The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Brian May

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

In this episode, Lawrence joins musician and astrophysicist Brian May at his studio in Surrey.  May, the lead guitarist of the legendary rock band Queen, recently served as a science team collaborator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.  Together, they discuss the link between his interest in science and music, as well as his passion for stereoscopic photography. See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. When I think of an individual who successfully merges science and culture, I'm hard-pressed to find a better candidate than Brian May. He's, of course, the lead guitarist of the legendary rock band Queen and one of the greatest guitarists in the world, but he also holds a PhD in astrophysics and was on the science team for the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

Having had the opportunity to have a conversation with New Horizons, Horizon's team leader, Alan Stern, I asked Brian to take time out for a brief conversation as well. I wanted to talk about his thoughts about the mission, but I also wanted to go back in time and talk to Brian about what caused him to choose between fields and how he's navigated that choice. I knew that Brian famously built his guitar with his father, and I wanted to talk about how his tinkering as a young man with the electronics of guitars may have spurred his interest in science or vice versa. I also knew of his other interest in science fiction. and the science behind stereoscopes

about which he's written several books. The conversation was especially warm and enlightening, and I hope it will be of interest not just for Brian May and Queen fans, but more generally, will provide new and exciting insights for all fans of science and culture. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program

and all our programs immediately upon the release at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. Brian, it's really nice to say, see you and thank you so much for having us as your guest to allow us to come in here and have a chat. Thank you, Lawrence. It's a pleasure. And, well, I want to start with your scientist had. I want to talk, we talked a while ago with Alan Stern and I just thought I talked to you a little bit about New Horizon and the part you played, but also what you were surprised by in that mission

so far. And what was the biggest surprise for you? I'm most surprised by Alan Stern. Yeah, yeah. It was a phenomenon in himself. Absolutely. My God, yeah, the man's amazing. I don't think he sleeps, you know, and his brain is so quick and so agile. And also, I think what people don't realize is a position like that as leader of a mission like that,

and he has that. Management skills. He just has that knack of getting the best out of everybody without ever being, you know, kind of pushy or impatient or whatever. He just gets 300% out of everybody. Amazing. Well, people don't realize that science

is generally big science, and most of some big scientific experiments require management skills as much as scientific skills. And also so long, because from the time of inception of a mission like that, to the time where you actually take the first picture of, in this case, Pluto, and you've got to keep people motivated. When did you sort of begin to get involved in, and how long have you been associated with it? It's gradual, really. I was kind of on the outside looking in, fascinated, you know, because I keep an eye from a distance

on all this stuff. And I have a great collaborator called Claudia Manzoni who helps to keep me fed with all this information. She's great because I don't always have time to look at everything. So she's my channel really and she works with me on the stereoscopic stuff. So I was very aware of the missions but I, do you know, the funny thing is Alan and I were talking about it. We can't remember how the first contact actually happened. I think it was through a mutual friend where you got talking and he said, you know, you'd be welcome to come out and and be with us when we actually do this flyby of Pluto. So I jumped at that chance.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I jumped a little nervously because, you know, it's a little out of my, at the time, I felt it was out of my sort of price range, you know. You know, I'm an interested party, and I, you know, I am an astronomer to a certain extent, but I'm not a professional astronomer. Yeah, yeah.

I do other stuff, as you know. On the side. Yeah. But, so I went down there and I have really, the major interest that I have is this stereoscopic side of everything. You know, I had this passion for 3D. Yeah. I had this passion for 3D stereoscopy of all kinds.

It's nice to be surrounded by here. Yeah, here we have around us all sorts of stereoscopy starting from 1838 onwards. photography. So you just, all the time, there's nothing new under the sun since Charles Wheatstone who discovered the principle. So all you need is a baseline. And in astronomy, and especially with all these probes that go out and get close to objects, you can normally get what you need to take an amazing stereoscopic picture of something. You know, well, actually, we have one of your books here, and I know a bunch of 3D books. Have you produced a 3D book of astronomy, of, of Well, mission moon 3D is all about the Apollo 11, the Apollo missions and the whole space race,

about the Russians too. So that's the closest we've come to an actual astronomy. I haven't seen any 3D pictures of Pluto yet. Oh, there is one, yeah. I was able to get it. That was my great scoop. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. And, oh, you haven't seen that. Okay, well, I'll show you. But yeah, you just need a baseline. And this probe is flying thousands of miles an hour past this object. called Pluto, which until now has been a white dot in the distance. And what you get is a picture from this point, and then it moves on, you get a picture from the next point. And so you have your baseline.

