I've have not been the same since we had lunch you explained to me and I've said it here the fabric of SpaceTime might be woven by wormholes that connect the virtual particle pairs that come in and out of existence so it's like a little Quantum net holding the whole universe together exactly right we find mathematically if we cut the threads of quantum and Tango space falls apart it discretizes and to little tiny pieces and it just disappears I got to go I got to go this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson you're a personal astrophysicist I got Chuck nice with me Chuck baby what's up Neil all right all right you know what you're going to talk about today I do not the the only way to talk about physics okay is to talk about physics with Brian Green in the house that is true thank you got to you know you can't it's empty unless you have Brian Green in the conversation absolutely and he's just up the street up at Columbia you're dual professor professor of physics and professor of mathematics that's right that's wow you get paid twice for that but I go to no faculty meeting I'm always say in the other department it's pretty cool I'm sorry I can't I'm math today so you're author of several books until the end of time was that your more recent one that's my most recent and that came out how long ago 20 right at the pandemic what a moment to have a book called until the end of time right and the one I think most people know if they know you at all the elegant Universe there's another one the fabric of the cosmos yeah absolutely the next one hidden reality yeah that was about multiple universes right man so he's all up in it I believe the fabric of the universe is a Tweed a Tweed a satin weed so well welcome back to the show this is like you're you're more than a three Pat I think at this point oh God and you're involved in a lot of things you're writing the book other than being Professor you're writing the books and are we in the 15th year of your your world Science Festival how how many years have you been doing that's right we started 2008 so if you would just subtract it's even a little bit more but the pandemic changed things yeah but yeah we're coming up to probably the 15th live event congratulations on that although it's a little audacious to hold it in New York and call it the world Science Festival but we don't only have in New York we also have it in Australia and we've had events in Amsterdam in Moscow I got nothing I can't in Italy and Spain I try to I try to and by the way New York is the world let's be honest I mean for anybody out there listening I'm sorry you go to Paris you find parisians you know you you you go to England you you you you find the Brits but you come to New York you find everybody audacious would have been like the cosmic Science Festival yeah you know then you would have had a point well congratulations on bringing it to the world thank you uh or taking it to the world and uh what I enjoyed most about the several that I've attended is the effort to to bring the Arts into it in a meaningful way oh uh there's you know there many artists who I would later learn are are are not rare who are inspired by science and the universe and discoveries and they will compose dance and music and and and you have a a mixture of these sessions we do we do I mean the goal is to have science feel connected to everything that matters to us and of course culture is a big part culture and arts matter to everybody in fact now with AI we're doing a program on the Arts in the age of artificial intelligence so how is AI changing how artists approach their work and how Sciences think about art there'll be more unemployed artists yeah well but it's a funny thing say not paid they won't be unemployed they just won't be when every new technology comes along like the camera people are like okay now you don't need artists anymore because anyone can just you know click but there are artists who use the camera to create things that mere mortals can there are painters who actually take a picture and then they actually paint the picture as opposed to having someone sit for a portrait but but that wasn't the biggest ISS the biggest thing the biggest Force operating was you no longer needed the artist to portray reality because of course the camera captured that so that fre freed the artist right to to portray impression reality exactly it's not what the scene looks like it's what the scene feels like the interpretation that has M that matters it's huge I mean that's what is the Magic in so much expression right it's what we do with it as opposed to just literally depicting what's out there so there are many people who project that AI is going to create you know a new kind of art yeah just the way the camera just the way the camera so that's still to shake out I still need to see I think AI will just accelerates creativity it doesn't replace it because what happens is you you have associations that are being made at a level that you as a human being would maybe eventually over a course of years you might make those associations but the computer can do it almost instantaneously and then you take that and you say hm what does that mean to me okay so it pushes you along pushes you along yeah the flip side of that is if you have a computer creating so much there's a lot of chaff you know that you have to separate out true yeah there's chaff even when people too you're born and raised in New York City yeah right across the street from where we are sitting right now you went to Styers High School which is a a selective high school that specialized in science in the way the Bronx High School of Science specialized in fact they're Rivals they're like intellectual Rivals why do you think that we've wrestled each other now I always lose you would not like a book if it didn't have equations in it it's true that's true this is weird yeah that has changed I should say but but so you a novel that's right now and then uh that meant you thought more deeply about math than you thought about words yeah but but the one change I would make to that statement was it was when it came to books for a science class if the book was chalk full of words I'd feel like oh no there's a lot of interpretation that's going to go into this particular science class but it was chalk full of equations I was like nah this is rigorous this is going to be specific and it's going to be something that I can nail because I don't have to interpret I can just really engage with the equations wow so in a history class or a literature class you you you would you would have been in tears well for for the task re most it was mostly just for science but you're absolutely right there is