Thing You Thought You Knew – Red Hot, Blue Hot

How small is a molecule? What is the color of light? How can quantum physics spoil food? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice visualize a molecule’s actual size, break down the different colors of light, and the physics of what’s going on in your fridge.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey StarTalkians, we've got yet another Things You Thought You Knew episode. We're talking about small molecules, the temperature of light, and food gone bad. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Do you have any idea how small molecules are?

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Well, seeing as I can't see them, I'm gonna say I do not.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and even if you did say you knew, I would say you didn't know. I'm just pulling rank here. I'm just saying, molecules, I mean, think about it, our understanding of the existence of atoms did not even come into age until the 20th century. Atoms were still a hypothesis, alright, that there'd be this sort of smallest unit of a material called the atom. By the way, the word atom from the Greek means indivisible, so they imagined that there was some individual, minimal part of a thing, but of course, we break out, bust atoms all the time, so, no, they're not indivisible, but we kept the term.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We kept the term atom to describe the electrons, protons, neutrons, the classical particles you learn about in high school chemistry and maybe physics. So, molecules are, I could give an example, okay, and this is my favorite example of them all. So, I ask you, think about how much water there is in the world, in all the oceans.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you go in the middle of the ocean, it's miles deep, okay? The Titanic was like three and a half mile, I forgot the exact number, multiple miles below Earth's surface, okay? That's a lot of water.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  It's a lot of water.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is the water molecule?

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  H2O.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H2O, okay, so two hydrogen, one oxygen, H2O. So, it's just salts and dissolved salts and fish poop and stuff like that, but it's basically H2O all over the world, alright.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  I love that you threw in the fish poop.

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  I'm so proud of you.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. That's the juvenile part. The eight year olds will want to know that, yes. There's also fish poop.

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the ocean. So where else does it go, right? Um, and just to recite the title of a book they may have grown up on. Everything poops.

• 2:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It shows, it's just a story, it's for little kids.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  I know.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause they poop and they know they poop and they're fascinated by it. And it's just an account that everybody poops and all the fish poop in the ocean. Okay, they don't go onto land to poop.

• 2:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. I, I read that book to my daughter, she thought it was crappy.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  I couldn't help it.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they don't have outhouses on the land, right?

• 3:05Chuck Nice?

  Right, that would be amazing though.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Poop in situ.

• 3:09Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't that be, oh god, you just gave me the best thought in the world where a fish, a fish just shows up at somebody's apartment door or house and just lets one go and goes, how do you like it?

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it into your own house.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause we put all our sewage into theirs.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  We put them into theirs, right? How great would that be? Now you know how it feels.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so I now take a glass and fill it with water.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? A regular cup, a cup, okay? That you might drink water out of.

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fill it up, so stare at that cup and I will tell you that there are more molecules of water in that cup

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans.

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  Holy crap.

• 4:07Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now, the reason why I couched it that way is because that leads to fascinating conclusions. Okay, if this cup of water has more molecules than there are cups of water in all the world, that means when I drink this cup of water.

• 4:27Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it comes out of me eventually, right, through snot, spit, uh, sweat.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pee, whatever, it'll come out of you and it goes back into the environment.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? You have excreted enough molecules to populate every single cup of water that is ever drawn from the oceans. Just gotta give it enough time.

• 4:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this moisture goes back into the environment and the molecules that pass through my kidneys are now working their way around the world. Give it enough time, I can guarantee you that there will be some molecules in that next cup of water you scoop that pass through my kidneys. So I get to make the following statement. Every glass of water you drink contains molecules that pass through the kidneys of Abe Lincoln, of Genghis Khan, of Joan of Arc. Uh, pick your favorite historical character.

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have shared water molecules with that person.

• 5:38Chuck Nice?

  Well, all I can say is that somehow, you've done it Neil. You've done it. You've made it so I am never again going to drink water.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I did, I ran the calculation. It's about a hundred molecules per, per cup of water. That's how, that's how small molecules are. That's, that's my point. That's the whole point of this exercise. Like, I'll give you one more. You ready?

• 6:03Chuck Nice?

  Go for it.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. There are more molecules in a breath of air. Okay, this would be now nitrogen molecules, mostly nitrogen and then oxygen.

• 6:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, N2 and O2, because they're each in a molecular form. A little bit of argon and, and some carbon dioxide, but it's predominantly nitrogen and oxygen. There are more molecules, air molecules, in a breath of air you take than there are breaths of air in all of the Earth's atmosphere.

