Cosmic Queries – Quantum Consciousness with Charles Liu

Harry, Chuck, something cool always happens when we have our geek in chief. Chuck Lou. He's the best. With his new book on quantum, people started asking about quantum physics. My favorite was quantum consciousness. Quantum consciousness. And boy, did we bask in that. Oh, yes. Straight in the deep end. Right to the deep end. Some of us drowned. Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. star talk begins right now this is star talk special edition neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist and if a special edition you know that means gary o'reilly's in the house gary how you doing i'm good neil i'm good it's cold but i'm feeling okay cool that's all right colder than your uk roots would ever have for you in this moment for sure but we are getting the world cup yes and you used to play professional soccer yes i'm interested okay i'm gonna check nice baby how you doing man that's right chuck nice who played no soccer no football no nothing so this is a special edition grab bag yeah oh yeah and we have for certain grab bags only ones that like achieve great heights we we put we put up the bat signal to call in the geek in chief charles lou charles how you doing man our returning champion chuck lou it is so good to be back with you all i played soccer when i was a kid too i was usually the goal oh not the goalie not the goal the goal the goal okay yes so then he twisted his ankle and he turned to astrophysics we're after. Yeah. So Charles, you're a professor of physics and astronomy or just astrophysics? Both of those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see University of New York on Staten Island. Yes, that's right. And you also, I'm loving the fact that every couple of years, there's a book that comes out of you. Most recently in the Handy Answer series. Yes. A series of books where, you know, you just want to, you know, they're not going to insult you by saying it's for dummies. That's right. They want to elevate you and say, we know you're curious. We know you've got questions. Awesome. And so this one is the handy, the latest, the handy quantum physics question book. Yeah. Yeah. Right here. That's it right there. I'm sorry. Quantum physics answer. Answered man. That's right. That's right. Question book. Right. You see these days answers we have, right? So if you want an answer, here it is. But what we really need to do is to know what questions to ask next. If we're moving forward in the science, this is a guidebook, right? It's not a textbook or anything, but it's like, here, you want some answers? Here they are. And a lot of people, they've heard, you know, quantum is all the buzzwords lately. It really is. And they just want to become fluent in it, which is a great way to make that happen. Right. Now we solicited questions from our fan base and, but we told them that they were going to you. So those who are already plugged into your geek and chiefitude probably are going to take us there, but I haven't seen the questions. So who's got the questions? Gary, Chuck? We do. Chuck and I. I'll start us off this first question. By the way, before we go any further, Chuck, I don't know if you can see this, but that's you next to Michelle Obama on my Kendall, baby. That's right. So yeah, man, I am truly on the, the, yeah, there you go, buddy. That's you right there. You see that? That's you on my Kindle. You are actually next to, so a picture of his book is next to a picture of her book. No, it's, it's his book. It's just in digital form. You just said, I have the picture of you next to Michelle Obama. I said, I didn't know my boy was hanging out with Michelle. Oh, well, yeah, it's his book and her book. I don't know her. Okay. Hence my confusion here. Okay. All right. Let's start these questions off. Here we go. All right. I'll kick us off. Morgan Fisher from Waterloo, Ontario. It's a slightly longer one, so bear with me. It is my understanding that quarks always exist in pairs and separating the pairs creates enough energy to generate a new quark. Here's my question. If the universe ends in a big rip that means that everything right down to quarks will be torn apart, but tearing apart quarks generates new quarks. Could this mean another big bang? If so, does this provide evidence that our current universe is simply one in an infinite number of universes that emerge, exist, then undergo another big rip from the infinite past to the infinite future? And that's a variant on an earlier question that we got that none of us could answer. when if a nucleon is falling into a black hole and the tidal forces become so great, it breaks apart the nucleon into quarks and then it wants to break apart the quarks. It breaks apart the quark and forms two new quarks. And it just keeps doing that all the way down to the singularity. And it seemed to me you would have a quark catastrophe if that kept up. We took it to- Brian Green. Brian Green. Okay. Everybody's scratching their head. This feels like the same kind of question, Charles. Well, it's a little bit different, but we'll address that big rip part first. Yeah. Okay. Remember this question, which is a great question, by the way, love our Canadian friends who come up with great questions, come up with great answers too. The issue is that the big rip is a scenario of the expanding universe and the end of the universe that is true only if dark energy has a particular kind of characteristic where it's kind of negative. OK, that's known often as the phantom energy scenario of dark energy. And for that to be true, then that would mean that when quarks split up because of some sort of internal energy, not like what we're trying to do, but like some sort of a dark energy split, they won't create new quarks. So why not? The solution, because of the dark energy characteristic, the phantom dark energy itself basically allows for the creation of negative particles or negative energy particles. And these things don't exist as far as we have ever found. Wait, so we split the quark, then I have an isolated quark sitting out there minding its own business? No, you split the quark and it becomes something completely different. It doesn't become quarks anymore. Oh, so it's a different... You wind up with a decay of sorts. It's a different reaction. Right, right. So you're not worried about that aspect of things if it's not a big rip. Chuck, I think he's trying to wiggle out of this one. What do you think? No. It's a different particle. If you want me to circle back to what Jana and Brian were trying to talk about, I don't have any more insight than they do. They are much closer to the forefront of quantum research than I am. But what I would say is that you're thinking of a quantum particle like a quark, like a classical particle, which feels tidal forces, right? If you think of a quark instead of a thing that can be pulled apart, like our bodies, like from our noses to our feet or something like that, then you get this weird catastrophe. But if you think of it as a packet of energy or quantum information, then as it falls in, it doesn't get stretched physically. It gets changed in a way, perhaps because of the tremendous gravitational tides and influences, but it will not actually wind up with more quarks. You'll wind up with a bundle of energy going to the event horizon and the event horizon growing to encompass it. That's my intuition. I think I would have to work the math out to make sure. But Morgan's question is predicated on the fact that there is a big rip. Correct. And therefore, it becomes rinse and repeat. But what if there's no big rip? That's right. Right now, the odds are there is not going to be a big rip based on really because of the the necessity of the condition that a big rip requires, as far as we know, this idea of phantom energy being the dark energy component of the universe. And that would imply that we should see negative energy particles popping out in the universe like random. These are generally these do they have negative gravity? They