Breaking Down Einstein’s Greatest Papers, with Janna Levin

0:00 We're here to talk about what I reference as Einstein's crumbs. What did Einstein do in 1905? And the dude was 26 years old. He writes a series of papers, all of which completely knock the world on its proverbial art. Yes. He said, "Well, you know, what is speed? It's it's the distance you cover in space divided by the time elapsed." So, it has to do with space and time. I mean, I mean, that's a huge leap already. And he said, "I'd rather that your measures of space and time are relative than give up the absolute nature of the speed of light." Wow. So your very measuring stick changes changes relative to the other. So that you get the same answer. So that you get the same answer. That's crazy. Early 1900. Which drug is he on? I know. Was it opiovailable?

0:46 He's not doing ketamine shots. This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. Got with me is my co-host, Harrison Greenbound. Harrison, how you doing, dude? Good to be here. All right. And not your first Star Talk rodeo. Nope, not at all. All right. All right. Maybe it will be my first rodeo. I've never done a rodeo. I think I would die immediately. That's not happening here. I promise. Uh, we're going to talk about Einstein today. You going to help me out on that? I've heard of him. I need more help than that. He married his cousin. I know that. Every time we talk about Einstein and related subjects, we have our go-to person at large, Jan 11. Janet, welcome back to Star Talk. I'm

1:32 always glad to be here. You're like a regular practically. I know cuz Einstein's a regular. So, I know. I feel like I just want to hang around here all the time. Yeah. So, so Janet, you are the TAL professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Theoretical cosmologist. Yeah. I mean, I say astrophysicist these days. Or theoretical physicist only because people think cosmology is like cosmetology and stuff. Oh, okay. Right. And they wanted me to do their makeup. I want a fancy title. Fine. I'm not a comedian. I'm a punchline engineer specializing in haha building and giggle construction. So, you're director of sciences at the Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, one of my favorite places. This is quite the juxaposition of science, creativity, and art. And it

2:20 just we're creative people on on both sides of that fence, if there really is one. Yeah. Come to come together and express. I really feel like Pioneerics is a sanctuary because science is part of culture. We're not trying to hide it in something else. We're not packaging it in something else. It just exists out there and it's a big appetite for it. People want to know. And you've also written a bunch of books. I have two with me like right now. The black hole survival guide. I mean, it's like it looks tiny but it's dense like a black hole. Spoiler alert. It does not end well. It does not end well. I I could have guessed that. I think so. So, a black hole death guy, not a black hole survival guide. Exactly. The book is normal size. Neil's hand is gigantic. There's an element of truth to that.

3:06 And my favorite book I like to pronounce the black hole blue. I love that. That's the British cover. That's very nice. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I get I get around. I get around. What's the difference between the British and the Is there an extra U? Yeah. Right. Well, actually, they're completely different covers. Yeah. They decide. Yeah. Different countries, they have issues with each other's cover. They changed the Albert Einstein's teeth to make them feel less bad. In one language in translation, they changed my last name to what? Levanova, I think it was Czech. Wow. I thought that was some serious license. We'll help you out. We'll make it less Jewy. I kind of I kind of like Yeah, cuz it

3:51 made it like Italian almost. It's just a thing. Women are loving. The ova. Okay. Yeah. All right. It was a female thing. So, we're we're here to talk about what I've intermittently referenced as Einstein's crumbs. You know, when you eating a eating a meal that you enjoy and something spills over the edge, you don't even notice because the meal is so good. And then you walk away with your plate and other people see what's spilled off of your plate. Say, "Hey, I that's tasty. I want that. I can build I can work with that." So in this analogy the other scientists are my dog who comes in and is like crumbs this is the best. So these Nobel Prize winning scientists are Rufus. Thank you. I had not thought about it that just that way.

4:39 Let's benchmark ourselves Janna to do I pronounce this right? Anisabulus. It's Latin. I'll take it. 1905 quite a year. Just list for me. What did Einstein do in 1905? And by and the dude was 26 years old when this happened. Go for it. So he writes a series of papers, all of which completely knock the world on its proverbial art. Yes. Each one on its anis, if you will. I'm sure there's Latin for that. Um on it morabulous anis. That's my dating profile. So let's see. What are they? Photoelectric effect. Yes. Which which the photoelectric effect was the idea that sometimes light behaved like a particle and not a wave. And so

5:26 sometimes when you bombard a surface with light, it will knock it like a basketball might dislodge something from place as opposed to accumulating energy like a wave might. And so it really was very shocking. Was that the first demonstration that light could be also referenced as particles? Yeah, it was the first observation connection between theory and observation that it is actually behaving like a particle sometimes. Very shocking because because 1800s we thought of light as a wave and we often still do because it's very convenient to do so sometimes and sometimes it's acting like a wave. Yeah. Um but here was an instance where it really acted more like you threw a basketball at something. Um a really tiny basketball. A really tiny which was incredible for Einstein to observe because basketball hadn't been invented

6:12 yet. Yes. Right. Right. And I somehow don't see him I don't know jing with the sports analogy but anyway so photoelectric effect shocker paper one paper two paper two um special relativity where he oh just that just that so a lot of times so the theory of relativity became this real colloquial thing everything's relative and it became invested in society I often say it could have been called the theory of absolutism because what Einstein really had done is he had adhered to the absolute limit of the speed of light he took that more seriously ly than anybody else was taking it at the time. In fact, people were were struggling to get rid of it. Uh this idea that the speed of light was a constant and they were doing everything they can to dethrone that concept which really wasn't taking. So it's not just that it's a constant. It's