How far a baseline, do you know? It would be tens of thousands of miles quite a bit, but it's a few thousand miles away. Yeah, sure, sure. And the speed is going. You have to snap those pictures relatively quickly. Yeah, which is what they do. Yeah. I mean, it's a kind of nail-biting thing that New Horizons do. does because most of these missions is very different from most of the NASA missions which go around

things you know like the Rosetta mission they go there they get into a position next to it and they more or less orbit these objects new horizons doesn't do that it just whizzes straight past so everything has to happen everything has to happen in a few minutes yeah and the the tension that the drama in that is colossal because if you mess up there will never ever be another chance and You've been waiting for decades. Yeah, for 12 years. You've waited for that moment. So it's incredible to watch it unfold.

And the moment when you first see that image is incredible. And both times, you know, with Pluto and with Ultimutelais, I was there to see the first image come in. That's amazing. I mean, Pluto, it seemed less surprising to me that they actually got a picture of the planet. But Ultimatoula, it amazed me. Given what little was known about that object and the speed and not knowing exactly where it was or at least having to infer,

to be able to, it could have been so easy for them to just take a picture and be off by a few degrees and miss it. Absolutely. It was really amazing. The precision that they work to is incredible. And you think it's four billion miles away. And they're guiding it to an accuracy of a couple hundred miles. And everything has to be time to the second.

Well, I'm always amazed. As a theorist, I'm always amazed when any kind of experiment works. It's because it's, it, it, it, and also, the dedication and it's required for people doing it because you are working for 12 years and if you miss it, then that's 12 years essentially wasted. And everybody would hate you.

Yes, they would try not too, but they would. When I looked, I remember when I first saw the image of Pluto being, as everyone was, but I just remember being shocked because the assumption was it was going to look like a, I mean, like a snowball. It was going to, and potentially a heavy crater snowball. But the fact that there was dynamics in Pluto,

the fact that the part of the surface was so smooth, that it clearly had been new material. The fact that this object out there was a dynamical living object. It's very unexpected, isn't it? Yeah, it was really, I mean. Beautiful thing. Well, it's true. Every time we've had a new picture of any,

or a new learned, not just objects in our solar system, we've learned that our conventional wisdom in some sense is wrong. And even as we learn about exoplanets outside our solar system, we learned that what we thought was conventional, that gas giants out there in Iraq, And it's just different for it. It's really a fascinating thing to see. As someone who studies particle physics and cosmology,

it's really nice to see that in our neighborhood, we continue to be surprised. It's not as if it's all known. That's very, that's something that strikes me every time. It's never what we expect. Never, never. It's always something more interesting, more surprising than what we imagine. I mean, that's the point for me for science

is that the imagination of nature is just much bigger the imagination of humans. And if you lock theorists in a room for 30 years and had them describe how things should be, it would be totally different. And so we keep having to be guided by observation and experiment, which is why we have to keep doing it. And it's not, you know, people often wonder,

why do you have to keep building things? But if we don't, we just, the surprises of the universe and our context within the universe, our own origins, are totally misplaced. So what, what, you know, all the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the fact that we're inspired by these things,

and it can inspire us. And there's no doubt that Pluto inspired the picture of Pluto, of course, more recently the picture of the black hole, they inspire people in a way. I don't think many producers in television and realize how much people are inspired by science, by images that can really change their picture themselves. That's right.

Yeah. Well, it's an important thing. This thing called outreach. is very important. Otherwise, scientists would just do stuff and nobody would know. People have to know what's going on. And you've been involved in it.

You've been writing as well speaking. Something that I love doing, yeah. It's nice that you can, well, because of who you are. People are probably more willing to listen or less afraid, maybe. Well, I can be a channel because I'm visible and people kind of expect to get something from me. My great inspiration is Patrick Moore. So Patrick Moore, who for 50 years presented that program.