a different mindset that you bring to a history class or English class which I did not have a full appreciation for it when I was younger that's absolutely true and as I got older and especially there's a moment when I graduated college and I said to myself I think I just got a technical education as opposed to learning about the world and life and humanity and I went into kind of a tail spin for a little while because I was like what did I do and that really then changed it all for me and words have become vital to the way I engage with the world you think I mean four bestselling books yeah words matter if you want to talk to other people who are not physicists and if you want to really get the essence of what what someone's about as opposed to quantifying some quality of abstract or objective reality okay yeah all right that's I think that's a uh that's an enlightened posture yeah gotten there took me a while so I don't want to do is followup there was a question to our our Cosmic Cosmic queries that I didn't have an answer to oh no here we go okay and I said you know I don't know I got to we're going to have to get Brian GRE we got to get the big guns in here all right if I remember the question it was what happens if a quark falls into a black hole you have a cork pair yes and we've only ever found them in Cork pairs okay and in a normal lab if you take them and pull them apart the force that wants to bring them together grows MH which sounds weird when you're used to gravity and other things where distance makes something weaker but they're like really creepy identical twins like you ever meet identical twins that are like super creepy where they sort of talk together they got their own language yeah right so but it's it's kind of like a rubber band yeah because you stretch a rubber band the force is greater yeah the gluonic force between them the gluonic force is held together by gluons okay so now as I pull it apart there will be a point where it snaps as I understand my Nuclear Physics it snaps with the exact amount of energy you put in so that out of that energy creates two other quarks so now I have four quarks quk antiquark pears PR thank you okay pears okay so now so you want to see what happens now you send a pair of quarks down the black hole it gets split we make two other quarks yeah you thank you very good and you keep doing this and they so wouldn't the quarks eat the entire gravitational field of the black hole and that you wouldn't have a black hole left you just have a ball of quirks you have to realize number one that we still don't know the under the physics of the singularity of black hole well enough why else did I invite you into this office now so so well I wish one day one day I pray that I'll sit here and tell you what happens at the singular BR person knows next time but here's the thing there is nobody on planet Earth who knows the answer unfortunately yet okay when we follow the mathematics to the actual Singularity of a black hole using Einstein general relativity using Einstein general relativity and even some of the modifications that have come from more recent thinking we're still not there yet to truly understand what happens but I should say there are ideas there are ideas of things I don't know if you've heard of them called fuzzballs where there isn't actually a singularity and the black hole is actually a more fuzzy collection of matter that so there are ideas that people that makes your math come out okay makes the math come out okay but we're what they say black holes work the singularity at the cent of her black hole is where God is dividing by zero yeah that's a Stephen Hawking quip or I think it is you remember if you divide by zero not right and it's actually in a sense it's literal because if you calculate what's known as a scaler curvature which is a number that characterizes how warped a region of space is okay it does go to Infinity as you go to the center of a black hole just like when you divide by zero it goes to Infinity in fact it goes to Infinity as the sixth power of your distance so we know very well how badly behaved the center of a black hole is so inity fast goes to Infinity fast that's crazy yeah and so if you ask what really happens if something is just being crushed at the center we can't really answer yet so is it possible that as a quark antiquark pair goes that the title forces will create additional quk antiquark sure and then you have makeing me some sounds yeah so so there may be a cloud and there may be some sort of cloud that forms just before it hits ultimately we believe it hits the singular whatever that means because we don't really know what the singularity if it's a fball you can have a fuzzball or quirks Poss or or the fuzzball may have a slightly different impact on the cork antiquark pair maybe before influence on it yeah yeah impact you yeah right exactly so it's a really good question but it will have to fully await a full understanding of what truly happen so mean not being able to answer it wasn't just my personal ignorance it's a total ignorance of all humans on Earth yeah so I don't feel so bad say there are many many questions like that that we're still struggling with like we believe that when any information falls into a black hole we believe that information does not get destroyed but for a while Stephen Hawking thought no any information ultimately hits the singularity and leaves our universe he changed his mind later in life which just fam bet with uh yes that's right so they bet I think an encyclopedia you know the the the source of information that we humans have created so there kick Thorne was a one of the executive producers on interstar and he sort of spearheaded the effort among others but he was the exponent to build the laser interferometry gravitational wave Observatory Lego that detected colliding black holes and he won the Nobel Prize for that so he's he's significant in in our field and I have at least a few books by him on my shelves yeah and uh he was clearly on a level of geekdom where he bets encyclopedias yeah but in terms of his book he wrote an encyclopedic book on gravity in black holes which is about you know 1,200 Pages just filled with equations therefore I loved it when I was a kid wa with the misner thorn wheeler yes I have two copies of that in my office two copies you want to cross reference or something one of is mine and the other one belonged to my wife who was a PhD in mathematical physic that's so cool and we met in relativity class really taught by John Wheeler really yes you took relativity from wheeler yes I did that is amazing wow yeah nice yeah so John Wheeler is one of the authors of this misner Thorn and Wheeler