would have negative gravity. They would be able to push space forward. The Alcubiere warp drive, for example, could be found. All those kinds of things. We could make wormholes. That is another possibility. But we don't see them. We haven't seen a single wormhole. We haven't seen a single white hole. So the existence of those things has not yet been confirmed and appears to be contradicted or refuted by the fact that we don't see these things. that phantom energy is not what dark energy actually is but that's just the opposite of in math well then well then let it since we don't know so then what is dark energy chuck i don't know i have no idea i have zero idea all we know attitude while you address my guest here it's okay it's okay listen here's something yeah i have no idea but i'll tell you something else that's been really interesting. Maybe we can save this for later in the show if there are other questions regarding this. But I was at the American Astronomical Society meeting not too long ago in Phoenix. And I was just so happy. There was just a lovely time. I'm still basking in it, even though it's been a little while. But one of the last speeches, one of the last talks in that conference was about the nature of dark energy. The dark energy survey, which has now gathered information about 15 million galaxies and where they're placed in the universe seems to show that what we have counted as dark energy, the cosmological constant, is probably not constant. It looks like it's actually changing, which is really amazing, which adds still more speculation as to what this dark energy actually is, because you have to account for the fact that it looks like the universe doesn't have a constant cosmological constant. And just to be clear, our assumption that it was constant comes directly from Einstein's equations. Correct. His equations require it to be constant. So if it's not constant, it means Einstein's general relativity is missing something about it as a model of the universe. Not so smart are you now, Einstein, are you? No, it just means that lambda, the number that he had put as a number, is a function of time. It changes the equations. It means that Albert was just, and he himself admitted it, it was a temporary thing that made the equations work he had no idea if there was anything physical about it right and so now we're actually trying to see whether albert's prediction of its existence is leading to something physical and so the fact that it might be dependent on time or the age of the universe is further evidence that it is something physical and not just mathematical Oh, snap. Yeah. Okay, but that really makes, that makes things super freaky then. Like, if you're factoring in time as part of the equation, that's insane. That's a whole other dimension. I mean, you've opened up a whole new world. That's right. You know? That's crazy. That's right. Oh, my God. It shows you how far away from knowing certainty we are. Absolutely. 95% of the material in the universe is still wholly unknown to human science. Only 95%. 96. Okay, maybe 96. We'll have this figured out in no time. Yeah. We're almost there. Yeah, we're almost there, man. We only got 96% more to figure out. I would have worded that slightly differently. I would say 95% of what is driving the universe is unknown to us rather than 95% of the material. Because I don't know if it's material. Who knows what it is? You don't know. Yeah, right. You don't even know if it's material. We can't even say if we can call it material. Right. Yeah, I use the term material to be as general as possible. I didn't call it matter. I didn't call it energy. I didn't call it particles. Right. I mean, an even better ambiguous word would be like the stuff of the universe. Yeah, stuff. Right? Stuff. Yeah. I kind of like that. Stuff. Anyway. Yep. Lots in there to unpack for the future. Yeah. Wow. And for those who are ego, who want to be ego stroked, this is the opposite of that. Where, you know, we're not even the majority of the stuff in the universe. Right. Right. Right. Not by a long shot. Take that one home. Yeah. Crying your pillow on that one. I got to tell you, doesn't bode well for the creationists. I'm just saying I'm not trying to start anything I'm just saying I'm God and I'm sitting up here and I'm like I'm going to create a universe and I think I'm going to let you guys have 4% of it but it's all for you the whole thing is for you no I love you I love you I love you and it's all for you 4% that's what you get you get for it I'm Nicholas Costella, and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. You got another one. Here we go. This is Raphael, who says, greetings, Dr. Tysons and Lou, and of course, the cosmological constant Lord Nice, Raphael Vigod in Toronto, Canada. Okay. He gave me a phonetic spelling of his name. I still think I got it wrong. The behavior of light seems to be intrinsic to both relativity and quantum mechanics. Yet the two systems cannot be reconciled, at least not so far. Is there a single explanation for this? And is the imposition of observation or measurement an obstacle that just can't be overcome? Dang. I like that. Wow, Chuck. Okay. The answer is the key to the answer, shall we say, Raphael. And again, an excellent question is we have not yet reconciled the situation. You see, general relativity's mathematical equations operate well down to a particular limit. But at that limit, it stops working in terms of how it explains how the universe works. Could you just give us a little overview there? Because like you say that, but what you're saying requires a lot of understanding. Sure. Real basic. okay einstein's general theory of relativity in in very general terms talks about space and time and how that interacts with us quantum mechanics uh this quantum world stuff it deals most with like matter and energy on the tiniest scales and how we interact with that okay when they come together space and time matter and energy they seem to have a problem getting through from one to the other. In other words, the math of quantum physics doesn't work really well when we're talking about space and time. And the mathematics of general relativity don't seem to work very well when we're trying to talk about little subatomic particles. So there's some kind of shotgun wedding waiting to happen with somebody who has a new way to bring them together. Once you can combine them, right, then we're in good shape. Now, people are working on this. light does seem to be a place where you both somehow, for example, have a maximum speed of light, right? Speed of light is the maximum speed at which any object can move through space and time. Meanwhile, matter and energy, right? Light is both a particle in a wave and it's energy, which can be converted into matter, things like that. So light does seem to be some sort of linchpin in this sort of shotgun wedding that Neil was talking about. But it might not be shotgun. Um, I'll venture this, Neil, you and I both know a very, very, very good guy named Jacob Barrandes. Jacob is a preceptor at Harvard university and he has recently. When I was in graduate school, he was in high school and he programmed my website at the time. That's the same Jacob Barrandes. It's that same Jacob Barrandes. Yes. Wow. But yes, that Jacob, who is now a preceptor at Harvard, he has written and published some articles just recently. He's an example of one of the many scientists that's trying to tie these systems together. And what he is basically saying is that there is actually a mathematical way to bridge general relativity, the macroscopic world, with quantum mechanics in the microscopic world. And it has to do with the math of statistical physics and chaos theory and the ability to take things which are uncertain and make them more certain. Not always certain, but more certain. And that pulled out from the microscopic to the macroscopic unites the two areas of physics. But we're not quite there yet. That's just one hypothesis that appears to work sort of. And then there's going to be a