StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries: Time and Higher Dimensions

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

Neil deGrasse Tyson, mathematician John Allen Paulos, physicist James Kakalios, and comic co-host Harrison Greenbaum investigate the fourth dimension, hypercubes, wormholes, Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland,” and much more!NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/cosmic-queries-time-and-higher-dimensions/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today's topic is on higher dimensions in space and in time. And for that, I have a new co-host, Harrison Greenbaum. Harrison. Hey, how you doing?

Welcome to Start Talk. I'm very excited. Where have you been all our life? I've been around in another dimension watching you guys. That's what it was. Yeah. It was another dimension.. Where have you been all our life? I've been around in another dimension watching you guys. That's what it was. Yeah. It was another dimension. Glad to have you.

And I hope this topic is something you feel good about. Absolutely. Okay, because even if you don't, I got somebody else just in case. Okay, cool. Perfect. Let me introduce an old time friend. It's John Allen Paul. He's a professor of mathematics at Temple University over there in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia. There you go. He's written some books. Most recently, A Numerate Life. Sounds very autobiographical. Is that correct? It's a mixture of math and memoir. Oh, I like that.

Math and memoir. That's beautiful. And Harrison, you're tweeting at Harrison Comic. Harrison Comedy. Harrison Comedy. Yes. Oh, yeah. Tens at Harrison Comic. Harrison Comedy. Harrison Comedy. Yes. Well, we'll... Oh, yeah.

Tens and tens of people read it. Tens and tens. Oh, yeah. Killing it. So, John, I called you onto the show because we always get questions. Because part of the show is going to be cosmic queries. And we always get questions about dimensions. Sometimes informed by movies that people saw. But there's other things about dimensions that I think are just awesome,

that people wouldn't even necessarily know to ask. And I brought you in because you're my mathematician at arm's reach. Harrison, do you have your own mathematician? I have a calculator on my phone. Close enough. But I think everybody should have a mathematician at arm's reach. Harrison, do you have your own mathematician? I have a calculator on my phone. Close enough. But I think everybody should have a mathematician at arm's reach. I was a psych major. We had our own statistics. We had statistics for psych, which was not as heavy as...

It was like a toned down... Yeah, like this is a medium. Like, okay, we got it. So let me walk through what I'd like to explore. and I want to hear how you would plug into it. All right. Sounds good. So we are all familiar with living in three dimensions, okay? And we measure them all the time. We have height, width, and depth, all right? And mathematically, it would just be X, Y, Z. That's how we do that, right? Okay. And we're're good with that we can move in any of these directions

at any time we have full fluidity in the spatial dimensions in which we occupy okay now there's a fourth dimension we talk about time we are moving forward in time but we don't have access to the past so we are forever prisoners in the present transitioning from our past to our future. So that's a different kind of coordinate. I don't want to worry about that just yet. I just want to imagine that we have like a fourth spatial coordinate that you can move around in. That would just seems to me to be really cool. But before we get there, let's start small. Okay?

So let's imagine a two-dimensional being. That's something that only has height sort of and width, but not depth. All right? So this would be like the Edwin Abbott's book, Flatland. Flatland, right. Flatland. Could you just remind us about the themes of that book written like 100 years ago, right? Right.

He talks about what he calls Flatland, which is a two-dimensional surface. And he was a mathematician. He was a mathematician. And circles and lines and polygons move around on this two-dimensional space. So a polygon is just a stop sign, as an example of a square, a stop sign, this sort of thing. Yeah, well, the interesting thing about Flatland, though, is there's a lot of social commentary built into it. He criticizes Victorian values especially with regard

to women. Women are just lines and the way they communicate is by wiggling their back part and it's very, very hierarchical.

I'd forgotten that. Very hierarchical. The polygons that have more sides are above, superior to triangles, for example. The ideal is a circle. Even in two-dimensional universes, people got to divide themselves up.

So there's a social hierarchy. Right. But then he imagined a third dimension. He's taken to the third dimension. One of these creature characters in 2D. Yeah, he's a creature in 2D, but a third-dimensional entity comes and takes him up and shows him what the third dimension looks like. And he goes back and he kind of proselytizes for the existence of this. We have this very parochial view of the universe.

It's actually much greater, but the little beings don't uh the two-dimensional beans don't uh don't like that they can't even they're very parochial yeah they can't conceive of it they get angry because they can't conceive of it and they they think he's some sort of quack or whatever so instead of squares you have cubes right instead of triangles you might have a pyramid right three-dimensional versions of those shapes right Right, yeah. And as the sphere comes down onto flat land, the circle, its intersection with the flat land gets bigger and bigger as the sphere descends or ascends. So if you were a flat lander

and you saw a point grow into a circle and the circle gets bigger and bigger, it gets to some maximum diameter and then shrinks back down and then disappears, that would be completely mysterious to you. But if you live in a higher dimension, in three dimensions, you would say, oh, that's just a sphere passing through your two-dimensional universe.

