Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi About this episode Is “now” just an illusion? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio answer questions on the Higgs Field, dark energy, and the feasibility of Dyson spheres with astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Paul.
0:00 Paul Mecurio? Yes.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dr. O came back to my office.
0:03 Paul Mecurio? Oh, he's the man.
0:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's the man, Dr. O.
0:05 Paul Mecurio? He knows his stuff.
0:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Man, we love it.
0:07 Paul Mecurio? He's in charge of a lot of acronyms.
0:10 Paul Mecurio? Wait till you hear the acronym.
0:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. And his expertise in, in the universe cosmology, dark matter, dark energy.
0:15 Paul Mecurio? Dark energy.
0:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the future of the field on StarTalk, coming right up.
0:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Paul Mecurio. Paul!
0:42 Paul Mecurio? What's up, my man? Good to see you. Always great to be back with you. Love you.
0:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, you're a comedian and you got a show on Broadway or Off Broadway or traveling.
0:51 Paul Mecurio? It was Off Broadway and then Broadway, now we're out on the road.
0:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Out on the road and it's a-
0:55 Paul Mecurio? Permission to speak.
0:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One man show and you interact with the audience and stuff?
0:58 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, yeah. It's about stories from people, from me. Frank Oz is directing it.
1:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We love Frank Oz.
1:04 Paul Mecurio? Created Yoda. Try being directed by Yoda. He's never wrong.
1:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we're gonna do Cosmic Queries today.
1:09 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, I love these. Grab bag.
1:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With an old colleague and friend of mine, Hakeem Olashay. I'm gonna get your last name. Olashay.
1:20 Hakeem Oluseyi? So far away.
1:23 Paul Mecurio? Way to do your research before the day.
1:25 Hakeem Oluseyi? Here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think OU shady.
1:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hakeem OU shady.
1:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? But instead of you, it's Lou. Olu Shayi.
1:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hakeem Olu Shayi.
1:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yes, sir.
1:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go. We got you.
1:39 Paul Mecurio? And you were on my podcast. We had a great conversation. Awesome book. Yeah.
1:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I got your bio here. It's great. Astrophysicist, cosmologist, your previous guest on StarTalk from a few years back.
1:49 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
1:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And recently, like practically minutes ago, CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
1:55 Paul Mecurio? Well, look at that. I didn't know from your sweatshirt that you were a CEO. You're looking good, man.
2:01 Hakeem Oluseyi? Ah, man, we're taking the CEO vibe in another direction, right?
2:08 Paul Mecurio? No pretension.
2:09 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, we don't need that.
2:10 Paul Mecurio? Congrats, man. That's awesome.
2:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Appreciate you, sir.
2:12 Paul Mecurio? That's awesome, man. Absolutely.
2:13 Hakeem Oluseyi? Thank you.
2:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you got a podcast, Does It Fly?
2:16 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
2:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By Roddenberry Entertainment. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek fame. And you've got a memoir out there.
2:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
2:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's been out for a few years now.
2:24 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
2:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A Quantum Life.
2:26 Hakeem Oluseyi? It keeps getting released.
2:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My Unlikely Journey From the Street to the Stars.
2:30 Paul Mecurio? And that's the book that we talked about on my show.
2:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
2:33 Paul Mecurio? It's a really great story.
2:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That reminds me of the quote from Oscar Wilde. "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars."
2:40 Hakeem Oluseyi? Ooh, that's good.
2:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You didn't know about that quote?
2:43 Hakeem Oluseyi? You could have put that in the book. I could have put that in the book. That could have been in the book. You could call me next time.
2:48 Paul Mecurio? Unless you're drunk on Thunderbird, then you're not looking up at the stars.
2:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you've also involved with NASA's IMAP satellite.
2:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yes.
2:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So NASA has no shortage of acronyms.
2:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
2:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So unpack IMAP for me.
3:01 Hakeem Oluseyi? The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Can't wait to talk to you about it.
3:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, we'll get to it in like a minute.
3:08 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
3:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
3:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
3:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm a big supporter of theirs, like from way back.
3:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
3:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they say, it sounds like it's only the Pacific, but they have a mission statement that's functionally international. Getting people to look up.
3:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
3:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's like, I try to do that every day.
3:25 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right, you're succeeding.
3:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
3:27 Hakeem Oluseyi? You're succeeding, right? It's cool now. When I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd.
3:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
3:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right now, nerds are cool science. Everybody loves space.
3:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plus, we were blurds.
3:37 Paul Mecurio? Right, that's true.
3:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? Black nerds.
3:38 Paul Mecurio? There's no way there's a black nerd. No, there's two of them, trust me.
3:41 Hakeem Oluseyi? At least.
3:42 Paul Mecurio? They don't know each other yet, but they're there.
3:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, I could give you a list.
3:46 Paul Mecurio? Is that right?
3:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh.
3:47 Paul Mecurio? Do you have a secret meeting before it was like public that you guys are black nerds?
3:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah. National Society of Black Physicists.
3:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Blurds are a special subspecies of the whole world.
3:57 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay. Because people could ask you, what kind of nerd are you? They come in different elks, right?
4:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
4:02 Paul Mecurio? What type, isn't there just one general type of nerd?
4:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? No.
4:05 Paul Mecurio? Science nerd, like a TV nerd, like that kind of thing?
4:08 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, well, you know, the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek, right?
4:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, no, here's the thing. I got this.
4:13 Hakeem Oluseyi? I got it. You got it.
4:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So a geek can be a geek in... Any specific category. You can be a music geek.
4:20 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
4:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, you're just into the music. So, but you're not necessarily associated with science. If you're a geek.
4:26 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
4:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're geek, you're just into your thing.
4:28 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
4:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But a nerd, it says something about your personality and your behavior and your.
4:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's like kind of a quality.
4:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the quality of your personality.
4:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? I'll give you some examples. Okay. I was in the Navy back in the eighties. Mm-hmm. And a guy asked me, "Yo, how come you the only brother that don't wear hella gold?" And my answer was, "Never occurred to me."
4:49 Hakeem Oluseyi? And he said, "What does a curd mean?" Like, I couldn't even tell the difference, you know, like dudes love cars. I couldn't tell two cars apart, like, you know.
4:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, what you care, it's, you care about different things.
4:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? You care about different things, exactly, yeah, yeah.
5:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, uh, do you have a vision, uh, for the Society of the Pacific?
5:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? I do, I absolutely, I, I do. So, the Pacific has, well.
5:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me just remind people, it's an organization that promotes public awareness and understanding of astronomy at all levels.
5:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? At all levels.
5:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At the amateur level, you get a telescope.
