StarTalk Radio - Science at Warp Speed: StarTalk Live!

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

How much energy would it take to make a warp drive? Neil deGrasse Tyson joined by Sasheer Zamata & Pete Holmes explore the science in TV shows from antimatter annihilation to tachyons to warp bubbles with astrophysicist & science advisor for Star Trek, Erin Macdonald, and particle physicist & advisor for The Big Bang Theory and Oppenheimer, David Saltzberg.  NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Thanks to our Patrons Kevin Lee, Meeka, Orlando Cruz, Landyn Blankenship, Gargoyleb, Matthew, Alex Anderson, MageLord, Akash Akash, Munch, Moien, Clarence Jones, Julie Harden, Thomas Cruz, Mike Nold, HEY JUDE BACA, Terry Melman, Zerain, Susan S, Jody Minx, Connor Wolanski, Dom, Aaron Alter, Scotty, Rawan Brou, Myrthu, Sean Smith, Roderick Van Nooijen, Clarence Jones, George Knapp, Lev Pickovsky, David, Jonathon Widmer, Keith Kimura, Wayne Terry, James Kovacs, CM Blake, C.M. Blake, Dj001, Don Wishnek, Joshua Leavitt, Aaron Ivey, MaconSTUFF, Siddhartha Krishnamurthy, Todd White, Steven Mc., Roberto Mariano, Curtis, Yan Drugalya, Grey Shirt Guy, Alexander Fish, Ellison Williams, Inara Liepa, Courtney Bui, Andrew Alford, Todd, Niclas Anton, Derek Evans, Elyssiel, Mick Ender, Josh Sroka, Kate Smith, Blake, Timothy Del Orbe, Hans Rikson, The Constant Imagination of John Scavella, Jason Racisz, Amrik Bhogal, Todd Farrell, Benjamin Lopez, Brian McCoy, Justin or Justy, Radu Dumitru, Pitou Devgon, Bradley Martin, Dylan Jones, Fredric Palmér, Odysimus (oh-dis-eh-mus), Arek, Steven Kania, John Swilley, Don Schmalbeck, O. Inha, M, Joseph Beckerman, Alf Ford, Gami Lannin, Kristi Pickens, Remi Verdel, Barry McIntyre, Raphael, David Films, Will T, Saurabh Jakate, Benzell Evans, Adithya Venkat, Hue, Rob, Geo, and Derrick 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.

Coming up on StarTalk, we're live from the Novo Theater in Los Angeles. Join me and my co-host, Sashear Zemeda, in conversation with particle physicist David Salzberg, an astrophysicist and Star Trek science advisor, Aaron McDonald. Also joining us is special comedic guest Pete Holmes. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture, collide. Star Talk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Live at the Novo Theater, Los Angeles, and we've got a show for you tonight. Thanks for coming out. Tonight we're going to find out where the sci is and the sci-fi, the science and the science fiction. And we'll also explore some of the most iconic science fiction stories that have ever been told. But I want to first introduce my guests. As you may know, StarTalk is a juxtaposition. It is a braid of science, pop culture, and comedy. And right now, I will introduce to you my comedic co-host.

That is Sashir Zameda, Sashir. Come on out. Where are you? A comedian, actress, a former cast member of Saturday Night Live. But you had more hair back then. I did have more hair, yeah. I think people think I'm a different person. I shave my head.

I shaved my head for the first time ever in college, and I lost like half my friends over the summer. They just didn't recognize you. They truly didn't recognize you. It was like, what? Now, in addition, we will have two expert guests. Let's bring the first one out. We have astrophysicist Aaron McDonald.

Aaron, come on out. Here you go. Hello. Erin, hello. Thank you. Where did we find Aaron McDonald? She is the official science advisor to the Star Trek franchise. Whoa. Whoa.

I want that job. We all want that job. Thank you. Everyone wants that job. Everyone wants that job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You have your Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Glasgow? Yep. specializing in, what's it, neutron stars.

Is that correct? Yep, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, and gravitational waves. So I'm excited to talk about those. Actually, and you worked a bit with LIGO. I did. And remind us what LIGO stands for? Laser interferometry, gravitational wave, observatory. That's why we abbreviated LIGO.

Okay. In addition to Aaron, we have David Salzberg. Dr. David Saltzberg, come on out, David. All right. Hi. There you go, man. David Salzberg, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA right here in our backyard. You're an experimental particle physicist.

And this is like, that's a rarefied space. There's a lot of people that I have to deal with. Now why is he on this panel? Because he is the science advisor to the Big Bank Theory TV show. as well as Young Sheldon, and he advised Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer. Oh, my gosh. So his job wasn't to edit the script.

They had other people to do that. He made sure that all the set design did not really mess up for what was supposed to be there at the time and at the place, Mr. Particle physicist. All right. Well, it wouldn't be a complete Star Talk show unless we round out. We have one empty chair here.

Oh, yes. So, Seir, you brought a guest comedian with you. Who might that be? Yeah. You know, as you've said before, the show is about science, pop culture, comedy, and I don't want to be the only comedy arm on this panel. So I'm bringing a buddy, who is the creator and star of HBO's crashing and the host of the podcast.

You Made It Weird. Give it for Pete Holmes. Pete, how? Oh. Pete. Hi, Neely. How you doing? Petey, okay.

There it is. We cleared the nicknames before. Pete, thanks for coming. Thanks for having you. I love your work. I love your portfolio. And we decided you're ideal for this show. Well, I'm here to be confused, bewildered, afraid, belligerent.

It's bewitched bewildered confused. Not this time. I'm just here to represent the common person. who doesn't know what dark matter is or anti-matter or reality. There you go. Perfect. There you go. So let's bring this around.

David, you study matter. Right. And Aaron, you study Space Time. Correct. That's kind of the whole universe right there. That covers it. That kind of covers it. And you've got the expertise in the Big Bang Theory,

one of the most successful shows there ever was. and I have two cameos in that, season three and season eight. Brag. Weird, flex. If you were a scientist, you might have a cameo too. I know. I'm just saying.

Or a comedian or an actor. Damn it! And we have the consulting for Star Trek. So, you know, when you think of astrophysics or astronomy in general, you think of telescopes, and the telescopes look up and they detect light. And the first telescopes detected visible light.

Of course, eyes see, by definition, visible light. Then we discovered other kinds of light. First described as unfit for vision by William Herschel. He had the spectrum laid out that Newton told him, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet from a prison. And he put a, he said, I wonder what temperature each color has. So he put a thermometer in each color

and put a control thermometer just outside of the red. Because there's no color there. That's your control thermometer. And every experiment he did, the control thermometer was hotter than all the other colors. Then he put it somewhere in his backyard and it went to a normal temperature.

And he concluded there must be some extra light coming from the sun that you can't see that below the red. He called it light unfit for vision. The boy discovered infrared light in that experiment. Nice. Just to even ask that question.

So then we, Then the race is on. We go from, there's infrared, there's microwaves, there's radio waves, there's ultraviolet, gamma ray, x-rays. That's the whole electromagnetic spectrum. And we have telescopes and detectors in each of those bands. But that's not enough. The universe talks to us in more bands than that. So you seek out other ways of detecting the universe.

