Cosmic Queries: Space and Science with Bill Nye

Guest host Bill Nye the Science Guy and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer your most intriguing questions about space and science, from asteroid deflection and life on exoplanets to the Large Hadron Collider and climate change.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Bill Nye?

  Hello, hello, Bill Nye the Science Guy here, sitting in for Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm your guest host for this week's StarTalk Radio, and our guest this week, everybody, is none other than Chuck Nice.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Hey, how are you, Bill?

• 0:34Bill Nye?

  Well, now that I'm here with you, I'm fabulous.

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  You know what, Bill? You had me at, "I'm Bill Nye."

• 0:41Bill Nye?

  So, it's great to see you. It's great to, of course, the word "see" is something you have to imagine on the radio, the most visual medium, but my understanding, Chuck...

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:51Bill Nye?

  Is you have some questions that our listeners have provided.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. This is what we call our cosmic queries, and you do not know the questions. I have them here in front of me on my little tablet device.

• 1:03Bill Nye?

  I'm feeling the drama.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  And what we do here is we just allow our listeners to submit any question that they would like, and when I say "any," I mean indeed, "any."

• 1:16Bill Nye?

  I believe you. And my understanding now, these questions are submitted on the electronic internet, on those computer machines that the kids are using. And so, they've not like, you've got a Twitter handle?

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:28Bill Nye?

  You've got a, you have a photo, you have sort of a visual...

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, you know, what's funny is, this is the first time I've actually used my tablet to access the questions, which means that I am able to see not only the questions, but I'm able to see the Twitter handle, their profile pictures. Some of them are coming in from Google+, some of them from Facebook, so I literally have either an avatar or a picture of the person who's asking me the question.

• 1:51Bill Nye?

  You have a picture that they've chosen to send you?

• 1:53Chuck Nice?

  Yes, a picture like, I'm pretty sure this cat didn't ask our first question.

• 1:58Bill Nye?

  Well, it depends.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  You never know.

• 2:00Bill Nye?

  A cosmic cat. Yes, so try the first question.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's jump right into this, Bill. This one is from Google+, and this is Michelle Rivera, and Michelle wants to know this. "What's the closest that any comet has come to Earth? And what was it named? And when did it come close? Also..." What's your favorite ice cream?

• 2:21Bill Nye?

  Uh, well, we'll finish with the ice cream. Uh, but the, I think that my understanding, the closest comet would have been Comet Holly.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  Comet Holly?

• 2:30Bill Nye?

  Yeah, back in, uh, 1910. I believe it, uh, people, that you could read at night by the light.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  By the light of the comet?

• 2:39Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so it is reported. And so then you could argue, uh, if you want to, which is fun, that perhaps the impactor that, uh, became, uh, the, the, uh, Chelyabinsk Bolid, the glowing thing in the sky over Russia last year, or maybe you could say, what about, uh, the Tunguska event, blowing down trees for hundreds of kilometers in every direction? That's coming real close.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Let's, let's, let's go back to that one. Okay, cause the other stuff I've heard, now go back to Tenduska?

• 3:11Bill Nye?

  Tunguska.

• 3:11Chuck Nice?

  Tunguska?

• 3:12Bill Nye?

  That was a party, 1908, June 30th, as reckoned in the modern calendar.

• 3:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:16Bill Nye?

  You know, back then, even, uh, Russia, they, because of their hyster- historical, uh, affiliations with certain, um, certain religious organizations, they didn't agree on what calendar to use, but in the modern calendar is the 30th of June, 1908. Something hits the Earth's atmosphere so hard, how hard did it hit? So hard that it blew up. Knocked down trees, hundreds of kilometers, just like Chelyabinsk.

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  Just a shockwave.

• 3:41Bill Nye?

  Yeah, only more so. And I remind you, last year in Chelyabinsk.

• 3:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:45Bill Nye?

  Every, there's so much insurance fraud, how much insurance fraud is there? There's so much, people have dashboard cameras, right?

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  That is correct.

• 3:53Bill Nye?

  So there were dozens, hundreds of videos of this thing streaking through the sky. Everybody runs up to the window to watch it, and then three minutes later, whack! The sonic booms hit the ground.

• 4:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and all the windows shattered, and yeah, you had, uh, a lot of documentation, cause you're right, everybody does, uh, use.

• 4:09Bill Nye?

  Now, hold on, there was one more part of that.

• 4:10Chuck Nice?