5:17 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
5:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You, you.
5:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? Why the term Pacific?
5:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, that's what began in, in San Francisco Bay Area.
5:22 Hakeem Oluseyi? The first president was the director of Lick Observatory. But it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization. And Lick Observatory is Observatory of Santa Cruz. Mm-hmm. And, uh, so, yeah.
5:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
5:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, in the Bay Area, I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc. Great place to drink. You know, you go with a bottle and then boom. Eat chips, gotta eat chips at the observatory. So, um, the ASP, one thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective. So, they accepted professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level. Because it was all about sort of just lifting everybody. All together, all together. And you want to get it out there. It's like, you know, yeah. The more you include, the better the knowledge base.
6:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Highly laudable fact.
6:07 Hakeem Oluseyi? Highly laudable fact. Because he doesn't, uh, hang out with riffraff. He's, uh. Don't make me slap you. But later, they added a new group that that is labeled as enthusiasts.
6:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
6:19 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing about it. So I discovered them. I joined, I went to the Bay Area in 91 for graduate school, and there was this guy at the nearby community college, a name you're gonna recognize, Andy Fracknoy.
6:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
6:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? Who was, who was the CEO.
6:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He was teaching at the community college.
6:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? Excuse me. Yeah, he was teaching at Foothills.
6:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Foothills, yeah.
6:36 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right. And so I, I'm looking at Mercury magazine, I'm looking at the proceedings of the ASP.
6:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The ASP produces the magazine for the public, Mercury magazine, and they produce proceedings of scientific conferences.
6:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? Of scientific conferences.
6:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They got it in everything. There is probably one of these books is from that conference.
6:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? But, but you know what else they do?
6:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
6:54 Hakeem Oluseyi? So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world.
6:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hmm.
6:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals. So they're typically the top around 17% of astronomy journals. And there you go, a proceedings of the, yeah.
7:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is, this is for every meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, every professional meeting, their proceedings.
7:16 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
7:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And this, and it beautifully published.
7:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? Everybody has one.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Line them up. Yeah, we all have these. And, and these are just two that are here relative to others that I have on a different part of the shelf. Galaxy Evolution, The Milky Way Perspective.
7:27 Paul Mecurio? Oh, that's a great, yeah. They made that into a film. Starring Tom Cruise.
7:34 Paul Mecurio? He jumps through a Milky Way, uh, covered in gasoline. It's an amazing scene.
7:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? An equation. So, uh, I mean, there are now hundreds of these. I mean, it's been around a long time.
7:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, absolutely.
7:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So very, very good to hear that.
7:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right. So, so I saw them as a rigorous, scientifically rigorous organization that had the social consciousness to do this educator training.
7:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which nobody else was doing, because no one else was doing it.
7:57 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's very inclusive.
7:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They were ordained to even talk to the public.
8:00 Hakeem Oluseyi? Exactly.
8:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so the ASP has been everything I care about as a professional scientist.
8:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? Same.
8:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is fulfilled by that mission.
8:07 Paul Mecurio? Well, why haven't other, why haven't other societies picked up on that part of it? Why have, I mean, you know, it's, it's out there, it's a good example, and be inclusive, bring the.
8:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I have an answer. He probably hasn't answered, but I have an answer. In our field?
8:19 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
8:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There aren't many fields where it can reach. The enthusiastic amateur and they can still participate.
8:27 Paul Mecurio? Well, but your show does. Cosmic Queries is a perfect example of that.
8:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What I'm saying, that's astronomy and astrophysics. You can't really do, can you do that with physics, really?
8:35 Paul Mecurio? Well, you can if you're not pompous like you are.
8:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, but it's harder because everybody's looking up. And you know, when we discovered a supernova, a black hole, anything, it's headlines.
8:45 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, splitting an atom is less relatable than looking up at the stars.
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How many other sciences make a headline with that frequency? Think about it.
8:53 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, that's true.
8:54 Hakeem Oluseyi? And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally? Like people buy telescopes.
9:00 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
9:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's what I'm saying. Yeah, so good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that.
9:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, absolutely.
9:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you're at the helm of a very important organization.
9:08 Hakeem Oluseyi? Thank you, sir.
9:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there it is. So now tell me about the latest NASA acronym.
9:14 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yes, interstellar, mapping, and acceleration.
9:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And acceleration probe.
9:19 Paul Mecurio? But you can't have a thing that says IMAP and then the word mapping is in the middle of it.
9:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that is, that's, that's, that's bad.
9:24 Paul Mecurio? It's not working. We're gonna have to redo this.
9:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The word in the acronym can't be in one of the words of the acronym.
9:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's like GNU not Unix.
9:32 Paul Mecurio? Mr. Smart aleck over here.
9:35 Hakeem Oluseyi? GNU's not Unix, GNU?
9:36 Paul Mecurio? Oh, yeah.
9:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? GNU, Linux, Unix, you guys aren't that old. Okay. Never mind, it's the white hair. So here's the thing, before this.
9:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's not nerdy enough.
9:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? I was working on a satellite called the Supernova Acceleration Probe, and now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe.
9:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, you're working on Earth.
9:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? Related to the probe. And I misused the word on.
9:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, you did. Okay. So, so.
9:57 Hakeem Oluseyi? This is awesome.
9:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So why is the word acceleration in the probe?
10:00 Hakeem Oluseyi? Because essentially, what happens is the sun accelerates particles, right? It creates this bubble and the example.
10:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the solar wind.
10:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? The solar wind, right?
10:11 Paul Mecurio? For the heliosphere, right?
10:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? It is supersonic, right? The heliosphere. But when it hits the.
10:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you mean supersonic if it's moving through the vacuum of space?
10:19 Hakeem Oluseyi? Space is it exactly a vacuum?
10:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, it's approximately a vacuum.
10:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's approximately a vacuum. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
10:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so cool. So it's moving faster than the speed of sound would be in that very reduced vacuum?
10:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Exactly. And what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out.
10:37 Paul Mecurio? That's the helio pause, isn't it?
10:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? No, the helio pause is what I'm getting to.
10:41 Paul Mecurio? Okay.
10:41 Hakeem Oluseyi? So just like the example that's given is when you, when you run.
10:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're showing off how much you know. Let him catch up with you. And then, where do you find these two comedians?
10:50 Hakeem Oluseyi? These guys know more science than me.