lot more work and a lot more people have to keep working on it. So in that case, if Jacob and his colleagues are right, then the wave particle duality is only temporary. This incompatibility is only there because we not advanced enough yet in our mathematical construction of physics to unite them Interesting If it were a Venn diagram and you got quantum in one circle and general relativity in another is there a crossover at all or are they two separate? At the moment, they just touch. They do not have any crossover area if we're talking about Venn diagrams. For anyone who doesn't know what a Venn diagram is, it's a box and then you've got little circles that come overlapping things to sort of show. Wait, who chooses a box and a Venn diagram? That's the universal set on the outside. Oh, okay. Yeah, right? Otherwise, you use little circles, but sometimes you can use different shapes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, but if you have GR and quantum just kissing in the middle, the way physics has worked historically is somebody's going to come up with, and maybe it's this Jacob Behrendt solution, with another circle that encloses both of them within. Yes. That's right. And so it's not like you shift somewhere else and discard anything that has already been demonstrated to work. That's exactly what Einstein did with Newtonian physics. Exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So we'll see how that goes. Excellent. All right. Great question. Give me some more. Ready for the next one. Right. This is from Andrew D. Greetings, Drs. Tyson, Liu, and, of course, Lord Nice. Andrew Dack from Minneapolis. Well, stay safe and stay warm, sir. The question goes as such. Yes. The path integral formulation calculates probabilities by summing overall possible paths a particle could take. The two-state vector formalism describes quantum systems using both a forward evolving state from the past and a backward evolving state from the future. Both suggest quantum mechanics can be written with boundary conditions at both ends of time, not just initial conditions. It goes on. Sorry about this being as long as it is, but it's complicated. No, no, this is good. That background is good. Has this led to experimental predictions that differ from standard quantum mechanics? And do physicists take retrocausality seriously as part of reality's actual structure? Could retrocausality be evidence of a four-dimensional deterministic universe where the indeterminacy we observe is just our limited perspective of a structure that is already complete? All right. So first of all, let me just say this. Let me just say this, Chuck, before you. This is not the place to show off. All right? This is not the place to show off, Mr. Andrew D. All right. Before you answer that, Chuck, there's so many things that he packed in there. You got to explain them, man. By the way, just a shout out to my wife. We met in graduate school. She got her PhD in physics. She specialized. Her PhD thesis was on path intervals. That was her entire. So technically, her PhD is in mathematical physics. Right. Wow. We should have her as a guest then. I was looking in on that as the question unfolded. Yes. No, that's a great point. Isn't that something that in Neil's family, he ain't even the smart one? It's true. My family, too. I'm a big fan. Yes, I had the pleasure to meet all various spouses and like none of us can match up to our spouses in their brilliance. It's so true. Well, okay. Yes, we don't want to get too deeply into the vocabulary, but I agree. But Andrew, that is a very good question. And let's just cut to the basic chase. Andrew is basically asking, with the way that we're trying to figure out how the universe works on the quantum level, Is it true that time could be considered as running backwards and forwards at the same time, and therefore the entire universe is filled not just in space but also in time? In other words, the past, the present, the future all already exist, and all we're doing is either moving forward into it or standing still. We're not moving backwards, right? That's basically what he's asking. And then the corollary to that is— Which means all trajectories are predetermined. That's right. So if that's true, right, then should we do physics backwards? as well as forwards. Can something happening in the past cause what's happening or predict what's happening in the future and vice versa? Hence the retrocausality. Retrocausality, right. Fancy word, but just time running back. Great word though, if you think about it. That's right. Pretty clear what it means. So here's the bottom line, in my opinion, on that one, which is again, a great question. Thank you, Andrew. The idea is, does time already fill all of the dimension, the fourth dimension, or does it not? Right. What do you mean by fill it? What do you mean by fill it? Well, okay. Think of the universe as a big, tall glass of water, okay? And time zero is the bottom of the glass. As you're filling the glass, you're basically adding more and more content in the vertical dimension of the glass. Until it's full. Until it's full. But if we, right, are right at the surface of where the water is now, right, is the glass already full? Okay. That's what you mean. Has time already timed out? That's right. Has already ticked. And we're just experiencing it. This has been explored in several science fiction stories, for example. Ted Chiang's excellent story called Story of Your Life, which became adapted into the movie Arrival that starred Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. It was also in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. That's right. That's right. Yeah, where the main character, who's loosely autobiographical from his time as a prisoner of war, cleaning up Dresden after the bombings, he's abducted by an alien. Right. And put in an alien zoo. So that doesn't sound very free, except they grant him access to his entire timeline. Right. So, so, so. Don't, don't, don't spoil it for those people who haven't read it yet. It's worth reading once. But yes, your point is exactly taken. There's a movie of it too. There's also a movie. That's right. For me, the fun part is it changes how you even speak of things. So you don't say, well, when were you born? Well, I was always being born. Right. I'm always dying. I'm always, because that timeline is just always filled out. Right. That's right. So this is sometimes referred to as what's called block time or a block universe, where there are four dimensions of space and time, and it's already filled. It's a block that's already filled, and we just happen to be moving through it. And because of our physical limitations, we can only move it in one direction. Okay. But that is only one possible solution to the mathematical equations, right? Andrew invoked quite a bit of advanced mathematics, but that math has yet to be borne out in experiment. And so his asking, you know, has an experiment been borne out? The answer is no experiment has yet shown that the universe is, in fact, a full block. So we will see. I'm trying to figure out what experiment would you how would you? Yeah, that's a good point. How would you? What experiment could you concoct that would actually show that? One thing that people think might help is if we could somehow send information faster than light through perhaps quantum entanglement or some quantum teleportation. it is at the moment absolutely technically impossible but some people have thought imagine if we could create an experiment between here and the moon where somehow we could send a signal and see if we could get a different signal before the light from the earth would get to the moon that's a really cool idea some people think that we could get that experiment off the ground in half a century or so. I am less optimistic, but it's a possibility. Interesting. It would have to be through quantum entanglement. Well, that's one way to do it. You have to get rid of what we call local hidden variables in order to be able to do that. But that's, again, a