StarTalk Radio - When Black Holes Collide with Nergis Mavalvala

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

How do we detect ripples in spacetime? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Harrison Greenbaum explore black hole collisions, quantum tricks, and how gravitational waves can help us uncover the early universe with MIT physicist and LIGO researcher Nergis Mavalvala.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/when-black-holes-collide-with-nergis-mavalvala/Thanks to our Patrons Akhilesh Kashyap, George Woods, Alishan Momin, Scott Artyn, Terrance Wallace, justinetaylor1989, David Kupersmith, Asef Karim, Robert Somazze, Micheal Emmer, Jeffrey Cooper, Bigyan Bhar, Gavin TRaber, A Bains, josh burrell, Darius Cruz, Cassandre L Henderson, Liam Higley, Ojakuna, Karen, Anshul Sanghi, Sam Walley, David Eatwell, Psychotacon, Alec Myers, Alfred Rivera, Colby Carmichiel, Tommy, kim kanahele, Robert Breutzmann, Dan Defibaugh, Slyter, Aksheev Bhambri, Chris Topher, Joanna Apergis, Rockington, Patrick Corrigan, AlexKP_, Abi ROdriguez, Shawn Santor, Shanna Johnston, Cleve Dawson, Mohammed Bilal Monnoo, Patrick Laurin, Eric Kaplan, Dr. What, Glen S. Sheets, David Yardley, Librak Productions LLC, and Catherine Thomas 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.

So Harrison, I'm finally getting to the bottom of these gravitational waves. I brought my gravitational surfboard, I'm ready. I don't know if you can do that, maybe? I'm gonna try. I can barely surf in real life. Yeah, so gravitational waves, black hole collisions, the Big Bang.

Sounds like big things. With one of the world's experts on these very subjects. So excited. A quantum astrophysicist. In a few moments on Star Talk. Welcome to Star Talk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Harrison Greenbaum. Harrison, how you doing, man? I'm good, thanks for having me back. I'm so excited. I know, this is not your first rodeo with us. All right, you know what we're gonna talk about today?

Space. Stars. Gravitational waves. Yeah, I know. I know about them separately. Oh, gravity and waves, but not gravitational waves. I will totally hook you up on that. All right, great.

So Harrison, you're a comedian, and I just learned you have an off-Broadway show. Yeah, it's called Harrison Greenbaum, coincidentally. What just happened? Really, I wonder why. Yeah, exactly. So Harrison Greenbaum. What just happened?

What just happened, it's on stage, and it's performance? It's a comedy and magic show, I've been working on it for probably. I forgot you do magic Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh, that is so geeky. Oh, yeah I went to magic camp and space camp. So I've really she had no dates going through your entire career in school Yeah, my parents don't want to breaks for me one week at a time So our guest today has a different expertise from you

Really? We have nergis Mabawvala. Did I say that correctly? Yes. Excellent. And this is your second time on Star Talk. It is. You were last on Star Talk nine years ago.

I'm hardly nine years old. Don't, you know. At one of our live performances, Star Talk Live in a Camp AC theater in New Jersey. We occasionally take the show on the road, but regionally. Yeah, and that was back when our first results from gravitational waves came across. Shortly after the first discoveries.

Yeah, very, very cool. Well, you are a quantum astrophysicist. That is the baddest asses thing you could ever put on a business card. I feel like quantum is very small and astrophysicist is very big. That's another reason why. It's very, quantum.

You were a professor at MIT. Which department did they put you in? Physics. Physics department, that makes sense, doesn't it? It'd be weird if she was just teaching English. And I'm sorry to learn you're also dean of the School of Science, sorry to hear that. Yes.

Can you get people in trouble? I can, but mostly I get myself in trouble. Oh. Do you cheat on your own tests? No. I have the answer key, it's not fair. So a dean of the MIT School of Science, I say I'm sorry to hear that because that takes time away

from your studies, doesn't it? But they pay you more. They do. They do, and the other thing that comes with being dean is you actually get some administrative help, and as a result, I actually have a little bit more time to be in the lab than when I'm just being professor and running around doing too many things.

Trying to get things done, now you got peeps. Now I got really, really talented peeps. Okay, all right, that's how that should work. You are on the LIGO team, let's test Harrison. Harrison, what is the acronym, what does LIGO stand for? Lord, I got options. Is that, is that, that works? Nergis, I think that should be the new meaning

of the acronym LIGO. You know, there's a lot of changes coming to NSF proposals, that could be one of them. Lord, I got options. Laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. Did I get that correct? You did, you did. Very good.