10:53 Hakeem Oluseyi? I'm done, that's the only thing I know. You know how you want to water them first before you put them in? You know when you run water in a faucet and it makes this, and then there's that ring? Yeah. Right, that's like the heliopause, where it goes from supersonic to subsonic. Right. So our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium, but here's the thing. There was a previous satellite, so the guy who's running this professor out of Princeton named Dave McCollum, okay? So I don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite? Yes, I do. That went over the pole. Went to the sun, didn't it? Went to the sun. Went over the poles of the sun, and we got to see that the solar wind around the mid-latitude, you have the regular wind, 400 kilometers per second. Out of the poles, the high-speed wind, 800 kilometers per second. Didn't know that. So young Dave McCollum is the guy who made that famous plot, alright? Okay.
11:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? So then he had an idea, and the idea is crazy. Let's look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons, we look at different higher. There's nothing more boring than a neutral atom. Nothing more boring. It's not ionized. Yeah, but here's their origin. These electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause, so there's magnetic fields there. There's ions trapped in those magnetic fields. Those electrons get captured by those ions, and they become neutral. So it's like neutering a dog. No.
12:13 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay, well. Anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field, and it's stuck out there. But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck. It's no longer tied to the magnetic field. Because it has no charge. Because it has no charge. So some of them stream into the inner solar system. So you can get a map of the stuff that is in. Raining back down. Raining back down. And they discovered that if you look at the galactic magnetic field, it wraps around our bubble, and perpendicular to that is a, just like we have a radiation belt around our planet, there is a belt around our heliopause. And so NASA goes, that's interesting. Now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail, study the sun. As these things go.
12:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? You'd make a tiny discovery. Yeah.
13:00 Paul Mecurio? And it can open up a whole.
13:02 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, opens up. Now you can build an entire experiment just for that discovery.
13:05 Paul Mecurio? What do you anticipate that you might find there? Do you have, I mean, you must have some.
13:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? Just the unknown. It's the exact same thing. You know, you're gonna find something you've never seen before, just like they did with IBEX, right? So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun. They're looking at acceleration of those magnetic fields and they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of, because those particles also stream in. So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration probe.
13:38 Speaker 03 Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
13:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Donald Goldsmith, who's an astronomy writer and co-wrote the original Cosmos. And I actually co-authored a book with him on origins. He has his own LLC company. And because he writes books and writes for TV, it's called Interstellar Medium.
14:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, Interstellar Media, Interstellar Media.
14:17 Hakeem Oluseyi? Interstellar, I love that.
14:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's great. It was so simple and perfect.
14:20 Hakeem Oluseyi? So I have an LLC too.
14:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's that?
14:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? Quarkstar.
14:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
14:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? I thought no one would think of that. Turns out there is a lighting company on the West Coast named Quarkstar.
14:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whoa, Quarkstar, alright.
14:30 Paul Mecurio? Here's a little bit more heady than theirs, though.
14:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, this is a cosmic queries.
14:34 Paul Mecurio? Yes.
14:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? And we can't just like shoot this shit forever.
14:36 Paul Mecurio? Alright, okay, let's do it. Alright, this is James H. English. Greetings. He's from Denmark. I read recently that the universe is expanding too fast for our theories and models to fit, increasing the Hubble tension. Do you think the problem is with our models? Or is there some physics we just haven't discovered to explain this? I.e. is the rate not constant due to some undiscovered property of spacetime?
14:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Or is there something wrong with the data?
15:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So are models off? Do we trust the data? Or do we need new physics? If the data's off, the model's off, by definition, no? It's... Maybe, no? I spent time at Princeton where they have a lot of theorists. They say, "Never trust an observation unless it's backed up by a theory."
15:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, that's happened. I know of two cases where observation was made, and it did not fit with the theory. I'll give you a very simple one. It was Art Walker's research. When he first got the images, so when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops, Art did that first, right? And so, the plasma loops had a constant cross-section. And so, the solar physicists were like, "Dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes, because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude. So it should get fatter at the top. They're not getting fatter."
15:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, just to be clear. So the magnetic field is confining the plasma.
15:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
15:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the shape of the plasma is the shape of the magnetic field.
15:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? Exactly.
15:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, he's saying that the magnetic field is just a constant cross-sectional tube.
16:00 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's what the data showed.
16:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it should be something more dynamic than that.
16:02 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, at the top, they should get fatter, right? Just like if you look at a bar I made it. Theory said that, right? And Art was like, "Ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna have the same passband, but I'm gonna give you three different configuration telescopes. I'm gonna give you a Casa Green, a Herschellian, and a Ritchie-Cretian, so you can't say it's the optics. And not only that, so we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes with all these passbands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same passbands on SDO and EIT, the solar satellites, and show, "No, this is what nature is doing. It's not an issue with the passbands, it's not an issue with the optics. This is what nature is doing." And now, that's what everyone knows.
16:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the theory had to be adjusted.
16:41 Hakeem Oluseyi? The theory had to be adjusted, right? You had to come up with a mechanism.
16:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so that can happen. So let's get back to Hubble tension.
16:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? Hubble tension, right? So people have...
16:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's been a lot of articles.
16:49 Hakeem Oluseyi? There's been a lot of articles, right? And so, essentially...
16:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And everybody wants to just throw out the Big Bang.
16:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? Or throw out dark energy.
16:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's clickbait.
16:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? Clickbait, yeah, right, exactly. It's clickbait, right? So, essentially, what's been happening is, you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information. Then you have the standard way that we... Expansion. I have some object. I know.
17:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How fast it's moving?
17:17 Hakeem Oluseyi? How fast it's moving away. It's redshift. And I also know it's distance based on its brightness, right?
17:23 Paul Mecurio? Right.
17:24 Hakeem Oluseyi? And so now I can make a Hubble diagram. I fit the Planck data. I get a value of the Hubble constant. They don't agree.
17:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But the Planck is the cosmic background.
17:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
17:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Planck satellite.
17:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? Exactly. European satellite. I be saying stuff, don't you know, I be leaving stuff out, man.
17:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why, that's why I'm here.
17:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's why you're here. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so.
17:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To keep you continuous.
17:42 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, so now there's new James Webb Space Telescope data.
17:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, just set the stage. So you have data from the early universe.
17:50 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yes.
17:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You get a Hubble rate.
17:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? You get a Hubble rate.
17:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The traditional galaxies, usually with supernova or some other standard candle.
17:57 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
17:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And those two numbers do not match.
17:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? They do not match.
17:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In my day, measurements of the expansion rate of the universe differed by a factor of two. A factor of two.
18:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah.
18:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so now they differ by just a few percent.
18:11 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
18:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But.
18:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? The error bars.
18:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The error bars, the uncertainty is way smaller than the difference in those two measurements.
18:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
18:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that is a more severe fact than not knowing the expansion rate of the universe by a factor of two.
