on, highly accurate and very predictive, but I don't think you can derive them from just looking at how a molecule moves in a gas. Well, you could in principle. That's the point. In principle, if you had a very, very, very, very powerful. If you could model a billion particles, okay. If you just keep track of every single particle and then track them, then you would be able to then, in principle, determine.

Yeah, which actually goes back to what we talked about earlier, though, it'd be pointless. As you say, you know, gases, you can understand them with pressure and volume and temperature. Right, macroscopic objects. So there's no point. Why would you bother? You know, having a supercomputer track the motion of all, and the mementor of all these things, it'd be a silly thing to do. And does it matter if there's, okay, I don't know how to say this properly.

So I'll just ask, does it matter if there are levels of emergence? Because when you say consciousness, animals are also conscious. There are dogs, they are clearly conscious chimpanzees. I'm sorry, let's go down to monkeys. A Capuchin helper monkey is definitely conscious, but it is not conscious on what we would consider the level that we are. We don't know if it's pondering, its existence, and all that kind of stuff. Whales are definitely dolphins. So, but does it matter that there are levels of consciousness?

No. I mean, they would just be one of those remarkable properties of atoms. Was it again, to quote Carl Sagan again, didn't he say that a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about hydrogen atoms? That's a great definition of the business. That's a great quote. I never heard that. I'd have heard it at that level.

I heard humans are a way for the universe to know itself. That's also great. I've heard you say that's a little higher. than hydrogen atoms. That's pretty cool, though. That's another example. In cosmology, about three or four minutes after the Big Bang, you have 75% hydrogen, 25% helium,

a bit of lithium, maybe, not much else, a tiny bit of beryllium, I think. And that's it. And then you go, so there's also that story which I tell in the show of how you go from that, which we have a very good picture of, let's say 10 minutes after the Big Bang, how you then go to this 13.8 billion.

years later, which is stars and planets, yes, but at us as well. It's a remarkable story. But it's understood in broad sweep. Yeah. No, that is not true. We all know that the greatest story ever told is Jesus. Please stop. Okay.

Well, he's an emergent thing, too. So true. I mean, so true. Tell me about the wetness of water. What should we be thinking about? that. Yeah, that's another good example of something that's appropriate to talk about liquids and they're wet and what's it mean to be wet. But actually at the lower level, it's just a load of molecules, oxygen and hydrogen atoms which don't have the property wet. So again, it would be another

example. Oh. So, I mean, really, I mean, you can read by the literature. You can't point to a molecule You'll say that's wet. No. But an ensemble of them, then you can measure it and see, okay, is it wet, is it not? Interesting. Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, basically, I mean, in a sense, almost everything's emergent, right? That we, I mean, clearly, you know, we observe the universe at our particular scale, so sizes of things that we can see, and we're a particular size.

And so I suppose you could argue that everything that we understand and perceive as human beings is emergent, right? But is it really? because doesn't emergence have to have some special characteristics that otherwise would not be if you just did the same thing over and over again? For instance, the noise that happens after the cellular division of a sperm and an egg coming together, that starts a certain kind of noise that biologists don't know what, but they know that split, split, split. And then that keeps going until there's a person,

And then none of those people are the same. None of them. So, like, that to me is truly emergent. Whereas when you talk about water, like, that is the connection of these, you know, this hydrogen, this oxygen. And I don't care. You just keep connecting them that way. And guess what? You're always going to get that.

You always going to get water. So is that truly emergent? Oh. You see what I'm saying? Oh, so you're saying in some cases it's a precisely repeatable thing. Yeah, exactly. Whereas in sperm and egg, you've got billions of different people. Absolutely.

And so the true nature of the emergence is in the uniqueness of those separating characteristics as opposed to something that is just repeatable. Doesn't it come down to just how many variables you're working with? Yes, it's a really beautiful way of thinking about it. I hadn't thought about it in that way, but you're... I made Brian Cox think differently. Hello. Okay.

I'm joking. Go ahead. And you could say, as Neil were just about to say, You could say, well, it's just the number of variables you have to keep track on. Right, right. I think you're right. There is something that feels very different between just wetness. As an example, you're a liquid.

Right. That's an emergent behavior. But you're right, when you get to life, I mean, life is surely the most remarkable example of that. And actually, some of the work that we see, I was listening to some, there's a paper just been published. I've forgotten the name. It's from a Google research group about essentially seeing replicators, which is what we're talking about here,

living things emerge. That behavior emerge just from random code. So it's a very beautiful paper. I wish I could remember the name. Maybe on the strap line here when we do this thing. You mean in human written code? Yeah, so you just do a very basic computing language. And essentially the concept of a touring machine,

which now I'd have to explain. But this idea that a computer is essentially just a tape with characters on it, or you could have just ones and zeros on it, and something that goes along and can change those zeros into ones and ones into zeros. It can read and write on the tape. And a few other properties.

And Alan Turing back in the 1930s wrote a very famous paper, which introduced the concept of a universal touring machine, so all computers are equivalent to each other, essentially. Oh. And so, but there's some work been done on seeing how you can just start with no coding, really, just randomness and a couple of rules for computing. And you leave it. And over time, you get, you essentially get code written that can replicate.

So you get coding sequences that can copy themselves, which is what you need. There's an economic counterpart to this, okay? So you can go to the street corner and say, I need milk, and there's milk there, and you need the eggs. The eggs are there, and they'll sell you the eggs. Okay, you didn't set up the shop. You didn't do anything. It's just there for you.

And you can say, there must be some cosmic law that is serving my needs here and now. This must be some magic force. And then you realize it is very simple economic forces operating. Right. Okay. Buy it, sell it from. more. The laws of supply

to ban and profit. Exactly. And you had a product someone wants. Okay? That's it. Everything else falls into place.

So that would be not very many variables that lead to high complexity down the line. Yeah. Yeah. And the complexity

emerges, is that word. Right. From really some very simple laws. That's really cool, actually. No, think about it.

Yeah, because I want to get rich. Right. And so I want to find something you want. And I'm going to sell it you. Right. And I'm going to sell it a profit so I can get rich. And an entire economy unfolds out of that. And that emerges out of this simple transaction that one person thinks, oh, it's there

for me. And the other person is like, oh, I have to do that so that, you know, I can profit from that. It depends how big your ego is to think the whole world is configured for you. Yeah. Well, listen, I'm in therapy for that. I'm for your ego. And it's interesting because it raises, and this is not my field of expertise, but it raises questions about what life is. Right. Because you could say that life is just, it's about information. It's really computing is what life is. Holy moly.

