Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Live at the Bell House (Part 2) About this episode In the second half of our live show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit, Eugene Mirman and our very special guest Alan Alda travel through time and higher dimensions.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Last week, we aired part one of our live recording from the 4th Annual Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival in Brooklyn. This week, we bring you the second half of that show. The next day, I was to leave for Australia, and that fact showed up in our discussions about the paradoxes and limitations of time travel.
0:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We are live at the Bell House in Brooklyn at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. Eugene, please reintroduce your guest here.
0:59 Eugene Mirman? Sure, let's do this. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Kristen Schaal.
1:10 Eugene Mirman? She is a favorite from "Flight of the Conchords" and "The Daily Show." And now, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know why I'm... You're really good at this. It's very dramatic.
1:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And in this corner.
1:20 Eugene Mirman? And in this corner, from 30 Rock, Scott Adsit.
1:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I brought Alan Alda with me, so there.
1:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, so Alan, I was reading your bio. You have six Emmys, but you've been nominated 33 times. Like, what's up with that?
1:47 Speaker 02 I just keep losing.
1:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just checking, you know, I don't wanna like, get in your business there, but...
1:56 Eugene Mirman? I think it sounds impressive.
1:58 Speaker 02 I keep my chin up, I keep trying.
2:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright.
2:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, what about relativity? So as you may know, in relativity, it is prescribed, and we know this is true, we've done it on particles. It's harder to do it on people, because they might die in your experiment. If you accelerate them to high speeds, their time ticks more slowly than it does for everyone who observes them. Time slows down for you, you can effectively go into your own future, that way. And, so in principle, however fast you go, 90% the speed of light, 99% the speed of light, you have unlimited power over how slowly you will age compared with everybody else when you return to Earth. Now, I did the calculation. The shuttle astronauts from STS-135, in fact, I tweeted this. I tweeted that the astronauts, and I forgot, what was it?
2:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was...
2:50 Eugene Mirman? Half a second into the future?
2:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it was like, 100,000th of a second into the future, they traveled. On their voyage around the Earth. And, so, but, people were like...
3:00 Speaker 02 So did they come back and buy stock, or something?
3:07 Speaker 03 Did they recognize the world they returned to? Whoa, what's this? Who are you, honey?
3:14 Speaker 04 The SEC just leave him alone?
3:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I know, yeah, the 100,000th of a second, uh, rule.
3:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you can do this. So if you actually wanna cross the galaxy, you can do it at a sufficiently high speed, even though it's 100,000 light-years across. Get a high enough speed, you can cross there in whatever time you need, without dying before it happens. However, if you wanna observe someone to do it, you have to be a little more clever, and they did this on Star Trek. Hence, the warp drive. The warp drive on Star Trek were engines that took the fabric of space, said, "I'm here, and I wanna go there." Let's warp the space between the two, because they cannot violate the law of traveling faster than light. Warp the space between the two, cut a hole between there and there, unfold space, there you are, across the galaxy during the TV coming through.
4:07 Speaker 02 You know, Neil, that didn't really happen.
4:12 Speaker 02 That was, that was a TV show. And those people were actors. Especially the guy with the pointy ears.
4:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think for some people in the world, that show was real. Yeah.
4:25 Speaker 02 That's what I'm afraid.
4:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And wasn't there a movie where the aliens came and that was real to them?
4:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, that was a great movie.
4:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What movie?
4:31 Speaker 02 That's one of my favorite movies. Galaxy Quest.
4:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Galaxy Quest.
4:34 Eugene Mirman? Oh, the parody, yeah.
4:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, my God.
4:36 Speaker 02 Let's talk about that for the rest of the time.
4:41 Eugene Mirman? I brought scripts if we want to do a reading of it.
4:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So here's the thing, we live in three spatial dimensions in which we have unlimited capacity to move. We are locked forever in the present of the fourth dimension we call time.
4:59 Speaker 03 Just like Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest.
5:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I forgot he was in, Alan Rickman was in Galaxy Quest.
5:06 Speaker 02 He was so good in that.
5:08 Eugene Mirman? Wasn't he great?
5:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:09 Eugene Mirman? So was Tony Shalhoub.
5:12 Speaker 02 Oh, was he good. Oh, my God, that was gorgeous. And wait a minute, let's not forget the Gurney Weaver. Yeah, how about her?
5:23 Eugene Mirman? We've definitely seen the movie.
5:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:25 Speaker 04 I have.
5:26 Speaker 02 We've all seen the movie.
5:30 Speaker 02 So does that take care of that topic?
5:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I guess so, yeah, let's move on from. So all I'm saying, our dimensionality, we are prisoners in the present.
5:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you stepped out of these four dimensions and looked back, in principle, we can re-enter our timeline at any place at all because we would no longer be locked in our own present. It'd just be a simple coordinate like any other spatial coordinate where we can go forward and backwards within it. That means you are always dying, you're always being born, you're always doing whatever it is you were doing at any point along your world line.
6:06 Eugene Mirman? Say that again, but like really fast.
6:09 Speaker 02 Didn't Stephen Hawking say on page 312 that you can't go back-
6:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The brief history of time wasn't that long.
6:18 Speaker 02 You can't go backward in time, I believe-
6:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a problem if you want to go backwards in time. Because if you do and manage to prevent your parents from meeting, you would have never been conceived to then have lived, to then go backwards in time to prevent your parents from being-
6:34 Eugene Mirman? It's called the grandfather paradox.
6:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or grandmother paradox. It takes two-
6:38 Eugene Mirman? But it's called-
6:39 Speaker 04 Thank you.
6:40 Eugene Mirman? But it's referred to as the grandfather paradox.
6:42 Speaker 04 Of course.
6:44 Eugene Mirman? It's a sexist thing. I'm not happy about it.
6:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a sex paradox.
6:50 Eugene Mirman? Oh my god.
6:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In fact, he doesn't have to be your grandfather. It could be your great, great, great, great, great grandfather.
6:56 Eugene Mirman? But they have to call it something.
7:03 Eugene Mirman? No, but go through all the options, Neil.
7:05 Speaker 04 Wait, but Neil, so you're saying right now, right now, you are in Australia also.
7:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no. I am in Australia tomorrow.
7:16 Speaker 04 Right, but that exists in another dimension.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, but you can't call tomorrow now, because now is now and tomorrow's tomorrow.
7:23 Speaker 04 And I'm a prisoner of now.
7:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You are the prisoner of the now.
7:25 Eugene Mirman? But you are always in Australia, no?
7:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm always in Australia tomorrow.
7:31 Speaker 02 I came all the way to Brooklyn for this?
7:36 Eugene Mirman? You could have gotten just high in 1972 and had the same conversation.
7:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, it turns out, there's no reason in principle why space, or the universe, or the cosmos at large, would be limited to four dimensions. There could be other dimensions we are not exposed to, have no access to.
8:01 Eugene Mirman? Like, can I guess, like a fifth dimension?
8:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A fifth dimension. A fifth dimension.
8:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, here's what's interesting.
8:18 Eugene Mirman? Ah, that's good, that's good.
8:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If I take an ant and embed him in a sheet of paper, and I draw a box around the ant, the ant cannot get out of the box, because the ant is stuck in the sheet of paper. The ant is in jail. I have surrounded the ant on all four sides by what the ant considers to be a wall. But we higher dimensional creatures called humans say, "Ant, just step out! And back down, and you've escaped."
8:46 Speaker 04 And he doesn't speak English.
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
8:49 Eugene Mirman? Without making a big deal, weird example, but go on.
8:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You would have to speak ant.
8:55 Speaker 02 I don't like how you have to prove this theory with a stupid ant.
8:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, you would have to speak-
8:58 Speaker 02 Why don't you get a smart ant and see what happens?
9:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No matter the brilliance of the ant, if it's embedded in the page, it cannot get out of a-
9:04 Speaker 02 Oh, embedded in the page?
9:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, it cannot get out of a square.
9:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
9:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We know how to get out of the square, because we are higher dimensional creatures than the embedded ant. We just say, "Step out, come back in, you're fine." Imagine a higher dimensional creature than we seeing us in a jail cell, surrounded on all of our six sides by a wall. They'll say, "Just step out in the fifth dimension, and then go back in, and you've escaped. Can't you see it?"
9:33 Speaker 04 Oh, I'm so humiliated by that being!
9:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They will view us-
9:43 Speaker 02 Is there any room at that table?
9:49 Speaker 02 He's pounding the table here. This is solid stuff. You can't get out just going through the table.
9:54 Speaker 04 Ah, higher beings.
9:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, think about it. Since the jail cell is actually only a jail cell in three dimensions, not four, if you had access even to our time dimension, you could just rejoin your timeline before you enter the jail cell, and you've escaped the jail cell.
10:13 Speaker 03 But you can use the four- We could all use the fourth dimension to get out of that jail cell if we just serve our time.
10:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes! Yes!
10:21 Eugene Mirman? What if we go to stand next to some sort of giant mask? Can we go into the future then?
