StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries– Multiverse Madness with Max Tegmark

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Do we live in one of many universes? On this episode of StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice investigate the theory of the multiverse with physicist, author, and professor Max Tegmark. (Originally Aired March 22, 2021)NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-multiverse-madness-with-max-tegmark/ 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.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this is going to be a Cosmic Aquarius edition, the ever popular format that we started many years ago, and it just keeps going strong. And today's topic is going to be the multiverse. I got with me my co-host Chuck.

Hey Neil, how are you? Chuck, nice. You know, you're getting such a schooling here with all this cosmic knowledge. Yes I am. We're going to have to give you a degree this cosmic knowledge. Yes, I am. We're going to have to give you a degree of your own. No, no, no, because then that may, you know, normally once you get the degree,

that means that your time at the institution is over unless you start paying more money. Okay, so they kicked you out the front door. Right. So I'm just going to continue to, I'm just staying in school forever. That's all. Lifelong learner. That's it, just stay in school. Well, this topic is in part celebration for the release of the second StarTalk book.

And guess what that book is called, Chuck? Let me take a stab at it. Could it possibly be Cosmic Queries? Cosmic Queries, inspired by this very format. Yes. There are questions that people just ask that are so deep and so interesting, and not all of them can we get to on a podcast.

And so we had to like take it to the book. And so there's a whole section in that book on the multiverse. Nice. Yeah, yeah. And I learned almost everything I know about the multiverse from our guest today. And that is the one and the only Max Tegmark.

Max, welcome back. I mean, I've had you in other events at the museum for Hayden Planetarium, panels and things. It's just always good to know you're in arm's reach of us. Thank you. But you know, you just said something dubious. You said the one and only Max Techmark. And if you take the multiverse seriously,

I'm not the one and only. Damn, I just got schooled on my first sentence. Hmm. Mm. But Max, we go way back. I mean, when you were at the Institute for Advanced Study and I was post-docing at Princeton, I think that's when I first met you and I followed your career. It's been a brilliant melange of

topics that are just so interesting and And the multiverse is the least among them that I have found interesting in your career So we'll have to have you back for other topics for sure Plus Chuck Wow that is that is a serious compliment. If, if, if. You know what I mean? If the multi-vote. The universe is a side, it's a side gig.

Multiple universes are the least interesting thing. Like. I'm sorry. I'm leveling with you here. Wow. To be honest guys, it has been, especially my side gig all along, just so I wouldn't tank my career with it.

Because when I was a grad student, I was already fascinated by this, but nobody else seemed to be. And that was generally considered a bit too fringe. So I played the multiverse very close to my chest. And I didn't even, I even wrote some papers when I was a grad student. I didn't show my advisor until after he had signed my PhD thesis. But under a suit on him, John Doe. Yes.

Oh, that's so funny. And it's so weird how now gradually some of these topics have actually come in a bit from the cold and gone from being just considered career ending to being things that considered legitimate scientific controversies that we actually talk about openly at physics conferences. So you're a professor of physics at MIT, of course, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, basically up the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Chuck, I've

always been jealous of this man's name. It's like movie star Max Tegmark starring. It does. It could be either the star of the show or the producer. This is a Max Tegmark production. Yeah, it works either way. All of the above. And Max, you've got a couple of books under your belt,

at least. One of my favorites is our mathematical universe, where you argue that everything is math, and if everything is math, someone could have programmed it that way. And so a brilliant exercise there. And of course, Life 3.0, where you're exploring the future of what we even think of as life. And I've enjoyed both of those books. So thanks for, I think of them as a gift to civilization to share in how you think about this world.

And I enjoyed the conversation that I heard on NPR about your book, about, about Mathematical Universe. Okay. But now we have the guy, we got him ourselves here. Exactly. You know, actually, I changed the name of that book in the last second for reasons we're going to talk about now. The first title was The Mathematical Universe.

And then I thought, that's so arrogant. If we really believe that there are other universes, we shouldn't just say, the universe are ours. We should talk about, be more humble and acknowledge that it might just, the our universe might not be the only one. Okay, alright. So we went through a brief last-minute title change so that you wouldn't sound like an a-hole.

