Science Literacy in the Misinformation Age - #LMASA

Continuing with our Let’s Make America Smart Again series, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice welcome astronomer and author David Helfand to discuss science literacy in the misinformation age and what you can do to find the facts. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And joining me as my co-host today, professional comedian and StarTalk veteran Chuck Nice.

• 0:31Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're still tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  That's right, sir. At ChuckNiceComic, thank you.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did someone else take Chuck Nice?

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Actually, yes. A guy who has eight followers. Believe me, I've looked him up. He's got like eight followers and he took my name and there's nothing you can do about it. He's sitting on it.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's tough, that's tough. Today's show is gonna be all about science literacy in the misinformation age. And, once again, I never do this alone. I find, I comb the universe, finding people whose expertise can not only supplement this topic, but become the topic itself. And we've got with us in studio, Professor David Helfand. He's actually a colleague of mine, a fellow astrophysicist. In fact, he was chairman of Columbia's astronomy department when I entered as a graduate student.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he and I go way back.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  He's like your boss.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, so, he's got this book, A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's...

• 1:34Chuck Nice?

  I mean, could there be anything more relevant at this particular time?

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence, my blurb. Okay? Read it now. The future of civilization may depend on it.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I get a little more urgent than that? Are we okay with that? David, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes. It's a pleasure to be here, Neil.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  In all fairness, David, you, even though we just made those statements about the timeliness of the book, you were, you were a bit foretelling because this, you wrote last year, right? A couple of years ago. A couple of years ago. It came out last, a year ago this week. It came out a year ago this week, but you actually wrote it a couple of years... So you, are you... Like you got a third eye or something?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  It was, it was building, you know, it was building. It's not just a s-

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You saw the writing on the wall.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  It's a big step up in the last couple of months, but, but I think it's been building for a while. Gotcha.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and just for those who are only listening to this.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, David Helfand has a Santa Claus beard and, and mustache, just to be clear.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  It is cool though.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I keep, I, I just keep.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  In December, you must, you must get so much.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he smells good.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  TSA guys always say, "Do you work in malls?"

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I work in the North Pole.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, how would, how do you characterize, are there some signs that you point to and say, "Here is the best example of this age that we've just entered."

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Well, the first problem with this age is the amount of information, or misinformation. Uh, IBM estimated recently that, uh, we generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of information per day. Wow. On Earth. And if you're not used to quintillion, you are Neil, I'm sure. That's 2.5-

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me some quintillion.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Followed by 18 zeros. And if you printed it out, it would fill a bookcase that stretched around the Earth at the equator and was half a kilometer high.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you printed out that information that was generated.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Per day.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  That's 185,000 pages per person, per day.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is it meaningful information?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Well, did you edit 185,000 pages per day that you produced? No, probably not, right? So that's part of the problem there.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  And-

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's absent curation?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  It's completely absent curation. You know, when we were living in hunter-gatherer groups there of 30 people, information was very limited. We didn't have a lot of libraries and stuff, but it was accurate. Because if you were the guy who led the hunting party to the hungry lions instead of the zebras, you know, you didn't, you-

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never came back.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Eliminated from the gene pool really fast.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  But now-

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be the stupid gene.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. But now-

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh, those were the days, weren't they?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Now-

• 4:08Speaker 02

  If you don't know who you're propagating information to, you just send it out to millions of people, right? You do it all the time.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, millions.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And if you don't know those people, then you have no investment in their survival. And so if misinformation enhances your fame or power or wealth or something, or if you're a politician, your fame and power and wealth, then why not provide misinformation?

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Regardless of its impact on those who receive the information.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Right, because you don't know them.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is what you're saying is we are victims of something that was quite useful in the past and now has, in a way, become our enemy.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our evolutionary enemy.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Sort of like fat.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fat, yeah, yeah.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not expect him to say that.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I know, but that's a great answer.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's true, it's completely true.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  It really does.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, fat was like holy, it's like high-density calorie.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Survival.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  It was your friend.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, so it's one, so it's a survival guide. So is this the beginning of a movement to recognize, yes, there is this information, it's not going to go away. So now, here's a recipe, how to sift through it and make sense of it and judge what is and what is not true.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Wow. Precisely, because you know, your browser's not going to do that for you. When you Google something, it just spits back whatever's out there.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't it?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Well, that's an interesting question. Why doesn't it, might be the question.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I give just a fast reference to this? Before browsers, John Allen Paulus, he's a friend and mathematician, I heard him once say, and this is before the era of search engines. He said, "The internet is great. The problem is, all the books are scattered on the floor." At that time, you didn't know how to access information filtered by your interest. Now we have search engines. That's not a problem anymore. You can sift through it. Billions of pages in a fraction of a second and it's handed to you on a silver platter. And who would have thought that that created this next level of challenge that perhaps we need some next-level browser to handle for us? What do you, is it on the horizon or not?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. It would be a challenge to write one, I think. Now, of course, everybody assumes the filters that are put on by various internet companies are all politically motivated. Right. We need one that's, uh, science motivated, I think. Mm-hmm.

