StarTalk and Baba Booey Rock Comic-Con (Part 2)

The geek out at San Diego Comic-Con continues when Neil deGrasse Tyson, Baba Booey and Bad Astronomer Phil Plait turn from gadgets that exist to gadgets we dream about.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As an environmental advocate, professional climber Alex Honnold knows the most critical battles for our planet happen far from the spotlight. That's why he hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to the people finding real, hopeful solutions to climate challenges. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Curiosity is fundamental to progress, so why not take what you're curious about and

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• 1:28Speaker 00

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• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, San Diego Comic-Con 2012. Two special guests. We've got the bad astronomer Phil Plait, friend and colleague. Phil, I'd love to have you. Love you, man.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  It's great to be here.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love you, man.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  I love doing this show.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary Delabate, tech gadget extraordinaire. Writes about tech gadgets for?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Sound and Vision Magazine.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sound and Vision Magazine, very cool. For this hour, I just want to talk about gadgets that we still need. Not ones that exist today, but ones we wish already existed or we think might be a little just beyond our horizon. Why not start with some movie gadgets?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Well, I'm gonna jump right off of that. I'm going right to Star Trek.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Star Trek, okay.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  I'm gonna ask you guys, seriously, as scientists, what about, say, are we 20 years away, 50 years away, or 1,000 years away from teleportation? Come on, when you're sitting in-

• 3:10Speaker 02

  You're gonna hand that one off to me?

• 3:10Speaker 03

  All right. When you're sitting in the LA airport on your way to New York, don't you dream of going in the William Shatner cubicle and teleporting to New York?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Maybe a Patrick Stewart cubicle, but, uh...

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so there's a difference. There's the teleportation room, but all you really need is your own portable wormhole. And you can dial in a location.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you just travel, and then you don't have to decompose yourself and hope that you reassemble correctly on the other side.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  So how do you, where do you get a wormhole?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Well, in Star Trek, they always talk about, "We're gonna convert you from matter into energy, which we can then, you know, send off as a beam or something to some other place." And the problem with that is you convert your mass into energy, that would be an explosion larger than every nuclear bomb on the planet. That would be bad.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so the energy contained by E equals mc squared and all of its atoms would take out this quadrant of Earth?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  That would be bad. On the other hand, there is an equation that describes the way you're constructed. And if you could write out that equation exactly, then I could redefine you someplace else. The problem is, that's sort of impossible.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if that's the case, then you don't have to lose him here. You just duplicate him in another place if the equations define it. So then you could just, it's essentially a clone.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Unless there's a term in the equation for a location. Ooh, I don't know, I'm making this up.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, because he is only himself here at this time and place. That's gotta be part of the data.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, space and time and...

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  So, so it's a great writer's tool.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Writer's tool. So they don't have to keep landing the ship back and forth.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  But it's impossible, do you guys feel it's impossible?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hate to use that word, right?

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say a thousand years or more.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  But okay, but in seven...

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many years would you say?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Thousand and one, Price is Right, right?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  If in the year... If in the year 1850, in the year 1850, which is 170 years ago, if I'd have walked up to somebody and I told them that, forget about the telephone and the telegraph and the television and all that stuff, that we're gonna have devices where through some weird thing in the sky, we can look at each other and communicate that way, that would have seemed as outrageous as what I just told you.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, no, no, if you come a little later, like 1890s, because by then, we had the telegraph, and so we knew how to use electromagnetic energy to send information. And if you said, "One, the day will come where all the information in the world will be transmittable in this way," you could essentially extrapolate to that point. There's no way we can extrapolate to a teleporter.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Right, that doesn't break the laws of physics or engineering. But a teleporter, as we understand physics right now, a little dicey, it's kinda like faster than like travel. Using a wormhole to create a wormhole and go through it, physics says that doesn't work as we understand physics right now.

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, Star Trek was what, the 23rd century?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Depending on which one you're talking about, yeah, whatever, a couple hundred years.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A couple hundred years ahead. So, what I'm entertained by are the gadgets they had that we invented and now we're beyond them.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Right, that's right. The Macintosh disk, I mean those little colored discs that they use, Spock had them, right?

