Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Stars Talk to Neil – Rocket Fuel About this episode The observer effect? Rotating bodies? The science of rocket fuel? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice answer science questions from our favorite pro athletes: Jerry Rice, Lindsey Vonn, Eli Manning, and more!
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.
0:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist and one-time athlete, although not of the professional kind. For that, as my co-host, we got Gary O'Reilly. Gary?
0:28 Gary O'Reilly? Hey Neil.
0:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, man. Former pro soccer player, footballer, as I think they call him, over across the pond. Always good to have you there as my co-host. And of course Chuck Nice.
0:39 Chuck Nice? Yes, someone who has actually seen a pro soccer game.
0:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So for this episode of Sports Edition, it's a new format, really, and it's called...
0:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Gary, what do we call it? Athletes Ask Neil?
0:56 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
0:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what it's called. So what have you cooked up here?
0:59 Gary O'Reilly? Well, I think what we've done is we've gone and found some super elite, world-famous athletes and said, "Hey, why don't you ask Neil a question?"
1:12 Gary O'Reilly? And they went, "Really? I get that chance? I get the opportunity to ask Neil a question?" I said, "Yeah."
1:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love it.
1:19 Gary O'Reilly? "What do you got? What's on your mind?" And so this is a little taster of what we're hoping to bring forward in the future.
1:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's good. Let's see how this goes down. And if I can't answer the question, that means this format has failed.
1:33 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck and I'll jump in.
1:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He'll jump in and help out.
1:36 Gary O'Reilly? And it may or may not be, it won't be the same.
1:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think, I'm looking at the list here, oh my gosh, we got Eli Manning, we got Lindsey Vonn, Jerry Rice, Tony Gonzalez. Oh my God. I'm looking forward to this. Okay, this is actual recordings of them asking me questions. I love it. I love it. And we have three segments. And did you theme the segments, Gary?
2:00 Gary O'Reilly? Uh, maybe.
2:03 Chuck Nice? But it's a surprise, so you'll have to figure it out.
2:07 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, something like that.
2:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, all right. Well, then, who's up first? Who do you have?
2:13 Gary O'Reilly? All right, I'll jump in. Let's introduce each athlete as they come. First up, Tony Gonzalez, friend of the show. He's a former NFL tight end.
2:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've been on his podcast.
2:23 Gary O'Reilly? He's a lucky man. And, I mean, a lot of people in the sport consider him to be one of the best ever in that particular position.
2:31 Chuck Nice? Oh, without a doubt.
2:33 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, 14 times pro bowler, and he probably owns more records than Tamela Motown. Because he just played and played and played and played, so...
2:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And just to be clear, a pro bowler is the football equivalent of, in baseball, you'd be an all-star, right?
2:48 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, all right, let's line Tony up and see if he is a science curious athlete.
2:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's do this.
3:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm obsessed with quantum physics, and you'll look at certain molecules or neurons, or whatever you want to call it, or protons, right? And you look away, and they'll be in a different place. That quirk, or whatever, where does it go? When I look away and it's now in a different place, where did it go?
3:23 Chuck Nice? Oh, he's got a magic question.
3:28 Chuck Nice? He's like, how do you make the coin disappear from your hand like that? Wow, that was amazing. Wait, let me...
3:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait. Chuck, you're accusing an entire branch of physics of being just a cheap magician. You just insulted a century of physics.
3:47 Chuck Nice? Quantum physics, Hogwarts, what's the...
3:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, actually, Einstein ruminated on this, and when he started uncovering how quantum physics actually works, which is probabilistically rather than deterministically, he famously said, "No, I don't believe this. God doesn't play dice with the universe."
4:10 Chuck Nice? Oh, wow, what a cra...
4:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whoa.
4:11 Chuck Nice? Wow.
4:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so, and he mentioned God a few more times, and then Niels Bohr, another fellow physicist of the day, said, "Einstein, would you stop telling God what to do?"
4:25 Chuck Nice? That's a funny exchange. That's pretty cool.
4:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, yeah, quantum physics, however uncomfortable it makes people feel, first of all, the universe has no obligation to make sense to us, to any of us.
4:39 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
4:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's under no obligation at all. Just make that your first sort of point of reference in trying to decode the operations of nature. Second, quantum physics. What he's referring to is the observer effect, all right? Where you want to observe a particle, the act of observing it has a changed state and that it's somewhere else doing something else. And if you're not looking at it, it's doing something that you can't see, but you know it's doing it, but how do you know it's doing it if you can't see it?