• 6:28Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, a science filter. Or a science browser.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Science browser. No, no, what you really mean is, is a bullshit filter. That's what you mean. I think, really, that's what you were saying. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  It's the bullshit detector. But that's, that's what the browser could do. I think you still have to have some judgment involved in how to assess the evidence. Mm-hmm. And that's what the book tries to do. It tries to give you those tools. Like I say, it installs those. What's a good tool? Give me top, top three tools. Ooh, top, top three tools? First is being able to make estimates. Just using simple arithmetic, being able to estimate whether something makes sense or not. You know, almost every day in the established media, the gray lady even, there are mistakes by a factor of a thousand, by a factor of a million, you know, and no one pays any attention because they don't notice it, but you can look at this. You don't even know how to think about it. Not even know how to think about it, but it's.

• 7:18Chuck Nice?

  I don't care what you say. There were millions of people there.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Is that what you? Go ahead. Okay, so that would be a, a, a failure of an estimate in that case. Okay. Second filter is having some idea of the way the physical world works. I mean, the problem is that we live in an age of magic, right? Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. One of his edicts, yes. That's right. One of his third law, I believe. So what are we living? We live in this world, this little box on the car, and it speaks to you, and it knows exactly where you are at all times. Knows where grandma lives and where to make a left. And how to get there, right? So why shouldn't talking to your dead relatives be reasonable? Right. You know, and this guy shines a little light in your eye for 30 seconds. You don't need glasses anymore. Why shouldn't magnets cure your arthritis, you know? Right, right. So it's all just magic, and in a world of magic, who knows about magic, you know?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Astrologers, psychics, uh, homeopaths, you know? Does this mean science has been a little too successful? Well, it's too successful in the sense that it's changed things too fast. Too fast for us to be able to adapt.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  So, and so what you're saying in essence is, in order for us to actually um, understand science the way we should, we have to create a society filled with little scientists. Like, we all have to be-

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're science literate.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  We're science literate. We all have to be scientists in some way, shape, or form.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  And we all are until we're about five or six years old, right? We go exploring around and-

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but David, I don't wanna, okay, so I try to uh, evaluate every statement I make, hoping that I never make a statement that betrays some kind of old man on the porch point of view.

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  You mean you've never tweeted, "You kids get off my lawn"?

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying!

• 8:59Chuck Nice?

  Or, "You ki- you kids go play where you live"?

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't wanna be that old man. And so you just said, "Yeah, informa- it's, discoveries are happening too quickly for us." Let me, let me perhaps get you out of the old man syndrome and say, "Maybe it's not that discoveries are happening too quickly." Because my kids are not complaining about being overwhelmed by data, alright? It's older folk who come from an era where there weren't, wasn't that much data. Maybe what you wanna say is, we need tandem educational curricula so that we understand how the world works. Rather than just be fed volumes of, of, of science information, thinking that's what makes you scientifically literate.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When the real source of science literacy is not what you know, but how you think about the world. Is that fair?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. So the whole model of education as information transfer makes no sense-

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Makes no sense!

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Right?

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've thought about this. You founded, you, you co-founded a university, a brand-new university in Canada, and I hear you add it again in some other place. Where?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  In the UK.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the UK. Just tell me what you, what, cuz you didn't just come out of nowhere, out of a cave, to say this.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You put, you, you, you did it. What did you do?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  And are you being sued by the New York Attorney General? No, go ahead. That's the other guy. Oh, okay, okay. Well, yes, so the idea is instead of feeding people information, you have them construct knowledge. Construct their own knowledge out of what they know. And a little bit of guidance shoving them down a path. Takes much longer. Much harder. It's much harder, it takes much longer. It doesn't matter if you don't have to transfer all this information, because it's all there. Much longer and harder, I'm gonna take you up on that, because I'm not sure if I understand what you mean when you say construct your own knowledge. Okay, I'll give you a good example. We're, we're, we can talk about astronomy. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, when we discover all these planets around other stars. Right. And that's, that's So planets. So planets.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  That's amazing. Yes, it is. Twenty years ago, we knew no planets except ours, and now we know it. So how did we do that? Well, we have to know how planets move. So Kepler figured this out in 1610, you know, figured out how planets move. He wrote down three laws of planetary motion. So at Columbia, I go to the blackboard, I write down the three laws of planetary motion, and my students all copy them down, even though it's sitting in the hundred fifty dollar textbook next to them, but they write it all down. And then I say, how long does it take the Earth to go around the Sun? Right. And they sort of look at me, and finally someone says, a year? And I say, well, let's see if that works. And we plug in the numbers of the period and the semi-major axis of the eclipse. And they write all that down. And then you send them home, and they do it for how long it takes Mars to go around the Sun. Right. You know, then on the test, you make it real tricky, and you say, how long does it take Europa to go around Jupiter?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  You know, and they figure out to change the math. But they get their As and they go away, and they're happy. That's just feeding information to people. Gotcha. All right, so that takes twenty minutes. At Quest Quest is the name of the university. In Canada, right. Three-hour classes, five days a week, three hours a day. I walk into class, I give them this little simulation about planets going around other stars. It's got fifteen parameters, they don't know what any of them are. Okay. I give them a sheet of a few questions. To say, well, see what this, see what happens if you change this and keep this one fixed. I gotcha. Figure out what this I means here. And then I let them play. Gotcha. And three and a half hours later, they stayed a half hour after class, someone got up and wrote down Kepler's three laws. Wow. I never mentioned Kepler. I never mentioned three laws. They had constructed that.