Give me another way. So, for example, neutrinos travel in straight line just like light, but they're not light. So if we could... It's a particle. It's a particle instead of... It's not a particle of light. Right. It's a nutritious particle?

It's the neutrino. It was named by an Italian... Who called the Little Neutral one? Oh. Nogino. It's a neutrino. Why do I love my mama so much? Let me look at a little...

Is that a little? A little neutral. It's a particle with no charge. That's right. Okay. And maybe the best way to think of them is it's like an electron that lost its charge. That's about as close. Come on.

Come on, buddy. You can get your charge back. Yeah, that's right. You can have your Brendan Fraser moment. Get it back. Oh, emotional? Okay, and so you try to detect neutrinos. That's right.

And where do you find them? So the experiments that I did were in Antarctica. We used the Antarctic ice as a giant lens or target that collected them. So this is like glacial ice? Glacial ice that's hundreds of thousands, if not more, years old. Okay. Just waiting for us to, it's incredibly clear to radio waves. So the idea is that intrinos mostly pass through, but one will hit,

and it will make particles that emit radio waves that we could then detect from our platform. Awesome. Okay. So how many neutrinos are out? there. Well, through the sun, the most of them that we're coming through us right now are from the sun, and through our bodies right now, there's about a hundred trillion per second going through you. Nutrinos? Yes. Ah! Now you feel it. But only about one or a dozen will actually interact with you in your lifetime.

Define interact. Like interact. Yeah, yeah, define interact. Yeah, define interact. Be specific. That's a good question, because we, but let's just say it leaves a little energy behind. Oh. Or breaks up your DNA a little bit. Okay, well that's less good. That sounds bad. All right, so Aaron, so not only are these particles, but there's also waves that are not electromagnetic that are not part of that whole spectrum that I just delineated.

And so predicted by good old Albert. Indeed. Give me some of that background there. So one of the things that Albert Einstein did was general relativity, which was sort of describing the fabric of our universe. If you've seen that bowling ball on a trampoline idea, that that's kind of how gravity works that they figured out. Most of us learn Newtonian gravity, the apple falling from the tree. It's a force. But that only really, it's an approximation for gravity.

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

And one of the things he did was like, well, what if the bowling ball explodes, right? What if two bowling balls crash into each other? And you can propagate that through the math and the trampoline will ripple. And so space-time ripples when there's a change to it. And it travels at the speed of light, but Einstein was like, it's there, but it's so tiny,

no one will ever detect it. And scientists went challenge accepted. And 100 years after his prediction, we detected the motion of space time in our universe. And the best analogy I can give you, but really pay attention to what I'm saying, it is like hearing the universe. It is not hearing the universe, sound doesn't travel in space,

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

And LIGO detected its first way, in 2016, if I remember. 15. They announced it in 16. It's a common mistake. I know. I know. What are you going to do in this guy? It's a little embarrassing, but yeah.

2016 over here. May I? May I ask you? Please, please. Go, yes. When, Aaron, fascinating, when you said, fascinating. It's the guy who didn't know what you were saying. I do love that it's a bowling ball.

on a trampoline that this was solved in like some trailer park somewhere. Definitely. It's like a thimble and an above-brown pool. We're going to figure this up. When you say it's the sound of the universe, what is the subject of that? Wouldn't it be a more localized source? So everything that's moving in our universe is giving off gravitational waves.

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

Now, I say it's really big, but what we're detecting is changes in spacetime, one 1,000th the size of an atom. So it's tiny, and that's the most... But Ligo measured that. But they measured it, with mirrors made of it. Adams, which blows my mind.

The physics for it is so cool. Yeah. And they saw it. Nailed it. You guys are great. I hope you get back to your car safely. Go L.A. Lakers. Nailed it.

I'm sorry. So my favorite way to think about it is Einstein in 1915 or 16. Yep. Common mistake. He predicts the existence of gravitational waves. Then, a few years later, he describes an obscure quantum phenomenon called the stimulated emission

of radiation. This is a research paper that is obscure. Stimulated emission of radiation. A few decades later, that became the foundation of the invention of the laser. Laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission. of radiation. Wow. And...

Well, we just got your Netflix password. That's solid. So then LIGO comes around. The first L in LIGO stands for... Laser. So we did... So 100 years later, we detect gravitational waves

predicted by Einstein using lasers that he laid the foundation for. Wow. So Einstein was badass. That's all I can say. It's irritating how much stuff that guy discovered. Man. Like, it is wild.

It's irritating that your acronym is made of another acronym. Yeah. Double acronym. Oh, I didn't have thought about that. Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do the whole thing.

That whole thing. Unpack it. Spell out laser and then the rest of hers. Yeah. Amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Interferometry, gravity, gravitational wave observatory. Oh, man. I am turned on right now.

This is sexy. You're welcome. I love it. All right, so we've got this window to the universe that can detect things that ordinary telescopes couldn't. We've got this other window to the universe. But there's a third one, there's more, but another one I want to make sure before we move on, cosmic rays.

Just catch me up on the- So cosmic rays are also particles that move through the universe, but they would be things like protons or electrons. So familiar particles. Yeah. Mostly, yes, and nuclei. All right. But the problem with them is because they're charged,

when they go through the magnetic fields of the universe, they bend. So the direction you see them coming is not the direction they came from. So it's really hard to do very meaningful astronomy. Yeah, right. So you might just see them spread. Even if there's one source out there you'd love to study, it kind of rains down on you from almost all directions. So these come from what?

We don't exactly know. Okay, next thing. By the way, science is like the only branch of human inquiry where you can stand flatfoot and say, I don't know. Ask yourself who else can say that? Who else does say that? Everyone has got to have an answer to something, everybody. And so in science, you're at the frontier, at the precipice, it is...

We don't know. It became a we don't know. He doesn't want to be an idol. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're high energy, so some high energy phenomenon must be driving them. Right, and also probably they have to be contained in some magnetic field, so in order to stay in one place long enough to get accelerated. So we have the idea that it could be the remnants of supernova.

Exploding stars, yeah. It could be active galactic nuclei, which are... Supernova exploding stars, keep going, please, you're boring us. Neutrinos are going through us. The nuclei of galaxies can be quite... So it would be powered by a black hole, for example. But there's a lot of candidates and we don't know which one yet is the real winner. Okay.

So these are three whole new windows to the universe that tell us what's going on out there that we had no idea before we had these other kinds of telescopes, if you want to think about them that way. Okay. So now we use telescopes and we look out in the universe and we find that 85% of the gravity Gravity of the universe has no known origin. And we call that... Dark matter.

Right, got to say, dark matter. Say it like you mean it. Well, it's not really the greatest word, so it should be called the invisible matter. Because you don't see it. It's just not luminous, and so people call it dark. See, what I would call it, I would call it dark gravity. That's what it literally is.

