Time and The Universe, with Charles Liu

Can time itself die? Astrophysicist Charles Liu is back in the hosting hot seat alongside comic co-host Chuck Nice to explore black holes, big bangs, our understanding of time and how it relates to the universe.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Charles Liu?

  Welcome to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm your All-Star host, Charles Liu. Feel free to call me Chuck. I'm a professor of astrophysics at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. And I am very excited to be here because tonight I have with me my comedic co-host, Chuck Nice.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  Hey, hey. It's Chuck and Chuck. You know it.

• 0:39Charles Liu?

  The Chucks. It's great to see you, Chuck.

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Hey Chuck, it's always good to see you, man.

• 0:43Charles Liu?

  And I am...

• 0:44Chuck Nice?

  Always. I know that I'm gonna have a good time. I'm gonna learn something. I'm gonna be fascinated. Every time I see your face sitting behind the microphone, I know we're in for a good show.

• 0:56Charles Liu?

  Oh, you're very sweet. But you know what? I gotta tell you, not only are you gonna be fascinated today, you're also going to be fascinating because you are also our special guest in the studio today.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  Uh-oh. What happened there?

• 1:10Charles Liu?

  Welcome, Chuck Nice, to our wonderful show here. And thank you for being here and talking with us about all the cool things that you do and who you are and all the neat things, so...

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, thank you for having me. I didn't know this was happening. This is totally... Nobody ever wants to know about me.

• 1:25Charles Liu?

  Well, I disagree because I do wanna know about you.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 1:29Charles Liu?

  Yes, absolutely. You are, I guess, perhaps amongst all comedians, the representative geek median. You're the geek median.

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  Geek median. I love that, by the way.

• 1:41Charles Liu?

  You are the man when it comes to representing the humor that comes out of geekdom. And so, let's just start right away.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 1:50Charles Liu?

  Today's topic is time.

• 1:52Chuck Nice?

  Time.

• 1:53Charles Liu?

  We are talking about time in all of its aspects. Time cosmologically, time as it exists...

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  As dimension?

• 1:59Charles Liu?

  Yes. And the idea of what's gonna happen to us, present, past, and future. And so, I'm gonna start by asking you, Chuck, what is your take on time? How has time affected your life, your career, your childhood, your adulthood? You know, things like that. Give me a sense of... Pick a thing that you feel like most exemplifies your interaction with time.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  So my interaction with time, to be honest, would be that mostly philosophical.

• 2:27Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Believe it or not, it's mostly philosophical. And I I I found the physics representation of time.

• 2:40Chuck Nice?

  Not to not, you know, of course, in high school, when you learn about relativity and all that, right? But I I, you know, it was just like, okay, cool. Now we did that, now I gotta move on. Like, it was like that, you know? And now I'm fascinated by it. I'm just fascinated by it. But for most of my lifetime has been a philosophical perspective in in that. It can be a friend, an enemy. It marks the passing of your life mostly.

• 3:09Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Chuck Nice?

  And that my father used to say, there is no such thing as time, there is only life.

• 3:16Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 3:17Chuck Nice?

  And.

• 3:17Charles Liu?

  Really interesting.

• 3:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and so, you know, the the more you make of your life, the better your relationship with time. And and and the less you make of your life, the more time seems daunting.

• 3:33Charles Liu?

  Yeah, seems like an obstacle, right?

• 3:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:35Charles Liu?

  Because time is always moving.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:37Charles Liu?

  And how you perceive it is very different from sort of the cosmic universal clock. But at the same time, if you are able to live a life that is taking advantage of all the time or that's available to you, then you really feel like you have all the time in the world, don't you?

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, and you know, it's funny that that happens that way. And so like, you know, a lot of my life is has been spent time, you know, pretty much measuring whether or not I'm which side of that equation am I? Like, what?

• 4:06Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Chuck Nice?

  Am I winning at this game or? You know, so and and I think that that's pretty common. I think a lot of people actually.

• 4:12Charles Liu?

  I think that's absolutely right, yeah.

• 4:13Chuck Nice?

  Now, now with respect to, you know, science. I think the most fascinating aspect of time, aside from the the the dimensional.

• 4:23Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  Aspects of time, okay? Aside from that, is really Einstein's thought experiments.

• 4:31Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 4:32Chuck Nice?

  And the. Slowing, the physical slowing of time. That to me is just so rich.

• 4:44Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  Uh, to think that if we could actually travel or approach the speed of light, okay? And take a trip and then come back and here I am, still thirty-two years old.

• 4:58Charles Liu?

  No, you're not a day over twenty-nine Chuck, no way.

• 5:01Chuck Nice?

  And, and everybody else is dead, you know what I mean?

• 5:04Charles Liu?

  Well, at least a hundred and fifty.

• 5:06Chuck Nice?

  Like, that to me, that's a, that's because, that is represented in the physical realm.

• 5:12Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 5:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that actual thought experiment, if it played out, would be represented in the physical realm. And so, you know, mathematically, you're actually, you found the fountain of youth.

• 5:22Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 5:22Chuck Nice?

  Mathematically, you found the fountain of youth. I, like, when I think about that, I get really excited for some reason. It really blows my mind. And at the same ti- at the same time, excuse me, simultaneously, as you try to think about the physical slowing of time, my brain cannot do that.

• 5:43Charles Liu?

  Oh, you can. And let me tell you why you can, because we are introducing a new segment here on StarTalk All Stars.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 5:49Charles Liu?

  And we will use this segment to illustrate a wide variety of our more complicated concepts of time.

• 5:56Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 5:56Charles Liu?