• 12:31Chuck Nice?

  That's freaking amazing.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So therefore, they will not be susceptible to being handed information by others.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  That's right. Now, they won't remember Kepler's laws. I don't remember Kepler. You remember.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the process matters.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  But the process matters. They remember. You can look at, look at information. You can look for patterns in it. You can cast those patterns in a mathematical form.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  You can use that to predict the way something else behaves. And that's all you want them to know.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're testing, and those are tools. It's a toolkit for learning how the world works. And you probably construct one for biology and chemistry.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  And the reason is because you already know how the world works.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That helps.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it, what it does is, it, it, I don't want to put words in David's mouth, but what it does is, since David already knows how the worlds work.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World works. He knows that the wor, the world can be figured out from this set of parameters he puts down on a table. And.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot that science knows about how the world works.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way more than many people would even recognize.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is, is the level. So, so.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that was two. So you got a third one? Or did we go through three already?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  I, I don't know. I can't count that high.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, one is estimate.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Estimations.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two is.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Knowing how the world works.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Knowing how the world works. Three.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I have a bunch of, probability and statistics, I would say.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, nice. Well, we need that.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Having an idea that whether something's likely or not likely, recognizing that, you know, the plural of anecdote is not data, you know, that something happens to you, it doesn't mean that it's highly significant.

• 13:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. You just, you sent a chill down my back, because I gotta tell you, that is the thing right now, that it seems as though anecdotal evidence seems to be taken as fact for so many people. And I don't get it. It's like, yeah, dude, that happened to you.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. There's, there's another, one of the cleanest examples of this, I remember, was back in the day when Japanese cars were much safe, were much more reliable.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than American cars. So here you are. You're ready to buy a Honda Accord, because consumer reports highly rates it, okay? And it hardly ever fails on the road, and, and the like. And someone walks out of the dealership. And, and looking frustrated and you say, well, what's the matter? Well, I just returned my, my Honda Accord. It was, it was awful. I said, what happened? Oh, it was the worst car I've ever driven. Ah, it broke three miles down the thing and I was like, and then you decide to not buy the Honda Accord because of this one person, not the volume of data from Consumer Reports.

• 14:56Chuck Nice?

  By the way, they made seven million other cars that year. Not sure if that matters.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably evolutionary as well. You want, the, the passion of your, your friend.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And your own experience. I mean, you know, if the, the tiger chases you up the tree, you know, that's, that's a, that gets lodged in your amygdala there. That's, that's something that's going to trigger a response all the time.

• 15:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  But, and it happened to you and then it probably mattered. But you know, when you walk into the subway and, well, that's an example I use in the book, right? So I was going out to see my mother-in-law in Staten Island and I got on the train and the train went a few stops and then it stopped and someone had fallen under the tracks, right? And so I think, gee, how often does that happen in New York, you know? So I later looked it up, but.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have never seen it happen.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right.

• 15:42Chuck Nice?

  That's how.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  I've actually caused it to happen.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Chuck.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Shut up. Coming back the same weekend, happened again.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Calculate the odds in the books, 22 million to one. So if you're on a jury and I'm charged with killing two people by showing in front of the subway because it happened 22 million to one against, you'd vote to convict, right? But I had nothing to do with it because it's a completely random occurrence, happens 40 times a year out of billions.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billion, a billion people ride the subway.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Right. So it's one of the safest things you can do.

• 16:17Chuck Nice?

  A billion paying customers.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paying customers, yeah.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  Billion fairs. That's amazing though, but you're right. It's probably the safest thing you could do statistically with respect to that anecdote. Well, that's amazing.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is in fact a cosmic query version of StarTalk, which we will begin to solicit from Chuck.

• 16:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got him there waiting, ready for us after this commercial break, when we come back to StarTalk.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm here with Chuck Nice.

• 16:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Media co-host.

• 16:55Chuck Nice?

  That's correct.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we, I've got in studio, not only a friend and astrophysics colleague, he's written a book on science literacy called "A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age", David Helfand, Professor David Helfand. Great to have you on the show.

• 17:11Chuck Nice?

  Great to be here.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let's get right back into the conversation. We have cosmic queries.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, this is the second installment of Cosmic Queries, "Let's Make America Smart Again."

• 17:24Chuck Nice?

  Again, yes.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a subcategory of cosmic queries.

• 17:27Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's do it, give it to me.

• 17:28Chuck Nice?

  And of course, we always, first of all, we get them from all over. So whenever you see the call go out, make sure you answer it, whether it's on Twitter or Facebook or what have you. But we also take questions from our Patreon patrons first.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, that's so cheap. That is so... People give you money.

• 17:46Chuck Nice?

  They'll give us money.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will never get...

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  And we prioritize...

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will get on your case every time you say it.

• 17:51Chuck Nice?

  I know, I know, Neil doesn't like it, but I think it's great.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us money, we'll read your question first.

• 17:57Chuck Nice?