yeah and misner taught physics at uh University of Maryland Charles misner Charles misner yeah yeah yeah okay so I would think of it as a quark catastrophe that would happen in the center of the black hole trouble with quarks they're like Tribbles by the way there's a previous if we're geeking out here there's a previous time was it 100 years 110 years ago with there's something called the ultraviolet catastrophe do you remember that I remember it well I wasn't there but I but I've learned about it yeah that this is this is the start of quantum physics yeah it had to predate 1900 uh uh it predated plank Max plank oh okay because there was an equation that would show how much energy would come from glowing objects okay and how much energy of a certain wavelength of light and then another w length and so there'd be the spectrum of what it gives you okay and if you follow that equation to higher and higher energies it blows up and was called the ultraviolet catastrophe nice now we knew that's not happening in the actual universe but we had no theoretical understanding of why the actual Universe was not doing what our equation said so we knew something was missing okay and Max plank comes along finish the story yes and Max plank comes along and He suggests an idea that he never fully believed this is interesting He suggests that maybe the energy only comes in packets of certain quantize sizes and therefore your calculation of the amount of energy was biased by assuming that energy could come in arbitrarily large or small amounts if you assume it only comes in packets of a minimum size then the total energy inside that cavity actually converges and drops off and it agrees with experiments right but the weird thing is and he got an equation the equation is like holy that this would come out of someone's head to make this happen yeah it's got an exponential and an exponential has interesting properties where it goes up and then it comes down again if it's a negative exponent I mean there's a fun math in there ex and was it just a fitting function or did he actually have deep physics Insight he had a model in mind he really quantized the energy he broke it up into little bits and redid the calculation and that what came out but then later on he never fully believed that energy in light in photons as we now call it did come in little packets right he said sure the math seems to describe it but but I'm not willing to go to that next of of of ascribing a full reality to it and so it it's really Einstein who came along and came up with the idea of photons more particularly with the photoelectric effect and that's how he wins the Nobel Prize many people think he won the prize for special relativity or general relativity no my boy should could have had eight Nobel prizes his Nobel prizes are for what he's least famous for right yeah right I mean but perhaps most gang that's straight up there people winning Nobel prizes for discovering things that he predicted right so if you add everything he predicted to the Nobel Prize count plus what everything if they gave out Nobel prizes for everything you did I give them eight Nobel prizes what would you give them uh well certainly gravit waves Al he didn't fully believe it but it comes right out of his 1916 and 198 you give him a Nobel Prize for everything people discovered based on his stuff well then it's kind of everything person on the Nobel Prize receiving no right it's like that Bugs Bunny first base Bugs Bunny second base Bugs Bunny Third Base bug yeah every Nobel Prize is Albert Ein that's the answer right there um and so of course since If energy is quantized thus we is Born the branch of physics called Quant quantums quantum mechanics wow and that probably has had the greatest impact on Life as we know that was the year 1900 yeah well 1905 is when Einstein writes his paper on the idea of photons but Max plank you're right 1900 C clean 1900 starting a new century yeah before they even had calculators oh was that really was it that far back as you may know we recently posted a video in response to Terrence Howard's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast where he discussed his interpretation of maths and key points to take away from that are one we should critically analyze all the information we come across and two be open to our views being challenged like this new study on dark matter being debunked for example it suggests the universe's expansion is not driven by dark energy but by weakening forces of nature now when it comes to new theories that challenge our accepted understanding of space it's important to see how different scientific sources are interpreting these new findings to fully understand it luckily ground news makes this much easier to do with the Vantage plan you get access to original research plus every article covering it and even Insight on each news publications's political bias and credibility context that could influence their report their founder and former NASA engineer also designed their blind spot feed which uses patented technology to help us easily step out of our Echo Chambers and see important new stories we might have otherwise missed exposing yourself to diverse perspectives helps ensure that you don't just know enough about an issue to think you're right but you actually know enough to recognize when you might be wrong so avoid the Dunning Krueger effect get ground news and critically analyze the information you consume all for $5 a month if you use our link or scan the QR code you're saving 40% on the same unlimited access Vantage plan you use with the discount we really can't recommend ground news and their commitment to rigorous analysis and combating misinformation enough having said all of that let's get straight back to the show we're old enough to remember when the United States lost the most powerful collider in the world the super conducting super collider yeah which they already there was money allocated they started digging a hole MH what was a 200 M circumference there was some huge and super conducting it was going to use super conducting magnets which had very powerful magnetic fields and because that was coming of age at the time it was going to push the frontier my analysis if you read the report well there were cost overruns and we have too many other priorities here so we're going to zero the budget for this super conducting super collider and you read the report say well we have other priorities plus this was going to be built in Texas and if we're going to build the space station which is based in Houston Texas was already getting a chunk of change you know when all this happened like between 1989 and 1992 when the debates and then they