  The segment is called All-Star Super Silly Space Songs.

• 6:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, right on.

• 6:03Charles Liu?

  Okay, and what we're gonna do is-

• 6:04Chuck Nice?

  Is it from K-Tell?

• 6:06Charles Liu?

  I could ask them if they were interested.

• 6:08Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 6:08Charles Liu?

  Put it with Teen Rock sixty-seven or something, right? Or Kids Bop.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  K-Tell's Kids Bop and All-Star Super Silly Science Songs. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:18Charles Liu?

  That's great. So yes, our first, uh, Super Silly Science Song describes what you were talking about, the dimensional aspect of time.

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 6:25Charles Liu?

  You see, time, as Albert Einstein explained it in his theory of relativity, is a dimension.

• 6:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:32Charles Liu?

  It's like space, uh, time dimensions, like length, width, and height, but it has a unique- Thing compared to those other dimensions in that it only moves forward. Right. We can't move backwards in time. We can move forward or backward in length or left or right in width or up or down in height, but we cannot go forward and backward in time if we are moving through the universe since the beginning of time, which is the Big Bang. Right. And so all of that together, if you take length, width, height and time, they come together in this fabric which we live in called spacetime. And that was what Einstein's tremendous breakthrough was in his general theory of relativity. That we can imagine space and time being knit together, being affected

• 7:15Charles Liu?

  by matter and by densities and things like that. So we can twist and bend and shape, kind of like an ill-fitting swimsuit made of spandex on the beach. Well, first of all, let me just tell you, that sounds so sexy.

• 7:32Charles Liu?

  Ill-fitting spandex speedos. Yeah. I believe I've been on that European beach. Oh, my gosh. Don't, don't make me have to unsee what I just saw in my mind. Exactly. But, yes, the super silly science song goes something like this. Go ahead. And, and here it is. It, it, we thank, by the way, the Rolling Stones for part of this wonderful music, this super silly space song. Well, already I think I know where you're going. Please feel free to join in if you feel like, okay? It goes like this. It starts like this. Time is a dimension. Yes, it is. Time is a dimension. Yes, it is. Okay.

• 8:16Charles Liu?

  Time, length, width and height. They all come together. Making spacetime. Making spacetime. Making spacetime. Yes, indeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time, time, time is a dimension. Yes, it is. Well done. That is the first. There you go. Super silly space song of the show. Super silly space songs. Dimension. I, you know, this is, here's the great thing. So for those of you listening, if you have not seen the StarTalk television show, Chuck is a frequent scientist guest. And inevitably.

• 9:03Chuck Nice?

  We break out into song, so.

• 9:06Charles Liu?

  That's how it should be, right?

• 9:07Chuck Nice?

  It is!

• 9:07Charles Liu?

  I mean, why does science and song not work together? Song has to do with psychology, it has to do with the voice, physics, chemistry of everything. And it's a very, very nice way for us to remember and learn interesting concepts.

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 9:22Charles Liu?

  So that's how we go with that.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Nicely done.

• 9:24Charles Liu?

  No, thank you very much. Now, I wanted to go right to cosmic queries.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:31Charles Liu?

  Because we have the opportunity today to do a lot of cosmic queries. And they've been building up, and thank you all of you who have been making these questions available for us, let's go right to it.

• 9:42Chuck Nice?

  All right, you little curious people. Uh, this is John Callahan from Patreon, and he says this. "Is the name Big Bang a misnomer? From what I recall, we don't actually have any evidence that the Big Bang started with an explosion like a supernova or a black hole merger. All we know is that the universe began expanding since the beginning from a very small point, expanding faster during the inflationary period."

• 10:14Charles Liu?

  Yes, that is an excellent question.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  That's a great.

• 10:16Charles Liu?

  Thank you for that.

• 10:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Charles Liu?

  And the answer is, sort of. The Big Bang is a misnomer if you think of an explosion as a thing that happens in space, okay? So let's say you have a firework shell. It goes up in space and it explodes.

• 10:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:33Charles Liu?

  And therefore you have things going outward from its location out into space.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:37Charles Liu?

  Right? In that sense, the Big Bang is not such a thing, because as you say correctly, it is the expansion of spacetime. It is literally the beginning of time ticking in the universe.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:50Charles Liu?

  So if we think, though, more expansively of what an explosion is, instead of just our conception in a typical daily way of an explosion being some sort of chemical reaction.

• 11:03Chuck Nice?

  TNT, dynamite type of deal.

• 11:05Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Then you can certainly consider an explosion of space itself from a very tiny, possibly infinitely small point.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:15Charles Liu?

  And then in that case, you can think of the Big Bang as a bang of... Whatever, space and time, into or just beginning to exist. It doesn't have to go into somewhere. And that mathematically is still a challenge. You know, we, what is beyond our universe or what is the Big Bang? But you are completely correct, and I want to thank you for making that point because indeed,

• 11:40Charles Liu?

  the Big Bang is an expansion of spacetime, which has changed speed a few times. Yes. So that's really, really cool. And in fact, I, you know what? Chuck, do you like Big Bang? Do you like, do you like the idea of Big Bang? I do, indeed. I like Big Bang. Yeah, I cannot lie. I like Big Bang and I cannot lie. Oh my, oh, you know what? Uh huh. Yeah, you are hearing the first line of our next all-star, super silly space song. Oh, my God. Is it, I like Big Bang and I cannot lie? I like Big Bang, no, I cannot lie. That's correct. And with thanks to Sir Mix-a-Lot and all that kind of thing. The lyrics here. I can't wait to hear this.

