Solving Crimes with Science, with Patricia Cornwell

Neil deGrasse Tyson investigates the world of forensics with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, comic co-host Matt Kirshen, forensic pathologist Dr. Rebecca Folkerth, MD, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg, MD, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/solving-crimes-with-science-with-patricia-cornwell/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And on our show tonight, our topic is forensics: solving crimes with science. So, let's do this!

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. My comedic co-host tonight is Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back!

• 0:38Matt Kirshen?

  Thank you, it's nice to be here.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're one of the comedy writers on "The Jim Jeffrey Show."

• 0:43Matt Kirshen?

  That's right.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent!

• 0:44Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, it's a fun gig.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like some of his jokes. No, no, just kidding.

• 0:47Matt Kirshen?

  They're my ones. The ones you don't like are other people's. That's just...

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also joining us is forensic pathologist, Rebecca Folkerth. Rebecca, welcome!

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Yes, hi, thank you.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You work at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you specialize in brain trauma pathology. Just so you know, just in advance, anyone from Medical Examiner's office has always just a little bit creeped me out.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Well, it was good reason.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we need your expertise tonight because we're featuring my interview with bestselling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. She wrote her first novel, called "Postmortem", back in 1990 while working in a morgue. And she went on to write 24 New York Times bestselling books and sell more than 100 million copies of her forensic science novels. I think the Bible has only sold a few more copies than that. So, this is pretty serious.

• 1:46Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, and how many mysteries does the Bible solve? Almost none, so...

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I asked her, what sparked her interest in science? So, check it out.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  You know, my chemistry teacher in high school was somebody that I've never forgotten because she was, she was the real deal. She loved it and she cared about science. She also was very patient with me because I was no good in chemistry. See, I fled from the sciences in school. Fled from all of them. I couldn't do math. You know, when I did astronomy, the only way, I couldn't get the relativity math problems. Every time I'd get it wrong.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This interview's over.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  I mean, me. This is what I do for a living and I skipped science in school because, first of all, girls didn't do science. They didn't. And my brothers did science, but I didn't do science, you know, and I wasn't encouraged to do science. And how I ended up falling in love with it, I'll never know, but it is, to me, it's everything.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, do I understand correctly, you worked in a morgue?

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Went to work in one for six years.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How old were you?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  I started there in my late twenties, mid twenties.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that just completely creepy?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  I don't like morgues. People think I love morgues. I hate morgues.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just really creepy.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  They're awful. I mean, they're depressing and it's hard work and it's gross and there's nothing pretty about it. But it's, that's what you, I had to learn technological study, hanging out in labs, learning about anatomy, learning about human nature, learning everything, what I call the, you know, the overview effect?

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  That's the underview effect. The morgue.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't know if people know about the overview effect. It's come, it's come of age in the era of astronauts. You don't see national boundaries, you don't see ethnicities, you don't see religions, you just see sort of ocean and land and clouds. Just the overview effect. So Rebecca, tell me about the underview effect. Would you, would you agree with this?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I think that's a tremendous concept, the underview effect. But what's interesting to me is that I think it brings us to a similar place as the overview effect because the overview effect here, the astronaut is out from far, far away looking at a tiny planet with 11 billion...

• 4:04Speaker 02

  People on it and we're sort of at the

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're headed there fast.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. We're at the opposite end where we're looking at one individual and then looking with a microscope at their cells, trying to figure out what's going on with them. And it gives you this sense of sameness among human beings and a really sort of a wonderful humanitarian feeling to me.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I guess we and you bookend the human experience.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yes, I think so. And so I like the idea that we're looking at it from so far distant, but we're kind of ending up in the same place.

• 4:40Matt Kirshen?

  I do have to ask, because when Patricia just then said in the clip that no, morgues are creepy, she doesn't like working there. You sort of, there was a moment, I just caught your expression where you're like, "No, it's not."

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not creepy, it's totally cool.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  No, it is creepy, it is, but

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you actually do?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Well

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than collect bodies and pull them out? Is it like in the movies?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  The big drawers?

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You pull them out of the refrigerator?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Sort of like that, yeah.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what we do, we're medical doctors and these people are our patients. We're the last doctors to see these people.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you take the Hippocratic oath and they say, "Above all else, do no harm," when you get a dead body, you're pretty clear on that one, right?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we don't so much have to worry about that. But we're, you know, trying to figure out what happened to them so that their families have answers. And there are right ways and wrong ways about going