6:58 that it's a constant no matter how when or where you measure it. Absolutely. You're getting the same answer. Even if you're moving and the light is moving relative to you, you measure the same speed of light, right? Which doesn't exist for anything else. That's insane. That was an insane concept. cars coming at each other are coming at each other faster than if one of the cars stops, right? Okay. But that is not true at the speed of light. You run at the speed of light. Maybe you're running slowly. Maybe you're running near the speed of light yourself. It's still coming at you at the speed of light. It is chilling, strange, seems impossible. A simple example is I'm on the front of a train. Let's say the train going 60 m hour and I throw a ball 40 miles an hour. Can I throw that fast? Probably not. Okay. I know. I definitely could. I think you can do anything. I can do anything. I

7:44 thought 40 miles an hour in front of the train. You're standing on on at the platform. How fast is the ball passing you? Right. Is it not adding the two up? Yeah. Yeah. 100 miles. 100 milesPH. But I'm on the front of the train. I mean, I'm not calculating the speed. I'm worried that Needle Grass Tyson's on the top of a train throwing the ball. I'm very confused. So So now I'm on the same 60 mph train. I shine a beam of light and you measure the beam of light going by you. It is the same speed of light. It does. We don't add the trade. We don't add the trade. We don't add the trade. That's that that's bat crazy. It is crazy. And Einstein meditated on this for so long. And there's kind of a simple way to see. He he said, "Well, you know what is speed? It's it's the distance you cover in space divided by the time elapsed."

8:30 So, it has to do with space and time. I mean, I mean, that's a huge leap already. And he said, "I'd rather that your measures of space and time are relative than give up the absolute nature of the speed of light." Wow. So two, so your very measuring stick changes changes relative to the other. So that you get the same answer. So that you get the same answer. That's that's that's not your measure stick and your rate the time ticks that that's crazy. You get chills a little. So he's Which drug is he on? I know. Was it opio? What was available at the time? either. He's not doing ketamine shots. No. Okay, give me more. So, that's two. Um, brownie in motion. Talk about Give me some brownie emotion. So, if you I mean, I think that feels like a dirty topic. I don't know

9:17 if that's appropriate for this. Oh, actually, I'm not I bet Neil knows why it was called brownie. There's a guy there's a guy who first talked about the statistical observed it but didn't fully understand it. Mr. Brown, we've all observed it. So, you go to a window, the dustier the house, the better. You pull the curtains aside and you start to see all the particles move around. They don't fall like rain. They bounce around the dust particles. Yeah, the dust particles. And you can see the reflection of the dust in the air. You know, it's a kind of a beautiful image. The sight sunlight hitting reflecting off the dust particles. Dusted apart. I was going to say of grandma's my OCD like clean. Yeah. Why have you let it go so but we all have had that observation and we all know it doesn't fall like rain. Mhm. So Einstein also relates this

10:03 to the quantum nature of matter. He says fundamentally air is not a continuum. If I look at it at the microscopic level, I'm going to realize it's made up of individual molecules and the molecules are moving randomly because they're knocking into each other. They're bouncing around. You call that brownie in motion. So they bounce around randomly because they're kind of constantly knocking it banging into each other as they move around. And um it was more evidence for the quantum nature of of reality in very early. In fact, I think it was one of the first supportive bits of evidence that atoms even exist. That's right. Because you can if you in other words, you can have a big you use the air dust analogy, but in a in a in a liquid solution, uh if you have a a suspended particle that's larger than the molecules themselves, the particle

10:48 sort of moves around in response to the collective energy of all the particles that are around it. And you can calculate what should happen if this liquid is composed of these tiny particles and then you only get this motion when you have atoms doing the constant Yeah. Absolutely. And we talk that's a better word. We we talk about the temperature in the room all the time, but what that really is is the average of the thermal motions of an awful lot of particles and the statistical behavior later very well predicted by Plunk. And so this was all part of that early era of starting to understand that if I look at a glass of water, it is not a continuum. If I got small enough, it is actually made up of individual molecules. So, and it was in

11:34 the fourth paper, wasn't there? Um, E= MC². Oh, that's a pretty good one. Okay. Yeah. How could I forget about that one? Yeah. Yeah. Which so that was the whole paper. He just wrote E= MC. This has been a busy year. Except they didn't have mics then. drop totally a speaker refrigerator drop. He was working in a patent office, right? Refining things like refrigerator coolants and refrigerator cooling mechanisms. And at the bottom drawer of his desk, he had what he called the physics department. And in the physics department, he was working on these papers between refining people's patents and E= MC² is one of the most gorgeous results, obviously most famous equation. Obviously, we all love this result and the implications of it went so far beyond his initial

12:20 motivation for thinking about it, but that's the point of this whole so far beyond episode. I mean, it's changed the world as we know it in so many ways. But okay, so of those four results, yeah, two of them were stapled together for the one Nobel Prize that he got. Brownian and photoelectric. Correct. Right. And the So he's got one Nobel Prize for two things that and not for eagles. Not for not for relativity, let alone general relativity which comes 11 years later. So for me, what's intriguing is his Nobel Prize is some of the least interesting work that he's done with somebody who wins a Grammy for their worst album. Well, it was practical. It was practical. The Nobel was always very attached to verifiable