And it might be possible to infer the existence of the third dimension from that very process. Here's a circle that gets bigger and bigger and then smaller and smaller. They'd have to be able to imagine a circle, though. Right. They'd have to imagine a sphere. Imagine a sphere imagine the sphere yeah some flatlander makes a ton of money it's like their copper fields weird look at this point he has television specials so here's

what's interesting to me which gets kind of freaky fun okay so when we as three-dimensional space beings, look at a two-dimensional world, every creature is completely transparent to us. We can see their entire innards. Right. Whereas they cannot see their own innards because the boundary of those innards is the outer, quote, surface of what they see. And that's all they see, right.

And they just see that line, the textured line, but they can't see through that line unless they cut it open. Or they see a point, if it's a polygon or a triangle coming towards them. Okay. So that tells me that a four-dimensional being looking at us would have access to every one of our interior organs, and that would just be completely mysterious to us. Right. And the four-dimensional, I i mean you get into these standard puzzles uh affordament if there was a fourth dimension even if you were locked in a cubicle jail you could step into the fourth

dimension and escape in the same way as you can escape from a circular enclosure by going into the third dimension and escaping so you can imprison an ant by drawing a box around it if an ant only really lived in 2Ds. You can imprison it, but we as three-dimensional people, just step over it. Yeah, what's the matter with that? But to do so, it has to engage a third dimension for it to then come back down.

And so it is out of their mental awareness. Right. So let me ask you, are we not only prisoners of our timeline are we prisoners of our three dimension what what will it take you're the mathematician you've calculated in higher dimensions before what will it take to escape our three dimensionality well i mean three physical dimensions uh that the threeness was probably established in the early moments of the universe after the first moments after the Big Bang. The formation of the universe.

Right. The energy was sufficient to pop out a new dimension. But once it cooled a little bit, the third dimension was locked in. So people are using the second law of thermodynamics to explain the threeness of the dimension. And whether that's the case or not there are lots of alternative theories but that's that's one and it's a little bit like a phase transition you need energy to change phases from from water to gas or whatever and you need energy to bump up to melt ice to liquid right to bump up a dimension and now it's

cool i think about phase transitions all the time because it's a fancy term we use in physics, but it's a very familiar thing. But it's so familiar that we no longer are astonished by it when we should be, okay? Here is this liquid, and then it becomes completely solid. Why aren't we freaking out every day about this?

It happens when you take out your parents' vodka and you replace it with water and then the thing explodes in the freezer. You're like, oh, you damn phase transition. Lord, it again. Yeah, so you were replacing the vodka with water so they wouldn't know. Right, but that expands. This sounds like you have such expertise at this.

Perhaps. Or you put a Diet Coke can in the freezer and leave it there for a day and it comes up whole. Right. Right. So it's a, well, that would be, that's a different. That's a different going in the other direction.

No, no. If you expand, that's a separate phenomenon. Yeah, right. From just the phase transition. Yeah. So what you're saying is we missed a few phase transitions in the early universe. Right. It could have been four dimensional, five dimensional.

Right. And these are defective dimensions if you believe in string theory there. But here's another interesting thing I learned. If you're a two-dimensional creature, you cannot have a digestive tract. Or even a brain, actually. I mean, if you push it, I mean. Well, no, a brain, not as we would know it. But you can imagine some network of lines.

Right. But a digestive tract in us is a hole through a tube and has two ends to it, right? Okay. Or three, but let's keep it a two for the moment. So you eat food, comes out the other side. Right. That's a hole through us. But that tunnel is completely enclosed by our flesh. Okay?

Right. Okay. So now let's draw a two-dimensional being and it has a mouth. And then it opens its mouth. You put food in. If that food goes through it and then comes out any place,

that being is in two separate pieces. Right. Unless the mouth closes and the anus, for lack of a better term, opens. Oh. Interesting. This sounds like somebody who's also thought about Flatlander sex. I feel like that's the next question.

How does it work? Yeah. What are we going to do with all these? No, this is, yeah, top people we need working on this. So it would open its mouth, consume the food, close its mouth. That will hold it. It's got to, to like re-steal or something. That way it's still together as one thing comes and it's got to open that.

Okay. All right. Okay. I got this now. Okay. Unless you need to keep the food away from the rest of the body. Like there's a reason it's being separated from the rest of us. No, but no, it gets absorbed in. Yeah. Through the walls. They need nourishment.