5:13 Chuck Nice? It's the refrigerator light.
5:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the refrigerator light. I tweeted about the refrigerator light in a list of unsolved problems in the universe. I should repost that. I just said, you know, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and what is dark matter, and does the refrigerator light go out? And people got all, got into battles over that. People even mounted their cellphone cameras in the refrigerator to film it and just say, "See? It does go out."
5:50 Gary O'Reilly? What's interesting, Neil, when Einstein references God, you spin it round another way and look at it, this thing being there and not being there is about faith, that you have faith in the fact that this is true.
6:06 Chuck Nice? I don't know if that would be the case, though, because what we're really looking at is the probability or the likelihood of something happening as opposed to just believing that it might happen or not.
6:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and here's what's interesting, interesting thing about quantum mechanics, even though everything is statistical, essentially everything is a statistical statement about what will happen, that implies, well, you don't really know. Well, the statistics that we compile for it are precise. This will happen exactly this number of times out of this many trials, okay? Will it happen on this particular trial? I don't know. Will it on the next? I don't know. But the ensemble trials, it will happen with high precision. So, in a sense, we are certain about our uncertainties.
6:51 Chuck Nice? Mm, wow.
6:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Deal with it.
6:54 Chuck Nice? That's.
6:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so here, here's how, here's how it goes. We are macroscopic objects. We are human beings. And if I say Chuck, I enter a darkened room and I say Chuck, where are you? And I can't see you.
7:08 Chuck Nice? Is that a black joke, seriously?
7:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no.
7:11 Chuck Nice? What, what the hell just happened?
7:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, okay, sorry. Okay, I'm in a snowbank and.
7:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, why everything got to be black to, black joke to you?
7:22 Chuck Nice? I told you because I live in America.
7:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you live in America.
7:26 Chuck Nice? I live in America.
7:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, alright, so I'm in a room, it's dark. I don't know where you are, so I turn on the lights and then I see you.
7:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so how do I end up seeing you? Because the light came from the bulb or whatever, went to your skin, reflected off your skin and went to my eyeball. And I say, that's where Chuck is. Alright, now, you're a big object. If I start making you littler and littler and littler, then the energy of the light that hits you
7:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? becomes significant compared to who and what you are getting illuminated.
8:00 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if I make you small enough to be the size of a particle.
8:05 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I say, oh, particle, where are you? And then I turn on the lights, the light beam, the photons of light will hit the particle and kick it somewhere else.
8:17 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the very act of observing the particle, it has nothing to do with consciousness or your brain. It has to do with shining light on it.
8:25 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that I can identify where it is and the very act of doing so, kicks it out of that place and sends it somewhere else. Do I know where else? Actually, no. Because I have to put on another light and figure out where that point is. And by the time I do that, it jumps to another state. So, all we can do is describe the probability of where it is at any given time. And so, so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a striking phenomenon that freaked us all out, our, my, my century old brethren, trying to figure this out, coming out of the classical era of physics. Where, yeah, so you push a particle, it moves, it's there, it's where you expect it to be,
9:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? when you expect it to be there, and all of that had to get tossed out the window. So, where does it go? I have no idea, but I can answer you statistically. Where? Where it likely went after I did it. And that's the best I can do. That's the best the universe can do. And Einstein, in fact, God does play dice with the universe.
9:32 Chuck Nice? Come on.
9:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bam.
9:33 Chuck Nice? Papa needs a new pair of shoes.
9:38 Gary O'Reilly? So we found a way to have deeper thought because of science.
9:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we found a way to have what?
9:44 Gary O'Reilly? Deeper thought. So the way that we look at this quantum mechanics, quantum physics, has meant that we need to think in a deeper, different way.
9:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would say different. I don't want to call it deeper. It's all deep. But we definitely have to think differently. And, and that was hard for many people. Some people just died fighting. And by the way, here's Einstein not believing that the universe is actually statistical, yet he made major contributions to quantum physics in the 1920s and, and beyond. We're, we're approaching the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics, which by the way, would become the foundation of the entire world of information technology. There is no creation, storage and retrieval of information without a deep understanding and exploitation of the rules of quantum physics.
10:38 Chuck Nice? There you go. Not just knee deep, totally deep.
10:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, so Gary, did I just blow an entire segment answering only one question?
10:45 Gary O'Reilly? Maybe, yeah.
10:46 Chuck Nice? But that's good. Now we can get two shows out of this.
10:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. When we come back, I'm told Gary has even more questions for me from other professional athletes who are at the top of their game. When StarTalk Sports Edition, Athletes Ask Neil continues.
11:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. A new feature we're testing called Athletes Ask Neil. And Chuck and Gary, you all went out there and got marquee athletes to ask me stuff. Maybe these are questions about the universe that have plagued them since childhood, perhaps. But I look forward to this. So who do we have up next?
11:55 Chuck Nice? All right, so the next player is a former Major League Baseball player with the Mets, the Dodgers, and the Blue Jays. A Golden Glove winner, hit the most home runs in one game, which was four. Hit most home runs in three consecutive games, seven. Okay, and is another athlete who really wants to know something about the cosmos. And his name is Shaun Green.
12:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Shaun Green, bring it on. All right.
12:27 Speaker 03 Hey Neil, are there any promising propulsion and energy storage technologies that can help us go beyond our nearest neighbors and explore other solar systems? And if so, how far away are we from doing this?
12:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh, ooh. Why does it sound so young? Is that because I'm just an old fart and professional athletes are like in their twenties?
12:51 Gary O'Reilly? How do we say this not to upset you?
12:53 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
12:55 Chuck Nice? Just think of it like this. Just think of it like this. They don't have a lot of 50-year-old pro athletes, that's all.
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, is that what it is? Okay. Unless they're bowlers or somebody. Okay, yeah, all right.
13:07 Gary O'Reilly? Nicely done, Chuck.
13:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
13:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, so, that's an age-old problem we're still grappling with, okay? Our rockets today use combinations of chemicals that are what we call exothermic, whereas you bring them together, energy gets released when the atoms and molecules combine, exothermic. If it absorbs energy, it's endothermic. And Gary probably knows about this because you have ice packs and heat packs.
13:39 Gary O'Reilly? Yep.
13:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That you can just crack, you know, you, you, you crumble it. How does it work? It's, it's a package, right? Seal pack. And one variety, you, you, you smack it to get down. It, it makes the, the, the molecules merge and it generates heat. Another one, the molecules merge and they absorb heat and then it'll feel cold to you. You, you probably use both of those in your day, is that right?
14:02 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that's a, that's a really easy analogy to, to get in your mind. So, yeah, thank you for that.
14:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so with rockets, we have exothermic reactions. So imagine Gary doing that and then exhaust comes out the side.
14:17 Gary O'Reilly? Alright.
14:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so much energy is produced that your heat pack enters orbit. Okay, so, we're very clever about our chemistry. We find the, the atoms that when you combine are highly exothermic. Among them is the water molecule. I don't know if you knew this. Did you guys know this? Okay, do you remember the space shuttle way back when we used to have our own space program in the United States? Um, we had the space shuttle and had two boosters, booster rockets on the side, and a big ol' orange tank in the middle. That orange tank has two tanks within it. One of them holds oxygen, the other holds hydrogen.
14:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the hydrogen tank is twice the size of the oxygen tank, all inside the orange vessel. So you have twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. Chuck, put them together, what'll that make all by itself? H two O, there you have it. And you, and to make the water molecule is hugely exothermic. So you combine them with valves and nozzles and, and, and, and, and cavity, jet cavities. And boom, you have a rocket. And so when we go to Mars, it's important to know that there might be water under the surface of Mars. So then you extract the water, separate the molecules, and now you have ready-made rocket fuel. And by the way, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
15:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The energy it takes to break apart the water molecule is the energy you get back by having them come together again. Okay, so just keep that in mind. There's no, no such thing as a free lunch. All right, so the point is ever since Robert Goddard, 110 or whenever, how many years ago, uh, we've been using chemical rockets, chemical fuel for propulsion. And we haven't been using nuclear, we haven't been using, uh, nothing else. And so that's kind of embarrassing. It's like our batteries, it's still chemical batteries. It's embarrassing. All the other advances we've made in this world, and we're just kind of stuck on this. And so, no, it's a problem.
16:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the two ways around that, one, you have filling stations in space where you burn all your fuel, you, you run out and you just refill. You can burn a lot of fuel again. If you do that, it won't take nine months to get to Mars, you can get to Mars in a few days.
16:42 Chuck Nice? Yeah, excuse me, guys, can you, can you get the windshield and chuck the oil too, please?
16:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a way back machine you just pulled up right there?
16:54 Chuck Nice? No, I live in Jersey, I live in Jersey, that's still.
16:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, Jersey's full service gas stations.