18:26 Hakeem Oluseyi? So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe, which depends on the Hubble thing, right? And so it was the cosmological data that had to be adjusted.
18:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody found stars that were older than the universe.
18:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe, right?
18:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But then.
18:42 Hakeem Oluseyi? And the headlines were, oh, catastrophe. Oh, my God. Well, yeah, whatever.
18:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, people like, ready to give up on the universe.
18:49 Hakeem Oluseyi? But then we realized, oh, no, our cosmology needs to be improved. And so, you know, what happened in the nineties, really? You know, post Kobe, that changed everything in cosmology, right?
18:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not Kobe Bryant.
19:01 Hakeem Oluseyi? Not Kobe Bryant. The Kobe satellite.
19:03 Paul Mecurio? You mean right at that game, after he got eighty, he scored eighty-one points, that game?
19:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? No, not that game.
19:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cosmic Background Explorer.
19:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
19:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One of the first high-precision measurements of the cosmic background.
19:13 Hakeem Oluseyi? Matherin Smoot.
19:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
19:14 Paul Mecurio? So do it.
19:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nobel laureates.
19:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? Nobel laureates, yeah, yeah.
19:17 Paul Mecurio? So circling to the Hubble tension.
19:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So tell me, so what, what's, something's gotta give.
19:22 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, something's. Got to give. So I think that there's something that we don't understand. I think I, I think I'm trusting the measurements. And I think that I trust the.
19:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The measurements look good, don't they?
19:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? The measurements look good. I was, I was involved in supernova cosmology, right? And, and also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things. And so all this different data, there's, there's more than one probe, right? People are using different types of stars.
19:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. That's where you get the confidence from. It's not just one, one data point from one telescope.
19:48 Paul Mecurio? So what James asks is, is there some physics we just haven't yet discovered?
19:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are we missing physics? Or do we, or we just have to adjust the model?
19:54 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, what, there, people coming up with these models that maybe the expansion rate of the universe, we have it like, okay, there's this initial impulse. Right? And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents, of which there are three main ones, right? Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through face, space, but almost not at all through time. Matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space. And spacetime, which has its own energy density that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one, right? And so initially radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate, then dark energy, i.e. spacetime energy density comes to dominate.
20:29 Paul Mecurio? We think.
20:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, that's what, that's what he, right? And each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe. But here's the thing, once we discovered the Higgs particle, we, first time we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field. What do I mean by that? Right? So.
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll ask you that. What do you mean by that?
20:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't ask yourself these questions. That's for us to tell. If you, one of, one of the things that we look at is.
20:55 Paul Mecurio? You and I don't need to be here. Let's go.
20:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Myself questions and answers them. Yeah. Who needs a, I'll query myself.
21:03 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, you, you read them.
21:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's just back up. In the United States, we surely would have discovered the Higgs boson.
21:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, yeah.
21:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, with our superconducting supercollider.
21:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yep.
21:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whose budget was canceled right around when peace broke out in Europe.
21:15 Paul Mecurio? Hmm.
21:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, right, uh, between eighty-nine and ninety-three.
21:19 Hakeem Oluseyi? Procurement.
21:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. And so the center mass, the particle physics moved to Europe, to CERN, to the Large Hadron Collider. They discovered the Higgs boson. So now what happened?
21:28 Hakeem Oluseyi? So here's what, here's the deal. Here's why I bring this up, because it's what is known as a scalar field. So when you think about the field. That you know of, right? They're like, oh, the electric field. I have a charge. It has electric field. Magnetic field. I have a charge that's moving. It generates a magnetic field. Gravitational field. Oh, there's this matter. So every field you know of, there is some source in matter. But then here come the particle physics. They're like, oh, yeah. You know why every electron is identical? Because they don't say it this way. This is mine. Know why every electron is identical? Same reason every C note, musical note is identical, because they're not the real thing. The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating, right? So they invoke this idea of quantum fields. So the quantum field just permeates all of spacetime and is just there.
22:08 Paul Mecurio? But nothing is real in that quantum field.
22:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, excitations of the field are particles, right? So they're the permanent ones and they're the virtual ones, right? So we measure the excitations as particles. As particles, right. Now here's what happens, though. They say, oh, there's this thing called a Higgs. It was just there. It's just everywhere in space at all times. It's just there, right? Scalar field. No source. And I'm like, in my mind, as a young scientist, I'm like, is that real? Then they discover they ring that damn field and create the particle. I'm like, wow. So now what can you do? Oh, inflation. Looks like Alan Guth creates inflation. Looks like the universe rapidly expanded. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll create another scalar field. I call it the inflaton field. So now you see some dynamics happening. You can just create a new field. So. But it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass.
22:53 Hakeem Oluseyi? It does. It does. But you're supposed to like use it to make predictions. So you know to test whether what came out of your ass is real.
23:00 Paul Mecurio? You're using one as a jumping.
23:00 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
23:05 Paul Mecurio? I actually have a device that does that. I'll bring it to the next show.
23:08 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, hey, do you remember the shit list from the 90s? No. Oh, it was like a joke and it it it it lived on the internet, the early internet. And it was like all these different types of shit. One of them was gold shit. You felt it came out. You wiped. There's nothing on the toilet paper. There's nothing in the toilet, but you know what happened. Oh, wow. Okay.
23:27 Hakeem Oluseyi? So, some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it of, as simple as we think it is. And it could, and then another
23:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? question is- It'd be yet another phenomenon acting on the expansion rate- Exactly. Beyond the three that we have characterized- What do we, do we have an idea what it might be?
23:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? Some weird quantum-
23:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You come up with some-
23:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, you come up with some-
23:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is weird the scientific term you're going with here? Sure. So, but let's, let me clarify here. So, this notion that the expansion rate is misbehaving, let me characterize it that way. That just means it doesn't match what our three most potent models would give us for it.
24:03 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
24:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so, do we introduce a fourth accounting?
24:07 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
24:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or do we say that one of these are wrong?
24:10 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
24:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or they're all working in harmony. Or each of those have to be adjusted in some way?
24:14 Hakeem Oluseyi? There's an assumption within there as well. That comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is ice-rotting homogeneous. And now people are looking, if I look in that direction, I look in that direction, I look in that direction, is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction? So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on, like the Vera Rubin Telescope LSST, because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part, or surveys that don't go too deep-
24:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? LSST was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope?
24:43 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
24:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we're astronomers and we don't like going that way. We don't play that. So we just named it after one of our- You guys just like acronyms. You're just the laziest group of people. Vera Rubin Telescope. Yes, she discovered dark matter in the Milky Way.