  We'll read your question first. I think it's so American.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't argue that, that's right.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  There we go. All right, let's start off with Mark Miller from Patreon, who says this, "In a world of alternative facts, would taking the social media to confront the source of the quote-unquote 'alternative facts' be at all constructive or helpful?" And Mark is coming to us from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just that, my sense is, it's not that there's a false fact because someone happened to get it wrong. That there are false facts is because that's how they want it to be true. And if you actively want a false fact to be true, I don't, I wonder, does your book have any access to that mind at all?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. It's, I mean, social media is designed to construct echo chambers, right? So all of your beliefs are reinforced.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, as does a Google search. You can Google search the most, the weirdest, non-true thing, and you'll find the website dedicated to that.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I say in the book, if you do a Google search on age of the earth, you know, radioactive dating, you know, some ninth grader might get assigned that topic, right? Six of the first 10 things that come up prove that radioactivity is nonsense and the earth is 10,000 years old.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? And a Google, were you trying it now?

• 19:20Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I'm trying it right now. Okay.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so therefore, having correct information in the face of misinformation clearly doesn't work.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  It's a problem. It's a problem.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's not, I don't have you on the show to tell me it's a problem. I have you on the show to tell me how to solve it.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  The solution is changing the education system.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Education, so, okay, so you have to give up on the-

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Holy, oh, sorry.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Sorry. I'm actually doing what David said. I cannot believe the crap that is coming up on Google right now. This is unbelievable.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what do you have?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe, and that includes the ones that are listed here. Holy crap! You're allowed to say that?

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Well, so the-

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a free country.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the democratization of information is good. It just comes with this big baggage.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a responsibility.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  So how crap, many different measurable processes are used to, oh my god, and it's all, and I got to, I don't even want to say where the sources are from, because I don't even want to get into that, but this is-

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you have to do-

• 20:33Speaker 02

  I don't want to advertise them, but this is-

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you have to do, so what you have to do, it seems, is everyone else is a goner. You've got to then change the educational curricula.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  You've got to change the philosophy behind education, that it's no longer transfer of information, it's teaching kids how to keep their curiosity, first of all, so they question everything.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do that for free.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  They do that for free.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they're young enough.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  When they're young enough, we beat it out of them, right?

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, completely.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  And then learn how to construct knowledge for themselves, so they can use these tools. I call them the little, you know, apps to install in your prefrontal cortex that filter this information in a way that says, gee, does that make any sense? Can I figure out if that makes sense?

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. So what do you do when you're confronted with, with, I should call them worldviews?

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What should we call it? A-

• 21:28Speaker 02

  I would say political bias for the most part.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, but they don't, but they wouldn't think they're biased when you're in it. So I don't want to call it that.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And echo chamber has been bandied about, but then that's almost still self aware.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I know what you're saying. What do you call it from the perspective of the person who actually believes it?

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, yeah, exactly. So it would just be, what is your cultural, political, religious philosophy? There it is. And if that conflicts with fact, with objectively true facts, it just doesn't matter to people.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Well, that's right, but, but, but you can, if you work at it, you can get people usually to agree on a few facts.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Right? They, they, you know, like.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Earth is round? That's been a hard one lately.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  That's been a hard one, but, but, you know, so the, the air in this room.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did we just give up? Okay, this is the last episode of.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  It was getting so depressing.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, David, here, take your book.

• 22:23Chuck Nice?

  And that was the day science died.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I'm buying. You ready? Ready? Go to the bar.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go drinking right now, baby.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right, um, all right, Dave, sorry we interrupted. Go on. Good. You're bumming me out here, but go on.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking we're making progress.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got our own bubble. We think we're making progress in our own bubble.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Well, you are.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We read our feeds and people, oh, you're doing a good job, you know, atta boy, you know, and we say, hey, and then you come at us with this and you gotta go look, you gotta Google the damn age of the universe.

• 22:59Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry that I did that. I gotta tell you, I had no idea. Uh huh.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  But go ahead. It's never been the case that the entire global population, all 7.4 billion of these homo sapiens, understood everything about the universe, right? I mean, that's never been the case.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  The, the problem now, we're in the, we're in the, the, the death of expertise, right? I mean, expertise is elite and elite is evil and therefore we have to abolish all of that.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. By the way, I blame some of that on.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Scientists.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On, yeah, on the elite, the intellectually elite, because I think there's an, there's an attitude involved that others are just not with them. And if they, how could they possibly even want to vote for someone? Who the elite does not vote for.

• 23:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think it came back and bit him in the ass.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  No, that's exactly right. And I scientists are also responsible. And the level of hype that goes out with press releases when you publish some paper is completely out of proportion to the result. You'd see the reproducibility crisis and.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about the reproducibility crisis.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  All right. So in.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now, by the way, now you're talking about a problem in the scientific community.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Inside the.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let the public alone for the moment. Let's just mind our own house. Okay, go.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  So, uh, Amgen, some years ago, did a study.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the bio, the pharmaceutical, the bio, bio, bio, biochemical company.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Right. And they took fifty-three studies that were not just published in peer-reviewed journals. This is on cancer for cancer, looking for cancer drugs.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Fifty-three studies, not just published, but highlighted in the editorials of the issue of the journal they were in as potential major breakthroughs. And they put a whole bunch of people on it and put a whole bunch of money in it, tried to reproduce them. Eighty-nine percent of those studies were irreproducible.