And you're on the team that discovered these. So I understand they took a bunch of people to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. Were you on that plane? Yes. Excellent, so you got all dressed up and everything? Kind of, yeah. Yeah, that's not my favorite.

What do you mean kind of? What outfit would you have for some other occasion if not for the Nobel Prize? I'm not a dress up type. And I'm not a girly type, so I had to also decide am I going to wear girly clothes or tux? Oh, you fell into a haberdasheral gap. A sartorial dilemma.

A sartorial, okay. Nice. Interesting match there. So what did you end up doing? Just shorts. No. I feel like that's the answer. But King Sweden was cool with that.

Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. No, so I'm delighted that you got to see that. By the way, we just had, on Star Talk, I hung out with Kip Thorne, the man himself, and we visited him in his home, and we had a whole interview. It was largely about, he was one of the executive producers

on the film Interstellar, and it just had its 10th anniversary, and it was a re-release, just in celebration of that fact, because it had so many people talking about gravity physics and relativity and all the rest of that. So anything out there that sort of ratchets up people's fluency in physics, I'm all for it. Even if they didn't understand

what the hell they were looking at. I was like, Matthew McConaughey, I think he's aging, I'm not sure. Is the thing with the daughter. Yeah, the daughter and the thing, yeah. So we covered that. But let's get back to gravitational waves. You reminded me, I'd forgotten,

that when we were on stage, we actually did a gravitational wave together. The gravitational wave dance. Dance. Yes. Yeah, I don't know if we have footage of that, but I hope not. Me too.

I'm trying to picture it. So Nargis, remind everybody, we've heard the term gravitational waves or ripples in space-time that's surely accurate, but I don't know that it helps. So how can you dig into that and unpack what's going on? Yeah, so I think one of the ways we can think about that is it's very tempting to look out into space and think of empty space as a number of things that are just not true. Space isn't empty. Space doesn't do nothing.

It actually has many, many dynamical properties, things that like it can curve, it can ripple, it can curve, it can ripple, it can tear, and so that's really the wavy part of space time. And the idea is that when we have objects that are massive, so they should have gravity, and if they just- When you say massive, you don't mean a brick or a stone. You're talking about black holes. Well, you know, bricks and stones would do the same thing, except it would be just a much, much smaller effect.

And harder to measure? Way, way harder to measure. So our threshold is for what? I mean, our measuring threshold today. Our measurement thresholds today are not even ordinary stars like our own sun. Couldn't measure that. No.

So if we're looking for waves from these kinds of objects, they're more things like neutron stars and black holes. So dense objects in the universe. Dense objects. Where gravity is saying something. Yeah, so objects that have so much gravity packed into a small volume that really the space around those objects is very bent.

Okay. Have those objects tritozempic? Oh, oh, oh! How do we end up doing a commercial for a pharmaceutical company? And we're not getting paid for it. We're helping the black holes slim down a little bit. They're very dense.

They're causing waves and gravity. That's actually. We don't want them to slim down. For their work, but actually isn't Hawking radiation a kind of ozempic for black holes? Yeah, it'll help them evaporate. Yeah, so we got a little mechanism. Tell everybody about Hawking radiation.

So Hawking radiation, it comes about from the quantum mechanical properties of black holes. So the idea is that in quantum mechanics, we have a phenomenon where particles and antiparticles can be formed out of photons, and then they can crash together and become photons again. And Hawking radiation- Since energy to matter, matter back to energy.

E equals MC squared would prescribe how much of that is happening in any moment. Right, and Hawking rad- E on one side, M on the other side, so we good. And then C is speed of light? Speed of light squared. Yeah, okay. And so C is speed of light? Speed of light, square. Yeah, square, yeah. And so this is a phenomenon by which,

as you create these particles, some of that energy can get radiated away. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the gravitational properties of the black hole, what happens? So you're stealing gravity, matter out of the black hole, and thereby taking Do you stealing gravity, matter out of the black hole and thereby taking away some of his gravity? Yes.

Okay, and it just does that. And so it's a very slow version of ozempic for black holes. That's what started this. Very, very slow. Is when I finish it there. Right, okay. Yeah. All right, so, Nergis, can I take you back

to when I was 14, all right? I came to the Hayden Planetarium, here's my office here. I became director of the planetarium. I came here as a kid. Not at 14. No, no, no. He, he, he, he. No, ultimately I became director.