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just been rewatching with my kids from the beginning, the first series, and they talk about storing data on tapes. And so that itself would pass. When I first saw Star Trek, the most unbelievable part of it to me was not the warp drive or the photon torpedoes or the transporter, it was that you could just walk up to a door and it would open. I said, "Well, how does it know?" It doesn't know.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I'm unimpressed by that because a year after that show, they were able to do that at my local A and P.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Well, I know. Ah, but those use pressure or they're infrared sensitive, right? What if it's a weightless being that is at room temperature? And it's just waiting for somebody to walk up and open the door for it.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A weightless being at room temperature would not be able to open the door.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. How would the thing detect it?

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The infrared is not detecting your thermal radiation.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I know, it's breaking the.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's just reflecting the light like you're remote control.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  It's an infrared absorbing alien.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, right.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I can keep doing this.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, then that alien ain't walking through the door.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  But when you talk about future gadgets, one of the things.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm okay with that.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  One of the things that I, how come in my house it never has come to a handprint on the door to open things up or a thumbprint on the door?

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could be.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  But why hasn't that caught on?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  It might be expensive, right? Biometrics, actually.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but suppose you eat and can't, you know, how often do you have to clean the surface of your iPad because of junk?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  I love, I love those movies where they cut off the guy's thumb and they keep it.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was the one where they took the guy's eye?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a, in a baggie?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was nasty. And for me, I slice my hands up all the time. I'm a complete klutz. So this thing would constantly, I'd have to actually program it to say, oh, yeah, blood stain, that must be you.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  What about eye recognition?

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you remember the scene in 2001, the movie? Where it's such a, a romance of the future. That as he's coming on to the space station, he has to go into the secure area, says, welcome to voice print identification.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, state your name, Christian name first, given name second.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then he says it and then, thank you, voice print ident. And so it's all, and they took five minutes to just relish in the voice print identification.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  By the way, that movie's very ambitious because 2001 came, it didn't look anything like that.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did, that's exactly right. Well, actually AT&T was out of business, Howard Johnson's was out of business.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Pan Am.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pan Am, right, right?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we did have a shuttle.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  But you'll notice on the ship, when they're going to Jupiter, I believe this is true, they had little flat-screen computers that sat on...

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they were headrests. In the back headrests.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  They were iPads!

• 8:45Speaker 02

  But there were some that were sitting on a countertop or something. And yeah, they looked just like iPads. And it makes you kind of wonder if maybe, you know, Steve Jobs or whatever was looking at that going...

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Well, listen, we all had access to the movie.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  He thought of it.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. That's what it takes. So what else from Star Trek you want? You want the teleporter? We don't have it. Sorry.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  I want to figure out a way to not sit in traffic.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to not sit in traffic? Move to someplace where you don't have to sit in traffic.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Be a blogger.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  It's so fun.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I never have to leave my house.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  I always had this dream that, like, I work in the city and I live in Connecticut. I always had this dream...

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The city? New York City.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  New York City. That I would get in my car, and I would hit some buttons and, via some sort of magnet underneath the ground or whatever, that I could, like, put my chair back and it would just take me home.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could do that. That's not an unimaginable future.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, it can take you faster than you can drive it. Because a computer can take you faster with greater precision than a human...

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And there's no accidents, because theoretically if the grid is being run correctly...

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  That is just a simple computing power thing, right?

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's talk more about that, because I think Google designed a car that would be undribbous. And when we come back to StarTalk, more on gadgets and the future.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dateline, San Diego Comic-Con 2012. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of StarTalk. Today, we're talking about gadgets we always wished we had, gadgets of the future, gadgets imagined by creative science fiction writers and represented, demonstrated on the unlimited infinite palette of cinema. And I've got with me the bad astronomer Phil Plait. I've got gadget man Gary right here. Gary, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. And so, let's talk about Star Wars. There's all these Star Wars characters walking up and around here. And Star Wars, they got the lightsaber, they got droids. Did you have any... You're a gadget guy, dude. Was anything they used that you felt you wanted or should have, or you want to invent?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I gotta think about that. There's nothing that's jumping out at me, because I'm more of the audiovisual stuff.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know what I didn't... Well, okay, how about the holographic movie thing, right?

• 10:53Speaker 03

  So, now, what would you use that for? Would you use that to send a message to somebody, the way they do in the movie?

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so, but remember when they did it in the movie, you didn't actually have to look at them. It was just an audio... What mattered was the audio, right? Maybe they're just trying to show off that they can do it all.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  I thought it was sort of confirmation that you were actually getting it from the right person. Like, you know what I mean? In other words, instead of making a fake audio thing, you could see that it's the right person.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  You know, my favorite part of that whole thing is...