zeroed the budget what else was happening over those years let me think oh my gosh peace broke out in Europe no longer do we need the physicist to protect us from the evil right Godless Communists that's what I think was the subtext of that story damn you Harmony because no other particle accelerator was ever cancelled for any reason that was designed conceived and built in the 20th century yeah so if you grant me one conspiracy theory that's the grant me that but then you think they kept the space station because that was the place where the new battle might be wage I mean Poss it's what we're looking at right now when you think about it yeah yeah with the space force and everything else so that's where I am on that but I I say this only to note that once that got canceled the center of mass of particle physics went across the pond to Europe and then CERN the European clear pH nuclear resarch somewhere in there yeah it's a French acronym when it when the words are in the French order or something that's you it goes there and I think our lawmakers don't really understand that if we don't do the physics someone else can and will we don't own all access to Future discoveries of Science and so now Europe does it and so they went ahead Build A Large Hadron Collider and they successfully found the higs bozan the big Holy Grail July 4th 2012 look at that was it July 4th that that's sticking it to us look at that it really was and you know they really found it on like June 28th you know they found it on June 28th and they were like guys we're going to sit on this for a few days yeah but but there are a lot of Americans involved in the large but just to say but yes exactly right yeah even Peter Higgs is he American Peter higs was Scottish I would think you know I think it's from Edinburgh although I think he was Edinburgh but I don't think he was Scottish maybe he was English you know I I don't 100% know but uh but yeah you know he he uh predicted its existence and then it was discovered and at the announcement saw tears Welling in this man's eyes who' been waiting decades for this idea that at first nobody believed right ultimately was accepted theoretically but it was proven experimentally finally what is the what is the Hicks bosan exactly of the particle categories one of them is bons right okay and bons are Force mitigating particles okay okay so and when we think of a force action at a distance there's a way to think about that in terms of the particle that in the category particles is a boson one of the bans is this higs boson which has what properties well it has did I was I right yeah it's very good we said that was very good hey can I answer than you Bri thank you Bri please it's what endows other particles even itself actually with mass interesting now where does where does that come from well just to take Neil's idea it starts with the idea of a field that's how you get rid of this idea of action at a distance you imagine that space is filled with stuff you know invented Fields uh I I really don't Michael Faraday yeah oh really well that makes sense first mag and think what a what a leap that is it's an insane there's there you're looking at nothing you're seeing you're positing that there is something there that's an amazing thing but he was talking electric and magnetic fields right what higs is talking about is a new field called the higs field which he didn't call it that but that's what we call it so it's it's field that fills space and as particles that otherwise would be massless as they try to go through space they have to burrow through the hi field and that creates a kind of drag force on them which is what imparts the mass that they have okay and that's the field now what's the particle well if you have this field in principle if you hit it hard enough like hitting the surface of water you can cause little particles of the field to spray out and that's what the large hydron collat did it slammed proton against proton and that way jostled the higs field and caus a little droplet of it to break free and that's the and we got oh my God so you're seeing an actual piece of the field yes you're wait wait wait so the higs field generated via equal MC s its own particle of its own that's amazing that's right or you can say it's a Quant to go back to the other language it's a Quant of the higs field like the photon is the Quant of the elect field all right that's amazing that's some stuff so okay if okay okay now I get it so it's not the particle that you're actually seeing it's not the particle that is imbued with mass itself it is the thing on which the particle is traveling the field the medium itself boom it kind of splashes apart for a quick second and then that itself becomes a particle and has mass holy wait so so you that's amazing that is amazing Chuck just blew a gasket oh my God that's crazy dude that is insane call the doctor this is the first time I've actually really understood because oh my God that's so freaking crazy oh my God a week later he's there in bed still eyes is this big that is fantastic so my favorite analog to this yeah is when I've when I explain the Hicks feel to people I say it's it's like a a a Hollywood party uhhuh okay so there are people in the party right all right and the bar is at the back of the wall okay okay and if you if no one knows you and you walk into this party okay that's my experience you have near zero resistance to movement through that party true so you have a a very low if not zero party Mass exactly okay because you have no you get into the bar right away you get in the bar right so your inertia it knows no resistance there exactly whereas Beyonce walks in uhuh everybody will crowd around here she can only make very small steps towards the bar right she has a very high party mass is that fair that that's a party field party field and then if you slap all those party go you can slap off one of them that's the party some from The Beehive somebody from the Beehive out oh my God love Beyonce like oh there it is all right so I learned learned not from you and I'm disappointed because I thought you would have told me the whole story yes I come to you for these Frontier conversations that the higs mass that a particle would have is only for free particles if a particles in an atom it's not getting its mass told you this in the past though I absolutely have but you're absolutely right you're absolutely right so so so if I'm I'm I'm a fat proton yeah in in a nucleus I'm not getting my mask from the hick field no and that's why it's a really misleading notion that many people have they think that all mass comes from the Hig field it is just the fundamental particles and here's the thing if you