Right. We used to talk about the solar system, and then we realized, oops, there are others, right? Yeah, or the universe, and we're not saying that anymore. It's our universe, I like that. It's a good shift for that. You changed the universe into the humble verse. That's cool. Ooh, humble verse, very good, Chuck.

Making up words on the spot. Man. So Max, tell me, what motivated people to you and your, either you early on when you were doing this So Max, tell me, what motivated people to you and your, either you early on when you were doing this sort of under the cover of Knight, to what is now mainstream research on the multiverse, what motivated it? Well, I think first of all, throughout human history,

we've had this epiphany again and again that, hey, stuff is bigger than we thought. We used to go into it with this hubristic assumption that all we knew about was all there was, kind of like an ostrich with a head of this sound and then people realized- Oh, by the way, the corollary to it's bigger than we thought is we're littler than we thought. The flip side of that coin. We realized we're actually, we're part of this huge, we're standing on this huge round ball in

space which in turn is just part of this gigantic solar system, part of a galaxy, part of a cluster of galaxies, part of a super cluster, part of this that we then would call our universe and why stop there? People started wondering could there be still more? And the earliest people got into much more trouble You know than I ever did in grad school like Giordano Bruno 400 years ago Started talking about how maybe space went on forever and you know what happened to him, right? Yeah, he was burned at the stake upside down

with a with a Something plugged into his mouth Wow so that even in death he could not repeat these heresies. They drove a stake into his mouth so that even when he died, you know. You know, that's what I liked about that time, overkill. Overkill. Everything was overkill. Now, I went to Campo deiiori actually in Rome where this happened and

I started to think you know compared to that that just getting burned on the job market there's a lot less of a threat so we're making some progress and it's a little bit of progress. But just to be clear that square that in Italy there is in all fairness there is a statue to him where he's looking very solemn, but it's a very honorific statue in his memory. It is. Small consolation for being burned at the stake. I'll take life, you keep your statue, is that what you're telling me? Thank you, exactly. But you asked this very good question, what drove us to these things? And it's basically just natural, logical steps. Euclid himself postulated that space is infinite.

And when we were kids and we started wondering, does this space go on forever, it seemed pretty natural that there wouldn't just be an end to it. So if you just take that idea logically, then that means that the part we can see, this, is finite because light has only reached us from this spherical region that it could get here from during the 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang. So if that's what we call our universe, then by definition there are others, other regions

of space just as big, just as cool. And it's sort of hard to dismiss. Right now I don't have a single astrophysics colleague anymore who thinks space magically ends right at that edge. And in fact, you can just wait one day and you see some more light arriving from farther away. And then, so that's what I call the level one multiverse, just other regions of space that we haven't had any access to. But then it gets kind of weirder.

So initially, it wasn't that people were motivated to try to answer some other question. They just more fully explored what we were already thinking and already knew to be true about the universe. So in that sense, it's not some epiphany. It's just an extension of what we were already thinking and already knew to be true about the universe. So in that sense, it's not some epiphany. It's just an extension of what we're already thinking. Is that a fair way to think about your level one multiverse? I think so. And I think a lot of the pushback honestly

wasn't really based on science so much, but based on arrogant hubris. The reason Pope Urban the eighth or whatever was so pissed at Galileo wasn't because he had a good scientific argument, but he was so stuck to the idea that everything orbits around us. We humans are so important, and we didn't like to be demoted to just being an average planet and an average solar system orbiting a galaxy, etc.

I think we see still a little bit of that today. Some people argue that they don't like this idea of Reality being even bigger just because it makes their egos feel even smaller. Mm-hmm After the last four years, I I can't imagine that people would actually have hold to those sentiments All right so what I don't know because I haven't quizzed people, is what are they thinking of when they hear multiverse? And my sense is their thinking is maybe a parallel universe that you might be able to

sort of move between at some distant future time. So is there any truth to the concept of a parallel universe in the way it's commonly thought of in the public is there an evil Chuck some With a goatee. Oh you already have a goatee Is there a clean shaven evil You are the evil Chuck Chuck That's right, I think they're through Oh my god, that's right. Just think that through.