So I came here and I, beyond the space show that I watched at the time, they would have programs at night, which we still do. And speakers would come in and give lectures on modern astrophysics. So I would come in for that, and one of them was on black holes. That's when I first learned that

gravity moves at the speed of light. Okay? You knew that when you were 14? I didn't learn that until I was much older. That's when I learned it, that's when I learned it. 15. No. And then I thought about it and I said,

if gravity travels at the speed of light, then how does gravity get out of a black hole? And the answer was a little fishy to me. They said, well, there's a gravitational field that's always there, and it's a change in the gravitational field that moves at the speed of light. And I don't know if that's accurate,

but that's what the dude told me. And otherwise, he couldn't get gravity out of a black hole, where the black hole doesn't let anything get out, even the speed of light, and that the gravity moves at the speed of light. How's the gravity going to get out of a black hole where the black hole doesn't let anything get out even the speed of light and that the gravity moves at the speed of light. How's the gravity going to get out of a black hole? I just don't think of it that way. I think about gravity as the geometry of space-time and the black hole is part of that geometry and the things that we can know about and this is true for light as

well are only things that are outside the horizon of the black hole. What I've always been taught, and I think I learned this maybe even from Kip Thorne, was that it's not meaningful to think about what happens inside the horizon because we don't even know if our laws of physics would hold there or not. When I think about gravity traveling at the speed of light, what's actually traveling at the speed of light is a gravitational wave and it's only really meaningful outside of the horizon.

She dodged that one. Yeah. We can't know what's in there, so who cares? She totally dodged that one. No, no, that's good, that's good. It's an important distinction that physics had to mature into as a field to realize there are things that are beyond your knowledge

and therefore there's nothing you can say about it. At all. For now, who knows what other forces we might discover that would describe something inside that horizon. Okay, but right now that's not happening. Right. Okay, so, but a change in gravity would then be a ripple, a change in that sort of thing that I'm feeling out there.

And we can just watch that at the speed of light. Because we'd say if we pluck the sun from the center of our solar system, you wouldn't know about it for eight minutes and 20 seconds. You'd still orbit, we'd still feel the heat, we'd still feel the gravity, everything would be normal, and eight minutes and 20 seconds. You'd still orbit, we'd still feel the heat, we'd still feel the gravity, everything would be normal, and eight minutes, 20 seconds later, we'd fly off at a tangent in the dark

and freeze in interstellar space. Have a nice day. That's it. How is this gonna happen? But those eight minutes before are amazing. Yeah, yeah. Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Did Einstein, I don't know that I've seen the paper that did this, did he predict gravitational waves?

Yeah, so Einstein when he was developing the theory of general relativity, and this was the theory of gravity. So the thing that, so we all learn in school Newton's version of gravity, and Newton's law has been, it's easy to understand, it's intuitive, it says you have two objects that have mass and they're going to feel a force of attraction between them. And it was quite quantitative. He said the force of attraction will be proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. It's very clean.

It's a clean operation. It's very clean. It's a clean operation. You know, we teach it in very early, sort of first encounters with physics, and it was quite successful. It told us about how orbits would work, and it also had pretty early on, places where it didn't work perfectly. Now, what Einstein, when he was formulating,

thinking about gravity, he kind of turned it on its head. He said, well, look, gravity's not really a force. Gravity is the geometry of space-time. Big words. But he had a series of papers, two or three, from 1915 to 1918, in which he sort of formulated this theory of general relativity. He wrote down what are now known as Einstein's equations.

They look not that much worse than, say, Newton's law, except they're quite beastly. They're very difficult to solve, but part of that work was that he did ask the question, what happens if whatever object you're thinking of isn't just sitting still in space? What happens if it's moving and not just moving at constant velocity? What happens if it's accelerating? And then out of his equations popped this wave-like object, which he called gravitational waves, and the other things. You know, I want stuff like that to pop out of my equations. Do you have equations where stuff pops out?

No. Look, me neither. I'm still stuck on the wave part. The wave part, okay. It was gravitational surfing. I have a lot of analogies to that, because if you wanted to try and visualize what would this look like, one way that you could is you could think of space-time as the surface of a still pond.

And you drop a big rock in the middle, and there's a wave that travels, a ripple that travels on the surface. It travels outwards from where you drop the rock. And if you were a little teeny tiny ant on a surfboard, you would surf that wave, right? And the wave length, so the distance between the crests, would be related to how big was the rock that you dropped in. Exactly, right. Okay.