Yeah, yeah. That's where the nourishment comes from. Didn't you take Bio 101? So it's these things that intrigue me. And that's why I brought you on, just to sort of wax. Wormholes is another topic that's very intriguing. Yeah, yeah. I love wormholes. But you need, you know, we always show a wormhole with one reduced dimension,

because I guess we can't otherwise conceive of it. Right. Right? We show a rubber sheet, and there's like a, you know, a stretch that goes through it, and it comes out the other side. But that rubber sheet is our way of representing a full three dimensions.

Right. It's just two. Right. It's really, so did you see the movie Interstellar? Yes. Okay, so they're coming upon... I like the part with the Joker. So they're coming upon a wormhole through space,

and it's a sphere. And you say, well, that's not a hole, but yes, it is, because it's a hole in every direction so you go in and you come out another side but that requires a higher dimension for it to happen and that's just that's just cool so what i you know what i want i want but in any dimension is that movie fun to sit through well if you read the book, there was a tandem book, Matt, I guess you didn't get the book. Oh, okay.

The book is, it's an explanatory book, The Science of Interstellar, written by one of the co-executive producers who's a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. Nice. Yeah, and it's like a coffee table book, but a lot of pictures and things from the movie, and he explains everything.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. So you read that, and then you- Okay, then I'll get back that, and then you reserve judgment. You call me in the morning. I like the time stuff. The time stuff is really nice. It's good.

It's good. So I just love thinking about dimensions. I also like thinking about a hypercube. A hypercube. A tesseract. Tell me about hypercubes. Hypercubes are just cubes of four and higher dimensions. I like the math.

He's so like Dezacoff. It's just a higher dimensional cube. We have these. I got one in my pocket. Actually, if you look at the ordinary sense of dimension, which is some feature or aspect of a person or thing or whatever, you can have very you know, very high dimensional entities. I mean, if you allow, for example, look at a person, his height, his weight,

his whatever, plus what he likes, the degree to which he likes it, the brands he likes, his almost any dimension, you could have 50 dimensions, you look at eHarmony, 100 dimensions. What's interesting about that, if you think of a person as a 100-dimensional person, almost everybody on Earth is on the edge of the hypercube. Because if you take a square, a 10-inch by 10-inch square to use parochial units, and you stay a half an inch away from the edge, only, what is it, nine times, edge, only, what is it, nine times nine, 81% is in the interior and the rest is in the exterior. But now if you take a cube and you take a look at a half inch around each one, then it's nine times nine times nine.

It's only about 73% in the interior. The percent goes up. The percent goes down. No, no, the percent of what is in the perimeter goes up. Right. And then you have four, it's 62%. If you have 50 dimensions, almost everybody is in the edge, around the edge. So in that sense, my father used to love this saying.

He says there's two kinds of, you've probably heard it, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are very strange ones and the ones you don't know so well. And so we're all really strange because we're all in the periphery of this hypercube that describes us As a collection of dimensions Does that mean eHarmony works or not? I'm not

You're on the dating scene I am, I'm on all the apps I'm on Tinder, I'm on Jswipe Which is Jewish Tinder It's like regular Tinder But if you both swipe right You get half of her father's business It's great

So do you feel like your dimensionality is properly represented in your social profiles? I think they should ask if you understand hypercubes, and that could really get out. I use astrology. That's my big thing. Oh, there you go. I sit a girl down, and I go, do you believe in horoscopes?

And if she says yes, I end the date immediately. Oh, I see. That's a filter. Right. If she's like, what's your sign? I'm like, the exit. I'm out of it. It's worse than between you and i yeah exactly that's if you're if you're hyper literate you'll back when cosmos was airing there there was a comic that was really cute

there was a speed dating right and uh one person says the other uh have you seen cosmos and the person says what's cosmos and the person says what's cosmos and versus next? Academic pressure, you know on your speed date encounter So this continue the hypercube so so what describes me how you get there because I when I think of it I think about start with a line and the line is one dimension because it only has length and it's bounded by two Points points each with zero dimension. Points doesn't have height, width, or depth or anything. OK? That's kind of interesting to me.

But I only see a cube if you hand it to me. No, wait. So watch. No, no, no, no. Watch, watch. So now I take this line, and then I sort of rotate it out into an axis. Then I get a square. it out into an axis, then I get a square. So a square has two dimensions to it, but it's bounded by four one-dimensional lines.

That's just kind of interesting. So now I take that square and slide it up to get a cube out of it. So now a cube has six sides, each bounded by two-dimensional surfaces. It's called a die. A what? A die. Oh, a die, yes. Okay, sorry. Excuse me.

Okay, so now if I want a four-dimensional cube, I take this three-dimensional cube and pass it into a fourth dimension, and thereby I end up with eight sides, each a cube. The sides, each a cube. The side is itself a cube. And we just can't think of that. But you're a mathematician.

