Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up on StarTalk, we're live from the Novo Theater in Los Angeles. Join me and my co-host, Sashir Zameda, in conversation with particle physicist David Salzberg and astrophysicist and Star Trek science advisor Aaron McDonald. Also joining us is special comedic guest Pete Holmes. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Live. at the Novo Theater, Los Angeles, and we've got a show for you tonight. Thanks for coming out. Tonight, we're going to find out where the sci is in the sci-fi, the science in the science fiction. And we'll also explore some of the most iconic science fiction stories that have ever been told. But I want to first introduce my guests.
As you may know, StarTalk is a juxtaposition. It is a braid of science, pop culture, and comedy. And right now, I will introduce to you my comedic co-host. That is Sashir Zameda. Sashir, come on out. Where are you? A comedian, actress, a former cast member of Saturday Night Live? But you had more hair back then. I did have more hair, yeah. I think...
People think I'm a different person when I shave my head. I shaved my head for the first time ever in college, and I lost like half my friends over the summer. They just didn't recognize you. They truly didn't recognize me. I was like, what? Now, in addition, we will have two expert guests. Let's bring the first one out. We have astrophysicist Erin McDonald. Erin, come on out. Here you go.
Hello. Erin, hello. Thank you. Where did we find Erin McDonald? She is the official science advisor to the Star Trek franchise. Whoa! Whoa, I want that job, we all want that job. Thank you, everyone wants that job. Everyone wants that job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You have your PhD in astrophysics from the University of Glasgow. Yep.
Specializing in, what is it, neutron stars, is that correct? Yep, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, and gravitational waves, so I'm excited to talk about those. Actually, and you worked a bit with LIGO. I did. And remind us what LIGO stands for. Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory. That's why we abbreviate it LIGO. Okay, in addition to Erin, we have David Salzberg.
Dr. David Salzberg, come on out, David. All right. There you go, man. David Salzberg, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, right here in our backyard. You're an experimental particle physicist, and this is like, that's a rarefied space. There's a lot of people that I have to deal with. Now, why is he on this panel?
Because he is the science advisor to the Big Bang Theory TV show, as well as Young Sheldon, and he advised Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer. Oh, my gosh. So his job wasn't to edit the script. They had other people to do that. He made sure that all the set design did not really mess up for what was supposed to be there at the time and at the place. Mr. Particle physicist. All right.
Well, it wouldn't be a complete StarTalk show unless we round out. We have one empty chair here. Oh, yes. So, Sasheer, you brought a guest comedian with you. Who might that be? Yeah, you know, as you've said before, this show is about science, pop culture, comedy, and I didn't want to be the only comedy arm on this panel.
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Chapter 2: How do warp drives theoretically work?
Get it back. Oh, emotional. Okay, and so you try to detect neutrinos. That's right. And where do you find them? So the experiments that I did were in Antarctica. We used the Antarctic ice as a giant lens or target that collected them. So this is like glacial ice? Glacial ice that's hundreds of thousands, if not more, years old. Okay. Just waiting for us to, it's incredibly clear to radio waves.
So the idea is that neutrinos mostly pass through, but one will hit, and it will make particles that emit radio waves that we could then detect from our platform. Awesome. Okay, so how many neutrinos are out there? Well, most of them that were coming through us right now are from the sun, and through our bodies right now, there's about 100 trillion per second going through you. Neutrinos?
Yes, from the core of the sun. Ah! But now you feel it. I didn't know about it before. But only about one or a dozen will actually interact with you in your lifetime. Define interact. Yeah, define interact. Be specific. That's a good question. But let's just say it leaves a little energy behind. Or breaks up your DNA a little bit. That's less good. That sounds bad.
So Aaron, so not only are these particles, but there's also waves that are not electromagnetic, that are not part of that whole spectrum that I just delineated. And so predicted by good old Albert. Indeed. Give me some of that background there. So one of the things that Albert Einstein did was general relativity, which was sort of describing the fabric of our universe.
If you've seen that bowling ball on a trampoline idea, that's kind of how gravity works that they figured out. Most of us learn Newtonian gravity, the apple falling from the tree. It's a force. But that only really, it's an approximation for gravity. It turns out. Yeah, we didn't know at the time. We didn't know, yeah.
And so Einstein was the one who kind of introduced mass into this fabric that scientists had already been thinking about and saw, like, that works. That described the gravity that we were struggling to describe at the time. And one of the things he did was like, well, what if the bowling ball explodes? What if two bowling balls crash into each other?
And you can propagate that through the math, and the trampoline will ripple. And so space-time ripples when there's a change to it, and it travels at the speed of light. But Einstein was like, it's there, but it's so tiny, no one will ever detect it. And scientists went, challenge accepted. And a hundred years after his prediction, we detected the motion of space-time in our universe.
