In Theory with Janna Levin

Physics and the laws of possibility

0:00Coming right up on StarTalk is a one-on-one conversation between me and my good friend and colleague, Jana Levin, theoretical physicist. Why? She's got a new series appearing on our channel called In Theory. You're going to learn all about what makes the mind of a theorist tick and how it connects to what we know, what we don't know, and what we have yet to discover in this universe. Check it out.

0:30Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and culture come on.

0:46Is everything that's possible in the universe inevitable if the laws of physics allow it? Will nature experiment with every possibility, no matter how improbable? I'm Jana Levin, and this is In Theory. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a special version of the show today.

1:19This has got just me and Jana Levin returning to StarTalk. She is the Claire Tao Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, right up the street. And she's one—we have several theorists at large. She's one of them among our favorites. And we're going to talk to her today about some recent projects she's been up to to bring more of the universe down to Earth for you.

1:50So, Jana, we're going to talk about some of the weirdest, wackiest theories of the universe, because you cover them in a new series appearing in the StarTalk channels called— In Theory. In Theory. Love it. In Theory. Yeah. That's where all the big ideas happen. And then we hope nature finds a way. I spent time at Princeton where there are a lot of theorists, not only today but historically.

2:22And there's a sign on a door there that says, never trust an observation unless it's confirmed by a theory.

2:31How do you feel about that? Well, as you well know, that's inverting the usual adage. Yes. Where theorists are often chastised. Yes. For not being experimentally verifiable. But sometimes it's just a few hundred years of patience. I read up on the themes, and I love it. Yeah. It's— We're out there. You're out there, because the laws of physics tell you what's possible. And I think we used to imagine nature picked a specific example, but we kept learning over and over again that nature was kind of rolling the die.

3:08Oh. Trying different combinations, whether it was planets, organisms, stars. Because the laws of physics allow more than what we might see in any given moment. Yeah. To manifest in this universe. We used to think the Earth was it, the sun was it, and we realized, in some sense, anything that was physically possible seemed to be attempted by nature. And if you think of the entire principle of evolution, that it's trying again and again under pressure, but nonetheless experimenting with every possibility.

3:44And not all experiments work. Not all experiments work, and not all experiments can be tried on this planet. But if we go further out, maybe all experiments are tried on other planets. And if you really want to go out there, in total, other universes. Right? So I think the question is, if it's theoretically possible, maybe nature has tried it. So there's another way to say that is, if it's theoretically possible, whether or not we have yet to see it or discover it, might it be inevitable?

4:14Might it be inevitable? That's my question to you. Don't ask me. I'm asking you. Well, in theory. Okay. And I think that's exactly, as a theorist, what you're exploring. Sometimes you don't have a handle on what the experiment's going to be or what the observation's going to be, or if it's going to be possible to make that observation viable in your lifetime. Either because it takes too long or costs too much money. Costs too much money, takes too long. You haven't thought of a way to actually observe something that faint that far, right? Or if it is another universe, does it mean that there's no communication?

4:48Will it be, in principle, impossible to communicate? But as a theorist, you're instead trying out all the possibilities yourself. And a lot of them die on paper. You can figure out which ones nature will say are not viable many times. But anything that really seems viable, you have to ask, has it happened? But you just casually mentioned other universes. Yeah. Other planets, other stars, other universes, right?

Expanding into the multiverse

5:16I think that conclusion has been foisted on us precisely because we kept being deposed from the center of everything. Not the only planet in the solar system. Okay, there are only, let's get this right. Eight. Eight. That's not that many. Not naming names. But then you realize, probably most star systems in our galaxy, as you well know, has multiple planets. It starts to go up to the trillions. You start to imagine maybe every combination being attempted.

5:50And then you go beyond our galaxy and it starts to seem like a possibility. We've got a trillion galaxies in our universe. The universe. Yes. So if we're not at the center of the galaxy, we're not at the center of the solar system, and we're not unique in galaxies, maybe we're not unique in having had a big bang. No! You've got to give us something. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Do I? I mean, it's possible this is the only one, but wouldn't that be breaking the whole pattern?

