2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light

2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light – Transcript

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON(Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium):Thank you all. This is the 13th annual Isaac Asimov panel debate. I’m your host and moderator this evening, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium, where I also serve as an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History.

Thank you all for coming this evening. For the first time, this event this evening will be live streamed on the Internet. See, so you could have stayed home. You see? We waited until now to tell you that. Sorry about that. Isaac Asimov is—the name is no stranger to any of us, certainly no stranger to anyone seated here tonight. He was a polymath. Perhaps one of the last of his kind. Maybe Gardner was another one, who just was really great at a lot of things, and bringing it to the public. And he was smart and ambitious. Isaac Asimov was a native New Yorker, did much of his research for his 500-plus books that he’s written, sourced from the research libraries here at the American Museum of Natural History.

And when he died in the 1990s, we wanted to find a fitting tribute to him. There are a lot of ways you could possible raise funds and commit them, but one we figured to have his name live on would be to celebrate his life and his science advocacy with this panel debate. Like I said, it’s in its 13th year. And I just want to publicly thank Isaac Asimov’s family and friends, who started the original fund to make this possible. If you join me in thanking them.

These debates are designed not in the traditional sense of a point/counterpoint, three-minute, two-minute reply. That’s what politicians do. We try to do it a little differently here. The panel debate is really a conversation that we will have. We have six physicists here—sorry, five physicists and an engineer. And it’s as though you are eavesdropping on our conversation at the bar. And in that way, you get to sample some of the spontaneous thinking that goes on when people grapple the bleeding edge of scientific discovery. And so in that sense, it’s a debate because there’s typically not enough data to resolve the conflict. And that’s where things get interesting.

The format of tonight is I’ll introduce the six panelists, one of whom will be sent in via Skype. And they’ll each give two minutes opening remarks, and we just go straight into it. We’ll do that for about an hour, and then we go to Q&A, represented by you in the audience. There are microphones up front. We will also be soliciting questions from the Twitterverse. That is a parallel Universe to our own. It’s there whether you want to believe it or not. Let me just give some brief introductions.

The full profile of each panelist is in your program. Oh, by the way, I didn’t even tell you the topic of tonight. It started out where we would explore faster than light particles based on the announcement at the European Center for Nuclear Research that they may have discovered just such objects. And some later results—later like a few weeks ago—came out that maybe there was a mistake in the measurements. We don’t know. We said, well, let’s broaden this. We have tremendous brain power coming to the stage. We will not simply talk about whether you can travel faster than light, but we will explore all ways modern physicists are testing the fundamental laws of nature. That is this evening’s topic.

Joining me on stage now is David Cline. He’s professor of physics at UCLA, with a specialty in neutrinos. David, come on out. Where you’d go? There you go, David. Thank you. We have coming over Skype we have Gian Giudice, if I pronounce his name correctly. He should be sliding on to our monitor. There he goes. Gian Giudice. He’s a theoretical particle physicist at the Center for European Nuclear Research. And we will be chatting with him about the experiments being conducted there. Next is Sheldon Glashow. Shelly, come on out. Professor of theoretical physics, Boston University. Shelly. Oh, did I say he has the Nobel Prize in physics? I forgot to mention that. I’m sorry. But that’s not even the most impressive part of Shelly’s resume. He’s a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. One of seven Nobel laureates from that school. All seven are in physics, by the way.

Next, Christopher Hegarty is an engineer with the MITRE Corporation, specializing in everything GPS. GPS, the system we’re all familiar with that prevents you from getting lost, is also—you might not know—a remarkable test of general relativity. Christopher, come on out. Next we have a senior researcher at the Italian Nuclear Physics Institute, and is a member of the OPERA Collaboration at the—where are we here—Gran Sasso Laboratory. Please join me in a warm welcome of Laura Patrizii. Laura. I keep trying to get the name right, Laura. She was in Italy when the neutrinos arrived. So, we have to get some—did I leave someone out? Who’d I leave out? Oh, there she goes. Thank you. And last among our five here, and certainly not least, is Gabriela Gonzalez. She’s professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University, which is the academic home of one of the most advanced observatories of gravitational waves ever conceived. Let’s give a warm welcome to Gabriela. Gabriela. So, let’s get my stuff together here. So, I’d like to know a little bit more about each one of you, so why don’t we start at the far end. David, just tell us what drives you in the day. Spend a couple of minutes doing that, and then we’ll get into our beer talk.

DAVID CLINE (Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA):So, I study neutrino physics. Actually, there was a picture up here of the detector I use, but it’s gone now. And neutrinos were thought at one point never to be detectable. There were invented in 1933 by Wolfgang Pauli. It was discovered in 1956 by Professor Reines. So, I’ve devoted much of my life in the study of high-energy neutrinos, low-energy neutrinos. In particular, tonight I’ll be talking later about looking for neutrinos with faster than the speed of light with a counter detector to OPERA. But, anyway, neutrinos fascinate me and I hope they will fascinate you. Thank you.

TYSON: Thank you. Gian Giudice, welcome to New York. At least your avatar is here in New York. If you can tell us just how you plug into the world of physics.

GIAN GIUDICE (Theoretical Physics Division, CERN): Sure. I apologize for my last-minute problem and not for being able to be physically there. But I’m very glad to be at least virtually there. After all, I am a theoretical physicist, so I don’t care too much about actual reality. It’s an interesting experience because it’s the first time in my life that I wear a jacket, tie, together with pajama pants and slippers. I’m a theoretical particle physicist—

TYSON:So, you’re in your underwear now is what you’re telling us.

GIUDICE: Well, pajama pants. I’m very glad that theoretical physics exist and is supported by society because I’m not a very practical person. I’m probably—there’s not much else I could have done in life. I was educated in Italy. Then I had the privilege to do research in your country. I worked at Fermilab near Chicago and at the University of Texas at Austin. These were fundamental years for my research because they really shaped my vision of particle physics. And then finally I moved to European laboratory of CERN. And how can I describe CERN? I think that if God were a particle physicist and if he had to create Heaven, then he would build something very similar to CERN. So, very privileged to work in such an intellectually stimulating environment.

TYSON:Okay, excellent. Well, thank you for those opening remarks. Shelly, what do you got—it’s your third time, I think, on this stage here.

SHELDON GLASHOW (Department of Physics, Boston University):Third time here, yes. Look, I agree with the previous speakers. And neutrinos are my favorite particles, too. But we’re here, I think, to talk a little bit about relativity as well. And we all know that the special theory of relativity was introduced back in 1905, and there have been doubters ever since. And one of the great fascinations that I’ve enjoyed is looking at tests of the special theory of relativity. And let me just recall that. Fifteen years ago or so, in the late 1990s, my dear-departed friend Sidney Coleman and I got into the game as theoretical physicists to see what we could say about tests of the special theory. There had already been all sorts of experimental tests. There was an atomic physics experiment that was sensitive to 21 or 22 decimal places done by some experimenters at the University of Washington, as I recall. Could we as theorists do better? It seemed an absurd question, but we did. Because we realized that if, for example, particles traveled faster than the speed of light then there would be consequences; processes that would ordinarily be forbidden become allowed and processes that are ordinarily allowed can become forbidden. And on that basis, we were very proud of ourselves. We did an experiment. We said people have seen protons—cosmic ray protons of such large energies that they couldn’t have had these energies if relativity were violated. And we put a limit on the passable superluminality of protons of 10 to the minus 23. I mean, that’s an absurdly small number. And, yes, even theorists can do experiments. Thank you.

TYSON:Okay. And that’s not even what you got the Nobel Prize for.

GLASHOW:Well, no. To be honest, that had to do with something I did as a mere infant back in 1961. A long time ago, one of my first papers written after I graduated—got my PhD from Harvard University. By the way, I also taught there for 35 years. Gave up because 35 years is enough to teach it anyplace. Yeah, so I got my PhD, and then ran off to Copenhagen. That’s a story in itself, but we’ll skip that for the while. And that’s where I wrote the paper that won the Nobel Prize.

TYSON: Excellent. Christopher, what does it mean—well, this is your opening remarks, but you’re not from an academic setting. You’re in a MITRE Corporation. In your comments, opening remarks, can you just tell us what that is? Because I think many of us might be unfamiliar.

CHRISTOPHER HEGARTY (MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development):Yeah. MITRE Corporation is a private company that manages five Federally-funded research and development centers. I am an electrical engineer. I am live here in New York because I like things that are real. I absolutely hated my modern physics class in college, and never wanted anything to do with that voodoo stuff. Although, I have to say I’ve been working for the past 20 years on GPS, and I’ve grown to like modern physics a lot more because it is used. Both general and special relativity are very important to the operation of GPS today. And you can see it with your own eyes. If you don’t apply the corrections that Einstein derived for us, it doesn’t work anymore. And I like that much better than seeing cubes from the side, or whatever my textbook talked about. So, that’s why I’m here.

TYSON: Okay, thank you. Laura?

LAURA PATRIZII (Department of Physics, University of Bologna):Well, first of all, I would like to say that I’m very happy to be here and honored for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m from Italy, as you can easily guess from my accent. And I started my career—professional career as a physicist in the so-called astro-particle physics, which is a quite new field. I mean, it dates back to the 1985, something like this. And it’s a field in connection between particle physics and astrophysics because there is strong connection. And neutrinos are a link between those two. But now I didn’t start with the neutrinos. Actually, I started with magnetic monopoles, with an experiment with the Gran Sasso—you will hear about the Gran Sasso later on a lot, I think—which was looking for those magnetic monopoles in cosmic race, which the existence of magnetic monopoles would prove the unification of three fundamental forces. And then I shifted [unintelligible 15:50] to neutrinos. And I am one of the guilty person tonight because I am member of the OPERA Collaboration, which has claimed that the neutrino can fly faster than light. But, okay, you will hear more about this later on.

TYSON: Yes, we will for sure. Okay. Yes, Gabby?