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. So, that's the future equivalent of the ring stamp on the ceiling wax.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Seal, yeah.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, very good.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  My favorite part of that whole thing is at the end, you see Princess Leia look, because, right, the Empire's coming, and she turns the thing off, and it's like, you know, "No time to edit this." I mean, she was getting away and sending it off. I think, you know, maybe... I guess the Empire was right on her. But you see that a lot in YouTube videos now, so they were fairly well ahead of the time there.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, one of my issues was with C-3PO, because, you know, he's a robot, right? But a robot doesn't have to look like a human. The human form is really poor at so many tasks. Look at him, he can't even run!

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Well, but there are a lot of different robots in that movie, some smaller, some bigger, they've run the gamut. And I do think that there are some things that a human robot...

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A humanoidal robot.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, just functionality with handshaking and the way they hand things to you.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Remember, he's a protocol droid, and most of the aliens in Star Wars are humanoid. So you want to see something that looks familiar, but doesn't get into the uncanny valley and freaks you out. So he's vaguely humanoid, you can talk to him, relate to him.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think anything freaked out anybody at that time, given what everybody looked like in the bar.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  That's true. And on the other hand, you know, what's the favorite android or the favorite robot in Star Wars, right? Everybody loves R2-D2, which is basically a trash can.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  And everybody... Well, not everybody hates C-3PO, but he's irritating. It's his character. So it doesn't really work out the way maybe you'd expect.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what else did you want? So, how about the lightsabers? I have issues with the lightsaber. In fact, I tweeted once about it. I mean, if it's light... You can't have light block light. Light is not space filling. So two lightsabers would just pass through one another. That doesn't mean we couldn't make it powerful enough to decapitate you or to punch a hole in you. It could still be a dangerous weapon, but you wouldn't be able to have a sword fight with two beams of light. And then someone said, "Oh, well, it reflects back and it's got some magic goo in it that solidifies." But I thought that was a lame comeback.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  There's a lot, a lot of literature on the web, of course, about how lightsabers work. And I always think-

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you really would call it literature?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I know. A lot of fanboy nerdery.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot of encyclopedic knowledge on something that doesn't exist and how it works.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. And I always think, "Well, maybe the name is just wrong. Maybe they just call it a lightsaber. It doesn't mean it's made of light. If it's a force field that comes out and is filled with a plasma or something like that, then they will interact with each other. But if it interacts with you, it'll slice your head off."

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can imagine a plasma containing some ingredients that suspends it within the plasma.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Or a magnetic field or something like that.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you could, two magnetic field lines. You'd have a hard time crossing those.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's interesting.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magnetic fields, you know, the lines never cross. You've never seen a bar magnet with magnetic fields crossing. With, you know, with iron filings on it, remember from school? They always have a beginning and an end, and they don't touch each other at any time.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  And if you try to cross these two things, they might repel each other.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would, and in fact, on the sun-

• 14:21Speaker 02

  We may be onto something there.

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not. On the sun, the sun has explosions, flares, and sunspots and all kinds of turbulent activity when the magnetic field that's embedded within the gas. I don't know if you know, the sun does not rotate as a solid ball. I mean, it's gas, but the equator rotates faster than other regions of the ball. So that in fact, magnetic fields that are in the gas wrap up on each other. And they start coiling and it reaches a breaking point where it busts free from the surface of the sun. And it takes plasma and flings it into space with it. And so magnetic fields don't like getting messed with. And so I bet we can work on this.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I'll call an engineer.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  I'm getting lost, man.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll call you back.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Magnets, how do they work?