So it's not really, what you're saying there really is biology, the nature, the physicality that we think of as life. We think of biological systems with DNA and all those things. Right. But you can argue that that's not the really interesting bit. That's just the way that it's realized. That's an expression. It's an expression of the true thing,

which is the computing, which if that is the case, then we have stumbled into the creation of life that will replace us, which is if we ever get to artificial general intelligence and what you're saying is an emergent property of computing, which is also an expression of life, then it's only a matter of time before that particular computing becomes a life form which, of course,

will outthink us, outlive us, out everything, us. Terminator. Well, yeah, and this is, you know, again, outside my area. Don't smile while you're agreeing with him on that. It's interesting. It's a sad face for once on your, that mug. One of the things I've been involved in, I'm involved at a research institute called the Francis Crick Institute in London,

which is a biosciences. It's a wonderful place. It's a temple to curiosity. I love the place. There's a great Nobel Prize winner called Sir Paul Nurse, who's a good friend of mine who were not. Nobel Prize for cancer research, actually by looking at what yeast cells. So it's a remarkable sort of fundamental study of life. But he really pioneered the building of this institute or

inspired it in his image, which is about curiosity. The French's crick code discovered the DNA double healings. Oh, that's why it's called the Crick Institute. Yeah, yeah. But we did some podcasts called a question of science, actually, which are around. And we just did them at the Crick Institute and with panels of experts. And so it was wonderful for me because I just chaired it and ask the questions and it was mainly audience questions

actually but one of them was on AI and there was interesting split in the panel between the neuroscientists

and the computer scientists so the neuroscientists really felt that for example large language models which is what we have

at the moment were just symbol shuffling things and the brain is fundamentally different to that so we are not

large language models I kind of feel that way about them as well. I kind of feel that way, too. It's just rearranging statistical juxtapositions of words. It's seeing all the probabilities.

I don't feel like it understands anything when I interact with a large language model. It's like this is vacuous eyes staring back at me and there's no soul behind it. Yeah. Well, the argument one of the panelists gave was that imagine that you're immortal. So time doesn't matter to you.

But we could be in this room if we were immortal. and someone could start putting little symbols in under the door and if we put the right symbol out we'd get some food right so we'd soon learn what the right symbol was and then they put two through the door and we'd do the same thing and then three and ultimately if we had a huge amount of time kind of a near infinite amount of time we'd end up having a conversation right and we'd do it right but at no point would we have any clue what was going on

where we'd not have any understanding at all of what we were doing It's a transactional exchange of simple information that itself is not anything more than just symbols. There's no understanding. That's one of the points of view that were expressed. Was that the neuroscientist? That was a neuroscientist who said. I think it goes back to the philosopher called Searle.

I think there's an argument he made a long time ago about symbol shuffling cell's argument. So it's similar to that. But one of the computer scientists said, No, that, irrespective of what you think about that, that's what we are. So we don't know what we are. We don't know what consciousness is. So it could be that that's all we're doing.

Really, and it's true, I suppose, at the cellular level, at the level of a neuron, there's no understanding. Don't tell me that. I don't want to think, I don't want to believe that. Now that you mention it, there are acoustic stimuli coming from your mouth, entering my ear, hitting my brain, and now I process. that and some other response comes out and maybe I'm not conscious of anything. No, you're just like

charging people. I'm just a information processing and response machine. Yeah. It's very possible. And I think that this debate is quite live actually amongst people, among many people who all know what they're talking about and there are different views which just shows you it's complex, a complex

emergent phenomenon. That makes sense. And that is why a lot of Like, and these aren't like neuroscientists, computer scientists, but there are many in the AI world who feel like given enough time, you just train the AI on everything. If you have enough time and enough computing power, they will definitely be truly thinking. They're like thinking the way we consider thinking.

Especially when you think of thinking in that way. Right. Right. And it reminds me of a New Yorker comic, I think it was. there were two dolphins swimming, right, in this water park, and the humans up walking on the walkway. And one dolphin says to the other, they open their mouths and noises go between them,

but it's not clear they're actually communicating. Yes, I'm sorry, I don't know. Right. Yes. So I get that there's emergence in these complex systems, but what is this talk I hear of emergence from the standard model? particle physics, what's going on there? I thought that's a pretty straightforward

grid of what exists and what should exist or how they interact. If I understand the question right, so there are things, there are quite basic things about particles that are difficult to derive from the standard model. So the standard model is you know, the here is

the quarks and the so we up quark, down quark, electron, electron it's an inventory. So we have 12 matter particle, the Higgs boson and then three, four, that it describes. It's an inventory. Yeah.

Well, and it tells us about the interactions, but it's got, so how particles interact with each other and through which forces do they interact. Can I ask this? I don't care if I feel stupid or if I seem stupid. Why do you guys call them particles when it seems like everything that I read, once I go anywhere in depth, that it's more like a field of, I don't know. I can't, it's just some kind of amorphous, field, but you call it a particle

which makes me think like a little piece of something that's kind of floating around and it's a tiny little but they always are when we observe them. So it's really about the observation. But you're right, the standard model of particle physics is a quantum field theory.

So you're right that the objects in the standard model fields but maybe it's historic nomenclature but it's true that when you always see we detect in a particle physics detector an electron. Okay.

And it goes to a place in the detection. And just to be clear, you detect the signature of an electron. You don't actually see the electron. No, we don't see it, but we see it in the... We see its path that it makes or other things that it has touched on its way through the system. The track. Right. We have magnetic fields, and so the charged particles are deflected. So are you seeing a disturbance in the field that shows up as this singular kind of identifier?

I think that, I think you have to say yes to that. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Listen, I'm just trying to, as a layman, get my understanding, like, on point here because sometimes when you guys talk, it makes, what happens is my physical association with the world kicks in, and I'm like, well, that can't be, because it's not that. And so, you know, that's why I'm asking this. Yeah.

And it's a good question about how are you to picture? the existence of, you know, solid this existence in terms of quantum fields. You know, it's a rather abstract underlying description. So that's absolutely true. Okay. But you're right. Well, you said that they're just the particles of the, we'd say the excitations in the field. Gotcha.

All right. Very cool. Can you start with the standard model and derive quantum field theory from it? No. No, the standard model is a quantum field theory. and there are lots of what we call free parameters so that ultimately things are put in by hand and there are a lot of them

does that make the standard model of that much less satisfying to you as it's not complete it's certainly not complete I mean for example one of the most wonderful examples is that so how many matter particles are there in the standard model

so there are so to make up you and me so what's the minimal description of us is up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. That's it. And the up quarks and down quarks make the protons and neutrons, which sit inside the atomic nucleus, and the electrons go around to make the atoms, and that's it, right?

Three ingredients, basically. And there's another one called the electron neutrino, of which there are a lot streaming through our head now from the nuclear reactions in the sun. So four things, that's it. Now, it turns out that there are also two copies of that set. so there's a thing called the charm quark and the strange quark

and the muon and the muon neutrino so the muon for example it's a heavy electron it's identical in every way except it's heavier and then there's another set the top quark and the bottom quark and the tau and the tau neutrino

so three sets of these things so the one that makes up everything and then another two why we don't know we don't know why there are three it's a good job there are Particles of the universe are in triplicate, except we are familiar only with that lowest energy regime

with electrons and... And then we discovered the other ones. And we... With some very straight little caveats, we know there are no more than three. Why not? How do you know there no more than three? Because it was...