• 24:38Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  That's bad. That's bad. I'm gonna say that's not a good number.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to be clear, for people to know it, how, when a scientist uses the word irreproducible, that doesn't mean they couldn't figure out the experiment. It means they did the experiment, did not get the same.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Same result.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same result. That's what irreproducible means. And so if you don't get the same result, then one is wrong and the other's right, the other is wrong, the other is right, or they're both wrong.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you, they both can't be right.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is a problem.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  This is a problem. Just recently, a very energetic psychologist rounded up a couple hundred of his colleagues and tried to reproduce a hundred and some, I forget how many there were, experiments that have been published in behavioral psychology.

• 25:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  You know, of order, half of them could not be reproduced.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Half of them couldn't be reproduced. So, so.

• 25:28Chuck Nice?

  And what is this attributable to? I mean, is, is it, is it a matter?

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait, wait, just to be clear, just to be clear. And David will round this out, but I just want to be clear. There is no requirement, cosmic requirement, that your research.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  will ultimately be shown to be correct.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most research is shown to be either unimportant or uninteresting or sometimes wrong.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no wrongdoing there.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when you want to assert a new emergent scientific truth, you cannot link it to a single research result.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we recognize as a community that we can have bias. We're human, like anybody else.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can have bias I didn't know about. So now I get, I do an experiment. Now David comes in and so, you know, I love you Neil, but let me just double check you. And he gets a different result. Finds out I made an error. Or maybe we both made errors and you need a third person to come in and show that. That happens too. So.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Speaking of your thesis.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That will not be broached in this. So, so no, so we, so is there a solution here? Because the ones highlighted by the editor at the beginning of the journal, this is good for the tenure prospects of potential researchers and it's self-feeding.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Okay, exactly. It's, there's publication bias. You get a negative result, you don't publish it because it's not interesting. You get a positive result. Well, if you do anything 20 times, you're likely to get one positive result that's with.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's even not even true.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  It's not even true, right? It's just on the statistical distribution.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just the fluctuations. One of them looks like what you wanted it to be.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  And so that's what's that.

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  I like that.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that looks good.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, ah, yeah, there we go.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Right. Finally got there. So that's first problem. The second problem is.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, you know what that's called? It's called the, the, the sharpshooter effect or the bullseye effect. Where, so you, you, you fire arrows into the side of a barn.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look to where all the, where they collected and then you draw a bullseye.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  I like this grouping here. Paint the target.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now look how good my aim was. Yeah, okay, go on.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  And then as, as you say, there's this pressure to get grants and so you have to produce positive results to get your next grant. And you have to get grants because you have to get tenure. And you have to get tenure by publishing in prestigious journals.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we, and there's no currency for duplicating someone else's result.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Well, of course, in, in the scientific method, there is. That's, that's the ultimate way of showing something is more probable rather than less probable is to have it reproduced. And you should always publish. The methods you use such that someone else could reproduce your results.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see if you can put your money where your mouth is. You were chairman of the astronomy department at Columbia for 20 years? How many, some, some order, something like that, okay? And you were there young, you were chairman before you were 40. So, would you have tenured someone that devoted their career just to duplicating other people's research?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Well, interesting question.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just calling you out. I'm just, just, just keep it as, as, as Larry Wilmore would say, keep a hundred.

• 28:33Chuck Nice?

  So, is it, is it the fact that you guys have made that whole thing too sexy to begin with?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  As Neil knows, I refused to accept tenure when it was offered to me and I'm not a fan of the tenure system.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a whole other thing. The man is an iconoclast.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Gangster right there.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gangster, so gangster.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  That is academic gangster.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We give you tenure, no!

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  No need for stinking tenure.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a five-year contract and only if I'm good after five years.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Renew it.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, you're like my wife in that, she was like, you can leave me anytime you want. There's one of us in this relationship that won't have a problem finding somebody else.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Woo!

• 29:10Chuck Nice?

  You should take a look in the mirror and find out who that is.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  I would at least give you a five-year contract.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awesome. So, so you agree to this?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's the challenge. I mean, just simply reproducing someone else's results, no. Reproducing them in a different way that comes at it from a slightly different tact that supports or refutes the result, sure.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you don't know in advance if it's going to refute. I would commit five years of my life, it's choice years of my life where I'm being reviewed for hiring and for tenure. And I say, these three research results are spot on. Now give me tenure. I'm last in your line of hires.

• 29:54Chuck Nice?

  Well, you wouldn't be

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds like a yes to me.

• 29:56Chuck Nice?

  In my line, but I agree that that's the general view, yes, that that is the general view in in science.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what it also means, though, let me, let me try to fix this. If more than half of all research papers are not reproducible, that means this could be a new cottage industry.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  It certainly could. And in fact, what's what's been proposed in psychology, which I really like, is you have to publish your methods and your hypotheses and everything in advance.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 30:26Chuck Nice?

  Before you can do the experiment.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  Because now we know your motivation.

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  Know where you're coming from, all that.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your funders, too.

• 30:35Chuck Nice?

  Right, your funders, it's all out on the table, it's so transparent that you cannot, once you have your results, you cannot, you can no longer alter those results.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cherry picket.

• 30:45Chuck Nice?

  Figure out or figure out.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't draw the bullseye where the arrows went.

• 30:47Chuck Nice?