17:00 Chuck Nice? That's not way back.
17:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I forgot there's no self-serving in Jersey.
17:04 Chuck Nice? You can't pump your own gas if you live here.
17:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I forgot about that, wow.
17:09 Gary O'Reilly? Neil, are we gonna, are we gonna get anywhere with electric? Rockets, is that, is that ever gonna be a thing? We've got electric cars, we're talking about electric planes.
17:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, well, so, you, in a, in a sense, your electric cars are not running on electricity in the, in, what, in that sense, they're running on batteries.
17:27 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
17:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? So you plug in the car to charge a battery, which is a storage device of energy, a chemical storage device, and then you, uh, run the car based on that. So it'd be something different if we could just plug in the car, plug in your spaceship and have the long cord that gets you all the way to Mars and back. That would be kinda cool.
17:47 Gary O'Reilly? That's your filling station.
17:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so for me, the future is not any, there's ion propulsion where you, where you charge a gas, and until the point where like electrons fly off their atoms, you make an ionized gas, you might remember from your chemistry class. And if you let these, these, these, um, ions fly off in a direct, in a direction that you choose, then the ship recoils and goes in the other direction.
18:13 Chuck Nice? So they become the propellant.
18:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They become the propellant. It's very efficient, but it's not good for like fast takeoffs. It's good for a slow readjustment of your orbit, or to send a supply, a supply ship or something, where you can wait a few months before you get there. So these are all challenges. What I really want are wormholes. Then just open a wormhole, walk through, come out the other side, you're in Mars in 10 minutes. That's really what I'm after. And so I'm, I'm leaning very sci-fi.
18:43 Chuck Nice? Yes.
18:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In this moment. Otherwise, we're just kinda stuck here in the solar system.
18:47 Chuck Nice? That's the Rick and Morty approach, by the way.
18:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, exactly, exactly. Or the, the ca- the, the Captain Strange, no, what's his name? Doctor Strange.
18:54 Chuck Nice? Strange, yeah.
18:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Doctor Strange. You just sort of open up a portal, step through, close the portal, there you are. That's exactly how a wormhole that you control would operate.
19:04 Chuck Nice? Sweet.
19:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There it is. All right. All right. Thanks for that question. So who's next?
19:09 Gary O'Reilly? All right. Someone a lot of people know, but not everybody. A gentleman by the name of Jerry Rice.
19:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Jerry Rice.
19:17 Gary O'Reilly? Jerry Rice. Right. So, yep, a former wide receiver in the NFL. Probably the greatest wide receiver ever in the history of American football. Three-time Super Bowl winning player with the 49ers, Super Bowl MVP, and NFL MVP. And of course, a Hall of Famer and another NFL player with a record collection of his very, very own. So this is Jerry's thought. It's a very sports-specific one, but this is what he's thinking.
19:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's try it.
19:49 Speaker 04 Hey Neil, Jerry Rice here. I hope you're doing well, and I have a question for you. Why does a football go further when it has spin?
20:02 Chuck Nice? Oh, look at that. And relating it to his own sport. I like it.
20:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. I love it. I love it. Okay. So, so I had to remember that that's even a true statement, right? And of course, he would know that's true because the boy played the game. So, here's the thing. If you just have a blunt object, such as a ball, that it's not sort of an aerodynamic airfoil like what you find in an airplane. It's just a blunt object, and you try to move it through the air. The air has to part for it to move through it. That creates friction, that creates drag, and that will slow down the ball. Slows it down. Okay. Not only that, if it's just sort of moving through the air, and then there's a current of air moving sideways to it,
20:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? that'll just sort of carry it to the side. Okay, it'll just sort of move it. By the way, in baseball, forgive the cross-pollination of sports here, there is a pitch that will move in whichever way the breeze blows. And what is that pitch called? Chuck?
21:09 Chuck Nice? The baby pitch. No, it's the knuckleball.
21:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the knuckleball. That is a ball that has no spin. And when you don't have a spin, you are susceptible to small air currents that are taking place in the air through which you move. If you spin an object, a frisbee, a baseball, a football.
21:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You spin stabilize it. Okay, and when you do, and by the way, you spin a soccer ball, that's a whole other thing. Well, I can talk about in just a moment, but when you spin a football, you gyroscopically stabilize it as it moves through the air. It becomes less responsive to something that would try to um alter its trajectory. And by spinning, it's actually corkscrewing through the air, reducing the total friction on the ball itself. So a spinning thrown ball will always go farther than one that is not.