So when you measure gravitational waves with LIGO or whatever other tools available to you, you try to measure the wavelength of that so that you can infer what created that wave. Because you don't otherwise, you didn't see the thing happen. No, exactly, right. So we measure a number of things. We measure the wavelength, which is the spacing between the peaks, successive peaks.

We also measure the amplitude, which is how big, what was the height of the wave. And both of those things are changing with time, measure the amplitude, which is how big, what was the height of the wave. And those, both of those things are changing with time, depending on what the source is. So by measuring sort of the shape of the wave. As you go into it and as you come out of it. As it passes by you. As it washes over the earth.

Exactly. And as you do that, you can tell many, you can infer some of the properties of the system that emitted that wave. Sort of like if you just saw the ripple at the edge of the pond and you have to kind of measure the frequency of the wave, you have to measure the amplitude of the wave, you have to know something about the density or the viscosity of the water of the pond. Oh, that's right. Because the medium, it would come through differently. And once you have put those things together, without ever seeing the rock fall in the center of the pond, you can say something about the rock.

And that's kind of what we're trying to do. So that's very impressive, because you get this measurement and then out in the research papers, these are two black holes of 30 times the mass of the sun colliding a billion light years away. I mean, that's badass to make that kind of statement. It is, I think that the properties of the black holes are almost, I can't think of too many things that are more badass than that.

I agree. I have to tell you why. I mean, so one of the first gravitational waves that we measured with LIGO were from these 30 solar mass black holes. And you know what these monsters were doing? At the time that they collided, they were moving at half the speed of light.

Whoa. Okay. I mean, just, you are speechless. I'm trying to picture it. I don't know if I can actually picture what that... I'm picturing a Godzilla movie. It's like a black hole with like little arms and legs. Start with Godzilla. And they're both fighting each other.

But instead of the city, it's space. That's where my brain is going. And instead of moving at sort of human or Godzilla speeds, they are moving at the speed of light. The amount of energy it takes to accelerate a little electron in our sort of experiments to the speed of light and to think we do it with something that's 30 times the mass of our sun.

So there's no greater particle accelerator than the universe itself. Indeed. Ooh, ooh, ooh. Is it making a sound when it happens? No, and the reason is that- But wait a minute, you guys put a soundtrack to that wave. Metallica? That's different

than whether it made the sound. Then get us out of that little media ploy, because I always have to undo things that the media does, or give context for it, because people say, well, if space is a vacuum, because they knew that sound doesn't help. If there's space, someone can hear you scream. Exactly, that's a legit call, right, for the movie.

Alien, alien. So did you endorse this attachment of sound to it? How did you, as an educator and as a physicist, where were you on that? Yeah, so you know, I think of of it as there are many, many phenomena, as scientists or as humans and observers, that we can't directly observe. Let's take light. So we love to look at pictures of even astronomical objects

where they're emitting X-rays. We can't see X-rays, so we color it blue. And we can see blue, and then the object looks blue, and we imagine that's an X-ray. And so when I think about sound, or the sound of these waves, it's an encoding. It's a way of mapping it onto senses that we do have. So that's how, because otherwise...

That's fair enough. So I mean, think about the way that we visualize a cell. We can't just look at a blob of stuff and say that, you know, that's the cell. We've used microscopes, we've used ways of observing, and then we put together a picture. We've enhanced our feeble senses. Exactly.

To gain access to the universe that would otherwise lay forever invisible in plain sight. But it's dangerous, because if you pick the wrong sound, then nobody cares. Like if you make a video of two black holes colliding, and it goes, But it's dangerous, because if you pick the wrong sound, then nobody cares. Like if you make a video of two black holes colliding, and it goes, boing, boing. You gotta pick the right sound.