You okay with that? It doesn't sound like he's okay with that. He's like, all right, gave you my answer. It's invisible. I'm a little bit not knowing what you're after because there's dark energy and there's dark matter, and I wasn't sure which you were going on. I'm saying dark gravity, something's got gravity, and we don't know what it is. Okay, so here's my question to you. We don't know what it is, but some of your people.

Wow. Go on. What do you have to say about the whites? What do you got on the whites? Neil, we're outnumbered. Okay. So the community of particle physicists, you know, if you're hammer everything

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

and we have certain places that would fit in really nicely. We need a particle that does this, and by the way, it would also be the dark matter, so that's really great. But no one says that it isn't black holes, for example. But what's cool is because gravitational waves don't rely on light to detect them, we can't see dark matter using

that traditional electromagnetic radiation, but we see the gravitational effects of something there and that could potentially with gravitational wave detectors in the future. We're not that sensitive to them yet, but that may start giving us clues as to what dark matter is because we really don't know. So it's not invisible to you.

Right. Yeah. Okay, but if it might be a particle, how would you detect a particle that doesn't interact with our particles? You're kind of sort of already doing that with neutrinos. We have many ways that we're looking for dark matter.

Dark matter particles. Because you're a particle physicist and you're a hammer looking for now. I have friends that go, well, we really, it's very small nail, but... I feel like I'm your lawyer. Objection! Objection!

Leading the witness with a nail analogy. He's looking for the truth. Yes, I did lead the witness there, yeah. I like it. But for example, people go into very deep caves to get away from the cosmic rays, which would be stray noise, and have very, very cold vats of liquid noble gases,

like liquid xenon and liquid argon. They make it as cold as they can, as low radioactivity as they can. They shield it as much as they can, and they wait for something to hit it. A dark matter particle from space. Right. And just one mic did it. They just sit there. And just wait and wait until they see it.

I'm Joel Cherico, creator of Cosmic Mugs, CosmicMugs.com, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. So Star Trek, I, you know, any, I don't want to create fights in the audience, but Star Trek cares about real science. Uh-oh. Take that Sequest. Oh, we don't hate on Sequest. We don't hate on Sequest.

Darwin hungry. Darwin hungry. I'm just saying, I don't want to name names, franchises. But Star Trek cares. So how does Star Trek think about dark matter? So what's interesting about Star Trek is because it's been around for 60 years, you can kind of trace where scientists are based on the science terms that come up. Like you can kind of look at like how we started learning more about genetics.

Like genetics showed up a ton in enterprise after they had mapped the genome, like all of these things. And so only recently has Star Trek kind of sprinkled in some. dark matter stuff and in Star Trek Discovery. So did you want to talk, do you want to talk about the discovery of Dark Matter? Go go for it, go for it. Okay, so. I can take it from here.

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, you got it. Actually, no, you can go. Okay, all right, all right, all right, yeah. But it's not like you don't have dark matter stories. So many. So many.

I'll tell you after. Okay, all right, all right. Sounds good. You cue them up and we'll come back to you. Yeah. So Franswicki in the 1930s was able to look at sort of distant galaxies and see how they were moving and see how the stars in them were moving. And it appeared that there was more stuff there than how the stars were behaving. And so that's kind of the first origin of that.

And then Vera Rubin came along and she was this great woman astrophysicist and she was able to... Some ribbon heads. Yeah, Rubin. And map in our own galaxy showing that the movement of the stars, like that there is dark matter in our own galaxy. and I love Vera Rubin, Rubinhead here. And in Star Trek Discovery, we actually named a dark matter nebula after her because it's called the Verubin Nebula. I was very excited to get that in there.

I know, little shout out. Sounds delicious. I know, shocking, but there's a lot of overlooked women in physics. So any opportunity to shine a light on them. Vera Rubin was awesome. All right, so we have these things that are kind of mysterious and sci-fi-e. Don't ask me to spell that. the sci-fi-e things, you know.

And one of them is antimatter. And many people's first encounter with antimatter was Star Trek. Yeah. Because matter, anti-matter drives. And what goes on there? So, you know, with antimatter, it's one of those things. You hear these technical words thrown around, and you don't really know what science and what's science fiction.

Antimatter sounds like science fiction, but it is actually a real thing, but it has to do with particles, so I'll let you. Explain anti-matter. Anti-matter. I know. Give it to me. So, okay, it was an interesting case where that was predicted before it was found.

And we had Paul Dirac in 1930s playing around with the equations of... But that's two names. Paul Dirac. Yes. First name was Paul. Last name was Dirac. Okay. You said Paul Dirac.

The sister was Tesserac. He was playing around with the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics. And he had to take a square root, essentially. And, you know, the square root of nine is... three, but it's also minus three. So he had two answers. Minus three times minus three. It's also nine. Right.

So it has two solutions. And that's kind of close to why he found two solutions when he combined these equations. And one was a positive charge and one was a negative charge that we now identify as the electron and it's antimatter particle, the positron. Okay, so

as I understand it, he hypothesized that since we are regular matter, there might be a whole other place filled with antimatter. And he also had this idea that there could be an entire sea of particles that correspond to the antimatter. And they're the matter,

and we're the anti-matter, man. The weird thing with matter and antimatter, though, is if you touch, you annihilate yourselves and you turn into pure energy. So if you met your matter counterpart and you shook hands, you pf! energy.

Yeah, so don't do that. So don't do that. Just be careful. Yeah, yeah. So this is 100% efficient in converting matter into energy. If a positron meets an electron, they collide and produce pure energy. All their mass disappears and goes into energy by E equals MC squared. Okay, so Star Trek uses matter and antimatter for warp drives.

Yes, that is correct. So, strap in. Because it's awesome. So, sheet of space time, right? You want to go faster than the speed of light. You can't on the surface of space time. Just to be clear, if you went the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy,

and that's too much time for a TV show. Yes. So you've got to do that during the TV commercial, so how do they pull it off? There you go. Yeah, the nearest star to us is over four light years away, and if you have a five-year mission, that's going to be boring. So there's lots of different ways you can sort of shoot this.

I forgot about that. Yeah, it's a five-year mission. Five-year mission. The original series. To seek out and explore strange new worlds to boldly go where no man has gone before. We activated it. I'm going to be this. You're an alien, so it's a five-year mission, but the show only lasted three seasons.

I know. Well, that's a different conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And why do they have all those clothes for a three-hour tour? Catch us up on the warp drives. Okay, so the idea behind warp drives is you can't go fast. than light on the surface of space time, but there's nothing that says that space time itself

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

from matter, anti-matter collisions. Most people will conflate dilithium crystals thinking that those are powering the ships, ships, but those are more like control rods for the matter, anti-matter reactions. They like keep it stable. But there's lots of like, once we start poking holes in it, we're going to, like, how can you contain antimatter, right? So right, if you put antimatter in a bottle and not an anti-bottle, the positrons in

the antimatter would see the electrons in the bottle and they would annihilate and give off a lot of energy. So how do you carry around antimatter? So one way we saw in the movie Angels and Demons. Oh yeah, I remember that. The priest, who played the priest in that? Ewan McGregor. He's walking around with this vile, the Vatican has the only vial of antimatter.