You've been doing it. Can you think in four dimensions? Or is it still weird for you? No, you still have to resort to cross sections. I mean, there are animated versions of the Tesseract where it rotates. The Tesseract is the four-dimensional cube. It's the four-dimensional cube where it rotates and you look at the various cross-sections. You can get a little bit of a feel, but no.

I mean, some people, I mean, Thurston, a late mathematician, I think he was at Princeton, did have a kind of visceral feel for four-dimensional entities. But most people, most mathematicians. Okay, so I don't feel so bad. No, you don't have to. Got to take a quick break. When we come back, we will be joined by a good friend and fellow physicist, James Cacalio. Some of you know him as the world's expert on the physics of superheroes.

There's some higher dimensionality going on there. We will bring him into the conversation as well as queries from our families. We're back at Mashable headquarters in New York City for StarTalk. The topic of today is higher dimensions.

And I got help. I got mathematician right here, John Palos. And coming in on video call, John Kakalios. How you doing, man? I'm doing great. How are you? Excellent. Excellent.

You've met my co-host for today, Harrison Greenbaum. And wait, wait. met my co-host for today, Harrison Greenbaum. And wait, wait. For those of you who see this on video, you have superheroes dangling from your wall. Now, I know you wrote the book, The Physics of Superheroes, but little versions of them have appeared to have invaded your den.

You may think of them as action figures, Neil, but to me, they are lecture demonstration tools. Oh, that's how you explain that to your mother and to your wife. Yes, okay. And my department chair, yes. You've been expensing a lot of action figures. Moving on.

So one of your favorite books of mine is The Physics of Superheroes, but that's not your latest book. Remind me of your latest book. The latest book is – oh, and hair. I happen to have it right here. Who says this isn't the Marvel Age of Shameless Plugs? The Physics of Everyday Things. Excellent, excellent.

So you're everyone's sort of man-about-town physicist. There are people who cover astrophysics. There are people who do the Higgs boson. I cover all the nitty-gritty stuff that surrounds us every day and explain how physics is useful not just to explain colliding neutron stars but also to explain our Fitbit. Okay. Very good to know. I got rid of our Fitbit. Okay. Very good to know.

I got rid of my Fitbit. You got rid of it. It measures your motion based on wrist activity. And I was like, I don't need people to know they run a marathon at 4 a.m. every evening. So what we've got here, we're in the Cosmic Queries section

of our Star Talk. And Harrison, you've collected uh questions all the questions bring it on all right bring it on and i got two experts here i could just like go to the bahamas right now because we got all the expertise you need for higher dimensions and so much of people's access to higher dimensions and knowledge of higher dimensions comes from superhero movies so let's see what you got yeah so the first question comes from our patreon so thank you for patreon okay for supporting us um and this one is from orlando florida so he's near a superhero theme park uh we've seen compelling theories that postulate everything from 4 to 26 dimensions in our physical world what's so special about the fourth dimension is there anything mathematically

unique about it compared to what we consider spatial dimensions i think we pretty much answered that, but... Is there anything mathematically unique about it? It's physically... I mean, there are arguments for it. As I said, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that once the early universe cooled a bit, it didn't have enough energy to...

To birth out another dimension. To birth out another dimension if you wanted the second law to hold. So the fourth is beyond us. You're saying we're stuck with four dimensions. We're stuck with three and one, yeah, four dimensions. So, I mean, there are these other deficient, for lack of a better term, dimensions if you believe in string theory. But, you know.

Okay. I mean, there are lots of theories i mean content is his own theory is uh but i don't want to get into count emmanuel khan emmanuel khan okay yeah but he didn't know anything about cosmology no well one thing he did he he made a distinction that many people derided between lumina and phenomena lumina is the way things are that we'll never know phenomena isenomena is the way we see things. We are a priori categories. And in a way, I mean, the strength theory is something we'll never know. And the extra dimensions and other universes, we'll just never know.

In physics, we don't give a rat's ass about what something is if what it is is not revealed to us through a measurement. Yeah, but... Would you agree with that? I would. It is kind of disturbing that of all the extra dimensions, none of them are in the time domain. They all seem to be extra spatial dimensions because if they were in the time domain,

then maybe we could move back and forth in time the way we move back and forth in space. And in fact, science fiction stories have sometimes suggested that that would be how time travel would occur. So help me on this. So if we had more than one time dimension accessible to us, does that mean we can just go off in one time coordinate while freezing our movement in the other time coordinate and do things with our life and then return and then continue?

Because that's what I do spatially. Why not? I... No, presumably that would be in fact the case. That's kind of cool. I can't remember where it might have been even an H.G. Wells

short story about that might be a way of achieving time travel that they discovered that there's other pathways just so you can get from one point to another taking alternate routes.