deep conversation for another time. That's a lot of Bell's theorem stuff to unpack in quantum. All right. Okay, this is Janata. Jayanta. No. Jayanta. Jayanta. Jayanta Banik. I like Janata better. Okay. You're going to finish this. It's not your choice, Chuck. I know. It's not up to you. Okay. This is Jayanta Banik, who says, Dear Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, warm greetings. My name is Jayanta Banik from California. I'd love to get your take on quantum entanglement exhibiting instantaneous correlations, even though no information can travel faster than light. Could this apparent non-locality be explained by particles being adjacent in a higher spatial dimension, appearing distant only in 3D? Or is the institution fundamentally incompatible with quantum field theory? My intuition is further supported by the recently measured speed of quantum entanglement, formation of 232 atoseconds. There's a new one on me. That's a new thing. I love it. I do a second. So, like, the whole deal is, happens in another dimension, which doesn't make a difference what time it takes if you're outside the dimension. And then back here in 3D, instantaneous, faster than light. So, what do you think, Chuck? First of all, did you pick that question just because we started talking about quantum? or was that question predetermined, in which case it might have been leading back to the mention we had about quantum entanglement in a sort of block time kind of way? What a coincidence. That's really awesome. I see what you did there. I see what you did there. I know. Well, it's not what I did. It's what the universe has done because of its strange structure. I don't know. So to answer this very good question, what I would say is that if you invoke an additional dimension to move through literally anything, right? Then you don't have to follow the rules of physics as they currently exist. You just add, as long as you can make the math work, you just add a loop or a different travel time of that information. Okay. So your suggestion that quantum entanglement just merely means that there's actually an entanglement that's physical, but it goes through a different dimension to get from one part of the entangled pair to the other part of the entangled pair is a mathematical strategy that can explain a bunch of things. The only thing is, if you're doing that, then you have to explain what that other dimension is doing, right? Where is it affecting the rest of the universe in other ways? Is it true for every entangled particle that they go through the same dimension? Does it go through a different dimension? also philosophically does that mean that there is actually a hidden local thing going on right the idea of quantum entanglement fundamentally is that once you have these two particles or two two parts of a pair of an entangled pair separated or once they've created it doesn't matter if there's a physical space in between them there's nothing connecting them at that moment other than the fact that they were entangled at one point in the past. And so there is no real way that we can show that that extra dimension is necessary or even effective. The time, the 223 attoseconds in which quantum entanglement occurs that you quoted, is a very cool experimental result. It needs to be further confirmed and things like that. But the idea is that it doesn't give us a lot of insight as to whether or not another dimension is necessary. At the moment, we probably don't want to go in that direction yet. We don't have enough information to know whether or not that's a fruitful path, so to speak, for entanglement. So it's a known unknown. It's an unknown unknown, right. But it would allow us to accept this faster than light communication because it's happening in another dimension. Precisely. not actually moving faster than light right right that's the thing it's still not moving faster than light it's just well isn't that what subspace would be well subspace is only vaguely determined decided or defined in star trek right yeah but yes if you're in a in a cubiery warp drive or something like that right and you are in subspace as a result of being in a warp bubble right that could be considered a dimension or it could be considered something that is in the existing spatial dimensions that just happens to be temporarily not accessible. And yet you have subspace communications in Star Trek. So it is accessible and it's just all kinds of weirdness. But also you have thought about it and try to come up with a solution to it. Yes. Unlike Star Wars that doesn't try to find solutions to anything. Correct. Well, that's one of the interesting things between Star Trek and Star Wars, right? I love them both, but even though Star Trek has tried to be much more scientific, right, Star Wars just gave up on being scientific. Star Wars is just a space opera. And so in that sense, it's actually still kind of fun. Although things like the Mandalorian and so forth, they still have a little bit of science thrown in there, right? The ideas in general of things like the force and whatnot in Star Wars, eh, not so much. Are we ready for another question? Yeah, bring it on. All right, this time we are Cindy Brill. Hi, it's Dr. Tyson Liu and Lord Nice. Cindy from Tua Latin, Oregon. my question oh i like this my question is consciousness is consciousness the result of quantum physics ha ha ha what a great question people because we don't really understand consciousness and no one understands quantum physics you just get one of those to explain the other and we're all fine yeah this is this is another great question thank you cindy and in fact this is a question that i was asked like exactly word for word when i was at the american astronomical society meeting back in january um yeah i i know i like i said earlier i'm still feeling really good about that meeting i really was i mean you know the world is on fire i mean things oh it's also in ice things are just messed up but when i went there see what he did so yes fire and it's also in ice yeah yes yes yes yes i that was robert frost everybody i didn't invent that but um when i was there and i was just with all the wonderful young people at the american astronomical society uh meeting presenting their research asking questions talking being together it just felt so good it felt like the future is what matters you know we not things can suck but that's only now and and the world is in good hands i felt so good i can help it but anyway yes uh this was asked a student of mine uh now neil you of course uh you were even a trustee a counselor of the american astronomical society so you're you're deeply in into the society as were you i mean yes yes you were on the board as well for a while that is correct yes uh it's the so people know the american astronomical society is the organizing group of professional astrophysicists in the country that's right and in fact all of north america There are more members of it than the International Astronomical Union, which was the organization that, amongst other things, helped you demote Pluto, Neil. Don't blame that on me. Pluto had it coming. Pluto so had it coming. But the official vote was the IAU. IAU, right. So the AAS is a great organization. And how many is it up to? 8,000 members. 