And I'm looking at it's like, Dan Brown did not take any physics in his entire life, the author of this story. First, we make antimatter all the time in labs. The Vatican does not have a particle accelerator in his basement. I assure you of that, okay? And so they're thinking that this is, but he's walking around with a vial. But that part, I think, was reasonable. They had magnetic fields made by superconducting magnets,

and the idea is that the antimatter just spins in a circle and never touches any walls. It just sits there in a vacuum, and it's totally fine. How do you hold it in real life? We have things, traps, penning traps, Paul traps. They have specific names, but they're basically magnetic or electric bottles. A magnetic bottle. Right.

Okay. So then it just sees the magnetic field, which is not matter. So therefore it will not annihilate. Magnets, bitch. Do you get that reference? Nobody knows how they were. Yeah, that. All right.

So I got the wrong reference. For the benefit of the audience, I just want to measure the scale of energy we're talking about here. So in Oppenheimer, they built the first atomic bomb. How efficient was that conversion of matter to energy? Right. So there's, in the first atomic bomb, I'm sorry it's kind of sad to talk about, but there's dozens of kilograms of uranium. Only about 1% of that uranium underwent fission, which is how you get the energy out. So 99% didn't even know it was a bomb.

And of that 1%, only about 0.1% of the mass of the, uranium is converted into energy by E equals MC squared or by the fragments of uranium flying apart from one another. So as devastating as that bomb was, it's a fraction of the energy that it might have had. Had it used all the uranium, it would have been 100 times more powerful. There's really no way with fission to, for the reactions that do happen,

you just happen to get about 0.1%. Okay, so now next up was fusion, which was alluded to as the next wave of warfare in Ophanheimer. So fusion is combining deuterium and tritium and smaller. Instead of taking large nuclei in atoms and breaking them apart, you can also get energy out of combining small nuclei. You can do this all the way up to iron in both the rest. So how efficient is that going up from hydrogen?

So that's a few percent more. One of the ways that fusion bomb people don't always realize is that a lot of that's still fission. The fusion is making neutrons, and those neutrons are hitting uranium outside, and then those are fissioning. And probably about half the, half the energy released is still coming from fission.

Okay, so whatever these are, these are percentages. Yeah, very small percentages. Whereas matter, antimatter is 100%. Right. Okay, so why don't we just have all antimatter energy sources in the world today? Well, I did say dozens of kilograms, right? So you would need...

What does antimatter cost? What was it? How much you got? We can buy anti-matter? Is that what you're asking? On the dark web. Yeah. There you go. There you go.

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

That was good. All right. So it depends how you get it because, for example, your body is making antimatter right now. There's potassium in your bones and about, usually decays to electrons, but about once every few seconds, there's potassium in your bones that is producing a positron or antimatter. So that would be free. you just have to catch it. So one gram of this might cost how much?

But if you had to make it at an accelerator and it was a hundred million dollar accelerator and you're making nanograms, we're talking a lot of money. You can say an astronaut. You're physicists, I expect you to quantify that answer. You're not President Bush. Make with the data.

We just said 100 million divided by nano. Oh, okay. So that's 10 to the 8th. Is it 10 to the 17? So 10 to the 12. Yeah. Trillions. I was right.

No, way more than trillions. You were doing it? No one heard it. I loved it. I heard it. What did you sell? You are not. And overlived two women in physics.

We're up with quadrillions, I think. Of dollars per gram. Okay, so there's not that much money in the world. And that's in my body right now? That's all I heard. Does you just see me in the parking lot with a styrofoam cop and a lighter? How do I get it?

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

So subspace is fictional. Yes, subface is fictional. It's a website that helps people get paid to write. Relax. So, wait, wait, so subspace... is fictional, dilettium crystals are fictional, anti-matter is real. Subspace is the concept is real. It's just the fictional term isn't been a...

It's basically the area outside of the trampoline. However you want to think of that. Everywhere outside the trampoline is subspace. And that's how they communicate faster than light in Star Trek, because again, if you want to communicate, fastest you can go is send a signal at the speed of light, but they create subspace buoys that poke through the trampoline and then talk to you. to each other faster than the speed of light, which is awesome. But you're all clearly impressed by.

No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think are we confused if that's real? Huh? That... Did we know that's not real? So the idea of... The buoys?

Additional dimensions would be... Is a real concept. We don't call it subspace. That's what Star Trek calls it. And the physics of the idea of subspace buoys is solid, but it doesn't exist. Okay. We don't know how to get out of our own universe into subspace. Yeah, does that help?

Yeah. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. So, Shear, you had Treki parents. Yeah. Did any of that spill out onto you? Or would you just have weird, geeky parents, and you were the artist in the family?

I'm still geeky. Next generation was my show. Oh, okay. Yeah. And, yeah. And they gave the one black guy on the bridge, he had the full vision. There were two black guys on the bridge. Okay, you're right.

Sorry, thank you. Thank you. So Jordy Laforge had that, that visor, they called it, which is acronym. Who's got the acronym? Oh, God. Wait, is it the visor? Visual, integrative.

Censor. Censor overload resource. Optical. Pulling that out of your ass. I did, but I bet it's resource. I bet it's so close. He was half right. Yeah, laser.

So close. LIDAR Assumption Symmetry. Yes. ER George Clooney. So it's a self-driven acronym. So he was able to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And so was he one of your favorite people?

Willie Goldberg was one of my favorite. Whoopi! Oh, we love Whoopi. We love Whoopi. In the canteen. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blue Milk.

Yeah. What is that? What was Blue Milk? Wrong franchise. Nope. They all have it. You're right. I take it back. I take it back.

Seques, regular milk. Wow. You got having a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Blue milk is, yeah, very Star Wars. But, yeah, my parents really, yeah, I feel like Star Trek was very much in our household. And, like, you know, my mom would braid my hair while we're watching the show. And my dad, I remember asking him one time, I don't know why I asked him, but I was like, where are you from?

Or sort of, like, where did you grow up or something? And he was like... You asked your father this. Yeah, we didn't know each of them that well. Okay. Okay. Okay. You know, just getting to know him.

Okay. And he said he's a Vulcan. And he speaks Vulcan. I never heard it, but... Wait, he does? That's what he said, which, you know, my parents divorced later and my mom was like, we are not, like, great of communicating with each other. And I was like, that makes a lot of sense.

Two consecutive sentences. My father speaks Vulcan. My parents divorced later. Doesn't that make sense? How does that not track? That is the most convoluted. I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes I've ever heard. And never come back.

Right, right. I speak Vulcan. Goodbye. That was weird. I was actually embarrassed to have a name from Star Trek. So when I was a kid, I would tell people like, oh, it's a Christmas. from far away. Because it wasn't actual the name of a...

It wasn't the name of a character, no. So, after Captain Kirk gave a rose to this princess, she was like, we have something like this on my planet, except it's made out of crystal. Is this a kid? An alien he had just boned? He was trying to bone. He was courting.