13:05 results. So, it was very hard for Stephen Hawking to get nominated for a Nobel Prize. It was surprising to me that even Roger Penrose not only was nominated but was awarded the Nobel Prize because they were so theoretical and the Nobel Prize is often awarded for things that have been verified by experiment not a minute before certainly in the day. That's the intention. That's correct. That's correct because it was the idea that if you're if it's a theoretical result could could go with the winds, right? You know, whereas you have if you anchor it in an experiment then we got we got legit. You become legit. So So let's you did this all at 26 by the time you turned 26. Yeah, I'm 38. So, this is very demotivating. Sorry. I'm already 12 years pass. Look at us both consoling. This is until

13:51 you're 38. Okay. So, when Mozart was your age, he was already dead for a year. Okay. So, I don't mean to tell your mom this. It's not going to happen. You are such a disappointment. As for Einstein's latest idea, we're still chasing. CERN is building the future circular collider, a massive machine designed to explore dark matter, antimatter, and the unknown edges of physics. Ground News analyzed over a 100 articles covering this to pull the most credible information into one place. Depending on where you look, it's either a triumph of human curiosity or a multi-billion dollar waste of time. Which is exactly why we rely on Ground News. Our partners at ground News built an app and website that bring clarity to complex stories by showing how the

14:37 world's media from scientific sources and original research to political and international outlets cover the same event. They were actually founded by a former NASA engineer with the same level of precision you'd expect for space missions. But the best part, ground news isn't some new tool to learn. They're a smarter, better version of how you're already staying informed. If you're reading about this collider somewhere else, their browser extension flags bias and links you to dozens of science focused highfactuality articles instantly. We're giving our viewers 40% off the same unlimited access vantage plan we use. Just go to groundnews.star talk or scan this QR code to bring the cost of context and clarity down to $5 a month. Be part of our mission to help

15:23 the world understand the cosmos more clearly today. Now, back to the show. So, let's pick up some of the crumbs now. All right. So, let's talk about his cosmological constant. Okay. What's up with that? I love the cosmological constants. It's like the guy couldn't be wrong. It's like he couldn't be wrong. Even when he was terribly wrong. Even when he was terribly wrong, he was right. He was somehow later would turn out to be right. Yeah. So, one of the crumbs, big a crumb, you don't even know it's going to grow into an interesting crumb later. So, your dog would need to give it a chance before it laps it He put it in his bed and he's leaving it. Yeah, I should go look up some more Einstein crumbs actually now that you're maybe maybe this will give me some I got invigorate ideas. Well, so Einstein writes down the general theory of

16:08 relativity which goes beyond special related 10 years later. Okay. Yeah. Takes kind that he wants to describe not just that space and time are relative. Not just that I can rotate space into time, that they're one kind of spacetime, but also that spacetime itself could maybe curve, stretch, be mutable, respond to matter and energy. That around the earth, the reason why the apple falls from the tree is because it's following the natural curve in space created by the mass of the earth. This is general relativity. Now, he generalizes the theory away from flat spacetime to curved spacetime. Now once he does this he still cannot predict everything that this theory suggests. It's just

16:54 abundant. It's so abundant that today people are still trying to find solutions from the theory to describe universes. And people came to him a number of different scientists from around the world very international experiment and and over very quickly and over the the next couple of years said you know your theory predicts that the universe is expanding. So other people are studying his theory. They're imagining what if I have an average distribution of galaxies in there, all this stuff now. But I I smooth it out. I imagine it's it's pretty smooth out there. And they say, "How is spaceime mutable in response to this distribution of energy?" And you would sort of think, well, a lot of gravity means things are going to recolapse. Everything is mass. And so, you know, it's all going to pull towards each other and it's going to cause a collapse of the universe. In

17:39 which case, the universe shouldn't be static, stable, or permanent. And Einstein really is resistant to this idea. He does not like it. And he he says to himself, I I must have made a mistake in my fundamental equations of general relativity that describe every possible scenario in the universe. And he adds something called the cosmological constant because technically mathematically it was consistent with Einstein's laws. And if you're being completely thorough, you would have included this term called this cosmological constant. And it's this magic term. doesn't know what it is physically, doesn't know what it refers to in terms of known forms of matter. So, you can have a math representation of an idea, not all of which actually applies to reality. Yeah. I also like the idea that you just like throw that in and be like, I don't know if my

18:25 theory is right, but I there's this magical extra thing and now it's right. He knew it was mathematically consistent. That's exactly what he legit. He said, "Look, maybe nature produces an energy density that's uniform across space and time and it is an absolute constant and it has this very different property that it actually pushes the universe outward and if I tune it to exactly the right value, I'm going to balance things and the universe will not collapse and it will be permanent and it will it will exist that way forever. The universe is doing anything at all." Right. But the ow it doesn't owe you. Right. The universe is just there and if it's just there you got to somehow stabilize it. Yes. So he stabilized the universe with the cosmological constant. There you go. There. Now he has a universe that's permanent, has lived forever, will last