were to go up into your particle Data Book which I know you have a few copies lying around dat it's very good if you look up the masses of the quirks the up Cork and the down cork that make up a proton up up and a down add up their masses he said that quickly up and down that the the nucleons have three quirks right in them all bound together making up the proton and the neutron but they're different combinations of three quirks this is this is good tell them so quirks have charges fractional charges right so watch watch watch this watch this so proton has a charge of plus one all right how do you get that from three quarks yeah how do you do that so give me give me give it to me you got to have a 2/3 and a 2/3 and a minus 1/3 2/3 2/3 - 1/3 so 2/3 2/3 is 1 and the3 and then a minus charge to bring it down now now neutrons have charge quirks inside of them but they don't have any charge so how do you get them how you get them let's hear it oh must be uh up 2/3 down one3 down one3 yeah so if you have an up and then a down and down down then you got a 23- 13 13 canceling out and so it's a neutal thing even though what's inside of it has charges right but here's the thing the point I want to make though is if you add up the masses of those corks right they're much less than the mass of the proton so what's going on here they make up the proton and yet the proton's much heavier than its ingredients right answer is there's another contribution to the mass which has nothing to do with the higs field which is the thing we were talking about before the energy in the glue holding the cork together the gluonic force there energy holding them together equals Mt s there's Mass associated with that energy and most of the mass of the proton is coming from the glue that's holding the quirks together that's insane so let's take a neutron which has a half life in minutes like 15 minutes memory serves and after that amount of time half the neutrons will have decayed uh into a proton and if let's say if it's a regular proton and then an electron an electron and an anti- nutrino and an anti nutrino if you add up the masses of those don't you recover the mass of the proton as long as you taken kinetic energy into account and all this too they fly they fly away but but yes but yes the energy is all there it's all there okay look at that so everything is conserved all the time and in fact the way the nutrino was predicted was from looking at these particle decays and finding that the energy budget was not adding up and so the idea was maybe there's an invisible particle that's carrying away some additional energy yes so so what I like about this is he like look folks I can't explain this let's make some up yes but but Geniuses make up that's right there's a quote qu that's a bumper sticker right there that's it I'm getting the T-shirt I'm getting that t-shirt that's awesome that's great that's what uh Carl Sean was famous for saying they laughed at Einstein they laughed at you know all these people with these great ideas and he said they also laughed at Bozo the Clown just cuz people laugh doesn't mean they're going to be wrong he makes it up and then everyone starts looking for it and it's this highly elusive particle that has no charge because we knew all the charges had already balanced in in the lab it's got no charge but it's carrying away energy and no one has detected it and and he was Italian right so neutrino is like little neut Neutron little Neutron little neutral one I think is that may right little neutal little neutral one and so that's the only thing that allows me to okay I'm not going to get in your way when people saying dark matter it's some elusive particle that we can't detect right that's accounting for the extra gravity and it's a particle we haven't found the particle yet and I'm thinking that's intellectually lazy but it's no different than nutrino than nutrino so that's why I cut it some slack more slack than I otherwise would now we we still need to find it we still haven't found if it's a particle we haven't found yeah right so which are you a betting man is it a particle is it something else uh look I'm relatively conservative when it comes to these things so I think that it's likely to be a particle but just because we've been down that road before we've been down that road before it fits in so well to our theoretical framework it doesn't requ SL you have a slot for a dark matter particle well the amazing thing is and here's where you're going to come back at me and say this should undercut my confidence when you look at a theory called super symmetry that I've spent a long time working on okay within this Theory which goes beyond what we know about particle physics for reasons that are well motivated ordinary symmetry that's right it it takes the symmetries that we have and it takes them one step further and it's the only step further that you could possibly go so of course nature must make use of this final symmetry principle why else would it exist that's the thinking that we've had wait just let me let me back up for a minute so as I was learning particle physics I was intrigued to recognize that you have your electron you have your Photon you have your neutrino and these other sort of basic particles and they exist in our world that we live we experience okay if you up the energy knob other particles manifest there's a version of the electron that manifest only in these higher energy levels and it's called a muon right okay and so there's a whole layer of particles sitting above the ones that are in our world so there's three of these layers and tell me the three electrons the you got the electron muon and the tow the tow okay and there's an electron nutrino there's a muon nutrino there's a town nutrino so now I have three layers here and you have access to them in your particle accelerators because it takes a lot of energy and you can get there okay now what does Super symmetry do with say this package is is beautiful and confirmed and tell me the three the three Force carriers we have a photon you got the photon then you got the gluons and the w and z bosons or the weak nuclear force and those are the Discover by boo boo Bo actually Boose Boose is a is a is an Indian physicist yes absolutely and then for the quirks you got the up and the down that we spoke about you got the charm the strange you got the top and the bottom so again they come in three pairs super symmetry says take all of those particles and double them another Shadow version of all of those particles Shadow govern for the electron we are the puppets this is the Deep State they are the Puppet Masters the quantum deep State wa wait where wait so I didn't know this the