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the procedure? The body comes in?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  The body comes in, we examine it from head to toe. It's rather like a surgical procedure, it's just more involved. And of course, we're not fixing anything, we're just documenting everything that's there. But we use many of the same tools that a surgeon uses. And as I say, we're medical professionals. And so it's done in a respectful way.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's curious to me is that forensic science has become pop culture. I think in part because of Patricia Cornwell. I mean, I think she's, if you're on the bestseller list talking about this, people are talking about you. And so I asked what her impression was about the role of her books as sparking public interest. Let's check it out.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Well, what I did is I inadvertently made forensics accessible to people. And it had not been before. Nobody knew what happens when somebody dies. They really didn't. It wasn't part of popular culture. But you want to know how that happened, though? You know what got me interested? It was one thing that somebody said. The first time I had a tour of the morgue. After hours, all scrubbed and hosed off, so it's nice and clean and sparkly. Shiny steel, lovely, warm place to be. And this medical examiner, she starts telling me. I said, "What's new? What's coming down the pike for you guys? Because, you know, you've been doing autopsies for hundreds of years. It doesn't change very much." She said, "Well, there's this thing called DNA that they're just starting to play around with.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  And also, we're starting to use lasers to look for evidence on bodies." And I went, "Ooh, DNA? I don't know what that is. Sounds interesting. Lasers." And now you got my attention. That was what hooked me. It wasn't the dead people. It was the science that she told me. This was 1984. They would not use DNA.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not yet.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  For several more years. But that, and so I just arrived, just and all this stuff was starting to happen. And I was just intrigued by it. Using science to tell the truth. What happened to you?

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Beckett, so give me an example of how forensic science just tells the truth.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Well, science itself is the business of uncovering the truth.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for damn sure.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so we're just applying it to the human body. And especially in a, you know, criminal justice setting. Our motto at our office is "Science Serving Justice." And that's what we're doing. Yeah.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what were some of the earlier methods and tools?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Well.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you didn't have, before DNA, what would people?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Well, yeah, as Patricia said, DNA is a relatively recent development. We do rely on it a lot, but the time-honored tradition is the autopsy. And that's how we, as I say, we get to the bottom of things. We have to see with our own eyes, with direct observation, what happened. What natural disease was there? What the pattern of injury is?

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you could miss something if there's a chemistry test that you could do but don't think to do.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yes, well, we have guidelines for running toxicology on cases just for that reason, so we don't miss them.

• 8:53Matt Kirshen?

  So is that reliant on what the police officers who've done the initial investigation? Will they then tell you, hey, we suspect this might be going on, so you might want to check for it? Or do you look for other signs that are independent of what the police say?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  It's both. I mean, we have the evidence that the medical legal investigators and police.

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they can say we found drugs around them.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Exactly, we have that. We can see for ourselves if they have evidence of self-injection. And we can see changes in the body that are characteristic, for example, of drug use. But if you're talking about poisoning, we have to have, you know, more specific suspicion of that, to test for things like arsenic or whatever. But it comes up, it does.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And some poisons have other evidence manifest in the skin.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yes, skin changes, sometimes in the brain, different things we might, that might clue us in to, hey, maybe that's what's going on here.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're one of those people that put the brain on the meat slicer and look at thin slices of brain?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  No, no, no. No, we, we, no, no, that's considered.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's wrong with that question? We've all seen that, haven't we?

• 9:59Matt Kirshen?

  We all knew exactly what you were talking about.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 10:02Matt Kirshen?

  You said meat slicer, and everyone's like, well, that's probably not the name, but we know it.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I don't know about this, all right. We all saw the movies.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  But this is where the TV and the movies have it wrong. Because for us in neuropathology, it's, we are very particular about how we examine the brain, and we do it freehand, so that we can tailor it very carefully to try to get the most out of what we're looking at, both on the outside and the inside brain. Yes, you have to be extremely careful. You don't want to destroy anything, and you want to be able to look through the microscope at the tissues later if you need to.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when DNA came on the scene, what's the biggest change that it introduced?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Well, I would say it's had a huge impact in a couple of ways. Identification of remains is very important for individuals who don't have identification on them, or who die in circumstances where it's not possible, you know, to ask their family members. So we do about 100 such missing cases, missing persons type cases per year.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't mean to get morbid, but in the day when they say, let me dispose of the body, but first remove the head and the fingerprints. And now you just have a headless body with no fingers. And that doesn't matter, the DNA will still get it.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  We, that's another circumstance in which we use it. Uh, dismembered bodies, um, that sort of thing. Uh, yeah, and for example, after-

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was creeped out by even that question.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but let me put it in another context. Uh, after nine eleven, uh, our DNA lab was one of the, uh, at the forefront of trying to identify all the remains. And our chief at that time, Dr. Charles Hirsch, pledged to the city of New York that we would identify every last human remains through DNA testing, and we've been doing that.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you couldn't have otherwise done that.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Could not have otherwise done.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burned bodies and crushed, and they've been there for months. As they slowly recovered the, uh, dug out the, the site.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yes, e- even now, I mean, we still have a permanent presence down at the, uh, at Ground Zero. Uh, our office that's staffed by forensic anthropologists for this kind of thing. So this is where DNA has done an immeasurable service to families.