  Around the barn, yeah, exactly.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You already drew the bullseye.

• 30:49Chuck Nice?

  Right, it's like, it's like somebody falling down the steps and going, I meant to do that.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have to say, I mean to fall down the steps in this next.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, right.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in our field, there's also, of course, bias from funding sources, which we are less susceptible to as astrophysicists.

• 31:10Chuck Nice?

  Because nobody's funding you, period.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why. What'd you say, astrophysicists? Oh, get out of here. Yeah, it's not like Pfizer doesn't care what the black hole.

• 31:21Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spacetime continuum is doing.

• 31:23Chuck Nice?

  Unless, unless there's a big zit inside of it.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got the skin medication.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  I got some zit.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sunspots, we can remove those.

• 31:32Chuck Nice?

  Get rid of those. Isn't that astrophysics?

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's, that's, that's, you know, Clearasil. So is there, um, so.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting back to our own wheelhouse, our own, our own community of scientists, the bias that would result from one source having some expectation, that's obviously stronger in other fields than in ours. But in your Survival Guide to Misinformation, the scientists are participants in the misinformation when you are biased by your funding sources.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  That's certainly true. I think in our field, it's really easy. First of all, there is

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's easy to do what?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  There's the record of the sky, right? You can't, I mean, you can't mess with it.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  That's true. So someone else can go look.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just discovered a comet between here and here. Now, and, yeah, if it ain't there, it ain't there.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  If it's not there, it's not there, right. The other thing is, we have these huge repositories where you take data, it goes in that repository. Anybody else can go in there and look at that data.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the raw data.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  The raw data.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. That is true. We don't, it's, it's very hard to manipulate raw data.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just comes out of the telescope, the detector, it goes in, and we are, data's like gold to us.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  And it's public.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, right, and that's an emergent fact about our field, that the, your raw data, when it's publicly funded.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  It's public all the time.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It goes public right on, right off the bat, right off the bat.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  You know, it sounds to me like that's the way it should just be, though. Okay.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but otherwise, yeah, we don't know. What are you doing with your data under the table?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. We, we gotta, we gotta take a quick break. When we come back, more of science literacy in the age of misinformation with my friend and colleague, David Helfand, where StarTalk continues.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio, talking about the science literacy and its relation to the misinformation age. We've got this book written by David Helfand, published by Columbia University Press. I've got funny man Chuck Nice here.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This is a cosmic queries.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the subcategory of cosmic query, which we call Let's Make America Smart Again.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Chuck Nice?

  And I have

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got, give me another question.

• 33:48Chuck Nice?

  I've got a great question here from Rob Paul Davis, coming to us from Facebook, and he Says this, I have a hard time accepting dark matter. Utterly undetectable matter by direct means? That cannot be any substance that we already know of? What other possible alternatives are there to explain this supposed missing gravity?

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, so David, let me, let me shape that question for you into your, into your center there. So you said earlier in the broad, in the show, there's crazy things that we as scientists are saying is true. And then we chastise someone for thinking that crystals rubbing them together will heal them. Which sounds way more possible than the existence of dark matter. So where do you come at it with that? So it's basically hard to believe science truths and false believable truths. How about that?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I try to avoid the word truth when it comes to science. You know mathematicians can prove things true.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Scientists just make ever better approximations to the way the universe works.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  So dark matter is a current approximation.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  And it is detectable in that we can detect its gravitational influence on things that move around in it.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  So it's, we just can't see it with our eyes, but seeing with our eyes is not the only way you can detect stuff.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Uh, it is, is a hypothesis. And there are alternatives.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That it's matter that is, is the hypothesis, right, right.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Right, there are alternative hypotheses that Newton's laws or Einstein's laws of gravity on scales vastly greater than we can directly experience.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Uh, slightly different, they're supposed to be a little tiny bit different. And then that'll explain the way stars move around instead of postulating that there's six times more dark matter.

• 35:40Chuck Nice?

  The regular gravity, right.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what it, what it fundamentally is, is an apps, it's dark gravity.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's really what it should have been called.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a, an observational fact. The fact that we call it dark matter is, I don't even like using the term.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reason, because it's, it's lead, it leads the, the listener.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes you think that it's not, that's just, that you've gone away from talking about gravity.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  You're still talking about gravity, no matter what.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Primarily that.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Primarily, right.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you have a way to get around that? Because in your lectures, there would be a time when you say the whole universe wants fit inside of a marble. And why are we gonna believe that at all? How do you, where's the believability there?

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Well, there, again, it's a model, right? That's what we do. We build models of the way things work. So, we have a model that makes predictions. Now, dark matter, you know, we've been going through various hypotheses. Are they dead stars? Are they missing runaway planets? Uh, and we knock those off, one at a time. No, no, no.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reliably, I would add, yes.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Quite reliably.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Uh, there are some things we haven't knocked off yet. Are they little subatomic particles from some other part of the...

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The particle zoo?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Particle zoo that we aren't familiar with yet.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Uh, people are working really hard, spend a lot of time and money and effort to try to find them.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the over/under on that is that that's where people are leaning. If you had to lean, if you're a betting scientist, you'd lean towards a new family of particles that don't interact with ours.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Okay, gotcha.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  That's...

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where the most money is being spent.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that direction, right.