Cording. Yeah, yeah. Okay, got you. So she gives him a flower. He gave her a rose. A rose. Like a, I guess, a plant that looks like an earth rose. Earth Rose, yeah.

And she was like, we have something that looks like this on my planet, but it's made out of crystal. And that's called a... Sashir. Yeah. That's so cool. That's beautiful. Yeah, that is.

It's a little rude. Someone's like, look at my flower. He's like, we got this, but it's better. It's kind of what that's... I was just crystals. Yeah, this one dies. So do we have actual... I mean, other than Star Trek and hyperspace and all this,

Do we have actual anything on the books that could get us going faster than light? Aaron? It's all theoretical, but the math checks out. So things like wormholes. Wormholes are mathematical constructs, and that would allow you to shortcut a distance in space and time. We do love wormholes.

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

So that doesn't require engines or anything. You're just stepping through. You're just walking through. And what else do we have? Tell me about tachions. So there's particles that are called tachions. If a particle goes faster than the speed of light, we've never seen one.

We don't know that such a thing exists. So you're just making this up. And that's just a word. So not me. I'm experimentalists as a theorists. But they're talking about a particle that you can, And your particle physicists. Well, they just, because they name it,

doesn't mean it exists. Wow. That was some real theoretical physicist, Shane. But you just threw down. It's actually, I think it's 10-separator? I don't know what that happened. It would feel pretty much. There's actually a good reason particles

don't go faster than the speed of light, because as long as nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we never violate what's called causality, meaning that if I press a button, a light turns on. And any observer moving around the universe will always see me pressing the button before the light turns on. We might disagree about how far apart they were. We might disagree about the time difference between them.

But if A caused B, no one will see B happening before A. As soon as we start communicating with tachyons if they existed, that would go out the window. So you would lose causality. So I don't even know how you would live in a universe that you have faster than light communication. If you're going to detect them, they'll be detected before you turn the detector on. No, no, you'll be detected before they were sent. Before they were sent, yes.

Which is, like, wild. And Star Trek uses tacky, so you may have heard that word because Star Trek uses tachions all the time, and that is another thing that is a physics concept. A theoretical physicist over here. But we don't know how to detect them, but like you said, the causality, Star Trek is pretty consistent with how they use tachions, because any time they break causality, like through time travel, when they break those rules, tachions show up.

So like when Janeway came through the wormhole at the end of Star Trek Voyager, thank you. They detected a surge of tachions first, and then this wormhole opened, and it was because they were violating causality, because Janeway does. And of course, Tachyon has the Greek root tachios meaning fast, like a tachometer, that these are the same roots to that word.

But I just want to clarify here, according to Einstein, you cannot accelerate past the speed of light, but that doesn't stop a particle from being birthed faster than light, so never had to cross the boundary. So we're okay there.

You're okay? Don't look at me like you were a practical guy. And based on that, you are the killer this season on CBS. I don't know. I don't know how you get around the causality. problem still. So here it is.

You're walking down the road and you slip on a banana peel. And I say, you're my friend, I don't want you to slip on the banana peel. So I invoke tacky on texting, okay? And I send you, this is after it happened. So I send you a tacky on text. You get it before you slip on the banana peel and your phone alerts you. You look down at the phone and it says, watch out for the banana peel and you're not looking at where you're going and you slip on the banana peel.

Oh, man. That is a closed time. What's really going to bake your noodle is Woody would have broken it if I hadn't said me from it. Exactly. Right? Thank you, Matrix Lady. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. You're a prominent African American science fiction character. I'm very sorry to bother you. So to me, that's my favorite tachian example. You actually cause the person to slip on the banana. It's like a rival, too, right? Yeah. This I'm not doing.

Oh, to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the movie. She was pretty Takiani. Yeah, but in her interpretations of the past, present, and future. But she whispers a thing to a guy that hadn't. Yeah, yeah, there was some of that. Yeah, definitely Takian's involved. I got a definite.

Yeah. All right, so, and plus there was a Mexican physicist named Alcubieri. Yep. Tell me about the Alcubieri drive. Yeah, so. Chris, wasn't he in the United States and they deported him? Is that what happened? Just to say.

Oh no. Just get it. It's my duty as a comedian to join you in the riff. I must! Oh no. I can't leave you out there! By the way, one third of all Nobel Prizes in the Sciences that have been earned by Americans

were earned by American immigrants. A third. Yeah. A third. These are foreign-born nationals becoming American citizens earning the not American citizens earning the Nobel Prize for Merker. Merger.

Apostrophe M-U-R-R-R-I-C-A. So, he's a Mexican physicist. Yes. Tell me about this drive. So he kind of motivated by Star Trek was like, well, could we build? It's a neat idea. Is this possible? And so did the math to try to figure out if it was possible to have a warp drive using the

manipulation of space time. And the answer was yes. And that's what we call the Al-Cube Air Drive. And so he published a paper about this. And what was funny about it is... So there's an authentic physics paper. It is a physics. The physics of warp drive checks out.

Like, it checks out. And he was sort of the first one to come up with a good concept of how you make physics laws happy when you're doing this. And they did. In other words, not to violate known laws of physics that apply. So you dance around that if you can. Conservation laws and all those sort of things. And so the issue with it is, remember I said earlier, like if you want to be, been space time but you don't have the matter, you could use the energy. So the question is,

well, how much matter and antimatter are you going to need? How much energy is going to be used to build this warp drive? And the first calculation that they did of this, the answer was all of it. All of what? Energy. All energy matters. Ever existed. The number was so high that they were just like, uh-oh, that's not great. Nobody needs to go anywhere that bad. Exactly. And, and, And a lot of it was just because of all the manipulation of space-time. And so they kind of like go back to the drawing board, as it were, go through the equations and figure out that you can do the same thing without breaking any laws of physics

with about the energy equivalent of a semi-truck being torn in like E equals MC squared. The mass is a semi-truck. But as we talked about earlier, the amount of matter used for an atomic bomb, like multiply that to the side of a semi-truck. And that's why Zepham Cochran is hitting the juice. I'm not going to strap myself into that anytime soon. But that's our big limiter to how we don't have warp drive now. The math is fine.

Theoretically, it all checks out. But we just don't have any understanding of how to obtain and hold and manipulate all of that energy in order to do it. Detecting gravitational waves is actually seeing the motion of space time. That's starting to get us there in terms of like how do we start playing with space time. So this is all just things that lie in front of us, and they're just unknowns of how long it's going to take. What you're saying is we'll never have warp drives. Be positive.

I said 2063 is probably pushing it. But if we make a huge discovery in energy, maybe we do find a way to more efficiently capture antimatter. That's a different conversation. I'm looking at his facial expressions while you speak. They put us as far away as possible on purpose. Yeah, we kept them separate here. The serious and the experimentalist.

So we've also heard things about higher dimension. I love me some higher dimensions. Love. I love higher dimensions. What, what? I just like the way you say. It's very casual. Oh, right.