• 12:08Matt Kirshen?

  Is dental records still a thing? Do people still do that?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yes, dental records are very important, especially if you have an unidentified, uh, person. It's, uh, yeah.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Patricia Cornwell's books, they really birthed an entire generation of TV shows like CSI and Bones. And I'm just curious, how authentic is the forensic science in those TV dramas? Cause those are highly praised dramas. One of, CSI even became a traveling museum exhibit, where you would go in and, you know, for, for school groups, would go in and try to solve a crime using the scientific evidence. So how authentic is it? What, what grade would you give it?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  I would give it about a B plus. It's, it's, uh-

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good, that's very high grade.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  No, it's, it's, it's very, you know, the tools they're using, they describe them, uh, with great, uh, accuracy. Um, and, uh, they're certainly the same tools that we use. And, you know, Patricia uses them a lot, refers to them a lot in her novels. And I actually appreciate that. She's in fact been a great friend to our office over the years and, uh, and I think it's fabulous that the public is getting to know a little bit about what it is that we do.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, we're gonna explore the science of decomposing bodies. When StarTalk returns.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Bringing space and science down to earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with bestselling forensic crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And I asked her about that creepy research facility in Tennessee called The Body Farm. Check it out.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's not a health spa. You don't want to go. The Body Farm is two acres of land outside of University of Tennessee, near their hospital there, that people donate their bodies to science and they let them decompose out there in all sorts of different circumstances.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a special on this.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's been around for about 40 years.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a huge dead body laboratory.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  And why do we do that? Mostly it's to answer time of death questions. In other words, that is the biggest alibi in any murder trial is could you have committed that crime in the period of time it would have taken? You know, when did this person die? Time of death is very tricky. It's like quantum computing. Every time you ask it, it gives you a different answer. And it depends on the wind and the rain and how clothed you are, how much body fat you have. I mean, everything is dependent on something and it can dramatically change your answer.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this just, this land and just dead bodies out there.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Well, there might be one in a car, there might be one in a pond, there might be one buried in a casket, there might be one hanging from a tree.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One with maggots.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Oh, the nature, they have cameras set up and yes, because we are lunch for these people.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it seems to me you owe your body to The Body Farm.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  No, I don't. I, listen, to be honest with you, The Body Farm is, I mean, I think it's, I think it's a great utility for some of this stuff, but, but there are probably other ways that we could learn some of these things.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rebecca.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That seems like an awesome way to get all the data you need, but she's talking about other ways. What other ways might you gather these data?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Well, we basically see these kinds of cases pretty much every day.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, except you get a body that's partially decomposed that's brought in. But you don't know when the body started to decompose, which the body farm will know. Because they know when they put down the body, so they have data that you don't have.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  That's right, but from those kinds of data, we extrapolate to our cases. But the kinds of data that we often do have are things like if someone has died in their home, we may have their newspapers piled up in front of their house and we'll know how far back that is. We'll have their mail. We may have the expiration date on their milk in their fridge. I mean, these are things that we use and we correlate. So every day, we have those kinds of data when the last person who saw them, when their family got the text from them. So we have enough data to often make those kinds of conclusions.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a little weird now that you're going to be looking in my refrigerator at my milk expiration date. I don't know if that...

• 17:13Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, my milk, I've got some old stuff in my fridge. I think he died in like 1996, so I don't know what's going on there.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, would you donate your body?

• 17:24Matt Kirshen?

  I would like to donate my body to science and I want to find out more about that from you after the taping.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not much of a meal for the maggots, you know?

• 17:30Matt Kirshen?

  Exactly, so I might as well have some scientists have some fun. Although I think the main thing I want to do really is have some fun with the scientists. I'd rather try and confuse the coroners. I think I want to die with a list in my pocket with a list of names crossed off and mine's in the middle of that list. And I want to be covered in gasoline but not burnt. And clasping a locket next to a broken birdcage and dressed as a centaur. So that's my plan and just be like, work it out, see what you can do with that, so.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay, well you just publicly announced this, so we got you now.

• 18:07Matt Kirshen?

  Well, that's the first draft. I'm going to switch it up for the real deal, but try and match that to something in the Tennessee body farm. Like, oh, okay, no, we actually have that exact same thing as well. Turns out it was a comedian trying to screw with us, so. We did, um, we did a bit of research though. I found out there were some other cool things you can do with your body after. These are all real things.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go on.

• 18:25Matt Kirshen?

  These are, um, these are interesting ways to donate your body. Firstly, you can be buried in a suit made of mushrooms and composted, and you get turned into a tree. I think that's quite a nice, green thing to do. You're sort of, it's the circle of life, but immediate. You can turn your body over to medical experiments, either officially or just find a well-meaning medical person online and say, "Give it your best shot."