So the caveats are very weak, but so at the LEP Collider at CERN, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, that that machine was... it was built in the 80s, it was run through the 90s. Did you have a position at CERN for a while? Yeah, yeah, so I worked on the... As we're building the LHC, I worked on some ideas for little detectors close to the beams

and so on on the Atlas Experiment. Before that, there was an electron-positron collider there called LEP, which was in the same tunnel. And that was really a factory to make things called Z-Bosons, or Z-Bosons, and I call them. And they're to do with one of the forces of nature, the weak force. And by measuring exactly the, what's called the lifetime, the behavior, let's say, of that particle, you can see how many things it can decay into. Basically, the general rule in particle physics is if you're very massive and you can fall to bits into lighter things, then you will. And the more chance there is, the more things you can fault a bits into, the more rapidly you fall to bits, right, basically.

So you can measure how many particles this thing can de facto. into. And so with some caveats about other generations as we call them being extremely heavy and you wouldn't see them, then you can see how many different kinds of particle this thing can fall into. So it's a very famous

measurement. So we're sure that there are three these three copies. Three and only three. But that looks like the periodic table of the elements, Mandalayev, going back all those years ago. So the pattern

that you can see that we all learn at school in the chemical elements. And there's an underlying reason for that, which is quantum mechanics and the way that everything works. So there will be a reason why there are only those three families, but we don't know what it is.

It's father, son, and holy ghosts. It could be that. That's the reason. So there's a lot of that in the standard model. There are a lot of things that we don't know. We don't fully understand the Higgs particle at all. Okay. We've detected this thing.

It is... Got the Nobel Prize given. Yeah, and it's a remarkable new property of nature, a new kind of thing in nature. But exactly how that works, whether and why... So we know that it gives masses to the fundamental particles, at least in the standard model, that's its job. But why it gives the masses to them?

You know, so there's a... Why is the electron the mass that it is? In the standard model, you say, because it interacts in this way with the Higgs field. And you go, why does it do that? And we say we don't know why it does that. So there are a lot of things in the standard model that you have to measure.

And so it's not a theory of everything by any sense. And how come it doesn't contain gravity? Well, so now you're asking about a quantum theory of gravity. Yeah. Up with it. Einstein spent the last, what, 20 or 30 years of life trying to find such a thing. Don't cop out on us now, Brian.

Einstein tried this for a while, guys. No, we don't know. I interviewed, I did great. It was an honor, actually. I interviewed Roger Penrose a few weeks ago and chatted to him about these things. And Roger Penrose is one of the greats of the 20th and 21st century.

He got the Nobel Prize for his work on Black Hole for really a very famous paper from 1963, I think it was. 56? Was it? 60s? early 60s, yeah, yeah. Where he showed that, with very minimal assumptions, a star, a sufficiently massive star, will collapse

to form a space-time singularity, a black hole. Inevitably. Yeah, inevitably. So Oppenheimer and Schneider did it in the night, just before the Second World War, but with some assumptions about symmetry. And you could say, well, nothing collapses in a perfectly symmetric way, so you wouldn't form a black hole.

But Penrose removed those ideas. But he's a great relativist. He's a great, you know, a real expert in general relativity. So he would not, you know, I suppose the fashionable way to think about this is general relativity comes from quantum mechanics, but we don't know how. And there's some support for that from the study of black holes a bit, so. But there is another way of thinking that says, no, space time is fundamental. You know, relativity is fundamental.

So I'm saying that because there's debate. I think most physicists would say quantum mechanics is the underlying theory some kind of quantum description of nature and out of that emerges It's on a role for how successful it has been in accounting for everything Right? I mean so why doubt it at this point?

Yeah so maybe we don't know enough to start So I think I'm not misrepresenting him He would question whether you really need to have a quantum theory of gravity in the coming from quantum mechanics I think he would question that so the reason I'm saying that is to say it's an open question we don't know

so what about the fabric of space time is that emergent well so the recent work in the study of black holes which is the tiny bit of research I still do I had a PhD student and postdoc working on this it's called emergent space time

yeah what is that So it's the idea that space and time are not fundamental. So space time is not fundamental. There's a, let's say, a deeper description, which is basically a network of qubits to do the shorthand version. So qubits, quantum bits, so essentially it looks like a quantum computer. Absolutely not to say that we live in a simulation.

He's a little defensive there. Have you noticed that? I don't really mean that. Well, no, I don't know whether we live in a simulation. Nobody does, but I'm just saying it's not evidence for that. Right. But it's beginning to look like you can say, well, let's say a notion of distance can emerge from a network, an underlying network, which doesn't have the notion of distance or geometry in it. So that's the...

You just described subspace from Star Trek. Did I? It's like this underlying sub-street where the laws of physics aren't necessarily in play, which is why you can go faster than the speed of light. Well, information goes faster. Information goes faster.

They communicate in subspace. In a witty repartee, even though they're... Even though they're half a galaxy apart. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. I was thinking about this in other context, actually.

So there would be laws of physics, by the way. They'd be underlying laws. and then our laws would emerge from them. Please forgive my inelegant description. We call them effective theories, right? So it's an effective theory, which works in the regimes we observe things. Effective theory. But I was thinking about this, and I have no evidence for this at all,

so I might cause lots of people to write in. But I think that no causality, for example, cause and effect. Which is what you're saying, if things can go faster than light, then you can essentially build a time machine and go into the past you can send messages back into the past if you can go faster than speed of light basically. My guess is

that that's absolutely fundamental and so you wouldn't, just because you can skip if you could skip beneath relativity, so to a deeper picture of space time I still guess that causality

will be there. We'll still be there. I'm not a aware of anyone who's really proved that or I'm not aware of any anyone's opinion on it. It is my opinion. I don't have any, I don't think I have any evidence for that other than Stephen Hawking. How is that different from Stephen Hawking's time travel conjecture? He had a chronology protection. Protection conjecture, sorry.

So it's called the conjecture because he conjecture. It was conjecture. And that was his conjecture, you're right. He said that whatever the underlying laws of physics are, they have to prevent time. travel into the past, which is to say that causality is respecting causality. Right, exactly. But I think we're absolutely miles away. We're miles away.

This might not be right, this idea of space-time emerging, although it's quite a popular research field. It is interesting because quantum mechanics can seem to violate the spirit of that. So you probably discussed before on the show, quantum entanglement. Yeah, everybody wants to know about quantum entanglement. Einstein, spooky action at a distance, he called it, right? didn't like the idea that you can have these widely separated things that can appear to be correlated in such a way that something happened instantly. Now, we know John Bell and others

showed and it's been experimentally tested that information can't travel faster than speed of light. But still, the idea that some kind of call it configuration, that the quantum state can change instantly, seems to violate that somehow, doesn't it? So this is, this is a He's again. I heard from the other Brian. Brian. So I was having lunch with him, and I just, he said something that just blew my mind. What might be fundamental in space time is this sea of entangled virtual particles

where the particles are entangled via what are essentially wormholes. Yeah. Because a wormhole has instantaneous contact from one side to the other. And the wormholes then are the stitching of the fabric. of space time. It's called ER equals EPR, which is Einstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Pedolsky Rosen.