And the best analogy I can give you, but really pay attention to what I'm saying, it is like hearing the universe. It is not hearing the universe. Sound doesn't travel in space. But it is like, you know, if you just didn't have any light and you're just hearing the universe, that's a different sense. And that's effectively what gravitational waves are.
They give us information in a different sense. And they ripple away from the incident. Yes. And they move at the speed of light. Correct. And LIGO detected its first wave in 2016, if I remember. 15, they announced it in 16. They announced it in 16. It's a common mistake. I know, I know. What are you going to do with this guy? It's a little embarrassing, but yeah. 2016 over here. May I?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of antimatter in science fiction?
Actually, no, you can go. All right, all right, all right, yeah. But it's not like you don't have dark matter stories. So many. So many. I'll tell you after. Okay, all right, all right. Sounds good, sounds good. You queue them up, and we'll come back to you, yeah.
So Frans Zwicky in the 1930s was able to look at sort of distant galaxies and see how they were moving and see how the stars in them were moving, and it appeared that there was more stuff there than how the stars were behaving. And so that's kind of the first origin of that. And then Vera Rubin came along, and she was a great woman astrophysicist, and she was able to... Oops, some Rubin heads.
Yeah, Ruben. And map in our own galaxy, showing that the movement of the stars, like that there is dark matter in our own galaxy. And I love Vera Ruben, Ruben head here. And in Star Trek Discovery, we actually named a dark matter nebula after her because it's called the Veruban Nebula. I was very excited to get that in there. I know. Little shout out. Sounds delicious.
I know, shocking, but there's a lot of overlooked women in physics. Yes. So any opportunity to shine a light on them, Vera Rubin was awesome. All right, so we have these things that are kind of mysterious and sci-fi-y. Don't ask me to spell that. Sci-fi-y things, you know. And one of them is antimatter. And many people's first encounter with antimatter was Star Trek. Yeah.
Chapter 4: What are the potential future technologies discussed?
Because you have matter-antimatter drives. And what goes on there? So with antimatter, it's one of those things you hear these technical words thrown around, and you don't really know what's science and what's science fiction. Antimatter sounds like science fiction, but it is actually a real thing. But it has to do with particles, so I'll let you explain antimatter. Antimatter. I know.
Give it to me. So OK, it was an interesting case where that was predicted before it was found. And we had Paul Dirac in the 1930s playing around with the equations. But that's two names, Paul Dirac. Yes, first name was Paul, last name was Dirac. OK, you said Paul Dirac. The sister was Tesseract.
He was playing around with the equations of special relativity and quantum mechanics, and he had to take a square root, essentially. And, you know, the square root of nine is three, but it's also minus three. Yeah. So he had two answers. Minus three times minus three is also nine. Right.
Chapter 5: How do storytelling and science intersect in this episode?
So it has two solutions. And that's kind of close to why he found two solutions when he combined these equations. And one was a positive charge and one was a negative charge that we now identify as the electron and its antimatter particle, the positron. Okay, so as I understand it, he hypothesized that since we are regular matter, there might be a whole other place filled with antimatter.
And he also had this idea that there could be an entire sea of particles that correspond to the antimatter. And they're the matter, and we're the antimatter, man. LAUGHTER The weird thing with matter and antimatter, though, is if you touch, you annihilate yourselves, and you turn into pure energy. So if you met your matter counterpart and you shook hands, you . Energy. Yeah, so don't do that.
So don't do that. Just be careful. Yeah, yeah. So this is 100% efficient. In converting matter into energy. If a positron meets an electron, they collide and produce pure energy. All their mass disappears and goes into energy by E equals MC squared. Okay, so Star Trek... uses matter-antimatter for warp drives. Yes, that is correct. So, strap in, because it's awesome.
So, sheet of space-time, right? You want to go faster than the speed of light. You can't on the surface of space-time. Just to be clear, if you went the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, and that's too much time for a TV show. Yes. So you got to do that during the TV commercial. So how do they pull it off? There you go.
Yeah, the nearest star to us is over four light years away. And if you have a five-year mission, that's going to be boring. So to go, there's lots of different ways you can sort of shoot this. I forgot about that. Yeah, it's a five-year mission. Five-year mission. The original series, yeah. To seek out and explore strange new worlds. To boldly go where no man has gone before. We activated it.
I'm going to call it this. Aliens. Wait, wait. So it's a five-year mission, but the show only lasted three seasons. I know. Well, that's a different conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And why do they have all those clothes for a three-hour tour? Right. Catch us up on the warp drives.