10:28 Eugene Mirman? No? Like a huge, like a... huge mask?
10:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did you say mask?
10:36 Eugene Mirman? Mask, no, like M.A.S.S. probably.
10:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ma-
10:41 Eugene Mirman? Like, uh-
10:42 Speaker 02 What, you mean like we all become Catholic? What do you mean?
10:45 Eugene Mirman? I mean, is there a church you could go to to go into the future? No, I mean, isn't there? No. I mean, if you... I don't know, I mean, this is obviously a thing I'm explaining poorly to a scientist. But it's really fun to get a chance to do this.
11:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Mirman's Time Machine Theory. Go.
11:06 Eugene Mirman? Well, one, if you can go around the Earth like, say, uh, seven times a second, would you then go into the future?
11:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was Superman.
11:17 Eugene Mirman? Yes.
11:20 Eugene Mirman? I got it off Discovery Channel, but I know.
11:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was a movie-
11:23 Eugene Mirman? He rewound the Earth, I'm not a fool. I'm saying if you got onto a train that went around the Earth seven times a second, would that be any help to anybody? And then the other thing is if you were next to some sort of giant mass of some sort, like the sun, or maybe something colder. Is there any way... How do you go into the future is my question, and I'm coming up with bad examples.
11:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
11:44 Eugene Mirman? And I apologize.
11:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so now we know what you meant by the word mass. Okay, you mean a physical Newtonian mass, yes. So, it is-
11:52 Eugene Mirman? Sorry, I didn't know Newtonian.
11:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
11:56 Eugene Mirman? My bad.
11:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are some trajectories-
12:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are some trajectories through the fabric of spacetime around extremely massive objects, where you can actually go into your own past, but it is a past that does not interact with your timeline, spaceline, through life. So you cannot actually interfere with anything you've done in the past.
12:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, but you-
12:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're in another past, not your own past.
12:27 Eugene Mirman? Sounds fun.
12:28 Speaker 02 It sounds like you're saying that theoretically, based on the math, time is kind of flexible, you can go back and forth in it, but-
12:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, if you have, if you have the power, yes.
12:38 Speaker 02 But in, in real life, you can't do what you can do on paper with the math, am I right?
12:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because we don't have the power, yes.
12:46 Speaker 02 What power? The power of voodoo?
12:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The power of moving through time.
12:53 Speaker 02 What power are we talking about?
12:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All I'm saying is that we can show on paper that there's no reason for the universe-
12:58 Speaker 02 That's what I'm trying to say. You can show it on paper, but just try to walk through that wall.
13:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here's the concern. No, not here. You're a fraud. No.
13:13 Speaker 04 You're the ant. I got a question, Neil, if the ant's in its physical body, and we're like, "Come on out, ant, come up here." Would he jump up and then deteriorate because, or fall back and crush his little body on the paper?
13:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, don't try away from this. It's not a real ant. It's a two-dimensional. It's a drawing of an ant. It's not a real ant he's talking about. Well, it can understand English, so it's some kind of ant. He said it's a two-dimensional ant.
13:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a pretend ant.
13:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we will continue with our live broadcast from the Bell House in Brooklyn.
14:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing with the broadcast of our first show in front of a live audience at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn. In addition to Eugene, our panel included the comedian Scott Adsit and Kristen Schaal, and our very special guest, Alan Alda.
14:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A physicist, a theorist, named Dirac.
14:31 Speaker 04 Oh, yes.
14:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is he your boy?
14:35 Speaker 04 I'm my first child.
14:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dirac noticed the equations of quantum mechanics and noted that there were two solutions to one of the equations. Some equations have more than one solution. For example, what is the square root of 9? Class 3. However, it is also minus 3. Minus 3 times minus 3 is 9, so 2 is plus 3 times plus 3. Two equally legitimate solutions to the question.
15:06 Speaker 02 So if I lose $3 three times, I really have $9?
15:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, you have-
15:12 Speaker 02 Exactly.
15:15 Speaker 02 That's fantastic.
15:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it's if you-
15:22 Speaker 02 If I don't lose $3.
15:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you don't not lose $3, three times.
15:26 Speaker 02 I realize that, as I said, but I didn't want to embarrass you. You're right, you're right, totally right.
15:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of course, it's obvious.
15:33 Speaker 02 And you're even right about time.
15:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. So, here's the point. Dirac noticed that this equation, which applied to matter itself, he said to himself, "If there's an electron," and that's a solution to this equation, "there ought to be another thing that is the opposite of the electron."
15:53 Speaker 02 The positron.
15:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The positron.