Alternate time routes. You could, spatial routes, we do it all the time. Right, right. So, Oh, I see. Spatially,

you'll take a shortcut, you'll do it, you'll go backwards to where you once were. Exactly. You'll get your. Right. You'll go backwards to where you once were. Exactly. You'll get your old haunts. Yeah. It's like a time shortcut.

Yeah. So you could have a time shortcut. Right. That would be interesting. But they never want to add another time dimension when they need to add dimensions. Is this anything different from the wiggly, wobblybly timey-wimey time of doctor who i think that ultimately the reason why there are only extra spatial dimensions is in fact just that to avoid saying well they kind of postulate time travel is not going to happen so everything has

to stay all the extra dimensions are spatial, time travel always leads to the grandfather paradox. You go back and tell your grandfather. Unless the universe splits there. One universe, your grandfather. That's the many worlds. So that's the many worlds. That's right. So you can go back in time, but it's an alternate.

So you can kill as many grandfathers as you got bullets. Would Trump be president? There's nobody who's using their time travel to come back and be like, what are you doing? I'm working on it. I'm working on it. All you have to do is prevent your grandfather from meeting your grandmother. Then you won't be born. Or delay

when they had sex by 10 minutes. This guy with blood on his hands, he's like, you just had to go to the library. Knock a book out of his hand. Oh my God. Let's go to the next question all right uh this gets us to our next one from justin colato in facebook how much cannabis do i have to smoke to get to the fourth dimension oh i'm assuming he's in seattle or colorado or color. We got good places for that. What are you looking at me for? I know.

Okay, so John, when you get deep into your math, how much cannabis is required to reach different dimensionalities in your analysis? I don't know. Don't know, okay. Okay, so that's an experiment that you could perform. Yeah, well, in my particular case, it would probably be a tiny amount since I don't ever engage in such.

So I think a tiny little bit, and I'd be in the fifth dimension. Okay. Time slows down when I use it, so that's a way of changing the fourth dimension. Right, so is that for you? For me, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The rest of us are looking at you like... My friend. Oh, your friend. Yeah, my friend in your friend yeah my friend in colorado who smokes i don't know anything about that all right next all right cool uh this is from the star talk website is there a study of physics that delves into the 0d dimension every other dimension possibility is looked at like in string string theory but why is the possibility of dimensions lower than one excluded from that line of thought well technically they're not because that's what a singularity is in the center of a black hole.

That's what the singularity was at the birth of the universe. That's the definition of a singularity. So now here's the problem. And James, correct me if I'm wrong here or if you think differently about it. What's interesting about these singularities is that we know in advance that's where Einstein's general theory of relativity breaks down. We need a new way to gain access to what's going on in the universe at those points of singularity. And it's been said that's where God is dividing by zero. We're like, you're not supposed to be lining up to handle that limit, that limiting case.

So, yes, this writer needs to think of singularities as the zeroth dimension. And James, could you add to that? I would. So, along what you just suggested, Neil, the tricky part is that if you're going to base, you say physics only cares about things that you can measure, and what the evidence is, and at the singularity, we have no evidence, and all of our equations break down, it makes it rather tricky to then have a theory that accounts for the singularity, and then presumably would then account for things that we're observing today to try to justify. I hadn't thought about that.

What you're saying is you can't use a macroscopic object to measure a zero-dimensional thing. Right. Or going back to that point of the singularity, it's like where's the – we say what's the evidence or what's the data that you're going to use? But you can't be there if everything is singular uh all right next question all right uh so this is sort of related we touched on a little bit but this guy on the website gary f anderson he said supposedly before the big bang dimensions didn't exist when the big bang manifested itself dimensionality suddenly came into existence did that dimensionality expand at the speed of light or did it just instantly pop into

existence creating an infinite empty universe well everything we know says that we were endowed by the matter energy space and dimensionality from the the the transition from an extremely high temperature universe to one that's much cooler and we're freezing out these properties as the universe expands and cools. So, James, would you add or subtract anything from that account? Not at all. I'm a humble but lovable solid state experimentalist. Notice, don't blame me for this Big Bang stuff.

No, no, but this is not my area of expertise, so I will defer. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you get this at different stages of the extremely early universe. And so we're stuck with the universe we have. Get over it. Next question. Let's hear it.

Got time for one more before we take a break. Go. Yeah. Green Meteor from Instagram said, is death the fourth dimension? Ooh. Ooh. Sounds, seem like more of the zeros dimension.

Just disappear. Yeah, I would agree. Death is the zeros dimension. I'm going with that. You're going with that. We got three. It works for me. We're going with it.