What's incredibly confusing here is that different people mean different things when they say universe and they mean talking about different kinds of... In fact, I remember once very vividly, Martin Reiss had organized a conference in his house about these forbidden topics. And I just heard... Chuck, these are the kind of friends we have. You get that, you get invited for tea tea and you solve the issues of the universe, okay You know this was considered pretty taboo back then but because Martin was organizing it people still came and behaved

And but I noticed the two people were arguing about the multiverse and I realized they're talking past each other one guy was talking about The what we call the inflationary multiverse, which is just really big space. And we can get back to that. Another guy was talking about the quantum multiverse. And they thought they were talking about the same thing. So I stood up and said, hey, wait a minute. Aren't there actually four different kinds of multiverse that we should give different names to,

to not confuse ourselves so much? And then I wrote that up in the book you mentioned. But just to be clear, the book that you're talking about is... You posted something, it's online, which is a very clean and clear exposition of the multiple levels of the multiverse. And that's what we referenced when we included... When we fleshed out our section on the multiverse in Cosmic Queries.

So I just want to be clear that you're not just pulling this out of your ass. This is... you've thought about this for a long time. So I think it's very important that this... yeah, be clear on what we're talking about. Yeah, thank you. So by our universe we mean what astronomers call our observable universe. It's just this spherical region of space from which light has reached us so far I know this then what I call the level one multiverse is just other parts of space that are so far away that light hasn't reached us yet

Level two multiverse is what you get if you take seriously Alan Guth and on relindy and others And the theory of inflation that made our space so big Which says that far far away in the same space now, you have something much more diverse than you might have thought, where even the number of different kinds of quirks could be different or the sort of forces that are different and we can talk about why. And then there's this third kind, and that's what gets more into the parallel evil feeling thing, which has to do with studying not the big, but the very small,

studying quantum mechanics, where you can argue and people love arguing about that at physics conferences that in some sense, our reality feels like it's splitting out into parallel branches. And that's the whole, if that is true, you can tap into that weirdness by building quantum computers. And then finally, there's the fourth one, which is so weird that almost nobody except myself believe in it, which is the biggest. And I think of all of this as basically Russian dolls. They're nested. They're all inside of each other.

You start with our universe. Many of those, that's level one. Many of those, that makes level two. Many of those makes level three and many of those makes the ultimate one the fourth level So these are these are These are multiverses of multiverses. That's right. That's right But the only one that ever gets any real attention is that kind of you know

Tree limb version that you put that you know, tree limb version that you put, that you depicted this splintering, you know, where there's so many different infinite paths that are separate yet existing simultaneously. That seems to be the one that captures the imagination of every sci-fi writer and even Rick and Morty, which is like a hugely popular show. I mean, it's like, it's, you know, because I think you could do so much with it. You know, there's an infant number of Ricks,

and they're all geniuses. So, you know, so, I mean, you have an unlimited reservoir of stories to tell. Chuck, Chuck, Max is Rick. Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck, you've got questions for me. I'm going to read them out loud. We've got questions for us.

Let's do it. Okay. Let's just jump right into all the questions that we have taken from our Patreon patrons, people who support us out of their substance to keep our show going. So thank you guys for your support. And if you are listening to this and you want to be a Patreon member, go to patreon.com slash start talk

and give us some support and maybe I'll read your. Maybe I'll read your. I didn't know that's how you're gonna end that. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll think about it. Maybe I'll think about reading your. No, of course I'm joking. Of course I'll read your letter

and I'll butcher your name, no doubt. No doubt, here we go. All right, this is Eric Gross. He says, hello fellow Earthicans. Can you explain the mind boggling idea of infinite infinities? Ooh, wow. Wow. That's a good one. Wow, wow. Ooh. Wow.

That's a good one. Wow, that's a great question. Wait, so Max, let's start simple and let me ask you, what does it mean for one infinity to be bigger than another? And then, let's take it from that into that directly into the question. Let's drive the truck right into that question.