One presenter for 50 years, the sky at night. And since I was a kid and begging to be allowed to stay up and watch it 10 o'clock at night, you know, it inspired me and it inspired generations of astronomers in Britain. And it's outreach, yeah. It was all happening, but unless Patrick Moore was telling us, we know. Yeah, no, it's really amazing. I think how many people, how many scientists get to start by those kind of things. For me, I remember this series by Jacob Bernowski when I was growing up, and it was just an amazing, the ascent of man. And this one remarkable guy sitting in front of the camera talking about everything from

science to culture. And that's one of the things I want to talk to you a little bit, because part of my interest and part of the interest of this program generally is to try and combine science and culture. That science is a vital part of our culture. It's not a separate thing. And you epitomize it in some sense. Thank you. Well, you do by what you do. And I wonder, I, I wonder, I, I wouldn't mind going back a little bit. Yeah. To, it seems to me, to some extent, as far as I can see,

you've always been a tinkerer, not just tinker with these, but in making the first guitar. Yes. Was it in terms of chicken and egg and music and science, was there one that motivated the other? Was there one that prompt the other? No, it's all inextricably linked, I think. I just had this passion for discovery, I suppose.

And tinkering is a good word. I think I got that from my dad, yeah. We got this idea, me and my dad, that we could do anything if we set our minds to it. So in this tiny little room, spare bedroom, which was converted into a workshop, we made my guitar. And it's from scratch, you know,

it's not a copy of anything. And we experimented to get our ideas together. Were there a lot of, are there failed versions of your guitar somewhere? We did little test rigs for the, like, the tremolo and the truss rod and all sorts of things. Yeah, they're not exactly failures, but yeah, and I still have some of that stuff.

Yeah. Just, you know, things that are on the road. Yeah, failures are good. Yeah, well, failure is essential part of, if you're not failing, they, I mean, it's true. It's true for science, it's true for music, it's true for anything. I mean, that you're not pushing yourself. One of the problems, I think, when we teach, by the way,

I've talked about that, is we don't teach kids to fail effectively. We give them problem sets in physics classes of their design to be able to do, and even a thesis, something that in general they can do. But then when you get out to real world, that you have problems that you try and solve and you can't. And then what you need to do is learn how to solve maybe not the problem you thought you were going to do. And I assume, I don't know if the process of your writing and music is the same. If you have an intentionality and you find the final product is very different.

That's a big question. I think there are parallels. Yeah, I think you're searching. I've always had this feeling that art and science are not really any different. They're different parts of the same animal. And the Victorians felt that instinctively. You know, if you look at the Crystal Palace 1851, it was the works of all nations.

It wasn't arts and science brought together. It was just works. And thanks to the glorious Prince Albert. And the Victorians generally, if you look at all the great scientists, they're generally musicians, almost without fail. And they didn't see the distinction. All the great photographers,

I'm a passionate collector of Victorian photography, especially the stereoscopic stuff. All those guys are artists and scientists, and they have to be, because they're working in a medium that requires incredible knowledge of chemistry and physics. They also are creating art, creating portraits, landscapes, beautiful things,

and they don't even think that there's a distinction. So that's how I am, you know, and I resisted the 20th century concept that you have to be one or the other, and they try to split us, and they succeeded for a while. And I think that was bad. And I think now we're seeing a coming together, a rejoining of art and science.

In someone like Matt Taylor, for instance, who's the PI of another NASA mission, the Rosetta mission, you expect to meet this boffin guy who's one of the most successful scientists of her time. He's a heavy metal phenomenon. He's got Einstein tattooed here and Lemmy tattooed on the other side. And he's as much passionate about his music as he is about his. his work, you know, his science and his engineering. So that to me is lovely. I think that's a healthy thing. We're all coming together and realizing that we're human beings. We're supposed to be complete human beings. We're supposed to have all those sides to us. Otherwise, we're not

complete. Well, exactly. And it used to be, speaking of the 19th century, that an illiterate person in the 19th century, it was, I think, expected to have at least a cocktail party knowledge of the science of the time. Whereas now, it's kind of sad that. that you can sort of proclaim your scientific literacy as a badge of honor of being cultured. It's like I'm cultured because I don't get, the science just doesn't do it to me. And whereas everyone, at least,

I think everyone can enjoy that aha experience. It's orgasmic. Whether it's listening to the first song from Queen or seeing the first picture of Pluto. It just changes your picture of what it means to be human. Definitely. I'm with you. And, you know, but there is one thing that interests me, in that regard.