22:09 Gary O'Reilly? So it continues with its its profile.
22:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, it maintains its profile and the the uh there is no hail mary pass that was not a perfectly thrown spiral. Just just check on that.
22:23 Gary O'Reilly? So so think think about it from Jerry Rice's point of view. As a receiver, he has to know that this ball is going to be coming in a certain way so he can set himself up to get it.
22:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A a trajectory, correct.
22:33 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
22:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So a very important point, excellent point. So when you have a spin stabilized thrown football, the trajectory is more predictable than with any other kind of
22:44 Gary O'Reilly? Exactly.
22:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? of the moving object. So he's running and he's doing the brain calculation, be it active or or subliminal. In either case, he is moving at the rate that his body judges, where he will, he and the ball will be at the same place at the same time. And not only that, a little known fact about the American football is that when you throw it into the air with the the nose of the of the ball pointed upwards, as it reaches the peak of its arc, the ball becomes horizontal. And then on its way down, the nose dips so that it is always corkscrewing directly into the wind, which is the minimum air resistance that it can receive.
23:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And in that way, the ball goes straight into the receiver's arms, nose first. It's a beautiful thing to watch.
23:36 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
23:37 Chuck Nice? Wow, that's cool.
23:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There it is, there it is. Alright, so, so, give me one more before we end this second of three segments of Athletes Ask Neil.
23:46 Chuck Nice? Okay, so our next, our next, uh, uh, player is somebody who, um, yeah, uh, uh, uh, he's played for the Giants. Blech, anyway, uh, he's a two-time Superbowl-
23:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, the Giants baseball team?
24:01 Chuck Nice? Uh, no, no, the New York Football Giants.
24:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, actually, the, so, it's, uh, Giants are not from the Brooklyn, Dodgers were from Brooklyn.
24:06 Chuck Nice? Right.
24:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Gi- you know where the Giants actually played? In Manhattan.
24:09 Chuck Nice? Really?
24:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
24:11 Chuck Nice? And, well, that's, that's why they had to name his team the New York Football Giants, because there was, there were other Giants here.
24:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Giants, exactly, exactly.
24:20 Chuck Nice? Two-time Super Bowl winner, two-time Super Bowl MVP, uh, Walter Payton, NFL Man of the Year, which I think is the most impressive thing, because he's-
24:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, totally.
24:28 Chuck Nice? He's actually a good guy. Four-time Pro Bowler, uh, Eli Manning has a question.
24:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh, cool, Eli! Uh, Brothers Manning, yes.
24:38 Chuck Nice? The, the other Manning with actually more-
24:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a quick thing about the Walter Payton Man of the Year. Walter Payton died prematurely, if memory serves.
24:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
24:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and devoted a lot of his off-field time to, um, to charitable and, and humanitarian causes. So I'm delighted that the NFL has, recognizes the Player of the Year who, who, uh, does the same. So this is, uh, one, one of the great, um, acts of recognition in, in the sports calendar.
25:04 Gary O'Reilly? Do you know what his nickname was, Neil?
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, what?
25:07 Chuck Nice? Sweetness.
25:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, Walter, I mean Walter Payton's-
25:11 Chuck Nice? Yeah, not Eli Manning. Eli, yeah, Eli Manning's nickname, Eli Manning's nickname was Eli Manning. That's, that's how boring Eli is.
25:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, what question does he have?
25:29 Speaker 05 Hey Neil, Eli Manning here, uh, I was hoping you could answer this question for me. Uh, during my professional career, I got hit by a lot of big people, some big masts. Can you, uh, explain the physics of some of those hits, please?
25:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Wow. Interesting. Yeah, okay, so there are two laws of the universe that we have never seen violated ever. One of them is the law of the conservation of momentum. And the other one is the conservation of energy. We would broaden that to be the conservation of mass energy. But for football, we only need to think about energy. So when two people collide, what you do is you add up before the collision, how much momentum is there? And how much energy is there? Energy of motion, kinetic energy. Just add it up. And then, no matter what happens,
26:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? after they collide, you have to be able to account for that momentum and energy. Okay? Now, momentum is a vector.
26:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A vector. Which means if Eli, because I don't think he was a very big quarterback. He might have been 190, 200 pounds. He's running in one direction. And let's say someone wants to collide with him in the other direction, who also weighs 190 pounds. You have momentum in one direction and the exact opposite momentum in the other direction. Those directions cancel. Which means the total momentum of this system is zero. Even though two players are moving. So watch what happens. After they hit, they're not moving, okay?
27:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the momentum's successfully canceled. And there they just, they just fall down on the ground. They'll stop in their tracks, whatever. Now, if the person running after Manning has twice the mass of Manning, what's two times 190? 380 pounds. Okay? That person has twice the momentum. If they're going the same speed and collide, there's more momentum moving in the direction of the tackler than in the direction of Eli Manning. So what happens is, after that collision, the entire system is still moving in the direction of the tackler. Okay?
28:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which means Eli Manning's forward motion got stopped and got reversed.
28:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For that to happen. Now, how about the energy of the collision? That has to go somewhere. That's why they have these, the, the, these football pads. You ever donned one of these pads? There are these like plates of plastic on the shoulders and plates across your chest. So that if you hit it, that energy dissipates throughout the, the, the, the pads. So that it doesn't land in only one spot on your body.
28:41 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
28:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The energy still goes into your body, but not all in one place. So that these are physically fit, muscled men. So they can, they can accommodate it, but not always in the one spot where you get tackled. So the energy gets dissipated and the momentum continues. And he ends up flattened on the ground. So, uh, so that's why I've, I've, I've reported duly that American football is one of the greatest displays of classical physics that there is in this world.
29:14 Chuck Nice? Yes.
29:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I say spin stabilized projectiles, uh, in, uh, in a, in an arc following the forces of gravity and you have endless examples of momentum and energy transfer.
29:28 Chuck Nice? So, and, and, and if it's, uh, if it's a really good hit and they're playing the Eagles, then that energy ends up on my couch where I'm like, yes, yes. Because Fletcher Cox just flattened Eli Manning and, uh, and I'm celebrating and hoping that Eli gets up so I can see him get knocked down again.
29:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Damn Chuck, where's this coming from Chuck?
29:53 Gary O'Reilly? Chuck, do you?
29:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unresolved.
29:55 Gary O'Reilly? Do you have problems with every NFL quarterback that isn't from the Eagles?
29:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That isn't from the Eagles. Yeah. Chuck being a native Philadelphia.
30:02 Chuck Nice? No, I just listened.
30:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait Chuck, aren't you from the city of brotherly love?
30:06 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that just means that they, um, that when they take your wallet, they go, thanks, brother. That's a.
30:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with more questions from professional athletes and I think including Lindsey Vonn, the skier, the Olympic skier when StarTalk Sports Edition returns.
30:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist and it's sports edition, Athletes Ask Neil. We're testing this out because there are athletes out there, some of them have geek underbellies. Chuck, Gary, did you know this? You must have known this.
31:12 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, we're all cut from different cloths and it's no surprise.
31:16 Chuck Nice? Some of these guys are super, super, like Ryan Fitzpatrick, he's a pretty smart guy.
31:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but you don't have to be smart, you just have to be curious. I'm not judging people's smartness. I will judge how curious you are. If you're not curious, you know, go back to the cave. Because that's where you would still be if there weren't other curious people in your species that got us out of the cave in the first place.
31:36 Chuck Nice? Well, that's because you're a science educator, you say that. I'm a comedian and so what I say is there are some stupid people out there.
31:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck!
31:43 Chuck Nice? Okay. So, I'm sorry.
31:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right. All right, so Chuck, Gary, give me, who's next up?
31:51 Gary O'Reilly? All right, next up, and you said it before the break, Lindsey Vonn.
31:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lindsey Vonn, we all love Lindsey Vonn.
31:57 Gary O'Reilly? We do, we do. For those of you who aren't familiar with Lindsey, she is Team USA's Alpine skier of all the different events in Alpine skiing. She's considered probably one of the greatest skiers of all time, period. Twice world champion and an Olympic gold medallist. And this is a question that obviously she feels is important, otherwise she wouldn't have asked it.
32:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, let's do it, okay.
32:23 Speaker 06 A lot of people I know are super into astrology and I'm wondering if planetary and star alignment has anything to do with people's behavior.
32:38 Chuck Nice? Okay, that reminds me of a really cool meme where The Bachelor in Australia, who by the way was an astrophysicist in the last season, he's an actual astrophysicist, and the girl walks up and she goes, "Oh, hi, um, what do you do?" And he says, "Oh, I'm an astrophysicist." And she goes, "Oh, that's so cool. I'm a Gemini."
33:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did he say next?
33:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so here it is, just in all fairness to the idea that the universe affects us, just consider what it was like in the pre-scientific era. There you got your farm out back, and when the stars align in a particular way, the crops bloom, right? And you say, "Oh, my gosh, I wonder how that whole, yeah, hey, and the sun and the moon and the..." And you start, and by the way, all of this stuff moves around you, all right? It rises for you, it sets for you. So the notion that we are not only in the center of all of this motion of the universe, but that the universe cares for us,
33:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? it runs deep and across culture. Do you realize the brightest star in the night sky, it's called Sirius? Uh, it would rise just before the sun 5,000 years ago, and it happened to do that at the time of year when the Nile flooded, enabling the ancient Egyptians to irrigate their lands and their fields. And so you say, "There it is. This caused the rise of the Nile." So you can get a correspondence, a correlation, but miss the cause and effect of it. And so that's how we went for thousands of years, believing that the universe actually cares about us,
34:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? and cares about who you are and your social life and your financial life. And then we learned, no, the earth is not in the middle of it all. We orbit the sun like the other planets. And these constellations, which are really, really sorry excuses for what they're pretending to be. All right, you connect the dots. Are you really drawing a crab? Connect the dots. Is there really? There's a centaur archer. Uh, Sagittar- really? Really? Is that what we're drawing here? And you're not only going to draw that, you're going to put personality traits in.
35:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By the way, and the people who came up with this are sleepless Babylonians, Romans and Greeks, right? They, they, they're not getting any sleep. So they wake up, oh, I got a story. They tell the story. They put it in the sky, named gods after it. And now, now you're going to say that the, the stories of these sleepless civilizations have such meaning that these stars in your night sky, which would look different from any other angle, somehow know that you were born and wants to influence you.
35:49 Chuck Nice? Well, everything you said so far makes perfect sense to me.
35:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just saying that it's a holdover from a pre-scientific era when we genuinely thought the earth was in the middle of the known universe. And, uh, that is not the case? What? No. So the answer is no. None of this has any effect on us at all. Including the one, oh, the, the moon affects the tides. And the tides are made of water, so we're made of water, so does it affect us? Yeah, okay, so it'll raise tides on your body by an amount less than the weight of the pillow that you sleep with in your bed. You can calculate this. It's a trillionth of that, by the way.
36:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so if you're worried about gravitational tidal forces on your head, uh, look for other stuff that's walking around you first before you start thinking about the moon. And by the way, the tides raised on the moon are a few feet, 10 feet, whatever. That's on the entire diameter of the earth. So we got 8,000 mile diameter of the earth. And we're getting 10 foot tides on the, on the edge. Oh, look at the tides, they're big. No, they're tiny. So what would raising tides on your skull look like? It would be a trillionth the magnitude of a pillow that you happen to sleep with on your head that night. So all I'm saying is we can calculate what effect it might have and the answer is none.
37:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I now quote Shakespeare. Um, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. You got another one out there?
37:34 Gary O'Reilly? All right. Um, okay. So Joey Brzezinski is a professional skateboarder. He's in the street skateboarding rather than park, just so as you know.
37:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cool.
37:43 Gary O'Reilly? He's a dude that is full of tricks. He's a four time winner of the Manny Mania, which is obviously a, a big deal in skateboarding. And he's co-founder of Andale Bearings, which is obviously one of his sponsors as well. So, uh, this, this is interesting because I think this is, this is possibly the hottest of hot topics right now. So listen to his question, Neil, and see what you think.
38:09 Speaker 07 Yo, what's up Neil? It's the COVID-19, put us all on lockdown. The earth has seemed to really benefit from it. I mean, the skies over here in Los Angeles are cleaner than they've ever been. So my question to you is, how do we maintain this positive reaction as we come out of quarantine and open our cities?
38:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Damn, that's a good question. Oh, man. Yeah, it's interesting. You have these unintended consequences of other things that happen in our lives. You know, we have, we have an attack virus which targets humans. And so we go on lockdown and then our air is clear to breathe. There are no contrails because we, we stopped flying. And for a big period there, we didn't go out. And so the air got clean and you could, wow. And so how do we maintain that? I don't know, dude. I don't know. Um, I think it's, what it is, it's in, as we say in mathematics, if we don't know how to prove something, but we know that it exists, we call it an existence proof.
39:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We say, I can't get from here to there, but the there has already been gotten by whatever other means that remain mysterious to me. So we call that an existence proof. So the fact that we can do that? is an important sort of revelation, the fact that so much business then got conducted via by a by a video conferencing.
39:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That we thought maybe you had to be in person for, but yeah, actually you didn't, right? That these are things that I think that not all of that will entirely reverse. I think there'll be many meetings for which that will take place. And that means you don't have to travel. You know, a lot, a lot of what was putting pollution in the air goes away. When that becomes the solution. And if I can give a geeky Einsteinian response to this.
40:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So much of what makes that pollution is the need to be at a time at a place. That coincides when another person is in that same place at that same time. These are called world lines in relativity. Where are you? And when are you? And for us, pre-COVID, to have our world lines meet, I would say, Chuck, I'll meet you for lunch tomorrow. At noon. And Chuck, what's your next question to me?
40:37 Chuck Nice? Can we do it at Eric Repair's Restaurant, please, since you're paying?
40:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, fine, but you have to specify a where. I gave you a when and you had to specify a where, otherwise we don't meet. We could be at the same place at different times. Or at the same time at different places, but we have to be at the same time at the same place in order to meet. What Zoom has done is removed one of those coordinates from our timeline.
41:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now Chuck, we only have to be at the same time.
41:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that sucks because that means that you're not buying lunch and I'm eating peanut butter and jelly again.
41:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't have to be. And so, so that's the same place turned out to be one of the great consumers of fossil fuels. Being at the same place at the same time. So. If there's anything that has stayed with us, I think it's going to be the video call, the video conference call. After that. You know, there are other ways to reduce the footprint. But um I I don't want another virus to be the the the motivator. I I want it to be other ways that we can be inventive and creative about how we acquire and consume our energy needs.
41:53 Gary O'Reilly? It's shown us we can.
41:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you for that question.
41:56 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, it's a great question, and as I said, it's probably the hottest of hot topics right now with everybody's mind in climate. But it shows that actually, even though we were painted into that corner.
42:09 Gary O'Reilly? There is a way for us to to deal with, or at least try and improve.
42:17 Gary O'Reilly? This way, you know, our own climate. So whether or not people want to grab this thistle, Neil, is the way I look at it. Whether or not there's enough energy in in the thinking to grab it and make it happen.
42:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, or or inventiveness and creativity, and especially in Los Angeles, where the four oh five is in some sections is twelve lanes of dense traffic. You're not going to walk out and say, hey, everybody, tomorrow, no one drives, so let's see what effect that has on the air. That that that's a that's going to be a failed experiment. Covid became that commandment, and then we got to see what effect it has on the air.
42:54 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
42:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's just the air we breathe. Forget the greenhouse gases. It's just the air you breathe. All right, that's that that was the first immediate effect. Because you can see and feel that in your lungs, the CO2 is invisible to you. So that's a whole other thing. By the way, if CO2 were colored purple, I bet you we'd have solutions to this practically overnight.
43:15 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
43:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You see this purple gas coming out of your out of your uh out of your exhaust pipes.
43:21 Chuck Nice? Well, maybe we can get.
43:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But anyway, I think we gotta call that quits.
43:23 Chuck Nice? That will um increase scientific literacy, and then we won't have to worry about any of this.
43:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, or a visible virus. And then people will, will, will not say, "I don't need the virus." That beep beep beep beep. It's like, gosh.
43:35 Chuck Nice? Yeah, exactly. You either take this vaccine, or this thumb continues to grow out of your forehead. That would be great.
43:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow, okay.
43:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, Chuck will write the sci-fi novel.
43:48 Chuck Nice? Exactly. A posable thumb head.
43:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, guys. So this has been StarTalk Sports Edition. In a new version called Athletes Ask Neil. I'm proud of you guys for soliciting these questions from these great athletes. I feel I'm reminded that, like I said, athletes can often have a geeky underbelly.
44:11 Chuck Nice? Well, I'm glad you said proud of you guys, because you should have said proud of Gary.
44:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
44:17 Gary O'Reilly? There's a team, there's a team involved in doing this, and the whole StarTalk team.
44:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the whole StarTalk team.
44:22 Gary O'Reilly? Rallyed together.
44:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When they want to do a whole show celebrating the team. At least get some webpages where you can see them all. They're working behind the scenes, making us look good and sound good. So anyhow, we gotta call it quits there. Gary, always good to have you.
44:34 Gary O'Reilly? Pleasure, Neil.
44:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. This has been Neil deGrasse Tyson, personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking out.
Previous Cosmic Queries in the O-zone: Saving the World with Susan Solomon & Stephen Andersen Next Cosmic Queries – Animal Outlaws with Mary Roach Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