  Then, then, here's the other part. What's your favorite ice cream?

• 4:13Bill Nye?

  It's vanilla. I'm, vanilla is genius. People say vanilla's boring, I go, you kidding? Vanilla is, is, is, is perfect. It's, it's a perfect flavor.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't get any better than vanilla.

• 4:25Bill Nye?

  Not for me.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  Right, and you know, most flavors are nothing but vanilla with something added.

• 4:28Bill Nye?

  My point, I was about to bring up my point. What is strawberry ice cream?

• 4:34Chuck Nice?

  It's just vanilla with strawberries.

• 4:35Bill Nye?

  Well, the word just vanilla, I gotta remind you. Be careful there.

• 4:39Chuck Nice?

  Please, by no means did I mean to diminish vanilla.

• 4:42Bill Nye?

  But I'm not gonna get in a fistfight in the ice cream flavor bar. If you want to enjoy your chocolate, chocolate chip, if you want your mint chocolate chip, if you want your peppermint stick, knock yourselves out.

• 4:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:53Bill Nye?

  Cause it's more for me.

• 4:56Bill Nye?

  It's more vanilla for me.

• 4:57Chuck Nice?

  All right, fantastic, man. Let's move on and uh, let's grab another question here and this one is from, he calls himself Red King. All right, coming to us from Google. Mister Nye, which occupation would best fit for a student majoring in aeronautical engineering and minoring in music theory? What a weird and not weird combination at all.

• 5:25Bill Nye?

  Well, it depends what you want to do. If you really dig rockets.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:28Bill Nye?

  I gotta point out that the biggest, the biggest, um, a, a significant problem in rocket launching are the acoustic waves, the acoustic energy in the flame tunnel, the flame duct.

• 5:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 5:41Bill Nye?

  And so to me, acoustics and sound music theory are related intimately or smoochifying. So, uh, I, I encourage you.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  Smoochifying?

• 5:52Bill Nye?

  Smoochifying, a little Nibonic, uh, coinage. I, uh, recommend that you pursue aerospace professionally and you play, keep playing music for kicks. Because, uh, we need you. We want you to take us, this, uh, Red, what's his name? Red?

• 6:09Chuck Nice?

  Red King.

• 6:10Bill Nye?

  Red King. Red King, we, and I say he, Red King, he or she, want you to take us to, um, to Mars.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, Red King is a guy.

• 6:18Bill Nye?

  Well, he has a guy.

• 6:19Chuck Nice?

  Has a guy, uh, it's a male designation king.

• 6:22Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  You know, Red Queen could go either way though.

• 6:24Bill Nye?

  I'm glad you said it.

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 6:26Bill Nye?

  I'm glad you said it.

• 6:26Chuck Nice?

  Indeed I did. Hey, okay.

• 6:30Bill Nye?

  Not that there's anything wrong with it.

• 6:36Bill Nye?

  You started it.

• 6:37Chuck Nice?

  I did start it, but you know what? That's quite all right.

• 6:39Bill Nye?

  There was no goalie on that punchline.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Let's move on to Aaron W.

• 6:45Bill Nye?

  A A R?

• 6:47Chuck Nice?

  No, not Aaron.

• 6:48Bill Nye?

  E R I N.

• 6:49Chuck Nice?

  E R I N. Aaron W. And Aaron wants to know this. What if any is the best way to present scientific fact in a way that won't make people super defensive? I'm thinking specifically of anti-vaccination crowd, but anyone can have irrational beliefs and fake science. Basically, how do you not get people PO'd?

• 7:13Bill Nye?

  Well.

• 7:14Chuck Nice?

  In the face of science fact?

• 7:15Bill Nye?

  The thing about vaccinations is they are proven to work. Everybody enjoys his or her pasteurized milk. And the other thing to remember, not only are vaccinations designed to protect your kid from diseases, but they're designed to protect my kids from your kids.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:36Bill Nye?

  Vaccinations work. And that this very well-known woman associated spuriousely her kid's vaccination with autism, but at the same time he or she was diagnosed with autism, is wrong, is bad science, has been disproven, and I hope her views are discredited soon enough. Meanwhile, Chuck, we'll be back after this.

• 8:13Bill Nye?

  Welcome back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. Bill Nye here, guest hosting for my beloved, good buddy Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I'm here being interrogated by none other than Chuck Nice, who's got your questions submitted on that electronic computer internet with the electric computer machines that the kids using. And he can see your avatar.

