Feel the Photon | StarTalk

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

So I tried to get Wayne Shorter to express sounds of the universe through jazz, through his saxophone. OK. So I prepped him for a cosmic phenomenon to see how he—can he roll with it.

Uh-oh. This is going to be deep. Let's check it out. I want to describe something astrophysical to you, and I'm wondering if you can convert that to a musical expression. In the center of the sun, energy is created by fusion, and a photon of light is born. This photon of light, careening back and forth, eventually escapes the sun. That takes hundreds of thousands of years for that photon to get from the center of the sun to its surface, and it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to Earth. Is there music in that? Yeah.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can you feel the photon? Trying to—

Feel the photon. Feel the—oh, I like that. Feeling—that's an album title right there, feeling the photon. The photon fears nothing. OK.

[sustained note] And if I move in any direction other than that, I think this one thing incorporates all of the movement and struggles and everything like that and all of the short-term goals and stuff like that that other people be looking for, and this photon is wrapping around that whole thing for millions and millions of years, and something else is wrapping around that, and that's us.

OK, now we know why people hate jazz. What the hell was that? Did you see your face in that clip? He was like, "pah," and you were like, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing Wayne Shorter?

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