19:11 forever, but not so fast because very quickly people study the mathematics of this and they say it's very unstable. You basically have stood a pencil on its tip on the top of a hill and said it's stable. I mean you can do it for a second, but it very quickly wants to fall over and begin to do something. It'll fall in one direction or the other or the other. And the two directions in this case collapse or expansion. Yes, there you go. So, either the universe is collapsing or it's expanding. It does not want to stay static. And uh he called it his greatest blunder. Now, he made a lot of kind of mathematical mistakes. So, he was not afraid of that. And he was really so experimental and so daring. So, the idea that he even called it a blunder, I think, was because it was a blunder of intuition. Wait, wait, wait. Resistance. Wait, but wait, it's

19:59 not a blunder until it's a blunder. So he puts it in reluctantly and then Hubble comes along later later in the telescope came first. Yes. Edwin Hubble. Yes. Comes along in the same decade discovers that the universe is not static. It's expanding. Mhm. So now we're okay because that's one of the signs. That's one of the signs. And so you don't even need the cosmological const. You don't even need the cosmological constant. So he comes along and says look the universe is not dominated by the cosmological constant from what what he could measure. It's dominated by the galaxies and the galaxies are in fact expanding away from each other. The universe is in fact expanding and um it was a real shock. We

20:46 had no physical way to understand a force or pressure in the universe going opposite gravity. There was there was no there was no way there was no and then philosophically what is it expanding into? I know that's we haven't got there. We'll get there. Yeah. But but you know, at the time Einstein was first doing this, especially 1905, I mean, he didn't know there were other galaxies out there. I mean, imagine that. We knew about the Milky Way, our our little island of hundreds, the stars in the night sky and that was that. And I mean he imagined I mean but but it wasn't until Hubble that we identified that some of those objects out there really were first of all other galaxies and that they were all moving away essentially on average and that it looked like the universe was in fact expanding. So at that point he doesn't

21:31 need the cosmological constant and then he declares his greatest blunder his and then fast forward to 1998 right and there it is and we discover the cosmological constant operating in the universe. It's measured and it wins a Nobel Prize for him. No. God damn it. Plus they don't give it to you if you're dead. All right. No, they don't they don't announce it might have happened unless you're alive. But if you die between the announcement and the award ceremony, then you're okay. Then you're still hold on. You got to hold on to the announcement. Yeah. If you die, you still get the award, but you're dead. All right. So, in this sense, what he rejects as a blunder becomes an actual

22:19 measurement and they get the Nobel Prize for making that measurement. So now the reason why they can measure it even though it's not static, you might think, oh, they could only measure it if it made the universe static or something. It it actually was very unstable. What it really wants to do is kind of dominate. So as all the energy density in the universe kind of slowly waines, this constant is eventually there to peak above all the others as they dilute away. It just doesn't go away. And so eventually there's a permanent feature of the background permanent feature. It's crazy empty space, right? There's no way that it is the energy of empty space. The energy of empty space. So eventually it will dominate the property of the universe. And what it does when it dominates is it drives the universe not only to expand but to expand at an

23:04 accelerated rate faster and faster. Dark energy. I've heard about the energy of NPCs from my realtor. They walk around. They say you should feel the just feel there's nothing in here yet, but you should feel this energy of sell air rights. Right. Exactly. Maybe they should charge you extra for the dark energy. Yeah. in the air rights. Don't give them that idea. And in 10 to the 22 years, which is a long time from now, that's a pretty long time. Pretty long time, but I have it on my calendar. Um, the dark energy will become so dominant and the expansion will become so accelerated that the fabric of spaceime cannot keep up with it and it will rip. Well, that's not You don't want to be alive there. It's called the big rip. That's if it goes unchecked. the big

23:52 rip. So if there are still humans that far out, they have to figure a way to to not have it rip, right? It'll rip the very structure of the fabric of space cosmological climate change. Like they'll have, you know, like does it happen instantaneously or do they feel it slowly start to happen or is it like they're just they just know at a certain time? I know. You start seeing it all around you. Stuff starts flying apart. Oh yeah, look that that face like it's going to happen in your lifetime. So now here's the great great great grand. Maybe you don't know this one. Okay. He predicts based on general relativity. Mhm. That if you have an alignment of two objects, one of them will get lensed around it and you get what is called an Einstein ring. Because if two objects are perfectly aligned together, the curvature of space will take that light

24:39 and spread it into a perfect ring. And so you would see rings around stars in the night sky from another star that's exactly aligned behind it. Here's the problem. Mhm. Back then the universe was composed only of stars and stars are so small at those distances. You would never get an exact alignment. So he said this will probably never get observed until we discover whole galaxies out in the universe. And so it's no longer a point of light. The galaxy has a whole field. So there many places you can be behind a galaxy and still have this phenomenon. So we see gravitational lenses all the time. Yeah. And we we we see it around black holes. That's how we detected a black hole. We took a picture of a black hole because the light from behind it went above and below and cast

25:28 the shadow of the black hole. There's no above or below in space. Went around. You in my office went around. Went around like it's all north. So that was one that he predicted assumed there would never be found. And then in my lifetime, like while I'm in graduate school, we'd discover gravitational lenses cuz people found these objects hanging off the side. I said, "What is that? Why is a little distorted?" A whole arc. It's a whole arc. And then he took a spectrum of it and exactly matched the spectrum of the object on the other side. And that's the splitting of the light around the object. So that's another little crumb that fell off the dude's plate. Okay. So tell me about black holes themselves. Yeah. Well, black holes also predicted