• 8:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes, for the first time.

• 8:37Bill Nye?

  When you put in the question, we know what you want to look like.

• 8:40Chuck Nice?

  That's right. We know who you are now. And we actually know who... Mark Seegert is, and, or Seigert, I'm not particularly sure. Don't want to mess that up, Mark. But he's got a pretty cool question here for you, Bill. Uh, with the majority of stars in the universe.

• 8:55Bill Nye?

  Majority of stars.

• 8:57Chuck Nice?

  That's what he says. The majority of stars in the universe being red dwarfs. And the majority of planets, uh, revolving around red dwarfs. Is there any chance of life on those particular planets? And if yes, will it be completely different? Will plants or microorganisms be able to use the much weaker solar energy? So a different take on photosynthesis, basically. Would there be?

• 9:27Bill Nye?

  I say that have to be.

• 9:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:28Bill Nye?

  That's what I would say. And, and the reason I would say that is there's so many stars. When people throw around the expression billions and then billions and billions. It's really beyond imagining for most people. Now, you know, when I was young. People speculated that there would be a planet around every hundred stars. One in a hundred stars.

• 9:48Chuck Nice?

  Just one planet for every hundred stars.

• 9:51Bill Nye?

  Uh, then of those, how many of those would be Earth-like? You take another fraction. Well, it turns out Kepler Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope.

• 9:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:58Bill Nye?

  Apparently every star is a star system.

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:01Bill Nye?

  With planets.

• 10:02Chuck Nice?

  Now, why would, you know, why would, just a quick aside. Why would the assumption be made that one planet, uh, for every hundred stars? When our sun is a star and we clearly have eight planets around our sun.

• 10:16Bill Nye?

  Well, we were just, we were just dealing with it, man.

• 10:20Bill Nye?

  Nobody knew. You didn't have a Kepler Space Telescope. We were jamming. I'm talking about Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and our, our predecessors.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  Predecessors. Okay, go ahead. So continue.

• 10:32Bill Nye?

  The chances of there not being life, when you have billions of planets.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:38Bill Nye?

  It seems extraordinarily low. That is to say, the chance of there not being anything just got to be vanishingly small. There has to be something out there.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 10:46Bill Nye?

  Just because we have green plants which reflect green light mysteriously. That doesn't mean somebody else who hasn't had. Asteroid impacts, you didn't have all this sulfur or whatever the heck cadmium, whatever else we might have on the iridium.

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:00Bill Nye?

  After the uh, impact from the kill the ancient dinosaur, who knows what plants came up with or what living things came up with, there's gotta be something out there. And if you meet somebody who says he or she has never wondered if there's anything out there. They're lying.

• 11:15Chuck Nice?

  They're lying.

• 11:15Bill Nye?

  They're lying.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  Just straight, we already know, we don't need a test, we just know, you're a liar. So you know what, if I ever encounter anyone who says, ah, I've never really thought about it, I'm just gonna call him a bald faced liar, right to the, right out.

• 11:28Bill Nye?

  What else can I not trust you about?

• 11:31Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so that's cool. So there you have it, what a great answer, because uh, yes and yes, there, there'll be life there.

• 11:39Bill Nye?

  And are those organisms out there wondering about you and me?

• 11:43Chuck Nice?

  Now that's a different story.

• 11:46Bill Nye?

  Wouldn't they wonder the same things? Where did we come from? Are we alone? Those two questions.

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  Maybe they're not wondering, maybe they already know the answers.

• 12:00Bill Nye?

  Could be. Chuck, that's not my strongest material, thank you for your validation.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  I like it, I like, you're silly and I didn't know that about you.

• 12:09Bill Nye?

  Looks aren't everything.

• 12:12Chuck Nice?

  Alright, let's uh, let's move on and get to uh, Richard Mohler and uh.

• 12:17Bill Nye?

  Rich, sure.

• 12:18Chuck Nice?

  Rich.

• 12:18Bill Nye?

  Mohler.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, Richard Mohler is uh.

• 12:21Bill Nye?

  What's his avatar look like?

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you.

• 12:23Bill Nye?

  My business.

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  You know what, here's.

• 12:25Bill Nye?

  He looks like an accountant, what is he?

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  Nope, I tell you, Rich is a family man, he's, he's in the picture with his son or a child.

• 12:32Bill Nye?

  I was gonna say.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  A child, cause I have, I've made assumptions with facts not in evidence, so.

• 12:37Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 12:37Chuck Nice?