Something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Exactly. A rooka. Boing, boing, boing, boing. Doesn't work. So, with LIGO, all's well that ends well, but it didn't begin smoothly. I remember there were physicists called to Congress to defend the budget outlay to the

National Science Foundation that was going to take huge chunks of money to pay for your laser toy. Yeah. How did you convince them you weren't building a Death Star? Yeah, so a couple of things. It is certainly part of the history of LIGO that, so what I know of the history is that Ray Weiss and Kip Thorne, two of the founders of LIGO, Ray Weiss was an experimentalist thinking about

how you might measure gravitational waves. And he shared the Nobel Prize. Right, and they shared the Nobel Prize. And Kip Thorne was thinking about the astrophysics. What would gravitational waves look like if two neutron stars or black holes collided? And they met somewhat accidentally in 1975. The story goes that they had to share a hotel room because one of their bookings got messed up and then they were up all night conjuring up how one would make this measurement. And that's where the concept of this four kilometer long detector, two and a half mile long detector,

LIGO was born. What intrigues me here is at the time, because I remember, because I'm that old, there was someone at the University of Maryland, Joe Weber, who was building a gravitational wave detector. And it was a cylinder of aluminum with very highly sensitive servos, if that's the word, that monitored the position of this slab of aluminum.

And if a gravitational wave washed over it, it would jiggle it in such a way that he would then measure it by way of these servos. So this method conjured in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel room is a completely different method. And maybe there's no way you could have detected it with a cylindrical slab of aluminum. I think now in hindsight we can say

that would have been quite, we haven't done that yet. So it is true that Joe Weber at the University of Maryland had this big slab of metal and it was instrumented with sensors that would see this big slab of metal ringing, just like if you hit a wine glass and it rings a tone. So it would ring because of the gravitational wave that went through it. Now it turned out that Weber's claim, people, so when Weber made the claim, a lot of people started to build similar instruments and to try to reproduce the measurements, and they

couldn't. And eventually people just didn't believe it. If I remember correctly, he had a paper saying he had a measurement. He had a measurement, and if I recall correctly, the claim was, we have a measurement, and not only do we have a measurement, but it seems like the wave is coming from the center of our galaxy, which was sort of seen as a preferred location for some gravitationally heavy object like a black hole. But people just couldn't reproduce it.

But what it did do is it really sparked interest in the topic. And so a large number of people started to build these and they weren't making an investment. So not all null results are bad if they stimulate interest is the lesson there. I think that's right and even in Weber's case though, eventually it turned out to be incorrect claims. He invented some techniques that even to this day

we still use. Okay, you mentioned something very important about science. One researcher's result does not make the truth. You need verification. Because anything could have, they could be biased, their current could have fluctuated. Anything could have happened in one case. But if you have two, three, four,

and if they give the same result, you got something good. If nobody can match the result, it's time to move on. That's right. And in Weber's case, I think it was even more interesting because he had two of these bar detectors, and it was only when people built third, fourth, fifth, and they were built with slightly different technologies and perhaps even with slightly different expectations that it was understood that no one was reproducing what Weber was saying. So now in LIGO, when you made your grand announcement to black holes colliding, why should we believe you?

Because is there another LIGO to check what you did? Yes. Oh, there it is. How many of these lasers you did? Oh, there it is. How many of these lasers are there? Okay, yes there is. We're done there? Okay. No, there was foresight there, of course.

The LIGO facility I visited was in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, but you would have a whole other one if that one LIGO facility makes a detection, you would presume and expect another LIGO to make the detection as well. Not necessarily in the same moment, separated by? Almost certainly not in the same moment

because there's another LIGO facility in Washington state, east of Seattle. And you can think about, sort of, if you think about a wave that's coming through the Earth, a gravitational wave does that, if a gravitational wave is emitted by some distant source, light is actually quite difficult for astronomers because light coming to us interacts

with everything in between. Gravitational waves just pass through most things. So they are quite useful. You have a pure expression of what happened at its source. Yes, but it's a double-edged sword because by the same token, it doesn't interact very strongly with our detector either. So it's really pretty darn weak.

Be careful what you wish for. Yeah. Right, right. This gravitational wave sounds rude. Wait, wait, so the one in Washington, it's Hanford, I think, is that the one? Yes, in Hanford, Washington. Which I think used to be a place

where they purified plutonium. Yeah. So are you giving emotions to the gravitational wave? You're declaring it's rude? Yeah, the gravitational wave just walks through the party, says hi to nobody. Nobody. Right.

So that is one of, so if you ask, one of the things that we haven't observed with gravitational waves is gravitational waves from the very early universe, say right after the Big Bang. And when we think about what we know about the Big Bang. But just to be clear, you haven't observed them because you don't have the capacity to do so yet. Yes, our instrumentation just isn't sensitive enough.