So E-PR is the spooky action at a distance of paper. And ER is Einstein Rosen, which is 1935, I think, where they showed that the swatial metric, the eternal swatural metric, which is the description of a non-spinning black hole, which was discovered very early in relativity,

has in it, if you extend it as far as you can, a wormhole geometry. So that was Einstein and Rosen. So I think Leonard Susskind coined the term ER equals EPR. So what does that mean to you as a thinker in this space? Can wormholes be the fabric of anything? Yeah, it's part of the answer. One of the answers for how information might get out of a black hole.

So it's what it's called the black hole information paradox. That's very cool. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, one of the pictures people have for that, very hand-wavy picture, is that wormholes somehow connect the interior of the black hole to the external universe. But all the other virtual particles that fill the vacuum of space, those are particle pairs that come in and out of existence.

Yeah. They're entangled. Why wouldn't that also be in this wormhole discussion? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that's it. So it seems there's some sense of, a link. The reason it's

it came in in the black hole context is the math, people did very complicated mathematical calculations about what happens to the hawking radiation. So this is the radiation that is emitted from a black hole, from the and it's really, one way to think about it is

it's the event horizon of the black hole is disrupting these particles that you talked about, these entangled particles that are really the structure of the vacuum of space, right? And it kind of disrupts them. And so people, were calculating how that radiation, which is entangled with the black hole, how everything behaves as the black hole shrinks. Because if you think about this, black hole is glowing,

it has a temperature, losing energy. Through hawking radiation. Through the hawking radiation. So not at the moment, because they're much colder than the cosmic microwave background. So they're cold things at the moment. But eventually in the universe, there'll be hot things, and they'll start, they'll shrink. It'll be hotter than the background. Yeah. So they'll be That flow of energy is out. Yeah. Hot is, I mean, we're talking about it. Point, naught, no, no, no, whatever Kelvin did.

But eventually they'll shrink. They're entangled with the Hawking radiation because of what you said, because of these pairs that are coming out of the vacuum. And so you get to a point where you get a crisis, really, where the entanglement can't be supported. It's one way of thinking about one of the problems with the black coal information paradox.

So it's all to do with entanglement and what happens. and so from that research some calculations were done which are just mathematical that say that ultimately the Hawking radiation ends up essentially entangled with itself again right is one way to think about it

because so you don't lose information but those calculations can be pictured with hand-waving as representing wormholes some sort of wormholes They're not the Einstein Rosen wormholes, actually. So it gets very complicated. And people aren't clear on the interpretation.

But that's where the modern resurgence in this idea has come from, I think. It's coming from these really very technical calculations about black holes and how information behaves in the presence of black holes. And wormhole-like structures appear to be one interpretation of what's happening. But I'm choosing my words carefully because it really isn't fully. fleshed out by a long way. It's interesting, isn't it? It is really fascinating to think about

like a quix. It's like an information tunnel just for that for the purposes of getting it out. Yeah. Yeah. And then you go, and even, you know, you see the language you say for the purposes of why is it that information is conserved. That looks quite basic.

So it looks like another of these basic ideas. Information is not destroyed. It becomes massively scrambled. So you can't in any conceivable future read the stuff. But the example that's often given is if you burn... But it's the iPad, let's say you set fires at the iPad. You might say, well, surely I'd destroy the memory.

But the idea is that you don't, if you could measure everything that came off somehow, all the photons and everything, the whole thing, then in there scrambled up that you could reconstruct it. It would be the iPad. Even though you set it on fire and all those atoms and every particle that was in there

if you could get them all together you would be able to say oh that was the iPad yeah and you'd have your photos in there whatever it is you know you could

in very principle but really in principle not practice reconstruct so you don't destroy information it's also determinism

it's also it's called unitary evolution in our language right you don't destroy information got you So energy and information, conservation of energy,

conservation of information, can we think about them like that, or is that a wrong way to think about it? Well, let's about information more about entropy, right? I mean, entropy, you can move from one place to another, and then you can measure that or think about it as an entity. Okay, I get that. A point we're raising before,

obviously if I send a molecule that has structure, a DNA molecule into a black hole and it gets ripped apart and then it comes out as separate atoms I lost all that DNA information however that DNA became DNA at the expense of the sun or whatever other input of energy

that went into it that's correct gotcha right so you draw a sphere around all the action somebody get me some weed this is awesome that should be high right now maybe So then you could talk about sort of entropy moving

Right You know without having to inventory the shape of the DNA molecule Right Because the DNA molecule is a result of the energy From another source That put it in their middle Correct, yeah Oh, wow

Okay, this is great You're right that I mean it's so fascinating This work on Blank black hole's, black hole information paradox, emergence, FaceTime. Yes. But it's such a early stage that I don't think there are popular articles that really, you know, the language isn't there yet.

It's just mathematically difficult. Wow, man. So we are doubling up on this and adding a whole segment of Cosmic Queries, which is a branch of what we do here. It's beyond just conversations. People get to ask questions. And we tell them who the guest is going to be, and they direct questions to that guest.

You have been duly outed on our pages, and people, you have a whole fan base out there. and they're eager and dying to hear from you. And we have some professional overlap, but in the questions that will come in, it's not likely that I will ever need to jump in. And I look forward to basking in your brilliance in the face of these questions.

But I would lead off, if I may. Do you have to fork up $5 for the Patreon? I would like to have it. Okay, because it's Patreon supporters who... Yeah, which is good option. They're the only ones who get to ask questions. So this actually came in by a Patreon supporter. So actually I'm channeling it.

All right. All right. Quarks, you've never had an isolated quark. No. Okay. Oh, I remember this question. I know. Yes.

I know, and I couldn't answer it. Yes. I said, I need one of the Bryans here. Right. We got one now. Excellent. Here it goes. You ready?

So as you pull two quarks apart, you're actually putting energy into the system by doing so, like pulling a rubber band apart. And at the point where the quark connection breaks, there's enough energy you just put in, so whole new quarks are created, so now you have two pairs of quarks. Yeah.

I might be simplifying it, but that's the idea. Yeah, yeah, basically. We call it hadronization. Hadronization. In particle physics. Okay. And we have models of it. Okay, gotcha.

So now watch. I now have a quark pair falling into, a black hole. It's nearing the singularity. Tidal forces stretch it. Putting energy into it. It splits makes two pairs of quarks and they keep falling in. Will this create a quark catastrophe because the title force will continue to split the corks and make a new pair of corks? Will the singularity be overridden with corks that were created? from the tidal separation and the formation of brand new quarks

in the energy that was invested in it. Am I taking energy out of the black hole by making quarks with it? What's going on there? And I'd rather think of it as a... I want to think of it as a quirk catastrophe because that's way more fun. I mean, you're not taking energy out of the black hole

because all this is happening inside the horizon. For a big black hole. Anyway, I mean, I suppose you could say for a micro black hole, Where the separation is on the same scale of that. Okay, but why don't I just make a bajillion quarks as if falls towards the... I mean, it's, I've never thought of before. It's a beautiful picture.