GABRIELA GONZALEZ (Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University):I’m Gabriela Gonzalez, and I live in Louisiana, but you hear an accent from much farther south. I was born in Argentina. Came to do my PhD in the U.S. in Syracuse, New York and loved what I did and stayed there. I started working, even at that time in the early ‘90s, on a beautiful project called the LIGO Project, which is testing a prediction—but I think it’s a most striking prediction—of Einstein’s theory of relativity that says that space time itself can vibrate, can produce gravitational wave. We all produce gravitational waves that travel. We’re out to measure these tiny waves that come from black holes. And I’ve been working on that ever since. I’m the spokesperson for a big collaboration of hundreds of scientists that are working on this. And I hope I tell you more about that later on.

TYSON:You certainly will. So, thank you all for your opening remarks. I want to spend a couple of minutes before we put on the boxing gloves. I’d like to just—I want to explore just the way physics gets done today. We have a couple of you who are part of the CERN collaboration. So, CERN is how you pronounce the word, which I think in French that’s the sequence of word, but in English it’s the European Center for Nuclear Research. You swap some letters back and forth and you get CERN. And that’s where you have the Large Hadron Collider. And so, David, just to go back to you, this is—can you tell me just something about this Large Hadron Collider relative to previous colliders? Just what is it and what is it doing for us?

CLINE: I worked at CERN for a long time, and we tried here in America to develop our own very large machine called the Super Conducting Super Collider, which was going to be in Texas. A series of a very unfortunate events led this machine to be canceled, so CERN, which was then directed by my colleague—

TYSON:Wait, just to clarify, you’re describing a particle accelerator that was proposed in the United States that got cancelled.

CLINE:Right.

TYSON:And so stranding an entire generation of particle physicists here in America.

CLINE: Now, we understand that that may have been a tragic mistake because at the Large Hadron Collider, which is 27 kilometers in circumference, we are hoping to see some particles, which are called super symmetric—you may have heard of those before—they seem to be at this moment outside the range of the energy. Now, we do think we’ve seen the Higgs boson. Maybe we can say more about that later. But the energy range of the SSC might have been ideal, but now many scientists in the world—even people from Iran, Vietnam—it’s just an incredible array of scientists who work on this Large Hadron Collider. I, in particular, work on the Compact Muon Solenoid. There’s six professors at UCLA that I work with, and we have our own duties for the hardware. So, basically the Large Hadron Collider has now been—come now the world machine, but we’re still hoping in the future we’re going to be able to build something comparable to that in the United States. So, for the time being, we’re hoping there’ll be major discoveries there. The only one on the horizon at this moment is the Higgs boson.

TYSON:Gian, at CERN how many different countries are involved there just to get a sense of this?

GIUDICE: Right. But in the LHC experiments, a lot more countries are represented. Essentially, I would almost all countries in the world of all continents—I mean, hundreds of countries. It is really truly international endeavor. And that’s a nice thing. When I was saying that CERN is Heaven, there’s much more physics involved. It is really the idea that science brings people together, joins nations. CERN was funded soon after the war, and as you can imagine—

TYSON:Wait, this is America, so you have to be specific about which war you’re talking about. Funded after the war, please specify.

GIUDICE: It’s the only one that is in my view as an Italian—

TYSON:That’s the Second World War

GIUDICE: —so, that’s the Second World War. And as you can imagine, Europe was divided and also did not—was destroyed and did not have the resources to fund the fundamental research. So, that point was a special political endeavor to bring together nations that were just fighting a few years earlier. And science [unintelligible 21:26] to bring people together and also to start something new. To bring back from United States many of the scientists that had to leave and starting in the ashes of a destroyed Europe something new. And I think that mission was really a success. And now we see that CERN is expanding even beyond the borders of Europe. And it’s truly the biggest and most international center for science at the moment.

TYSON:Excellent. So, it’d be fair to say then that CERN in Switzerland and the International Space Station are two examples of extraordinary international collaborations. Perhaps the greatest international collaborations outside of the waging of war. Would you agree?

GIUDICE: Yes.

TYSON:Yeah, okay.

GIUDICE: I wasn’t sure you were referring to me because you’re looking at David, at least from my point of view. But that’s what I said, so I certainly agree with what I said.

TYSON:All right. I want to spend a little time just starting off thinking about what it is to test what we call fundamental physics. Shelly, let me ask you: Are people still testing thermodynamics? Or Maxwell’s equations; these classics physics from the 19th century, or is that just in the books and we’re on to other things? And if we are on to other things, why ignore 19th century physics and only test 20th century physics? GLASHOW:Well, yes. Let’s pick—

TYSON:My question was not a yes/no answer. Just so you know, I’m on to you here. Go on.

GLASHOW:You mentioned many things. Let’s think of classical mechanics. Think of the mechanics that was that apple fell on the head of Newton and he created classical mechanics: F equals MA and all that stuff. That’s a great theory. It is a true theory. Now, what the hell could I mean by that? Because it’s not true for things that move too fast. When things move too fast, you have to invoke the special theory of relativity. It’s not true for things that are too small because you have to invoke quantum mechanics. It’s not true for things that are too big and fat like the sun because general relativity begins to play a role. So, why do I say classical mechanics has proven to be true? Because we have mapped out its envelope of validity. We know exactly where it applies and where it doesn’t apply. And I think this is, in a sense, the modern definition of truth in physics. We have quantum mechanics. We know, to a certain extent, its boundaries. We know Maxwell’s equations. We know that it falls apart under certain circumstances where light behaves as particles. We know the boundaries of classical physics.

TYSON: Okay, that’s an important distinction. So, when you conduct experiments to test these theories, you’re not testing them within the realm where you’re pretty sure it falls within the boundaries. You’re designing tests at the boundaries.

GLASHOW:At and beyond.

TYSON:At and beyond.

GLASHOW:Exactly.

TYSON:At and beyond the boundaries. Gabby, you are at and beyond the boundary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. A reminder—and correct me if I’m wrong, allow me to make this generalization that special relativity of Einstein—1905—was his extension of Newtonian mechanics; motion essentially. And then general relativity was Einstein’s extension of Newtonian gravity. Is that a fair way to think about it?

GLASHOW:Definitely.

TYSON:Okay, good. That was a very grumpy yes, but I’ll take it. Okay. But, yeah, all right. If you’ve got to say that. So, Einstein is looking pretty good every time I’ve ever looked at it. Yet, somehow you have some doubt, apparently, because you’re involved in a very expensive experiment to test it. So, let me ask you: Are you testing it because you think he could be wrong? Or are you testing it because you’re trying to show him to be right?

GONZALEZ: I’m very convinced that Einstein was right. We are testing it because we are measuring this prediction that has never been measured before. Einstein’s theory in one of the most straightforward predictions is that masses, they attract each other not because there is a force like Newton said, but because they distort space time, and then they fall into each other’s space warps. And it is those space time ripples that we are trying to measure, which are very, very tiny. And that’s why they haven’t been measured before.

TYSON:Okay, so what’s an example of what will ripple space time on a level that you’ll be able to measure?

GONZALEZ: We are measuring—

TYSON:Wait. We’re all rippling space time here, aren’t we?

GONZALEZ: We are, yes. We are all waving space time around.

TYSON:Okay. But you’re not measuring that.

GONZALEZ: No, because it’s too tiny to measure. And that was Einstein’s prediction. Einstein said that these things would never be measured because they were too small.

TYSON: Okay, but what did Einstein know?

GONZALEZ: What did he know? He didn’t even know what technology we could have.

TYSON:All right, so—

GONZALEZ: We use his theory to calculate how big this was. And what his theory says is that these gravitational waves are coming to Earth maybe once every year or so, changing the distance between the Earth and the sun by an atomic diameter.

TYSON:Whoa. Wait, wait. Okay. So, wait, wait. Back up. So, these ripples you’re trying to measure is like a wave through the fabric of space and time. And when you have a wave, it distorts just like the fabric shrinking or expanding.

GONZALEZ: That’s right. Exactly.

TYSON:So, in the 93 million mile—this is America, so it’s miles. Sorry. Okay, 150 million kilometers, yes. So, that distance from Earth to the sun changes by the diameter of an atom from that wave, and you’re going to measure that.

GONZALEZ: We’re actually going to measure on a much, much smaller scale, which is still very big. It’s two-and-a-half mile scale, so we have these huge observatories.

TYSON:Two and a half miles is much smaller than 93 million miles.

GONZALEZ: It is a lot smaller.

TYSON:So, you’re looking for a shift—

GONZALEZ: And it’s still very expensive.

TYSON:You’re looking for shifts much smaller than the diameter of an atom.

GONZALEZ: That’s right. We are looking for shifts that are smaller than a proton—a [unintelligible] 10,000 of a proton diameter.

TYSON:Okay, then you woke up, and then you said, okay—

GONZALEZ:The most exciting thing is that we have measured already a part in 1,000 of a proton diameter.

TYSON:You mean if a wave came at a part in 1,000, you would have seen it?

GONZALEZ: Yes. And it didn’t come yet.

TYSON: Okay. But that hasn’t happened.

GONZALEZ: It hasn’t happened yet.

TYSON: And you’re after a part in—

GONZALEZ: Ten thousand.

TYSON:Ten thousand. Okay, factor of 10. Okay. We’ll get back to you on that. MITRE dude?

HEGARTY:Yes.

TYSON:Chris.

HEGARTY:Neil, dude.

TYSON:Someone should tally how many people are not dead because they didn’t have to read a map while driving the car. An unfolded map across the windshield because they were guided by GPS.

HEGARTY:You’ll have to offset that from those that are dead from looking at the GPS or programming their GPS.

TYSON: So, it’s all balances.

HEGARTY: Yes.

TYSON:You’re a big GPS guy. We all love—who doesn’t love GPS? Of course, it started as a military project. And I’m guessing the military wasn’t thinking what a great test for Einstein relativity. They probably weren’t thinking this, isn’t that correct?

HEGARTY: Probably not, but they knew a lot more than we think going back through some of the old papers that were written, even right around 1970 or so. They knew a whole lot of things that we rediscover now and then.