• 18:48Matt Kirshen?

  You can be turned into a diamond. I don't know if that's something that appeals to, as a scientist, in you. Um, or be turned into fireworks. I don't know whether you'd rather have that.

• 18:59Matt Kirshen?

  You can become an exhibit at BodyWelt, the touring body exhibit.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, and that way you're around for a while.

• 19:06Matt Kirshen?

  Right?

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Matt Kirshen?

  You can be turned into a vinyl record, which, uh, sounds a lot better than being turned into an MP3.

• 19:15Matt Kirshen?

  You can be cryogenically frozen. Um, you can be launched into outer space. I don't know if that's something that, uh, something you might want.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would like, take bits of you or totally cremate you so that you're lighter.

• 19:27Matt Kirshen?

  Right, I think, yeah, I don't think they put the full bulk in there. They wouldn't want your water weight, but you're just a corpse.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll dehydrate you or something, right.

• 19:34Matt Kirshen?

  Or you could be put into a haunted house. Uh, or a regular house that just becomes haunted because of you, so.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that works.

• 19:42Matt Kirshen?

  But, but those are all different options.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I like the diamond one, I think. Yeah, pressure and time.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's plenty of carbon in our body, and the diamond is pure carbon.

• 19:53Matt Kirshen?

  So how would that work? They presumably a mixture of heat and extreme compression.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have to break every single chemical bond in your body to just leave the carbon behind. And then there's just this pile of carbon, and then they turn the carbon into diamond. Yeah, that'd be very cool. So you can wear your dead spouse on your ring, you know? What?

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the creepiest thing you've heard today yet? No, I don't think so.

• 20:19Matt Kirshen?

  We've definitely got some strange Facebook comments when people post that picture like, "Guess what just happened?"

• 20:25Matt Kirshen?

  "It's not what you think."

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rebecca, are there stages of decomposition? That you've broken it up into parts?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yes, more or less. I mean, it's a biological process.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how long does the whole process take?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  It varies a lot with the conditions, depends on the heat, the humidity, if it's a dry environment, if you're in water, that sort of thing. But pretty much, the human body is skeletonized by about six months to a year after death. Again, depending highly on circumstances.

• 21:00Matt Kirshen?

  I know, I was thinking that exact same thing.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  She's skeletonized.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, that just rolled off her tongue.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so I asked Patricia Cornwell what it's like, on a personal level, emotional level, to visit a place like the Body Farm. And so, let's check it out.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  It is surreal, because you think you're on a battlefield. Because there's all these dead bodies everywhere. Some of them clothed, some of them not, some of them are just the way they came from the hospital in their gown. One guy had committed suicide, but he had donated his body and he was he was dressed in the suit that he killed himself in. It was just lying there on the dirt.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a suit?

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's surreal.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  That he dressed up to take his life, that's what I'll never forget. You see what I mean? That's where the heart comes from, is if you don't go and visit with these folks, the dead, you don't deserve to write about them. And so, I had to do that for years, going in the morgue. And, you know, not just when I worked there, but the research that kept going on and on and on. And I have to tell you, I wouldn't wish that on anybody, it's really hard to do. It's hard. I mean, I could start crying if I think about it too much. It's hard, some of the stuff. And, you know, I've, I've, I've shown people what that is and I sure as hell have shown them what it's not. And it's not all the fakery and it's not pretty. And when you see, you know, Shelley's sculpted, you know, sculpture in university college

• 22:29Speaker 03

  at Oxford, the drowned poet, and he's all beautiful with his flowing hair, that's not what you look like when they fish you out. Sorry. It's awful. But I learned such an important lesson because one day I was going down the elevator and there was a decomposed, a guy who'd been out fishing with his little boy. He fell overboard, probably had a heart attack. And he'd been in, it was summertime, and he'd been in the water for about a week. And I'm telling you, the minute I got to that building, you could smell it on every floor. I'm on the elevator going down because this medical examiner's gonna get, just gonna do this case. And I'm already dreading it because, and I said to her, "I sometimes don't know how you do this." And she said, "I try to remember them before they were like this."

• 23:12Speaker 03

  And suddenly I saw that man in the boat with his little boy on a July morning fishing on the James River. And I thought, he would be mortified, literally, if he knew he looked like this right now. So give it the poor guy a break, he can't help it. And I stood there the whole time and I scribed, took notes and did my job with her. But I've always tried to remember that. Look beyond what's in front of you. Look at the person inside. That person who's not there on that table anymore. And, and this is what he's left. This is his bloated, stinky space suit. And let's see what we can find out about it. It would be respectful.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rebecca, what is, as Patricia noted, how important is it, maybe for your own psychological stability, to be respectful of the dead?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. These are our family members, these are our community members, and it's really...

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If someone's father, mother, sister, brother...