• 12:25Charles Liu?

  No, they, they have this idea where space starts very small. Yes. And then space. Rapidly expands. Like this Big Bang, this boom, shall we say? And then there's suddenly room in space, whereas there didn't used to be, right? Right. And then from that, time starts ticking. And the Big Bang is the moment that we start, basically time equals zero. Okay, so time starts moving forward. Goes from the past toward the present and into the future. So spacetime is now very big. The universe expands. And so we just shake from the excitement of knowing that I like Big Bang. So Chuck, if you'd be willing to help me with this, I will start this song and. Go ahead. Yes, but it, you know, this is the abbreviated version.

• 13:10Charles Liu?

  There's a lot more, but we'll just keep it short. So be ready, okay? All right, I'm ready. And any, any of you fellows out there who are listening, you know, you should be ready too. Okay. All right, here we go, here we go. You gotta help me. Go ahead. One, two.

• 13:23Charles Liu?

  I like Big Bang, no I cannot lie. Astronomers cannot deny. The universe starts as an itty bitty thing, then space goes boom and then there's room and time starts moving forward to the present it moves toward. Fellas.

• 13:36Chuck Nice?

  Fellas.

• 13:36Charles Liu?

  Fellas.

• 13:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Charles Liu?

  Does the universe expand?

• 13:38Chuck Nice?

  Hell yeah.

• 13:39Charles Liu?

  So shake it.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  Shake it.

• 13:40Charles Liu?

  Shake it.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  Shake it.

• 13:41Charles Liu?

  Spacetime's really big, baby got bang.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 13:45Charles Liu?

  Dude, that's crazy.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 13:47Charles Liu?

  But that is the Big Bang.

• 13:49Chuck Nice?

  By the way.

• 13:50Charles Liu?

  That is fundamentally what it is, yes.

• 13:51Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I am really impressed that your lyrics were a spot on.

• 13:58Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  Explanation. You know what I mean? You didn't sacrifice anything for creative license. You took no creative license. You actually stuck to the astrophysics the entire way through.

• 14:09Charles Liu?

  Look, there's two points that I want to make on that. Number one, there is no reason why strict science, correct science, can't be expressed artistically. There's no need. When you say artistic licenses suggests that I have to stray from what is known scientifically and I don't because it's there.

• 14:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:27Charles Liu?

  So that's great. So thank you for that. But no, it's completely okay. And the second thing I would say to that is that I cannot take credit for these lyrics. Um, in fact, I don't want to take credit for any of these lyrics. I just want to say that a colleague of mine, uh, has helped in every instance.

• 14:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 14:42Charles Liu?

  In creating these, so.

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic.

• 14:44Charles Liu?

  Can I take credit on my own? It's probably not a good idea for me to do that. But all of my colleagues, everyone who appreciates science has been involved with it. And so I really, really thank everyone for helping me.

• 14:54Chuck Nice?

  I appreciate your humility.

• 14:56Charles Liu?

  Another cosmic query, sir.

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Um, let's see. Paul Foster says, if we could find the point in space at which the Big Bang originated and could also go there, what do you think we would find or learn about the ever-expanding space?

• 15:12Charles Liu?

  Ah, an excellent question, Paul. Here's the answer. You are right now at the point where the universe began to expand.

• 15:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:22Charles Liu?

  Think about it this way. The whole universe did not exist as a spatial entity until the Big Bang happened.

• 15:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:30Charles Liu?

  Since then, all of space and time has been created.

• 15:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:34Charles Liu?

  What that means is that we are all in the Big Bang.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  In it.

• 15:38Charles Liu?

  We are expanding at this moment. And Chuck, you can, you know, you know this as well as I do. You are at the center of your own observable universe.

• 15:45Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 15:45Charles Liu?

  I am at the center of my own observable universe. We are all at the center of the universe and your mother knew that.

• 15:51Chuck Nice?

  She certainly did.

• 15:53Charles Liu?

  My mother knew that I was in the center of the universe, and you know what? They were both correct.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  They were both correct.

• 15:57Charles Liu?

  Which is amazing. Now Chuck, let me ask you this. When you were younger, at an earlier time in your life, at what time in your life would you say that you felt or realized that comedy was your way of moving forward, that the showmanship and so on? And that you, well, we can talk later about the time you decided to bring science into all this as well.

• 16:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, uh, seven, eight, seven. I was eight, seven, and I had to give a public speaking in front of a large assembly. And I was wearing a clip-on bowtie.

• 16:30Charles Liu?

  I love it.

• 16:30Chuck Nice?

  And it fell off.

• 16:31Charles Liu?

  No.

• 16:32Chuck Nice?

  And everybody laughed. And so instead of, you know, I continued to do the thing, but I stopped and picked. Now, what you're supposed to do is just leave it off and keep your speech going.

• 16:41Charles Liu?

  Yep.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  I didn't know that.

• 16:42Charles Liu?

  Uh huh.

• 16:42Chuck Nice?

  So I bent down, I picked it up, I put it back on, I kept talking, and it fell off. And I did that like eight more times. And what I, and then I was like, I like the fact that they're laughing more than I liked the, the speech part. And it didn't bother me. It didn't bother me that I was speaking in front of this big, large group of people and that it wasn't going well. I just liked the fact that they were laughing. And that was it. That was, I, I knew at that point that something was there.

• 17:05Charles Liu?

  What a terrific story.

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Charles Liu?

  So really, I mean, it's a lesson to us all who have ever felt a little bit concerned or worried about being embarrassed, doing something that didn't happen. Go with the flow.