• 6:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, got you, right.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, it means when you exhale.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Air that comes out of your lungs scatters back into the air and there are plenty of air molecules to scatter into every other breath that will ever be taken in the future history of the world.

• 6:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're not only sharing water molecules with people who've come before you, you're sharing air molecules that you have breathed.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how small they are. This is my point. And, and so, so it's remarkable that we were able to discover them at all, much less the atoms that they comprise. What you do is you look at things that they do that you can see through microscopes, electron microscopes, this sort of thing. And you say the only understanding of this is if the atoms got together and made a molecule. But nobody's holding up a molecule, "Here, take this and plug it in this way." There are some ways to image molecules. We're on the verge of that. There's something called quantum construction. There's a real term for it, but what they're actually doing is,

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  if you get tools small enough, you can take a molecule and put it here and add an atom and build things at a molecular level, the way carpenters or construction workers assemble buildings by putting bricks together.

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's freaky and scary.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little freaky and scary, right? If you have a brick that's a smaller part of a larger hole, you just need tools that can maneuver the bricks.

• 8:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I want to make a molecule that's never been made before, and I make sure that it's a stable molecule, how am I gonna do that? Do I just put all the, and jiggle them? Maybe they won't want to do that on their own. But if I make it happen with quantum tweezers, then I can start making molecules. And you might even be able to make life at that point and not wait for it to happen by chance.

• 8:34Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so a frontier is our ability to manipulate those things that we could never see.

• 8:41Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. That is amazing.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I think of it not as creepy that you're drinking water that passed through someone else's kidneys.

• 8:52Chuck Nice?

  No, I don't ever want to have that thought again. I'm so sorry that you brought it up.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna stop drinking water entirely.

• 8:59Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you, the whole time you've been talking, I've been wanting to drink this right here. I'm not doing it.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not doing it.

• 9:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm not doing it now. It's over. I just can't. I can't drink water anymore. I'm gonna have to go. My whole life now, it's gonna have to be grape Kool-Aid, because guess what? I know that I'm not sharing that with Jesus and Genghis Khan.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't have Kool-Aid.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  I know that Jesus and Genghis Khan did not have Kool-Aid, so now I can only drink grape Kool-Aid. Thank you.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so it's just they're impressively little. Yeah. And here we are in our big macroscopic scale. I mean, think about most of the history of research and investigation and trying to understand the world around us. We were anchored to our five senses as the one and as the only means of measuring and decoding what the world was doing around us. Right. And forget molecules, we didn't even know about bacteria or viruses, right? And so you catch a disease, you find somebody to blame, or you were a sinner. You know, you had other explanations for it, none of which bore any correspondence with an objective reality that we would not then glean until many, many centuries later.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what you're talking about. We still haven't learned that lesson. So, although it's true, people say, yeah, people don't know how to relate to viruses. We still don't know. Oh, man. Oh, that is really cool, though. Yeah, so, so, so there it is. I have nothing more to add to that. Oh, and by the way, this is how you get Avogadro's number. That's, that's, that's the count of molecules. Right. In, in a mole. What's, what's the mole number? Yeah, so you have to look at the element on the periodic table or the, the atomic weight of the molecule itself. Right. And so let's look at carbon. If carbon has, is, it's atomic number is 12.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The natural carbon has six electrons, six protons and six neutrons. So a mole of carbon is 12 grams of carbon. Got you. Okay, a mole of silicon would be 18 grams of silicon. Okay, so, because its atomic number is 18. Right. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't say this right. Carbon's atomic number is six because you're counting protons, but its atomic weight is six plus six, you get 12. Okay. All right, so that's six protons, six neutrons. Right. So my only point here is, so you can ask, if you have a mole of a substance, how many molecules is that?