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yes, and we're the last physicians to see them. And that's part of our commitment to...

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Society and humanity.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To see this every day, so many times a day, does it wear on you? Do you need to put a layer of distance between your emotions and what you're experiencing?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Somewhat, but we more often support one another and help each other.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You help people in the field?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yes, our colleagues in the field. And for me personally, I'm a Buddhist and it's a lesson in compassion for me every day. When I see them.

• 24:56Matt Kirshen?

  And like you were saying before, it does feel like it's a level of everyone everyone ends up like this. Everyone looks the same on the table.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  We do, we're all the same.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So has it changed your perspective of death?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I don't fear it.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You embrace it more? You don't fear it?

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I don't fear it. It's a normal part of life, you know. It's impermanence is what we have to deal with.

• 25:20Matt Kirshen?

  Do you get to choose who would do your autopsy? You know, like the way hair stylists would be like in the salon, they'd be like, Marco's the best, so I want to have him do mine.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  People do do that, you know, for their funeral hairdos and that sort of.

• 25:35Matt Kirshen?

  Right.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Sure, oh no. We, I've had colleagues who've specified these kinds of things, absolutely.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's someone named Marco.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, we ponder the scientific search for the afterlife when StarTalk returns.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  This is StarTalk.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're discussing the science of death, featuring my interview with bestselling crime novelist, Patricia Cornwell. Check it out.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Science does show us that we really can't get rid of anything, can we? It turns into something else.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it turns into something else, that's right.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  So...

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It degrades, but it's something... Yeah, not all things are equal. But it does go somewhere else, right? When you die, your body temperature, you notice, radiates to the air, the air then will radiate to space. That energy that was once you is still somewhere in the universe.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  I believe in eternity, I believe in infinity, I do not believe we end. And I would bet you my life on that now. I know my flesh is gonna end, and it reminds me of it every day. Because as I get older, like, I don't know how, the time goes so fast. And I've seen so many dead bodies, I can't even count. And one of the things that I was struck with, year after year...

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most people go their whole life never seeing a dead body.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  I've seen thousands, thousands, of the worst thing imaginable. And I've seen people who were, that literally was just unstrapped from the electric chair and driven right over to the morgue and their body temperature is 106 degrees. And the blood is still kind of, their veins are still standing up on their arms, they look so alive, but they're not. And there's something so missing, when that person's not there anymore, that you realize that the spirit, or the essence, or whatever this is that we are, our consciousness, our intelligence, is not really the same thing as this. It's not. And it does, it is not destroyed. It goes, I don't know where, but it's, I'm telling you...

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, all you can really say is that it's not where it used to be.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  It's not where it used to be.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it could have disappeared, or gone somewhere else.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  I also think...

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're saying it's just not there.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  I'm saying that the body is, your body is not the same thing as you.

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, joining us now to discuss the concept of mind, body, and soul is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. Andrew!

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you for having me.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  Thank you, it's been great here.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a physician at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia?

• 28:17Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're a pioneer in the field of neurotheology?

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, did you, like, make that a...

• 28:26Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did, so what is that?

• 28:29Speaker 05

  It's basically the field that is trying to understand the relationship between the religious and spiritual part of ourselves, and the biological part of ourselves, and trying to understand how they interweave within us.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this would be a neurological thing.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Well, it's both in this case. For me, neurotheology is kind of a two-way street. It's not just science or neuroscience looking at religion, but it's also religion looking at neuroscience and how they can inform each other about who we are as human beings.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what have you learned about this concept of a separation? Or what do you have to say about this concept of separation of the body from the self?

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Well, it's a fascinating problem in neuroscience because, for the most part, today cognitive neuroscience sort of thinks of them as together, that the only way we can have thoughts is through our brain. But people have a lot of very interesting experiences that suggest just the opposite. When people have a mystical experience, they feel that they transcend themselves. They go beyond just their physical body and they feel that they experience the universe in a completely different way.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that relate to near-death experiences?

• 29:30Speaker 05

  Well, and that's another kind, which are these out-of-body or near-death experiences where the person literally seems to get outside of their body. They often describe themselves as floating up to the ceiling of the room and being able to see the hair color of the nurse in the room, or maybe sometimes even going down the hall and seeing a patient in another room and learning something about what's going on with them. And people have corroborated these reports, so there's something to them. The question is, what does it mean?

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. When you mean corroborated the report, you mean more than one person has said this about their experience?