And you're one of the only people I can talk to about this. Because you have spanned it. For a while, I guess you had to separate, right? I mean, you left astronomy to do music. I did. I always thought astronomy benefited from me leaving. Yes, I did.

But you came back. And was it hard to come back? Was it hard? Well, I was never that far away. Yeah, okay. You always sort of... Academically, it was hard. Yes, it was.

It was tough. And it was a mountain that I nearly didn't manage to climb, to be honest. I was fortunate in having Michael Rowan Robinson, who was the head of astrophysics at the time, about to retire. I was one of his last projects. Yeah, but he rang me up when he'd heard that I was thinking of rejoining this astronomical community, which had become astrophysics. Yeah. And said, if you want to finish your PhD, I am here at the place where you started it, and I will be your supervisor.

Oh, that was wonderful. So it was incredible. I mean, my heart kind of stopped, really, and I dropped everything. And I dropped, for a year, I didn't do anything, pretty much, except, yeah, except just sitting in the little office in Imperial College back where I'd started. Yeah. Picking up the pieces of my PhD. It was tough. Yeah, and they had to, I mean, they couldn't make it easy for me because that's not what PhDs are about. PhDs are about making it fucking hard. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be happy to get it over with. Yeah, every PhD student has to want to give up or else he hasn't. Yeah, I almost spent, you know what that's like.

Well, you know, I think, yeah, because if you didn't, you might be due, comfortable being a PhD student. Yeah, exactly. So I was hard, and I think three distinct times I tried to give up, but I had good friends. One of them was Garrick Israelian, who runs Starmus. Yeah. He took me away for a week and taught me how to read papers.

Again? Scientific papers. He re-educated me on how to actually get the information out. That was incredibly valuable to me. And Patrick Moore was incredibly supported. He just kept saying, you couldn't do it, Brian. Of course you can do it. Of course you can.

I went, Patrick, I can't. My brain's gone. I've been playing music for 30 years. I can't do this. Of course you can. And my wife was very supportive. She was great. She was just like, yeah, you know, you chose to do this.

You're going to do it. You can do it. Oh, that's great. She didn't say, you're going back to be a student? How will we survive? No, no, we're right. Yeah, you're all right. Yeah, the breadwin was going back to school.

Well, she's a breadwinner, too. the thing. Well, but what I was going to ask you is, you know, I often, what disappoints me about people their approach to science often is the notion that to appreciate science, you have to be a scientist. No one says to appreciate queen, you have to be a musician, or to appreciate art, you have to be Picasso, or a literature, you have to be Shakespeare. I mean, you could, everyone can appreciate those things, but somehow the notion is, well, you really have to be a scientist to appreciate, to science when in fact, of course, we are all scientists. But it's interesting that that, now I think the hurdle partly is this sense that mathematics is involved in science and

somehow there's a hurdle that people need to get. But of course. And mathematics is beautiful in its own right, of course. I think I would blame some of the communicators of the 20th century who kind of wanted to mystify it, to make it seem like they were very clever and they understood it and we really didn't. I think that still persists a little bit. But we're coming out of that, I think, yeah. And pictures really help. Yeah. Everyone can on Instagram is great.

You know, you put a picture up of that black hole on Instagram. It was enormous. One of the biggest things that ever happened. Yeah, I mean, I put it one up.

I don't understand black holes. I don't understand black holes. Really, honestly. I don't, but I look at it and I feel like I'm connected to it. I had some kind of understanding that this is happening out there and we're discovering.

And I'm excited. Everyone was excited about that. Yeah, it's amazing to me. I got, of course, lots of calls and letters. And at the time, asking me, about it. And of course, and I actually worked on black holes theoretically, and, and, you know,

it not as if it changed our picture, but just seeing it. And no, for me, it was a triumph of human ingenuity. I mean, the notion that we could actually combine eight telescopes around the world and interferometically take such a way. And, and it worked. I mean, it would have been interesting if the picture hadn't looked at all like we expected either. That would have been, in fact, for many scientists, would have been more interesting, right, to see it like Pluto look different than than would have expected. It looks a little asymmetrical, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think it does look asymmetrical, although some people argue because the spinning of it that you'd see one side a little different than the other. But being connected, it's pictures, you're right. And I want to ask you another question, because I wouldn't mind talking a little bit about your impressions of, say, manned versus unmanned or human versus unhuman space travel.