TYSON:It seems to me they’re going at orbital speed. That’s fast, but it’s not speed of light speed. Right?

HEGARTY:Yeah, the—

TYSON:Couple of tens of thousands of miles an hour.

HEGARTY:The satellites are going about 4,000 meters a second, which is a little over 8,000 miles an hour.

TYSON:Eight-thousand miles an hour?

HEGARTY:Yeah.

TYSON:That’s pretty high up then.

HEGARTY:About a New York taxi driver’s speed at a yellow light.

TYSON:New York taxi driver speed at a yellow light. This was the analogy. That’s a new unit of speed.

HEGARTY:Yeah.

TYSON: So, I remember my relativity equations and you have to get pretty close to the speed of light for it to really matter. And so I don’t think of GPS as being any kind of test of relativity at all. So, how does this surface as a benchmark for it?

HEGARTY:Well, what’s interesting is you’re mentioning the effects of special relativity that says if you have a clock up in space, it’s whizzing around. You’ll actually see it from the ground, is running too slow. But the effects of general relativity are actually bigger for GPS. The fact that it is 20,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth makes that clock appear to actually run fast. And the clocks that are put on the satellites are actually intentionally set slow by about five parts in 10 to the 10th, so that they’ll appear to run correctly as see here on Earth. And that’s something that’s done in GPS—

TYSON:Whoa, you just blew my mind. Wait. Did you just say that the clocks on the GPS are intentionally designed to run at a general relativistically slower rate just so that when we observe them from Earth in a deeper gravitational setting, it will look accurate to us?

HEGARTY:Not just general. It’s actually the combined effects of general and special. But general relativity has about six times greater effect than special relativity. Special would make them appear to run slow. General would make them appear to run fast. And general is bigger, and the net effect is needed to be compensated within the system. And not only that—

TYSON:Okay, just to remind people—okay, yeah. My mind is blown. I’m done. Good night, everyone.

HEGARTY:Let’s go for an explosion here then. But the interesting part is the satellites aren’t perfectly in a circular orbit, so that there are imperfections there where they are slowly going up higher sometimes and going lower sometimes, which means the speed isn’t constant and the gravitational effects aren’t constant. And the user equipment actually compensates for that, taking the ellipticity, the non-circular nature of the orbit into account in every piece of equipment that’s out there, including probably the stuff in your phones.

TYSON: Okay, it’s one thing to be high in a lesser part of Earth’s gravitational field. So, now that means they’ll run a little slower—faster because as you’re deeper in a gravitational well, you’re time slows down from general relativity.

HEGARTY:[Unintelligible 32:44].

TYSON:So, now these orbits are not in perfect circles. When you’re not in a perfect circle, sometimes you’re close. Sometimes you’re far. And that difference is measured.

HEGARTY:That difference is compensated in virtually every GPS receiver that’s out there. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get the several meters accuracy you get. You’d get about 10, 20 meters accuracy.

TYSON:So, that’s because—what you’re saying is—not to put words in your mouth, but just so I understand it—that the time precision translates into location precision on Earth.

HEGARTY:Correct. Yeah, the GPS is an arranging system. It’s measuring the transit time of signals from the satellite down to the user on the ground.

TYSON: All right. So, if you did not correct for general relativity, and I’m here, where’s the satellite going to tell me I’m standing?

HEGARTY:If you let the clock run on the satellite for one day without compensating it, the close could be in error by 38 microseconds or so, which would be about 11 kilometer ranging error after—

TYSON:Eleven kilometers?

HEGARTY:Of one range measurement, and your position would be off by something commensurate within—

TYSON:I can’t even continue.

GLASHOW:Hey, Neil, can I translate the previous discussion into English?

TYSON:Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. So, now we can find another way to blow my mind. Okay, go ahead, Shelly.

GLASHOW:No, not at all. If we did not have Einstein’s general theory of relativity—well, it could have been somebody else’s general theory of relativity, but if we didn’t have the theory of general relativity, we would not have GPS. It’s as simple as that.

TYSON:Okay. All right. So, can you—

Laura Patrizii: Can I add one thing to this?

TYSON:Yes.

Laura Patrizii: If one wonders what’s the use, again, of studying so academic like or relativity like Einstein was doing, what’s the practical use of this, then you may discover later on very long time after. So, the point is—

TYSON:In 1916, surely no one was saying this is some practical stuff, Albert. Right, that probably not what he was hearing in the coffee lounge.

Laura Patrizii: Yeah, in fact.

TYSON:My favorite equation of Einstein’s, just while we’re on the subject, is when he derived the stimulated emission of radiation; his famous Einstein A and B coefficients, is what they’re called. We study that in astrophysics. And that’s the equation that enables the construction of lasers. And so Einstein, at the time he wrote that, was not saying, “Barcodes, yes, this is how I will—this is where this will land.” I’m thinking—it’s an appeal for basic research is what you have here. So, can you flip this question around and ask: Rather than pre-compensate the satellites for general relativity, can we use GPS to test the limits of relativity? Or are you so within the zone that Shelly just described that you’re not going to land—you’re not good for that?

HEGARTY:Yeah, in some ways you can use it to measure relativity. In fact, before the first GPS satellite was launched, there was a series of experimental satellites—navigation technology satellites they were called, NTS 1 and NTS 2. And the engineers at the time weren’t all believers the relativistic corrections would need to be applied. So, they actually had a switch on the satellite where they could turn it on or off. But they actually ran it with the clock running at the right rate factory set on ground, and they ran it and measured the offset, and then it was consistent with what you’d predict using special and general relativity. And that sold the engineers anyhow.

TYSON:So, the engineers didn’t believe Einstein?

HEGARTY:Not all of them. In fact, I believed Einstein until tonight—until we went up into your reading room upstairs and I saw Einstein in a light I had never seen him before. What is Einstein wearing in your office up there?

TYSON:Oh, in our research library up in astrophysics? There’s a bust of Einstein, and he’s wearing a New York Yankees hat.

HEGARTY:So, I don’t know about him—he’s from Boston, too, but I’m a Red Sox fan, so I don’t know. I’m starting to doubt this all.

TYSON:Red Sox fan. Wrong place to say that, let me tell you.

HEGARTY:We do get to leave through a different exit, don’t we?

TYSON:I’m just saying. Where’s all my stuff here? So, I’m impressed by this. And so this continues. So, it’s a few months ago we learned of—how many months ago—that there’s the possibility—

GONZALEZ: Six.

TYSON:Six months ago, thank you. How’d you know what I was coming here? Six months ago we learned of the possibility—no, it was longer ago where we learned that maybe the neutrino, one of the fundamental particles of nature, may have been misbehaving. That it’s not following what we’d expect it to do. In particular, there was a claim that it was traveling faster than light. Gian, could you just update us on the original papers that led to that?

GIUDICE: Yes. So, on the 23rd of September there was this big announcement from the OPERA Collaboration—

TYSON:And OPERA is an acronym. And please tell me what each of those letters stand for.

GIUDICE: I think Laura can tell you.

Laura Patrizii: Yeah.

TYSON: Yeah, actually we’re going to get back to her, so I’ll save it for her. Please continue.

GIUDICE: All right. I know what OPERA means in Italian, and I think most of the people know, but actually don’t know what the acronym means. So, on the 23rd of September there was this result. And, of course, at that point many theoretical physicists were startled as soon as they heard about this result. And immediately they tried to make sense of it. So, for several months many physicists work very hard to understand if it is possible to modify the properties of neutrinos or the properties of space time to be constantly—to reconcile the OPERA results with our knowledge of special relativity. Because the OPERA measurement, all the neutrinos, as they traveled from CERN to Gran Sasso in central Italy, they arrived at 60 nanoseconds [unintelligible 39:19] to light.

TYSON:Sixty nanoseconds?

GIUDICE: Sixty nanoseconds may seem not a lot, but— TYSON:It’s 60 billionths of a second.

GIUDICE: That’s right. But that’s a lot. For a particle physicist, that’s an enormous quantity. So, that’s why people really jumped on that [chair] and immediately— TYSON:Just to clarify, you send these particles from Switzerland, through the Earth in a cord, through the spherical Earth, landing in her lab.

GIUDICE: That’s right. Seven-hundred-thirty-two kilometers. And we take advantage of the curvature of the Earth because neutrinos are very [unintelligible] particles. They essentially see the Earth as a perfectly transparent medium. So, they can cross the Earth with no problem. Although, as you may know, the Italian Minister of Science claimed that Italy had built a tunnel going from CERN to Gran Sasso in order to allow the neutrinos to go through. That was the Italian contribution to the [unintelligible 40:22].

Laura Patrizii: Gian, it’s not fair to say.

TYSON:We’re coming to you in like three minutes.

GIUDICE: Never said anything bad about [unintelligible]. Sorry about that.

TYSON:Yes. So, 60 nanoseconds—if we do that in English units, the light moves one foot per nanosecond. The light got there 60 feet ahead of when a light beam—the neutrino got there—would have beaten a beam of light by 60 feet. I think that’s—

GIUDICE: That’s right. And it looks a lot longer. Indeed, it’s something that in units of particle physics, it’s an enormous effect. Billions of times bigger than anybody could have guessed from the fact that maybe relativity when it enters the quantum regime should be modified. So, immediately many of us try to make sense of this result and see what was the meaning because that’s part of our job as theorists. But, at the end, I would say after a few months there was a general consensus that this reconciliation seemed really nearly impossible. I would say that there was only one plausible, theoretical explanation that I heard about this result. And, as you know, neutrinos travel from CERN in Switzerland to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy. And the explanation goes as follows: when the neutrinos are produced in Switzerland, they travel at the speed of light. But then as soon as it pass the border and enter Italy, it no longer respect rules and speed limits.

TYSON:Okay.