8,000 members. And there are 8 billion people in the world. That's right. So that makes us. One in a million. If you do the math. That's right. That's right. So it's very cool. And so many people there, there were about 3000 people there overall. And so many of them were students, younger people. And one of those folks had come up to me and said, Hey, you know, I remember hearing you guys talking about free will. And that made me wonder, is consciousness quantum? Is it quantum consciousness? And is that why there's free will? Because there's uncertainty in the quantum realm that we can't pin down. And so we can't determine what we're going to do at any given moment. So we interpret that uncertainty as free will. Possibly, right? Yeah. When we talked way back in the day, right? It wasn't that long ago, but it feels like a long time ago about free will. We were actually asking ourselves, right? At what point do we say we don't know what's coming next, right? And the more and more science we've done about human behavior and physics and so forth, The more we think we know how determined the system is, and we just have reached a boundary where we don't know, it could be all the way down at the quantum level. Now, there have been ideas about consciousness for a long time tying to physics. In fact Nobel laureate Roger Penrose had come up with a hypothesis with some of his colleagues decades ago suggesting that consciousness is sort of like the quantum spaces in between our synapses And that is not why he got his Nobel Prize That is not why. No, that's a different thing. He got it for black holes. That's right. But nevertheless, he very creative guy. He did all kinds of stuff about tessellations, mathematics and things like that as well. And so he gave this particular hypothesis about about how we store information right the bottom line is in my opinion and i use that term a lot because you know i like putting things down to the bottom we haven't yet defined consciousness right um philosophers will and i know you love philosophers neil i mean you embrace them and you think that they're awesome so yeah so i'll quote philosophers as much as i can here that Everything is conscious. It's just the different levels of consciousness that matter. Right? Gary, let me ask you. When you played soccer, did you sometimes feel like the ball had a mind of its own? Yeah, there were days. But basically, I worked out that it was mainly user error on my behalf. Nice. Nice. Mainly. Right. So philosophers of consciousness sometimes do argue that the soccer ball does have its own consciousness, but it's at such a low level, such a level that we cannot understand, that how hard it's kicked, whether the valve was affected or not, whether the wind is blowing, whether there's a spin, things like that, that fully explains how it moves. And that its own free will or its own consciousness has no effect. Well, then what good is it? The soccer ball? Yeah. What good is it to have consciousness if it's of no effect, zero agency, and zero influence on outcomes? The whole idea of consciousness is that you somehow can influence an outcome. Other than that, what good is it really? Well, I don't know. That's a really great point. If you have this kind of consciousness, if it even exists, right? I think we humans, I don't know. What is something that we have that serves no purpose, and yet we have it, and therefore it is part of who we are? An appendix. Ah, there you go. There you go. The fact that you have an appendix, does that make you different from when you have your appendix removed because it got infected? Are you the same as you were before? And if you aren't, what is it about removing that particular part of you? Is it that part's consciousness? That part's quantum effects? That part's physical effects that make you a different person? Now, do I have insurance or not? Because I live in America. You know, that is... Well, that's a good point. You can have... There is obsolescence that is a part of us. So, you know, and I'm sure it served a purpose at some point and now it doesn't. Right. You know, consider it on an even deeper level. Right. Surgery isn't necessary. Our skin cells completely cycle through every month or so. Right. Right. It used to be the dermis epidermis and then it flakes off. Yeah. They slough off. And it is completely true that none of us here at this meeting have the same skin cells that we did. A month ago. Maybe not even, yeah, might be not even same muscle cells. We have a lot of the same bone cells, a lot of the same brain cells, but a lot of them are gone now. Right. But our consciousness continues. And in fact, our consciousness continues to grow because we continue to experience things. You and I, I think my consciousness is enriched and improved because I'm hanging out with you guys today. Right. So how does it give it time? Give it time. How does our consciousness continue, even though our physical characteristics have discontinued? You know, the best evidence that nobody understands consciousness is how many books are written on the subject. That's true for quantum physics, too. The book that says consciousness explains means no one really understands it. But it's worth thinking about, isn't it? Definitely. So this is the context. That's on the consciousness shelf of the library and the bookstore. There's no end of consciousness books. But you go to the gravity section, there's like two books. Yeah, but one of them is big. It's Thorne, Weiser, and Wheeler, right? Like another book. Yeah. Right. But I'm just saying we're not continuing to rewrite a book on gravity because gravity is understood. So don't confuse the existence of a book that says something is explained as a statement of the state of the science behind it. I think that's a very good point. And so this question that Cindy has about quantum consciousness, right, is that point. Can the quantum properties that are inherent in our brains or in our overall physical systems allow us to hold together something, what we're calling consciousness, that persists despite our physical changes being so radical? I hope so. That's all I can say is because that that is the greatest possibility that our consciousness will extend beyond our so-called life, you know, physical life. That is the greatest case to make that we could in some way go on, especially when you think about the fact that the question before that, when we talk about entanglement and different dimensions, that maybe we could actually exist on a higher plane of being in another dimension because of quantum consciousness. And the only way we can find out, people, is to go ahead and die. No. Thanks. That's great advice there. I love the fact you end it with a laugh. Actually, that's the point, right? Right now, research in things like consciousness and quantum awareness and things like that are dependent on the fact that we don't want people to die as a result of that. And people have tried to make these experiments. More than 100 years ago, for example, there were some experiments about people who were about to die, and they were willing to be subjects of an experiment that were carefully weighed. Neil, you know this better than I do. Yeah, yeah. It started out with, you know, after the x-rays were invented. So let's x-ray dying people, see if there's a soul that comes out. And, you know, in retrospect, it's like, what were you doing? But at the time, that's a completely sensible experiment. That's right. Religion makes a prediction, and now you have a means of probing what's inside the body. If the soul is inside the body, maybe the x-rays will find it. Nothing wrong with that as an attempt to gather evidence for those whose faith is challenged. That's right. All right, so let me ask you this then. Okay. This is a philosophical question. Do you think that perhaps we do a disservice by looking for something like that, an afterness, I will call it, And afterwards, I will call it, because it robs us of the urgency and importance of being here now. So here's the deal. If I understand the urgency and importance of being here now, and that is always at the top of mind and at the forefront of my consciousness, then it allows me to live to the fullest. Whereas if I retreat to this sense of there's going to be something after I'm waiting for the after, then I am robbing myself of the fullness of life in the here and now. Well, I'll just say one thing about that. And I'd love to hear everybody else's opinions on this. But here's here's my take on that. Go ahead. Your idea of that sort of thing, talking about afterlife and things like that, has been the basis of just about every apocalyptic cult or evangelical religion, you know, where you are going to be saved or that you were heading on to be better things. Each one of them requires an