6:24This trend line. Yeah. All right, so if there's more than one universe, and we call that the? Multiverse. Then are there more than one multiverses? Well, interesting question. I think some of that becomes a language breakdown. Are we imagining a cluster that there's a possibility that universes can interact? Can they collide, for instance? Could our big bang be a collision with another universe in our past? Or are we imagining universes that are completely disconnected in any meaningful sense?

6:59They have no relation in space or time to each other. We can't say how far away they are. We can't say how long ago they were. So the multiverse is right now indistinct because I think we don't understand it well enough yet, other than to say, imagine there are other big banks. It's an interesting idea, Neil. If we can classify planets, these are Earth-like planets. These are hot Jupiters, right? These are brown dwarfs.

7:30Maybe we can classify universes. I don't think that's really been done yet. No, I don't think so. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But we're in this one. This one's pretty good. I like this one. It's like this planet's pretty good. So as I understand it, that's the subject of your first installment. Yes. Out of how many installments? We have six episodes. Six episodes. Yes. And the first one, the multiverse. Yes. Space fact.

8:11Space fact. There's a collision of galaxies called Stefan's Quintet. We would later learn that it's not a gathering of five galaxies. It's a gathering of only four. One of them is photobombing the collision. If you like that fact, you can find 4,999 more in Lost in Space. 5,000 facts to help navigate the universe.

8:45Lost in Space is now available wherever you get your books. I really want you to stay tuned. And we're examining the exact possibility that nature experiments as much as possible and anything viable will happen.

9:17And we contemplate what it's like. Imagine the times before we realized there were other planetary systems and we're on that cusp. So come check it out. Drop in. This is damn near pre-Copernican. In our state of inquiry. I mean, in a way, it's very... Minus the religion telling us that it cannot be. I mean, Copernicus really set us right on a lot of things.

9:48Yeah. And honestly, everything's been since Copernicus. Has been Copernican. Copernican. Yeah. Exactly. We're not at the center of the solar system. That was the first. And ever since then, it's just kept going. And with dark matter and dark energy driving the universe, we're not even made of the stuff that most of the universe is made of. Yeah. Everything anyone has ever seen. That's emotionally wrong. Right. It's a violation of your trust. Thank you. With the universe. Thank you. Well, the dark matter and the dark energy is most of it.

10:21So imagine... Oh, this is an interesting game we were playing, which was... Imagine you were a dark creature. Like, the dark sector was complex enough that it had dark interactions. I don't have to imagine that I'm a dark creature. There's no imagination necessary. Okay, go on. You're going to get us right off the air. Okay. So imagine you're looking at the galaxy, and then you see this huge halo of dark matter. And it's vast. It extends well beyond this little pancake of stars.

10:51It's hundreds of times... Yes. ...the gravity of what you see. Yeah. Imagine you're a dark astronomer, and you are arguing to your colleagues, I think there's this tiny pancake, flat little spiral of something I'm going to call stars. In the middle there, it's less than 5% of what's in the universe. It's maybe 15% of what's in the galaxy. Are you imagining dark matter astrophysicists? Yeah. Contemplating our existence as being so small and insignificant.

11:24Imagine how long it would take them to even notice everything every human being has ever seen. Janet, you're bumming me out. I think it's kind of beautiful. We'd be like these jewels somebody discovered. This little luminosity. Because we be luminous in ways dark matter be not. Exactly. Against all odds, you find these tiny luminous jewels buried in a sea of this non-luminous... So dark matter aliens will totally...

11:57Wow. No, they'll just take us and put us on their jewelry.

12:00Wouldn't you be blown away if in this huge galaxy you found this little... Right. What would you call that? Centerpiece. Yeah, I would put it on jewelry. This jewel. Janet, in your theoretical exploits, in your theoretical dalliances with the cosmos, what

Black holes and Einstein

12:23showed up that nobody imagined, nobody predicted, and was still kind of, really?

12:34Really? We got to contend with this? Nobody saw that coming. Wow.