One infinity, wait a minute guys, give me one second here. Wait, wait, wait, what Chuck? All right, sorry. I gotta get this little pipe here. No, is that what you're talking about? You know, if we gonna talk about one infinity being bigger than another, I'm just saying,

I need to be prepared. The pipe has to be right there. Okay. If you have a pile of oranges and you have a pile of apples and you want to know is it the same number of apples as oranges? The way you do it is if you compare up each apple with exactly one orange, you say the two numbers are the same. So now play that game with infinities and weird stuff happens. Let me, for example, you might think that there are more numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, than there are even numbers,

2, 4, 6, but they're actually the same because you can pair them up. I can pair up 1 with 2, I can pair up 8 with 16, I pair up every number with one that's twice as big, which is always even. So it's very counterintuitive. So for a while, mathematicians start to think... But just to be clear, you said something, but not everyone knows this, Max, that twice any number, any whole number, is always an even number. Thanks for clarifying, yeah. Yeah, that is always the case.

So you can't take twice anything and end up twice a whole number and get an odd number So when you say twice the number that's always even that's a that's a fundamental fact about mathematics. Okay, that's right and the Quite weird conclusion is that? Some infinities which intuitively would seem like they're much bigger are actually all the same size and some mathematicians start to think maybe all Infinities are the same size, but then George Cantor came along and said, no, there are some infinities that are even bigger. And he proved famously that the number of real numbers, like 3.1415 with infinitely many decimals, that there are actually more

of those than the numbers you can count. And after that, people have realized that there's this whole tower of infinities. So what's that got to do with parallel universes and this question? Well, it's got a lot to do actually with the level one and the level two multiverse because- Wait, wait, wait. Chuck has to take a toke.

Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Toke break. Yes, exactly. So far this is good. This is great. I mean, take a deep breath because I'm going to tell you one of the things that I find the weirdest. This is one of the weirdest things I believe to be true. And if Max finds it weird, brace yourself. Right.

Exactly. It is actually impossible. It is, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity possible to take a little piece of space, just finite, and inside of there make an infinite space that doesn't stick out anywhere and actually infinitely make many different infinite spaces inside of this finite thing. So Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and others came up with this most popular theory we have so far for what put the bang into our Big Bang, right? And made this expanding universe of ours, starting with something tinier than an atom. It's very, very big.

And the ultimate party trick is inside of this tiny region, they can not only make one space which when you live in it feels infinite. That's a level one multiverse for you in there. So it has room for infinitely many of our universes. But you can have infinitely many of those within there. So you can have an infinite number of infinitely large universes in a finite universe. Basically, that's why it feels so utterly weird. And the way that general relativity kind of pulls

this trick is because even though it was a finite volume of space, it has an infinite amount of future time to play with. And it keeps stretching the space. And then general relativity has this funny thing where it can kind of mix up space and time so that for someone who lives inside this, what they consider to be space was something that you might have considered a little bit of time.

And I don't want to get too nerdy about this, but you know, Einstein told us that what really we should... Only now are you saying you don't want to get too nerdy? It's only just occurred to you now. I think I already blew it. Einstein told us that we shouldn't think of reality as a three-dimensional place where stuff happens, but rather as time being just the fourth dimension in this never-changing place called space time.

So if life is a movie, then space time is the whole DVD. And basically because you have this infinite future time to mess with, if you can sort of bend your definition of what space is in there. This is how Alan Guth and Andriy Linde and Alex Valenkin and others have demonstrated this apparently crazy thing. That maybe everything we see here in infinity of infin, could actually be emerging inside of this little bubble. So just to clarify your DVD analogy, what you're saying is we live as prisoners of the present, transitioning from our past to our future.

So we experience a moment in time and many places in space. But if you have the whole DVD of the movie, then your entire timeline is manifest in that place, in that all at once. All at once. All the time. All of your life is in that DVD. And you can have random access to it. If you can move throughout the time coordinate. Is that a fair reference to how you used the concept of DVD? It is, it is.

And that's right. Einstein even told some of his friends that they shouldn't worry so much about his death because he argued that it's just from a space time perspective an illusion, it's not like. Right. Because I'm already dead, man. And so are you. We're all already dead man. And so are you.

We're all dead man. And we're not. I haven't even been born yet, man. And I'm dead. What? It is pretty weird Chuck. I mean, I'm sure sometimes people come up to you when they're lost and ask, Hey, excuse me, but where am I?