Yes. Because clearly you'll do that. You rip matter apart. That's the way it's usually said. So people just say matter, everything gets ripped apart. Even the protons and neutrons and even the quarks get ripped apart when you go to the singularity. But the rip apart of quark has consequences. Yeah, and we don't know what the singularity is.

I mean, other than it looks like a moment in time, it looks like the end of time, which we've discussed before, I think, which is also a difficult thing to think about. So there's a finite amount of time in there for the quarks themselves when they're inside the... Ooh, that's a way out of that. Or wait, just to be clear, was that what Penrose said? Because as you crossed the event horizon,

what was previously in front of you in space is now in front of you in time because we had Jan 11 here and she's our resident you know up the street cosmologist so the time in front of you is finite so it can't keep splitting corks forever

and creating you don't have forever I mean even in the up the top of my head even the big black hole like the M87 black hole which is the one we have a photograph of yeah the ones that made the news six billion solar masses or something like that thing

and in there I think you have about a day it's about 24 hours or so if you cross the horizon before you go to the end of time it's roughly speaking a day give or take a factor of two I can't remember exactly what it is

but it's something like that so yeah that's freaking crazy so trippy you have a day left before time ends yeah and you wouldn't notice you wouldn't know it

no you wouldn't notice we could be I mean it's one of the fundamental properties why can I notice it well you wouldn't notice until all the tidal forces became important. Right.

Which is what you're referring to. Oh, then again, ripped apart. Right. Yeah, so when you cross the horizon, so this room, we could be falling across the horizon in Einstein's picture, purely in Einstein's picture. We could be falling across the horizon of a supermassive black hole, would not notice. Right. So from our perspective, everything's normal.

Ultimately, you'd feel the tidal forces. As you get closer to this singularity. I think it's within the last few seconds for these, if I remember rightly, very big black holes. and then you feel it and then it's tidal forces but you wouldn't have time to react really you just got like that's a bit

right but so you're not going to make an infinite number of quarks no no you won't make an infinite number of quarks because time stops it right you actually get to the end of time having never thought about it that's probably the answer wow that's a really that's so cool I mean also you I mean energy's conserved as well

so you can't make an infinite number of massive maybe it could evaporate the black hole so you'd be increased you could turn the whole black hole into quorum into quarks. Well, you're pulling energy out of the

out the... Well, no, the mass of the black coal will stay the same. So that process of harmonization... I get that. I get that

the mass energy budget is slowly getting converted into corks because the quarks will keep making new corks because you keep trying to rip them apart

with your title forces. So you're saying that the courts guard drain on the electric bill. So you're saying that spacetime would unwarp Because the energy Will be completely converted into...

And you have one giant quark The quark catastrophe That's not what happens, isn't it? But it's a brilliant... It's a brilliant question Because we see black holes. Oh, okay. Well, that's the answer.

Oh, yeah, okay, that's it. I can't argue. I mean, no, you cannot. So they haven't... The geometry is not unfolding. So then you're left answering why it did not happen. Right. That's what it was.

Yeah, and I think you're, I suspect the answer is because of the finite time you have in there. That's so calm. You know, so. All right. There's some weed for you now. You want some. It's also important to say that we don't know what the singularity is. Right.

So we really, you can't calculate with it or anything. Yeah, because you can't get inside a black hole to see what exactly what it is. Well, thank you for that. That was from an earlier Patreon question. It's a great question. I don't know. I don't know. I'd never thought of it.

Yeah, that came from one of our listeners. One of our people. One of our, one of our Patreon patrons. Which, by the way, you can be one for $5 a month as the entry just to let you know. It deserves more than, it deserves the money back for that question. It's a great question. Refund. Stump the expert.

You get a month free, buddy. That question was so great. That's funny. Yeah. Okay. So Raoul. starts us off, Raoul. And he says,

Hello, Lord Nice, Dr. Tyson, Professor Cox. I'm Raul, a new Patreon manager, from a couple streets north of where you guys are right now, I'm Central Park. I wanted to know if there was any thinking discourse on whether dark matter and dark energy affectionately dubbed as Fred and Wilma by Dr. Tyson are emergent phenomena resulting from the curved manifold of space time.

In the case of dark energy, could it be that geometry of space allows for peaks and troughs for the accelerated expansion of space and we just happen to be observing the expansion phase. Thanks for all that you continue to do for science. I have to explain Fred and Wilma here before he began.

So I had taken issue with the terms we have invoked to describe dark energy and dark matter because it implies that it's energy and matter. What we know is that it's dark gravity. That is what it is. We don't know if it's matter. maybe it is probably it is but we don't know and dark energy is in energy we don't know

so I said we should just call them Fred and Wilma okay and that way there's no bias associated with the label yeah and that's how I was going to answer the question is in that there are different so dark energy what so as you said observationally and we already mentioned Brian Schmidt who was one of the people

who discovered that the universe is accelerating there is in Einstein's theory of general relativity a thing called the cosmological constant, which you could just put in, and it does that job. But whether that's what we're seeing is a good question, and we don't know the answer. So it could be that you're seeing some kind of quantum field, which we talked about earlier.

So, for example, inflation, which is the idea that before the universe was hot and dense, so before what we call the hot big bang, then space was stretching extremely fast, driven by something which we call the infloton field, which is one of these quantum fields we talk about. And then that field changes and decays away. That's the end of inflation

and the heating up of the universe, which we call the hot big bang. So it could be that dark energy is something like that. It's some kind of quantum field that's doing it. That may mean that it changes, and it could change over time. So it could go away. So it could go away.

And I think that one of, so there's a, in the current data which is associated with the early universe, there's a tension in between the things we measure, like the Hubble parameter and things like that, from the early universe, from the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the measurements from the later universe, which is from seeing supernova explosions and so on, seeing the expansion of the universe that way. And there is some sort of almost, probably not handwave, but preliminary ideas

that you could be seeing that something was present in the early universe that is not present now or vice versa. So something's changed. So it is true that inflation would be an example if it's correct of one of those quantum fields

which then changes and goes away. And that's associated with what we used to call the origin of the universe, So it could be that dark energy is something like that. And also, actually, to add to that mystery, there's the Higgs field. So the Higgs field is what's called a scalar field, which is technical jargon, but it's of the same type of thing that we think the inflation, the inflaton field is, and possibly the dark energy is.

But the Higgs field doesn't appear to cause the universe. Well, it does not cause the universe to accelerate in its expansion, or at least not in the way that we would expect. We'd expect it to blow the universe apart, and it doesn't. So there's something in there, many of my colleagues think, associated with these things called scalar fields and the way they interact. Is that something that's going to pop out of a future run of the large Hadron Collider? No, no, I don't think so.