24:56 Hakeem Oluseyi? Wow. And speaking of, you know, another telescope that's on coming is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
25:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It's looking for dark matter or dark energy or both?
25:04 Hakeem Oluseyi? Both. Both of them. It's going to be a survey telescope.
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Everybody knows that, Neil.
25:07 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah. So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the ASP, she valued the ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars.
25:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whoa.
25:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah.
25:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, listen- Astronomers have millions of dollars?
25:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? Nancy Grace Roman had millions of dollars.
25:27 Paul Mecurio? We're gonna jump to the next, that was a great question, James, we're gonna jump to the next one. Adam Omalon, hi Dr. Tyson and Dr. Olusse. Adam from Poland here, first, all of, first of all, I am a big fan of everything Dr. Tyson is involved in. I love his books, all his programs he's been on. My question is about the ability to detect various particles in the atmospheres of very distant planets. We know that, that the light is altered as it travels towards us, but how exactly does this happen?
25:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Ooh. Absorption spectrum.
26:03 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
26:04 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah. So it happens.
26:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what's absorbing what?
26:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? So what happens is, is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star, right? And so at that time, the light from the star will pass through the atmosphere of the planet.
26:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Through the edges of the planet.
26:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
26:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, so we're with you, you have this transit, and the planet is moving across the surface. Now, you don't see that.
26:28 Hakeem Oluseyi? You don't see it.
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just see light.
26:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
26:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so I'm getting light in my telescope.
26:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? So as that planet is going in front of a star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the star passes through the planet's atmosphere, and that light interacts with that atmosphere, around the edges, right? Yeah, that light interacts, and so certain wavelengths of light aren't gonna make it out the other side, they're gonna be absorbed, right?
26:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the chemistry of the atmosphere.
26:50 Hakeem Oluseyi? By the chemistry of the atmosphere. But, remember, the star has its own spectrum as well. So you get a spectrum of the star by itself, you get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, and you subtract them, and what's left over is a spectrum of the planet.
27:06 Paul Mecurio? Ah.
27:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? And now, you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere.
27:11 Paul Mecurio? And is that, is that a constant? In other words, that is a proven theory that works every time?
27:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, it's hard to do. And so James Webb Space Telescope was built to do that job, and it actually has succeeded in doing that job. Those are some of the early releases, like, hey, we can do it!
27:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It hasn't just succeeded, it's badass.
27:28 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's badass, yeah.
27:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's opened up the whole industry.
27:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
27:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The whole cottage industry to make that happen.
27:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah.
27:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright.
27:34 Paul Mecurio? Alright, we're gonna go on to Jordan Visina from North Dakota. I've been curious about dark matter.
27:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you went from Denmark.
27:41 Paul Mecurio? Denmark, Poland, North Dakota. Yeah.
27:45 Hakeem Oluseyi? Three places I've never been to.
27:48 Paul Mecurio? It may not ever go. I've been curious about dark matter. Is it possible that the reason why we don't understand dark matter is because it defies our understanding of the laws of physics? Meaning, is it possible that dark matter is something that we can, that can travel faster than light? Ooh. Or how massive gravitational effect without having large mass? Love the show.
28:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me, let me shape that another way and throw it right in your lap. So, we probe the universe using our methods and tools of science that we have developed to this day. Could dark matter simply be awaiting some brilliant theoretical understanding coupled with some brilliant new kind of telescope that would see it in ways that no one had previously dreamt? So is it awaiting technology? Is it awaiting new physics?
28:41 Paul Mecurio? I think it's more basic than that.
28:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or is it good, is it gonna, is it gonna plug in with just a new kind of particle that just doesn't interact?
28:47 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, first off, trivia, my very first physics research.
28:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I was wondering, you were in that?
28:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? Was summer of 91 on the cold dark ma, CDMF, right? In, in, in the basement in Berkeley.
28:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
28:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Building a dark matter direct detection, right? Which we've not detected any dark matter yet.
29:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So your PhD is from?
29:04 Hakeem Oluseyi? No, no, no. It's, it's a funny thing. I, I got accepted, I applied to Berkeley and Stanford. I got rejected from Berkeley, accepted by Stanford.
29:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You idiot. Got rejected by Berkeley.
29:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right?
29:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know, right? But here's the thing.
29:14 Hakeem Oluseyi? Send him off to Stanford. I went at work. Where do idiots go? Exactly. Reject. But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley a summer between undergrad and grad on that project. At the end of the summer, they said, dude, if you want to come to Berkeley, come. But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin school. I didn't know that.
29:29 Paul Mecurio? Wait, you didn't know that?
29:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Dude, I was from the country, man.
29:32 Paul Mecurio? You're a smart guy.
29:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? His, his, his memoir is called From the Street.
29:36 Hakeem Oluseyi? To the scarf. I got that out the mud.
29:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What part of that title do you not understand?
29:41 Paul Mecurio? All right, you thought it was a town in Connecticut, not a university.
29:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? I didn't know Connecticut existed. So, and I still haven't seen it. But anyway.
29:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the town in Connecticut has an M, I think, doesn't it?
29:50 Paul Mecurio? It does, but just go along with the joke.
29:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? Here's how I like to think about this dark matter and dark energy stuff, right? Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger. Basically over two twenty thousand light years, bigger than the galactic arm, nothing moves consistent with the laws of physics. And so there's two ways, right? There's this like alternative gravity theories, which you know, just like when you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever. And then there is this, oh, there's other stuff, dark matter. Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is. It's black holes, it's machos, it's
30:20 Paul Mecurio? Dark energy.
30:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? Super symmetric particles, oops.
30:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Machos would be massive compact halo objects.
30:25 Hakeem Oluseyi? So we come up with our better instruments and look for them.
30:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Two kinds of.
30:28 Paul Mecurio? Yes.
30:29 Hakeem Oluseyi? They don't exist. We, we look for them, they're not there. The super symmetrical particles, sorry, should have saw them. They're not there.
30:35 Paul Mecurio? At what point, no seriously, do you go, let's stop looking, like, and move on to something else? It's like looking for a second sock and you just don't find it.
30:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because when we'd have to admit that we're stupid or that we're not.
30:46 Paul Mecurio? Yes, exactly.
30:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, but we are driven by the uncertainty. There are ambulance chasing theorists out there.
30:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yes, there are.
30:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The slightest observation that's a little quirky, they're gonna come up with a whole theory to understand it.
30:56 Hakeem Oluseyi? Maybe several, right? Cause only have to get it right once.
30:58 Paul Mecurio? Is that what they call them?
31:00 Hakeem Oluseyi? I call them that.