So we live in three spatial dimensions, up, down, left, right, forward, back, right? And then there's a time dimension in there. And so these are our four-dimensional realities. and if you're not completely comfortable with thinking that we live in four dimensions, I'll convince you right now, okay? If someone comes up to you and say, I'll meet you tomorrow at Starbucks. What time?

That's a place, but it's not a ton. You need the space. And if I say, I'll meet you tomorrow at 10 o'clock. Where? The four dimensions of our space, time, reality are built into our language and our capacity to encounter one another, even if you didn't know it. And one thing that Zoom did during COVID is it broke that spacetime continuum.

That really checks out. No, no, no, no, here it is. We've all had that meeting. No, no. All you needed. No, think about it. It's called your world line where you are in space and time. And if you want to meet someone,

your world lines have to intersect. You have to be at the same place and the same time. You can cross a street where trucks have been, but you're not killed by the truck. You're in the same place, but at a different time. This I'm following. Okay? We're good.

So, what Zoom did only required that you be at the same time, not in the same place. And you still had the encounter. So I was deeply moved by this fact. Okay, so. This is how they felt about phone sex. You can get it anywhere now. Anyway, payfold, subfold, car phone.

Payphone? Who's doing it at a payphone? Okay, so. Desperties. Desperties. See, we're bound by the laws of yesterday. So what I'm saying is, so the universe, particle physicists tell us, is more than these four dimensions.

Oh, maybe. So, we, my students and I looked for extra dimensions at the large Hadron Collider. The particle is called a radion. Say that again? A radion. It was another case of just because you name it doesn't mean it existed. We didn't find it. We found it.

We'd found that there'd be one more Nobel Prize in the denominator of your fraction. Okay. We didn't find it. And the idea is, remember how we talked about, Paul Dirac was combining the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics? Well, more modern physicists have tried to combine the full equations of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

It was a bit harder, and to make that work, they needed to add extra dimensions. Now, obviously, there's nothing more that we experience an up, down, left, right, et cetera, as you said, but the idea is that they'd be really small, so we missed them. And so they started... How convenient.

I know. I know. Particle physicists. So they started with the idea there would be 26 extra dimensions. And then they said, well, that seems like a lot. But then they had this idea called supersymmetry where every particle has a partner, just like matter and antimatter, every particle would have a super symmetric particle. We haven't found that yet. That lowered the number of extra dimensions.

Do we only need 10 total dimensions? So we're down to 10? 10, as long as this other symmetry exists that we've never found. Or we could just smoke some DMT and be done with it. Have you considered that you're the particle collider man? So here's my favorite example of interdimensionality, if I may. You may. Then you'll understand why I say I'd love some dimensions.

Okay? I like it. Okay, so if we lived just in a flat plane, two dimensions, all right, And all of a sudden, someone noticed a dot, just appear out of nowhere. And then it grew, became like a circle. And then it shrunk back down to another dot and then disappeared completely. We'd be scratching our heads. What is this?

You know what that is? That is a sphere moving through, a three-dimensional sphere moving through the two dimensions of your world. And it manifests as something that's not done. it appears and then disappears. So when your particles pop in and out quantum mechanically, I wonder is there some higher dimensional existence that's passing through our space time? And we just happen to get a glimpse every now and then.

Maybe. Maybe. That's your best answer, maybe? After my whole poet, after my own. I loved it. I loved it. I feel you. Thank you. I'm mad.

I thought I got more than one word answer when I got here. Well, I think you've got to make a... It's science. You have to make a prediction. And the more surprising the prediction, the better. And then we will go look for it. And that's...

The idea can sound great, right? The idea can... But it has to be the way the world works. Okay, Pete and I will work on it and we'll work on it. But wait, if there are these other dimensions that could be other versions of us? Are they like other universes in a way? Because in the Netflix series, Stranger Things.

Heard of it. It's fifth season now. It's they have it upside down. What is that? Did you know what that you've you have you seen the show? I have seen the show I don't understand all of it, but they do have upside down and it's And it's upside down so sure I'm gonna say it's underneath it's like you know we're up here? Oh up here and then they're okay so like it's like it's like it's like W WL flip it around Yeah yeah yeah okay so then what so what I didn't think I would ever see that again Thank you.

So what's there in the upside-down world? Reepy. Monsters, demagogians. It's like a black, scary, stormy. Black? The trees are black. Black? It's very dark.

Dark. Dark. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. What was, I mean, so strange. So, what? How did they get access to this, this upside-down world?

They opened a portal. To another dimension. And then they communicate through like the Christmas lights. But I like the upside down idea because it is like they, you just multiply everything by minus one, which is kind of the original multiverse question, which was like, but what if goatees and evil?

Like that was Star Trek, right? They had the mirror universe, which was just our universe just flipped upside down. That means there's another, if you had a goatee, you were bad. Yeah, exactly. There's another version of this podcast happening where we're all hanging like bats from our feet.

And we'll have goatees. We have goat teas. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like I heard they opened it with a particle accelerator. Is that right? In stranger things. In stranger things. Yeah, I think they did. Yeah, I think, but.

I'll just say, you say black hole, particle, neutrino, you can kind of do whatever you want. Get to the demons. Get to Winona Ryder. We don't care. We're good. Right? I mean, you care. That's your job to care.

Yeah. We're sort out here going like, who cares? But there's some mixed things here. So we have this upside-down world. Is it another dimension or is it in the multiverse? So we've heard a lot about the multiverse and Marvel has run with it in the multiverse. Right. Right.

With no missteps. Has Star Trek picked up the multiverse? Yeah. did, in the next generation, there was an episode where Worf is going through a quantum fissure, which I would probably push back on the language of that, just because that's quantum doesn't, anyway, and then sees all these different versions of like what would happen, where you know, he's married to Deanna Troy and there's a birthday cake at one point, and like there's all these, there's all these different things. And so we did in more recent seasons in Lower

Dex, season five, which, yeah, like, that shows. great. I'm biased, but it's a great show. But we brought that multiverse concept back, and they do a cool explanation with it. What is Lower Dex? Star Trek Lower Decks. It's one of the animated shows. I'm a fan of Star Trek

Upper Decker, but I don't know. Wait, so David. To boldly go. Don't you split your infinitives on my stage. Did they fix the split infinitives in the later To go boldly?

Yes. No, it's Star Trek. I thought they tidied up there. In the future, split infinitives are a different thing. So David, we think of these multiverses as, oh, I have a goatee or not, or somebody's married to someone else. But really, as I understand multiverses, it's quantum forged so that there'd be variations not just in who you marry, but in the actual laws of physics that we'd find in those universes,

which would make it really hard to set up life again as you come to know it. Well, the last part you said is the key part as we come to know it. We don't know what else we would call life. Damn. Maybe it's not made of atoms. Maybe it's something else. You have lots of other chances in whatever that universe is that you've made in its own rules. Is there going to be some local collection of matter that locally lowers entropy?

at the expense of expending heat. And that's basically a lot of what you need to have life. So maybe there'll be something that would satisfy our criteria. I'll give you that, but is it you're married to someone different? I'm thinking not. It's other kinds of creatures. Sure, we're not Adams, but who are we? I think there's...