When I see pictures from the, the rovers. I almost feel like I'm on Mars more than if a man was on motors or human. Totally. I'm with you. Yeah. I felt that about the Pluto mission. Every time I'm sitting in that control, I feel like I am in that probe approaching this because it's a camera's part of the probe. It's not separate from the probe. It's an integral part of it. Yeah. And yeah. And so I think the notion that we stuck to this planet can be at the same time able to experience Pluto black holes or, you know, the, pictures from the earliest history of the universe are just,

are inspiring because they change our view of ourselves, which is what the purpose of art is too, I think. I mean, right? It's to change, reflect your view of yourselves. Yeah, absolutely. We have that ability as a species to be able to look inwards. And part of looking inwards is looking outwards and understanding and relating to what is inside us, yeah.

You know, one thing that interested me about you, given that, it seemed to me that you're a tinkerer. This is patented, right? Yeah, I'm an inventor. I love it. I sit in my little workshop and I fiddle around and make stuff. Now, but I wonder, that's what surprised me, because if I understand your astronomical work, it's theoretical, right?

No, not really. No, I was an experimental astronomer. My PhD is about spectroscopy, looking at movements of lines. But not building spectro. Yeah, I built my spectrometer. Oh, you did? I built the spectrometer, the sealer stat that went with it to direct the light into it, and I built the electronics, very crude electronics in the 1970s, which processed the information.

No, it was a purely, yeah, it was experimental PhD, but you have to bring some theory into figure out what you're looking at. Okay, that makes more sense. I just seen to me that given everything else I knew about you, that I would have been surprised if your science wasn't involved in building and, and, and, and, and, and, and, including. including the electronics to some extent. Yeah, I hated it. I hated my electronics because it was very crude and didn't always work.

What about the electronics of the guitar, which I understand you wired differently? How did that come about? Well, I had my dad. My dad's an electronics engineer, so I really had a great start there. He taught me about everything. He taught me what series and parallel meant.

And I wasn't as good as he was ever. He just lived and breathed electric currents and PDs. and stuff, yeah. But he taught me that, so it makes very good sense that we rewire the guitar. Well, we wired the guitar in a way that was different from anyone else at the time. But so was his idea? It was probably both our ideas, really, yeah.

I kind of knew what I was looking for, which was a breadth of sound from the guitar, but my dad was able to help me find what I was looking for. That's fascinating. Well, it's fascinating to me that people who do that professionally hadn't done that, I guess. What do you think? Was it because they weren't musicians? Well, they're clearly musicians, but, well, it's hard to know why someone has a new idea.

Well, they did pretty good, you know. The people at Fender and the people at Gibson did a pretty damn good job, you know. I was just finding variations, little corners that people hadn't explored before. When I also look back at your scientific history, I was just in Tenerife, actually, with my friend of filmmaker Werner Herzog, and we were up at the Solar Observatory, but it was, of course,

I'd been up there before. But this day was amazing because it was, of course, completely covered in mist. And we got some incredible photographs. I'll send you a few. Werner's wife as a photographer of the observatory coming out of the mist. You know, I lived there, don't you?

For quite a while, yeah, I love that. Part of my heart is up there. I love it up there in Izania. It's an amazing place. With observatory blossomed, yeah, because you wake up very often and you are above the clouds, this sea of clouds.

So beautiful. Well, when I was in the mist, though, I was wondering, well, that's not great if you're a solar astronomer or, but was that a rare day? Generally, the mist is below. The mist doesn't generally rise that high. But you do get days. It even snowed on the mountain itself and we were there. So in fact, we couldn't go up to the top because they close it if there's snow. Right. And you get this Kalima as well, which gets in the way. You get this dust from the Sahara. That's the other problem you get in Tenerife. But on a good day, without any of that, and with all the clouds below you, it's heaven. Yeah, it's a spectacular. You're in heaven. I've gone back now three times and it's just each time. So beautiful. But you spend a year there, you say? On and off. Doing the observations.