31:00 Paul Mecurio? So the, the answer is that sort of there, we, we're never gonna stop trying to pursue this theory and, you know.
31:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? Something is a mess. The question is, what is it?
31:08 Paul Mecurio? But is it possible that dark matter is something that could travel faster than light? What is your theory on that?
31:13 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, well, we have those tachyons. Is it tachyons? Is that what it is?
31:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If dark matter is some kind of matter, we call it matter, but we don't know what it is.
31:23 Hakeem Oluseyi? Here's the thing, why we know it's not that, because there are these two models. It's not moving faster than light. Because the two models that we're competing were, is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter? So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter. And we know that the best model is lambda CDM, cold dark matter.
31:39 Paul Mecurio? Dark matter just feels, every time I read about it, it just feels like, I don't know, they're like a guy shows up at a party or something and he just, it's there, but it makes, it's a weird vibe. It makes every, it's the person that makes it.
31:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? And I don't find that to be well, uh.
31:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People making up particles that'll do this.
31:56 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah. Well, they're made of a particle to, to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton, which should exist, right? If, if the quarks have electric charges and there are separation between the minus and the negative. There should be some what's called separation between it, which we call a dipole moment. But one is not measured. So Helen Quinn and Al, they came up with this idea, maybe there's this other field that cancels it.
32:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's the Wild West.
32:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's the Wild West, man.
32:19 Paul Mecurio? Which is actually makes it exciting.
32:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? You come up with all these ideas and you go through all of them and none of them.
32:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But because we know that whatever the dark matter is, it's cold and not warm.
32:29 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
32:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It can't be going faster than light.
32:31 Hakeem Oluseyi? Exactly.
32:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because it would have evidence.
32:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, it's clumping gravitationally, right? And then, you know, you see, I imagine, shrink off radiation, right? That's when you travel faster than, uh, light in some medium.
32:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:41 Hakeem Oluseyi? You, you emit light.
32:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
32:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? So dark matter wouldn't be dark, baby.
33:05 Paul Mecurio? Here we go, next one, David from upstate New York. I recently watched a side channel show with Hakeem.
33:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Word!
33:12 Paul Mecurio? And I fell asleep. It was really boring. That was weird. Why would you write that, David?
33:17 Hakeem Oluseyi? I'm the guy who wakes everyone up.
33:18 Paul Mecurio? No, you're the best, man. You're the best. I recently watched a side channel with Hakeem. It was about gravitational waves. Just wondering, can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?
33:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so will it do damage, first of all?
33:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
33:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we know it's a disturbance in the gravitational field. And everybody knows after the movie Interstellar.
33:45 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
33:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That if you're in a different gravitational field, you're going to age differently.
33:48 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
33:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what, what, what kind of consequences?
33:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's a good question. Like, like the perturbations of time travel. Uh, this is a good time to bring up the Andromeda paradox.
33:57 Paul Mecurio? Okay, that's right. You know, I was thinking the same thing.
33:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? I was not.
34:02 Hakeem Oluseyi? What is the Andromeda paradox? Well, the Andromeda paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda. Andromeda, the galaxy. The galaxy. Not the stars that make the constellation. Yeah, not the constellation.
34:13 Paul Mecurio? And not the strain that killed millions of people.
34:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? Not the Andromeda strain, right? Two and a half million light years away. Then what happens is suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by. And at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda. Because I'm moving and you're stationary, we're gonna see events that are days apart. Even though we're in the same location at the same time.
34:33 Paul Mecurio? How can that be?
34:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? And you think that relativity and you think that the light arriving. And keep talking.
34:39 Paul Mecurio? How far, wait, in this scenario, how far away from me are you when you're running by me?
34:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? We're in the same place. We're in the same place, essentially.
34:45 Paul Mecurio? So you're like literally running here.
34:47 Hakeem Oluseyi? I've never heard of this paradox.
34:47 Paul Mecurio? And you look up.
34:48 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's a little-known paradox, right?
34:49 Paul Mecurio? And the thing that you see and I see are days apart.
34:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? Days apart.
34:52 Paul Mecurio? Because of our physical perspective on that?
34:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, here's what you would think. You would think the light is arriving right now. We should all be receiving this light. But that's not how it works. Motion changes the perception of time. And so we know about that in terms of the local universe. We call it relativity of simultaneity. Right? You're moving, I'm not. You see events as simultaneous. I see them as happening one before the other, right? But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times. So there could be a third person moving in the other direction seeing a different time. So how do you define what now is? So we don't even understand time. Even though you're in the same place, yeah.
35:28 Paul Mecurio? While we're sitting here, I'm here, you're running by. We look up at Andromeda at the same time.
35:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yep.
35:34 Paul Mecurio? And we're seeing something from days, from the same location, essentially. We're seeing things days apart.
35:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? Days apart.
35:39 Paul Mecurio? And that leads to the idea of what is now and your now and my now are two different nows.
35:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? There is no now.
35:45 Paul Mecurio? No, there is now. There's always now.
35:46 Hakeem Oluseyi? There's an illusion of now because we're so close together and we're so small, the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now. Right? But now doesn't really exist on larger scales. There's no such thing.
35:56 Paul Mecurio? But, but there is, always has to be a now in all seriousness.
35:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? No, that is your bias. That is your bias. That's so, that's so Galilean, Newtonian.
36:04 Paul Mecurio? But that's a, but that's a.
36:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's so backwards.
36:06 Paul Mecurio? Wow. I've never got, I've never gotten heckled from the left and the right at the same time.
36:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's right.
36:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, so wait, so, so what is the upshot of this?
36:15 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, what was the question again? Cause they're talking about time, right? And they're talking about now or something. And I'm just like, that now is this?
36:21 Paul Mecurio? It was about gravitational waves, wondering can they also alter time? If a huge collision occurred in our solar, near our solar system, how would we feel them? Would we be alive to physically notice?
36:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right, you curve space and you stretch time, right? It's kind of like idea like what a black hole does, right? You curve space, you, you know, time moves more slowly relatively. But these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle. And so the real calculation to do is, what type of gravitational wave would be necessary? It's like the big rip.
36:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's for that to happen.
36:50 Hakeem Oluseyi? For that to happen.
36:51 Paul Mecurio? To be, to be, to be felt.
36:53 Hakeem Oluseyi? To be felt, right? Or to be, you know.
36:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the one that, the first one that was measured, it jiggled the experiment by one twentieth the diameter of a proton.
37:04 Hakeem Oluseyi? There you go.
37:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You ain't feeling that.
37:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? You ain't feeling that.
37:06 Paul Mecurio? But we know they were gravitational waves.