GIUDICE: That should tell you it really was a status of theory. That point, there really the general consensus among theorists. But it is an inexplicability of the OPERA result. And this came earlier then this statement that—on the 22nd of February by OPERA announcing the experimental problems. So, I think this story has a good moral for theoretical physics because, yes, we are eager to chew on every bone that experimentalists throw at us, but we don’t swallow anything.

TYSON: Especially not the chicken bones. You don’t want to swallow—so, Laura, he sends the signal from CERN. You receive the signal in Italy. And now these are misbehaved neutrinos. So, either Einstein is wrong, they did something—

Laura Patrizii: It’s not correct to say misbehavior. TYSON:Misbehavior. Laura Patrizii: I mean—

TYSON:Surprising behavior.

PATRIZII:Okay.

TYSON:So, either Einstein is wrong, they messed up on their end, or you messed up on your end, or all of the above. So, where do you—

PATRIZII:And Gian already anticipated that the result has been corrected. That we found false in our equipment. It was quite a surprise because we have tested and retested many times all the different parts. It is a quite complicated experiment that measuring the neutrino velocity. So, it had been checked, but eventually we discovered that there was something very, let’s say, stupid that apparently was not put in the proper way. It was a, so-called, faulty connection. It’s not so simple as this. Somewhat more complicated, but we can summarize like this: a faulty connection. But it’s not so simple as this. And while I cannot say which is the—we found two different effects. One, which goes into the direction of making neutrinos slower than they appeared at the first time. And another effect, which makes the velocity to increase. So, the combination—this [unintelligible 44:33] effect—very likely will [conceal] the anticipation that had been measured. And so, in any case, but can I comment concerning all the interest? I mean, Gian, concerning all that you theorists have been doing, there was a lot of steering. Even now very likely we know that the result is not what seemed. It’s still a lot of interest, a lot of discussion, a lot of reconsideration of so-called effects. And this is, perhaps, the gift—the unwanted gift that at the end eventually OPERA has done to the community.

TYSON:And tell me what the OPERA stands for.

Laura Patrizii: Oscillation Project with Tracking Apparatus. And then you have to ask me why.

TYSON:Why?

Laura Patrizii: Because the main aim of this experiment was not to measure and is not to measure a neutrino velocity. It is look to prove—to give the final proof of an effect that a neutrino can undergo. That is the so-called neutrino oscillation. Neutrino, which exist in three families, which we call electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino. As they travel, they can change their nature from electron neutrino to, for example, muon neutrino. It’s a peculiar property of those particles, which prove that they have mass. They have a mass—the neutrinos was thought before to be mass-less. Anyhow, this was discovered in 1998, but it was discovered somehow in an indirect way and OPERA was aim at proving in a direct way by so-called appearance experiments: experiment that this is what really happens. But then you have to give me some more time if you want me to explain it better.

TYSON:Well, I’ll come back to that. Let me just come over to David. I’ve got a research paper, pub date 15th of March 2012. That’s five days ago. “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the Icarus Detector at the CNGS beam.” Okay, so you’re a co-author on this paper. What does it say?

CLINE:Okay. Let me say two things first. Let me go back to Shelly’s comment and say one thing about relativity. Every time a machine like the Large Hadron Collider works, it tests relativity. Now, these—in some way.

TYSON:Now, is this a picture of LIGO here?

GONZALEZ: Yes.

TYSON:Yes, in Louisiana.

GONZALEZ: That is LIGO Livingston. LIGO Louisiana.

TYSON:Oh, Louisiana. And has three—

GONZALEZ: No, this is the road.

TYSON:Oh, that’s the road?

GONZALEZ: We have to get there.

TYSON:Okay. That’s the road, and then we have two beams at right angles.

GONZALEZ: That’s right.

TYSON:Okay. And how long are those?

GONZALEZ: Two and a half miles.

TYSON:Each?

GONZALEZ: Each.

TYSON:Okay. Good, since we have the photo. Sorry to interrupt.

CLINE:Okay. So, let me just say—more or less finish up what Shelly said. We tested these fundamental principles, like Newton’s Law of Gravity, all the way from millimeters to thousands of—or millions of light years. We don’t make these things sit quietly. I mean, there was—when something has been tested that well, we start believing it’s real. Now, in terms of the neutrino faster than light, already there was a measurement of this. When the Supernova 1987A went off, and neutrinos traveled 150,000 light years to the Earth and arrived here within 20 seconds. That resulted in a limit on the neutrino—this time electron neutrino—velocity being less than about one part of 10 to the ninth the velocity of light. Now, in this Icarus experiment—which you had pictures up here before—it’s a very large vat of liquid argon, about 600 tons. It’s actually non-trivial device. We believe it will be now followed by a huge detector in South Dakota that will actually be 40,000 tons. This is one of the futures of science in our country.

TYSON:Just a quick second just to clarify, you mentioned Supernova 1987A. This is a supernova—the first supernova observed in the year 1987, and it was observed to go off in a nearby galaxy to our own—a dwarf galaxy.

CLINE:Large Magellanic Cloud.

TYSON:Yeah. And it’s visible from the Southern Hemisphere, and we can see the exploding star. So, that’s when the light gets to us, and then we had a detector that measured the arrival of neutrinos.

CLINE:Two detectors.

TYSON:Two detectors. And they came in behind the light, not ahead of it.

CLINE:Right. About 20 seconds of time the pulses lasted, even though it traveled 150,000 years to get here. So, it showed conclusively that the velocity of light was extremely close—the velocity of the neutrinos were extremely close to the velocity of light.

GLASHOW:Those neutrinos.

CLINE:Those. Let me finish now. I’m going to get to the other neutrinos now.

TYSON: Those weren’t CERN neutrinos. Those were supernova neutrinos, duh.

CLINE:I don’t buy the argument that neutrinos change when they go to Italy. So, what we have done, in this big liquid argon detector, which is I think going to be a marvel of technology in this country someday, we have looked for neutrinos coming from CERN 731 kilometers. And this paper that we were just talking about a moment ago, which we’re publishing shows that the neutrinos arrive exactly with the speed of light. And a second experiment, which we did earlier using one of Shelly’s theories—we follow him very closely.

TYSON:Isn’t it great just to have theories people just select from and—

CLINE:No, we know his theories are right, so we usually [unintelligible 50:39]. Anyway, in one of his theory contributions, which have been very important, if there were such high energy neutrinos with faster-than-light particles, they would emit a large number of electron positron [unintelligible]. Positron being an anti-electron. In that same 600-ton liquid argon detector in the Gran Sasso, we’ve observed no pairs. Now, there was a plot up here before, which has been taken down now, which showed our conclusions, which were very similar to the Supernova 1987A. So, we have shown in two ways that the muon neutrinos have exactly the speed of light or possibly slightly less because of the mass. And we entirely disagree with OPERA.

Laura Patrizii: Can I comment?

GIUDICE: I can—

TYSON:He disagrees with you, Laura. But let me ask—before I come back to you, David, you just cited two different neutrino experiments. So, the fact that you’re now saying they’re wrong has to assert that all neutrinos behave the same way in all situations. So, I’m echoing Shelly’s point here.

CLINE:We basically have seen now thousands or even millions of neutrino interactions in different venues and different process and different countries, different continents, and we’ve seen they all behave the same in their interaction.

TYSON:Okay.

CLINE:So, why would they change now because they’re coming from CERN to Italy?

TYSON:Okay. So, Laura, I understand—we spoke earlier—that there’s still a collaboration and a published paper being prepared. And you can’t really talk about that, but what does your gut tell you about these neutrinos that were measured by OPERA?

Laura Patrizii: They already told us.

TYSON:He already knows the answer.

Laura Patrizii: Yeah. So, at least for—

TYSON:What you really meant by that is he thinks he knows the answer. That’s really, I think, what you meant.

Laura Patrizii: What I mean is that we found those problems that I was mentioning. And when you put all them together, likely the result will be in agreement with what Icarus found. I want to point out one thing concerning Icarus. Icarus is, they said, another experiment located in Gran Sasso. But what they measured is not completed independent. It is not exactly another experiment. It’s another experiment only for the last part of the experiment itself.I mean, they took our—I mean, OPERA’s—data, OPERA measurements, concerning the baseline, concerning the synchronization of the timing the same that OPERA had established, that it had set. And then they simply used their timestamp for their events. So, down to Gran Sasso from CERN down to Gran Sasso, the elements of computation are exactly those that OPERA had set. And then they—not simply—were able to provide a more accurate measurement of the last part. So, if there is anything wrong in the OPERA part of the experiment, they have the same error. Am I correct?

CLINE:I don’t agree. We can talk about it later. TYSON:No, talk about it now.

CLINE:We have the right answer. That’s the key thing. And we have certified it. We’ve measured it actually twice. Assuming Professor Glashow’s theory is correct, of course. If his theories—

GLASHOW:It’s not a theory. It’s physics.

CLINE:Therefore, it must be right. It must be right. Therefore, we have checked ourselves, so to speak. So, I think we would be willing to probably make a wager. Although, scientists are not supposed to bet on things like this.

TYSON:You can bet a bottle of Italian wine.

David Cline:No, a bottle of Chianti.

TYSON:No, Barolo. Not Chianti.

Laura Patrizii: [Italian 54:53].

CLINE:I will bet that Icarus is correct and OPERA is wrong. It will pay off [unintelligible].

Laura Patrizii: Again, as you know, you know better than me what the systematic error is, so you have the same systematic error as we have from CERN down to Gran Sasso because you use exactly the same data. The baseline was what we had measured. The synchronization—

CLINE:Then why did we get different results?

Laura Patrizii: Oh, this is physics. You have to test even this. No? Isn’t it?

CLINE:Okay.

TYSON:So, if I understand correctly, the timings that were invoked here to assert that we had these neutrinos behaving differently were measured by GPS satellites. Is that correct?

Laura Patrizii: Yeah.