• 17:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Charles Liu?

  Go with the laugh. Make it part of who you are.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:18Charles Liu?

  And own it.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was too stupid to be embarrassed.

• 17:21Charles Liu?

  Or too smart, shall we say?

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 17:23Charles Liu?

  Because now you have been cosmically indoctrinated.

• 17:26Chuck Nice?

  This is true.

• 17:26Charles Liu?

  And we very much appreciate that.

• 17:54Charles Liu?

  We want to talk a little bit about time. We've talked a little bit about already the beginning of time. The Big Bang and how time starts going forward.

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:02Charles Liu?

  And now we want to talk about how things evolve, right? The universe. I want to talk about some of the stages of things that happen when time starts, right? After time begins, the universe is very hot.

• 18:15Chuck Nice?

  Hot.

• 18:15Charles Liu?

  It's very dense, but then it expands.

• 18:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:19Charles Liu?

  And then it starts to cool down because the same amount of energy, a relatively finite, we think, although we're not positively sure, amount of energy is being spread out over a larger and larger area.

• 18:30Chuck Nice?

  So with that, here's what I want to ask you.

• 18:31Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 18:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay? So you have this infinitely dense, tiny little spot. Boom, it starts to expand lots of energy, just incredible amount of energy.

• 18:42Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 18:42Chuck Nice?

  That energy is spread over, you know, everything that we are now. Why is it then that it was not centralized as opposed to most of space being empty? Okay? And then why is it that you have pockets of it, like star-forming nurseries?

• 19:03Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  And things of that nature?

• 19:04Charles Liu?

  Great question. This is what happened, okay? You have to realize, at least based on our understanding, that when the Big Bang happened, space itself expanded. And whatever was in the universe at that time actually was increased in energy at some future time.

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 19:25Charles Liu?

  In other words, it hasn't happened for a very long time, but we think that there was an influx.

• 19:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:30Charles Liu?

  If you just count the amount of mass or energy or density that was in the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, it's not enough to fill the universe as it exists today. So something happened, and we think it might have to do with this thing called inflation or spontaneous symmetry breaking just after the Big Bang, like a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 19:52Charles Liu?

  That infused the universe with a really, really large amount of energy.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:58Charles Liu?

  And that infusion caused the expansion of the universe to be so rapid for a tiny fraction of a second that that universe, that information was distributed all throughout the universe, almost perfectly uniformly. So now, there was enough energy in the universe then for gravity to start to take effect and produce collections of areas that were denser than others. So now here is the some, one of the mysteries involved.

• 20:28Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say that, that you've actually introduced a mystery.

• 20:31Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Chuck Nice?

  But go ahead.

• 20:32Charles Liu?

  Yeah, you have a circumstance now where we know that there is almost perfect uniformity.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:37Charles Liu?

  But there is a little tiny itty bit of non-uniformity.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:41Charles Liu?

  Like so small that if, say, we had a sheet of glass, a perfect sheet of glass, the size of the United States.

• 20:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:50Charles Liu?

  The imperfections from that perfect sheet would be the size of grains of sand or pebbles across this multi-hundred-million, you know, multi-million square mile area. So from there, how did those little tiny kernels of imperfection turn into the planets and the stars and the galaxies, which are very highly concentrated? And the answer appears to be gravity.

• 21:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:15Charles Liu?

  What happens is that as you pull these things together, they, gravity doesn't really pull. I mean, gravity does, so for example, black holes don't suck you in.

• 21:26Chuck Nice?

  They don't suck you in, right.

• 21:27Charles Liu?

  But black holes, or any other objects in the universe that have mass, temporarily dimple the spacetime around it, causing a little bit of additional stuff to fall into that dimple. And then the dimple gets larger as more and more stuff falls into it.

• 21:42Chuck Nice?

  But you'd have to be in the dimple.

• 21:45Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 21:45Chuck Nice?

  In order to fall into it.

• 21:47Charles Liu?

  That's correct.

• 21:47Chuck Nice?

  You wouldn't be, if you're outside of the dimple, you just remain outside of the dimple.

• 21:52Charles Liu?

  That's right. So if you don't fall into, for example, a black hole.

• 21:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:57Charles Liu?

  Then you don't.

• 21:58Chuck Nice?

  You're good.

• 21:59Charles Liu?

  You're fine. As long as you stay away, far enough away.

• 22:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:02Charles Liu?

  It won't suck you in like a Roomba or something like that, right?

• 22:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:05Charles Liu?

  But.

• 22:05Chuck Nice?

  Or my ex-girlfriend.

• 22:06Charles Liu?

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 22:08Chuck Nice?

  Terrible relationship.

• 22:08Charles Liu?

  No, I am so sorry.

• 22:10Chuck Nice?

  I should have just, I should have just, I should have just circled her for years and never gone there, sucked me in. That's okay now, I'm happily married for 21 years and everything worked out fine.

• 22:19Charles Liu?

  That's awesome.

• 22:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Let me ask you about that, you know? When your, your family sees you in both the role of a science communicator

• 22:30Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 22:31Charles Liu?

  and as a comedian. Um, how do they reconcile that, say, with the family? So, for example, do your kids, like, tell, tell people? Yeah, my dad's a comedian that, that tells people that science is cool.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  Um, uh, my, my son said that he told somebody, uh, yeah, my dad, uh, does science and comedy, which kind of means we shouldn't be eating, but somehow we still are.

• 23:01Charles Liu?

  No, uh, I, I, you know, I think you're on the vanguard of a societal shift.

• 23:08Chuck Nice?

  I think you're right.

• 23:09Charles Liu?