37:07 Hakeem Oluseyi? Well, yeah, we measured them, right? So, you know, you, you, you want to think of what event, what, what magnitude of wave do you need intensity? And then calculate what sort of event.
37:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But there are. That event would surely kill you before you had any experience of the wave.
37:20 Paul Mecurio? I was gonna say. But there are a whole host of, it's an infinite number of things that could cause a gravitational wave, right?
37:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But actually, wait, wait, the gravitational wave moves at the speed of light. So it can't kill you before the wave hits you. That would all happen at the same time.
37:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, that's a good thing, and you add those things.
37:35 Paul Mecurio? Oh, well, that's the upside.
37:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you don't even know.
37:38 Paul Mecurio? You don't even know.
37:39 Hakeem Oluseyi? So you get compressed to nothingness, you get ripped apart? This is like a sci-fi thing, right? The gravitational wavenator.
37:51 Paul Mecurio? Alright, we're gonna move on.
37:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can we do a lightning round?
37:52 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, absolutely. We got, we got some great ones. Here we go. Alan, guys.
37:56 Hakeem Oluseyi? Lightning round, dude. You know what that means? Be even more equatious.
37:59 Paul Mecurio? Yes, exactly. Right, right. Yeah, okay, here we go. I've always been bothered by physicists' preoccupation with conservation of information, especially in regard to particles falling into a black hole. Firstly, it sounds more like a philosophical position than one derived from, through mathematics or scientific method. Correct me. Secondly, Mr. Heisenberg taught us that one can never know all information about a particle. Thus, can't we consider that information? To never have existed in the first place and thus can't be destroyed. I, I, I have one thing for Alan. Alan, if you're gonna ask a question on acid, you gotta send the tablets to us too. So we can be on the same wavelength and answer the question.
38:35 Hakeem Oluseyi? Tablets?
38:35 Paul Mecurio? Go.
38:36 Hakeem Oluseyi? You mean tabs?
38:37 Paul Mecurio? There you go. There you go. There you go.
38:41 Paul Mecurio? Alan Geis, go ahead, answer, answer that question.
38:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He actually remembers the sixties.
38:44 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, exactly.
38:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you lived in the sixties, you shouldn't remember.
38:49 Paul Mecurio? There you go.
38:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, yeah.
38:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? So I, I say here, here. I say here. Catch yourself on the information. This is a cultural phenomenon. Nerds ain't cool. And so they try to make something cool that ain't cool. Alright, so i- i- i- this whole thing about, oh, you know, black holes have hair, we made a bet. Man, nerds, shut the hell up. Nobody care. I don't care. Alright, so here's what, here's what I think they're saying, right? If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun.
39:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to clarify, he said black holes have no hair?
39:22 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
39:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What he meant was that when matter becomes a black hole, it should have only like three physical parameters, like angular momentum, mass, charge. In charge, yeah, yeah. So the idea was whatever it looked like before, it has none of that later, once it becomes a black hole. So it says it has no hair. But that's back when enough people had hair that that was important. Part of how you identify.
39:48 Paul Mecurio? Right, exactly.
39:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But now that bald look, you know, Lex Luthor, the billionaire of bald look.
39:52 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, exactly.
39:53 Hakeem Oluseyi? Speaking of which, you know something I realized?
39:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
39:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? So, you know, I grew up in segregated Mississippi. So I go to graduate school and I would play basketball all the time. And I noticed that.
40:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You sucked at it.
40:02 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh man, I was a, I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49. Then I sucked. In the nineties, I was great. But here was the thing, I noticed something. And that is if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they invoke his hair color.
40:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
40:19 Hakeem Oluseyi? We didn't do that. That was.
40:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not our vocabulary.
40:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? I don't know.
40:22 Paul Mecurio? Wait, you mean they'd say like, you know, Paul McCurry, the guy with the dark hair?
40:26 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
40:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's like in China, you don't, you don't imagine people are IDing each other.
40:31 Paul Mecurio? No, because when I talk about.
40:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Invoking hair color.
40:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right, exactly.
40:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the person with the black, straight hair. That's not helpful.
40:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? But where I'm from, we, we invoke skin color. Oh, the, the light skin dude, the red bone, the yellow bone, the.
40:42 Paul Mecurio? See, I do it with voice, like, you know, Neil Tyson, he talks like James Earl Jones. I do it like that. You do basically.
40:47 Hakeem Oluseyi? This is CNN.
40:51 Paul Mecurio? So, we're gonna move on.
40:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? So, but the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that nobody... But let me tell you what, unlike a black hole, take the sun, right? You can reconstruct what made the sun. That's how we know, oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted. You can look at what it's made of today and reconstruct where it must have come from. You can't do that with a black hole, right?
41:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you're in the "we lost information" camp in the black hole.
41:16 Hakeem Oluseyi? Clearly.
41:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or information, there's too much made of this information.
41:19 Hakeem Oluseyi? Both. Exactly.
41:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, this is where he's coming from.
41:22 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
41:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Give me another one.
41:23 Paul Mecurio? There you go. "My name is Ross, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. Could dark energy, whatever it is, be the mechanism behind the big squeeze? As an analogy, consider a magnetic field that comes out of one pole, folds back on itself, goes into the other pole. Imagine this magnetic field being the fabric of spacetime."
41:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that something about dark energy? No, the point is the dark energy is making us expand and never return. So, maybe he meant dark matter. So, is there sufficient dark matter to close us back and then have the big squeeze?
41:50 Hakeem Oluseyi? No, not even close.
41:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not even close, okay. We'll give up on that one.
41:53 Hakeem Oluseyi? Lightening answer.
41:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right.
41:55 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay, next.
41:55 Paul Mecurio? Okay. "When were we..." This is Christopher from St. Louis. "When were we looking into the cosmos for possible Dyson spheres? What criteria were we using to tell the difference between a Dyson sphere and something else?"
42:06 Hakeem Oluseyi? Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now.
42:08 Paul Mecurio? All right.
42:08 Hakeem Oluseyi? All right, 'cause I did a little calculation, right?
42:11 Paul Mecurio? So did I, go ahead.
42:12 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay.
42:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, by the way, just make it clear, there are people who, when they wanna know stuff, they look it up on the internet, but when you're a scientist, you calculate the answer.
42:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay.
42:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. I gave someone an answer one time, "Wait, what source did you use?"
42:27 Paul Mecurio? My education.
42:29 Hakeem Oluseyi? The brain app.
42:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I should try it. Okay, try it sometime.
42:33 Paul Mecurio? It's called book learning.
42:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? So, basically, you're not gonna have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere. If you took all of Jupiter and you tried to make a Dyson sphere around the sun using all of it, the idea is that that matter, that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material.