  He is, he is with a child.

• 12:38Bill Nye?

  It's not your kid, none of your kids.

• 12:40Chuck Nice?

  It's not my kid.

• 12:41Bill Nye?

  Yeah, clearly.

• 12:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I, I don't take pictures with my kids, so.

• 12:44Bill Nye?

  That you know of. Yeah.

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so here's what Richard wants to know, since people at the equator go faster relative to people closer to the poles.

• 12:54Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Do they age more slowly?

• 12:57Bill Nye?

  It seems to me, I've done this calculation in physics class.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  For real?

• 13:01Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:02Bill Nye?

  They do, but it's not, it's not much.

• 13:04Chuck Nice?

  So it's insignificant.

• 13:05Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's insignificant for sure, but when you get into these um, thousands of billions, things do not add up.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Right. Gotcha.

• 13:14Bill Nye?

  But it's a cool question. Astronauts age ever so slightly more slowly than you and I do.

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  Just by being up there.

• 13:22Bill Nye?

  By being in orbit.

• 13:23Chuck Nice?

  By being in orbit. Okay, fantastic.

• 13:25Bill Nye?

  Now, the astronauts of the very near future, if we can use this term, who will go into where the sky is dark, 100 kilometers, the, uh, uh, Karman limit, the Karman limit, uh, they're gonna go up and down without going in orbit. They will be slightly younger. Oh, by the way, when you're in a jet airplane flying around a continent around the world, you're going, your time is passing ever so slightly more slowly.

• 13:49Chuck Nice?

  Slightly more slowly.

• 13:49Bill Nye?

  And for those of you who take physics and have not computed that, I encourage you to do that, cause it's fun. And then the other thing that's just used to rivet me was, there was a question, what is the attraction, but, uh, and then in parentheses, gravitational, between a 70 kilogram boy and a 60 kilogram girl, in parentheses, gravitational. Boy, that was a titillating science problem right there. The jig, uh, gravitational constant times mass one, mass two over the distance between them squared.

• 14:23Chuck Nice?

  And that's gravitational, because the other computation is boobs.

• 14:27Bill Nye?

  I am shocked. Absolutely shocked.

• 14:34Bill Nye?

  And I'm fascinated.

• 14:35Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. All right, let's move on to, uh, Vardhan Narasay, oh man, I'm, I'm.

• 14:42Bill Nye?

  Well, just do your best.

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  Vardhan, I'm really sorry that I'm about to butcher your name like this.

• 14:46Bill Nye?

  You're not a native speaker of Hindi or Urdu.

• 14:48Chuck Nice?

  Right, so it's, uh, Nazarretian, Nazarretian, Nazarretian.

• 14:55Bill Nye?

  But Vardy is our buddy.

• 14:56Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 14:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  So, uh, what is the best way to utilize an asteroid deflecting tech without actually having to use a spacecraft?

• 15:07Chuck Nice?

  If possible, like something, a space station on the moon that will deflect asteroids, though maybe a tractor beam.

• 15:15Bill Nye?

  A tractor beam.

• 15:16Chuck Nice?

  Some type of similar technology. So is Vardy just kind of watching too much?

• 15:22Bill Nye?

  He or she is jamming.

• 15:23Chuck Nice?

  Watching too much Star Trek, or is this?

• 15:25Bill Nye?

  I don't think you can watch too much Star Trek.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  That's so true. Chuck, I think you're right about that.

• 15:30Bill Nye?

  I've tried, I haven't, I'm having overdosed yet. The thing, I'm fine, I could quit if I wanted. The thing is, as soon as you say we're gonna have something on the moon to deflect it, that's just gonna involve a spacecraft, yeah, so the...

• 15:43Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 15:44Bill Nye?

  The question's trickily worded, but I think having a tractor beam is technology beyond us right now. However, you may recall Tom Swift and his Repelatron Skyway, Tom Swift Jr. He had Repeltrons, which would be beams that would repel objects. Instead of that, taking it one step less farther into the future, you could use earth-or-moon-based lasers to zap the asteroid, if you could find it, and aim it with such precision and keep the beam narrow enough, and cause the material on the asteroid to volatilize, to ablate, to burn off.

• 16:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:26Bill Nye?

  To eject. And then the momentum of the ejected material, fabulous Latin word, the ejecta, would then have you potentially hypothetically imaginationally would have enough momentum to deflect the asteroid. We only need to change, typical asteroid might be going 20 kilometers a second.