Okay, we got another one. Bring it on. Richard Adams on Facebook says says do accounts of powerful deities make more sense when you consider higher dimensions oh well you know when you think about like the the the flatland example that if we lived in a flat dimension a three-dimensional uh a person who could put things in and out of our flat dimension would seem extra physical, would seem beyond our realm or our understanding. And is that what Thor is to Earth? Thor exists in higher dimensions? They have access

to space-time dimensions that we don't? Isn't that correct? Presumably. Well, you're my comic book guy. Don't tell me presumably. Well, they've gone back and forth on that. I'm saying, oh, it's magic, or saying that there's a scientific, it's just like hyperscience, or back to it's magic. It's clear that if you live in a higher dimension relative to some community of beings, you are all-powerful and all-knowing in ways they will never understand or imagine. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's right. The answer is yes.

Yeah, yeah. I think the answer is basically yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's indistinguishable from what a high – and deeply religious people will say god is is a is knows all and and is all powerful they will describe powers ascribe powers to god that any of us would give to afford to a higher dimensional being if they yeah i think that would be a trivial and we could have a hierarchy of gods too the fourth dimension the fifth the fifth dimension, sixth dimension. Yeah, yeah. So I just need to find a flatland and be God.

Is that your first thought? Is that what you really... Yes, the cult of Harrison. There'll be a bunch of flatlanders giving me two-dimensional offerings. Like the tiny insects you are. Exactly. Well, when we come back, more of Cosmic Queries on higher dimensions when StarTalk returns.

We're back on StarTalk Cosmic Queries segments. We're talking about higher dimensions beyond the three spatial and one-time dimension with which we are familiar. I've got math professor John Palos. I got my co-host Harrison Greenbaum. And on video call, I've got James Kakalios, one of my favorite people out there of them all, Mr. Superhero Expert.

So we got questions from our fan base. So what do you have? Alex Lanter from Twitter wrote, is a tesseract a fourth dimensional object? Follow up, what is a tesseract? So that's weird that this person doesn't even know what it is, but he's asking about it. Well, because he's seen it in the movies.

Yeah. So obviously the word tesseract has its origins in mathematics. And it was then co-opted by the Marvel Universe, I presume. So earlier in our first segment, we talked about the Tesseract just as a four-dimensional cube. So if you can tell us, what role does it play in the Avengers pantheon? Not so much the Avengers. The Fantastic Four at one point had their headquarters that was kind of a Tesseract so that they could be on just a warehouse on the New York wharf

and yet managed to have the facilities of a skyscraper there. It was a real estate device? Exactly. It was a real estate device. It's bigger on the inside. Trust me. So it's bigger on the inside like Doctor Who's police call box, the TARDIS, like Mary Poppins'

bag, which she pulls mirrors and lamps out of it, like Hermione's purse in Harry Potter. The wardrobe from Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Or is that really more of a portal? No, more of a portal. I thought of that more as a portal rather than a container uh inside what's the movie i'm remembering where

like the tesseract was in this in a nasa facility and oh they were talking about so that was um the tesseract was actually one of the infinity stones that was in the first avengers film i know it yes yes and so that's that blue glowing stone. And that has been later identified as the space a portal or some way to go from one point to another. And now it's recognized that it would give you control over any point in space. So when you say now it is recognized, was there some team of researchers, a crack team? What do you mean now it came to be realized? Yes. it came to be realized.

Yes. When Thor went into that little mystic pool in Avengers 2, Age of Ultron, he recognized that what they were dealing with were the Infinity Stones. We saw a purple power Infinity Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Vision has a yellow mind stone that gives you powers. Okay, so Tesseract was just a holding word. It was basically, it was a holding word. They needed a cool word until they could figure out how to do more with this thing. Right.

Okay. And now there's a Trump Tesseract Tower. The Trump Tesseract. Okay, so that would be a building you walk walk into and it's way bigger on the inside than it would be on the outside. Isn't there a cosmic cube? There's a joke in there somewhere. There's so many.

I'm going to use my Tesseract to go back in time. I was nerding out because isn't there also the cosmic cube? Which is like... They were referring to the Tesseract a little bit as the cosmic cube in Captain America, first Avenger.

And then in the Avengers movie in the comic books, the cosmic cube is a cube that when you're holding it, you can change reality. So in some sense, it was like the reality stone infinity gem in that you could just change. So suddenly if the red skull was holding the cosmic cube, he could, You could just change. So suddenly if the Red Skull was holding the Cosmic Cube, we could suddenly be in a world where Germany won World War II. So a different outcome of events in the world.