• 30:03Speaker 05

  There are actually thousands-

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not that nurses saw things floating above bodies.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  Correct, that's a good correction.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just wanted to distinguish this.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Yes, but when people go up and they have this experience and they'll say, "There was an interesting report where they said they saw the doctor look like he was kind of flapping his arms like he was flying." And then when they talked to the doctor, they said, "Were you doing something like that?" He says, "Well, yes, I was because I wasn't sterile and I had to point to the other doctors in the room what they were doing, so he was making this kind of unusual movement." So that kind of interesting way of looking at what it is that the person describes when they are outside of their body.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I thought there was an attempt to do a more formal experiment on this, where someone wrote something on a piece of paper, faced it up to the ceiling, and it was something that you'd have to- Have an out of body experience above the paper to read? And no one was ever, in all these cases, no one knew what the hell was written there.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, it's, uh, one of the, the interesting possibilities with near death experiences is the ability to try to very systematically explore this. And as you mentioned, there are some studies that have been done theoretically. If they go above themselves and they're resting in the corner, then if you put a shelf there above where their body is, and you put a picture or something written, they should be able to see it.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a proper experiment, not a doctor doing this.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and, and I agree so far from what I hear, there have not been any hits yet in terms of the accuracy of finding that, but just imagine what would happen if we did get one.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be great. A new discovery, a new phenomenon.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  A new way of thinking about it.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about the perception we have of soul. Is that, is that, is that something we choose to believe in because of whatever religious affiliations we have? What do you think, and so therefore it's a conscious psychological choice? Would you think some of that might be hardwired in the brain?

• 31:52Speaker 05

  Well, one of the things that's interesting about the concept of a soul is that it seems to go back to the earliest origins of the human species, even, even to Neanderthals. The idea of burying people a hundred thousand years ago with trinkets and with beads and so forth. It implied that they understood that there was something more than just the biology of, just the physical nature of who we are. So it seems like it's been something that's been in our brains for a hundred thousand years, maybe more. And if that's the case, we may not have much of a choice but to think about ourselves in a more spiritual way, not just what is, what we see physically.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the history of research on this?

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, people have tried to see if there's a body's energy and, and maybe tried to use, you know, different modalities of imaging, whether it's through X-rays or other types of thermal studies.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because when X-rays were discovered back at the late 19th century, I mean, to, to the afterlife people's credit. They wanted, they thought, okay, if X-rays see through the body, and a body, somebody's ready to die, let's set up the X-rays to see if you can see something leaving the body and rising up. And they didn't find anything.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  But that presumes that you understand what a soul would be, that a soul would emit X-rays.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a first pass. X-rays see your bones and your, and other things. They see through you.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, I can't blame them for trying that experiment. But it failed.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  When you talked about, with your first question, we can talk about how our brain thinks about a soul, and that that may be something that's ingrained within us, but whether or not that actually means that there is a soul,

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  bigger question.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, right now, it's time for Cosmic Queries.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We took your questions about the scientific search for the afterlife. So Matt, what do you have for us?

• 33:39Matt Kirshen?

  Okay, first question comes from Nate Gardiso from Facebook and says, "Could the afterlife and ghosts just be reasonable science we don't yet understand?"

• 33:49Speaker 05

  Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, what we can measure and what we can know is just what we know today. And every theory can be changed sometime tomorrow. So, we have a long way to go to understand everything there is to know about the universe.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rebecca?

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Well, I...

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sheep means no.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  I've already told you.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a no.

• 34:13Matt Kirshen?

  I feel like that's the way you'd be leaning as well on this question, Neil.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I just think, I haven't seen experiments to justify...

• 34:19Matt Kirshen?

  The existence of ghosts.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  I'm open, show me the data.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the data's good, I'm good. But, so, but the question was, could there be a way of scientific investigation that will one day show if there goes? Fine.

• 34:31Matt Kirshen?

  Possible.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have no problems with that. And I just wonder, if that's the case, about 100 billion people have ever lived, so you'd have like 100 billion ghosts just crammed in all these spaces. And you need some way to dispose of the ghosts. You need the Ghostbusters.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's no room for all the ghosts. If every dead human that ever was leaves a ghost behind.

• 34:55Matt Kirshen?

  Unless they can stack in different dimensions.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's right, but I don't want to say he's right.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got time for one more question, go.

• 35:08Matt Kirshen?

  We have one more, this is from Dan Latham. Says, "Will it be possible to use artificial intelligence to create an artificial afterlife? If there's no heaven in the clouds, could there be an afterlife in the cloud?"

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got this. I got this. Once your consciousness is uploaded, then the concept of an afterlife is moot. Because there is no end of your life for there to be an afterlife.

• 35:36Matt Kirshen?

  As long as the data stays intact.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so as no one unplugs it.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, we dissect the mind of a serial killer. With StarTalk with Terra.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's a big Patreon shout out to Ted Shevlin, Andrew Alquinn, and Serge Rizzuto. That's right, Serge, we know who you are. Thank all three of you, and thank you if you support us on Patreon, because you're helping to make StarTalk possible.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  This is StarTalk.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We are featuring my interview with author Patricia Cornwell. She's written 24 bestselling crime fiction novels. But she's also taken a special interest in a real-life cold case. The infamous serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. Let's check it out. What's this obsession you have with Jack the Ripper?