Yes. And did you speak Spanish beforehand or did you? A little bit, but I learned a bit from being there. Actually, there's another interesting connection in our dialogues with people. Given the cover of one of the albums is an astounding science, right? Oh, Frank. Yeah, okay, yeah. So Shelley Glashow, who's a friend, a colleague of mine, a Nobel Prize winning physicist,

said it was astounding science that got him into science. Interesting. And did you, was that so... Astounding science fiction. Yeah, yeah, it was counting science fiction. Did you read out, was, or was that your doing, putting it on the cover? Actually, Roger found that. Yeah, he found it because we were both science fiction buffs when we were kids.

And, yeah, he found that. And we got in touch with Frank Kelly Fries, who had... painted that picture and he we commissioned him to do a version for us the original picture had him the robot which we call frank after his creator yeah these days uh the original picture had this hand of the robot he's holding it up and it's there's blood coming from the soldier that he's picked up yeah but what he's saying apparently is fix it daddy oh really he's not like a monster he's someone who's he's like a young robot who's done this stuff and doesn't realize what he's done the damage these cause. So there's an innocence about Frank, which people don't always realize.

I know a lot of people got very scared about him. When they were kids, it's funny. You know, you see that on The Simpsons. You know, they have an episode where they're scared of the robot on News of the World. But yeah, so we got Frank to do this picture. He did us two, one for the front cover and one for the inside, because it was a gatefold album. And the inside shows what's happening from the inside of an arena where the robot is reaching in and pulling us out. Oh, that's a great, it's a great story. Yeah, straight. There's a sequel.

Not a sequel. The story continues because Frank passed away, sadly, a few years ago, but we're very much in contact with his wife, and she always comes to see us when we play nearby. And just recently, the original artwork has surfaced for that picture, so we're hoping to get it, you know, keep it in front of our archives. Oh, good. Oh, well, good luck for that.

It would be a lovely thing to have, yeah. But you and Roger were science fiction fans? We were, yeah. I wonder again, I like science fiction and one, it's hard to know once again chicken and egg. Do you like science fiction because you're interested in science or the science fiction inspire you to be interested in the science? Oh, just all at the same time.

As a kid, you're just open, aren't you? Just everything. I picked up every bit of science fiction I could. Yeah, I used to like John Wyndham, who was a British science fiction. Oh, yeah, I read every single one of his books, old penguin books, weren't they? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And although, you know, I wrote a book called The Physical Star Trek. Actually, Stephen Hawking wrote the forward for it, and he said there that science fiction, like science, inspires the human imagination. Really? Yeah.

And, but what I've learned since then, of course, the great part of what makes science fiction good, if it's good, is the story. It's what the science is there, but it's not what makes it, it's got, like the Frank, like the robot. I mean, that's a poignant thing that you can relate to. I mean, the robot is there, it's nice,

but the story of the, I agree, yeah. It's always the human side which makes it worthwhile, really. I mean, my science fiction song 39, I don't know if you know about that. I was going to ask you about 39. It's the same kind of thing. You anticipated. Well, you know, there's a scientific phenomenon there, if you're like, you know, the time dilation. Yeah, exactly. And do you want to, I mean, did you always want to write a song with it? Well, it was just in my mind. But what fired me up was not the fact that the physics made you, you lose time, but the fact that what would this do to you as a human being? How would that experience be if you came back from a trip and all your relatives were dead and you were looking at your descendants?

How would that be? So to me it's a human song. It's got a science fiction skeleton, if you like, but it's about human beings. Well, it's again that interweaving of the human experience and science. And I think that's essential. And too often people think science is out there or the universe is out there and we're here and there's no relationship. And in that book you have, as you know, I point out that every atom in our body came from a star that exploded. And we are the cosmos.

We have that connection. We are stardust. Yeah, we are indeed as some. As Joey Mitchell says. I quoted that in my thesis. Really? Yeah. That was the, yeah, it was the, you'll see that on the title page.

Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you about everything from science to culture. I wish we had a lot longer, and there's a lot of questions and a lot of discussion. It's just nice to spend time with you, and I really appreciate it. I appreciate it, too. It's really stimulating. We'll do it again. I hope you'll come see us in Phoenix, and just keep doing what you're doing. It's great. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bless you.

The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Doll, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps. Directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwerta. Thomas Amoson, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.