42:51 Paul Mecurio? So, you're trying to harness the energy of a star using this artificial...
42:54 Hakeem Oluseyi? You're trying to absorb it in matter, right? And then convert it to useful energy, right? And so you do not have enough matter in the solar system.
43:03 Paul Mecurio? To create something.
43:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? Something that you could put around.
43:06 Paul Mecurio? Because it's not large enough or because it can't hold.
43:09 Hakeem Oluseyi? Cause it's not large, it's not, it's like.
43:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Stars are so much bigger than their planets.
43:12 Paul Mecurio? Have you seen the garbage bags that Costco sells? You put one of those around a star. Come on, guys.
43:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? So. They're hot.
43:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me add to what you just said, cause it's a brilliant revelation. Regarding the material necessary.
43:26 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right.
43:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you had that much material, it means you're visiting other star systems.
43:33 Hakeem Oluseyi? This is not even an interesting.
43:38 Paul Mecurio? You know.
43:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thousand, the planets of a thousand solars to get the energy from one star.
43:44 Paul Mecurio? Hey guys, we already got the energy. Why are we trying to create the energy?
43:47 Hakeem Oluseyi? You know what? The sun already has a Dyson sphere. You know what it's called? So when you think of the sun, you think, or a star, you think of it as two parts, the core and the envelope. The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere.
43:57 Paul Mecurio? It's already there.
43:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? Fifty percent of the matter, right? Fifty percent of the matter is in the core, fifty percent is in the envelope, and it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating into a useful form. That we could build our solar arrays and capture.
44:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, let me add to that. Last year, there was a research paper on a observing project to look for Dyson spheres. Now, you know how they're gonna do this? They're looking for very, very red star systems.
44:24 Hakeem Oluseyi? Oh, so they're like, they're not getting all the energy.
44:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Saying that if you absorb all the energy from a star at this greater radius.
44:34 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, yeah.
44:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then it would then radiate.
44:36 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, in the infrared.
44:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The infrared.
44:38 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
44:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they're suggesting that they're aliens. So they have a data set of a handful.
44:43 Hakeem Oluseyi? Because there's all these stars that are shrouded in dust that do the exact same thing.
44:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly the rebuttal to that.
44:48 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
44:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That there's stars, when you're in dust, they absorb the energy and it re-rates and it radiates. It makes, it makes the star look very red.
44:54 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
44:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that was the ordinary explanation.
44:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
44:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For those very red stars in that experiment. We gotta wrap.
45:02 Hakeem Oluseyi? Okay, can I say one more thing?
45:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, okay.
45:04 Hakeem Oluseyi? Astrosociety.org.
45:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, Astrosociety.
45:07 Hakeem Oluseyi? Society.org. Come join us. The Society of the Pacific, yes. And it may very well soon be the Astronomical Society of the Planet.
45:15 Paul Mecurio? And you can be a nerd, you can be a geek, you can be an enthusiast.
45:18 Hakeem Oluseyi? You can be a educator, you can be a learner, all of that.
45:21 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
45:21 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, and you know, you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation. We ask to become a member of our community.
45:26 Paul Mecurio? Here we go, it's about money.
45:28 Hakeem Oluseyi? No it's not, man, but you can give more. Under your leadership. Yeah. Will it become the Astronomical Society of the Planet? I think so. Okay. And the other thing is, let me tell you my other thing. As it should have been. My big thing is gonna be, I'm gonna take humanity, and when I look at the history of mathematics. So here's the thing, right? The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math. Right? When people go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major. What do I like? How much math is it? How much money can I make doing it? And what has the least amount of math? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so, what needs to happen is, so when I look at the, I'd look at it historically. And I look at it in four phases. There's the early phase, let's forget that. Here's how I named them. The Library of Alexandria.
46:11 Hakeem Oluseyi? That's where you have, you know, Euclid, you have the Pythagorean theorem, all that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda, or the City of Learning. This is Aryabhatta Brahmagupta, the Gupta Dynasty.
46:25 Paul Mecurio? Mm-hmm.
46:25 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right? Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals. Cause they're really Hindu numerals. That's how they started. And the zero comes out of there too. Exactly, right? And then the third step is the House of Wisdom.
46:39 Paul Mecurio? Mm-hmm.
46:39 Hakeem Oluseyi? Right? This is where you get quadrism, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day. And then you go to Cambridge, alright? So I, right now. Cambridge, Newton. Right now. Cambridge, England. The average human on Earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question, they are, they got the first two steps covered.
46:59 Paul Mecurio? Mm-hmm.
46:59 Hakeem Oluseyi? We need to raise humanity to the House of Wisdom. Which is arithmetic and a little bit of algebra. Exactly.
47:03 Paul Mecurio? Yeah, trigonometry maybe, yeah.
47:05 Hakeem Oluseyi? Here's what I mean, if you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs for three dogs? They'll say, five dogs. What's two galaxies for three galaxies? Five galaxies. What's two x squared y cubed z plus three x squared y cubed z? Get out of my face nerd.
47:15 Paul Mecurio? Yeah.
47:16 Hakeem Oluseyi? It's the same problem, but they don't realize it, cause we have it.
47:18 Paul Mecurio? See, I don't say get out of my first, I whip out my Texas instrument, bang, bang, bang.
47:22 Hakeem Oluseyi? Texas instrument, holy cow.
47:23 Paul Mecurio? There you go.
47:24 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah, he keeps it right next to his palm.
47:25 Paul Mecurio? There you go.
47:27 Hakeem Oluseyi? So anyway, I want to raise a level of humanity.
47:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I have an HP.
47:30 Hakeem Oluseyi? Join us.
47:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? HP 45 in there.
47:32 Hakeem Oluseyi? I got a klepsidra and a star. What is that thing? Sundial?
47:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go.
47:37 Hakeem Oluseyi? Boy, I got a stone circle.
47:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A stone engine. You got a stone engine in your backyard.
47:44 Hakeem Oluseyi? I got a naptaplia.
47:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, we out. We out here.
47:47 Hakeem Oluseyi? Yeah.
47:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Peace. Yeah, Hakeem. Really good to see you again. Thanks.
47:51 Hakeem Oluseyi? Man.
47:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your first time in my office here.
47:52 Hakeem Oluseyi? First time in my office. First time I've touched you in 20 years.
47:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That don't... That sounds a little creepy.
47:58 Hakeem Oluseyi? You're welcome.
48:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Paul Puri with my old-timey friend and colleague, Hakeem. Welcome back. And of course, Paul. Great to be here. All right. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.
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