Right. But they never come and ask when am I. In local English, we treat time as a very different sort of thing as space. Whereas when we say what's the time, that's actually very arrogant. Just like talking about the universe or the solar system. What is the time? I mean, that's saying that somehow the instant when we're having this experience is the only time.

I mean, all the other times, past and present in space time have just as much claim to be real. They certainly felt real to people who had experiences then, right? So if we want to be a little bit more rigorous, we should always go ask people, excuse me, when am I? You are right now at this particular time, having this experience. Wow, okay, so that doesn't have the arrogance

that it otherwise would, by asking what is the time. I mean, it's like going up and saying, what is the place? Right. Of course, where I am is the only place, so. All right, Chuck, give me some more questions. All right, wow, that was, woof, way me some more questions. All right. Wow. That was way to kick things off.

That is something else. All right. Let's move on to that other level you talk about. This is Chris Hampton. Could the parallel universe theory and the multiverse theory be combined? For example, we are living in a universe with billions of other organisms, but what if each organism in the universe

is itself a universe on a relative scale? Each one thus containing billions of organisms, so on and so on. So he's taking your nesting doll and Breaking it all the way down to every single organism right, but yeah, he's thinking I mean I So max if we have have as a lead into that the early concept of the atom where people said, oh my gosh Adams have structure and there's a nucleus and there's electrons

and you said, oh my gosh, atoms have structure and there's a nucleus and there's electrons orbiting. So that's just like the solar system. So maybe it's like turtles all the way down. So how do we go from any understanding of scales of, everything's just on a different scale rather than something that's a completely different universe unto itself? Yeah, very good question. We see, of course, in nature this fairly beautiful hierarchy, right?

You have some quarks stuck together into neutrons and protons that are stuck together into this big thing we call a nucleus, stuck together in an atom, and then you can make molecules and cells, and you can make Neil deGrasse Tyson and society and a planet and a galaxy, etc. What's different about the hierarchy of universes is it's not just that the hierarchy exists but by definition I like to define the universe, our universe, as everything that we could possibly have any access to with unlimited funding and never mind other stuff that's in the way.

So if you're one person in a society, there are a lot of people you haven't met, but you could in principle meet them. So they're not part of another universe. You could in principle go to Uruguay even if you've never been there. But you can never go 100 billion light years in that direction even if you wanted to. It's just off limits to you. That's basically the definition I think is helpful about universe. Okay, but otherwise we'd use the term sort of poetically or metaphorically, like the cell is a universe unto itself.

Yeah. You know, so I think that's fair poetically, but you're saying from the world of physics, no, that's not how we use the term. Yeah, exactly. And it's whatever we need to have, we should have a word for everything we can access. It's very important for us, especially in the future, both if we're curious, that's the limits of what we can observe. And if we're ambitious, that's also setting roughly the limits of where we could ever go in the future. So if you don't want to call it universe, call it schmoo universe and make up another word for it

But it deserves to be called something right and we where space I think is a word that's better used to actually describe All of space and it's not the same thing space is probably bigger Than our universe we have confirmed that Chuck lives in the schmoo universe just to be yes the schmoo Diverse is it's where all dismissive people live. Universe Schmuniverse! Yeah, whatever! It could literally be the Tuneiverse, so it's you. I don't mind a Tuneiverse, now you're making me hungry.

Well, Chris Hampton actually, it looks like he, from what you just said, is speaking of smoking, is that whole, hey man, there's a universe in my thumbnail, like that whole vibe. That seems to be where he's coming from. But it is. I like what you said, Neil. The reason people use it poetically in that sense is because we refer to things poetically as a universe unto its own, basically if it really

is doing its own thing and not interacting with the rest, right? Which is what we're trying to capture scientifically here. Okay. So now, I want to ask my own question, but I don't want to take up these people's time. Chuck, are you a Patreon member? If not, shut the hell up and read the question. Okay. Well, Neil, I got to tell you, you have bested me, sir.

Because that was a damn good point. Oh my God. Hold on. Now I got to go online right now. I've got to get on Patreon right now. So I can ask my question. All right, here we go. This is Curtis.