15:55 Speaker 02 Which, as Richard Feynman said, "The positron is, of course, an electron going backward in time."
16:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly.
16:02 Speaker 02 I love, don't you love the phrase, "In the middle of that, he says, 'Of course.'"
16:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The prediction was made on paper of the existence of antimatter that became an instruction booklet for the experimentalists to go look for it, and they found it. Antimatter was discovered in the lab before science fiction ever got a hold of it. So, what we find on paper, even if we cannot even imagine it at the time the equation is written, becomes a recipe for future discoveries. And therein is the machinery, the operations, and the very nature of science itself.
16:43 Speaker 02 Whoa.
16:47 Speaker 02 So, do you think that because theoretically you can go back in time, in other words, the equations show that you can go back, like a positron goes backward in time, that this is something that is, that can happen to us, or that only happens to particles? And it doesn't happen in a way we can experience?
17:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We just happen to be a lot of particles together, and it's easier to accelerate particles because you stick them in a magnetic field, and, you know, we can play with particles, and PETA won't complain, right? Because particles have no lobby, right? You can destroy them, smash them, no one will complain what you did to the particles. So, they are our proxy for what might happen to us if one day we build a machine that could accelerate us. That's all. So, I'm not going to stop the equations.
17:34 Speaker 02 I didn't say you should stop the equations, I just-
17:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're acting like it.
17:37 Speaker 02 No, I wasn't, I wasn't. I just, I'm trying to, I'm trying to find out the relationship between the equations and things that we can experience. And it sounds like you're actually saying that someday we'll be able to experience the going back in time.
17:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Someday we may. Not at the rate we are currently funding science, however.
18:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We are sliding backwards.
18:05 Speaker 02 I didn't think we were breaking for a commercial yet.
18:08 Eugene Mirman? Do you think it'd take, what, like another like five grand? Like, what do you...
18:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pass the hat.
18:13 Eugene Mirman? Are we five grand away from time travel?
18:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, like, what are the materials?
18:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just thinking it would be so cool if we had access to much higher dimensions. Imagine how different the world would look to us. Imagine how imprisoned we look to higher dimensional beings.
18:28 Speaker 04 But, but the, the next step for the access, you, you can see them, you can equate them. So what is it that you need to get there?
18:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't know.
18:38 Speaker 04 Like titanium? Like, are we gonna build a titanium ladder to dimension seven? I mean, like, what is it that we're missing?
18:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't know.
18:49 Eugene Mirman? Unobtainy.
18:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unobtainy, yes.
18:53 Eugene Mirman? Well, I know some aliens we could kill and take it from them.
18:58 Speaker 04 They are peaceful creatures, Eugene.
19:00 Eugene Mirman? They're too tall to live.
19:03 Speaker 04 They make love with their hair.
19:06 Eugene Mirman? That's their first mistake.
19:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why they have that USB hair ponytail that plugs into things, you know?
19:15 Speaker 04 What is it, the problem about us not knowing is that we simply can't imagine it? Just like the ant can't imagine getting out?
19:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why we have equations, to go places our brain cannot imagine.
19:27 Speaker 04 Well, maybe you need bigger imaginations to come up with new equations.
19:38 Eugene Mirman? I can't tell, I think you were just dared to something?
19:43 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, isn't that...
19:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was just totally dissed.
19:45 Speaker 04 Isn't there always a point where math can't go on without an extra bit of imagination?
19:51 Speaker 02 That's where the money comes in.
19:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, imagination and math go hand in hand. The difference is, the imagination and the math don't have to actually represent reality, yet. That's the only difference. But you need the imagination to carry the math forward. But sometimes, when you manipulate the equations following normal math rules, the equations guide you to places your imagination had not yet conceived.
20:17 Eugene Mirman? Holy bifurcate.
20:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and, and example of that is, Lobachevsky, the mathematician.
20:26 Speaker 04 Second kid's name.
20:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Among others, asked the question, "We learned geometry from Euclid. Parallel lines never intersect. The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees." He said, "Suppose space were not that. Suppose parallel lines had to intersect. Suppose the angles of a triangle had to be greater than or less than 180 degrees. What would the world look like then?" Thus was born, an entire new branch of geometry, called non-Euclidean geometry, where space is curved. And it languished there for centuries. The mathematicians had no clue what to do with it, because they could only do it on the page, until...
21:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Until...
21:15 Eugene Mirman? AutoCAD!
21:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Until Albert Einstein showed that the very fabric of the universe in which we live is curved, and all the math was ready-made and available on the shelf to apply to his new theory of general relativity.
21:40 Speaker 04 So we just need some new maths?
21:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some, yes. So that was, everything you never wanted to know about higher dimensions, and you heard it here on StarTalk.
21:51 Eugene Mirman? Wait, can I just ask, though I know it's kind of productive, what is an example of like a fifth dimension? I know that the word "fifth dimension" is one example, but what's the... But what would be an example?
22:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of a fifth dimension?
22:03 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
22:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I...
22:07 Eugene Mirman? Sounds good, get it, okay.
22:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
22:10 Speaker 02 No, that's probably an example of what you're talking about, that it exists and is useful, in fact, up to ten dimensions, or maybe more, useful in the math than trying to figure out the universe, but nobody can picture it or even describe it, right?
22:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me blow your mind before we go to break. You ready? You ready for this? Watch, okay? Are you seated? Okay, except for those who are still standing and drinking at the bar. Okay, you ready? A point has zero dimensions. That's why it's called a point. A line has one dimension. It is bounded by two points, each with zero dimension. A square is bounded... A square is two dimensions, but it's bounded by one-dimensional sides, each of which is bounded by one-dimensional points. Zero-dimensional points.
23:13 Speaker 02 Are you making this up as you go along?
23:17 Speaker 03 You forgot the words to your own song.
23:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so, so the lesson in progress here is that the shape you... The dimensionality of the shape you described is bounded by forms of one dimension less than the one you just described. So the square is two-dimensional, it's bounded by one-dimensional sides. A cube is three-dimensional, bounded by two-dimensional sides. A cube is a three-dimensional object.
23:53 Eugene Mirman? Now tell us about a time cube.
23:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so now watch. So, a line segment has two boundaries. A square has four. A cube has six sides, each of which is a square. A square has four sides, each of which is a line. A line has one side, bounded by two points. A four-dimensional cube is bounded by three-dimensional cubes on eight sides.
24:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I'm saying! That's what I'm saying!
24:37 Eugene Mirman? Alright.
24:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I'm saying! Right, so, so, its edges are three-dimensional cubes. Those are its sides. In the same way that the sides of a three-dimensional cube are squares.
24:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, that may be, but it's no reason to almost have bitten me.
25:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, let's go to break. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we'll do a brief ditty on the rampant spread of pseudoscience in the world today, and to figure out we have any solutions from this panel, so we can solve the problems of the world. And then we'll go to the audience for Q and A. We'll be right back, here on StarTalk Radio.
25:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. We are live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn in the house, as they say.
25:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Briefly, in this segment, I just want to talk about how much we are amok in pseudoscience, especially in America today. I get at least five emails a day, somebody saying, "Will the world still be here in 2012? Because the Mayans said it would end." And so my only response there is, "The Mayans could not predict their own demise. Why should we have confidence that they know about the end of the universe?" There's basic thinking that's not going on, and I'm worried about this. Alan, you spent the second half of your career trying to bring science to the public. Are you as pissed off as I am?
26:24 Eugene Mirman? The answer to that is no.
26:29 Speaker 02 I don't think anybody's as pissed off as you are.
26:34 Speaker 02 But it is rough. There's a lot of belief that goes before evidence. There's a website you can go to, where you can communicate with dead people. They charge $5, and what they do is, you write a message out, and they give it to somebody who's about to die, and he memorizes it. And for that five dollars, that person finds your dead relative and tells them your message.
26:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So who gets the five dollars, the dead person?
27:00 Speaker 02 No, the dead, the exchange rate is terrible.
27:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I can't see it.
27:05 Eugene Mirman? Wait, you send a message, they show it to someone who's about to die, assuming that like as if they're going to France.
27:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:11 Eugene Mirman? And then they pass it on when they get to France.
27:14 Speaker 02 And somehow they're able to find your, now this exists in people.
27:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, now, now, in all fairness, that's at least an experiment, that's verifiable or falsifiable.
27:22 Speaker 02 It ain't. How do you know that they delivered the message? You don't get any message back.
27:26 Speaker 03 I would love to be the guy on his deathbed. I want, where do I sign up to be that guy?
27:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, of course.
27:31 Speaker 04 How do you know a black hole that's spinning doesn't suck in dead souls and spit them out to another place? Maybe the particles of a dead, uh, soul are just right.
27:42 Speaker 02 This is a really interesting question that you've raised.
27:45 Speaker 04 Thank you.
27:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whether dead people are flung or slingshot through a black hole?
27:49 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no, no, the idea, you know, when you were talking about many dimensions, and when scientists talk about string theory, it sounds to some people that anything is possible.