Okay. So if you think about what we know about the Big Bang, what we know comes from light. Not because… Yes, our instrumentation just isn't sensitive enough. Okay. Yeah. So, if you think about what we know about the Big Bang, what we know comes from light. Now, the light that we see from the Big Bang, this cosmic microwave background, actually comes to us from 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Now, what happened before that we can't tell because the universe was so hot and dense at the time that the light couldn't escape. Now, what happened before that, we can't tell, because the universe was so hot and dense at the time that the light couldn't escape. Now, what does that mean?

It's exactly what you were saying, Harrison. So the light is like going to a party with an extrovert, and you say, honey, I'm ready to leave, and it'll be an hour before you leave the party, because they're going to stop, they're going to say hi to people on the way to saying bye to people. And top off their drink. Exactly. And they're going to stop, they're going to say hi to people on the way to saying bye to people. And top off their drink. Exactly. They're not coming. Gravitational waves from the early universe have been streaming to us. If we could measure them in the LIGO band, they would be streaming to us from when the universe was 10 to the minus 22 seconds old. And the reason is just what you said.

They're like going to the party with the introvert. You say, you know, we're ready to leave. And you're lucky if they'll say goodbye to the host. Right, so this distinguishes our access to the early universe from what our normal telescopes can bring to us, which is this 400,000 year barrier, really. And the gravitational waves, which is plow right past that. They don't even care, they're moving right along.

Right, and so if you want to see the earliest moments of the universe, gravitational waves are your friend. If we want to make them more sensitive, do we have to live with bigger lasers? That's a piece of it, but there's lots of other things you've got to make better too. I'm in conversation with Kip Thorne and I verified because I'd read this and but he's the man and I said you have all this apparatus four meter four kilometer long beam that reflects and they recombine you look at a phase shift it and look at a jiggle and I said how big

is that jiggle? How much did this apparatus move by virtue of this wave passing across? And it is the width of 1 20th the diameter of a proton. When it's cold, when it's nice outside. No, that's too big. Too big? Wait, wait, so, all right.

So let's just speak more broadly. A fraction the diameter of a nucleon of an atom, okay? A thousandth. Okay. So you want to make sure nothing else is responsible for what you're about to measure Otherwise you're measuring the wrong thing and when I visited they were telling me if somebody's walking down the street a mile away Those vibrations can be detected in that that was exactly how they described it But they see all by me so they have to isolate the experiment from anything that could be happening

from the outside, okay? So then you isolate it, and then you put it in a vacuum so that air particles are not bumping into it. So now it's there. But then it is at a temperature. It's not at absolute zero, so at any temperature, everything is vibrating. And even if you tamp that down,

there's always a quantum uncertainty about the position of a particle. Heisenberg told us this, okay? So if you wanna know exactly what a particle is doing, there's an uncertainty to that. So how are you making measurements that are smaller than the quantum uncertainty allows? And we had this conversation and Kip Thorne said,

well we did blah, blah, blah, and we did this, and in that way we cheated the quantum laws. And I said, no, no! Stop, stop! That is not a law if it bends at your will. So what was he talking about? Yeah, we do that. No, the fact, no!

That's not an answer! So this is like invasion of the body snatchers. Yes, he's one of us. I was thinking, Fre's like, one of us, one of us. We both can bend the rules of quantum physics. So, okay, for those of you who have such powers, please explain to me. It's plain English as you can.

Yeah, so I can try to do that. So what quantum mechanics tells us is that if you measure two particular properties of a particle, and one example would be the energy of, let's talk about photons, because it turns out in LIGO at the moment, we're limited by the quantum mechanics of the light. The quantum mechanics of the mirror isn't yet a problem, because the mirrors are still moving more than their quantum properties would allow.

So let's talk about the light. So the quantization of the light says the light has two properties. Light's made up of photons, and if I want to make a measurement of that I want to know two things about it. What was the energy of the photons that I'm measuring and when did they arrive on my detector? And you can't know those two things at the same time with infinite precision. With perfect knowledge. Exactly, with perfect knowledge.

But you can know one of those properties very, very well if you allow the other one to be very unknown. That quantum mechanics allows you to do, that's the trick we play. So if we are interested as we are in our measurement measuring the phase of the light wave. The phase would be, because you have two light beams, and you have to see how they match up.

That's right. Because if they match up perfectly, nothing happened to one relative to the other. But if a wave washes over, then one jiggles a little differently, and the waves don't match up. You'll see the, okay. So, go. That's exactly right.