12:40I think there's a variety of possible candidates for the top five of those remarkable discoveries. Some might be particles that nobody imagined that did not fit into the scheme of things. But I think... Maybe subatomic particles. Yeah, subatomic particles that famously the Nobel Prize winning physicist Robbie said, who ordered that? You know, he's at a particle accelerator. They're smashing things together. It is a door robbie. Yeah. Particles are coming out.

13:10And he said, who ordered that? Right? They're making discoveries. So if I remember... Mm-hmm. So if I remember reading, because I'm not that old, who ordered that was you take particles that we think are just genuine articles smashing together. They break into other particles. Yeah. That nobody saw or imagined. Yes. They were not indivisible. Not indivisible. And so we now take those particles, inventory them, and figure out what the hell the universe is trying to do. I think one twist in your question, though, is when you said, nobody imagined that.

13:44And I think over and over again, people have imagined what seemed impossible, were told it was impossible, probably themselves thought this isn't real. But there it was. And again, in this example of nature, figuring out a way to do something. Well, these people should have known that if it didn't violate a law of physics, they're in no position to say it's impossible. Well, let's take black holes. So when Carl Schwarzschild is writing a letter to his friend Einstein from the Russian front

14:18during World War I, he had mathematically solved Einstein's equations. Did he die on the front? He died from an infection contracted on the front within six months of the letter, actually. And he wrote to Einstein this beautiful solution, which we now call the black hole. They did not call it that. It took a half century for it to get its name. But Einstein knew the math was right. Best name for anything ever, by the way. Black hole. It's kind of contentious. No.

14:48If you fall and you're not coming out, it's a hole. Is light coming out? No. It's black.

14:55That's the black hole calling you. Well, so let's take the example of the black hole.

15:02Exactly. Before it was on a lunchbox. So Einstein knew the math was right. He was extremely impressed that the solution could be found so simply in the way that Schwarzschild had done this. But he thought nature would protect us from their formation. He did not believe they would be in the universe. Even though his own theory and his own equations gave that result. Right, because the equations omitted the fact that, you know, matter doesn't like to be

15:34crushed. I really want to know what's in that thermos. You do? Yeah. And how old it is. How long it's been in there. Well, what's typically in the center of galaxies? A black hole. A black hole. Well, in the center of this black hole is a Milky Way galaxy. Did someone give this to you or is this of your own design? No, someone gifted me the lunchbox. Yeah, that's pretty good. From the Disney movie, which was awful.

16:06Okay, I've never seen it. It was one of the worst movies, my 10 worst movies ever. I'm told they're remaking it, but we'll see. Do you do a 10 worst movies list? That's pretty good. Of course, this is StarTalk. Of course we get that. I didn't mean to distract you with my lunchbox and thermos. No, it's good. I hope the same person will send me one. I bet that was a while ago. It predates you, yes. It predates me. Oh my God, is that like a character? It's a black hole. It's a character named Black Hole. No, it's a black hole.

16:40You're not putting me on.

16:43I have my limits for promo. If anyone knew how to get out, it would be you. That's my promo limit. Right, exactly. I'll be consulting the survival guide.

16:55That's the title of one of your books, isn't it? Yeah. Tell me that title again. You do it better than anyone. Black Hole Survival Guide. Oh, there's the Black Hole Blues. Oh, Black Hole Blues, yes. And then you have the Black Hole Survival Guide. And I show you this. I'm ready to put you in it. And you get tense and nervous. I do. This is bad PR for your book. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the book doesn't end well. I mean, you know, you can bide your time is all I'm saying.

17:26I think what's interesting is not something nobody imagined. I think that's exactly what's interesting about this premise, is that it's all imagined. You can conceive of it. And then over and over again, nature finds a way to do it. So with the case of Black Holes, Einstein could not foresee a way in which mass could overcome its repulsion, the forces, the internal forces, the nuclear forces.

17:59That idiot. Nature thought of a way to do it. That idiot. Yeah. That guy. You know, nature thought of a way by killing off some really massive stars. So nature was smarter than Einstein. Yeah. I mean, nature's smarter than all of us.