end of the world scenario for you. Yeah. Yeah. In your lifetime. That's right. The world might end in a thousand years. You're not getting anybody in that cult. Something like that. Right. So the idea for that one is that if current life is worth living, if you feel good about your life right now, then looking for an afterlife is kind of like a bummer. But if current life sucks, in your personal opinion, maybe you want to be delivered somewhere else, right? This has become in so many different religions. I'm not actually the religion expert in my family. My eldest daughter actually studied religion in school. But the bottom line, oh, again, the bottom line thing there for there is that this idea of the afterlife has been used by organized religions. Co-opted, I would say. Yeah, to do anything, right? The caste system that is part of some religions. Well, you may be really bad right now, but that's okay. You do the thing that we ask you to do, and maybe you'll be born again as a higher caste individual. So that's a way to sort of make people not worry about their current lives. But it can bring hope if your life currently sucks, but you're like, you know, if I keep working, I'll do better and life will become better. But you're not looking at the present as much as you're looking at the long game. and reincarnation in that flavor also gets you the other way that's right if you misbehave you'll come back as something maybe not even human yeah right oh you come back as the soccer ball getting kicked around by gary and his friends and that little bit of consciousness that's in the ball i'm really effed up it's a tough call right yeah so it's a great it's a great question in the end we know that we human consciousness, we're no longer able to communicate our consciousness once we have expired. Except we don't want to upload it into software. We can't tell people if we're still alive or not, but there's been some really neat fiction these days, right? Where people have uploaded themselves into some sort of an AI system. Oh, I think there's a great show, I think it's called Altered Carbon, if anybody wants to check it out. Where the idea of your consciousness can be downloaded into a little disk. And then the corporeal body is called the skin. It's just skins. And you can put it in whatever skins you would like to put it in. And yeah. And so you could go from being, you know, a really attractive woman to a fat, stubby guy to it doesn't make a difference because it's just your consciousness that gets loaded into another body, including bodies that can be especially made just to hold your consciousness. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Altered carbon. The altered carbon. Now, the problem with that, and just to wrap up quantum consciousness on this idea, okay, is that if we are thinking that consciousness is quantum in nature, we can't digitize it. Because digitizing would mean that you could get every single bit of information correct and properly reproduced. Interesting. But if you're in a quantum system, right? You only have possibilities. Your qubits settle only when they are read. And then they're destroyed. That's right. So you can never actually get a perfect copy of your brain. You only get an imperfect copy every time you try to retrieve that information. So in the altered carbon situation, every time you're put into a new body, you could be fundamentally different in your consciousness. Interesting. Damn, you just ruined their whole show. Yeah, Charles, you just ruined everything. Don't tell them. Don't tell them. Charles, to that point, if you were to upload, download whichever load of your consciousness, all you would be doing is taking a snapshot of your consciousness at that moment. 100%. You keep existing, your consciousness, as we've just discussed, grows. Even though you will lose cells, your consciousness is there and continues to grow. So you'll only have a snapshot if you're able to capture it. Good point. What's wrong with the snapshot? Because every neurosynaptic connection with the chemistry, the electromagnetic fields, If I get a snapshot of that and put that in a jar and then re-engage it later, why isn't that an exact copy of where I am the moment that copy was taken? Like Apple time machine. It is an exact copy as well as it can be digitized. But then once you start running it, if you're a quantum consciousness, then all the decisions start changing again. Right. So everything is different the moment you turn it back on. Or, no, no. Okay, I think you missed something there. Okay. Okay. So what I said is not even possible. That's the point. Yes. You cannot know the state of every particle down to the last particle that's running your brain. Because quantum physics prevents that knowledge. So to say I have an exact copy of it cannot be a real statement. Excellent way to put it. Excellent. And that front ends what you just said about trying to recover what your thoughts were. Right. Right. Okay. Interesting. Wow. God. That put a kibosh on all uploading consciousness. Absolutely. Well, yes. And if you're talking about like fictional characters, which are digital, like the holographic doctor in the Star Trek Enterprise. Right. What you're doing is that you're assuming that consciousness can be digitized at least to a facsimile to where a starting point can be produced that is reproducible. right in other words every time you turn on the doctor it's please state the nature of the medical emergency right and if you can get to that point and then the future time evolution is also digital right and not quantum then maybe you can get some semblance of consciousness but if it's quantum no chance no chance now how about this suppose i'm able suppose i'm able to run subroutines in a program that is everything about me every single thing so i have the main program which is chuck and then i have like just almost it can't be infinite but like i got one you need a whole subroutine that has you put on lip balm 20 times a day oh absolutely speaking of which subroutine yeah that's good you've reminded him now you just remind me so the subroutine would be called chuck chuck and then the then the sub subroutine would be chuck chuck chuck right exactly yeah so so there's this kind of replication of everything that I am all the way down, turtles all the way down. That's just a map. That's not consciousness. That's my point. But everything about that is me. And when you run that program, you're talking to me. And then let's put an AI element, we'll call it, that allows that same program to grow and flourish mentally the same way I would So being able to take in information, process it the way Chuck would, and do every. So it's me on every single level. You're describing Chuck. But digitized. Okay, Chuck, what you're describing is the last chapter, if memory serves, of the book Gerdel Escher Bach, written by Douglas Hofstadter. It's called what? God bless you. What's it called? Gerdel Escher Bach. Gerdel Escher Bach. Okay. I, I, Gertle is a, a philosopher mathematician who did some important contributions in the early 20th century. Okay. But point is, uh, it's a philosopher who wrote the book and it's a very, it's, it's quite the meandering of ideas inspired by these brilliant three people in our history. Gertle, Escher, and Bach. Point is the last chapter he reserves, if that's the book I'm remembering, it might've been one of his other books. I think it's in that book where he has a conversation with Einstein's brain. So you take Einstein's brain like right when he dies and then you map everything that's there. Okay. And then it has an auditory capacity. So you ask it a question and you watch the sound waves trigger neurosynaptic connections. And then it goes through and then it triggers a connection back because it knows it's a question. and then Einstein's brain speaks back to you. And he made a very convincing account of how and why that quitter should work, at least in principle. But no mention of quantum uncertainty was given. Right. So the principle is good. I