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a magnet.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Magnets, I understand.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else from Star Wars?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Well, you know, just any kind of spaceship would be awesome. To be able to actually go and see these things.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the spaceships were just kind of hovering there, you know. I mean, I mean, sorry, not the spaceship.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  The speeders.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The speeders, yeah. They just hover. They didn't say how. They didn't say why.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  But you know, we have that technology now.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just the magnetic levitation?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Meissner effect, which is where you have a superconducting magnet, where you actually, you're sort of freezing the magnetic field into two things. And so you can have a magnet, you usually have to dip these in liquid nitrogen and they're really cold, but sometimes you don't have to. And you can put these two magnets together and then just let go and they'll float. Now, if you try to do that with just two regular magnets, they flop around. But if you freeze the magnetic field in, it's like you've locked them together. And you can actually take this magnet and spin it. And it'll spin in place. And it is the freakiest thing you've ever seen.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spinning in place just in the air.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Just sitting there, yeah, it's awesome. And you could, you could actually build a hoverboard or, or a car that way.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hoverboard from Back to the Future.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you had, but that gets very complicated because you're trying to move something.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not always over another magnet.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  What happened to the speed of travel? That's one of the things in the movie. So we got to a point where we had the SST.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We stopped going faster.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Why?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  It's hard, expensive.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm pissed off.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  No, but I mean, I know the SST wasn't cost effective, they went out of business. But I would like to think that we've got to a place where we can sort of recreate that in a more cost effective way, in a more comfortable, remember, I never flew on.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, part of the reason why the SST went out of business? Part of the reason?

• 16:39Speaker 03

  It was uncomfortable.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, no.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  It was.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of the reason was it wasn't our airplane. And so we did not allow the Concorde to fly Europe residents at supersonic speeds to the west coast. We said, "You cannot fly supersonic over our land." It wasn't our airplane. And so all you could do is just cross the pond. That's it. And then, you know, all right, it takes two and a half hours instead of seven. But now with internet on the airplane, I don't even care how fast the plane goes.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  That's true, I just watch movies all the time now, right? Or I'm writing.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you make an important point and I'm angered by that because we imagined the future as the time when you would continue ever to go faster and faster and faster.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  And we got there and then we stopped.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know what the natural limit of that would be? Suborbital flight.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, suborbital flight.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Where I was going.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suborbital flight, here's how it goes.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Sharing a brain here, yeah.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's how it goes, so orbit takes about 90 minutes. Space shuttle, space station, 90 minutes to orbit the earth. That means that...

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're never more than 45 minutes from any two places on Earth.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a full orbit is an hour and a half. So, wherever you want to go, if you go suborbital, you get there in 45 minutes. So I want to do a day trip to Tokyo. That's something I would have liked to have enjoyed today, and we can't do that.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Right. I would love that, except I would have to get into a rocket and be blasted into space.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, yeah, a few around 100 years ago, so I'd have to get into a plane and get blasted into the atmosphere.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and riding on planes sucks.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But back then, a lot of people died.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  But again, going back to the whole...

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's a technicality.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Going back to the whole travel thing, again, when you travel a lot, like I still want the thing from Total Recall, why can't we just walk past a screen? Why don't I have to stop and put my arms up, do all that stuff? Why can't we walk past a screen?

• 18:25Speaker 02

  You really want to start talking about TSA here?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  I do.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Really? You're feeling unviolated on this trip?

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mike, so what we need is a device that... Here's the problem. We're in a system where everybody's presumed to be guilty.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Okay. But it was like that in the movie. And everybody walked past that screen and you could see what was what and then you could stop.

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you saw the bones and then...

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Isn't that kind of what this thing is? What do you call that machine you're going to?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it is, but it's ridiculously slow.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  You know, my wife says that the reason they're doing this is to get us used to holding our hands up. So when they come to get us, we'll just do this automatically.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  When they come to serve man?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, so I know I'm gonna lose you after this segment. So other than instant travel, is there some other handheld gadget you think needs to be invented?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Um, you stump me. I can't really think of, of, I don't have the answer.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you want your own Death Star?

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? She worries me.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's not number one on the list.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  So the answer is yes!

• 19:28Speaker 03

  I want the ability to read women's minds.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that, oh, yeah, that'd be good. That would make social life really efficient.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Have you tried listening?

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you tried being sensitive?

• 19:42Speaker 03

  That's so 1890s. Oh, sorry.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Gary, thanks for hanging out on StarTalk with us.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  It was a lot of fun.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm gonna find you again in New York or Connecticut. I'll find where you're hiding. Next gadgets come around, I want to get a full report. All right, man?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Nice to meet you.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thank you.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Take care, man. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio will be back in just a moment with a conversation with the bad astronomer. And we're gonna talk more about gadgets in the future. See you in a moment.