• 16:47Chuck Nice?

  20 kilometers a second.

• 16:48Bill Nye?

  And we gotta deflect it about 2 millimeters a second, about a 10 millionth of its momentum, a 10 millionth of its delta, of its V has to be changed, of its velocity and direction, uh, speed and direction has to be changed. So this is, uh, that's not a bad insightful thoughtful insight. However... Uh, the problem is gonna be an international one, just finding the asteroids is a huge deal, and it is, Chuck.

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:14Bill Nye?

  The only, as far as anybody can reckon, the only preventable natural disaster. I am delighted that Vardy's out there thinking about this. Go get him.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  Vardy is doing a great job thinking about it. So you're saying, basically, it would be more, is it more feasible to repulse than it is to guide?

• 17:33Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay. So, but still, great that you're thinking about it.

• 17:37Bill Nye?

  But they're, they're co-interrelated together between themselves.

• 17:40Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 17:40Bill Nye?

  That is to say, puns intended.

• 17:42Chuck Nice?

  (laughing)

• 17:43Bill Nye?

  In that deflecting one is gonna involve changing its velocity, changing its speed and direction somehow.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:49Bill Nye?

  Either you smack into it, or you get something with mutual gravity to tow it off course.

• 17:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:55Bill Nye?

  Or what we at the Planetary Society are all hot for is volatizing the surface with space-based lasers.

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 18:02Bill Nye?

  In our Laser B spacecraft.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you, that's the first time I've ever heard that, and I think it's fantastic.

• 18:07Bill Nye?

  That's good. You keep thinking about that, and we'll be back right after this.

• 18:30Bill Nye?

  Welcome back. Bill Nye here, guest hosting on StarTalk Radio for my beloved buddy Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don't want you all to be jealous, but I'm sitting here with Chuck Nice.

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Bill.

• 18:43Bill Nye?

  Eat your hearts out, people.

• 18:44Chuck Nice?

  (laughing)

• 18:45Bill Nye?

  But you can join us, uh, by, by audio, by sound, because Chuck has some thoughtful insights that you have provided him. That is to say, some questions, some cosmic queries.

• 18:53Chuck Nice?

  That's right, some cosmic queries, and, uh, we have taken questions from all over the internet, whatever source that we are a part of and our listeners.

• 19:01Bill Nye?

  Now, as far as you know.

• 19:02Chuck Nice?

  As far as we know.

• 19:03Bill Nye?

  All of these questions.

• 19:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 19:04Bill Nye?

  All over the internet.

• 19:05Chuck Nice?

  All over the internet.

• 19:06Bill Nye?

  Are from Earth, is that right?

• 19:08Chuck Nice?

  As far as I know, and I cannot confirm nor deny that.

• 19:12Bill Nye?

  Yes, yes.

• 19:12Chuck Nice?

  Except in my limited understanding of where they, from where they come, which would be, from what I know, the internet.

• 19:19Bill Nye?

  On Earth.

• 19:20Chuck Nice?

  On Earth, that's all I know, but it could be. Uh, let's move on to Madison Barnes. And Madison has also included a picture. Now, I'm pretty sure this is his child. Because it's an infant and he's laying on the bed with it. And he looks really happy. Uh, then again, by that description, maybe it's not his child.

• 19:44Bill Nye?

  I was gonna say, is that, are you associating with that?

• 19:47Chuck Nice?

  I was just, I was.

• 19:49Bill Nye?

  Is this completely unrecognizable to you as a parent?

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  As a parent, you're right. It's completely unrecognizable to me, so.

• 19:56Bill Nye?

  Sixteen miserable years.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, there you have it. And most of them because of the children, Bill.

• 20:01Bill Nye?

  I know, I know, they, uh, they, um, it's an, it's a, what is it? Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids.

• 20:08Chuck Nice?

  That's right, absolutely. All right, here we go from Madison Barnes. And Madison wants to know this. Finding the Higgs boson with the LHC was an amazing achievement. What are we looking for next with the LHC? And is there a bigger and better accelerator being built to succeed it? Wow, interesting.

• 20:28Bill Nye?

  The Large Hadron Collider. Uh, as far as I know, there is not one being built. If I were king of the forest, we would build a bigger one.

• 20:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:39Bill Nye?

  Cause these people, the atom smashing people, my physics colleagues, they cannot get enough of smashing. They love smashing and they learn something every time they smash.

• 20:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:49Bill Nye?