mean, we humans don't interact with one another on the quantum level. So it's certainly possible that we could get to a point where we humans could not tell the difference between Chuck and Chuck 2, right? But that doesn't mean that they're the same. Right True And this is you know we don even have to go go to 20th century nonfiction to think about this on Broadway There is actually a pretty acclaimed play recently It was called marjorie prime if you guys are familiar with that where a character is speaking to a deceased spouse via artificial intelligence it's it's really a very black mirror yeah but but it wasn't dark or anything it was just a kind of a a plot device to have someone try to think about what does it mean to be alive? Or is it better to have yourself alive in some way, even if you actually aren't alive? Is it worth it or is it better that you just not? And, you know, things like that. It's not worth it to me, but it may be worth it to like, you know, maybe my children who could benefit from my life experience, even though I'm not there. And my spouse who could be comforted by the fact that, you know, I know them better than anybody else. And so they can talk to me the way they can't talk to anyone else. There are benefits to that. They're just not benefits to me. I would love to have that. I met your kids. They ain't coming to you for advice. They were done with you years ago. Brutal. Oh, my God. Tell me I'm wrong. I was going to say that would hurt if it weren't true. Especially that daughter of yours, Chuck. Yeah, well, that's so true. Yeah. I'd go to Charlie for advice. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Let's get to the next question. We luxuriant on that one. Yeah, we did. We took a bath in that one. Wow. Okay. All right. So let's have a little run and a jump at this particular contributor's name. Amagericana. Yes. Dr. Sloot. Amagericana. Sorry if I apologize. You sound like Chuck. Gary, I thought you were better than that. I don't speak Danish very well. Danish? Oh, okay. Yes. So, Drs. Lou, Tyson, and, oh, Chuck, you'll love this. Just smart enough, Lord Nice. Hello from Copenhagen. Smart enough. Wait, wait, wait. Chuck, that's the name of your comedy special. That is the comedy special. Which, by the way, you can watch on the YouTube. Let me say it. You can watch on the StarTalk YouTube. Yes, you can. All right, here we go. We've recently seen people that believe there are penguins in Greenland. Yeah. What are other, please hold that thought. What are other glaring examples of scientific ignorance you have witnessed in the realm of public opinion, which make your collective jaws drop? Please. And he says, tak, which is, I know. Yes. Thank you, Ian Danish. We'll just go round robin. I got one. You ready? What? Not only penguins in the Arctic, bears in the Antarctic. Oh. The very word Arctic means bear. So Antarctic should tell you there are no bears there. That's true. That's true. All right. All right. Well, I would say, because you said tak, I would say velkommen. Thank you very much. You're welcome. That's a great question. And there are a lot of misconceptions. But the one that I find probably the most saddening for me is the idea that vaccines are dangerous. That one is the problem that bothers me a lot because there's probably no science that has been better tested. And when mistakes have been made, they have been corrected faster than good vaccine science. And the attempt of a lot of people to prey on the fears and the insecurities of parents or just people in general, that bothers me a lot. I think that's the thing that drops my jaw the most. Charles, that's deep. I'm just going to say Flat Earth, but after that. Yeah, man. Flat Earth ain't great either, okay? We'll say that. Flat Earth never killed anybody, I think, is the thing. Well, actually, it did kill one person. It killed one guy. It killed a guy who built his own rocket. Built his rocket. to go up supposedly to prove that the earth was flat right but he didn't get the darren award you know why why you already had kids oh the darren award you can't have you can't right can't kids because the whole idea is that the whole idea is you know you removed well i don't i don't want to you know disparage anybody who falls for the pseudoscience right i mean these are these are not necessarily dumb people these are not necessarily no because it's an emotional decision that is made in ignorance. And I say, I use the word ignorant there for in its most technical sense. And people think that they are protecting a child, their child, but their ignorance, unfortunately, puts the child in peril because many, many needless deaths happen because people do not vaccinate their children. And we have probably the most tragic account of that was in Samoa when RFK Jr., God only knows how he became in charge of our country's health. He says he did not encourage anyone to steer away from vaccines. But the truth is he went there. He preached against it. People stopped vaccinating. They had a measles outbreak and many children died. So it's just that simple. Yeah, it's true. We don't remember anymore how you would come back to school after summer vacation and look around and see who amongst your friends from last year aren't there anymore because they died of polio during the summer or because they had some sort of childhood disease. We don't remember that. And so it's easy for us to say. Yeah, it's easy for us to think it's all fake. But it absolutely is not. And the reason that we are so luxuriously comfortable in our public health these days, as bad as some health care issues are, we don't get those kinds of diseases anymore is because of the success of the scientific vaccinations. Absolutely. That we have been fortunate enough to enjoy. It's the victim of its own success. It's the victim of its own success. It's the same thing as in the simplest example, why are you using dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff. Right. That's it? There you go. No, it's true. Stop using the dandruff. And you will. And you will have dandruff. It's that simple. And another thing, we're recording this in January, 2026. It's still football season. And I will highlight for people on the East Coast, because the sun sets early, so it gets dark around five or six o'clock, when you are watching a football game on the West Coast and the sun is still up. This is evidence Earth is round. Okay. I don't know how that's the simplest evidence I can give you. Yeah. Yeah. It's unfortunate. The sun has not yet set in the West for the people three time zones away. It's, you know, windmills are a hoax. Right. Well, look, I, to me, you know, and this is such a good question. And of course, it comes not from the United States. So it's not at all anything about our country or any individual society or country. But when there is the origin of the question, the person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The question. Thank you. We have to remember that everybody is subject to ignorance. There are things that each one of us does not know. It may be different depending on where we are. So instead of like forgetting about it and just being angry about it, we got to reach out and continue to convince folks and help them understand that whatever you think you may know, please be sure to check it with as many people as possible and as many different reliable sources as you can so that you can really get it done. All you need to do is look at a 20 minute YouTube video and then you become the expert. Yeah. Right. Thanks, Neil. Especially if that video is hosted by Joe Rogan. Oh, my goodness. So what you're missing there, Charles, I think is, you know, we're all educators here. And the word ignorance, as Chuck accurately described in its formal definition, it just means you don't know something. So we thrive in the space of where others are ignorant because we teach them. That is what we do as educators. The problem is not when people are ignorant of a truth. The problem is when they are ignorant of a truth and