• 37:04Chuck Nice?

  And, and, and how much validity, uh, which is not the right word. Um, what kind of evidence is showing us that that may be where we need to continue the search?

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Again, it's, it's what we keep eliminating. So, we've eliminated huge numbers of these fantastical subatomic particles.

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  That can't fit the data.

• 37:24Chuck Nice?

  Can't fit the bill, okay.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  So, we narrow and narrow and narrow. If we, if we shrink it all the way down to zero, like, there's no phase space left. There's no, there's no possible range of masses and energies and things for these particles. Well, then, we've eliminated that as a possibility. We might have to think a little harder.

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's basically how that, how, that's how we roll.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that, when it's done sensibly and, and with a directed mission statement. So, uh, so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, I, I like the idea when you say it's, it's, it's a model because what we're describing fits the data available to us.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or it is not violated in the absence of data, yet.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So, all of this, it's, it's this, it's this contest on the frontier of knowledge.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Goes on every day.

• 38:06Chuck Nice?

  So, what Rob, Rob should know is that this is an ongoing process.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An ongoing process.

• 38:10Chuck Nice?

  No one is saying definitively, "This is the deal." What we're saying is, in our best knowledge, this is where we are now.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'd like David's second opinion on this. Uh, I would say that no longer is science reporting in the news a major weak point in this problem.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've seen this hugely talented science reporters out there that by and large get it right, or they get it right enough so that they're not the ones that we can point to in this. But a little last peeve I have is when they say, oh, this new discovery about dark matter could send scientists back to the drawing board. It's like, no, we are always at the drawing board.

• 38:53Chuck Nice?

  Always at the drawing board, right.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you were not at the drawing board, you were not on the frontier.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  It's not like you went, dark matter, Mai Tais for everyone. Let's hit the pool.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, no, no, no, no. You know, just go, go, yeah.

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  All right, cool.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another one. Give me one.

• 39:09Chuck Nice?

  Let's move on to Christopher Lean, and Christopher says this, fact, colon, a noun, thing that is indisputably the case. Maybe we should stop calling things that are disputable facts. So I think his, his point in this is there's a lot of, um, fact talk being bandied about, about things that maybe are not facts indeed. So in science is a fact, something that is indisputable.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me hear from you, David. How do you deal?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  So I have a definition of a fact that I use in my talks on climate change, for example. A fact is a measurement of some physical quantity done with the best available equipment, vetted through skeptical review, and provisional with an uncertainty associated with it.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. So wait, wait. So Chuck is sitting to my left. Is that a fact?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  That is a fact, because I can measure that.

• 40:08Chuck Nice?

  Picture of it.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Of course, left depends on the point of view.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. To my left, I said. Yes, yes, yes.

• 40:16Chuck Nice?

  Got you. Another question.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  There are three of us sitting here. That's.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so measurement matters.

• 40:20Chuck Nice?

  Measurement matters.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Measurement matters. So it's not a fact if Jesus is my savior. That's a personal, it's a very personal thing that you cannot measure by these tools. So we, so just don't even use, whatever you want to call it, you just don't use the word fact.

• 40:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. Okay.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  So I agree with.

• 40:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay, got you.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  Ultra suede is amazing. Fact?

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Opinion.

• 40:41Chuck Nice?

  Opinion. Okay, all right.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you agree with the rather harsh, but I think mostly true statement that after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Well.

• 40:52Chuck Nice?

  That's really.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's, it's audacious. It's audacious.

• 40:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  It depends how you're, how broad your definition of physics is. I mean, I don't think it's physics that the three of us are sitting here, we can count up to three. I mean, that's not really physics.

• 41:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, for yourself there, David.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you're counting, you're not measuring. That's an important distinction. That's why there's no measurement error when you're counting.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Well.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not three plus or minus a half, right? This is three exactly.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's sixty-seven million votes plus or minus a few hundred thousand because you can't count them perfectly, right? So you're counting.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That case, right, right, okay.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  That's you.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 41:26Chuck Nice?

  That's you. All right, here we go.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, keep it going.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. This is Jeff Minier.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After this, we go to lightning round.

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  We're gonna go to lightning round.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After this, go on.

• 41:33Chuck Nice?

  It's Jeff Minier who says, "With the US only representing 4.4% of the world's population, does trying to legislate climate really do any good?"

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 41:44Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's 4.4.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's legislate climate in the United States.

• 41:47Chuck Nice?

  No, he's talking about globally.

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, he's saying if we.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  We do something.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we do it.

• 41:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're only 5%.

• 41:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I, I thought he meant that because we're such an insignificant portion of the world's population, should we have the right to tell the world?

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think that's what he means.

• 42:01Chuck Nice?

  But I, I understand what you're saying. You're saying, he's saying, "Since we're such a small portion of the population, if we do something, will it make a difference?"

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Difference at all.

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay. So how about both of those questions?

• 42:12Speaker 02

  All right, so firstly, we produce 22% of the greenhouse gases, so.

• 42:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, there you have it.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  A factor of five. Um, and there used to be a concept of American leadership in the world.

• 42:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Used to be, is the key word there. Uh, and so, taking a leadership position would be addressing a problem which 99 point something percent of the scientific community is in consensus on.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:34Chuck Nice?