26:14 from his mathematical theory, but not by Einstein. He did not predict. Well, you know, there's it's as I said abundant. It's endlessly productive. So, black holes are crumbs yet to be shaped crumbs. Yeah, you have to go at the equations to decide what you want to think about because it describes every possibility imaginable. Once you put matter and energy in, how will space and time curve? So, I could How does that couch curve spaceime? Not a great question. scientifically, not one most people aren't going to spend their time on, but one guy decided, you know, it's he's on the Russian front during World War I. Uh Carl, yes. Did he die on the front? He did. He died like six months after I think there's correspondence with Einstein where he sends him he said, "I found a very simple solution to your equation." Did he die in the front? Because he was busy writing letters to

27:00 Einstein. I know, but not paying attention to the bullets. Hey, buddy. You're on the front. Yeah. Um Yeah. I think he contracted some infection. Oh, it was quite dire. A lot of people back then died of non-bullet injuries. Related. Yeah. So, but he said imagine it was a thought experiment. Imagine you took all the mass of a star and you crushed it to a point and or it could have been a planet or it could have been anything. So, you're imagining that all the masses at the center in a point. You don't ask how nature would do such a thing. I don't even think Schwarzel believed that there was a way nature would do such a thing. Certainly Einstein didn't. But the math was sound. It described the curvature of spaceime. if you're far away around a star or the earth, but as you get closer and closer and all the mass is still in front of you, eventually you form this event horizon where not even light can

27:46 escape. That's really what we mean by surface gravity gets higher and higher. Yeah. Just gets because the mass is always in front of you. If you think about it like if I go inside the sun, the the gravity drops off because I'm leaving some of the mass behind. Oh, you're vaporizing vaporizing that complication, right? It's right. I always say, you know, black holes are much more benign than people give them credit for. You're right. The star is incendiary, right? Right. But the black hole you can get real close. So this is you can't get out. So we call this the Schwarz solution to Einstein's equations. Yes. So Schwarz does this. Yes. And but he dies so no Nobel Prize for him but it's still an amazing result. And Einstein doesn't think they're real. He says it's beautiful. He helps get it published and he couldn't believe that that such a simple solution came out so quickly. It was within six months or that nature would even allow

28:31 it. Yes. He he thought nature would not allow it. Yeah. that there could be some something that arises that prevents such a catastrophic collapse of matter itself, right? I mean, staring at this guy. No. Yeah. Well, try to crush a soda can. It's It's nearly impossible to get past a certain point. It's hard to do. It's hard to crush things because there's matter forces that resist, right? That's a soda can with soda in it. I could otherwise totally crush a soda can. Okay. Can I be clear about like a demo and I want to see at only to a point. You can't make a black hole. No, not a black hole. Right. Right. Right. Because the the atomic forces will resist. Now, so I have to share this quick story with you. I'm having dinner with Stephen Hawking and nice flex. And so I was talking about Isaac Newton.

29:17 Mhm. Where he did not figure out that the solar system was stable using his own equations. Okay. It turns out in the solar system, here's the sun and here's like Earth going around. You're Jupiter. Every time I go between the sun and Jupiter, you're saying I'm very big. So, no, I'm saying you're gashes. I've been I've been working I've been working to get to Mars. I'm saying you're you're bulbous and gaseous. So, Earth comes around and it feels you would tug a little because you're closer here, right? And then over here and it comes back around. It feels a little tug. So, all these little tugs, he knew that if this continued, Earth would just fly out of its orbit for thousands, millions of years. this would just be this runaway

30:03 destabilizing force going on in the solar system. And you know what he said? He said God must step in and fix things because I that's how badass he is. He said my I know my equations do my so the only thing because we see a stable solar system. Okay. But late 100 years later, 100 years later, Llas comes up with a formalism, a branch of he develops with others, but he develops a branch of calculus. Mhm. That can demonstrate that these little tugs, which are multiple little tugs on a major system, all cancel out. It's called pertabbation theory. But it's just a branch of calculus. The dude invented calculus,

30:48 right? Yeah. So you can't you can't figure that out. So I asked Hawin I said how come he didn't figure it out cuz who else are you going to ask if not Stephen Hawking right? So and you waited a very very long time for a Yes I did. Thank you. So so I went on to other conversations. Right. He's like my entire with his eye blinks. He's assembling the answer. Wow. And it must have been 20 minutes. 20 minutes later he said something simple and brilliant. He said, "You can't think of everything." That took about that 20 minutes to type. No, no, no. You can't think of everything. And I said, "That is so beautiful that" And then he went on to say to follow that with Einstein did not come up with black holes. That's

31:35 right. Because you can't think of everything. Can't think of everything. And I said that that that's comforting actually. I mean, an entire industry of scientists have been since still working on Einstein's equations. I got another one for you. Okay. He wrote a research paper on the stimulated emission of radiation. This is an extraordinary result that you have to kind of be on the inside to appreciate. Okay, I'll tell you what it is. You ready? So, you have an atom with these energy levels where the electron hangs out. It's in discrete energy levels. It can't hang out anywhere. This is quantum. A quantum is units of anything. Okay? So, it's quantized. Even solace quantum Think about it. If you have a quantum of solids, very marquees somehow. Yes, it is. So,