  I think more and more people, in fact, I think you will eat better than most of us.

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  Well, oh, well, thank you, sir.

• 23:15Charles Liu?

  I appreciate that. That's a great, great way to put things.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Isn't it?

• 23:19Charles Liu?

  But, um, yeah, no, to be able to do funny things, make people laugh in the service of helping people understand our universe around us must be just a really fun thing to do.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, it is because I love science. I mean, I'm, I'm a fan. You know what I mean? I'm a, I'm just straight up a fan. And like when I, so for me, you know, that's how I feel when I sit with you guys, you know? You guys who are scientists and you've done the work and you have, you know, um, you have immersed yourself in the discipline that will put, that makes you proficient at, uh, you know, disseminating this type of information. I think it's incredible, you know? And so I am fascinated. I'm also extremely grateful that people like you and every other scientist that has, uh, that is part of our All-Stars and Neil and everyone in our, our, our universe has spent

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  an inordinate amount of time and money to glean and garner this information. And then I sit and learn it from you for free.

• 24:26Charles Liu?

  Well, we owe you a debt too, because by helping people realize that science is something to laugh about and enjoy and revel in, that you're bringing people who may not otherwise have that opportunity closer to the things that we love so much. You know, I mean, you might talk to someone and say, man, sitting eight hours in front of a telescope in the middle of the night trying to get a few photons on a distant galaxy or a supermassive black hole must be so boring. And I said, no, it is incredibly fun. It is at least as much fun as sitting in front of your TV for eight hours playing Super Mario.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  See, now, that's a great way to look at it. I know a lot of people are gonna disagree.

• 25:04Charles Liu?

  Well, that's up to them.

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  However, I've never played Super Mario, so you may be right.

• 25:08Charles Liu?

  To each one's own, right? Okay, so, yeah, so we have, yeah, let's go to Cosmic Queries. Because we got the creation of the universe and then all the things in the universe that come and form thereafter, right? Let's talk about the time passing in the universe.

• 25:20Chuck Nice?

  So, talking about time passing in the universe, here's a, uh, let me see, this is Frank Mendola.

• 25:26Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Says, "Hey, black holes. In popular movies like Interstellar, they depict an image of a black hole with an event horizon."

• 25:34Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  "But is that just Hollywood, or would there be just a pinched point in space surrounded by gravitational lensing?" Ooh, look at Frank Mendola.

• 25:45Charles Liu?

  Very sophisticated question.

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you.

• 25:47Charles Liu?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  I think you're just showing off, Frank, you're like, "Let me throw this in here, let me let everybody know that I understand gravitational lensing."

• 25:54Charles Liu?

  Good for him.

• 25:55Chuck Nice?

  But it's a great question.

• 25:56Charles Liu?

  It's a great question, yes.

• 25:58Chuck Nice?

  But I, I, let's say, I don't know what gravitational lensing is, and, and let's say I don't know what he means by this pinch point. Can you break that down for me?

• 26:05Charles Liu?

  I certainly can. Let's imagine a black hole as basically a, uh, structure.

• 26:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:12Charles Liu?

  Where the escape velocity from its surface exceeds the speed of light.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 26:18Charles Liu?

  Which means that if there's a light beam that tries to escape from it, let's say you're standing on a black hole and you shine a flashlight. Right, the beam, instead of going off into the sky, will come up and fall down as if you had thrown a basketball or something here on Earth. That is awesome! It's awesome, and that's what makes... That is so cool! Oh my God, that is so cool! I know, right? And that's what makes black holes black. However...

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:41Charles Liu?

  There is...

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

  That, and they talk like this.

• 26:43Charles Liu?

  Chuck.

• 26:44Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, I could, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm just, "And where you think you going? What planet you think you, you think you leaving here planet?

• 26:52Charles Liu?

  Chuck!

• 26:52Chuck Nice?

  Get over here!

• 26:53Charles Liu?

  Okay, okay, all right, thank you.

• 26:55Chuck Nice?

  Get your ass over here, planet!

• 26:58Charles Liu?

  Jack! Come on, man! Oh god, that is so racist and wrong! Oh, please. And guess what, I don't care. I can do it, I can do it. Okay. Okay, sorry. I'm sorry, I have made you so uncomfortable. It's okay. I'm sorry, go ahead. It's okay, it's alright. I just love that. It's hypothetical. The black, black hole. It's hypothetical, it's a planet, it's a black hole. Moving on.

• 27:21Charles Liu?

  I'm sorry. There's gotta be a song in that one, too. There is. I think, you know, "Black, black hole." Well, you know like "Wow, wow, west, wow, wow, west." The black, black hole. The black, black hole. Screw you! Light! Think you're getting out of here, light? Okay, alright, go ahead. So you shine it up, it curves right back down. And it would just fall back down, right. But, so that's, that's all a black hole really is. Now, if the laws of physics as we understand them hold, under what circumstances could such an object exist? Right? Right. That's the thing that makes black holes have the structures that they have. Okay. And what we understand now, what we think, is that black holes have a singularity at their center, which has infinite density, zero volume.

• 28:06Charles Liu?

  But around it, out to that point, the event horizon, we call it, where then, if you shine the flashlight, it would fall down. Right. What is there? We actually don't know. So, it really depends on the environment of the black hole. If there are no objects in the area, Right. then it would just be a simple, single pinch point. Okay. Okay. But if there were gas, or planets, or stars, or something like that, they would start to fall in, if they fell into that gravitational dimple we described earlier. And then they would start this sort of slow spiral into the black hole. When they reach the horizon, they would fall in. Right. They would never come out, that's their new home, that's it.