  So what, what I guess everybody wants to do is reproduce those results of the Higgs boson finding, uh, which gives everything, apparently gives everything mass. And then, uh, what I wanna know, uh, what we want in science is to find laws or rules or theories that make predictions that are true, uh, the things they predict are true here on Earth and they're true deep in the cosmos.

• 21:14Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 21:14Bill Nye?

  So if there's all this dark energy and dark matter flying around out there, six times the mass of, uh, everything we can observe. Well, isn't some of that stuff here? And would we find it by smashing things with even more smashness? Perhaps? And so, yes, I would like to build a bigger collider and look deeper. But this is a civilian. You know, as a mechanical engineer, I took a lot of physics. I know what you're thinking. Did you put it back? No, so that aside, uh, I, it just seems to me, what we've seen deep in the cosmos, we should observe here, and I'm pitching right now, here on StarTalk Radio, or with a circle, copyright, Bill Nye, darkons.

• 21:56Chuck Nice?

  Darkons.

• 21:57Bill Nye?

  Particles of dark.

• 21:59Chuck Nice?

  Particles of dark.

• 22:00Bill Nye?

  Physics people, they love, they love their particles. They can't get enough of particles. They got their neutrons, their protons. Are they really particles? Or we just imagine them that? There's photons. Are they really particles? Or this sort of a way of, of thinking about things? And so maybe there are particles of dark energy that interact with dark matter, that interact with our darkons, that interact with everything we know and see, and that discovery would, dare I say it, Chuck.

• 22:26Chuck Nice?

  Change the world! That would change the universe.

• 22:29Bill Nye?

  It would change our perception of it.

• 22:30Chuck Nice?

  Our understanding of the universe. Actually, the universe would remain exactly the same.

• 22:34Bill Nye?

  As far as we know, unless there's that, that extraordinary chance that the, we could build a collider big enough to change things.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:41Bill Nye?

  Like they do in the, in the, in the movies.

• 22:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, that was an insightful question, I have to say. Nice job.

• 22:47Bill Nye?

  You want to sound so surprised?

• 22:48Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, I, I-

• 22:50Bill Nye?

  Just because the guy's got a kid doesn't mean he can't think.

• 22:53Chuck Nice?

  You know what? Okay, I, I had a joke there that I certainly cannot say.

• 22:57Bill Nye?

  All right.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  Well, you said, "Just because he's got a kid doesn't mean he can't think," but...

• 23:02Bill Nye?

  They're saying it about you, don't worry.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  That's right. I'm saying it about myself. It's a little late for the thinking part. Uh, here we go. Let's go with-

• 23:09Bill Nye?

  You're embarrassing me, Dad.

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  You've been at my house.

• 23:15Bill Nye?

  I've heard tell. I've heard tell.

• 23:17Chuck Nice?

  Eric of, uh, Valde wants to know this, Bill. Okay, so thinking about relativity, and how time does funny things when something is super massive or moving fast, I have in my kitchen a stove and a microwave, each with a respective clock. I have synchronized the clock, clocks, and after a few weeks, noticed that the microwave is running four to five minutes faster. So my question is, is my microwave moving faster or slower through the universe, or is it denser than a stove? Eric?

• 23:51Bill Nye?

  I would say neither.

• 23:53Chuck Nice?

  Neither.

• 23:54Bill Nye?

  They're moving at pretty much exactly the same speed through the universe, but there's different circuitry running the clocks. Now, back in the day, this would be three and a half years ago, the power company was required to count a number of cycles of 60-cycle power a week.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:09Bill Nye?

  They no longer have that requirement, although by long tradition, most power companies do. So what you're witnessing is an artifact of the circuit design. And so if, uh, we'll see in the near future if the next generation of these appliances includes clocks that are coordinated with, uh, global positioning satellites. And that is a fantastic system. I hope you'll think about it because we'll be back right after this.

• 24:51Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, welcome back. Bill Nye here, guest hosting for my beloved Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I'm here with none other than Chuck Nice.

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Bill.

• 25:01Bill Nye?

  Who, with his electronic tablet machine, is wrangling your brilliant questions, which you sent to us on the internet. And, uh, I just want to remind everybody, the thing that Chuck seems to be fascinated with, of course, he's fascinated with your questions. But I can tell he's looking at your avatars, your little pictures.

• 25:18Chuck Nice?

  I have to tell you, and this next, uh, gentleman, which is Danny H., is tweeting to us from, uh...