I think it's more theoretical advances that we, but, you know, precision. measurements of the way the universe is expanding and has expanded the expansion history of the universe. Because these things are all encoded in there somewhere. So the answer is to the question is we don't have a model. Well, we don't have

lots of models of what dark energy might be, but none of them are agreed upon or more convincing than the other, right? We don't have enough measurement, I think, the precision measurement. So it's a very good question. And the same with dark matter, you know, dark matter, we do have

evidence that it's some kind of particle. And some of that comes from... So I mentioned the cosmic microwave background. I should say what it is. It's the afterglow of the Big Bang. It's often described. The oldest light in the universe. So there are photons emitted

about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, which we can detect. So it is a measurement. There's a satellite called Plank that made the highest resolution pictures of this that we have at the moment. And so in there, you can model.

the way that that image looks. It's actually sound waves moving through the universe before 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So what you're seeing is sound waves in the plasma that was the early universe. Were you seeing an imprint of those sound waves at that time? So you see the imprint when the light got released, when the plasma went away.

Essentially what happens is... So there was an actual bang? No, I mean, that's what Fred Hoyle used the term, you know, because he thought he was so stupid. It's not a bang. Right. I mean, as I described it, it's the end of inflation. So whatever.

We don't. So these are sound waves. But we have a very good measurement. We have that photograph which shows us. In there is the information about the sound waves. And that allows us to model what the plasma is and what's in it. And the dark matter is a very important component of modeling the way those sound waves behave. So it's not, it's often presented as something that people invented,

because they don't understand how galaxies rotate or interact or something like that. That's a real thing. But you can see it in many different ways. So it is true that the way our theories of galaxy formation require it, there's a thing of the cosmic web that you probably talked about before. But there's also independent measurements from the sound waves in the plasma of the young universe,

and that requires them. And you can do, actually, my postdoc actually did it for it. It's one of the things that's in the show, not that I'm always plugging these tickets for the new show, But one of the things I do in the show is we, by we, I mean my postdoc, Russ, really is great, developed a real-time calculation tool of the way the sound waves work in the plasma. And what's cool about it is you can sit there with an iPad on stage and you can just go, I'll change the recipe.

I'll make the dark matter go to like 15% rather than 25% or whatever it is. You know, like play around with those things. And when you do that, the data goes completely. It doesn't match the data. The prediction drifts completely from what we see in the data. So it's highly sensitive. It's a beautiful demonstration of how accurate astrophysics is now, how accurate cosmology is.

So, yeah, so I'm pretty, I would be very surprised if dark matter isn't some kind of particle. Particle, because there's multiple, multiple different independent observations that suggested it. dark energy, we don't have precision, the precision, I think, to discriminate between the models. Cool, man. And you thought I'd give long answer. Well, it's a very good question.

I can see that we have to speed up. I'll speed up. I'm good for long answers from either one of you. All right. This is Donita Bukai or Bouchait, one of the other. And she says, hey, Neil Brian Chuck, Donita from southern Utah. Help! I need visuals.

How does the curvature of spacetime cause tides? I've read explanations, but since I think in pictures, I need some visual support on this. So imagine the Earth, if you try to explain the tides in the ocean, by just having a static picture of the Earth and the Moon just standing still. As is drawn in textbooks. As is drawn in textbooks, then it's hard to figure out what's happening, because as Richard Feynman said in the Feynman lectures,

if everything's just standing still, If the moon and the Earth are just standing still, they'll just be pulled towards each other and squash into each other. Like when you set them down on a table and they come together. So, of course, the reason they don't do that is because they're in orbit around their common center of mass, so they're orbiting. And actually, you need to know that the Earth is actually orbiting

around the center of mass of the Earth-moon system, as is the moon, in order to fully explain the tides. And so you get a good explanation. So there are centrifugal forces at work as well because you're in this frame of reference that's spinning around and so on. So it's actually relatively easy to describe, but not as easy as it's presented in, on television usually.

And you go out to an argument with a producer on this. Yeah, so I said I can't do it without talking about the fact that when there's centrifugal forces. It's basically because the centrifugal force exceeds the gravitational pull of the moon on one side of the earth and is smaller than it on the other one. It's that kind of effect. but it's beautifully described in the final lectures which are freely available online

is that right online now I think they're free I spent real money on mine I have to get I have a hardcover I got them in the when did I get them they're beautiful in 1981 I bought them yeah but it's in there you can download I think they're freely available now there's three volumes right so classical mechanics E&M and then quantum yeah it's in volume one

it's really lovely explanation of it so they have a Donita and also you can check out the explainer that Neil did on title bulges that might help you too because it's really good. I forgot about that. It's correct. You remember all of our explainers. Why you think I do this job? Okay. All right. I get a free education.

All right, here we go. This is Alyssa Feldhaus, sorry. Alyssa from Tucson, Arizona here. Question for Dr. Tyson and Dr. Cox. Do you think the concept of a particle will still be meaningful once we fully unify quantum mechanics and gravity, or will it vanish, like the idea of a phlogiston did in chemistry?

It'll be meaningful. We've been talking about emergence a lot, so different levels of description. So, yes, it may well be that there's a theory of nature. I mean, we have it, right? It's quantum field theory, which is quantum fields, and it may be a deeper level in terms of cubits or whatever those things are, plank-scale things. But there will always be a level of description where particles are the right thing. When I think about an old-fashioned TV, a cathode ray tube, where you have a beam of electrons,

and a beam of electrons goes through a magnet, a magnetic field, and it jiggles the beam around, and you get the picture on the TV. There's never going to be a better description of that than a beam of electrons. Right. So maybe a deeper part of that question is, if we come to understand that everything is strings, then we don't need the language of particles. Or once again, is it just a convenience? You will need the language of particles

to explain things that are happening in this room, these energies and temperatures. That's how it manifests. Yeah, it's just pointless. You wouldn't talk about these phenomena that only become important for your description of the world energies

trillions of a second after the Big Bang I mean it's just to say quarks quarks are not that you don't need those to describe nuclear physics you want protons and neutrons those are the things

that you need and so the quarks are hidden inside you don't feel that them you don't perceive them that's why we didn't discover them until 1968 I think it was pretty late you were on the way to the moon

and we don't yet know the quarks are real yeah that's wild that's wild all right we're stupid okay this is David Villasmill who says

That the best you can do with these people's name Hey listen Chuck That's his name now Stop the God Velasmille Yeah Velasmel

You've made him friends That's what I'm saying That's his name not Villasmille So, anyway, he says, Hello, Dr. Cox, I've been a fan forever. Dr. Tyson and Dr. Tice, you guys are awesome. Anyway, how do particles know it's time to decay?

Love that question. That's a great question. Yeah. Sorry about your name, David, because since you asked such great question. So what's the best way of describing that is time? So they have a lifetime, which is, as I said before, is to do with, can you decay into something lighter?

So there might be a reason you can't, right? Because things are, like electric charge, for example. Electric charge is conserved. So you can't take a positive charge thing and have it decay into a lighter negatively charged thing because you'd be inventing, you know, you can't destroy and create electric charge. You have to do it in pairs if it's conserved.

A very important example is that, the neutron and the proton. So the neutron is a bit heavier than the proton. So the neutron can change into a proton. And does. And does in about 10 minutes.