32:23 the the electron can only be in any one of these discrete levels at any given time. And if it's at a higher level, left to itself, it'll want to deexite back to a lower level. And it shoots out a photon in so doing. So, this is what atoms just want to do. If you excite them, they want to deexite. We got this. Okay. So, let's go back to our atom and we have an electron hanging out in an energy level. Now, I send in light photons that are exactly the energy level that'll boost this up. So, it's going to absorb those and take them up. Okay? It's going to do that. However, oh no, here's what he discovers. that if you bathe an atom with an electron at a

33:10 given level of photons that would boost it, it will also spontaneously trigger it to deexite at the same time. Yes. Exciting and de. No, no, no. I mean it will it will not all the all the photons will not go to just boost it. Gotcha. Being in that bath will also deexite it for for there's no there's no classical understanding of that. Okay. So, it's the stimulated emission of radiation. Normally, when you stimulate it, it absorbs it. This one, you shine on it, it deexites. Okay. That's a weird result. Yeah. It's a quantum result that he deduces using math and quantum physics. Okay. And what

33:56 do we get out of this? Well, we got lasers. Lasers. You say that so calmly. Lasers. We get lasers. pull your hair, pull some, grab some. So, it's really an interesting history because there were also masers before lasers, which were microwave versions of this. And Joe Weber, who wanted to study gravitational waves, was working on masers and they were they were completely overrun by the laser. A full acronym uh microwave uh amplitude stimulated emission resonance or something. Laser. Laser stands for You get a C minus on that one. Laser stands for look and stare experience regret. Oh, very good. On the spot. Or or it's like remember George Castanza

34:42 with the laser pointer. So it's like look a Seinfeld episode reference. Oh hey this guy's good. That's very good. That's very good. Let's from here on let us call it so so so the laser is an acronym like scuba and all these fun acronyms laser light amplification amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation and those are the three words I did in his paper so so light would be yeah the sir of laser so it' be visible light but you can it works with any kind of photons microwaves it turns out it's easier to make a microwave laser microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation So this was this is just some paper he does like while he's taking a crap. All right, and publishes it and then his boot paper I don't know

35:29 if he was actually on experiencing some brownie in motion if you will. So brown a brownie in movement. Yes. Yes. Uh so that for me that's my favorite is it? Of his crumbs. Of his crumbs. Interesting. I mean it's it's an unbelievable technological advance. It's incredible. It's everywhere. Yeah. Because because the amplification is if you emit light in this bath of light and that light you emit is the same light when brought around that will deexit it and emit a photon. So the so it's it's almost self feeding. The light that it emits is the same light that it then absorbs. So this this loop is can you you can pump light that way with the

36:16 right number of molecules in the right cavity. Oh my gosh. And it becomes very coherent and very tight beam and very intense. Yes. So it's a way of getting like this incredible intensity at this one very narrow frequency range or light range. Yeah. And so at the time I'm sure he was saying to himself skin peel, right? I was like I'm going to have a little laser. Yeah. I mean the application of laser were Oh my god. So the pe the people who invented the laser, I think it was Charlie Towns, got a Nobel Prize for that. Wow. Did you expect it to be in like a Walmart? Yeah, I know. At the checkout line. Yeah. Yeah. No, the first lasers were were huge. And so just the idea that here's a paper that 30 years later becomes a device and the device gets the Nobel

37:02 Prize. Incredible. Do you know when Towns got the Nobel Prize? So the laser was invented 1956 57 and Einstein died in 1955. Mhm. So he would not so close to seeing the lake. So close. So close. And they were going to operate on him cuz he had some element that was No. No. Stop. And he said he was already in his 70s or something. He said, "Uh, my work is done." Did he really? Yes. I thought that was classy. He was just scared of medical care. I mean, he was still so combative with quantum mechanics. I'm Yeah. He give me the quote. Which one? The God does not play dice. God does not play dice. was it Neils Boore who said back to him another physicist Einstein stopped telling God what to do. He kept it was one of several times he talked about God

37:49 and God's intentions because quantum physics is fundamentally statistical. It's not does not describe a unique objective reality. It only describes a statistical reality. And this felt very bad to Einstein even though he made significant contributions to quantum physics. This feels like a trend though because Newton also is like I don't know God. Yeah, bring a God when you need him. So, a couple of fast other ones. So, he predicts out of general relativity that certain phenomenon should produce ripples in Oh, yeah. space-time continuum. Gravitational waves, right? Gravitational waves. So he says look if the earth can curve spacetime if the if the sun can curve space time so that the earth falls around the sun then if these

38:35 systems move around the curves have to move too. So the curves themselves have to modulate like waves and he predicted something called gravitational waves which are these silent waves in the shape of spaceime and they are not visible. It's not light. It's pure gravity. It's not light, but if you saw something, you could see a bobbing on the wave as its path changed um around a moving object. So, if the sun decides to, you know, do something crazy, we would know eight minutes later when the wave got to us. So, I I think I have this right. There's a cottage industry rising up in astrophysics where they're looking at the pulsars in the galaxy. Pulsars are very fast rotating stars that have extremely precise timing. precise. So if there's a gravitational

39:22 wave not coming towards us but passing across our field of view, we can see the effect of the turbulent space-time wave on the timing of the pulsar as it goes through the wave and then you can see them move across the universe. They'll bobble around. They're like buoys on on the ocean. Yes. They'll just you'll see this effect as that happens. And so it's like whoa. So he wrote many papers where he thought they didn't exist. So he really struggled with whether or not these he had his go right. I don't know black holes exist but maybe well gravitational waves were really confounding whether they carried energy or were real in a substantive way or was just oh I'm just changing my coordinates. It's just it's