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so 12 grams, you know, 12 grams is not very much. No, it's not. Okay, it's, it's not. So 12 grams is a third of an ounce of carbon. How many molecules in it? Well, it's Avogadro's number of molecules. And that's 6.022, just call it six, times 10 to the 23rd power. Right. Okay, cool. 23rd. That's insane. That's insane. Yeah. Yes. I mean, that's, I, I mean, that's really not a conceivable number. It's 100 times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's not a conceivable number because like the 23 zeros, like once a

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't say, oh, it's twice as big as this other thing you already know about. Exactly. There is no. There is no other thing. It just doesn't, there's just nothing that, it's crazy. It's crazy. Right, right. This is a problem when you are dealing with extremes and we confront this all the time in astrophysics, right? Um, how do you talk about the biggest explosion in the universe? How do you measure that? Right? You know, usually you measure something because you have other things that are bigger, other things that are smaller, and then you say it was somewhere in there. And then you triangulate on it. And now I understand. But if it's more than anything you've seen before, it becomes a challenge to explain. It's, it's a philosophical

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  issue of communication, right? And, and our own physiology's ability to, to come to terms with things that fall far outside of our life experience.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, as an astrophysicist, uh, know... We have something called color temperature, okay?

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  I am aware of that.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We practically invented that concept, okay?

• 13:57Chuck Nice?

  Well, I like photography, so that's how I know color temperature.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm gonna get there, and you're gonna find out why I have issues, okay?

• 14:05Chuck Nice?

  Uh-oh.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, here's what, here's what happens. If you have an object that is of a given temperature, uh, if it's higher, if it's hotter than absolute zero, it will be radiating some electromagnetic energy.

• 14:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so the colder it is, the longer are the wavelengths of light it emits, radio waves. Uh, the universe is pretty cold, it's only 3 degrees Kelvin, that's emitting microwaves. And the hotter it gets, the more it emits light of higher and higher energy. So let's keep going. Uh, eventually, you can heat this thing up so that some of the energy that comes out, that it emits, comes out in the red part of the spectrum. That object, if you looked at it with your eyes, you'd say it's red. Okay? It'll start doing that at a, you know, 1,000, 1,500 degrees, okay? Keep increasing the temperature, it's not only giving you red light,

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's also giving you light from the rest of the rainbow, from the rest of the optical spectrum. So it'll give you not only red, but also orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. If you do that in roughly equal amounts, the glowing object turns white.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have equal amounts of all the colors of the rainbow. So now, if you keep raising the temperature, this energy output continues to shift, and now it's emitting more blue light than red light. If you're emitting more blue than red through the spectrum, that object will look blue. Okay. Okay, so I'm going from like a couple of thousand degrees to like 6,000 degrees to 10, 12, 15, 20,000 degrees. Is that my, on my stove? I'm getting there, I'm getting there, I'm getting there, so what? Okay. I'm getting there, that's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying, hang with me, hang with me. So, an object goes from what is basically invisible to you, unless you had radio wave eyeballs

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  or microwave eyeballs, to something that's glowing kind of red, and then it goes to amber and then it starts glowing white, and then it'll start glowing blue, and it'll forever more glow blue, but it keeps giving you higher and higher energy. It'll give you X-rays, it can even give you gamma rays, but the part of it that comes through the spectrum is more in the red than in the blue. So, hot things are blue. Medium temperature things are white. Cooler things that are still glowing are red. Okay. So if you have an electric stove, when you first turn it on, it feels warm, but you can't see it in the dark. No. Okay, that's giving you infrared, we can't see infrared.

• 16:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gotta glow so hot that it's giving you a little bit of red. Right. And then you say, "Oh, it's glowing red hot." Right. But a red hot object is the coolest of all hots. Ah. Okay? Damn. Damn, that's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. Sorry, red, dad. Okay? Oh, man. So, when I see red hot this and red hot that, I'm saying, "That ain't so bad." Right. "That ain't so bad." Suh. Okay, so now watch. Okay, so that is what's happening astrophysically, that's what's happening in the laws of physics. But, now bring in the artistic photographer. Okay? Okay.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, in art, if you're gonna paint a picture, a painting, you're gonna create a painting, and you want the scene to feel cool, like it's in the Arctic, what is your predominant color in the painting? White. White, or? Not just white, blue, blue, especially blue, okay? So they say that it's cool. Right. This is, there's a cool color. Right. Okay, and then, when they wanna show something hot, like hell and devils and everything, they use the color red. Alright. Because that's how our emotions, we see ice cubes and it's bluish and anything that got hot enough to hurt us is glowing red hot.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's rare that you'll see something so hot that it's glowing white or glowing blue, non-Earth. Because that stuff gets hot enough when it's red hot. Alright, so our entire life experience is shifted to the cool end of the spectrum with us thinking that red hot is actually hot. As a result, we have the absurd conversation between an astrophysicist and a photographer. It's, um, okay, I need a cooler lamp for this. Right. So what do they do? They get the 6,000 degree bulb instead of the 3,000 degree bulb. This is in the days when you use tungsten, but we still think of those temperatures even