I thought it's even quicker than like six minutes. Is it or eight minutes? Yeah, yeah. It's like you can count it out and watch and watch it happen. Yeah. So if it's sat on its own, it'll do that and it'll and a to conserve charge there'll be a positive thing, it'll go

as well. And so you'll So basically it can do it. And the lifetime is really proportional to the difference in mass between the neutron and the proton, which is very tiny. So if it was really big, if it was much heavier, it would decay quicker. So you've got the mass difference, and then there's the number of things you can decay into, the number of ways you can do it. Yeah, but that's just a statistical average, the decay time.

that's the half-life. Yes, half-lif. Okay, so we fill out the time with some of them are decaying sooner or longer. So it's not just as simple as you described where how much difference is there in the energy and the mass of what it is and what it can be

because there's a variation in there and I interpret that question is how do you get that variation? Oh, well, that's quantum mechanics. So it's statistical. Don't say that's the answer. you're right it's a very deep question

and that bothered immensely the early founders of quantum mechanics so people like Rutherford and those people and Niels Bohr and all those people in Einstein it bothered a lot God does not play dice

with the universe that's essentially what you're saying you're saying why does God play dice as Einstein put it so the reason He was laid on the mortgage for the universe so he plays dice against

some extra cash on the side. Papa got to make this money. I think he was... Papa got to make this money, baby. Come on. Wait, wait, but Brian, I realized just while you were speaking that you did answer her question precisely

because she said, you know, because why does some take longer than others? Yeah. And the difference in how many options it has coming out the other side. And the mass difference. And the mass difference. So that's, that'll say why,

One will decay in five minutes or ten hours. You can get that. Yeah. Okay. Given that, what is going on at the instant that it decays? It's another question. Because that give me insight into why some will decay sooner and some will decay later so that it averages out to that half-life.

So what's going on? So you can, it's called the weak nuclear force that's changing these things. So that's part of the standard model. so what actually happens when a neutron turns into a proton so a down quark turns into an up quark so what happens is the down quark you can think of it as emitting a particle force carrying particle comes off it's a W minus

which then goes to an electron and a thing called an anti-electron neutrino actually but it goes so the W minus goes off and then you get a down quark which is a charge plus two-thirds So you get a minus one-thirds quark, going to a plus two-thirds quark, and then you get an electron that comes off,

so all the charges are conserved. So you haven't invented electric charge. So the sum of all the charges at the end is the same. We got it. And when we think of a neutron decaying to a proton, all that's the engine process going on. That's the gearing that's happening that you just described.

So it's the same kind of picture. is why does an electron bounce off another electron? So we'd say, well, because they've got negative charge and negative charges repel. But the particle physics picture of that is that a photon is exchanged between the electrons. So in this case, it's not the electromagnetic force, it's called the weak nuclear force.

Basically, the down quark is changing into an up quark with ultimately the emission of an electron and a neutrino, and the W-minus is the particle. And in the end, when that happens as statistical, we've got to deal with that. Are we hiding our awareness of objective reality by dusting it into the bin of probability? No, so it's not the same.

That randomness is not the same as the randomness because we don't know everything. So in terms of a gas, let's say, you know, there are things are jiggling around. We don't keep track, we spoke about it earlier, we don't keep track of the billions of molecules in the gas. So there's some statistics comes in because we're averaging over a lot of...

Quantum mechanics is not like that. As far as we can tell, the statistical nature of it is inherently, it's built into the theory, it's built into nature. And that bothered everybody in... So Einstein, which is wrong. Yes, yeah.

Well, you know, Einstein didn't like it. It is true that how to interpret that. then it's a whole other episode, right? So you've probably talked to people about the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's all, that's this thing. That's all in this. How do you interpret those statistical predictions?

Without the collapse of the wave function? Without invoking a statistical description. Yeah, I mean, so it seems that it's a fundamentally, it's a fundamental part of the theory. You know my favorite part of particle decay? What's that? If you accelerate them, right? then they take longer to decay.

That makes sense. Because Einstein's special theory of relativity. Yeah. That's so badass. Going closer to the speed of light, so time literally is slowing down for them. So it's decay, it takes longer to decay. Yeah. That's a beautiful thing.

That's very cool, man. Yeah. Wow. All right. Time for a few more. All right, here we go. This is John. He says, hello, Lord Nice.

And Dr. Tyson, Dr. Cox, John from Arkansas here. You've both explained what a plank length is and how we will likely never get more accurate measurements beyond this supposed limit. I am wondering if light can have a wavelength that small, and if energy would be measurable, or could that be another infinity? We need new

physics to explain, much like the singularity in a black hole. P.S. love the show, and Chuck, I figured I'd mention you first for a change. Anyway, yeah. There is an answer to this. I love this question. I would not have been able to answer this question.

The answer is that So the smaller you make the wavelength of the photon, the higher the energy. Yes. So this should be an energy associated with the wavelength that is a plank length. Yes. And you find out that that's, that energy density makes a black hole. What? That's me.

Oh my heaven. And then so you think about it, the more you try. try to probe smaller... And then the black hole would... I think Len Susskind calls it the UV-I-R connection. I think that's what he calls it. So the upshot is that if you try to put more and more energy into a smaller and smaller space to see smaller things,

the size of the black hole you make increases. It grows. That's wild. So the more you try to see smaller things, the less you can see the small things. Because the black hole gets... The universe is diabolical. Yes.

So it stops you. So you can't probe it. So black holes are in the cosmological witness protection program. You can't get in there. You just can't, no matter what you do, you're knock on. That's amazing. What a great question, bro. That was awesome.

All right. Just remind us briefly about a plank length. Just put that on the map here. So you can construct units, fundamental units, from things like, So from specifically the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and plank's constant. So if you take those things and put them together, so you get meters out, you'll get the plank length. So it's plank who figured out that it would be good to make units of measurement out of things on which everyone would agree. If you think if you meet an alien, for example, then there's no point talking about a meter, because what is it?

It's the length of your arm or something like that. No, no, no. It's one, 10 millionth, the length of a quarter of the Earth from the North Pole to the equator through the Paris Observatory. Is that what it is? Yes, right. Okay. That's why the circumference of the Earth is 40 million meters, which is, and make that kilometer. It's 40,000 kilometers. Right. So it's a circumference. That's why it's that even.

Yeah. It's the French did that. But you're a Brit, so you don't care what they did. Yeah, so they're all arbitrary things that are to do our planet or our bodies or whatever it is. But then you could say, well, but the speed of light, plants constant, and the strength of gravity, everyone would agree on. Even aliens.

Yeah, because you can measure those. So whatever units, you measure them in, you can put them together to make something that looks like a length. Gotcha. And that's the plank length. It happens to be very, very tiny relative to us. Right. Very cool.

So can there be a fabric of spacetime that, in other words, if you would equantize general relativity, you would have to, the plank length would be fundamental to that. Is that not right? Yeah. So we think that's telling us something deep

about the universe itself. Okay. So these are properties of the universe, these things. Right. Not properties of planets. Right, right, exactly. Very, very cool.