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• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, live San Diego Comic-Con.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Comic-Con 2012, baby.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got my friend and colleague, Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. If you're the Bad Astronomer, then I gotta be the badass astronomer. But I want to do that only with your permission.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  We need to settle this one of these days, one way or another.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-oh, he's calling me out.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  All right, here we go, arm wrestle.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll lose that.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, I'm gonna lose that. Oh, God.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was audacious of you, though.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I know.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like the, you know, the little dog that just says...

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Need a...

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the big, with the big bark.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll find some way.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Star Trek trivia contest. We'll figure something out.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll find it. So, we were talking, we've been talking about gadgets, and, but you took it up a notch. Over the break, you were talking about whatever gadget it is that could destroy a planet such as the Death Star does.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And did you do a calculation about this?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's actually not that hard. You need a little bit of physics, but basically...

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what it's doing is, it completely destroys...

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...all the material connectivity...

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...of the solid object.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Why would you need to do that? You know, a 10-mile-wide asteroid pretty much takes care of a planet pretty well.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Takes care of the surface, surface life.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  It'd wipe out everything on the...

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every living thing on the surface.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  And certainly 30 or 40 miles across would do it. But to completely blow up a planet, that's a terror device.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's overkill.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no reason to do it unless you're trying to scare the crap out of somebody.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it's kind of like a nuclear weapon in today's standards of war.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it turns out, well, first of all, you don't need to do it. And also, it's almost impossible. You could take something the size of Mars and hit the Earth with it and not completely destroy it. To completely destroy a planet, think about it, right? You've got this planet here, and you take a rock, and you have to fling that rock off to infinity.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the rocks in the planet have to get... Okay.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and look at what it took to get, you know, three guys to the moon. It took this giant rocket. So it takes a huge amount of energy to do this. And when you calculate it, it's like more energy than the sun puts out. It's some outrageously huge number. So you can't just blow up a planet.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you did was calculate the binding energy of the planet. And if you pump more energy than the binding energy into the planet, it'll explode in the way the Death Star destroys the planet.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like breaking a stick. The molecules are bound together, you snap, unbind it. That takes some amount of energy.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and so the whole unbinding of the planet, so that's just overkill. So, this is the future. A lot of other things happen in it that we just accept, including sound in space. So why don't you accept that their Death Star can kill a planet?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, if it's just trying to like throw a beam at the planet and blow it up, that doesn't work. But, you can think of other ways this might do it. For example, if this beam actually converts 1% of the planet into antimatter. Boom, right? That's gonna blow the planet up. Antimatter and matter, when you touch them, release energy.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that enough, 1% antimatter?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Whatever, some small amount.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some small percent is what you're saying.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  But it certainly...

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why not just have an antimatter torpedo?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then you can blow up a planet. Why are you telling me you can?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Well, it still takes a huge amount of antimatter. I mean, the amount of antimatter we've made in the past few decades.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 10% of the mass of the planet is still huge? Oh, yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  And I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but you can calculate that. And it's still a huge amount. Planets are extremely dense objects that want to stay together.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you tell me, did I hear you write that you tweet about the Death Star?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, have you been checked out?

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Do you know how many people want to read tweets about the Death Star?

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe I don't want to know. So you're tweeting at the Bad Astronomer?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  At Bad Astronomer, yeah.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Bad Astronomer. And so, tell me one of your more popular Death Star tweets.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Well, in this case, I just said, because I do a daily fact, a BA fact, a Bad Astronomy fact. And today was in honor of Comic Con. And I just said, basically, "Don't tell Darth Vader, but the Death Star cannot blow up a planet." And I linked to an article I wrote where I do the calculation.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Article, one of your blogs.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Which shows how that works. In fact, this was written on the Sci-Fi Channel portal called Blaster.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you get around.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  I do, yeah.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  On my blog.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotta love your blog. The blog's got a huge following. This is Bad Astronomer Blog.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  This is coming from you. You have a huge following.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but still, but I'm not writing.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  You've got a decent following.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so on Discover...

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Discover Magazine.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Discover Magazine.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Bad Astronomy Blog.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a Bad Astronomy Blog in their blogosphere.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, okay.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  So they have a series, we have a series of blogs that do, there's a cosmology blog, and there's one about current events and that sort of thing, and I do the astronomy one.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  But they let me write about whatever the heck I want. And in this case, I did write an article...