40:09 not physically real. There's no physical impact. This was confounding for decades. He once would write he he wrote papers where he said they do not exist. They would be accepted for publication and in the space between publication and sending it to press, he would change the entire paper and say they do exist. In the space between it being accepted, yes. Between it being accepted and going into print, he would change the entire conclusion, rewrite the paper and say they do exist. He wants to be writing another papers. Right. Right. Right. Right. So then we decide maybe we can detect some of these. And Kip Thorne, who was a guest on our show, we took Star Talk to him because he's Kip Thorne. Right. We we moved the mountain to Kip Thorne. We went to his home office in Pasadena. He's a professor at a emeritus now I think at Caltech and we talked about Interstellar because he was

40:54 a executive producer on Interstellar. He wrote the original treatment. It's like his dream idea. He did write the original treatment. He brought on Christopher Nolan to to realize those views. It wasn't the other way around. So he uh petitions Congress and the National Science Foundation and other agencies to and with a lot of support from other physicists and the like. Right. Yeah. To build Mhm. the first gravitational wave detector. Mhm. And it's built, it's called LIGO, laser interferometer gravitational observatory, LIGO, sensibly abbreviated, LIGO. And they they they made it really sensitive to this. They have the two lasers that go off at right angles and if a wave washes over Earth, the length of one laser path will change relative

41:40 to the other. They make this measurement. Mhm. Bada bing, they found the first colliding black holes which deposited so much energy into the space-time continuum that it would have we'd have a chance of measuring it. Yeah. I mean, it was the most powerful event humanity's ever observed since the observation of the Big Bang itself. More energy came out of this all in gravitational waves in utter darkness. Utter darkness. And yet and that the power was greater than all the stars in the observable universe combined at that moment. So, but it all came out just in ringing space, literally. So, darkness, right? Could not see it with a telescope. And so, think about it. I love the look on your face. Thank you for that. He's looking back and forth like No, no, this is I'm trying to think of anything else that would be more

42:26 powerful than those stars combining. I'm stuck at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelson. When those stars came together, we all felt it. That was a moment. It was a tectonic ship. So, we discover gravitational waves. Mhm. That won a Nobel Prize. But more so, we discovered gravitational waves using lasers. Okay. His crumbs connected. His crumbs came together and made a big smorgish board of science and physics and Nobel prizes for everybody on board. So, can you get more amazing than that? I mean I don't I didn't The detection was essentially in the centenery too of

43:11 Einstein. It was in 2015 years after his gravitational wave papers. Oh man. Yeah. That's Einstein has something magic. Einstein totally had something to do with that. Now Janna memory serves Einstein was a big proponent of a unified field theory. And when I first heard that when I was a kid field, what do you mean by field? I didn't know that field was synonymous with forces. Right? So we have gravitational force, electromagnetic force, which in its day was the electric force and the magnetic force and then the force and I've seen Star Wars. Maybe they they maybe they figured it out. They got the one force, you know. Uh so with the work of Hinrich Herz and

43:59 and others we figured out how to combine electricity and magnetism to make one force and we take that word for granted but they used to be two whole separate words electromagnetic force. So Einstein why did he fail at this or what what what was motivating him? Well we've all failed at this. So okay, so there's great success in unifying all of the matter forces, all of the quantum matter forces, electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. That's the whole story of matter. Done. Completely sealed. Yeah. But they're not there's an outlier. Well, so the electroeak theory is combined. Weak. So we went from electro electricity, magnetism, and the weak nuclear force. Right. Then we got electromagnetism. And then with my guy from my high school, right? Uh um which guy from your high

44:44 school? What? Steve Weinberg and Sheldon Glow. They and was his high school. Who's the third one in there? Uh Salam Salam, right? That's correct. So the three of them, two of them were classmates in my high school before me, but in my high school. Anyhow, they there was something in the water there. They managed to conjoin the electromagnetic force and the weak force and they called it what? Electroak. Okay, that's not very creative, but all right, we'll go with it. But it is pretty magical. It says that those are really one force which is magical. Something that is at nuclear ranges that we do not experience in our everyday life separate forces today. You go back in time there's a point where they were just one expressed force in the universe. So that gives us electroeak strong force and gravitation. Yeah. Now the strong easily can get in there even

45:31 though we don't talk about it very much anymore. What do you mean easily? If you did that you'd have a Nobel Prize now. So well there's something called the grand unified theories and and they have certain failures. There isn't like an ideal grand unified theory, but but really there's nothing barring the possibility of it. I mean, it's it's it's no obvious obstacle. There's no fundamental obstacle to a grand unified theory. Most people think it's going to come along for the ride when we do the full unification. So, when Einstein said a unified field theory, was he thinking just that or was he also want to include gravity? He wants gravity. He wants gravity. He wants gravity. It's the same thing he did when he went from special to general. When he started thinking about quantum mechanics, he wants a quantum theory. Gravity behaves so differently from the other forces because you can think of gravity not even as a force but as the just falling down the curvature of space and time.