• 37:17Speaker 03

  This is, you know, I-

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it still unsolved?

• 37:19Speaker 03

  No, I know who it was.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Of course, I solved, honey. Yes, Walter Sickert.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  The artist, absolutely.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I used science on it. Nobody ever bothered to try before. I looked at the only thing left is the letters that-

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you solved the Jack the Ripper question?

• 37:34Speaker 03

  I didn't solve it. The scientist that I brought into it solved it. And actually, it was Scotland Yard-

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You orchestrated the solution to that crime?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Yes, because Scotland Yard came to me and suggested Walter Sickert, and I just did what they said, and I looked into it. They can't investigate that today. They don't even have enough cops for the stuff that's going on now. So they can't be worried about a 140-year-old case, but told me all about it. I didn't know anything about the case. And I asked who the victims were, and he told me the ones that we knew of, who the suspects, ones that we know of. I said, "Based on what?" He said, "Nothing." "Based on nothing." I said, "Well, is there no evidence left in the case?"

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's time for Patricia to take over.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And he said, "Well, there's just the letters that Jack the Ripper wrote." I said, "I didn't know he wrote letters." I said, "I'd like to take a look at those." So I went over to National Archives, and they put me back in this vault, this room with vaults and all this. And I got scientists to look, and we started finding paper matches between Sickert's stationery and Jack the Ripper's. Water marks, measurements. I had the world's foremost paper expert involved. But it was Walter Sickert.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jack the Ripper, just to catch you up on this, is the unidentified killer linked to a series of unsolved murders in London during the 1800s. And Patricia thinks she cracked the case, but others disagree. Rebecca, you specialize in looking into people's brains to find out what happened to them. Is there anything about the brain of a serial killer that you might be able to extract from an autopsy?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Well, I hate to disappoint here, but actually, an examination of a serial killer's brain is likely to show changes that any one of our brains could have or not have.

• 39:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about the shooter in the University of Texas?

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Well, he had a brain tumor, so that's one of the rare exceptions. A malignant brain tumor, and yes, that would be one of the... That's what we look for, but one hardly ever finds it.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. Okay, this is the dead person's report. How about the live person's report? If you could put a psychopath, like Jack the Ripper, in an MRI, or an FMRI, functional MRI, what do you think you'd find?

• 39:43Speaker 05

  They've actually done that. They've actually done a number of studies looking at violent criminals and psychopaths. And to simplify the results a little bit, what has generally been seen is usually one of two basic kind of changes. We have a very strong emotional center, our limbic system, and we have our frontal lobe, which helps to control it. So when people are psychopaths, or when they are violent criminals, either they tend to have overactive limbic systems, meaning that their emotions just really kind of run away with them and they can't control what they're doing because of that, or their frontal lobes are not working well. So even though they may have relatively normal emotional responses, they're just not able to control them well. But it seems to have something to do with how they respond to their emotions,

• 40:26Speaker 05

  which then allows them to kind of commit these crimes.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a start. That's an important start.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  It's a start, right. It's not absolute, and there's certainly plenty of people who have limbic systems that run away with themselves and don't kill people. So we have a long way to go in terms of truly understanding, but we're making some inroads into it.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So her novels center on forensic science, fine. It's a branch of all of science. But I had to ask her her thoughts on the wave of sort of science denial in America, something that I encounter in my everyday life and in my presence on social media. So I just wanted to get another sort of perspective on it. Check it out.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  To me, it's like a virus or a malware that gets into human nature that makes people persist in believing nonsense like the flat-earthers. Or believing that, you know, photographs taken at the gantry back in the 60s, that that was really the moonwalk, that we didn't go. I mean, what does it take to prove, you know, I guess unless you put your hand in fire and get burned, maybe then you'll believe it's true.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  So, I just feel this is a matter of life and death. That I have got to do something to get people to wake up to the importance of science and telling the truth, and do exactly what the word autopsy means. If you go to the Greek root, it means autopsia, which means "to see for yourself." Science makes you see for yourself.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's clear and concise. Well, up next, my good buddy Bill Nye the Science Guy gives his take on the power of forensic science to solve a crime, when StarTalk returns.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  This is StarTalk.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We've been exploring the science of solving crimes. And my buddy Bill Nye the Science Guy has a dispatch for us from the forensic science lab. Check it out.

• 42:31Bill Nye?

  Perhaps because life is so short, many of us are afraid of death, and a great many of us are fascinated with murder.

• 42:42Bill Nye?