TYSON:So, it’s his fault.
Laura Patrizii: No, no. In fact, when we got this anomaly, for sure it didn’t represent any—I mean, it was not that Einstein was wrong exactly because we were using Einstein or [anyhow 55:57] relativity to do the experiment itself. If it was true—if the result was true, it simply means that you had to, as Gian Giudice said, to invent a way to reconciliate—to put those things together. It was not that you were disproving Einstein. Also, in the newspaper it was put like this, that OPERA was disproving—it’s not like that. And we didn’t say it like that. We didn’t say this.

CLINE:Can I make a comment?

TYSON:It’s the press.

GIUDICE: Can I say something?

TYSON:Yeah. Yeah, Gian. Yes.

GIUDICE: Because now it looks like maybe to people that this was just the point was measuring some properties on neutrinos. And I think at stake here there was much more. that’s why theoretical physicists were so interested, because Einstein’s revolutions was showing that space and time are two conceptually identical aspects of a single physical entity, which is space time. And that the zipper that keeps together space and time is a principle of an absolute velocity—the speed of light, or the speed of any mass-less particle. So, if neutrinos were faster than light, neutrinos would see space and time differently. So, OPERA, in a sense, would have unzipped space time, would have broken the symmetry that links space and time. So, not only special relativity would be in danger, but our vision of space time. In other words, the entire stage in which we build our theories. So, at stake here, there was much more than just measuring the property of a neutrino.

TYSON:Would it be in danger only at the limits of relativity, or would it be a problem fundamental to the corral that relativity had established?

GIUDICE: See, the problem is that we believe that there is—as Shelly was saying—every theory has a range of validity. So, also relativity will have a range of validity and a stage in which it reaches the quantum world. Because quantum mechanics and special and the general relativity—in the way they are—they’re not compatible in the way we know them. So, we expect at a certain level that symmetry between space and time may be broken. The problem is the fact claimed by OPERA was so huge that it was putting at the level which was well within the range in which we have tested special relativity. And that was a shock, and that’s why it was so difficult to reconcile their claim made by OPERA with our previous knowledge and test of special relativity.

TYSON:You should know that because of that result I got like thousands of tweets at me saying, “What do you think of this? What do you think of this? Is it the end of physics?” And I said given how long relativity has been tested and our understanding of particle physics, it’s probably wrong. That’s the first, most likely explanation. Second, Shelly, haven’t we talked—we physicists—spoken of faster-than-light particles before? What’s so violating about that? Tachyons, for example, are faster-than-light particles. Hypothetical, but they’re consistent with relativity. Nobody complained about them.

GLASHOW:Yes. It’s hard to complain about particles that don’t exist. But let me say a word about Bronx science at this point because one of my buddies at Bronx Science was Gary Feinberg. And he coined the word tachyon.

TYSON:Is that right?

GLASHOW:Yes.

TYSON:Excellent invention. Tachyon, from the Greek root tachyos, meaning fast.

GLASHOW:Fast. Like tachycardia. Your heart beats too fast. Well, I want to attack that man.

TYSON:You want to—sorry. Here you go.

GLASHOW:Can I just say very briefly—

TYSON:Gian, Shelly wants at you here. Okay, go, Shelly.

GIUDICE: I’m very glad that I’m not there so he cannot physically attack me.

TYSON:Okay, Shelly, what do you got?

GLASHOW:Well, I was going to say give me the microphone. I didn’t realize I had one here. No, look, that man, Gian, is being far too modest because he made a very important point immediately after the “discovery” of superluminal neutrinos. He points out that—as he said, this was a very large effect compared to what was already known that it would spread. There would be metastasis of violations of relativity all over the place. And I believe you wrote a paper that argued you could not confine the violation of relativity to neutrinos. It would spread all over the place. [Unintelligible 60:52].

TYSON:You’d have neutrinos cavorting with protons and—

GLASHOW:Yeah. And we know at 10 decimal places, 15 decimal places, 20 decimal places, 25 decimal places, and now someone is saying there’s a violation at the 5th decimal place. Not possible. And I think that was a very important observation.

TYSON:You know what I think was the best statement ever for knowing that the measurement was wrong? I heard this. I didn’t come up with this. It was neutrinos arrive in Italy before the speed of light, so the argument was it can’t be true because nothing ever arrives early in Italy. That was the—I heard that. Did you hear that, Laura?

GLASHOW:That’s a convincing argument.

Laura Patrizii: I don’t like it.

HEGARTY:They’re the ones that were sent yesterday.

TYSON: You said what, Laura?

Laura Patrizii: I don’t like it.

TYSON:You don’t like that one? I want to shift topic just a little bit and go back to Gian. Gian, we spoke of relativity. We speak—there’s something else out there: the standard model of particle physics. It’s this organization of particles and forces. Do you feel like you’re testing the standard model? Is that another zone where we’re trying to find the corral where everything that works fits in the corral and you’re testing the edge?

GIUDICE: Yes. That is certainly the primary goal of the LHC. We have this beautiful theory, which is the standard model, but we want to go beyond. Theoretical physicists are very curious, inquisitive, ambitious animal species. So, they are not satisfied just by opening the toy of nature, inspecting the clockwork and identifying all the springs and gears. They always want to go one level deeper, and they want to understand the inner workings. They want to understand why the mechanism works. So, the standard model gives an excellent description of the particle work. And there’s nothing wrong with it. So, most of the questions that we are addressing today in theoretical physics are not about a consistency of the standard model. But about the reasons why the standard model is the way it is. So, superficially it may seem that many of these questions are about the beauty of a theory rather than the basic structural problems, but history of science has shown that following principles of beauty sometimes can bring you very far. Remember that general relativity was not invented to explain some observing consistency of Newtonian gravity. The calculation of the mercury [unintelligible 63:51] came later. The problem—in that case, the problem was understanding force acting at a distance, which was unacceptable in the case of special relativity.So, now we have many questions that we want to address. And the major open question regarding the standard model is the explanation of why the weak force—the force responsible for certain radioactive decays and for the thermal nuclear reactions that make the sun shine—

TYSON:This is one of the four major forces.

GIUDICE: That’s right.

TYSON:You have gravity, strong—

GIUDICE: There’s two major forces. No, the standard model describes weak force, intellect from magnetism conceptually as a single force. So, then the question is: Why can we send electromagnetic waves like, for instance, radio waves a long distance while we can’t do the same thing for the weak force? And we think we know the answer to this question, and the answer is the Higgs boson, which is the particle that is actively searched for at the LHC.

TYSON: The Higgs boson. That’s what we’ve seen some news reports on that maybe it was detected. Is that correct?

GIUDICE: That’s right. That’s a scientific statement: maybe. Particle physics is—

TYSON:Quantify the maybe for me.

GIUDICE: That’s why—I mean, every measurement in physics you have to give a level of accuracy. And there is a statistical properties that we are measuring. We are dealing with quantum mechanics, so we can—in quantum mechanics, you can make a perfect prediction about probabilities of seeing certain particles or [unintelligible 65:43] particles decay, but not of one single event. So, we’re always dealing with probabilities and with statistical errors. At the moment, we have—well, most important result was that the possible region of the Higgs boson has been narrowed down to a very small range of masses. And also within this small range of masses, there is some excess; an indication that the Higgs boson is there. However, the statistical reliability of the result is not high enough to claim discovery. We’ll have to wait.

TYSON:Okay. So, that’s the four-minute explanation of the word maybe. That’s what you have there.

GIUDICE: That’s right. Sorry. I also should say that the LHC is working very well, and we expect that by the summer that maybe will disappear and we’ll have a yes or no.

TYSON:Okay. Gabby—and we have to start winding down because I want to go to question and answer from the audience. We were speaking earlier. Apparently LIGO is the only experiment that touches all the force regimes of nature. Could you just briefly tell me how that’s so?

GONZALEZ: Well, after gravitational effects—

TYSON:So, the standard model doesn’t include gravity, right? There’s no gravity in the standard model of particle physics. Okay, so go. There’s just blank stares over there. It means no to them. That the physicist no.

GONZALEZ: That’s right.

TYSON:Yeah, it’s not there. Sorry.

CLINE:It’s not there.

TYSON:Can’t help you.

TYSON:Go on. Wait, wait. No, it’s a good—I mean, particles interact with force that vastly exceed that of gravity between the same particles. So, it’s just kind of irrelevant.

GLASHOW:Gravity is not irrelevant because it kind of keeps our feet to the ground.

TYSON:Well, it’s irrelevant to your standard model.

GLASHOW:It’s irrelevant to particles as far as we can see, but string theorists would disagree. But fortunately there are none here.

TYSON:Okay. So, tell me—it’s gravity, right?

GONZALEZ: So, gravity—

TYSON:That’s a force.

GONZALEZ: —is one of the four forces. It’s the weakest of all forces, and that’s why particle physicist think it’s irrelevant because it is irrelevant for most purposes. But it’s very strong near very compact objects like neutron stars and black holes. And that’s the gravity we’ll be measuring. So, we’ll be measuring these effects of gravity that have never been seen before of black holes about to collide, colliding and forming a larger black hole, neutron stars in which there’s a lot of particle physics and standard model being used, colliding and forming a singularity of space time in a black hole. That's what we are measuring, and that’s what I think will give us a clue of not just about gravity, but about nature. All of nature.

TYSON:So, fluency in physics matters here in all these regimes.

GONZALEZ: Oh, it does. Certainly, yes.

TYSON: And, Laura, just before we go to questions from the audience let me ask you: What’s in the future of the OPERA experiment?

Laura Patrizii: Well, as I said before, our goal is to prove neutrino oscillations [unintelligible 69:21]—

TYSON:So, the three species of neutrinos, and thy just switch back and forth among themselves for mysterious reasons.

Laura Patrizii: Okay, not mysterious reasons. It’s quantum mechanics.

TYSON:Mysterious to me. I heard it once described someone throws you a basketball, and then you catch a football. That would be a ball changing species midway.

GLASHOW:Football to her is soccer.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:Soccer ball.

Laura Patrizii:Yes. If you like.

TYSON:Okay, so continue please.