Time for two, maybe one more. All right, what do you got? All right, this is Big Stu. And Big Stu says, Hey, what a do? My name is Big Stu from Austin. Texas. I've heard Dr. Cox talk about how information that falls into a black hole might not

actually be lost. But what is that information exactly? Does hawking radiation somehow contain the same atoms that went in or does the universe just ejects some cosmic thumb drive full of data? I'm trying to wrap my head around this, man. Help me. Cosmic thumb drive full of data, yes. So the idea is that the hawking radiation

ends up yes the description that what was who was asked the question that Stu that Stu said

is basically right so in more technical terms you end up with this hawking radiation you'd have to collect it and do some operations on it with a quantum computer

to kind of extract the information so it's all no one's ever going to do it it's impossible to do in practice but that's the idea in a very fundamental sense

it's in there in the same way that I suppose the information if you were to I suppose ask the question how is the information of this photograph I took with my phone

encoded in the memory of the phone it's quite complicated actually and it's got error correction in it and all sorts of things like that and it's that idea really but at a quantum mechanical level so yeah

so it's not physically the physical stuff but it's the it's the data Cool. Very cool. Time for one more. All right, this is Wayne Ross Muson.

And Wayne says, Hello, star nerds. Nerds unite. Nerds of the world. Does Newton's third law hold true in quantum mechanics? Wayne from Northridge, California. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yeah.

That was simple. Good enough for me. I mean, so let me broaden that. Allow me to broaden it. So quantum physics and relativity has shown that the applicability of Newton's laws has limits. F is not always MA in that simple form. You need Einsteinian extensions on these constructs. So even with his gravity equation, you have to modify it.

And it was hard earned to learn that Newton's laws fail. So does every action is an equal and opposite reaction have a point of failure where we need a deeper understanding or an updated understanding of how the universe works. No, so for example, it's easier to explain the first law, everything continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion is straight line unless acted upon by a force. That is to do with the symmetries of space time, right? So that is true in relativity as well. So if you, if you're talking about special relativity, and it's one of the examples we teach, actually,

in our first year undergraduate course, you can show that if something's traveling in a straight line in one frame of reference, it's traveling in a straight line in a different frame of reference, under both Galilean transformations, which are the Newtonian picture, and Lorentz transformations, which are the special relativistic picture.

Both of that, okay, very good. And you could actually phrase that as one of Einstein's postulates because Einstein's two postulates from which special relativity emerges the speed of lights are constant for all observers and the laws of nature

take the same form in all inertial frames of reference Newton's law that says that something's going in a straight line unless acted upon by a force it'll still carry on going to straight line is one of those laws I mean if you think about the consequences

otherwise you'd be able to change between different points of view moving at the same speed relative to each other and something that was going along in a straight line according to one person

would be doing that would be in orbit or something we're intact built in so yeah so they're a representation of the ultimately of the and there's a very deep question

as to why is that the case and I remember again Feynman who we mentioned earlier talking about it why is that the case and he said it's because it's one of the fundamental properties of our universe.

So we don't know why that's the case. It just is. That is the way our universe is. It is. To be with the posh way or whatever. A fancy way of saying it is the symmetries of space time is. But that's one of the fundamental properties of our universe. I'm going to end with something completely irrelevant.

Okay. But he mentioned the Galilean transformation. Yes. There's a game played by the Seattle Seahawks. Correct. And I'm in like email... With P. Carroll. With P. Carroll.

Okay. So I'm on his radar, he's on my radar, and their quarterback did a lateral on the field that was being challenged by the opposing side. I say illegal forward pass. He's already passed the line of scrimmage, and he's going to his running back, tosses it to the running back, running back catches it, and they get a first down, and they would ultimately score. And he said to me, Neil, I think what we did was legitimate. What can you help me here? And I looked at it and I looked at it. And so I posted online that it was a legitimate Galilean transformation.

So here's what's happening. He and his running back are running down the field. He is ahead of his running back. He pitches to his running back. He's ahead of his running back when he let go of the ball. He's ahead of the running back when the running back caught it. Right. Okay?

And he lets go to the ball before the line of scrimmage. No, it's after the line of scrimmage. No, that would be an illegal. before we pass. I'm getting, no, no, no, no. No, he has to let go of the ball before the line of scrimmage. No, no, no.

The receiver caught it after the line of scrimmage. No, no. That's the only way this can work. No, no, hear me out. Okay, let me hear you. Please, please. They both are well past the line of scrimmage. Both of them.

He's ahead of his receiver, pitches it backwards to him. Oh, you mean they're running together. Yes. Oh, that's a different story. Okay, go ahead. Pitches it back to his running back. Right. Okay.

The whole time he's in front. of them. That's correct. But they're running so fast that from the reference frame of the gridiron, the ball actually went forward. No, that makes sense. Okay. Yes. So I said this is a Galilean transformation. You cannot penalize football players for running fast. Okay. You can't do that. Should have been two white players. He's in race therapy. He's getting out of it. He's gotten much better. By the way. That's funny. That was funny. It was two black players, by the way. They're fast. What can we say?

Okay, go ahead. So it turns out that they let the call stay that it was a legitimate lateral. Even though, according to the field, it was a forward path. Yeah, no, it would it look like. If you're running fast, that's what it would look like. Yeah, and so that was a Galilean transformation where whatever else is happening, your reference frame is moving and everything is happening in that moving reference frame. Very cool.

Galilean transformation. Awesome. Yeah. Science. You know how it? We did it on an explainer once. Have you ever been on the highway and then these cars racing each other around you?

Oh, yeah. It feels really dangerous. Right. But in fact, as far as they're concerned, you're just standing still. Right. And they're just darting around you. Yeah.

And so they're in their own reference frame and you're just blockage. Yeah, so there's, there's... We're all going 40 miles an hour in slow traffic and they're going 70 miles an hour around us. And it's less dangerous than it looks, is all I'm saying. But don't do it, Peter. I don't do it.

Okay, follow the laws of the road. Brian, and buckle up. Delight to have you visit. Our humble city, my humble office, don't be such a stranger. But you're busy guys, so we allow this. We'll look forward to your emergence tour. I assume it's another international book tour. Yeah, it comes to the U.S.,

and I think the tickets are on sale for the end of next year and the start of 27. Damn, the boy, you got a calendar, the New York Day, the East Coast. dates are not yet on sale actually but they will be okay okay you to come back to the beacon theater which is where i last saw you i think so no he's going to say i'm coming to yankee stadium yeah giant stadiums madison square garden this time we did the town hall as well oh town hall's a nice i love that yeah it's a little more intimate yeah yeah i'm not sure which one

okay town hall's a venue in new york city yeah they're both great venues they're both great venues. All right. This has been a delightful, I think long overdue episode with my friend and colleague and partner in crime trying to educate the world of everything cool in the universe and especially in the world of particle physics, Brian Cox. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. All right. And Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. You know,