  That's you.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:35Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we gotta go lightning round?

• 42:39Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go.

• 42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is where all answers must be in soundbite form, so we can get through as many questions as possible. And this is reminiscent, David, of my PhD thesis defense you served on my committee. And I get, I give my most, you know, my best thesis defense, and at the end, you said, "Okay, now how would you explain this to a reporter from the New York Times?" This is the last like two minutes of the of the thing and I'm deep in the stuff. Right. You know, I'm deep in the stuff and he's been requiring that of anyone to graduate from the the Astro Department at Columbia. So now, this is my version of this. We went through the details. Now it's, can you turn it into a soundbite? All right, there's the bell. Let's do it. Go.

• 43:24Chuck Nice?

  How the worm has turned. Uh, William Fullerton from Facebook. Is there any merit or a good idea of global space agency? Science is almost internationally connected anyway on the planet and space agencies all over the world are already collaborating on dozens of projects. Uh, how long will it be eventually before we're able to do things like send people out of the solar system?

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this like he wants a United Federation of Planets?

• 43:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes, United Federation of Planets.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Um, I think it'll be a long time and it will come about when the notion of a nation-state disappears.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 43:56Chuck Nice?

  Whoa, whoa.

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Now there's so much I want to talk about.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He hit that out of the park. Okay.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  That was great.

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very Einsteinian, by the way. Einstein imagined a world, a world government.

• 44:05Chuck Nice?

  Amazing.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 44:06Chuck Nice?

  Uh, so Patrick Leo Beal says this. With reference to WF9, I know people are worried about it will hit the earth. However, we won't see a close enough approach until December 2055. Even if that is the case, close enough to do anything about January 2063, it comes real close. What can we do and should we do about it now?

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, kill our asteroids.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Worry.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. No, no, let me, let me flesh that out. I can't. Okay, ready? Let me finish his sentence. Ready? Uh, we're worry enough to put into play what we already know to do under that situation, but do not yet have the wisdom or the foresight to act.

• 44:45Chuck Nice?

  All right. Derek Seabird wants to know this. Seabird wants to know this. How much farther ahead would we be if the Dark Ages were avoided? And do you think the Dark Ages are making a comeback?

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, David.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Dark Ages are definitely making a comeback.

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Uh, but we wouldn't be any further ahead because the Dark Ages were only in a little isolated part of the world that we used to worry about. But other places at the same time, we're experiencing a wonderful flowering of intellectual.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Passion.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's a good answer, but let me come back at you. We think of the Dark Ages as closing off the intellectual technological enlightenment of the Roman Empire. So if the Roman Empire did not fall, and their interest in architecture and engineering had continued, do you think that would have eventually fallen for some other reason? Or might that have still stuck with Europe?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think empires are designed to fall.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Man, David is kicking it.

• 45:39Chuck Nice?

  I think history's on your side there.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, go, go.

• 45:41Chuck Nice?

  All right, Katie Cortina says this. Since you're a professor, David, as a science teacher in a public school, how do I balance teaching inquiry and questioning without being politically correct about my students' beliefs?

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, David.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Well, I think you have to separate beliefs from facts, and questioning is the critical component of that.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if someone has a belief system that conflicts with facts as they emerge from the scientific community, then you are teaching something that is directly in the face of their beliefs. Then what do you do?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  But don't challenge their beliefs. People's beliefs are, you know, that's really tough.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Let them have their beliefs. That belief's fine.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They go home, believe what they want.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Exercise. We're doing a little exercise now. Like we do exercise in the playground. We're gonna do exercise with our brains.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  And we're going to see where this chain of logic leads us.

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We got time for one more. Pick a good one, go.

• 46:35Chuck Nice?

  All right, Evan Mitchell wants to know this. How's your society? Government, teachers, deal with the anti-science folks or whatever you want to label them, teaching these things to their children, listen, at home? So I would imagine many of them.

• 46:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Homeschoolers.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, homeschoolers is what he's talking about.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or school boards that get.

• 46:54Chuck Nice?

  Or school boards. Right. Their children, I would imagine telling their children the things that their textbooks and teachers tell them are outright lies. So what do you do?

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you do, David?

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

  Disinformation. Forget misinformation.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Active disinformation.

• 47:08Chuck Nice?

  Disinformation.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By educators, go.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Again, I think you teach people to construct their own knowledge. You don't pass them information, misinformation, or disinformation. You teach them how to construct their own knowledge, and that'll make them question those parents.

• 47:25Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Love it.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David.

• 47:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You killed it, dude. Killed it. You killed it. David Helfand, special guest today. Old friend, old professor. Looks like Santa Claus, if you don't see him on the thing.

• 47:38Chuck Nice?

  You're gonna have to subscribe to StarTalkAllAccess.com and you can see what David looks like.

• 47:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What he actually looks like, the video version. So, this closes out this edition of Cosmic Queries, which is a special subcategory called "Let's Make America Smart Again." Chuck Nice here is my co-host. This is David Helfand's book, "A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age," published by Columbia University Press. It's subtitled "Scientific Habits of Mine."

• 48:07Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's on it. He's in it, because that's how he rolls. David, thanks for being on the show. And I hope it's not so long between now and the next time we see you. I look forward to it. All right, I've been Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.