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the LED world, okay? So, when they say, "Make this scene cooler," they mean get a higher temperature lamp.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when they say, "We want to make this scene warmer," it means they wanna put in a lower temperature lamp that glows at like 3,000 degrees or 2,500 degrees. And I'm pissed off at this.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. That's great. If you're gonna, if you're gonna be numerical about whether something is warm or cool, do you have permission to leave the artists behind in this conversation? You scientifically illiterate troglodyte? No, I'm just saying. Damn photographers! I'm just saying, if you wanna say that the scene is cool, blue, and, and, and warm, red, fine, but don't hand it a temperature. Right, don't give it.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  Temperatures.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have the absurd conversation, increase the color temperature of the lamp so that the scene it's illuminating is cooler.

• 20:04Chuck Nice?

  Well, see, you gotta.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hate that.

• 20:07Chuck Nice?

  You have to talk to each other in temperatures, otherwise we wouldn't know what to do. So if if you're ever shooting something and somebody says, all right, yo, let's let's uh, give me that, give me that daylight and daylight is fifty six hundred, right?

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's basically between that and six thousand. And by the way, that is, that is the temperature of the sun.

• 20:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and wait, wait, wait, wait, and that is the temperature of the sun. And so, so when daylight, does that look blue to you? No, I mean, but it's bluer than a than a a a cooler, well, cooler uh, lamp. Cooler than a low temperature lamp.

• 20:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But but if you look at the five thousand six, that's daylight. By the way, it's not yellow. That is not a yellow lamp. You still have people saying the sun is yellow. No, it's not. The sun is freaking white. Okay?

• 20:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, I interrupted you.

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  No, you didn't. I mean, that's that you basically, that's what it is. But it's really like the only reference that photographers have. But what you're saying is photographers need to come up with a new reference um, because what they're saying is scientifically wrong. It it the the numbers are.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's it's artistically sensible, but then don't put numbers on it. Because with these numbers mean things. If you're gonna put a ten thousand degree lamp, that's a hot lamp and that's a very blue lamp. Blue is hot in the universe.

• 21:32Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense. I mean, now.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we have blue stars, they're twenty, thirty thousand fricking degrees. We have red stars, they're called red giants, they're hovering around a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand degrees, barely glowing. So I'm I'm.

• 21:47Chuck Nice?

  I like what you're saying.

• 21:51Chuck Nice?

  I just like the fact that I'm I'm changing red hot to white hot from now on.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, some people know that white hot is hotter than red hot.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just not it's just not common in society.

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  Blue hot is my newest thing. I'm going blue hot all the time. You know what I mean? Don't you know what? All the way with a blue hot poker. That's what I want for you.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, the problem is it's melted by then. You mean a fireplace poker? That's a problem.

• 22:19Chuck Nice?

  That's right. You're right. Because it's, oh, yeah, that would melt. Damn.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You start melting stuff. That's a that's a problem. That's why we have very little experience with white white hot and blue hot. But red hot, you can get almost anything to red hot temperatures and.

• 22:33Chuck Nice?

  You don't see a lot of white hot, though.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you don't.

• 22:35Chuck Nice?

  You know, my dad was a printer and so in printing, he owned a printing company. And the coolest thing in the plant was how you make photo plates. So the plate is treated with a chemical that when exposed to this super white hot light. The image is burned onto the plate and it's called burning a plate, right? And then that image is the only thing on the plate now that will transfer ink. And that's how you transfer an image. But they used, I forget the name of these little tubes that came together and they and I forget.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's an arc lamp.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:17Chuck Nice?

  And the light in between.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very high temperature arc between there. That's correct.

• 23:22Chuck Nice?

  And it was the coolest thing in the world and you weren't allowed to look at it because it would make you blind.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because it's it's it's high in ultraviolet light. It's very high energy light.

• 23:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what they do is they have these carbon rods, basically, and you you attempt to send current through it. But it has to gap across an air gap and depending on what your separation was and how big your current was, you could determine how what the threshold was before you jumped the arc.

• 23:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there there it was.

• 23:49Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. And the whole thing was just those two tubes and the light in between. And you had to look at it with like the same way you look at, I forget the glass.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welder's goggles, yeah.