• 28:49Charles Liu?

  But if you are sort of in the process of that spiraling in, you can illuminate the edges. You can make the environment bright. Right. It can be very hot. Right. It could shine not just in visible light, but maybe even in ultraviolet, or X-rays, or gamma rays. Right. And then the event horizon itself... Could indeed be this sort of shimmering. Illuminated kind of ring. Kind of ring, just outside the actual limit where things cannot, like photons, light cannot escape. Right. So it really depends, and obviously movie makers will want to make that more brilliant and pretty looking. Of course. Because that's sort of what movies are about, right?

• 29:28Charles Liu?

  But this talk of black holes leads us to our next all-star, super silly space song. Uh-oh. Yes, indeed. Here we go. And it has to do with black holes. Uh-oh. And of course, that is what we've been talking about, right? Black holes, as we said, you have to fall into their gravitational dimple. Right. In order to fall in, so they don't suck. Black holes don't suck. There you go. But if you fall in one, you're not coming out again. You might as well make a home there. Right. You're not going anywhere. Exactly. So. Objects check in. That's right. But they don't check out. Gotcha. Yes. So this all-star, super silly space song, we thank Harry Belafonte for the tune as we go forward. Uh-oh.

• 30:11Charles Liu?

  And please join in at the proper time, okay? Well, I don't know what it is, but let me. You'll see when it comes in. Uh-oh, here we go. The last line, we're just gonna do a little bit, okay? Here we go, here we go. I'm just waiting. All right, we go. Black holes don't suck. But if you fall in one, then that's your new home. No, they don't suck, they don't suck, they don't suck, they don't suck. No, they don't. But if you fall in one, then that's your new home. Nice. There you go. Ah. All right, well done. Thank you, Chuck, as always. I like it. All right, you wanna move on to another question? Let's get another cosmic query in. All right, here we go. This is Jonathan Creititis.

• 30:56Charles Liu?

  Cre- Creatit- Creatisis. Damn it. Johnson. Jon-

• 31:04Chuck Nice?

  All right, Jonathan, uh, Critis, Critis, Critis.

• 31:08Charles Liu?

  And Jonathan, we apologize in advance, but thank you so much.

• 31:11Chuck Nice?

  Jonathan, I don't apologize. You should change your name. You need to change your name, Jonathan. No, I'm joking. I can't. It's, uh, Critis, Critis.

• 31:19Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 31:20Chuck Nice?

  Uh, says, "If the Big Bang exploded with half the matter."

• 31:24Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 31:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 31:25Charles Liu?

  Interesting question.

• 31:26Chuck Nice?

  God, these people are, they're on top of their stuff, man. Would galaxies be half the size?

• 31:31Charles Liu?

  That's a great question.

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  Or would there be half as many galaxies?

• 31:34Charles Liu?

  Great question, Jonathan. The answer is that the Big Bang itself, as we said earlier, doesn't contain all of the matter that is currently in the universe.

• 31:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:44Charles Liu?

  Somehow, an injection of tremendous amounts of energy came into the universe after the Big Bang itself. Could have been tiny, tiny period of time after, but it did come in after. So if the Big Bang had half of its matter, or whatever it was at the time, it probably would not have affected the universe as it is today.

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:04Charles Liu?

  However, that Big Bang might have wound up differently. It might have had different, say, laws of physics associated with it. Might have had different things going on. It might not have even gotten big enough to be able to expand and have that hyperinflation that leads to the universe that we have today. So that's a great question, and the answer is, we really don't know, but it won't be an exact half of everything.

• 32:26Chuck Nice?

  Right. Okay, cool. And that's what we talked about with those little imperfections and everything like that.

• 32:30Charles Liu?

  That's exactly right.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  That's fascinating stuff.

• 32:33Charles Liu?

  I love it, don't you?

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  God, it just never gets old!

• 32:36Charles Liu?

  Uh, no, it doesn't.

• 32:52Charles Liu?

  We've been talking this episode about time.

• 32:55Chuck Nice?

  Time.

• 32:55Charles Liu?

  And we're heading towards the end of this episode, and thus, it's appropriate to talk about the future, the end of time, the end of things in general, not necessarily everything, but things do start, and then they go on, and they come to an end. This is true for stars, planets, galaxies, maybe the entire universe as well. Chuck?

• 33:15Charles Liu?

  Tell me, what do you think? I mean, is there an ending? Is there something coming up that you're looking forward to ending? Or was there an end, something that ended at one point in your life? That sort of affected you, shaped you, made you who you are? The, the cool, science communicating comedian guy?

• 33:31Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'll tell you that, I don't know who that guy is, but.

• 33:34Charles Liu?

  He's sitting right in front of me.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I will say that. What I do for a living.

• 33:39Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Chuck Nice?

  Has shaped beginnings and ends. So every job that I get, and it's kind of sad. Because in entertainment, you know that everything you do is ephemeral. There is no stability, longevity, there is no, it's not a job. It's on, there's only gigs, as they say.

• 34:03Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 34:03Chuck Nice?

  You only can get a gig, you're never gonna have a job. And so it's kind of sad, but this is the way it happens. Every time you get a job, the, you immediately start thinking, okay, what's gonna be my next job? Because this is going to end.

• 34:21Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  Like, no matter how long it lasts.

• 34:23Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 34:24Chuck Nice?

  This is going to end.

• 34:25Charles Liu?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 34:26Chuck Nice?

  And so that really kind of shapes like your entire perspective.

• 34:31Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 34:31Chuck Nice?