• 25:25Bill Nye?

  You know it's a guy?

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I, uh, I'm, I'm...

• 25:28Bill Nye?

  See?

• 25:28Chuck Nice?

  Unless the bottom of this picture will reveal something quite shocking. This is a guy.

• 25:34Bill Nye?

  Well, we'll get to the next...

• 25:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Okay, so Danny, uh, Danny wants to know this. Gravity can affect light, as in general rel.

• 25:45Bill Nye?

  General rel, gen-rel, we call it, apparently.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  Uh, but can it affect strong nuclear force? Or do black holes already do that?

• 25:58Bill Nye?

  Uh, black holes certainly affect, affect light.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Light, right.

• 26:01Bill Nye?

  Uh, and the strong nuclear force, I think, I, I'm not an expert on this, I think is independent of photons. I mean, that's one of its deals. Light is comprised of photons.

• 26:13Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:13Bill Nye?

  Photons can affect electron orbitals, but I don't think they can get in there to the strong nuclear force. Now, perhaps in coming weeks, uh, our beloved Neil will, um, have a great deal more to say about that, but I think photonic interactions don't hap- don't happen inside, uh, between quarks and baryons.

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:34Bill Nye?

  Heavy, uh, nuclear, uh, heavy, uh, particles in atomic nuclei. With that said, the stuff that goes on in black holes is not very well understood. So maybe things are torn apart and photons take on a new, something that we don't understand inside black holes.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 26:52Bill Nye?

  Investigating black holes, tricky business.

• 26:54Chuck Nice?

  I would say so. I would say so.

• 26:56Bill Nye?

  Can't see 'em. What about that?

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  Flying blind, huh? Is that how it works?

• 27:02Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Alright Danny, hey, that's a, there you have it, man. The answer is uh, pretty much, "Not really."

• 27:08Bill Nye?

  Probably not.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Probably not. Probably not.

• 27:09Bill Nye?

  Almost certainly not.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Okay. Alright, so, uh, this one is from @OldManCarson, and this is, uh, Jonathan Carlson. @OldManCarson wants to know.

• 27:22Bill Nye?

  If you wanna send him an email.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. If you wanna, if you wanna tweet, uh, Jonathan, it's @OldManCarson. And, uh, maybe that's an old picture, 'cause he looks like a very young man. "If in the double-hole electron experiment, E goes through walls, and I'm made of E, why can't I go through walls?"

• 27:43Bill Nye?

  Uh, maybe you'll be able to, but making yourself out of E is a big difficulty.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  Therein lies the, uh...

• 27:49Bill Nye?

  Electronic, electric field.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  There's the rub, huh?

• 27:52Bill Nye?

  But once again, our heroes on Star Trek, they're, they do it all the time.

• 27:57Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. You can transport down into, uh, if there's a cavern, couple miles underground.

• 28:02Bill Nye?

  Yes. Yes.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  Go right there.

• 28:04Bill Nye?

  And when you get there, everybody will speak perfect English.

• 28:11Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 28:11Bill Nye?

  It's amazing.

• 28:13Chuck Nice?

  That is the cool thing. However, now, that's very funny. That's true. They all speak perfect English.

• 28:20Bill Nye?

  Well, it's a big time saver when you, uh, when you're gonna do a TV show.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  Hey, guess what?

• 28:26Bill Nye?

  In the United States for audiences that are native speakers.

• 28:29Chuck Nice?

  English is the business language of the universe, people.

• 28:32Bill Nye?

  Of aerospace it is, that's for sure.

• 28:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool.

• 28:34Bill Nye?

  Now, when you travel around the world, go to the Astronautical Congress and what have you, as I have. Yes. Everybody speaks English, because NASA just, you know, and Boeing.

• 28:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:45Bill Nye?

  McDonnell Douglas just established this, so the Wright brothers just established this so far back.

• 28:50Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 28:51Bill Nye?

  That it's gonna be, but who knows what the future holds? Who knows what your children will be speaking when they run their own software companies? Mandarin and Cantonese and Urdu.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Are you hinting at the inevitable decline of our great empire, Bill?

• 29:06Bill Nye?

  No. But the developing world is developing.

• 29:09Chuck Nice?

  The developing world is developing. So are you saying that we might have to learn, uh, Cantonese or Mandarin? Well, Cantonese it would be, because Mandarin is...

• 29:16Bill Nye?