Are we horny? There's like different kinds of multiverses, and I think that, like, different multiverse theories, and one is where the laws of physics, would just be different in one universe, the other. And then there's that, like, genuinely infinite concept of multiverses, where, however it's structured, there is, and you're really hard to wrap your brain around the concept of infinite,

that everything is exactly the same, but one, and then... Because if you have an infinite number of those kind of universes, any variation will exist, and you can find the universe for which that is true. Right. There you go. Right. Okay. But those would have the same laws of physics.

in that concept. Exactly. In that concept, yeah. That's why they're kind of different theories, but I love multiverses. All right, well, let's tackle the biggest topic here, which is the storytelling in science fiction. And, Sehir, you're, I heard you comment on, when you saw some, was it the Jetsons? What did the Jetsons mean to you when you first saw them? Um, was it the Jetsons?

I don't know. I was just thinking how funny would it be if you didn't talk about this before? That's what's happening. What are you talking? No, no, so it was, if you look at 100% of future sci-fi story-telling. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Well, when I watched the Jetsons, I was like, where are the black people? Where are anyone but white people?

And that is also like how I felt about a lot of sci-fi growing up. Right. We didn't really see brown people in the future, which makes it feel like we don't belong there. And I mean, it's definitely changing now, which is so wonderful to see more representation in stories about our future. because we belong there. So, yeah, I guess I wasn't thinking that because just everybody... Is that what you wanted?

No, no, I'm just saying... That is hilarious. No, no, no, I'm just saying... You gave him exactly what he wanted. No, no, no. No, no, it's just when I was a kid. No, I'm just saying when I was a kid, it's just everybody on TV was white.

So that was just that universe. Yeah. That's all... So I thought it was weird that, you know, today we have self-driving cars, but they didn't have self-driving cars in the Jetsons. He had to fly his own car. I thought that was weird. That is weird.

Even at the time. Right, I thought that was. And why did Rosie, the maid, have to wear an apron? To cover her vagina. Yeah. You're going to love the answer. So in storytelling, in Star Trek, what I've always admired about it, is each story was a bit of a morality tale.

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

Well, I think what's great about Star Trek, too, is that it is very explicitly humans on Earth in the future. Like, as opposed to just some other universe or galaxy or whatever thing, it is like, this is where Earth is gonna go, this is what people will be doing, and this is what it looks like, and these are the people who have jobs.

And for 1966, it was a really big deal, not just to have Nichols, and I'm not undermining the importance of that by any means. Right. Plus, if you look at her title, Her military title as lieutenant means she is in the path of succession to be captain. Yep, yeah. Even though that never happened. The fact is that was a real possibility to even have such a title and not be the janitor.

So how do any of us feel, and you coming at this from the liberal arts, I'm curious. I'm a big fan of Mark Twain has a saying, first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure. And to me, that should be instructions for the artist who has access to science. And so do any of us, I'd like to get in opinions here, do you feel how much science can or should be sacrificed for the sake of a good story that you want to tell? So you sound like you got to. I always felt like my job was not to be the science police. My job was to be a resource to the people that were actually telling the story. So I would tell them if something wasn't correct, but I wouldn't and maybe give some other ideas.

but it's the idea it's what universe any particular story is if I had consulted on back to the future I might have told them you know we really don't know how to do time travel

and it probably wouldn't work and then it wouldn't have been a very good movie that afternoon yeah yeah yeah but he's mourning for his mother you're ruining the story how's he going to want to

his mother the way I like to think of it is like science fiction is a huge spectrum between science and fiction, and every story is going to pick somewhere on that and say, this is where we're going to land. But I think that quote is perfect and really apt for how you integrate science into story is that you get the foundation or the backbone of science and then build the story around that.

But when you're in those decision rooms and maybe the budget doesn't work, or maybe we have to change something, the story comes first, then the characters, then the science. I was talking with William Chattner about the transporter, and he said, they invented that so that they didn't have to have lower ramps and land. And it was too costly. Yeah. Just beam them in and get on with the show. So there was a cost provision there.

But... Except the problem is it murders the person and recreates them on the planet. It's not great. It's not great. It's not great. Now you're telling me this? Yeah. This is awkward. I teleported here.

So you don't exist, and then you get reassembled on the other side. I think the information, if I understand, goes down, but not you. So, I think they've murdered you in Greek cremate. Wait, wait. What are you, if not the sum, of the information that comprises you? Uh-oh, you believe in a soul.

Sorry! Sorry, Science Guy. Cut you! All right, so on one of my... He's busted right there, totally. So on one of my two cameos on the Big Bang Theory, my first of the two, there were... You have the whiteboards throughout the show, right?

And there are equations on those boards. And someone on set told me that you had found equations from my research to put them up there, them up there, but they were not my equations. There's someone else named Tyson in modern astrophysics. His name is Tony Tyson. I call him cousin Tony, affectionately.

But those were his equations. I thought I'm not buying that. I remember finding your PhD thesis and using it. Oh. Uh-oh. Someone doesn't recognize their own thesis. Oh!

Too long in trailers and show business. We're not about math. Or. Or I got Tony Tyson's thesis. Thank you. There's an alternative universe there. We'll find out. We'll have our team of researchers get on the...

According to Aaron, there is a universe in which you did it correctly. Let's imagine that that was it. And so, just in terms of storyline, in the final episode, I think it was, of the final season of the Big Bang theory, Sheldon, who's like the smart one with multiple degrees, teams up with his wife, Amy Farrow Fowler, who in life is Miami-Biolik, who is a real-life neuroscientist. She has a PhD in real life,

plays a neuroscientist in real life, plays a neuroscientist on the show. They collaborate with some new kind of physics that I couldn't follow, but did you advise on that? Yeah, I didn't. It was actually one of the rare cases where they gave me a lot of warning. Usually it's like, we're doing a script tomorrow, put some science in it.

And this time they told me, we're actually That's funny That is nice That's nice Classic Chuck Yeah But this time

to educate In the morning And said they need Some Nobel Prize Worthy discovery Go You're like Look

If I could Yeah I have a Nobel Prize I wouldn't waste it on your show And I wouldn't retire a year

before it was given Oh no Oh no Oh no That really That was deep That was team. You have it.

Just tell people you have it. We'll never look it out. Thank you. Thank you. So I remember something like super... Super asymmetry. Instead of super symmetry. And we've been talking about super symmetry.

That's been a theory since before I was a graduate student. People have been looking for evidence of this theory forever. I looked it up. There's about 10,000 papers with the title containing super symmetry. And another 10,000 carrying... the title, super symmetric. But then it came to me, super asymmetry.

And I was like, are there any, zero papers with that title? That was their new theory. Okay, so that gave you a space in which to operate that was new. Right, exactly.

Okay. I mean, I can explain what in my mind the theory was, but it's not Nobel Prize. But it was good enough for the show. Yeah. The idea is like in real physics is where are the super symmetric particles? Where is this partner of the electron?