don't know they're ignorant of the truth and assert that they know what they're talking about. Then it's a battle. They're not just a student in your class eager to learn what is true from an expert. It's some other construct in society where people are rejecting the advice of experts on the basis of what someone who's not an expert told them, like I said, or they did their own research spending 20 minutes on YouTube. So what we need to do is just remind ourselves that too, right? Yes. Our greatest- Practically, it's two different things. Right. As scientists, our greatest power is to be able to say, I don't know, and not feel bad about ourselves about it. Right. And what we want to do is to help other people do that. Scientists was the first branch of human inquiry where, I don't know, became a fundamental part of discovery. And something good. It's something good. And you know what? I hate to say this. I'm happy to say that it's the number one thing that I have learned from scientists and hanging out with scientists for all these years now. is one, I celebrate my own ignorance. I think it's a great thing because when I don't know something, guess what I do? Go learn. It's that simple. And so there's no shame in not knowing. And it's a wonderful thing. You're just ever growing. Not knowing is ever growing. That's the way I look at it. Nice little phrase. Ooh. Catchy. Not knowing plus curiosity is ever growing. Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah, you can't just stop with the not knowing. Gary, what do you have on that list? Not much, really. I think it's... In the UK, was there anything specific when you were growing up that was particularly anti-science or science ignorant? I remember, you know, get vaccinated, get there, do this, do that. My father was chief technician in the physics lab at East London Polytechnic, which is now East London. You never told us that. Oh, cool. Yeah. And you're the son of a soccer player. Okay. Yes. The fruit fell off the tree and rolled him away. The only professional footballer in the UK whose father is like, such a disappointment. Where did we go wrong? All right, son, that professional footballer. I'd walk in the room. A living life that everybody wants to live. I'd walk in the room and you'd just see his head go. Hilarious. Hilarious. All right, I think we've got time for one last question if we do it quick. All right. Margot Lane, Osage is on the Cosmic Mountain. As I watch the monks for peace walk from Texas to D.C., I'm struck by the constancy of their energy, how they all seem like one on some molecular level. are we all one being wow deep-ended swimming pool guys i'm a fast starter there but it's not the answer but it's a starter information i we walked out of africa into europe asia across the bering strait north america into south america we walked that so human beings and walking is something we genetically know how to do. I just want to put that on the table right now. So if they're constantly moving and so forth, I don't know that they're one single organism, but what they are is they're communicating really well. They're able to listen to each other or see each other and they can synchronize their steps and their pace and their speed and things like that. So in a sense, although we are many, uh, or although they are many, they are able to put themselves together and move as one. And clearly being a monk is not the prerequisite for that because soldiers do that as well who are marching somewhere to do harm. Okay. And so it's a human thing, not so much that they are monks in the interest of peace. Chuck. Okay. That is why we have the Department of War and no DEI. well i think the monks have something to say about that yeah exactly there you go i love it but but but but chuck you you did ayahuasca at one point i did find yourself resonating spiritually with others on the same wavelength kind of thing i know we don't have a lot of time so i'm gonna make this quick um the oneness you feel is not just with person kind you actually feel connected to like everyone who's in the Malacca with you, which is the sacred place where the rituals are. But you also feel like all the other people out there, like everywhere all at once. And then I can't explain this. You feel a oneness with all that is the universe itself. Wow. And this is all happening inside of your head, but outside of your being all at once. So monks are trained. I mean, I don't know if this is the meditative branch of monks, but presumably, Chuck, one might be able to reach that state of consciousness without drugs. Oh, without a doubt. Yeah. Just and so and you feel that connectivity just as the questioner was inquiring. You know, I don't have time for that. So I went to a place called Rhythmia in Costa Rica, and I spent a week. You don't have time to learn any mental tricks. I don't have time to learn it, and they did it for me. And it was amazing. Well, plus we all like choruses when they sing together. And, you know, we highly value coordinated efforts in our culture and our society. And Charles, you sang in a solo or a chorus? Everything. and whether it was solo and you're connecting with an audience or whether it was in a choir when you're with a whole bunch of like-minded people trying to produce one single piece of music it was a connection that really transcends the individual it was no there was no need for any kind of uh external you know drugs or whatever nor years of training it was just listening watching following and everybody together somehow trying to get something more than themselves of a common mind. Yeah, and if the monks were able to achieve that. Mind, body, spirit. Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. I would love to see these monks singing on ayahuasca. Okay. On that note. Exactly. I think that's all the time we have. Okay. So Charles Liu, you've got the quantum physics. handy answer book. This thing. The handy quantum physics answer book. I'm not in my office right now, but I have two copies on my shelf. That's very sweet of you. That makes you just a little wealthier because I bought an extra copy. Oh, thank you. There that is. No, it's quite the complete because there's so many dangling bits that people, they hear bits and pieces of quantum. They don't put it all together. And that book does that. Well, in the year or so since that book came out, there's been all kinds of new stuff. So there's going to have to be another edition soon because it just keeps growing. It just keeps growing. And Chuck, we posted your comedy special, Just Smart Enough. That's correct. It was New Year's Eve Eve, I think we posted it. That is correct. On our main channel, wasn't it? That's correct. And so this is, it dropped then. Check it out. It's all there and it's free. Yep, go watch it. Apparently it's been well-received. The people are loving it and I'm very, very happy about that. It's very satisfying to see the StarTalk audience supporting the show that much. It's very cool. You know the most evil thing someone said in the comments? What? They said, you know, I used to come to StarTalk to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson, but now I do it to hear Chuck. Yeah. That was my brother who wrote that. Tony, I owe you $20. It's coming soon. Gary. Yes, Neil. Got to get a gig for announcing for the World Cup, and we'll all come listen. All right. Let's see what I can do. Before we go, I'd like to say thank you to all our Patreon group that has supplied questions here today. There were so many, and we just only have time for so many. And we luxuriate occasionally on one. Yeah. There were 35 pages of questions. Thank you. Thank you so much to the good guys at Patreon. All right. Well, that's been yet another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. This one was a grab bag, a good one, too, with our geek in chief, Charles Liu. Guys, always good to have you here. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Neil. What a joy. Thank you. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up. Thank you.