A whole different reality where everyone has like a third eye or a forearm. You could change any aspect of reality. And that was primarily through the comics rather than through the films. you could change any aspect. And that was primarily, that was primarily through the comics rather than through the films. Yes. Except that in Thor, the dark world, God,

it is so sad. I know all this. The red, we weep for you. I'm on the same boat. I lost my virginity in college. So we're fine. The ether that Thor and the dark elf Malekith fought over turned out to be identified to be the reality stone.

So that is introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and will be seen presumably in Avengers 3 and 4. So these are other space paths, not time paths. Right. So other realities that you would explain. There is a time stone. We haven't seen that one yet, though. Okay. All right.

So next one. Nice. Sorry, we have seen it. We saw it in Doctor Strange. Doctor Strange and the Eye of Agamotto had the time stone. That's why he was able to trap Dormammu in the time loop. Oh, spoiler alert. Anyway.

Okay. All right. This next question comes from Nanook Shakook. Let it be.. Okay. All right. This next question comes from Nanook Shakook. Is that the... Let it be. It rhymes. All right. Could it be plausible that the edge of the universe is merely the end of a dimension

and possibly the start of another... Just a thought. Well, so it turns out variations on the multiverse idea have it that there are pockets of the universe that are expanding in such a way that other expanding zones don't know about each other. Okay. So the independently expanding zones within sort of the space that's spread out among this metaverse, if you will, this multiverse. And so the edge of your universe is technically the edge of your reality. But I learned this, James, I don't know if you knew this, I learned this like a week ago from a cosmology colleague of mine, that you can have one edge of an expanding universe bump into the edge of another expanding

universe, and that would show up as a circle because these are expanding bubbles which if two bubbles intersect you get a circle and that would show up in sort of the cosmic microwave background flatland the sphere coming down the sphere it'd be coming through so so uh so i don't i don't think we can think of it so much as another dimension, but it certainly would be the boundary between your universe and other universes. And so, uh, so that that's gotta be pretty good.

If you found a way to portal from one to, to, to tunnel from one to the other, you do a lot of tunneling in your, in your micro physics, don't you? Yeah, I actually,

we do. All I know is that if one universe bumps into another universe, your insurance rates are going up. Okay. No, you get one forgiven collision. Oh, you get one. That's no fault.

It's no freebie. The mulligan, yes. All right, Harrison, what else you got? All right. Since the Higgs field, this is from Gavin Minton on Facebook, since the Higgs field creates mass and massless particles do not experience time, does that mean that the Higgs field creates time?

Is time simply a bizarre emergent property of the Higgs boson? I love it. I don't know if it's true, but I love the idea. What do you think, James? Yeah, that sounds great. Because without the Higgs boson, you would have no particle mass and only particles with mass experience time. The question is, can you experience time if there's no mass and no speed of light particles?

Can you even imagine time? Or maybe time has no meaning because there is no sequence of events for you to measure. What do you think? Right. I think that's exactly right, what you just said there. That if there's – time is the thing that we use to kind of order what comes first, what comes second. And if they're occurring all simultaneously, then – It's either all simultaneous or nothing is happening anywhere.

Right. And time has no meaning. or nothing is happening anywhere. Right. Time has no meaning. The thing is that different particles interact with the Higgs field. They couple in different ways, which is why they have different mass. And yet, no matter how they couple to the Higgs field,

they all seem to experience time the same way. That's an interesting point. So even the high-mass particles experience time at the same rate that a low-mass particle does. But different unstable particles decay at different rates than do other unstable particles. So that's one of the great mysteries that you get. This particle will decay in 30 seconds, this one in six minutes, reliably, predictably every single time. Well, one thing that strikes me is that often in these speculations, the interplay between the English language and physics is very nebulous. I mean, even, I mean, Poincare once said that you could- Poincare, the mathematician.

The mathematician and the physicist, that you could insist that the universe was Euclidean. And if you did, you'd have to introduce fictitious forces and strange torques and accelerations. So you pick your physics-geometry combination, and you can make it whatever you want to some extent. They had this conventional view of philosophy of math. But if you do pick it one way, you've got to change the physics. So this reminds me of the quote,

was it attributed to Einstein, where it's time is invented to make motion look simple. Yeah, that's a- What do you think of that? Inventional theory of time, right? It's like when I, as a comic, you write a comic to say you have two minutes left.

So I always joke, can we light people based on how long their set has felt? That's good. Yeah. Because he's been on stage for an hour, according to my perception. It's a relativistic theory of stand-up, yes. The time dilation of comedic capacity to entertain. Speaking of time going slower than it should. Let's go.

Let's talk about the movie Interstellar. How do you feel about the accuracy of the presentation of the fifth dimension in the movie Interstellar? That's from lookayoyo89 on Instagram. Yeah, I have issues with the interior, the black hole in the library. I'd like their attempt to portray that. We're the sort of infinite boulevards,

basically, of space. I'd like the attempt, and so I can't come up with a better attempt, so who am I to judge it? But if you asked me, I would say that's probably not what it's actually like. But I don't know how else to say why that's so.