Laura Patrizii: So, we are planning to complete it. We already detected one event—one so-called tau event. We expect to find a few more before the end of experiment something like five, six particles. And the final run will be this year, so it’s about to start again in March. Okay, no, this week. Am I right, Gian?

TYSON: Wait, should you be there now?

PATRIZII:Yeah. The neutrino beam is starting again from CERN to Gran Sasso, and then we shall have 200 days of run, and then we collect the data, and then we analyze it. And it will be done with this, but at the same time we will repeat again—and not only OPERA. There are at least three experiments at the Gran Sasso beside OPERA and Icarus. There are also [LDD] and [unintelligible 70:59], which have a new set up to test again to measure in a really completely dependent way to retest this velocity business—velocity run.

TYSON:To do it the right—to do it—

Laura Patrizii: Yeah. I mean—

TYSON:So, you think that’s even necessary because your papers are so right?

GLASHOW:No, I think you have to think of Occam’s razor in a situation like this.

TYSON:Occam’s razor?

GLASHOW:In the sense it tells us you take the most likely scenario, which has been proven in the past—we’ve never, of course, looked at muon neutrinos—

TYSON:Occam’s razor is the simplest explanation.

GLASHOW:The simplest explanation here is the velocity of muon neutrinos is the speed of light. We found that for electron neutrinos. We never found any difference between electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos. That doesn’t prove it, but if some experiments start showing that you get the right velocity of light, there’s an overwhelming likelihood they’re probably right because they’re going according to the established tradition. Whereas, OPERA is going against the established tradition and has found an error in their experiment. So, not wanting to pile on to OPERA too much here, I’m just saying this has already been the consensus all along. And then we have tested this ourselves. Hopefully, other experiments will do the same thing.

TYSON:Okay. Let’s assume you’re completely right. I would say if you are right, the approach that you have about being right is not necessarily good for physics because you—well, I’ve read about cases in the past where people were just, sure, you didn’t have to test it any further because they’d already done the measurement. And someone with some skepticism kept at it, and they kept trying to refine whatever was the results that they had gotten before, leading to then a new discovery. Maybe that’s the rarer of the occasions—

GLASHOW:This happens, but it’s very rare.

TYSON:Rare.

GLASHOW:Because the collected wisdom of the experimentalist and the theorists are tremendous pieces of information that you have going into an experiment. And actually—

TYSON:But it can actually bias you, can’t it?

GLASHOW:It’s a bias, but it’s also how we decide which experiments to work on. An experiment can take a decade or two decades of your life now. So, you don’t want to go after some wild, crazy idea where 20 years later you regret you did it.

CLINE:See, many years ago Cherenkov invented the idea that if a particle travels faster than light, which particles can do if they’re traveling through air or water, that they will radiate light. And Cherenkov Effect was observed, and Mr. Cherenkov got his Nobel Prize. And the rather trivial thing that Andy [Cohen 73:45] and I did is to notice that if neutrinos were superluminal, if they traveled faster than light, then they, too, would emit radiation. And that radiation has been looked for. You’ve looked for it. Other people have looked for it. It ain’t there. And this unambiguously, I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt tells me that this charming young lady is absolutely wrong in her experiment. It’s flaws. TYSON:Okay. CLINE:Neutrinos travel at the speed of light.

Laura Patrizii: Can I comment a little bit?

TYSON:Yes, please comment. And then we must go to Q&A.

Laura Patrizii: What I want to say—

TYSON:In fact, we’ll give you the second to the last word.

Laura Patrizii: I agree, but the point is there is nothing wrong, I think, on being wrong with experiments. We are allowed to be wrong. Because physicists—

TYSON:David, you lost the crowd.

Laura Patrizii: Physicists, they can be wrong, buy physics is not. So, at the end, eventually, we will see what is true, what is not. And even what we know now, it will be perhaps an approximation. Perhaps in the future it will be discovered there’s a wrong thing. I mean, I’m not defending the OPERA result. Actually, I was one, which among the most skeptical inside the collaboration. But we have to—I mean, there is nothing so terrible. The most important thing is to be honest and keep on trying and proving whether or not you are wrong or not.

CLINE:I have a brief comment.

TYSON: No.

CLINE:It’s one thing to be wrong. I agree, we all have the right to be wrong. I’ve been wrong myself. But it’s another thing to have a big press conference, a big press release, from a huge laboratory, which we all depend on CERN—

PATRIZII:This is not our fault.

CLINE:It may not be your fault, but it’s what happened. So, being wrong is our right. But having this sort of information go all around the world, so a lot of young people get the impression that neutrinos travel faster than light, it might be very exciting, but it’s probably not true.

TYSON:You say that as though it’ll mess up young people forever.

CLINE:Well—

TYSON:Young people heard this newscast.

CLINE:I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s good to give young people—I teach them all the time—wrong information. Now, I don’t say they’ll never forget it, or they’ll have a heart attack or something, but as much as possible the veracity of science is based on as much as possible getting things right. That’s all I’m saying. Press release is hardly just a little bit wrong. It’s all over the world instantly. The day it came in, my students sent me a message immediately. “You know the speed of light for neutrinos is greater than the speed of light?” No—I mean, everybody was saying this. A lot of us never believed it at all. No disrespect. Shelly didn’t. He said it already. So, I agree you can be wrong, but I don’t think it’s good to advertise it so heavily.

TYSON:Except that your best evidence that it’s wrong only came out in a paper five days ago.

David Cline:No, we had a previous paper, which I told you about six months ago.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:Just checking.

Laura Patrizii: It’s true.

TYSON:What’s the future of GPS? I wanted to drive my car. I just want to read in the front seat, so can you do that? How come we don’t have flying cars? I’m going to blame you for all of this. They promised flying cars in the 1960s. They’re still not here.

HEGARTY:They have them in Italy.

TYSON: I got to stop it there. But thank the panel for this. You can come on up for questions. We have two microphones up front. We’ll take Q&A for about 15 minutes. By the way, the entire panel and I after this we’ll retire to the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. That’s where all the totem poles are. And you can bring your program, have them sign it, ask follow-up questions. There might even be a few books that they’ve written for you to buy. Okay, so—oh, by the way, we have 1,700 people streaming this live. And hello to all of them. And we also have an overflow room, and so let’s take our first question here. Try to direct it to only one panelist. Otherwise it takes forever to say can I have all six of you comment on my question. Just keep it tight. Go.

Audience Question: All right. For the gentlemen—I don’t remember the name, but from Italy—

Neil deGrasse Tyson:Gian.

Audience Question: Gian.

TYSON: We’re on first-name basis. We’re at a bar remember?

Audience Question: Very good. I guess I’m less interested in maybe the results that came out from OPERA and more interested in the physics community’s reaction to it. And by that I mean you said you were all curious, but is there some sort of deep-seated insecurity that theoretical physicists have where when something like this comes out they say, a-ha, that may be the missing piece of the puzzle that will allow everything to click? Of is this just an anomalous thing that was 60—I don’t remember the measurement you used, but—

TYSON:Got there 60 feet faster than the—

Audience Question: Sixty feet faster and you just wow that’s really big. We’re going to go analyze it.

TYSON:Excellent question. What do you got, Gian?

GIUDICE: So, no, when there is some interesting announcement, of course, we have to look at it. We have to scrutinize it, and we have to see if it makes sense. That’s as I was saying before. That’s our job. I don’t think we should be blamed for that. But I totally agree on what David said before. The particle physics has a tradition of rigor, of scientific integrity, and this should be maintained. And in the past, physics was just a—particle physics was a business for particle physicists. They were getting great results. They were [unintelligible 80:04], but most other people were ignoring—most people outside were ignoring what particle physicists were doing. Now, there is a lot of media attention. And, as David said, we have to be very careful of what kind of message we are giving. In the OPERA case, I don’t think it was a mistake either of the experimentalists of going public with the result or of theorists who try to make sense of this result, but rather the way it was dealt in the way CERN and the OPERA experiment communicated with the outside world.

TYSON:Gian—I’m going to follow-up on that. Gian, of the theorists you knew, how many said it can’t be true, I’m not going to work on the problem, go back and fix it? And how many said that is true, I have a new theory to account for it?

GIUDICE: Well, of course—no, the first reaction is, wow, this is too great to be true. But in order to answer, you cannot just reply with your first feeling. You have to study. You have to look at it. And Shelly was so nice to mention my paper, but I would say that really the paper that changed the opinion of the community was his paper. His paper gave a very strong, very clear, very simple argument of why it was—the OPERA result was inexplicable. And at that point, really people changed their opinion. So, people don’t—even theorists don’t form the opinion just on their first impression, but they want to get some scientific understanding. And I think after Shelly’s paper, the situation was very clear.

TYSON:Okay. Right here. Sir?

GLASHOW:Thank you.

TYSON:Thank you.

Audience Question: Yeah, I was actually up at the APS meeting in Boston—

TYSON: American Physical Society?

Audience Question: Yes.

TYSON:Has nothing to do with your body. It’s physics. In fact, they had—I got a phone call from their PR people. They said we have an identity problem because people think we’re about physicians. And so it’s American Physical Society.

Audience Question: Yeah.

TYSON:It’s really American Physics Society, but, yes, go on.

Audience Question: They actually had tucked away way off on the side a talk where we were talking about some of the results of the OPERA experiment and so forth. And so the thing that was pointed out by the gentleman I remember the most—and I would like her take on this—is this kind of science controversy is actually good. It’s not a bad thing to have publicized wrong experiments, even if it’s a “simple mistake” or an experimental thing because it does not treat science as a black box. And, therefore, the public can understand it. And so it’s not necessarily, oh, here’s a result and don’t ask how we got it. You’re not going to understand—

TYSON: I think that was Laura’s concluding point. She agrees strongly with that, and both of those points disagree with David in the sense that you go public with it if you think it’s true whether or not it’s consistent with the experiments or the theoretical underpinnings that you’ve put forth. If you think it’s true, you go to press with it. So, you’re agreeing?

Audience Question: With her point. And I wanted to know the broader panel’s, unfortunately, point of view on that, too. Is science controversy good or bad in general?