  Because you're always looking towards the end of whatever it is that you're doing.

• 34:35Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  You know, and some, so what you have to learn how to do is enjoy it even though you know it's going to end.

• 34:42Charles Liu?

  I see.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 34:43Charles Liu?

  But it's a good philosophy, right? If we're always looking forward to tomorrow's gonna be, you know, the, the brass ring or the pot of gold, you may not enjoy the moment.

• 34:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:54Charles Liu?

  Your perception of time may not quite be the most optimal for your own personal life and enjoyment and satisfaction. Like we were talking in the first segment about, you know, if you like what you're doing, if it's going well, then. You have enough time.

• 35:08Chuck Nice?

  Right, absolutely. And so, yeah, so that's a, that's a big deal. Like, you know, you have to be able to always look at it like, well, this will be over, you know, this, this is done, this is already done.

• 35:18Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  And it's almost like you're looking at what you're doing in retrospect.

• 35:24Charles Liu?

  Uh huh.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  As it approaches.

• 35:25Charles Liu?

  Isn't that interesting? Wow. Well, of course, I'm sure you can take comfort if you don't think about this on a regular basis, that everything that's being talked about now that you and I are talking about is being beamed out into space, all across space and time. So in a sense, although maybe this gig will end, your message, your information will go on all the way out into the universe over and over again, as long as the universe is around. So how about that for cosmic awesomeness?

• 35:57Chuck Nice?

  That, that is awesomeness, and it also makes me feel like I should do a better job.

• 36:03Charles Liu?

  You do just fine, Chuck, and we appreciate you so much. It's been really a lot of fun all these years, really.

• 36:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we've been together for years.

• 36:10Charles Liu?

  We talk about a lot of different things about the universe and, and time is just a, a natural extension of the kind of science that we do and the kind of things that we talk about all the time.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm certainly glad that I have fallen into your gravitational dimple. I'll say that, okay?

• 36:27Charles Liu?

  Likewise, sir.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 36:29Charles Liu?

  Okay, let's go to another cosmic query. You got something?

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I do. Why don't we talk about, oh, um,

• 36:39Chuck Nice?

  Lilac blew its.

• 36:40Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  Does a star have to be a certain mass to end in a supernova? Why? And which minerals, metals, and others are made?

• 36:50Charles Liu?

  Oh, it's a great question.

• 36:51Chuck Nice?

  It is a great question.

• 36:52Charles Liu?

  It turns out that, yes, there does have to be a threshold before it explodes as a supernova. Uh, and the reason is that a supernova is specifically caused when the gravitational pull, uh, the, of a star's core is so strong.

• 37:10Charles Liu?

  That it will overcome any external or outward pressure created by nuclear fusion.

• 37:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 37:17Charles Liu?

  So, for example, the sun, it has plenty of nuclear fusion and it has plenty of gravitational, the dimple in the center of the sun, like gravitational dimple is quite, quite, quite deep and quite significant. But the structure that forms at the center of the sun, which we call a white dwarf or it's electron degenerate material, can resist the collapse

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  Collapse.

• 37:39Charles Liu?

  of the gravitational dimple as the sun's nuclear fusion winds up. But once a star is many times the mass of the sun, it will not be possible, the white dwarf will not collapse, will not support that star's sort of final end stage. And so it collapses down until it transforms into either a neutron star or a black hole. That collapse and transformation is the thing that causes the supernova to occur. So that is the limit. And in terms of elements formed, it can be a wide variety of elements because in a supernova you get something called rapid process nucleosynthesis. You have nuclei that are being bombarded with neutrons.

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:24Charles Liu?

  Thousands of them sometimes in a fraction of a second. And the combinations of things that can appear are really almost unlimited. Most of whatever shows up, the elements that are built, decay away almost immediately.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:38Charles Liu?

  Within fractions of a second, you might have uranium 290 or something. But then it decays away.

• 38:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:45Charles Liu?

  And so then eventually the ones that stick around are the ones that we know, things like uranium 238, for example.

• 38:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:50Charles Liu?

  Or some of the other heavy elements like the gold or the silver, things like that that we're used to.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 38:57Charles Liu?

  That's very, very interesting.

• 38:58Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that is.

• 38:59Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 38:59Chuck Nice?

  God, if only you could just do that on purpose, you could make whatever you want.

• 39:03Charles Liu?

  You could.

• 39:03Chuck Nice?

  Or just, you wouldn't make it, you could mine whatever you want.

• 39:06Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but you have to go really, really far away during the explosion because, you know, a supernova will release more energy than in 10 seconds than our sun does in 10 billion years. So you don't want to mess with that.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's, wow. 10 seconds?

• 39:22Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  God, that's cool. All right, here we go. How do we predict? The whole universe, when we have, oh wow, when we have discovered just a small part of it.

• 39:36Charles Liu?

  What a great question. It is one of the philosophical limitations of astronomy as a science that we can't see the whole universe. So what we astronomers have been forced to do is to rely on a few logical assumptions, which may eventually prove to be false, but currently we still think are likely to be true.

• 39:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:58Charles Liu?

  Okay, one is called the cosmological principle.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 40:01Charles Liu?

  Which in a very brief glib sort of way basically says everywhere is the same. Once you get into large enough scales, if you're looking at the universe on macro, multi-hundred-million-light-year size scales.

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:18Charles Liu?

  Then statistically speaking, any given volume of that size will be exactly the same as any given volume of the same size somewhere else.

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:25Charles Liu?

  So that's a cosmological principle. And the other one we call is the Copernican principle, named after Copernicus.