18:13That's why we're an homage to nature. Yeah. Our very existence is an homage to nature. What an experiment. What a bunch of ideas in play. What's amazing about scientific discovery is precisely how astoundingly clever nature is. And we're just catching up, right? We're trying to formalize it, describe it, understand it. But nature is the real genius. That's a soundbite right there.

18:44Yeah. Who ordered dark energy? Yeah. Einstein. What's up with that? Yeah. It's in his equation. Yeah. But he didn't even like it. He didn't like it. My boy did not like his own damn equation. He could not make a mistake. That idiot. That guy could not make a mistake as hard as he tried to be a buffoon. You know the story where somebody was saying to him, Einstein, you have to be more careful. Your name is on these papers, your important name. And he's like, my name is on plenty of wrong papers. It was not a concern to him.

19:15He would sometimes contradict himself. There's allegedly a story where he wrote some paper about the existence of gravitational waves, the non-existence. And then when it was accepted for publication, it was in page proofs. It was just supposed to be copy editing. He submitted an entirely different manuscript that 100% contradicted the original paper. So that way you're right. Yeah. You could always point to one of the drafts. People remember if you're right and they're not going to remember if you're wrong. Yeah. That idiot. So if I were to pick one, I would say that the universe is knowable.

19:56Earth is knowable. You have tabletop experiments. But why should that apply across the universe? That's why you love Isaac. My man. Because he was kind of the first to map that. My man, his equations of gravity with the moon going around Earth and Earth going around the sun, they also applied to Jupiter's moons going around Jupiter. And Jupiter's not a star and the moons are not planets. Yeah. So this was the first hint that laws of physics as established here on Earth may be that way

20:33also in the heavens. Well, and also that he thought mass was this deep thing, charge, this kind of gravitational charge that big celestial bodies felt against each other, their mass. It was a crazy idea to map that all the way to the sky. Let's take this exercise to the present, not the past.

General relativity and quantum gravity

20:59Yeah. What's going on today that might be true but is completely out there? Well, you love Isaac Newton. Me and I. You realized that this heft that we feel makes it tough to push us around, right? Right. It's a middle-aged man belly right here. Hard earned. Hard earned, man. I have six-pack abs. It's just under the fat. Under the... Yeah. But they're there.

21:29Okay. That's another episode. When we show our six-pack abs. When we're like doing an exercise video. We can totally do that. You should do an exercise video. Well, I kind of did. Oh my... I kind of did. Was it a dance video? No. I was in Terry Crews' exercise facility. Oh my God. That's hilarious. And we were like... Can I find this? We were pumping iron and we were just talking about pumping iron. Oh my God. I see a whole bunch of promo ideas here. Yeah. So, what today satisfies these criteria of centuries past?

22:02So, if we look at your big hero, Newton's discovery, that gravity could be mathematized. Yes. It could be described as a very simple system of equations. And indeed it was. And indeed it was. It predicted Kepler's laws, post-dicted Kepler's laws, and we could understand... Kepler predates Newton. Yes. Yes. Then comes my guy. Who's your guy? Einstein. Okay. Who replaces this simple system of just equations with this really elegant description of a curved

22:38space-time. He kind of supplants gravity. He says, it's not really a force. Really, we live in this beautiful curved space-time. Relativity is stunning. We have the right to ask, are these just different interpretations of something that they both describe completely accurately? Mm-hmm. The problem is... I think it's a great question. It's not exactly right. Einstein struggled to make sure he could reproduce what Newton could do at the low velocities

23:08and the low energies where Newtonian gravity was valid and uncontested. And Einstein really struggled to reproduce Newton. And if he couldn't reproduce Newton, he knew he was wrong. So it's not that they're different or incompatible. One is kind of larger than the other. So Einstein's envelops Newtonian gravity, but then it goes beyond. And there are predictions that are strictly relativistic that were not consistent with

23:39Newtonian gravity, which proved Einstein was onto something. We had taken more steps genuinely. The bending of the path of light around an eclipse that Eddington famously saw in 1919, which verified Einstein's theory of general relativity. I like to say it was as though humanity was in the shadow of the war and stepped into the shadow of the moon and then emerged, you know, citizens of the same earth. Methinks, the light would have bent under Newtonian rules.