Jamie, what do you think? And actually, didn't he, existing in a higher five-dimensional space, he was able to move around then in time because he was able to then go to like when his daughter was young or some later time. And so it was the same notion that he was in what we've been talking about before, about Flatland. He was actually able to move around in a higher dimension. And I just don't know how he could do sort of Morse code

with book titles, but from the backside of each book. Right. How well do you know your books that the other side of the book, you can identify the title? Because he's on the other side of the shelf. He's on the other side of the shelf poking the book. Oh, yeah. I have issues. He can travel through five dimensions, but he can't go to the other side of the title. Because he's on the other side of the shelf. He's on the other side of the shelf poking the mirror. Oh, yeah. I have issues.

He can travel through five dimensions, but he can't go to the other side of the bookshelf. Just turn around. Yeah, just turn the brick around. We've got time for like one or two more questions. All right, go. All right. Those will be soundbite mode, okay?

All answers in soundbites. Go. Cool. This one's good. This is from Tony from El Paso, Texas. Is it possible to fabricate an artificial dimension and if so, could we theoretically create an artificial dimension and send people there to

solve our overpopulation? I'm not authorized to respond to that from my knowledge of national security. That would be cool, James, if you can manufacture a dimension. I could go into this, but it involves proprietary technology right now so both james and i are are silent on this i think it's the trump tesseract i think

i think we've already spilled the beans no it would be it would be really cool if you if you could do that well i mean wormholes i mean you are something like that i mean wormholes strike me as sort of like entangled particles writ large. What I want is a box on my desk. Because I already stack. The surface is already covered. I already got stuff stacked. But now I need something to put it in a fourth dimension.

Oh, see, I could have, yeah. The stacked pages must look really mysterious to ants on the surface of the desk. Because the pages just disappeared. But they actually were elevated into a third dimension. desk because the pages just disappeared but they actually were elevated into a third dimension and you could store way more papers up in a third dimension than you ever could two-dimensionally on the surface of the desk so i'm thinking now i've had boxes i'll just need a four-dimensional portal and put all the boxes in the four-dimensional portal i could do that like forever am i am i am i right there james i think it will not violate any point of entropy because no information will be preserved.

No, I'm not saying put it forever. You can access it later if you want. I'm just talking about the stacks that I have right now on my desk. If I could have any physical object, I would have like a Schrodinger's cat. I would have a cat that's dead and alive simultaneously. That's creepy. It would be awesome for Halloween. Yes, it would be awesome. Are you trying to get out of

feeding it or changing the litter box? Right, you wouldn't have to because at that point it's dead, but then it's not. So rather than take care of it, he said, I will now have dead cat for the day. I think it's no accident that dimensions sound like dementia. Always.

Let's do one more question. All right. The last one. This is one is from Call Him Bob and his name is Bob. So call him Bob. Is there an upper limit to the possible number of dimensions?

And if so, how do we know and why does it exist? Well, physical dimensions. I mean, dimensions in the everyday sense, there's no limit. You could go eHarmony. There's a hundred dimensions. But physical sense, there's no limit. You could go eHarmony, there's 100 dimensions. But physical dimensions, it's not clear.

I mean, 26 people used to talk about, but I don't know if there's any physical limit. I don't know either. Do you know, James? No, I think the only limit would be what's the evidence. The evidence right now is three spatial in one time. And there are proposals and suggestions for higher order dimensions, but are smaller, and that we'd have to access them at higher energy. But until we find them, and once you figure out how to find them, there's no reason to cut it off, but it's what's the evidence. If I found it, I'm not telling anybody.

the evidence if I found out I'm not telling anybody but but just to be clear mathematically there is no constraint on how many dimensions you can invoke in a in an equation or an calculation an infinite dimensional vector space infinite dimensions but physically I don't know so then there can never be somebody beyond your there can be an infinity plus one deity that you sound like a 10 year old kid What's your biggest number? A billion. A billion and one. Okay, infinity. Infinity and one.

No, it's still infinity. You lose. It's not like you lost that a couple of times. Oh, yeah. We've got to wrap this up. James, always good to have you. Pleasure. Thanks very much.

Any way we can get you. Next time you come through New York, just make sure to stop by. We will wrap a show around you. Okay. Bring your action figures yeah right yeah uh and uh john uh thanks for being on it was a great pleasure this is your first time on start off it is it is okay all right well we'll find a way to get back to you because i'd love me some math and and harrison yeah welcome thank you we'll get you back for sure. Awesome. And this has been StarTalk, the 4D Cosmic Queries Edition. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.