OK, so the idea behind warp drives is you can't go faster than light on the surface of spacetime, but there's nothing that says that spacetime itself can't go faster than the speed of light. And so you wrap a bubble of spacetime around your ship, and then that bubble pushes you faster than the speed of light. In order to do that, you need energy, because E equals mc squared.
If you don't have mass, if you don't have a bowling ball, you can use an equivalent amount of energy. And in Star Trek, they get that energy from matter, anti-matter collisions. Most people will conflate dilithium crystals thinking that those are powering the ships, but those are more like control rods for the matter-antimatter reactions. They like keep it stable.
But there's lots of like, once we start poking holes in it, we're gonna like, how can you contain antimatter, right? So right, if you put antimatter in a bottle and not an antibottle, the positrons in the antimatter would see the electrons in the bottle and they would annihilate and give off a lot of energy. So how do you carry around antimatter? So one way we saw in the movie Angels and Demons.
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Chapter 6: How do gravitational waves relate to the universe?
You're not President Bush. Make with the data. Well, we just said 100 million divided by nano. Oh, okay. So that's 10 to the 8. That becomes 10 to the 12. So we're trillions of dollars. I was right. No, way more than trillions. You were doing it? No one heard it. I loved it. I heard it. You are not an overlooked woman in physics. We're up in quadrillions, I think, of dollars per gram.
Okay, so there's not that much money in the world. And that's in my body right now? That's all I heard. Did you just see me in the parking lot with a styrofoam cup and a lighter? I'm just... How do I get it? Sorry, so... Who's the buyer? Where's the drop? There it is. So, Erin, I've heard in Star Trek they reference subspace. Yes. What is that? It's fictional. Yes, subspace is fictional.
It's a website that helps people get paid to write. Relax. Wait, so subspace is fictional. Dilithium crystals are fictional. Anti-matter is real. Subspace is, the concept is real. It's just the fictional term hasn't been, it's basically the area outside of the trampoline, however you want to think of that. Everywhere outside the trampoline is subspace.
And that's how they communicate faster than light in Star Trek, because again, if you want to communicate, fastest you can go is send a signal at the speed of light, but they create subspace buoys that poke through the trampoline and then talk to each other faster than the speed of light, which is awesome. But fake. Because you're all clearly impressed by it. No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think, are we confused if that's real? Huh? Did we know that's not real? So the idea of additional dimensions would be, is a real concept. We don't call it subspace. That's what Star Trek calls it. And the physics of the idea of subspace buoys is solid, but it doesn't exist. We don't know how to get out of our own universe into subspace. Yeah. Does that help? Thank you. Okay. Thank you.
I appreciate that. So, Shira, you had Trekkie parents. Yeah. Did any of that spill out onto you? Or did you just have weird, geeky parents, and you were the artist in the family? I'm still geeky. Next Generation was my show. Oh, okay. Yeah. And, yeah. And they gave the one black guy on the bridge, he had the full vision. There were two black guys on the bridge. Okay, you're right. Sorry. Sorry.
Thank you. Thank you. So Jordy LaForge had that visor, they called it, which is acronym time. Who's got the acronym? Barry. Oh, gosh. Wait. Please. Is it the visor? Visual. Visual. Integrative. Sensor. Sensor overload resource. Optical. Optical. Pulling that out of your ass. I did, but I bet it's resource. I bet it's resource. He was half right. Yeah, we were so close. Lidar assumption symmetry.
Yep. ER George Clooney. So it's a self-driven acronym. So he was able to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And so, was he one of your favorite people? Willie Goldberg was one of my favorite people. Whoopi! Oh, we love Whoopi. Wasn't she the bartender? In the canteen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blue milk. Yeah. What is that? What was blue milk? Wrong franchise. Nope. They all have it. You're right.
I love that you got it. I take it back. Sequest. Regular milk. Yeah. Wow. We're having our own show. You guys are having a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blue Milk is, yeah, very Star Wars. But yeah, my parents really, yeah, I feel like Star Trek was very much in our household. And like, you know, my mom would braid my hair while we're watching the show.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of dark matter in astrophysics?
Thank you. I'm mad. I thought I'd get more than one word answer when I got here. Well, I think you've got to make, it's science. You have to make a prediction. And the more surprising the prediction, the better. And then we will go look for it. And that's, the idea can sound great, but it has to be the way the world works. Okay, Pete and I will work on it. We'll work on it.
But wait, if there are these other dimensions that could be other versions of us, are they like other universes in a way? Because in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Heard of it. It's fifth season now. They have it upside down? What is that? Did you know what that? Have you seen the show? I have seen the show. I don't understand all of it, but they do have Upside Down, and it's upside down.