So, say if you're interested in measuring the phase, then what you can do is you can create light with properties where you let the amplitude or the energy of the wave be very unknown, but you've traded that off for precision in the phase. And we have learned how to make instruments that can do that. Damn.

So they're instruments that increase uncertainty. They do. In one variable. That's right. And reduce it in the other variable. And that's really important. If you were reducing the quantum uncertainty in both variables at the same time, you would be violating the laws of physics.

But that we are not doing. Okay, you're just bending the laws. Yeah. So we're not breaking the laws? No, no, we are not doing. Okay, you're just bending the laws of physics. We are not breaking the laws of physics? No, no, I meant to say that a loophole. I like to say- This is a quantum loophole, admit it. Well, no.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Any uncertainty. I call it manipulating the laws of quantum physics because we can't violate them and loopholes are things that are just usually things you haven't thought of. Yeah. Whereas this we've thought of. We're deliberately doing this and you know, so that's the kind of change. So it's not a problem if you don't know at all what the.

So there's a price to pay. The price to pay is look, It's not a problem if you don't know at all what the. So there's a price to pay. The price to pay is look, if you're interested in measuring the phase and if by accident, because your measurement apparatus isn't perfect, you start to collect a little bit of information about the amplitude, it won't work for you anymore. Because remember, the amplitude is now very, very noisy. Wow, okay.

So this is what we do. We reduce the noise in the quantity we now very, very noisy. So this is what we do, we reduce the noise in the quantity we're most interested in measuring, we stuff it into the quantity we're trying not to measure, and then we try to do that as well as we can. Grabbing quantum physics by the horns. Yes. And making it bend to your will.

You know, almost, we call it squeezing, we squeeze the light. Let's get the picture of this now. You have two beams. Yeah. They're at right angles, I presume. Yeah. Yes. And the round trip is eight kilometers, is that right?

Yeah. Okay. And so it takes time for the, very measured time for the light to do that. This is a single laser beam of light that has been split, correct? It has been split, and not only does it go four kilometers down and come back, there's an added complication, if you will, which is that in that four kilometer span,

we have a pair of mirrors that are facing each other. And just like when you put your own head between two mirrors and you see multiple images, the light is bouncing multiple times between those. It's a way of Increasing the path length if you will all right, so and so it bounces in our case and like us gets about a hundred times Okay, so but then it has to come back through to reconjure to Greek to recombine. Yes, okay So you have your magic ways that you, it goes up and back 100 times, then at some point the light has to come back through and not reflect back,

and then you compare the waves of the light. Okay, so that's the shift. So how much different would one wave have to be from the other to be the gravitational wave, to be the effect of the gravitational wave? Yeah, so the way that you can think of it is that the output of our instrument, we're measuring, you think of the light as two sine waves,

one from each arm, and we arrange the distances such that the two light waves cancel. So the peak of one sits on the trough of the other, and in the ideal case, you would see no light. Zero. Right? And then if one arm is slightly different in light than the other.

Then they don't perfectly cancel. Then they don't perfectly cancel. And now some light sort of trickles out. Ooh, brilliant. Right. Exactly. I should get a Nobel prize for that. That's pretty good.

They already did. You're tied with Einstein. Tied. So it's always better to see a signal where there isn't otherwise a signal than to measure the difference between two large signals. Yeah, if you're trying to measure a tiny difference in a big number, it's really hard to measure.

It's very hard. But you start with something that's very close to. And aerophone too. Right. You start with something that's very close to zero and aerophone too, yes, yes. Right, you start with something that's very close to zero and now you get anything, you got something. Wow. So that's what we do.

And how strong is that extra signal compared with the amplitude of the waves to begin with? So what fraction of that amplitude is it? Yeah, so that's sort of a technical detail because you start off with 100 watts of laser light and by the time you That's a powerful laser. Yeah, that's a very powerful laser. Particularly if it's a laser that's also, you know, as quiet and noise free as ours.

What is my laser pointer? Your laser pointer is like a milliwatt. Yeah, a milliwatt. A really bright one. A few thousandths of a watt. Right. Gotcha. Andths of a watt. Right. Gotcha.