TYSON: Shelly, let’s go to you. You’ve been around the block on this. Science controversy, would you say it’s good or bad or—

GLASHOW:Well, what is good or bad?

TYSON: If hanging your dirty laundry out—right here. Check it out, right there. Dirty laundry. The scientists doing that, and the dirty laundry would then take place via press conference, and then you see scientists fighting. It’s kind of what this whole panel is all—the Asimov concept is all about. And we fill the house every time. So, I have to say yes to that, but I just want to get a second opinion. And if it differs, it will be wrong. So, go on. Because we have empirical evidence.

GLASHOW:We guys who do what we call fundamental physics, particle physics, we have a problem. And the problem is called the standard model. And the trouble is that they damn thing works too well. And since the old days when Carlo Rubbia was in charge of CERN and—Carlo Rubbia once gave a talk at Harvard arguing that he had not only proven the standard theory right, but he had also proven it wrong. And that was shown to be not true. And his punishment was to be the director of CERN for some five years or so, and his—CERN in those five years did nothing but confirm, confirm and reconfirm the standard model. It was truly a [suscipient 85:33] punishment.

CLINE:He also started the LHC.

GLASHOW:But—he started the LHC. And our hopes are that the LHC will discover something beyond the standard model. And I was so happy when I first heard of the superluminal neutrinos because, boy, that is beyond the standard model.

TYSON:I got a question from the Twitterverse.

GLASHOW:But it doesn’t work. It’s wrong.

TYSON:A question from the Twitterverse, so the Twitterverse does exist. I have evidence, no matter what you say about it. I’m sorry, I can’t read the Twitter handle. [Unintelligible]. Are there currently unmeasured domains where we can imagine faster than light particles? Possibly highly warped space time.

GLASHOW:I can imagine micro-unicorns, but—

TYSON:That would be a no. Okay. Next question here.

Audience Question: Are there any insights from the neutrinos on dark energy, string theory and black holes? Is there any connection from your research?

TYSON:So, you’re trying to explain all the other unknowns with what we might discover with—

Audience Question: What they do with neutrinos.

TYSON:Neutrinos. David, why don’t you take that?

CLINE:I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear the question.

TYSON:He’s saying dark energy, dark—he’s got these other unknowns. Might neutrinos help us there?

CLINE:Neutrinos have a small mass, so it’s not nearly large enough, let’s say, to make the dark matter of the Universe. And they cannot in any way make the dark energy. That’s been proven. So, these are other phenomena, and we have some idea of what the other two like dark matter is probably some kind of new particle. Dark energy may be, but Einstein invented it in 1917, so probably there’s no connection as far as I know.

Audience Question: What about string theory?

CLINE:I don’t know anything about string theory.

TYSON:We’ve established string theory is off limits today. We’ve already established that. Another question from the Twitterverse. This is from our development department apparently, Will [Trammell 87:41], 13 years old. Oh, sorry, from our live stream. Will Trammell, 13 years old. It’s past your bedtime, Will. Past my bedtime. Neutrinos can pass through almost anything, but light cannot. So, could neutrinos be faster than light because of this lack of friction? And could we measure this friction rather than the speed of the particles? So, in other words, neutrinos got to Italy, but light didn’t. So, clearly, that beam of neutrinos beat any light beam you would have turned on with your flashlight. So, is the fact that neutrinos can penetrate solid matter any kind of indication of anything?

GLASHOW:No.

CLINE:No.

TYSON:Okay, fine. What you got here? I like these quick answers. They’re great.

Audience Question: I’d like to actually answer a question that I believe Sheldon and David posed to us, which is: What is the effect of experiments like the OPERA experiment to young people and what message is that sending? And from a moderately young person, I can tell you that the message that it tends to send is it invigorates us and inspires us to investigate and see that maybe the plausibility of the impossible can exist.

Laura Patrizii: Yeah.

CLINE:That was for me, I guess. I wish that was true.

TYSON:He wasn’t talking to you. He was just—

CLINE:Let me tell you something, most of my graduate students are Chinese. This is because very few Americans—

TYSON:That’s relevant why?

CLINE:And, by the way, the Chinese are paying some of these people to come to our university, which is a very clever thing for them to do. Probably other places also. So, I don’t think when people find out that something they were told turns out to be wrong—my own gut feeling is it just makes them wonder whether these people can get their act together or not. Now, maybe for a while they’ll be stimulated. The evidence right now is not nearly enough Americans are going into science.

Audience Question: Yes, but that’s my exact point.

CLINE:I don’t think they want more—

Audience Question: I’m sorry to interrupt you, but isn’t that my exact point? Sometimes it’s not just the science of proving, but the science of disproving is just as educational.

TYSON:Are you saying there aren’t enough Americans in our science programs today?

CLINE:Yes.

TYSON:Because of the OPERA result?

CLINE:No.

TYSON:Just trying to get the cause and effect here.

CLINE:They don’t even know anything about it.

Audience Question: I have to get to my question.

TYSON:Oh, you have a question? Let’s get to his question.

Audience Question: So, anyway, the point is there are tangible experiments going on OPERA, for example. But can you then instead of saying, okay, this is not possible because we have too much that’s in our black box of comfort that does work, so I’m going to disprove it? Why can’t people sit down, such as scientists yourself, as—even if it dissembles the structure of physics? We know that physics violates its own rules all the time, as we’ve seen from history. Right? So, can we, by the equations—not just by the tangible experiments, but by the paper experiments go back to rudimentary tactics and try to see what potential effects it would have on our box of comfort in science?

TYSON:If it were true.

Audience Question: If it were true.

CLINE:Let Shelly answer that.

GLASHOW:I don’t understand the question.

TYSON:No, I think what he’s saying is you have this weird—I think I understand you—results. You don’t know how to interpret them. Assume they’re true, and calculate the consequences.

Audience Question: Correct.

GLASHOW: Well, that’s exactly what I did.

TYSON:Okay, right.

GLASHOW:That’s what we do. That’s our game.

TYSON:So, he did say—he said if that were true, you should have these other experimental results that are not seen.

Laura Patrizii: Can I—

TYSON: Laura, yes.

Laura Patrizii: —add something to this? There are a lot of anomalies still in the neutrino field of the results with neutrino oscillations, they do not fit together in the same good box.

TYSON:Black box of comfort, was the phrase.

Laura Patrizii: And so you can take them as anomalies or errors, or you can take them as an indication hence of something else. And then if you take them for true, then you may want to investigate more. For example, there is a proposal to do—and this for as far as the neutrino concern, it would mean, for example, the existence of another type of neutrino called so-called [unintelligible] neutrinos, which are very exotic. And I don’t know if our guests here like them or not. Maybe people do not.

TYSON:I bet he doesn’t like them, is my bet.

Laura Patrizii: Yes, David, doesn’t like them. Anyhow, this is the way you proceed. And then you test, and then maybe it’s a mistake or maybe you find a new particle. And, again, you go to Stockholm.

TYSON:Stockholm for the Nobel Prize. That’s code for Nobel Prize in physics.

Audience Question: Thank you.

TYSON: Thank you for that great question. Yes? We’ll take maybe five more minutes of questions, so maybe make the question efficient and the answer short will be good. Go, sir.

Audience Question: Well, I came up for other reasons, but they’ve already been asked, I think. The neutrino experiment was exciting because we got to watch you guys go through finding the problems with the experiment. Everybody I know knows about the neutrino experiment, and they’re not scientists. It’s been very engaging watching you not fail, but discover the problems, is really interesting. I won’t [unintelligible 93:07]—

TYSON: It’s an excellent point. Thank you for that.

Audience Question: It’s been great. Thank you. Thank all of you. This is actually for David. The United States had the collider on plan years ago. Budgets got cancelled. Now, we’re over at CERN. Any plans coming up?

CLINE:Yes, we had the Superconducting Super Collider, which actually was—believe it or not—approved by Ronald Regan, which in some ways we don’t fully understand why we do better under Republicans than Democrats. Maybe I shouldn’t be too political, but—

Audience Question: In science funding, that’s a fact.

CLINE:Then Bill Clinton cancelled it. So, you can figure it out. Anyway, whatever the reason is we lost a tremendously wonderful scientific resource in this country, which might have brought a lot more American scientists into the field. And then, of course, we have the wonderful LHC, which was started by my friend Carlo Rubbia, I point out. He was director general of CERN. And that is still a lot of Americans are working there, so it’s still helping generate more interest and more excitement. But we have lost our momentum in this country a little bit the way we have in NASA on science. And I think young people are starting to notice. The number of young people have told me they themselves were disappointed when they heard the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled. So, they’re looking for their future. So, I think we have to really worry in this country about the future of our fields.

TYSON:I bet if you had called it the Super-duper Collider, it would have been funded.

CLINE:It would have been funded.

TYSON:Absence of adjectives there. You could have called me up. I would have helped you out. Yes?

Audience Question: This question is for Laura. I wonder if you could tell us briefly the logistics of how the OPERA thing was set up because I’m a physician and very often if we find a result which is out of what is expected, the first thing we do is repeat it before we go and act upon it. and it sounds like—from our point of view as non-physicists—this came out and it was a shocking thing this was found and you’re trying to explain how could something so unexpected happen. Was this the kind of experiment which when you got a result—I mean, maybe for you it was not unexpected, but, I mean, it sounds like it’s an unexpected result. That this could have been repeated in a quick timeframe and come up, say, with the same result twice. Then you start to think, well, maybe there’s really something happening—

TYSON:Well, that’s exactly what happened. The experiment was done more than once, isn’t that correct? Was the experiment done more than once?

Laura Patrizii: Yes. I mean, we started in 2009, and that kept going on until 2011. So, we analyze it more than 16,000 events. Neutrinos—16,000 neutrino events detected from CERN to Gran Sasso. It was not just one or two neutrino.