Oh, man, you really got me with that one. Okay, this is Curtis Lee Ziedelhak, I think. Ziedelhak, yeah, he says, first and foremost, my name is pronounced Ziedelhak. Okay, so I, okay, I was wrong, but I got it close. Okay. Conceptually, I do not really understand how a multiverse affects our universe. What is the most important effect on our universe? I love the question you just asked before you got cut off there about what's the evidence

for this? Is this just silly? Yeah, Chuck, who asked that again? That would be Curtis Ziedelhoch. Yeah. He's wondering, do we feel see this other universe? And so another, the official way to say that is, do we have experimental evidence that they exist? Right. Or this is just what you talk about at the beer halls. So it's a really great question, because by definition

of what you mean by universe, you are not affected by things outside of it. So isn't that, by definition, untestable? And the interesting thing is, no, that's not true. First of all, if you just take the theory that space is actually much bigger than we thought and with more stuff in it. If that's false, that would mean that actually things kind of end at exactly the edge that

we can see now. That's very testable. You just wait a little bit and then light from farther reaches you and keeps coming into view. And so we've already falsified that many times over. Now there's a more profound way in which you can test this also, though. We have to remember, in science, we test theories. And for a theory to be testable, you don't have to be able to test everything that it predicts.

Just at least one thing. Take Einstein's theory of general relativity. It predicts all sorts of stuff that we can observe, like how Mercury orbits around the sun in a different way than people thought it was supposed to because of Newton. We can test that, we can test how light is bent by gravity, et cetera, but it also predicts what happens inside of black holes, which you know very well,

we cannot go and observe it and then come back and tell our friends about it. Why do we still take it seriously? What happens inside black holes? Because this theory of general relativity has passed so many of the tests that we could test that we also start taking seriously its untestable predictions. And you can't just do, say, well, I know I kind of like what Einstein's theory predicts for the motion of mercury and gravitational lensing and yada yada yada. But I don't like the interior black holes.

I'm just going to opt out of that. Like if I go to Starbucks and say, I want my coffee, but I'm going to opt out of the caffeine and have decaf. That's not the way science works. If you want to opt out of the black holes, then go come up with your own gravitational theory, which doesn't have black holes in it, but still succeeds in everything Einstein's theory did. That turns out to be such a tall order that despite a lot of smart people trying for a hundred years, they've all failed. So what's that got to do with the multiverse?

Well, replace general relativity now with the theory of inflation that we talked about. It makes a bunch of testable predictions. It predicts that our universe should be expanding, that it should be very uniform. Wait, wait, just to be clear, you're not actually replacing general relativity. You're enclosing it in inflation. Isn't that correct? Correct. Thank you for correcting me.

We take generativity and then we add some additional assumptions to it. That there is a certain kind of substance there which behaves in a certain way. And then we do the math. And it predicts all sorts of things that we've tested now successfully with great prediction, like these ripples in the microwave background, their statistical patterns. For example, I've worked, as you know, a lot on trying to rule out this theory of inflation, and I've failed. And because of that, we take it seriously. And we also have to then take seriously that things inflation predicts that we cannot test, such as that space is actually

way bigger than our universe. Wow. Okay. I think that's an excellent way to think about it. So if the one theory has these multiple consequences, it's okay if some of them you can't or you never will, if the ones that you can test turn out to be correct. Right, exactly. And you say, if this is correct, I'm gonna take a stronger look over,

I'm gonna start thinking about this. By the way, is it fair to say, Max, that if you explore the things you cannot measure, you might come up with a discovery that you can measure? Very true, too, because very often, when people have been going off and thinking about these things, which they knew they could never test, it led them to ask questions, but led them back.

Back to a whole fresh way. Could test. For example, another very good reason, not just that we shouldn't think of these cool things just because they're fun, but they often turn out to be very useful. People started thinking about what the ultimate building blocks of matter were and atoms and so on, and people for a long time thought that was completely useless. But then by thinking about that, they invented quantum mechanics, which gave us the whole computer technology, which lets us have this podcast now, and so on.