entire set of particles yeah would have a counterpart in this super symmetric yeah place so for the electron you have the super symmetric electron for the quarks you have squarks for neutrinos you have neutrinos people just making shitest cartoon but here's the thing this is all mathematically motivated by an completely compelling rationale so this is not pulled out of you know thin air thin air we have our universe three ways a three- layer cake and there a whole other cake where does that live with us but we believe they're more massive which is why we wanted to build a superconducting super collider to try to find them now we've looked for these at the large massive why can't why aren't they right here in front of our faces they typically have short lifetime so they'll Decay into lighter particles but the lightest of the super symmetric particles would not Decay and therefore it should be all around us tell them why the lightest one would not Decay if it's the lightest one when it decays the Decay products have to be lighter than it okay and so if it's the lightest one subject to a certain no place for to go no place for to go no place it's the same reason why you can have an energy field of any kind and you will not make particles out of that right unless the energy available is higher than the E equals MC s of two electrons right because it has to make them in pairs okay the charge because plus and a minus and so an electron is the lightest physical particle right so nothing's happening that's why it's not happening around us right now yeah it's the lightest charge particle so it has to talk the electromagnetic field that's why light coming from lights it's not just making particles it doesn't have enough energy right but if if if x-rays started come out of there x-rays high energy x-rays you can pop electrons into existence because they're stepping down so they leave something the energy of the field is big enough to create the electron and anti-electron and so it will pair produce them in fact that's so wild electron microscopes are enabled by x-rays creating them and the wavelength of x-rays is so tiny that you can see Tiny detail that's it's tinier than the detail you can't have resolution higher than the wavelength of light you're using use to see it right right now back to dark mattera just a finish point so these this is a whole massive other layer cake and you're telling me that is the mass of the Dark Matter well the lightest super symmetric particle would be stable should be around us make it filling space right and here's the beautiful thing here's the this will blow your mind this will blow your mind blown when you when you do the calculation of how much of this lightest super symmetrical particle should be left over since the Big Bang it exactly matches what you need to be the dark matter it comes in the right abundance dang and yet we've not found it and it may be the wrong answer so sometimes things that just seem so deeply compelling are wrong but we don't know yet W so so do you know enough in the theory of these particles to predict how you should detect it yes now they can vary which is the lightest super symmetric particle on the flavor of the super symmetric Theory you're looking at but in any given version yes you know exactly how the particle interacts okay so now you have everybody's favorite flavor the theorists come out with their competing models but still they got to have one of these particles okay so now I'm I'm I'm a experimentalist and it tell let me test for this one I don't find it let me test for that one I don't find it so it's not looking good yeah I agree okay I agree okay wow I agree but yet when I was a student it was almost a foregone conclusion that you just had to look for it you'd find it this is the dark matter because super symmetry also solves other problems the so-called hierarchy problem it solved the Dark Matter problem it's a beautiful idea that seems perhaps not to be right now it's not fully ruled out yet but that may be where we're going who's the one that said uh the great tragedy in science a beautiful Theory a slain by some facts somebody said I forgot years ago exactly what it may be hey Star Talk fans I don't know if you know this but the audio version of the podcast actually posts a week in advance of the video version and you can get that in Spotify and apple podcast and most other podcast Outlets that are out there multiple ways to ingest all that is Cosmic on Star Talk I've have not been the same since we had lunch months ago and you explained to me and I've said it here that there are ideas percolating that the fabric of SpaceTime might be woven by wormholes that connect the virtual particle pairs that come in and out of existence and that if they're connected by wormholes rather than just some field then the Wormhole is an actual structural texture of the universe yeah in fact the other way man we I I'm sorry first of all I need some weed to even deal with this because if I'm I'm trying to figure out what you just said here because it's so freaking I mean it really is just crazy let's back up the vacuum of space right is not a vacuum right quantum physics requires what there's all sorts of uncertainty and that uncertainty means that there's fluctuations and therefore there are particle antiparticle pairs there's energy fluctuations there's field fluctuations right it's a roing mess out there in so there's no nothing there is no such thing as nothing that violates uncertainty truly nothing there's truly nothing we couldn't have uncertainty so the uncertainty is you know the gives us the fact that we do have virtual particles we know that they pop in and out of existence what you trying to tell me I think it's not that we know they're there no one denies it because completely consistent well I say the well the Casmir Force where you actually put two metal plates in otherwise empty space they should simply sit there they're drawn together and our best explanation is it's the virtual pairs of particles it's the fluctuating I did not I feel like I have fallen into a star trep nightmare watch so you take two exactly parallel plates okay okay and EV vacu what's in between the best vacuum you can muster then you slowly move them together right there is a point within which a whole other Force kicks in that's right and it's not the gravitational force it's not electromagnetic force rather it's a force that comes from the Kazmir field which is basically priz the Casmir well 1948 is is when it was discovered it got one in my books but it should just gave it I just gave it one yeah it definitely deserve one it's an imbalance between the fluctuations of uncertainty within the place and