28:02 Speaker 02 Are you gonna hit the table again? He's clearing the table, he's gonna have a real eruption here.
28:09 Speaker 02 Listen to what I'm, I'm asking you.
28:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm listening. I just rolled up my sleeves, because I'm gonna be ready for what follows. Go.
28:16 Speaker 02 When many laypeople hear about quantum mechanics, and it's counterintuitive when they hear about Schrodinger's cat and that kind of thing, a thing can both be and not be at the same time. They think to themselves, well, anything is possible, so why couldn't you go into a black hole and come out the other end? If you can imagine it, why can't it be true? So that's a problem, it seems to me, you have in explaining science to people, especially the more esoteric parts of it.
28:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, you are absolutely right. Up until the 20th century, what we discovered about the universe had some consistency with our five senses.
28:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You let something go, it drops. You push something, it moves. The laws of nature seem to make sense to us. Only when we began to probe nature in places where the sun don't shine, okay? When we started to notice that we had access to the atom, access to the large-scale universe. We had access to physical phenomenon that transcended our life experience. We saw the universe behaving in ways that does not issue forth from our life experience. Yet it nonetheless represented itself that way in our experiments. And we had the cold, hard reality that you can no longer invoke your senses
29:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? as the measure of what is true in the universe. That at the end of the day, what mattered is whether or not the experiment demonstrated it was true.
29:48 Speaker 02 Ah, that's the critical moment.
29:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right.
29:50 Speaker 02 The experiment seems like the critical moment because if you can imagine things freely and think that they're probably as true as quantum mechanics, then anything is possible and we can all go around wearing pyramid hats and little crystals that ward off evil.
30:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Your crystals?
30:10 Eugene Mirman? First of all, you can wear hats. That's not being disputed.
30:16 Eugene Mirman? It won't have much of an effect mystically.
30:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, Alan, yes, you can wear pyramid hat if you'd like.
30:24 Speaker 02 I'm not arguing for pyramid hats. It's the opposite. What I'm saying is people get the idea.
30:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Didn't it sound like he was arguing for pyramid hats?
30:32 Speaker 04 It sounded like you had a line of pyramid hats for sale. I would wear one.
30:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the point is, if a claim is made, you want there to be evidence in support of it. So we're living in a world where evidence is not the foundation of what people think or say. And that is the problem with American society today.
30:51 Speaker 03 When I was in junior high, my friends and I had a theory which we loved, which was that if the universe is truly infinite, in the real meaning of that word, there is no such thing as fiction.
31:04 Speaker 04 And also, isn't the fact that you don't have evidence for things that you can imagine? And isn't that what's propelling science?
31:16 Eugene Mirman? Are there infinite Earths?
31:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Probably.
31:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Science is a, they're two parallel streets. One of them, the brilliant ideas, the imaginative people, who put up an idea. And then there are the experimentalists who test it. And if it's wrong, you throw the idea out. So the theory goes ahead of the experiment. The experiment gets conducted, the theory fails, you throw it out. On the other side, you can have an experiment that has no understanding at all. Yet it is a result and it is a phenomenon, and it's waiting for the theorists to catch up. Such is the state of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. We know it's out there, we have measured it.
32:02 Speaker 04 What is it?
32:06 Eugene Mirman? Very quickly.
32:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just said, we have no idea what it is. But say how big it is.
32:13 Speaker 04 But you know it's a thing that's out there, but you don't know what you're saying?
32:16 Eugene Mirman? What does it taste like? Give us that.
32:19 Speaker 04 Isn't it the opposite of something? Is that why?
32:22 Eugene Mirman? Where can I buy some?
32:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell how much of it there is. There is five-sixths. That's a fraction you know here often. Five-sixths of all the gravity we have measured in the universe has a source of origin about which we know nothing. It is not electrons, protons, neutrons, black holes, clouds, stars, planets, nebulae, comets. It is nothing we know about.
32:47 Eugene Mirman? Proof of God!
32:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We, we call that dark matter. But really, we don't know what it is, we could call it Fred. It doesn't matter, okay? Why don't we then?
33:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, why is it dark matter? That's so uninviting.
33:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I get it, okay. Then... We look out in the universe, and the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang should be slowing down because of the collective gravity of all the galaxies, but it's not. It is accelerating in its expansion. There is a pressure in the vacuum of space causing this. We don't know what that is either. We call that dark energy. If you add up dark matter and dark energy, it is 96% of everything that's driving this universe. And we don't know jack about it. And all we do know is the 4% about which our laws of physics apply. The hand and will of God.
33:43 Eugene Mirman? Yay.
33:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can we bring up the house lights? We'll go straight to Q and A.
33:52 Eugene Mirman? Yeah. There's mics if people wanna...
33:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Come up to the mic?
33:56 Eugene Mirman? Yeah. If you say it into the mic, then it'll become part of the radio.
34:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, sir, go ahead.
34:01 Speaker 05 My question is, you spoke earlier about life existing in incredibly inhospitable parts of our world. Why is it that astronomers sometimes completely eliminate certain planets as possible places for life? Like, why are they not even checking Venus? If life can adapt to extremely hot temperatures like that...
34:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're right. We have a slight bias, but it's an understandable bias. It's called, "We are in search of life as we know it." And life as we know it, it's carbon-based, and phosphorus is in there, and...
34:29 Eugene Mirman? A face?
34:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And a face. No, no. Life as we know it is Earth biology, most of which does not have face. But it's an understandable bias, because if you say, "Is there any example of life anywhere on Earth?", yes, it's here. It's life as we know it. So you start with what you know. If you say, "Well, why don't you look for what you don't know?", well, what is that? We don't know. See, that's the problem. That's the experimental problem. You can't design an experiment to look for something about which you know nothing. So you might as well look for something about which you know something, in fact, about which you know quite a bit.
35:03 Speaker 05 Right.
35:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Second, Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit. A runaway greenhouse effect. By the way, a place to keep close tabs on, because the knobs that got turned there went bad.
35:17 Speaker 06 What knob?
35:19 Eugene Mirman? Was it at one point...
35:19 Speaker 06 And who turned it?
35:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We are flanked by planets that have gone bad. Venus, I did the calculation. You could take a 16-inch pepperoni pizza, put it on the windowsill, and it will cook in nine seconds. That is Venus. You go to Mars. Once had liquid running water on its surface. Today, it is bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. Nobbs. So, with Venus, what you find is that the molecules that carbon makes are not energetically bound tightly enough to survive those temperatures. So we're absolutely certain that life is only carbon-based? No, what I'm saying is...
36:03 Speaker 04 That's what you know, but you don't know what you don't know.
36:07 Eugene Mirman? It's not worth sending a spaceship to a thing that is probably not the thing.
36:11 Speaker 02 No, but answer his question. It's a really good question.
36:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so, so the bonds that are strong enough to sustain 900 degrees are not carbon bonds. They're silicon bonds. And what is silicon? It's rock in its many forms.
36:23 Speaker 02 So it's like the rock people in Galaxy Quest?
36:33 Eugene Mirman? Exactly.
36:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly, yes. Um, so, you're right. Is there some kind of special life thriving on Venus that is not harmed by the 900 degrees and thinks that that's just comfortable weather? We don't know what that would be, because as the lady said, we don't know what we don't know. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, we will return to the Bell House in Brooklyn.
37:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing with the broadcast of our first show in front of a live audience at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn. In addition to Eugene, our panel included the comedian Scott Adsit and Kristen Schaal, and our very special guest, Alan Alda. Yes, ma'am.
37:32 Speaker 07 Hi, thank you. So, a lot of the hypotheses and phenomena that you talked about tonight are based on kind of mathematical models. And I think that this was Alan's point, was that it's just because of the nature of these questions, they're not easy to test these hypotheses with experiments, like things like time travel, right? So, all we're left with is the math. And so, the validity of the predictions from the math are based on how well-constrained the parameters of these models are to data. So, my question is, you know, if you want to do something like predict how Kristin is going to be torn apart to like 2 to the 10th times by a black hole, you have to have information about the statistics of a black hole. And this is a naive question, but like, is there data to support that? How well-constrained are the parameters of these models? Or is it all kind of bullshit, where you're choosing from a range? I mean, I really, I don't know.
38:17 Speaker 07 I'm not a physicist.
38:18 Eugene Mirman? This is how we party in Brooklyn.
38:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I paraphrase your question, in case you missed it. How are you constraining the parameters of your model? Or is it bullshit? Right, this is the question.
38:32 Speaker 07 I'm sorry for the length.
38:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, that's fine. I have a very simple answer.
38:36 Eugene Mirman? I doubt it.
38:42 Eugene Mirman? But let's see.
38:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's just, just...
38:45 Eugene Mirman? I simply doubt the hypothesis.
38:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Spitballing here to find out. Okay. We don't have to test every case. If previous occasions where we've tested it, it has followed exactly what the laws of physics told us it would do. You gain such a level of confidence that you can just declare that what you expect to happen will happen in the future. And so, the stuff we do know, we know really well. And that is what gravity is doing in the vicinity of a black hole. And so, we don't have to do the black hole experiment to predict with high precision what it's going to do. It's the same equations that allow us to land a rover on Mars within a 10-foot radius after it's moved 100 million miles through space.