Wow. And that's another example, actually, of exactly this same question. The quantum parallel universes, of course, we can't visit them either. But quantum mechanics predicts so much else that we can test. And it's turned out to be very, very difficult to come up with a theory of physics that predicts only the sort of creation mechanism

for a universe that creates only the part we can see and then stops and doesn't make anything more. So let me ask you this with respect to what you're saying. Chuck, you're not a Patreon member yet. He's trying to come during the break. I, that's right. You never know what I did during the break, guys. I don't know what you did during the break. All right, I'll let you slip one in, go.

All right, so Max, with respect to what you just said, are there things that we are Are there things that we are able to observe, or at least able to observe the forces thereof, that remain a mystery that may in some way be attached to the multiverse theory? I would say- Isn't that what we just answered? Is that? Are you saying, Chuck, if the multiverse is what it is, is there some piece of a dangling

and visible in our own universe? Yes, that we're observing. We're actually observing, but it's still a mystery. Like, you know, are there mysteries that are observable that... Oh, I got it, Chuck. I'm going to recast your question. You ready, Chuck? Okay, good Are there deep mysteries in our own universe that could themselves?

Be evidence of a multiverse and we have yet to put the two together. How's that? That's what I'm saying I said, that's not what you say. You made it so mangled it But I didn't make it enough that you didn't know Resounding yes, okay dark energy for example. We all know by now that we have no clue what 95% of our universe is made of. Most of it is made of this weird stuff called dark energy. What's really odd about it is when you work out exactly how much there is in the most of most natural

units of measurement that we would do in physics, we get this number which is 0.000000 with 123 zeros and then a one and we wonder like why is that? It turns out if you look closer that if you have a little bit more we would all be dead, wouldn't be any galaxies actually ever formed and if you have a little bit more, we would all be dead. Wouldn't be any galaxies actually ever formed. And if you had less, so this was a bit negative, we would be inside of a black hole by now and also not having this conversation. So why is it that our universe was so fine-tuned that the amount of dark energy was dialed in to this very special value that let us have this conversation?

That is one of those mysteries, Chuck, I think that you're fishing for here. met some people said well tough luck we sometimes we're just lucky let's just be grateful for it and shut up other people said maybe this is evidence that we were designed either by divine being or by some simulator who tuned our universe especially to be able to have life in the parents basement they did this. And then if you actually have this thing with space being very big, with parallel universes, with all sorts of different values of that knob setting in different places, suddenly you have an actual simple explanation for this.

The picture you get then is that the bigger space is like the Sahara desert. It's mostly just a barren wasteland with no galaxies. But in a few places, that knob is set just right. You have an oasis where there is life and there are galaxies and there is star talk, you know. And surprise, surprise, of course, that's where we're going to be having these conversations. Well, just to be clear, it's not that it was set that way. It's that if you have an infinite or a huge number of these universes where the knobs are set at random,

one of those random knob settings will be the right combination for us. It's like tuning your dial up and down. What used to be radio, kids, there used to be a thing. Used to be this thing called radio, guys, where you would actually tune your dial and like most of it was just white noise and empty. But every once in a while you would come across somebody talking or some music or something like that.

Oh that is freaking brilliant. God I love science! Alright keep going. Alright here we go. Here we go. We got a few minutes left. See if we can squeeze them all in. Alright here we go.

This is Woody. And Woody says, what are your thoughts on how a multiverse could actually begin? Would each one require a Big Bang? And how many of those would end up with a Chuck being possible? OK. The Chuckiverse. Yeah.

Yeah, that ain't whatever. Yeah, so Max, does everyone have a big bang just like us? That's a great question. Yeah, so I've actually had a total rethink about the big bang concept, because first I was taught that that's the beginning. And now it's pretty clear if you take inflation theory seriously, you should think of the big bang just as the end of this crazy creative inflation process in our little part of space,

when things calm down enough that you can make galaxies and evolve a Neil and a Chuck and other places it kind of keeps going. So even if you have only one bang, but that it keeps going at infinite, you will end up having many, many different regions where it stops and you get what we would call a level one multiverse

with a universe. So all it takes is ultimately one bang to get it all. And if you have each one of those places where it stops being actually infinite, then no matter how unlikely it is that you, Chuck, arise because the particles started out in exactly the right configurations for your mom to meet your dad and all of that, The probability wasn't zero because it happened here and you're rolling the dice instantly many times now, right?