the fluctuations of uncertainty outside the place and it's that imbalance creates a force put them together okay okay so that's how we get the particles in the vacuum of space okay so now unbelievable so now why a what compels you to say Wormhole rather than just a field well because it really comes from the idea of quantum entanglement what we find is is that entanglement which normally we think of as particle pairs but now we're finding that the vacuum of space may be stitched together by the threads of quantum entanglement itself so deep down within the substrate of reality may all be stitched together by quantum entanglement and then other work shows us that quantum entanglement connecting two particles is just like a wormhole going from one to the other because what happens in one happens to the other instantly yes and that means they're touching each connected in some weird way and and entanglement is one language but we believe wormholes may be the general relativistic version of that Quantum language so it's like a little Quantum net holding the whole universe together exactly right because because we find we find mathematically if we cut the threads of quantum ENT tangent which we can do mathematically space falls apart it discretizes into little tiny pieces and just disappears I got to go I got to go no chck I need you to the end of this chck don't leave me don't leave me oh my god oh my god dude that's insane it's not just that there's a field there it's the fact that they were Quantum entangled that makes the Wormhole uh model compelling yeah but I would say you don't even need the particle pairs it's as if the entanglement is entangling regions of space so space itself has a fundamental substrate woven by these threads of quantum connection now look it's mathematical but it comes out of our Cutting Edge ideas it all makes sense it just makesense he's saying he's not pulling out of his ass right okay he saying the math gave TOs and he started out saying the man my boy loves the math so now last thing yeah explain why you need more than four dimensions for your string theory Universe well it's a very concrete explanation when we look at the equations of string theory there's a consistency equation where something must equal zero or the math doesn't work that something is a product of two things one term is really complicated it's never zero the other term is a number of Dimensions minus 10 the only way to get it to be equal to zero is for D to be equal to 10 that's it I am not joking this is where the constraint of extra comes from in string theory the math is forcing our hands forces your hand and then you say well let me take this math serious one thing you could say is well if it's not D equals four three space and one time throw the theory away others of us will say hey let's consider the possibility short yeah exactly so why should these three dimensions of space be the only ones right we only are aware of them because they're big enough that we can be directly aware of them with these really faulty sensors that we have right if it's only your sensors that limit that awareness yeah why not in principle can we build something that can gain access to these higher Dimensions yeah so there are experiments on the table some have been carried out but more precise ones may be done where you study Newton's law of gravity why is Newton's law go like one over R squ why do we teach our kids GMM over r s geometri geometric sphere in three dimensions of space yes look at that sphere in four or five or six dimensions and the two in Newton's law won't be a two no it'll be a bigger number the fall off will be differently right and so look at the gravitational force on very small distances look for a deviation from the one over r squ that Isaac Newton told us about in the late 1600 because that's only in our dimensional measurement of it yes okay cuz I'd asked you again over that same lunch yeah why do we have lunch I forgot we just CCH hung we were just catching up you know it's my annual fix my annual Brian Green infusion it was could dark matter be ordinary matter with ordinary gravity in a parallel universe because for reasons I don't understand the math of the the field theory equations of you were telling me that electromagnetic energy cannot Escape our SpaceTime but gravity can in a certain model called the brain Universe where our BR an e it comes out of yeah it's a membrane so our universe is like a four-dimensional membrane floating in a higher dimensional universe that might have other membranes higher dimensional membranes yes and those other membranes like parallel to us like two slices of bread in a big loaf of bread I like it so so one slice of bread is some other membranal Universe ours is this one but it's one it's one multibrain okay and so gravity could leak out of one into the other or it could just be the yeah that's right the gravitation P that's what I'm getting so if the other Universe has six times nobody see this is where you corrected me because I was thinking because we have six times as much force of gravity operating in the universe as matter and energy can account for it okay factor of six right so I'm saying why isn't it just a parallel universe that has six times the mass and it's leakage into our universe and we're trying to feel the elephant trying to figure out what it is but it's just regular matter in Another Universe whose gravity leaked but then you said if it's in another membrane it's going to be dropping off faster than 1 over r s yeah like one over R cubed there's some higher Dimension yeah and if that's the case it has to be way more than six times but you could imagine rigging it so that it would have the right amount and people have studied this and it's hard to make these theories work in detail and but in principle it's an idea that's absolutely worthy of of investigating because that's one way to make it invisible just put it in stick it somewhere else exct and then and then we're we can still calculate with it it's not a problem right yeah that's crazy Dam oh man all right I uh I don't know what to believe about anything nothing is real nothing is real man Dark Energy I'm curious about this because it was a natural arithmetic element of Einstein's equations it's like an integration constant As I understood it you talking about the cosmological constant the ological constant in his equations that enabled latre to calculate that the universe is either expanding or the universe is not static and so there's a term there and if you've had calculus you might remember there's a constant of integration often it's just zero and you can ignore it but when we were in graduate school I'm a little older than