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good gig.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And as a matter of fact, that was part, was almost in my contract. I said, "You know, I'm gonna write about Doctor Who." And they're like, "Absolutely, write about Doctor Who." Yes. So, you know, you can do, you can do these calculations, and it's a lot of fun. I mean, you must play with numbers in your head.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I just was never attracted to Star Wars to do the calculation.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  I am more of a Star Trek guy.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I try to be a little more real than the fantasies of Star Wars, if I'm gonna put a calculation out there for the public.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, yeah, you can, you can call Star Wars space opera. Calling it science fiction may be a stretch, but it depends on how you define things. I don't want to get into the whole fan war kind of thing. But, you know, if you're gonna establish something, the Death Star can blow up a planet, the Enterprise can move faster than light, we can beam people from point A to point B, there is some math you can do with that. And I know you, and I know that you studied the same things I did when you were in grad school. And it's fun to play with that.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is fun, it's definitely fun. I just need, the funness still, to me, has to have some connection...

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...to what could happen or might happen, that's all.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  I feel the same way, yeah.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's good. So what else in Star Wars got you?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  You know, I think the hair bun muffin earmuff technology, that was very advanced for this being so long ago and so far away.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're earmuffs!

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I nailed him!

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're earmuffs!

• 30:36Speaker 02

  And you know, there are headphones you can get like that. And you can buy these things, you can see people walking around with them, it's awesome.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's something we think the future will never bring.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Probably not, no.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when we come back in our next segment, I'm here with my special guest, Phil Plait. We're both here in San Diego. I'm overwhelmed, I'm a newbie here at Comic Con, and I'm a bit overwhelmed. This is what Comic Con for you?

• 30:57Speaker 02

  You're in my territory now, baby. This is my fourth or fifth.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am unworthy. So, when we come back more, live from San Diego.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back at Comic Con, StarTalk Live. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. StarTalk, you can find us on the web, StarTalkRadio.net. Not only that, StarTalk tweets at StarTalkRadio. I tweet about stuff that just pops into my head, at Neil Tyson. And there's a Twitter dude right here as well. My friend and colleague, The Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. Phil, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  I've been known to tweet.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know!

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on again.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, you're up to like 20,000 tweets or something.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're just out there.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  You have a lot more followers than I do, and you gain followers faster than I do. You got a lot to learn about tweeting per day, my friend. When you get up to 20 or 30 per day...

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per day, alright, I'll take lessons from you later. So, we're just riffing on gadgets. Earlier, we had Baba...

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Baba Booey.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Booey, talking about gadgets he's reviewed, and we took this into the future. So, we're in the future now. The real or imagined future of gadgets. Let's talk about Doctor Who.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Doctor Who.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got a sonic screwdriver.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Love that show.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who doesn't want a sonic screwdriver?

• 32:21Speaker 02

  I do not understand the sonic screwdriver.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what I like about it is, it does anything he needs it to do.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Open a door...

• 32:30Speaker 02

  It's literally a plot device.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unlock a window... I mean, I'm wondering if he walked by a cash machine with it?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Oh, they've done that, yeah, he's done. They did that in one episode in a Christmas special, to get cash out of an ATM.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's wrong! I don't know, whose cash was it?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Uh, it's insured.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  See, now the thing is, you know, that makes sense to me. You can encode stuff into a sonic wave, maybe, and it'll, it's Galafrian technology.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, it might not even have to be sonic. I mean, when that first came out, sonic was, they weren't thinking microwaves, right?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Well, they also do talk about a laser screwdriver in a couple of episodes.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Doctor Who franchise goes back to, what, the 60s?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  1963.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine, okay, so that's, back then, they're not thinking microwave transmissions.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  I know a lot about Doctor Who, apparently. Um, I've been watching the show since I was a kid, and I love the new stuff and everything.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  But, you know, what kills me, though, is that-

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He made the transition without paying.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I love, I love all the new-

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's much higher budget shows now that they're putting on, yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  But the writing is fantastic, it's really wonderful.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And the thing that gets me is, you know, opening a door and all that kind of stuff, I'll believe that, you can manipulate things with sound waves. The thing is, he'll scan somebody and he'll look at it, and I'm thinking, it's just a green light on the s- what's he seeing in there? Uh, but, you know, there, there's other things like psychic paper, where he'll flip open this thing that looks like an ID badge, and it's a blank piece of paper, and you will see what you want to see on it. And so it'll say, "I'm the inspector general for the, you know, the planetary defense," or whatever.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the language of whatever it is that-

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is he affecting the mind of the person who he's showing the badge?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Ooh, I don't, I don't think they've ever explained it. I think it just, it reads the mind and will find what it needs.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it is, it is pulling out of the head, because the person obviously knows what they need to look for.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In great detail.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  And when they first used that as a plot device to get past the guard, I was just, I was dying. I thought, "That is so funny."