So it's guaranteed. Well, there you go. And by the way, both my parents lost on that bet. So on the roll of that dice. By making you, is that what you're saying? All right. Believe me, I was not a good kid. All right. Keep it going. Here not a good kid. All right.

Keep it going. This is, here we go. This is Cameron Bishop. Hello, Max. Hello, Neil. I've always been curious. Is it flawed to ask what's between these universes? Is that measurable space?

Ooh. That's a great question. So between the different level one multiverses and the level two multiverses, there is still space. But that space in between is still doing this inflation thing and doubling its size over and over and over again in regular intervals. That's why it's impenetrable. Because if you start flying through, go for a while and now you're still farther away

from where you're supposed to go. It's expanding faster than you can gain distance through it. Exactly. Exponentially. Wow. OK. All right. That's great. That's super cool. All right. But wait, but in the quantum multiverse, there are actually whole other spacetimes. There's not one spacetime system, right?

But you have a quantum multiverse, the level three lives in a bigger space we call Hilbert space, which may even have infinitely many dimensions. So I hear the rents there out of the property values are just off the charts in Hilbert. Something has to be done about Hilbert. Damn it. So, but so what would you call what was between those quantum universes? In the quantum case, it's much more tricky. When quantum mechanics was first invented, people didn't know about this phenomena called decoherence, it was only discovered by Hans Dieter Tse in 1970, and he should be more

famous than he is, which is a kind of censorship mechanism that explains why we don't experience all those other weird quantum realities if they're actually there. Basically, what comes out of the math is that these quantum superpositions, they only survive as long as they're kept secret. And whenever something gets really big, air molecules bounce off, photons bounce off, and the secret is out. It's like you tell a friend, they tell a friend, and so on. That's why big things like us always seem to only be

in one place at once. And we can only experience and measure quantum weirdness with tiny things that can keep their properties secret. So Chuck, time for that last toke on that pipe. Yeah, man. I'm telling you right there. That's wow. That was that was cool. What's it called? What's it called?

D what now? The coherence. Decoherence. No, here's Chuck. When your kids are babbling on and you don't know what they're saying, say stop being decoherent. Yeah, don't be decoherent, okay? You quantum dummy. That's worse than incoherent.

You are decoherent. You are decoherent. Yeah, they're just decohering the whole conversation. Chuck, give me one last question and see if Max has a sound bite in him to answer, because that's all the time we have left for it. Go. Go. Okay, this is J Hunt.

Greetings, Neil and Max. This is Jeff from Titan. My question is... The Titan, the moon of Saturn, I guess, okay. Yeah, you gotta love that, right? My question is... That means it's full of methane gas, just so you know. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'll cut down on those beans, man. Yeah. Yeah, watch out for the beans. Right, go ahead. My question. My question is, is a new multiverse created every time

we make a this or that decision? So the idea that the infinite number of possibilities are not actually possibilities until we make one of those possibilities. Fantastic question about the level three multiboard. Basically, if you make a snap decision that you're really torn about, right? What ends up happening might come down

to the position of a single little calcium ion somewhere and some synaptic junction. And depending on where it is of your brain, yeah, off the things go and you end up with a completely different pattern and either you decide to say yes to that date and live happily ever after or say no and do something different, right? So that can micro superposition can get amplified into something that's so different macroscopically that this decoherence thing comes along and makes these two things really, really separate. So in that sense, yes, when you make a decision that really could have made both ways, you

are in a sense, if the level three multiverse is real, creating two parallel realities are equally real. And each one of you is only, of course, one outcome and is gonna think that's all that happened. Oh my God. That is crazy. I love that. That is awesome. I love that.

Oh my God. Oh right now it's somewhere. So it means you created another chuck, but you're only this chuck. And so that's why you know. Right. That other guy's actually happy. And he's having fun. I try to think about that every time I get a parking ticket, you know, that there's some other parallel universe where I didn't.

But then I think a bit more and realize there's another parallel universe where I got towed. You win some, you lose some. All right. Max, we got to call it quits there. It's been a delight to have you on. It's always great to talk to you and probe your brain for all the fun stuff that you're thinking about. So, thanks for being on Star Talk.

Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. All right. This has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries, the multiverse edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up.