  Now, a forensic scientist can't always tell why someone would kill someone else. But using the modern tools of chemistry and biology especially, forensic experts are able to determine who, what, where, when, and how a crime was committed. The word forensic derives from the Latin "to make public," or "get out in the open." Now, this works because almost any place you go in the present, a crime scene especially, is loaded with clues about what happened there in the past. So nowadays, forensic experts can pretty much tell whodunit.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rebecca, how hard is it to get away with a crime these days? Thanks to the modern work that you do?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  It's harder than it used to be. Because we do have tools like DNA.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you could probably have always said that at any time. There was, "Oh, now we can use fingerprints, that's a new discovery." And now it's harder than ever before. So is there a point where you say, "Okay, we're plateauing here." It's not gonna get...

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we haven't reached 100% solving of every crime, so...

• 43:53Matt Kirshen?

  Do you feel like you could commit a perfect murder?

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given what she knows, yeah. She knows! Good question. Be careful how you answer that one.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that a yes or a no?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Well, I would never be inclined to, but...

• 44:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a yes. Yeah, yeah, that's a yes. We need an interpreter for her under these situations. So Andrew, what do you think in the future, like neuroscience could be used to help prevent and maybe even solve crimes?

• 44:25Speaker 05

  Well, you know, theoretically, it's possible to do a better job. Again, it's some very interesting ethical, neuroethics they refer to it. You know, could you put little cameras in our brains so that we can actually see, you know, they have cop cameras now. I mean, could we all have something like that in our brain? Maybe, but is that okay? Is that okay to do?

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that would allow someone else to see through your eyes what you're doing.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could that be a little invasive? How about a chip that prevents whatever neurosynapses would make you commit murder?

• 44:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From actually firing?

• 44:57Speaker 05

  You know, it's...

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If there's such a thing.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Right, I mean, you know, it's a fascinating, I think about this a lot. You know, why can't you go into the jails and go onto death row and, you know, do some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulation? This new thing where, you know, you try to...

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a thing? I thought you made that up on the fly. Didn't he make that up?

• 45:16Speaker 05

  I would never do such a thing here.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not like something out of Batman. "There's a transcranial stimulator off your utility belt, Batman."

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, and they're using it to help people with different psychological issues. So, you know, is it possible you could turn off... Those emotional centers of the brain. But now, how comfortable would we all feel? I mean, what if you could do some kind of chip or surgery on Adolf Hitler? And say, OK, we're going to just send him back out into the world. I don't know how comfortable everybody would feel, even though we can prove scientifically that we may have changed the way the person thinks.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you imprison people to punish them? Or do you imprison them so that they don't commit that crime again?

• 45:52Matt Kirshen?

  And also, who gets to decide who has criminal intent? That sounds like it's very open to be, you say, ah, he looks a bit criminally. We better put the chip in.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, but like I said, there's a lot of very big neuroethical questions for us to deal with. But they are fascinating.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, crime author Patricia Cornwell is working on a new series about solving crimes in space.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked her about her process of writing stories by seeing for herself. If you can write a story about space, how are you going to see that for yourself? Because she likes being there. So I just had to get in there and find out. Let's check it out.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  I was on a rocket pad a couple of months ago at Wallops Island. And you know what those things look like? They're just a bunch of grating and all this metal, right? And when I was standing there in this bitter, cold wind, I realized why you always have to show up. Because I was hearing the sound the wind was making through the metal, and it was playing like space music. All this eerie noises. And if I had not been there and stood there, I would not have been able to tell that full story of what it was like to be on that launch pad. This is my method. I have to sort of taste, touch, feel, smell what it is. I'm a primitive person. I pick it up and shake it and poke something with it and smell it and taste it and then realize it's arsenic and I shouldn't have, you know.

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After the fact.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  But that's how I do things. It's like my world is a laboratory. And my job is to be like Cassini probe. I'm just going to take in the data and fire it right back to mission control. Only my mission control is the story it tells.

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of dead bodies,

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't like thinking of dead bodies, but when I do, no one wants to die, really. And why is that? Could it be because we fear death because we're born knowing only life?

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, okay, for me personally, when I die, I've thought this through. Don't cremate me. No. There's an energy content of your body. When you are burned, that energy is released from the molecules of your body. Molecules have energy contained within them. To burn is to break those bonds and release that energy. You then heat the air. The air then radiates to space. Your energy is still there. It's just scattered into space. And nothing can really use it after that.

• 48:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the lowest form of energy there is.

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Radiative heat.

• 48:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I say to myself, hmm, I've spent my whole life dining on flora and fauna as an omnivore. So for me, when I die,

• 49:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to be buried.

• 49:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buried. I want to be consumed by the flora and fauna that I had spent my life dining upon myself.

• 49:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in that way, I give back to the world that had given me life and sustained me.

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective.

• 49:38Speaker 07

  You've been watching StarTalk. I want to thank Rebecca Fulthur, Andrew Newberg, Matt Kirshen.

• 49:52Speaker 07

  I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.