46:17 That's geometry. It's geometry. It's not really a force. So So that could be a barrier to summing these together. Well, it's Nobody's ever succeeded at even So how about Kip Thorne? Does he have some ideas here? Does he Oh, well I mean Kip has endless ideas. He does. And I and I think Interstellar 2. Yes. I I think Kip's ambition is for yes a universe that would be completely comprehensible which would mean we either understand quantum gravity or we understand that gravity is not fundamental those are the two kind of choices that everything's quantum mechanics now I don't know quantum mechanics is the most successful idea we've ever had about anything in the universe I don't think any prediction has ever failed no and and and to the largest number of decimal points of any scientific theory in the history of time whereas general general relativity as

47:02 badass as it is We know where its limits are. Like at the center of a black hole is a singularity. It gives you a singularity in the equations. And I don't know what that's where they say where God is dividing by zero. You're not supposed to divide by zero. Yes. Bad. Well, even Roger Penrose who talked about the singularity in his Nobel Prize of recent years. Even in that paper, he says, I don't really think this part's going to survive. He really says, uh, quantum mechanics will probably get rid of the singularity. So, it was but it hasn't, but it hasn't done any of the things it was supposed to do around gravity. The point is more crumbs more crumbs the attention of brilliant people either walk among us or are yet to be born. I'm just going to throw in because this is very relevant to this wormholes which Einstein talked about the Einstein rose and bridges which ultimately give

47:48 rise to wormholes might be involved in understanding that things like black holes and gravity aren't fundamentally real. They're just sort of embroidered out of quantum wormholes. And so it might really be another one of Einstein's crumbs. embroidered out of quantum wormholes and not threads. So, more crumbs from Einstein to come. Wow. Is anybody Is there Keep your eyes on wormholes. Is there any other scientist that that is that a messian eater, so to speak? Has anybody else left? Isaac Newton was badass, too. Okay. In fact, I think if Isaac Newton were a contemporary of Einstein, he would have done everything Einstein did and more. Whoa. I'm I'm a Newton guy. Okay. Yeah, you're you're a real Newton guy. Yeah. Yeah. You got to give me something here. Yeah. I'm a Newton guy. I mean, calculus is pretty impressive. That's pretty good. Yeah. Just like on a dare. It's like I I Why are your orbits

48:35 moving in ellipses rather than circles? So, I don't know. Let me get back to you on that. I'm going to eat an apple. Yeah. Let me go back. And well, here's why. And well, how did you do that? Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to show that. Okay, Isaac, we So, if you'll indulge me just for a moment, I need to reflect on our conversation. Love me some mathematics. Why? It was early on when I learned when I wanted to be an astrophysicist that the language of the universe is mathematics. Now, that's an extraordinary fact because we just invented mathematics out of our heads. The history of math is filled with

49:23 examples of I don't know how that works. let me invent a way to calculate with it so that I can figure out how it works. Thus is the rise of of arithmetic and algebra and trigonometry and calculus. All of this helps us commune with the cosmos. But what makes it even more extraordinary is you start out with an idea of how the universe works. But you can't manipulate that idea because you're stuck with using only words. If you make a mathematical representation of that idea, then you can manipulate that idea using the perfect logic of mathematics. And by doing so, you can

50:10 extend the idea in places you didn't even know the idea could go. because you're extending it with perfectly logical steps from the map of that idea into the world of mathematics. The fact that that works for us at all leaves me in awe of not only the existence of mathematics but of the human mind that took us there. And here we have in the likes of Albert Einstein laying down a physical idea of how the universe works, attaching a mathematical model to it. And the rest of us run with that mathematical model. Crumbs from Einstein's plate leading to Nobel prizes that at some

50:58 level should have all gone to him. My boy should have had eight, nine, 10 Nobel prizes. But he's sharing his genius with the rest of us in these the 20th and 21st centuries. More to come from Einstein's crumbs and that is a cosmic perspective. So Jana, thank you for helping out here. Thanks. I'm always glad to be here. And you have a podcast. Tell me. Oh, right. Joy of why. I love that. Joy. The joy of why. Um that is that's a beautiful title. Yeah, Quantum Magazine. So, the story is uh my friend Steve Strogats, who's the original host of the show. It's uh by Quantum Magazine from the Simons Foundation, wonderful science magazine. His book was called The Joy of X Mathematician. And I thought it was a

51:44 brilliant title. And so, the show was originally called Joy of X called The Joy of Lex, which is all about language and words. There's another one I think called The Joy of Sex. That started it all. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yes. That was the original. So, Steve and I co-host the show. It's a lot of fun. We deep dive hardcore physics. Excellent. Biology, computer science. Good. And the Simons Foundation from Jim Simons, the very successful Wall Street trader. I think he's the most Wall Street trader there ever was. And he's the original quant. His background in in math and and physics. A brilliant mathematician and an accomplished mathematician. Like we still use his mathematical results and theoretical. I took a ride on his yacht. It was called the Archimedes. That's That's classy. Jim was the best.

52:29 All right, I think we did justice to the crumbs here. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, guys. Always fun. Yeah, thanks for filling in those gaps and taking us to the next step. And Harrison, you're on the road with your your routine. Yes, I have my comedy magic show. Uh, we've been off Broadway. I'm taking it on the road and I'm doing a stand up all over the country. And Harrison Harrison Greenbomb.com. We'll we'll look for it. All right. This has been Star Talk, the Einstein Crumbs edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.