So, Shira, I'm going to say... It's underneath. It's like, you know, we're up here. Oh, we're up here? And then they're... It's like an alternate reality. Flip it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so then... I didn't think I would ever see that again. Thank you. So what's there in the upside down world? Creepy. Monsters. Demogorgons. It's like a black, scary, stormy. Black?
The trees are black. Black. It's very dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Well, what's, I mean, so strange. So what, how did, how did they get access to this? This upside down world? They opened a portal to another dimension. And then they communicate through like the Christmas lights.
But I like the upside down idea because it is like they, you just multiply everything by minus one, which is kind of the original multiverse question, which was like, but what if goatees and evil? Like that was Star Trek, right? They had the mirror universe, which was just our universe just flipped upside down. If you had a goatee, you were bad. Yeah.
There's another version of this podcast happening where we're all hanging like bats from our feet. And we all have goatees. We have goatees. Exactly. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like I heard they opened it with a particle accelerator. Is that right? In Stranger Things. In Stranger Things. Yeah, I think they did. I think, but... I'll just say, you say black hole, particle, neutrino.
You can kind of do whatever you want. Get to the demons. Get to Winona Ryder. We don't care. We're good. Right? I mean, you care. That's your job to care. A little bit, yeah. We're sort of out here going like, who cares? But there's some mixed things here. So we have this upside down world. Is it another dimension or is it in the multiverse? Right?
So we've heard a lot about the multiverse and Marvel has run with it in the multiverse. Right. Right? Infinite multiverse. With no missteps! Has Star Trek picked up the multiverse? Yeah, so they did. In The Next Generation, there was an episode where Worf is going through a quantum fissure, which I would probably push back on the language of that, just because that's quantum. Anyway.
And then sees all these different versions of what would happen, where he's married to Deanna Troi, and there's a birthday cake at one point, and there's all these different things. And so we did, in more recent seasons, in Lower Decks, season five, which, yeah, that show's great. I'm biased, but it's a great show.
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Chapter 8: How does Star Trek influence our understanding of science?
His name is Tony Tyson. I call him Cousin Tony, affectionately. But those were his equations. I'm not buying that. I remember finding your PhD thesis and using it. Uh-oh, someone doesn't recognize their own thesis. Too long in trailers and show business, forgot about the math. Or I got Tony Tyson's thesis. Thank you, there it is. There's an alternative universe there. We'll find out.
Okay, how about this? We'll have our team of researchers get on this. According to Aaron, there is a universe in which you did it correctly. Let's imagine that that was it. And so, just in terms of storyline, in the final episode, I think it was, of the final season of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon, who's like the smart one with multiple degrees, teams up with his wife,
Amy Farrah Fowler, who in real life is Mayim Bialik, who is a real-life neuroscientist. He has a PhD. She has a PhD in real life, plays a neuroscientist on the show. They collaborate with some new kind of physics that I couldn't follow. But did you advise on that? Yeah, I did. It was actually one of the rare cases where they gave me a lot of warning.
Usually it's like, we're doing a script tomorrow, put some science in it. And this time they told me... We're actually... That's funny. That is nice, that's nice. Classic Chuck. But this time, they need some Nobel Prize-worthy discovery, go. You're like, look, if I could, I'd have a Nobel Prize. I wouldn't waste it on your show. And I wouldn't retire a year before it was given. Oh, no. Oh no.
Oh no. That was deep. That was deep. You have it. Just tell people you have it. We'll never look it up. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. So I remembered something like super. Super asymmetry. Asymmetry. Instead of supersymmetry. And we've been talking about supersymmetry. That's been a theory since before I was a graduate student. People have been looking for evidence of this theory forever.
I looked it up. There's about 10,000 papers with the title containing super symmetry and another 10,000 carrying the title super symmetric. But then it came to me, super asymmetry. And I was like, are there any zero papers with that title? That was their new theory. Okay, so that gave you a space in which to operate. Right. That was new. Right, exactly. Okay.
I mean, I can explain what in my mind the theory was, but it's not Nobel Prize. But it was good enough for the show. Yeah. The idea in real physics is where are the supersymmetric particles? Where is this partner of the electron? We know it's antimatter partner. We can't find its supersymmetric. So it's a symmetry that is broken.
So people make the symmetry theoretically, and then it's broken to explain why we don't see it. And the idea of their theory is that it's not symmetric and then broken, but it starts asymmetric. Just clarify here. Just clarify. Please don't ask me more questions. Look, okay. Look, clarify something else. What does it mean to break symmetry?
That implies that things are a certain way that you like, and then they're different and you say they're broken. But if nature is that, what does it mean for nature to be broken if that is nature? Maybe it's your understanding that's broken. He made it up. I like this a lot. He made some hell out of him. It's fake. I know.
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