• 23:59Chuck Nice?

  Welder's guy. You got to look at it with that. Same thing you look at a a a an eclipse with.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 24:05Chuck Nice?

  And it was it was the coolest thing in the world, but it was white hot.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and, and hot, very clearly hotter than anything red hot, right? That's what that is. So I, so these are my issues that I'm bringing to you, Chuck. I don't have a solution for them. I'm just highlighting them. And, and by the way, when I walk up to a water cooler and, and one, and the, the, the two spigots are color-coded.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One is red and, and I say, okay, I'm no longer in my lab. I'm in the real world and so blue is not hotter than red. They think blue is cold. So that's my, I, I waste, I can't tell you how much of my life I've wasted staring at twin spigots on a water cooler, figuring out which one is the cold water.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  So what we should do is maybe the red is hot. And then maybe pink for like the cooler blue. For the cooler one, like you want the water.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep working on that, Chuck. I don't know about that. Keep working.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, gray, gray. No, nobody wants to drink gray water, that's for sure.

• 25:07Chuck Nice?

  I'm trying to think of a color now.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all I wanted to do on this explainer.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  That's a really cool, but see now you got me mad at the fact that all these things exist in life that tell us that blue is cooler than red. Cause now that you said that, it's everywhere.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even the photographers know it's hotter because they ask for a higher temperature.

• 25:25Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's, that's the insidiousness of it all.

• 25:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, cool.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow.

• 25:30Chuck Nice?

  I know what we should do. Here's the solution. Next time you see a photographer, people, just punch him.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did that work for you so far? Is that really? Is that how you, you did that to your boss a few times? How far that gets you?

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  No, exactly.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did we find you on the street before you had this game? I punched my boss one too many times.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to talk about when food goes bad.

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay, see, already you got me. I love it. When food goes bad, because something I'm very well aware of, because I come from a childhood where mom and grandmom almost refused to almost throw away, I mean, to refuse to throw away-

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't want to waste food.

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

  Never.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if the food would kill you, they wouldn't throw away the food.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  I'm just like, "Mom, this thing is moving. What are you talking about?" You know? "Well, you put that in the pan, it'll be just fine." "That ain't nothing but a little mold."

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Firing that right back up.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  "Cut that mold off of there, and that's just fine."

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are people who like grew up in the depression, you know, and where hunger was a thing.

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they don't want them young whippersnappers just throwing away food.

• 27:06Chuck Nice?

  It's like, "How dare you waste food."

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of my favorite comics was Gary Larson. And the subtitle was, "When the potato salad goes bad, and you go inside the refrigerator, and the potato salad's got a gun and is holding it up to the lettuce."

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like mugging other foods.

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  When it goes bad, right.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he chose the right thing, the potato salad, right? Because that's the one you gotta watch out for.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, why am I, an astrophysicist, talking about that? I'll tell you why. Because there's the normal kind of way food goes bad, all right? You leave it in there too long, and something grows on it, all right? Something else wants to eat the food. And it's some kind of microbe, some bacteria, or a combination of bacteria, that start eating the food. And there could be mold that's enjoying the food that you were gonna eat. All right, now- First of all, there's this bacteria on the food all the time. It's just a matter of how much is there, alright? And you have a digestive tract. And depending on what you ate,

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the food will take a certain amount of time to go from your mouth to come out the other side or to get metabolized. Alright, so if you ingest bacteria on your food that would otherwise be bad for you, that bacteria begins to multiply, alright? It's multiplying at some rate in the refrigerator. But when it warms up to your body temperature, because you've just eaten it, it'll duplicate faster, okay? So there it is, duplicate. Now it's in your throat, it's in your stomach, it's duplicating faster. It's in your, your small intestine, your large intestine. If it gets out before it takes over, then you don't even think anything of it. No, it's no problem. It's no problem. So, but there are these thresholds where if you ingest a certain amount, the doubling time of that bacteria

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  will then manifest itself while it's still in your digestive tract. And then you end up with nausea, you know, diarrhea, whatever. Okay, so that's sort of normal food poisoning, alright? Normal, and we, also, we have, we've developed a, a means to detect by the smell when something goes bad. Okay, evolutionarily, if you casually ingested things that would make you sick and possibly die, if you enjoyed the smell of rotting food, that's a branch, that is a genetic branch that's headed for extinction. Because, right? Because you and all your descendants who like the smell of rotting food that would kill you, you would end up with none of you