TYSON:Right. In fact, the anatomy of this is—in all of science—if you get a weird result, you do it again just like you said, and then you do it again and do it again. Then you get someone else to do it with a different apparatus. And that way—

Audience Question: Right. That’s the way it came across form the announcements that it was done in one lab, and then other labs would then repeat it with their equipment and see if the same thing came out.

TYSON:That’s the natural sequence. [

Question] But it didn’t come out that it was really multiple events at that time.

Laura Patrizii: The point here is, as already been mentioned, the difference with the past is that it’s not unusual that something which that you find it is corrected then you have to say, no, I was wrong. The point here was that it was known to everybody in the world. This is the main difference. I mean, there are plenty of examples in the sense of this type in which many experiments then were corrected—eventually corrected that eventually were wrong. But, I mean—and nobody knows. But in this case, everybody know. But, I mean, this is the new society, no? It’s the—

Audience Question: Well, I think the press distorts things sometimes.

TYSON:You think? The press distorts things.

Laura Patrizii: There’s good and bad to that.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:We’re running really short on time. I wanted to end at 9:15. Maybe just two more questions. I’m sorry if I only take two. But if you come to the table in the back, I’m sure they’ll be happy to chat with you. It just won’t end up as a publically-announced question. You’re the last two here. Yes, go.

Audience Question: Okay. Concerning the speed of light, which is the thing everyone’s measuring it against and no one has asked a question about, which is this: When Einstein was writing all this, nobody knew about dark matter or dark energy. We know that when light enters the atmosphere it travels more slowly than an interplanetary space. And when it goes from the atmosphere to, say, water it travels slower still. We now know that interplanetary space and indeed interstellar space has a lot more stuff in it than we used to think. And that it is less of a pure vacuum. Is there any room there that light actually moves a little faster than we thought? And that this isn’t so much that they’re moving faster than the speed of light, but that the speed of light in a real vacuum is actually faster than we thought it was.

TYSON: Yeah. Shelly, so—I’ll paraphrase the question, if I may.

GLASHOW: Please.

TYSON:Okay. We have this 10-digit precision definition of the speed of light. And that’s the speed of light in a vacuum. But there is no vacuum. We’ve never actually created a vacuum. We’ve tried to approximate a perfect vacuum, but there’s always some particles left over in the space in which we’re measuring the speed of light. You go out to interplanetary space, there’s stuff there. Intergalactic space, there’s stuff. Light is never traveling through a vacuum. Is there some speed that it actually could attain that’s higher than anything we’ve measured it to be, if in fact we could send it through a perfect vacuum?

GLASHOW:Yes. The answer is yes. It’s easy—the things that are out there in space are mostly photons. The Universe is not at absolute zero. It’s at three degrees Celsius.

TYSON:Kelvin.

GLASHOW:Lots of photons.

TYSON:Three degrees Kelvin.

CLINE:Two-point-seven-three.

GLASHOW:Two-point-seven. That—

TYSON:You said Celsius. I’m just saying it’s the wrong temperature scale, Mr. Nobel Laureate from the Bronx High School of Science. Three degrees Celsius, that’s like a chilly day outside.

GLASHOW:Anyway—

TYSON:Oh, anyway. All right. I have to gloat in this moment. Please.

Sheldon Glashow:It’s not at absolute zero. And, therefore, light travels more slowly than it would travel in a vacuum. And we can calculate that difference, and it’s in the 47th decimal place.

TYSON:Got you, okay. Good answer to that. The very last question, so it better be an awesome question.

Audience Question: This is for Laura. I’m a scientist, engineer. You’ve made something that was so dramatic it shook up the world. It shook me up. It shook up those two guys definitely. But what I don’t understand—

TYSON:And Elvis Presley. He’s all shook up.

Audience Question: What I don’t understand is what happens at OPERA, the management there? They had to realize that this thing was so dramatic, so unbelievable. That’s why everybody’s here. It just happened recently that you ran another test that said you were wrong. And then within just a couple of months, OPERA comes out and says we’re wrong. Wouldn’t you—something bothers me that you should have gone back and checked and checked and checked.

TYSON:For those two months?

[Question.] Yes.

TYSON:Rather than even announce it.

Audience Question: What happened within OPERA? Who makes that decision to go out—

Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, that’s the management of science. At that level of the publicity and the publication—excellent question. Excellent question. If they found the answer within two months, then why not wait another two months and do all the same analysis and not have published the results at all?

[Question.] Yes.

Laura Patrizii: Can I answer like this, no comment?

TYSON:Should we end on a no comment? Last point here, ladies and gentleman, does the future of physics—Gian, is the future of physics bright? Is there new discovery just beyond your reach that’ll transform all of our understanding? Or is it all about just adding a few decimal places of precision?

GIUDICE: During history, many times people have repeated that physics is over because now we know everything. And the end of the 19th century, people thought that’s it. We know everything because we have a perfect theory of thermal dynamics, of optics, of mechanics and so on. And then just in the decades, relativity came, quantum mechanics came, and the whole world was revolutionized. So, I think that there’ll never be an end of science. I don’t think we are at the end of science. But there are moments in the history of science where we are at the end of some paradigms. Certain ways of thinking are finished, and we have to open new ones.I think now we are at the age of the standard model, which was an extremely successful age where we have a beautiful understanding of the particle world. And this understanding can be expanded to the complexity of the world. Now, with the LHC, we are at a turning point. And we will see. And depending on the result, we could be at the verge of a new revolution.

TYSON:Excellent.

GIUDICE: I think you have to wait for the results in order to—

TYSON:Okay, he just wants to erase the results of—or are we also waiting for the birth of another Einstein?

CLINE:No, I think the fundamental question in dark energy is whether we can calculate the level of this or not. And that’s more of a theoretical question than experimental question. The other question is: What is dark matter? There are very large number of very interesting questions left. They may not just be done in the traditional way with colliders and accelerators, but they’ll be done in other ways.

TYSON:Are you smart enough to figure out those answers, or are we waiting for the birth of another Einstein?

CLINE:We need another Einstein to calculate this dark energy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. Shelly?

Sheldon Glashow:What we need are surprising, unanticipated discoveries. When I first heard of the OPERA result, I was delighted because it is so inexplicable, so wonderful.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:The truth comes out.

GLASHOW:Unfortunately, it went away.

Laura Patrizii:It was not true.

Sheldon Glashow:We need surprises. We are the only science that depends on results that contradict our own theory. We want to be contradicted.

TYSON:Where in fact fame derives from contradictions of established theory.

GLASHOW:Absolutely.

TYSON:Unlike so many other professions in our world. You’re just happy with your GPS.

HEGARTY:Yeah. Hold on. I just want—

TYSON:The GPS is working.

HEGARTY:Well, I just wanted to point out one thing. That even physics is going slower. There’s still a tremendous amount of technical work out there for engineering to catch up with the science. There’s all kinds of things on the horizon.

TYSON:You just look at these machines that they’re building.

HEGARTY:Well, quantum computing. There’s Fermilab put out a press release that they actually could communicate by sending neutrinos. How exciting is that to have a communication system that can actually go through rock? Aside from the fact that you need a 27-kilometer transmitter to do it, maybe you can make that a little smaller and we’ll get more—

TYSON:I’d rather just send a text. That’s much easier than sending a neutrino.

HEGARTY:But I think there is a great deal of work to be done in bringing some of these very newfangled things that I’ve been learning about before this thing into things that you find in your house more so.

TYSON:Laura, is physics waiting for a new Einstein, or is everyone alive smart enough today to solve all the problems?

Laura Patrizii: Well, no. I mean, I was thinking another thing. Can I conclude you with another thing?

TYSON:Sure, okay.

Laura Patrizii: Because now I was wondering which is the main important point for me as far as physics is concerned. And I would like to be able—maybe my daughter—answer to the question: How is it possible that we are tonight here? I mean, by this I mean what made possible at the beginning that the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:One of the most profound questions that exist in all of physics.

Laura Patrizii: Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:How there is matter—

Laura Patrizii:And this is something which is thrilling to me. I mean—

TYSON:So, you lose sleep over this?

Laura Patrizii: Sorry?

TYSON: You lose sleep over this.

Laura Patrizii: Well, I lose sleep because of the jetlag.

TYSON:Okay. So, there are other questions that—I agree. The asymmetry of matter and anti-matter in the Universe is profound. Had it been symmetric, all of our matter particles would have annihilated with their anti-matter counterparts and we’d live in a Universe of just photons. At some point, that symmetry was broken, putting one out of every 100 million of these interactions leaving a lone matter particle without an anti-matter particle to annihilate with. And we are the manifests of that result. I agree. Gabby? Are you the next Einstein?

GONZALEZ: No. I think there are many, many Einsteins out there.

TYSON:I think they are like investment bankers or something. We got to get them out of that field.

GONZALEZ:We do, yeah.

TYSON:A whole lost generation that are billionaires now that could have just solved physics

GONZALEZ: But I think this is a very exciting time, especially for experimental physics because we have such high precision detectors. We have such exquisite precision on space missions, looking at the Universe and particle detectors, the colliders. Our detectors looking at the birth of black holes.

TYSON:So, we’re data rich.

GONZALEZ: We are data rich. Very data rich.

TYSON:And theory poor.

GONZALEZ: We just need people to look at it.

TYSON:Data rich and theory poor. I’d like to end on a quote from Isaac Asimov himself where he said—I’m paraphrasing. He said the most important revelation a scientist can have is not eureka. No, it’s in reaction to an experiment where the scientist says that’s funny. That’s who that begins. Great discoveries in physics happen because just some one little result doesn’t match something else that you expected. And you say that’s odd, that’s peculiar. Let me just look at that a little more closely. Let me design an experiment just for that. Let me see if I have an understanding of it. Maybe I need a new theory. Maybe I need a new experiment. And such is the life of this panel. And I want to publicly, with all of us, join me in thanking them for coming. And thank [unintelligible 109:00]. I think physics [unintelligible], if they’re represented by who we have here on stage. Thank you all for coming. We’re calling it a night. We’ll see you next year.

[End of audio]