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't need the Force?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  No, no. This is not the TARDIS you're looking for.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The TARDIS you're looking for is elsewhere, right?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  And the great tech of Doctor Who is the TARDIS.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  TARDIS is an acronym.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  It's for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, which is, like, totally made up. It's just a cool sound, right?

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  But it's a spaceship and a time machine, right? So, but it, it also can change its shape, but it's, it's stuck in the shape of a 1960s police box, where people could-

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call box, yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, call box, where people could go in and close the door and call the police and be safe from whatever's going on outside. Uh, but it's an iconic shape now. The idea of it, you know, being bigger on the inside than the outside. Love that.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it has access to a fourth dimension?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Or some extra dimension, yeah. And they actually explain it in one episode, in a brilliant scene, where he puts something on a pedestal, and then he walks 10 feet away and says, "Which one is bigger?" And the person says, "Well, the one in the foreground." And he says, "That's right, it looks bigger." "Now imagine I can keep it looking bigger, but put it back over there." And that's how the TARDIS works.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  And I was like, "That's awesome." "That sounds like it makes sense." And then you go, "Wait a minute."

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They offered an account.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yes, it's great. And that's what I love about Doctor Who. They explain things, but you don't really gain any knowledge when you walk away from it.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But other than that, they're not many gadgets. It's just he's got the TARDIS and his sonic screwdriver. Everything else is him figuring out how to save the universe.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Pretty much.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  And the TARDIS is generally a plot device. It gets them to 1888, or the far future, or whatever. But it's become a character on its own in the show.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's character on its own.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Much like the Enterprise on Star Trek.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But unlike other classic franchises like James Bond, or Batman, or others, where it's kind of all about the gadgets.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The gadgets are kind of, you can't wait to see what the next gadget that they're gonna pull.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  When I was a kid, yeah.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of the utility belt, or out of the compartment of the car.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when we come back, let's talk about that.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. When we come back to StarTalk Live! From San Diego, Comic-Con 2012. I'm here, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host and astrophysicist. I work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And Phil, you write a blog.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  I write the Bad Astronomy Blog for Discover Magazine.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But where do you work, if I were to find you?

• 36:25Speaker 02

  From home. I'm a blogger. I work from home and don't wear pants.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but he put on pants for this?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, where exactly are we here?

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the framing?

• 36:33Speaker 02

  I may be wearing pants.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be back in a moment. Stay with us.

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• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back at StarTalk in San Diego, live at Comic-Con 2012. Oh, Comic-Con! With the bad astronomer, my friend and colleague, Phil Plait. Phil, let's talk about, in this special show on gadgets, the gadgets of James Bond.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One James Bond episode, he made the car disappear.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Really?

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The car had a cloaking device, I don't know if you caught that one. And I think they were just catching on to that news story, where one side of an object can receive light, and transmit it around the skin of the object, and project it out the other side. So that if you're looking, your light path actually did that, but you'd never think that a light path curves, you'd think that's a straight line to your brains and eyes.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I thought that they were trying to stay ahead of things, but still with a foot in reality.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  I don't even think you need to do it that way. Now, there has been some technology where you can create this device, and they can beam microwaves at it, and the microwaves will go around this thing and come out the other side, and it's as if that object doesn't even exist. It just looks like the microwaves are coming at you from the source.

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you need some way to guide the microwaves around it.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Ah, but do you? I have this idea. If you had, and I've had this idea a long time, and it's actually, I'm seeing it implemented in some very primitive ways, it's still really cool. It's not that you need to guide the light around, you can stop that light, and say, so when you're seeing something, I see something over there...

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's light coming off that surface.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's light coming at me, so it has a direction, right? It's coming from there, not there, so it's coming in a direction, and it has a certain color, and a certain brightness. And if I can record that information, if I know the direction it came from, the color and the brightness, then I can say, oh, all I have to do is now have an emitter on the other side of me.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And electronically send that continual image.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yes, and then I don't send that photon, I send the information to the other side, somehow.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And recreates it.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Recreates it, and sends it out in the other direction. Now, it turns out...