We know it's antimatter partner. We can't find it super symmetric. So it's a symmetry that is broken. So people make the symmetry theoretically, and then it's broken to explain why we don't see it. And the idea of their theory is that it's not symmetric and then broken, but it starts asymmetric. Just clarify here. Just clarify. Please don't ask me more questions.

No, no. No, okay. No, clarify something else. What does it mean to break symmetry? So... That implies that things are a certain way that you like, and then they're different and you say they're broken. But if nature is that, what does it mean for nature to be broken if that is nature?

Maybe it's your understanding that's broken. I like this a lot. He made some galea him. It's fake. I know. We have broken symmetries all the time in just ordinary mundane physics. Like a magnet. The laws of magnetism have no preferred direction.

But when you pick up a magnet, it does point a particular direction. It chose a direction. And once it started to form the magnetic field one way, it was reinforced. And that's the direction that the magnet has. So we see that all... We see symmetry breaking all the time in physics. We start with something symmetric, but the actual instances we see are broken. Now drop your mic.

That's why they give it to you. My favorite fact about magnets is, you know, there's a North Pole and a South Pole. Okay. You got that? Okay. Are we together on that? Okay. I guess. Okay.

Okay. And opposite poles attract. Yeah. I like that you're looking at me. Okay. So if you have two magnets, the north will connect, will point to the south. Okay. So now you take the magnet, suspend it from a string, and the magnet, the north pole of the magnet will point to Earth's north magnetic pole. but it's supposed to repel north to north. So the fact that the north pole of a magnet

points to Earth's north pole means Earth's south magnetic pole is in the north. And our north magnetic pole is in the south. Yes. I like that. I didn't get it, but I like it. Every few hundred thousand years they flip

and were overdue. Oh. Well, that's comfortable. We don't have enough on our plate right now. I got to be waiting for the poles to flip. Great. I'll tell that to my daughter next time I'm reading her a bedtime story. Just so you know, we're overdue.

Good night. So tell me about future tech. Because I have on good authority that the first sort of flip phone by Motorola was inspired by the the communicator in Star Trek. It was a... Thank you.

Teamwork. You guys get a room, okay? Not without you, Neil. So, he just thought that was cool. It was an engineer with Motorola. And we had cell phones before that, but they weren't flip phones, and they weren't that small.

So this is science fiction inspiring design. We had clamshells. You don't think a caveman ever went Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Imagine? So, do you know the tricorder?

Yep. Tell everyone what the tricorders. Yeah, it's a, well, the medical tricorder is what we commonly think of, but that's sort of like the medical device that they hover over and they go like, oh, no, we have a problem. And so it's a touchless diagnostic tool. Science Reiki. And it's a thing that like we love Reiki.

We've won it. It's so. It's so is. It is, right? Okay, but there's an X prize for the first tricorder. Yeah. So the X prize is money gathered and it's given to, and then people compete for a device that you can hover over a person

and it'll diagnose your, get your vitals. Yeah. And so this prize that they offered, it was like you had to, I'm, the numbers are approximate, but you had to pick up like five to eight vital signs and be able to diagnose a handful of ailments without touching someone, like just with scanning it. And someone won it. Like they have that ability. Elizabeth Holmes, didn't it.

No, she didn't. Perfectly clear. Sweet perinous riff, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but what's neat is that idea of necessity driving invention, and, you know, we went through a period where he didn't really want to be in close contact with a lot of really sick people, and so that sort of moves that machine.

And just because it was invented, it's like that technology exists, but it's the size of a house and is, you know, so... Somebody's got to be motivated who's thinking about the future. Right. And you have creative futurists doing just that, and storytellers that can have all of us participate in that. So I'm old enough to be the first, first Trek series, okay? Like Captain Kirk, that one.

And I, so I, the warp drives, check. Foton torpedoes, check. That's the future for sure. And I was just going down the list. And then they just walk up to a door and just automatically opens. And I said, no, that'll never happen. So don't ever take future predictions from me. because that was the least believable thing.

That's how old I am. Doors didn't automatically. You had to physically open the door yourself. This is the first time we rode the subway in New York. You were like, wheeh! No, no, I'm not talking about, I'm not trying doors that do open automatically.

I'm talking about doors that know you're approaching the door and then they open. That the subway doesn't know you're there. I understand. Grocery store then. Yeah. That's the first thing. Touch-Sensitive pads.

They had pads on the enterprise. They were just the same color as the carpet. That was the whole foods in space. So I'm just wondering what the future might bring. What do we need out of the future? We want the molecule thing that makes a hamburger. The what? Replicator.

Replacator. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the one we're closest to that we don't have yet. Really? Because 3D printer technology has gotten so good. and efficient and smaller and like we all I'd never thought I would own a 3D printer

now I have 3rd because I'm that type of person The 3 3D printer? Well the first one printed the other Different way You missed it It's one for every dimension Ah very good There you go

Yeah exactly But also the food science And like things like discovering The protein responsible for red meat They can do this? Like what we're getting there in these advances that maybe one day we can print a burger that will take 25 hours and taste horrible,

but like, it might happen. So, anyway. Okay, that's what you're after. That's what I'm excited for. Still better than shakies. I'm just thinking, of all the things you're wishing for in the future, you want to print a hamburger?

I don't know. I don't. I'm wishing for a warpstrap. I want, I want radios that use dark matter to communicate. Nice. Oh, see, now that's the thing. I said I want to print a hamburger. No.

The environment. Implications of raising cattle are staggering. This guy wants a walkie-talkie that works a different way? Drop the mic for me! So, Sheer, what do you want for the future? I do want to teleport, but I don't want to be murdered. But, yeah, if I can just get some more quickly. Yeah, yeah.

I got to land this plane. Oh. Star Talk with Neil de Grassy. Star Talk, he's real sassy. Star Talk, Three Dimensions. Star Talk, check out dimensions.

They're just pulling random words out of this conversation. Dark matter. Vision, fusion, all of the Fs. Neil is horny, what you think of the Jetsons. Well, I'll never be asked back. So, let me offer some,

I'm parting thoughts here. I think you're here because you have some appreciation for science. As a minimum, you're science adjacent, okay, as the saying goes. And you know that civilization pivots on the progress of science and what it can do for our health, our wealth, and our security. I relish in the creativity of those

who tell us stories about a future that could be. Because it has me thinking beyond the moment and saying, what do I have the knowledge, the power, the wisdom, or the insight to implement? So I can create a world like that. And there's this time-honored debate. Does art imitate life? Does life imitate art?

Well, I think we can elevate that to the next level. Does life imitate science fiction? Or does science fiction imitate life? Or maybe we are needlessly turning that into a binary question, and perhaps as we go forward, it is the interplay of the two that will shape the future of civilization, a future world that we be proud to live in and not embarrassed. we created. And that is a cosmic perspective.

Novo Cedar, Los Angeles, Edward McDonald, David Salford, Pete Holmes, Sassir Demita. This has been StarTalk, brought to you live on stage, and as always, keep looking up. Neil deGrasse Tyson, everybody.