And this is 100 watts. Yeah, so this is 100 watts at the laser, and by the time the light has bounced between all the mirrors and so on, at any given instant in time, you could have hundreds of kilowatts of power circulating in the instrument. But at the time that we detected at the output,

we're trying to go for very little light, close to zero, we're measuring something around of order 10-ish milliwatts of light. 10 milliwatts, okay. Relative to the hundreds of thousands of milliwatts that are moving around. That's right. The more interesting question is you can think about

the output of the interferometer is itself just as it has a sinusoidal function. And so the way I like to think about it is we try to park ourselves at a trough. At the bottom. At the bottom. And then we're asking what is the smallest amount of light that you can distinguish, resolve, and that is how much of phase or distance path length you're resolving. And so that's the number that corresponds

to path length difference of 10 to the minus 18 meters. Which is the fraction of the diameter of a proton. That's a thousandth the diameter of a proton. Crazy talk. And so, so she slipped in a nice term in there, I wanna like pull that out. She mentioned interferometer, okay? That as a device had to be invented.

And it was invented at the turn of the century, the previous century, by Albert Michelson and Morley. What's his first name? I don't remember his first name. the previous century by Albert Michelson and Morley. What's his first name? I don't remember his first name. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment. They invented it to measure the speed of light. So the first truly accurate measurement of the speed of light was by Michelson and Morley

using an interferometer where they had waves that either line up or they don't and the amount that they don't line up will give you information about the speed of the light that they were measuring. I mean, it's hugely powerful. So they got the Nobel Prize for inventing that device. They wanted to-

It feels like they've just given these things out. No, stop, stop, stop. I think this is the third one we've heard about today. Just handed them out like candy. So just, I'm just impressed by how all this comes together. I think it's just a reminder to us that every discovery we make is built on everything that came before, right?

Because we've talked about so many things that were invented 100 years ago that were important to the discoveries we made in 2015. All right, so take us out with your prediction of what discoveries await us to take the physics we now know into a new place. Or what new physics needs to arrive to take our understanding of the universe to a new place.

Yeah, so I would say at the moment, the kinds of objects, astrophysical objects to a new place. Yeah, so I would say at the moment, the kinds of objects, astrophysical objects we've seen so far have been collisions of pairs of black holes or pairs of neutron stars or maybe neutron stars and black holes in the same binary system. And those were predicted, we kind of expected them,

but even that has given us mysteries. Like, I'll give you an example, we've seen black holes that are around 100 solar masses. We don't know how nature forms those, because if they're formed in the same way as black holes that are 20 or 30 solar masses are formed, stars don't do that. Right, it means we don't understand how stars are born.

That's right, or die. Right, exactly. I always thought it's like you pick up an instrument and you practice a lot how a star is born. Oh, oh, is that how that works? I think there's been three films of that. Yeah, they keep making the films, right? They keep remaking that one.

Making the stars born. So what I'm saying is we've had three films to learn how a star is born. But let me just remind you that movie stars are called stars because we had stars first. We came first. Not because they're filled of gas. Hot gas.

They are named after objects in the universe, not vice versa, just to be clear. But Neil, I think this is a good idea for you. I think you need to make the ultimate a star is born movie about real stars. Oh. If we're gonna make the movie again, just make it right. Yeah, I agree.

I'll be the one in love with the star. Well, thank you for enlightening us here with your insights and your expertise and your deanship. Oh my gosh. What I'd like to do is take us out with a cosmic perspective, if I may. This is the part where I just talk to camera and you just pretend like you're paying attention. Once again, we are exposed to major modern discoveries

in science, physics in particular, that was enabled by creative thinking that preceded it, creative engineering, improvements in computational speed. These things happen, yeah, you can say, I got a really fast computer, and you can be praised for that, but maybe someone can use that for something that they could not have solved before. I have a new idea about how black holes work. Well, let others know about it because somebody could have

another idea about how to apply that to a discovery we're not even thinking about now. And so this interconnectivity, this interdependence of cosmic discovery on these multiple frontiers is how science works. People ask, are we approaching the end of science? Well, if you think everything that will ever be discovered has been discovered, then you probably think that.

But my read of the history of this exercise tells me that if you think science is about to end, it's because you're not creative enough to imagine where else it could go. And look at all the dangling bits and pieces of all the scientific frontiers and how they might one day come together with the next generation Einstein

to take us into the next millennium of cosmic discovery. And that's a cosmic perspective. So Ineegus, thanks for coming back to Star Talk. We dovetailed another talk you were giving at NYU, sister institution downtown. Thanks for fitting us into your day. And again, it's myvalvala. Yes, I did that correct.

And Harrison, great to see you again. Good to hear about your show. People can find you at HarrisonGreenbaum.com at HarrisonComedy on social media. You got it. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.