24:13So I don't think it was just that the light bent at all. It's true. It was by how much it bent. It was by how much it bent. It bent by twice the amount that Newton would have predicted. Yes, absolutely. And Einstein had already by himself, when he first wrote down what was ultimately the theory that began to work for him, in pen and paper had confirmed the procession of the perihelion of Mercury. So as Mercury's slightly, slightly elliptical orbit approaches, closest approach to the sun,

24:46instead of forming a closed ellipse on its way out and coming back in to the exact same point, it actually overshoots a little. And so it makes one of those beautiful figures, you know, as though you were a kid with one of those pen figures. This tiny procession. The spirograph machine. Spirographs, yeah. It was considered, maybe there's another big Jupiter out there somewhere, but nobody thought you had to rewrite Newton's laws. Astronomers already had that figured out. Yeah. There was another body. There was another body that we hadn't seen yet. Yeah. And we called it Vulcan. Oh, Vulcan.

25:16I couldn't remember what it was called. We were out of our Vulcan minds. Right. It was quite natural to assume there's something perturbing it and it's near the sun. Maybe it's a planet so close to the sun. It's a lot more reasonable. It's lost in the glare. Right. It's more reasonable that we need a completely freaking new law of gravitational physics. Space time is geometry. That transcends Newton. Totally. Who's going to say that? Einstein. Except you're a part. Yeah. So, the crazy, he said he had heart palpitations. He was so excited to be able to match.

25:49So he was very much devout in terms of his adherence to Newtonian gravity. He just wanted to take a step beyond. Now we're on the cast. Did he apologize to Newton at some point? Well, I don't know. I mean, I... I heard rumors. They certainly weren't contemporaries. I think he did it in his autobiography. What was he apologizing for?

26:10The towering intellect of Newton deducing the nature of the universe. You're going to find a crack in the armor that was the universal law of gravitation. You've got to apologize for that. Did he ever disrespect Newton? No, I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. Okay. I think he was being gracious. So, what's interesting about where we are now, a hundred years more after Einstein, we might be superseding both of them.

26:43We might be in a moment where, yes, Newton's laws have to be reproduced by any theory beyond Newton, like relativity. Now, relativity has to be reproduced by any theory beyond Einstein's. Only because they've been experimentally verified. They've been experimentally verified, stunning, unbelievable power. So, there's a misconception that physics just goes here and then there and whatever is true. You throw away the old thing. No, you don't throw away the old. The old still works because it was experimentally verified. You don't throw away a bicycle, a pedal bike, because you invented the electric bike.

27:15Okay. So, we're on the cusp now where it's not that Newton was wrong and Einstein was wrong or that kind of exactly what you're saying. They were incomplete. They're incomplete to the extent that we know there must be a quantum theory of gravity. There must be. There has to be because the universe collides at the smallest scales, highest energies with curved space times. There's a paradigm there we can't get our hands on. People have been wrestling with since Einstein. It's a shotgun marriage. Yeah, and Einstein wanted to throw away quantum mechanics, and yet quantum mechanics seems to be the one that might be enduring.

27:56Did he really say God doesn't play dice with the universe? I mean, I don't know if that's an apocryphal story or not. I believe he indeed said that, but I don't think he meant it in the religious sense. How does he know, why does he believe he knows how God would make the universe? You were describing how the most miraculous thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible. Yes. I think that's what he means. Why would the universe become incomprehensible? This universe who had promised to be knowable through mathematics, as much of our marvel as it was, as great a mystery as it was, that it was comprehensible.

28:35Why would it suddenly fail us? Okay, so I once wrote on this subject, and I came up with a sentence I really like, and I'm going to say it again. Okay. Okay, that with quantum physics, the uncertainties are precise. We are certain about the uncertainties. Yeah. It's not just willy-nilly, who knows what's coming next. No, we formalize it. We have precise knowledge of those uncertainties.

29:08It defines the entire mathematics, non-commutative variables, all of these Grossman numbers, all of these things are designed to encode and formalize and make precise uncertainty. So maybe the idea that some parts of nature can only be described statistically, but we know precisely those statistics. So he wasn't happy with that. No, he wasn't happy because it really was weird, is weird. It's stuck in his craw.