39:31 Speaker 07 But I mean, with all due respect, that stuff was practiced in like zero-gravity experiments and stuff. Like, I mean, my point is...
39:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, you didn't practice landing on Mars.
39:38 Speaker 07 No, but you practiced kind of the interaction. I mean, I see your point. And so, the answer seems to be that the parameters of the model are well-constrained.
39:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, we didn't practice going to Mars to land with that accuracy.
39:48 Speaker 07 No.
39:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no. So, that's what I'm commenting on now. The laws of gravity are so well-known that we don't have to say, "You know..." This might not make it to Mars, let's just check it out, okay? We knew, we knew the Apollo astronauts were gonna make it to the moon. Now, if this craft's gonna hold up, that's an engineering test that you have to do. But not the laws of physics, okay? Neil Armstrong, or was it Buzz Aldrin? On the moon, dropped a hammer and a feather in the airless environment of the moon. They fell at exactly the same rate as predicted by Galileo, who could not have done the experiment, because a feather responds to air. So this is the power of science.
40:28 Eugene Mirman? He's going to eat you if you don't move. We have time for one more question, last question. One more question.
40:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, sir.
40:35 Eugene Mirman? You, sir.
40:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, Dr. Tyson? That means it's gotta be an awesome question. Otherwise, people are gonna be pissed off.
40:41 Eugene Mirman? It's fine, it can be shitty, just have fun.
40:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The universe is expanding. What is it expanding into? Like, it's gotta be, like, if it's expanding, it's gotta be something like it's growing, right?
40:54 Eugene Mirman? Into a sandwich, okay, we're done.
40:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if it's not expanding, like, how could it, like, how is there nothing that it's, like, expanding into? What is the universe expanding into? I can answer that. I have an answer for you.
41:06 Speaker 04 Great question!
41:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I can, I'm happy that I can answer that. We have no idea.
41:15 Eugene Mirman? Really? Not even a hint?
41:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, okay, there's a hint, but there's no data.
41:20 Speaker 04 It's expanding into what you don't know.
41:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I wanna separate what we have, like, meaningful. Alright, so...
41:26 Speaker 02 This question supposes that something is outside the space that we think we know.
41:34 Eugene Mirman? Well, it's growing.
41:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the ant imagining, "I wonder what the square is expanding into." That's right. So the answer to that is, whatever it is, it's a higher dimension than what we currently occupy. And, latest theories of quantum physics, mixed with gravitational physics, tell us that our bubble that is expanding, that we call our universe, might not be the only bubble out there. There might be other universes in a continuously frothing foam...
42:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of a metaverse. In fact, we have a word for it. It's called the multiverse. The multiverse is multiple universes being spawned, going in and out of existence. We are just one of them. The concept of the multiverse had strong experimental and philosophical precedent. There was a day we thought Earth was particularly special, but no, it's just one of eight planets. Well, the sun is really important, right? No, it's one of 100 billion suns, we would later learn. Well, that's the 100 billion suns of our galaxy. Surely, our galaxy is what it is. Nope.
42:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hubble showed, Hubble the man, showed it's one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe. And now you have us saying, well, that's the one universe. Well, why would there only be one of anything, even including the universe itself?
43:02 Eugene Mirman? Thank you, guys, so very, very much for coming out. Thank you to Neil Tyson, Alan Alda, Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit.
43:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, I gotta officially sign out the thing?
43:16 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, yeah.
43:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've been listening to StarTalk Radio live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York.
43:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Follow us on the web, we're on Facebook. Just look for StarTalk Radio. Our website is starTalkRadio.net. I tweet the universe, mostly cosmic brain droppings, at Neil Tyson. Eugene, you're a Twitter person as well, aren't you?
43:40 Eugene Mirman? Sure, we all are.
43:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, let's get your Twitter handle, Gene?
43:44 Eugene Mirman? Eugene Mirman. At Eugene Mirman.
43:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At Eugene Mirman.
43:48 Speaker 04 I'm Kristen Schaldd, E.D., K.R.I.S.T.E., and forget it.
43:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Schaldd, okay.
43:56 Speaker 04 I'm bad at Twitter.
43:58 Speaker 03 I am Scott Adsit, and I do not tweet.
44:05 Eugene Mirman? Stay in the past.
44:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation.
44:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As always, at the end of each StarTalk episode, we compel you to keep looking up. You got it!
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