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to then propagate this feature about yourself. Alright, so we Unless you're a vulture. Unless you're a vulture, right, but they, they're cool, they got But they're cool with it. Depending on, you know, how digestive your gastric juices are from one species to another. For humans, we know what those limits are. You smell it, ooh, that's bad, and you throw it away, except for your mom. That's right. Alright, so that's the normal kind of when food goes bad, alright? But suppose you got rid of all the microbes? And then you sort of vacuum sealed it? Now then, no microbes. Anyway, and you put it in a really cold temperature because

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  all as far as we have been able to measure, chemical and biological processes double their rate every 10 degrees Celsius.

• 30:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's why cooling things make them last longer.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why, so you can do this.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  So does it mean it stops at zero?

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would have to stop, yes.

• 30:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At zero. Yes, there's nothing hap- nothing.

• 30:44Chuck Nice?

  Nothing happens at zero.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At absolute zero.

• 30:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no, I don't mean absolute zero. I mean, if you just start, you say every 10 degrees Celsius. Oh, okay, yeah, so you, it would stop at absolute zero.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At absolute zero. Oh, you think zero just on the, on the.

• 30:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was thinking on the reg, on our scale.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's nothing special about that zero.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  There's not.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The only special zero is on the Kelvin absolute scale. And we did a whole explainer video on that.

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got a link, we put a link in there somewhere. Okay?

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  That's right, that's right.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so the, every 10 degrees, it's half. So you can just keep halving all the way down. Okay, so you can do the experiment if you want it, you know, have, uh, get milk and bring it to room temperature. Okay, then get milk, put it at, um, in the refrigerator temperature. And they get milk, put it like right at near freezing and then get milk and just freeze it. And just sit back and just watch what happens. All right, the microbes that are already in it are doing their thing. And you can look at the temperature differences and you can calculate this up. And basically the milk might last a day or two. If, oh, by the way, what does ultra pasteurized mean? Ultra pasteurized? They, they took out even more microbes than were there in the normal pasteurized.

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  Now, now with twice as little.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twice as little. That's right. I would say half as much, but you can say twice as little.

• 31:58Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fine. Um, so when you do that, the pasteurized milk, look at the expiration date on the ultra pasteurized milk versus the regular pasteurized milk. It's way longer in the future. Because there's so few microbes there, they're slowly coming along and they're doubling time. They still have a doubling time, all right, but they started out with fewer. So they're not going to get their, this milk smells nasty threshold until much later. Okay, so that's the biological when food goes bad. But I want to take this up a notch. Are you ready? Okay. Go ahead. Let us get rid of all microbes. Let us irradiate the food. Alright. So now there's nothing living on it at all. Now, we don't want anything to come to it after the fact.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, let's vacuum seal it. Now, okay, so now, nothing's getting to it? Nothing's on it? Okay, so now, I have a slab of meat vacuum sealed. Okay? Now, I don't have to refrigerate it. Because there's no microbes that I don't, I can put out on the counter. I can put it up in the cabinet. Okay? You can put it there for years. And years. And years. And you know why I know about this and think about it? Because when you're gonna store food on a long space mission, you don't wanna carry freezers with you and refrigerators. You want food that can just stay. You want food that could just survive on the shelf. That could just be. Be. You need food that just is.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That food that is. Right, you need your steak to be a Twinkie.

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm, I'm eating Twinkie steak. Twinkies from eight years ago taste just the same as if you bought them yesterday. Right. My steak is good for 20 years. Alright, so, but here's what happens. Okay? Right. And this is where quantum physics comes in. So you didn't see that coming, did you? I did not. You did not see that coming, alright. You, you totally had me. Alright, so molecules exist in a state of existence. Alright, all molecules do. And you can ask yourself, is the molecule happy in that state of existence? Is it happy? Uh, in other words, is there a lower state of energy

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that this molecule can occupy? Because if there is, it's gonna wanna go there. Is that state of energy, I'm such a big molecule, let me break into two. Now I have less energy than before because molecules don't like remaining in higher states of energy. And those two molecules can break and then they settle into a lower and lower form of energy. That's how the molecule wants to exist.

• 34:46Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 34:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so how does it get access to that lower form of energy? If you made the molecule that's happy here, how does it decide one day to not be happy?

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  It has me as a father.