29:39It remains weird. Are we one day going to find out that quantum mechanics, oh, it's just simply this thing, and now everything is understandable in a classical brain way? I think that there have been really brilliant attempts to say, hey, if we hide a bunch of extra variables, then this becomes completely deterministic in the normal way, just really complicated. Hidden variables. Hidden variables, yeah. They're operating in a deterministic way. We just can't see them. We just can't see them. So therefore, they're beyond our ability to calculate.

30:10Right, but you can actually prove that those do not explain the results of observations. The bizarre thing about quantum mechanics, as poorly as we understand it, philosophically, we're great at it computationally. Shut up and calculate. Shut up and calculate. I'm in that camp. And to 14 decimal points. Shut up and calculate. That's going to be confirmed at an accelerator experiment. Right. Like, that is stunning. As far as I'm concerned, we good there. Yeah. If you want to worry about what it means, go to the bar.

30:40Yeah. Right. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk. Bar talk.

31:13Bar talk.

Wormholes and time travel conjectures

31:14Bar talk.

Wormholes and time travel conjectures

31:15with wormholes. I think we can make it on paper, right? Yeah, we can make wormholes on paper. On paper. Yeah. We can't do them in the lab yet. Why not? Because we don't know of energy sources that behave like that. We know of energy sources that kind of do. Could they behave that way in another universe? Yeah, and they could behave that way in this universe if we just figured out how to make it. So for instance, sometimes it requires something called a negative energy density, which sounds terribly unstable and like a violation of all that is holy and good.

31:45But it's not impossible. We know of strange ways. All that is sacred. Yes, all that is sacred. We know of strange ways to temporarily trap energies that look effectively like they have somewhat a negative capacity. So none of it's impossible. We just don't, in the lab, know how to go mine something and put it together and make it make a wormhole. So the laws of physics do not prevent it? They do not prevent it. There are conjectures, right? There are conjectures, energy conjectures, that no such energy can exist, but they're conjectures. Remind me what a conjecture is.

32:20So a conjecture is a supposition that we haven't discovered the law yet, but that when we do, it will adhere to this principle. So people are pulling it out of their ass. Right. So like a conjecture might be that negative energies are forbidden. A chronology protection conjecture is a very interesting one. Yes. Tell me that one. So he realized that in the context of relativity, time travel was not forbidden. That if you're just doing, you're not doing quantum mechanics, you're not doing nuclear physics, you're just doing relativity on paper. Plain old

32:55relativity. You absolutely can find solutions that involve time travel, traveling backwards in time. That doesn't mean the actual universe will do it. That's the conjecture. So Hawking stated what he called the chronology protection conjecture. The idea that once I add quantum mechanics or once I understand quantum gravity, it will protect us from chronology violating paths. We cannot go back

33:25to before we were born. This sounds a lot like Einstein saying, I have a conjecture that you can't have a black hole. Right. That's right. Nature will find some way to prevent it. A conjecture is not a law. Okay. Or a proof. Okay. And many conjectures lie at the side of the road as we have litter bug. Right. Made unbelievable discoveries that have left them behind. We don't know that you cannot time travel. It's all done. Yes. It's all film. It's so exciting. Cool. I want to get

33:56back in and do it again. Well, maybe I can. We'll see if anybody watches it, that would be enough reason to do it again. But if no one watches it, we're done here. If the tree falls in the forest. You know, Moby Dick was a bomb. Was that true? Oh my God. It bombed. Really? In the most vicious reviews. Wow. Melville died thinking his great work. Call me Ishmael. Oh, it's so terrible. Oh, okay. With hate's heart, I stab at thee. That is a book too. Okay. Oh, we

Cosmic dimensions and origami space

34:34discuss whether the universe genuinely has three spatial dimensions in one time or if there are more spatial dimensions. I particularly love this topic. That's my research topic. Love me some dimensions too. Love me some dimensions. Dimensions good. And you also talk about black holes? Black holes. You have to. You've written two books on it. Yes. I spent a lot of my life in that whole arena. I have to say your titles again. The Black Hole Blues. That's the best. And the Black Hole Survival Guide. Yes. So you have to go there. You have to touch that. Yes. Yes. Okay. I suggest everyone carry it around just in case. Because you never