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you do it, so it electronically... ...communicates this information out the other side.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  And if you want to be invisible to everybody, right? You have to know where every photon is coming from every direction and send them back out. It turns out, we don't really know how to do that.

• 40:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can do it probably coherently, but not from every direction.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yes, so if I wanted to hide from you, I could know where your eyes are. I could do that. As you're looking around at me, I can, my computer could figure out where you're looking.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone two feet to the side of me has got another angle on your light.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  And it turns out, in Mission Impossible movie, they had something like this. It was actually registering where a guard was looking and then projecting.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the latest one.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yes, and it was, it was very well done, and it was that sort of idea. And I really liked that, because it was something I thought of on my own and thought, "I'll make a million dollars!" Except I didn't think about telling Tom Cruise about it.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A million dollars!

• 41:20Speaker 02

  But what some people are doing, and this is a really clever application of it, is they will put a camera right here, and then a monitor on their back. Yeah, like, like right there, you know, on their stomach or whatever, you have solar plexus. And then they have a monitor on their back. And so if you're standing behind somebody, and you're looking at them, what you're seeing is what the camera is seeing, projected onto the monitor, and it looks like they have a hole in them. It's awesome! And the first time I saw it, I was just like, "Oh, why didn't I think of that?" It's a great costume, so you could be like a zombie, or something like that, and it looks like you have a hole in you.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The only difference is, it's only a hole if you're looking straight on. If you try to look at an angle to the other side, it's not gonna get, it's not gonna do it.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Right, you're still, it's like looking at a TV from the side.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The TV is a TV from the side.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't work right, yeah. But I love this idea, it's, you can imagine a way of making an object invisible to everybody.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, of course, what no one talks about, is that there are bands of light that render most of what we interact with in a day completely transparent. So a car is transparent to radio waves, for example, largely. These walls are transparent to microwaves, otherwise my phone wouldn't work, so...

• 42:26Speaker 02

  We're at Comic Con, your phone doesn't work, man.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyway, the circuits are completely overrun by the population.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Everybody tweeting a hundred thousand people.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody at the same time. But we forget that certain solid objects are actually transparent to visible light, like glass. Right? We don't marvel, I, I wake up in the morning and say, "Damn, I can see through this solid object."

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that's awesome!

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's completely, and we just call it glass, you know, it's just glass. But there, I wanna see through this wall, well, just pull out some microwaves and you'll see through the wall.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Or you could put a window in it.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Your way's hard.

• 43:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else do we have? I complained about one of the James Bonds where he had a fountain pen. And Q said it had an extremely strong magnet at its tip. And he might use it for any number of things. So someone shoots a bullet at him and he deflects the bullet with the magnet on his pen. It's like...

• 43:24Speaker 02

  In...

• 43:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  What's the bullet made of?

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lead.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, doesn't...

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Or whatever.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever. It's not something magnetic.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Maybe it was cop... No, copper only conducts.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cops. Still not. Still not.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  It's not magnetic.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not going there.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Nickel?

• 43:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're trying to bail them out. Just say they messed up. Just say it.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll be happy to say that they messed up.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it could be a nickel bullet. A nickel bullet could do it.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and momentum is an issue as well. I mean, if you're trying to push a bullet to the side, I guess if you're pushing it to the side...

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a deflection. You're not stopping it.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're trying to stop it, that would blow a hand off. But if you're just trying to push it to the side, yeah, it's not...

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, because...

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Oh, no, it is... Yeah, because that bullet is moving so quickly. You have to apply a huge force to the side to be able to move it from here to here in that...

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the time.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  In the amount of time.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the time.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  So it's still... He's still...

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He still has to actually...

• 44:10Speaker 02

  That would be like getting punched in the face by this thing. Yeah, that won't work.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. He can't just hold the magnet and have the magnet do its work. He's got to be behind the magnet.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you have to really...

• 44:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the same problem when they show people firing heavy machine guns and not showing them recoil.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, that's... You need... The physics still has to work, which is what Terminator got right. Because when they shot the Terminator, everybody felt the recoil of these bullets, of the shot. It was working.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Phil, we've got to wrap up. Thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  I love doing this.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It happens so quickly.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always happens. We both talk too much.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. Talk too much. Get your back on. It's been great to have you. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Signing off from San Diego, as always. Keep looking out.

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