you when we were in graduate school we always recognized we paid homage to that constant but said let's assume it's zero if this term existed it would mean there was a force operating in the universe opposite that of gravity depending on the sign of the cosmological constant but yes because it could have either sign okay it would either work with gravity or against ex but if we had a static Universe it would be something just holding up Universe against the collapse of gravity which is why Einstein and we didn't have any reason to think it so it could be zero and we just but we always had to go through that portal we say here it is we set it to zero move on okay then it gets discovered yeah okay Dark Energy gets discovered in 1998 gets the Nobel Prize using quantum physics which has done so well by us yeah perhaps the most successful Theory ever about anything fails in its attempt to predict the amount of dark energy in the universe yeah and it fails badly by a factor what's up with that Brian of a Google wow by a factor bigger than a Google 10 to the 10 10 to like it's like 10 to 123 or something Google is 10 to the 100 it gets the wrong answer by the biggest amount ever in a mismatch between Theory and observation where are we with the dark energy theorists well look what this is showing us is that quantum mechanics is incredibly successful when you apply it to the electromagnetic force to the weak nuclear force to the strong nuclear force but we've long known that when you apply it to gravity something goes wrong something changes this is the motivation for string theory and this is the motivation for trying to go beyond conventional approaches and so you're absolutely right this is the clearest signal that something is wrong now here's I think our something's wrong that's actually a good thing well it's an opportunity opportunity that's the way it's huge opportunity yeah the Press always says oh scientist or angry or this no we're delighted if something breaks oh my gosh it's a new thing exactly that's right and so I would say my guess where we're going is and many of my my colleagues agree with me that you can't quantize Gravity the way you had to quantize Faraday and Maxwell's electromagnetism or the way had to quantize the weak or strong nuclear forces it may be that gravity and quantum mechanics are already so intimately connected that it's a completely different mindset when you approach them you don't take the rules of quantum mechanics and slap them onto gravity that gets you the wrong answer that's the wrong approach in fact this idea of entanglement and wormholes suggests that gravity Quantum already already they're already there that makes sense they're already have the shotgun wedding just was in 10 exactly so you just need to understand that melding better and when you do perhaps you'll be able to do a calculation of the cosmological constant and get the right answer right yeah now another answer might be maybe the cosmological constant is not a constant right there's recent working on that now maybe it's changing over time and so you don't actually calculate the number you just need to understand the dynamical process however doesn't the math in general relativity require that it be constant no that's how it came out of the integral there can be a constant but it doesn't have to be the only contribution that looks like that constant and the other contribution can change over time what do you say there it can be a constant but but it doesn't have to look like and then no it's not the only contribution so you can have a field that slowly varies over time and that field May dominate that field is meta to that equation yes look at that it is meta to that equation absolutely so Einstein did not talk about that field he was you're right and he did talk about the constant because you're right it's just an integration con integration con it's a constant it's a constant right so if if in fact it needs to modify because that's how they reconcile this tension in the age of the universe yes because the age of the universe there's in my day we didn't know it by a factor of two now people are there's a 10% difference so it's more than 6,000 years is what you're saying yes that's exactly what I'm saying yes yes yes when Noah's flood so to relieve the tension as we describe it this was a 10% some singled digit percent uncertainty in the age of the universe actually not uncertainty these two methods have very small type uncertainties that do not overlap that's why everyone is freaking out and one as I learned recently you can resolve that by allowing the cosmal constant to vary in some way but that's a meta variation on top of now this Hubble tension that people are struggling with today is exactly something that also May Point toward a dynamical value so we we'll see but uh yes their true test of a version of gravity that you fully understand with quantum mechanics included would be a calcul of the cosmological content and get you and you people smart enough to get this figured out I don't think so and that's good answer cuz you know I've dragged you over the call because I've told him I said look you know Einstein came up with general relativity in 10 years by himself you you strength theorist dozens of you been working on this for decades either you're all wrong or you all just too stupid to figure it out and it's probably a combination love you man Brian thanks for coming back start talk always good Chuck so great Chuck we'll find you in the hospital bless you will I'm completely fried right now I am fried just to take us out let me remind us all we are in my office at the Hayden planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History the cosmic crib the cosmic crib and after this conversation we just had I Delight in realizing in celebrating the fact that just a few pounds of organic matter inside of our heads can not only contemplate but figure out how the universe works and yes we still have a long way to go and we don't even know how long a way to go remains in front of us but the distance we've come thus far gives us everything that we call civilization and it's the power of Mind Over The Mysteries of the universe and that is a product of the Eternal curiosity expressed by our species beginning in childhood continuing for some into adulthood we call them scientists those who never lost that childhood curiosity Brian Green of course among them so uh I'd like to just give a shout out to our species for all that has wondered as we looked up at night all that we have discovered and all that we have yet to figure out that is a cosmic perspective I'm Neil degrass Tyson you're a personal astrophysicist keep looking up [Music] [Music]