35:08know. You never know. You never know. You never know. Topology. Yeah. Is a thing. Well, we talk about space not being taken for granted. Not this infinite stage. Just with events of the universe, stars exploding and things happening, playing out against this infinite stage. The stage itself can be quite organic, evolves, and quite complex. I call it origami. The space can be wrapped up. I love origami. Crazy little origami. And small parts and larger parts. I was an origami

35:39maniac as a kid. Were you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You still got some skills? I can do like five things. Yeah. Well, the universe has countable ways it can be folded up. So if the universe is really three-dimensional, we know all of the possible ways it can be wrapped up into a kind of origami. But as you go to higher dimensions, all bets are off. Way more complicated, all bets are off. But even with just three dimensions, if we imagine the universe is born and it is not infinite, or it is infinite, and we ask, is nature trying every possibility? As it happens

36:16mathematically, factually, there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to be finite. But there are very few number of ways for the universe to be infinite. So where are we? Where do we live? Can I even repeat that? Okay. There's an infinite number of ways a finite universe can be configured topologically. Yeah. Glued up into origami. All the unique ways

36:48it can be folded together. But there's only a finite number of ways. Very few. An infinite universe can be configured. Exactly. So if we really imagine nature's trying everything, trying over and over again, there's one way for all the dimensions to be infinite. There's a couple of ways for some of the dimensions to be finite and the rest infinite. The infinity of other possibilities are all finite and glued together in some complex origami. This is right around where Chuck Nice would say,

37:20I need some weed. I feel like Chuck would stand up and walk out right now. Right about now. Right now. Chuck exits stage left. One last question. What's your opinion of ambulance chasing theorists?

Ambulance chasing theorists

37:34Oh, that's so interesting. By ambulance chasing theorists, you mean there's a tiny observation that people aren't even sure about. And then there's 15 papers by theorists trying to fit this one tiny little, not my favorite, not my favorite. And then we later find out that there was something wrong with the observation. Right. And then we have 15 theories to explain the wrong observation. Yeah. That's ambulance chasing. That's ambulance chasing. Yeah. But the great theorists are out there. And I think that's what we're paying respect to in this series, which is we're honoring the

38:06deeper ideas. We don't know if they're right. We don't. And we don't know if they're observable or verifiable. But we are very much curious if this is an experiment, this whole thing, this whole universe lark. And if it's being tried over and over again, and every idea that we have that's internally consistent, that's consistent with the laws of physics, if that might be realized somehow, somewhere, sometime. What does it mean if I come up with a theory and it explains a whole bunch of

38:37stuff, and then I make another prediction out of that same theory and it's nowhere to be found in the universe? Should I keep looking for it? Or is the theory overstepping? It's a really interesting question. You could say we're there now because the dominant components of the universe that are driving the evolution of the universe are not things we've discovered. We've not found dark matter or dark energy. There are ideas of where it might be. The experiments aren't finding them there. Does that

39:09mean we abandon the attempt to look for a neutrino-like particle that might be the dark matter? Or do we keep pressing? I think this is a quandary every experimental physicist runs against if the first experiments aren't successful. And if the first 20 years aren't successful, then what do we do? So in the end, your series is a love letter to theorists. That's beautiful. I love that. Yes, it is a love letter to theorists.

39:43So, well, good luck with this series. Thank you, man. Yeah. Thanks so much. I haven't seen any of them. We had other producers do this. I know. But I wasn't even looking. I know. But I was texting you. I was. I was texting you, asking your advice. So, we look forward to this. And it was so deserving of your own thing. Thanks so much, man. It's really been fun. Online there. I love it. And you're one of our favorite guests. So, we have no reason to think that won't continue into the fan base. Yes. Love it.

40:14The Janna fan base. All right. This has been another installment of StarTalk. This edition, in theory, with the one and only Janna Levin. Until next time, keep looking up.