• 40:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:32Charles Liu?

  And that kind of, again, glibly in a single sentence, might mean we're nothing special. Okay, Copernicus, of course, as we all know, was the person who is credited in European history with dethroning the Earth from the center of the universe and moving it out as a planet among many, where the sun became the center. So the idea was, well, Copernicus said that Earth is actually nothing special. We're not the center of anything. We're just another planet. By the same token, our sun is just another star. Our galaxy is just another galaxy.

• 41:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:07Charles Liu?

  And so in that case, all the laws of physics and things like that are all pretty much the same, no matter where or when we look at the universe. And it is a limitation, and all astronomers understand that. But we are comforted by the fact that just the part of the universe that we can observe is so huge and so vast and so interesting that we'll never run out of things to study and examine.

• 41:30Chuck Nice?

  Nice. There you go, what a great question.

• 41:32Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 41:33Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  Um, how about two more? We got time for two more.

• 41:38Charles Liu?

  Okay, and we have one more all-star, super silly space song.

• 41:42Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well then maybe we don't have time for two more. Let's get the all-star, super silly space song then.

• 41:48Charles Liu?

  Well, go ahead and ask the one more, uh, uh, what, let's see if we can try, ask one more.

• 41:52Chuck Nice?

  Keelya Silves says this.

• 41:54Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  Um, I can conceptually understand stars, galaxies, et cetera, burning themselves out and undergoing heat death.

• 42:01Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  But how will time, space itself, die?

• 42:05Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  Can time die?

• 42:09Charles Liu?

  What a great question. He- here's the deal, right? If the universe were somehow not going to expand forever, then time actually can run backwards. Because time, again, is, is this, as we've been talking, uh, this episode, i- is a thing that might be thought of in many different ways. One way that cosmologists, uh, who study the universe think about it is you can measure time as a rate of expansion of the universe. As the universe gets bigger, that indicates that time is passing.

• 42:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:42Charles Liu?

  So if the universe were sufficiently dense that the expansion could be stopped and pulled back, then time would die by going back into a tiny little big bang, like a big crunch, the anti. And then the timeline, shall we say, will end there. But currently, research suggests that the universe will not collapse upon itself and will expand forever. In fact, it's expanding faster now than it was a few billion years ago.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:14Charles Liu?

  If that trend continues, the universe will get larger and larger. All the material in the universe, unless there's some refreshment, which we don't know anything about, we can't even predict, will become more and more separated and split up. And eventually, all the atoms and molecules will disintegrate into subatomic particles and all the black holes and everything, um, like that will disintegrate into subatomic particles. And all we'll have left is just darkness and quiet and, and cold and calm. Now, in a sense, that is a death of the universe.

• 43:47Chuck Nice?

  That is.

• 43:48Charles Liu?

  But it's, it's a peaceful death. It's, it's not a, it's not a violent death.

• 43:52Chuck Nice?

  Look at that, the universe died in its sleep.

• 43:54Charles Liu?

  Right. It's a calm, gentle, uh, you know, ending. And, and in that sense, you know. This is the time for the All-Star Super Silly Space Song.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:03Charles Liu?

  In this segment. And this is, this is based on, I know many, many people have sung this before, but we'll use, we'll thank Boys to Men for doing this particular one.

• 44:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:12Charles Liu?

  Talking about the end of time, you know?

• 44:14Chuck Nice?

  Uh oh.

• 44:15Charles Liu?

  Um, look, it'll be quiet, you know, it'll be dark.

• 44:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:18Charles Liu?

  So there won't be any light, but it's a long, long, long time from now. You know, at least, you know, 10 to the 100 years from now. So you have no problem with that. It's gonna be peaceful. It'll feel like just a long, gentle night, you know? So it's gonna be fun. I'm not afraid of it all. I think it's gonna be a really cool thing.

• 44:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm not afraid of it either, seeing that it's gonna happen 45 billion years from now.

• 44:39Charles Liu?

  Minimum, minimum, way, way, way longer than that. Okay, so, so at the end of time, so you can, you can join in at the appropriate time.

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:47Charles Liu?

  Okay, at the end there.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  I don't know, this might be a hard song.

• 44:49Charles Liu?

  Or just give me a little, give me a little rhythm, you know, whatever you wanna do.

• 44:53Chuck Nice?

  I'm scared.

• 44:53Charles Liu?

  No, don't be scared.

• 44:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:55Charles Liu?

  Don't be scared.

• 44:58Charles Liu?

  At the end of time, it will be quiet, there'll be no light. In a long, long, long while from now, it will be peaceful all through the night. At the end of time.

• 45:27Charles Liu?

  At the end of the time.

• 45:31Chuck Nice?

  Nice. I don't know how that was Boys to Men, but cool.

• 45:35Charles Liu?

  Well.

• 45:36Chuck Nice?

  I thought you were going to End of the Road, although we go to the end of the road. I thought we were going there.

• 45:42Charles Liu?

  That would be possible, too.

• 45:44Chuck Nice?

  But it was still of the night until the end of the time.

• 45:47Charles Liu?

  Look, that's gonna be the All-Star Super Silly Space Song for another time.

• 45:51Chuck Nice?

  For another time.

• 45:52Charles Liu?

  Because for us, although time continues, the time for this episode has come to an end. Chuck Nice, thank you so much for being both our comedic co-host and our special guest today on StarTalk All-Stars. Thank you so much. I am Charles Liu, or you can call me Chuck. It has It's been a pleasure today. Thank you all so much. You have been listening to StarTalk All-Stars. I have been your host. And remember, stay curious and enjoy the universe.