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it is, it is, so think of it, it's in a well. But there's a lower well off to the side. How do you get to that well? You have to go up a little hill before you go down to that lower well. So this molecule has to find a way to get over that hill and it'll immediately go to a lower energy state. If there's nothing to stick it over that hill, it would last forever. But quantum physics said all these molecules and particles are also waves. And the wave has an existence on the other side of that hill.

• 35:32Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a chance that this particle can disappear from this state and reappear on the other side of that hill in a state where it slides down to a lower, a lower energy level. Quantum physics takes it there. It's called tunneling, okay? So these bonds that are formed chemically, they're not forever. If there's another bond it could think about that has a lower energy. By the way, when it has lower energy, it gives off energy. So, so this, so your food has complex molecules in it. There are these protein fibers and it's, it's complex, right?

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, given enough time, quantum physics degrades the texture of the food. So, your meat will still be meat in five years, but you'll start noticing, start taking the mealie.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's that chewy?

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  What is happening?

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's happening to that?

• 36:32Chuck Nice?

  Why does my meat now taste like soylent green?

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soylent green. Because it is.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, what happened to Mac the astronaut? Where was he? Well, he died.

• 36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is this suit still here?

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so all I'm saying is food can go bad biologically and food can go bad chemically. Wow. Now, you know, the lowest energy state of anything? Something at absolute zero. Uh, well, yes, that's in by temperature, but in terms of configuration, the lowest energy state, one of the lowest energy states you can occupy is crystal. Oh. Crystal form. So that's why it's weird that there's whole, there's a whole cult around crystals. Crystals, like they said, I get so much energy from my crystal. Crystals have the lowest energy of that molecule. That's. So it's just weird to knowing physics and chemistry to see this unfold. That's funny.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eyes in this, the 21st century. But anyhow, when you go to buy salt, are you checking the freshness date on the salt?

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you ever done this? Are you kidding me? I actually have some Jesus salt in my cupboard.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so plus, where do you get salt? It gets mined from places that have been there for millions, millions of years. Okay. Do you salt that's down below the ground? Right. That's just salt. It's been there, hadn't been touched. That's right. Okay. It didn't become something else. It is salt. It has been salt. So crystal and things, wait, diamonds are forever diamond is crystal. Okay. Um, now I learned that there's another state of carbon that's a slightly lower energy than diamond. So diamonds are not actually forever, but they're really, really long-lived. Okay. And so another crystals, sugar. Okay. By the way, if sugar goes bad, it's not because something happened to the crystal because you put it next to the barbecue pit or something and it took on the smells. Right. Right. Or something else was near it.

• 38:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or it absorbed water somehow. Yeah, exactly. You didn't have it in a place that was dry enough. Then the other things are what then messes with it, but the sugar crystal itself is happy. So yes, I think salt does have dates on it, but that's just that you can use it and buy the next one. Right. Better put some more salt on that, man. It's about to go bad.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what happened with the Tabasco sauce? I don't think this is apocryphal, I think this is real. You know what happened? You know Tabasco sauce, a little bit?

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I love Tabasco sauce, you kidding me?

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They figured out how to double your consumption of Tabasco sauce.

• 39:13Chuck Nice?

  How's that?

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone in the company suggested that they make the hole twice as big.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Brilliant.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you still think you're not using much? You're using twice as much as you used to?

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  And guess what? That makes perfect sense.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they just doubled the sales and that person got a raise.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anyhow, so I just want to say that when food goes bad, it can go bad by this other way that we don't think about much, but for very long-term storage, like in the apocalyptic earth, this sort of thing. That's how you would need to think about that and want to know about. But that'd be true for any food stuffs at all. So you have to watch out, you can't, you can't really stop the quantum phenomenon from going on. So, so it would still taste like steak, but the texture tends to be one of the things that goes first.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  So the moral of this story is during the nuclear apocalypse, you better make sure that you have some salt.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, salt itself is a preservative of other foods.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was gonna say, because your meat's gonna taste like crap.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  And your salt's the only thing that's gonna last, so.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there you have it Chuck, so that was just a quick one.

• 40:26Chuck Nice?

  Nah, that was a good one, I liked that. The chemical decomposition of

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Molecules.

• 40:30Chuck Nice?

  Food, molecules.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any molecules in general, that's right.

• 40:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, super cool, man.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you have it, alright. This has been another StarTalk explainer video. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck, always good to have you.

• 40:41Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, keep looking up.