  What have you. Tonal languages. And so, uh, this is not a bad thing. It's a thing. When you meet people from Europe, they routinely speak two or three languages, because they have to.

• 29:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 29:26Bill Nye?

  And that's not neither here nor there, but you know, you can drive all the way across the country of France in six or seven hours. You drive six hours out of here, you barely get to Buffalo.

• 29:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, six hours away. We're not even in Pittsburgh.

• 29:40Bill Nye?

  It's not that we're all bad. It's that the US turned out to be this huge country. So, uh, do we have one more question? Uh, because the break's approaching. I feel the excitement.

• 29:50Chuck Nice?

  You know what? I'm gonna give you this question, but you might have to answer it after the break.

• 29:54Bill Nye?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 29:56Chuck Nice?

  Because I, I think you're gonna need some time for this, but, uh, this is what, uh, at RT Feely wants to know. Climate change deniers drive me crazy. How can we convince them that the data is real and not some scam?

• 30:10Bill Nye?

  I'll tell you. Right after this.

• 30:33Bill Nye?

  Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, guest hosting for my beloved, my good friend Neil deGrasse Tyson here on StarTalk Radio. I don't want you to be jealous. Yes, I'm here with Chuck Nice. And he is all that, ladies. He is nice. Now Chuck, we had a question right before the break.

• 30:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did. And RT feely wanted to know, "Climate change deniers drive me crazy. How can we convince them that the data is real and not some kind of scam?"

• 30:57Bill Nye?

  Well, here's the thing about the scam. Conspiracy theories are lazy. Wouldn't it be nice if there were someone in charge screwing things up on purpose, but actually, things are screwed up just sort of by accident. We've got 7 billion people living on a planet where the atmosphere is just this thick. If you could drive straight up on some crazy road with some crazy car, you'd be in outer space in an hour and a half. The way people drive in New York, you'd be there in 45 minutes.

• 31:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:24Bill Nye?

  So conspiracy theories are not very good explanations for things, especially something as complicated as climate change. I encourage you to read "The Hockey Stick" by Michael Mann. Full disclosure, paperback version, I wrote the foreword. Now Chuck, it's time for the lightning round.

• 31:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is. You have the bell there. And what we are going to do is, we are going to zip through these questions as quickly as possible.

• 31:48Bill Nye?

  Let me remind you, this installment of the lightning round is powered by our good friends over at GE. You should head over to their YouTube page and take a quick look at some of the cool things they're doing. Quick, right after this segment, www.youtube.com/...

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  GE. Alright. Let's move on to the lightning round. And there you go. Let's start with Rachel Palmeroy, @rachelpalmeroy. She wants to know this. "We know some things can be ignited with light. Can anything be ignited with sound?"

• 32:18Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:19Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 32:19Bill Nye?

  Sure.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 32:20Bill Nye?

  You get it vibrating at its natural frequency. If you have something that's going to fatigue, you ever tried to straighten out a paperclip and it gets warm? Take a rubber band, stretch it, stretch it, stretch it. It gets hot. You could get it hot enough to burn.

• 32:33Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. That was awesome. Alright, this is @CorbinBonsbod, okay? This is Danielus' name. And he actually sent this to you, because you're @scienceguy, right?

• 32:45Bill Nye?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so he wants to know, @scienceguy. Here we go.

• 32:48Bill Nye?

  Really? That's a question?

• 32:51Chuck Nice?

  I lost, I lost the question on my tablet. Here we go, let's go.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Could we build a space elevator to the moon's pole from the earth's pole? A space elevator?

• 33:06Bill Nye?

  Uh, very difficult business because the moon is going around the earth. It's orbiting, although because, uh, even though it has a little, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo, vibration. It say, it faces the same face to us. It's an eigenvalue, if you're scoring along with us, a proper value. So it rotates once while, every month. So you're gonna have to have a pivot. You're gonna have to have something like a cowboy's wrist with his lasso.

• 33:31Chuck Nice?

  Excellent. Uh, the answer is no.

• 33:34Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yes, it's no.

• 33:37Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this one is from at one guilty pleasure. Also for you, this is straight to you, Bill. Um, is it possible that dark matter is the excrement of a black hole? He's being funny, but I know what he's asking. It's pretty funny.

• 33:52Bill Nye?

  It's could be that the, what, uh, things that fall into a black hole come out another part of the universe at another time.

• 33:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:58Bill Nye?

  Have they been modified, the things that fall in? Have the, has the stuff turned into dark stuff?

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:05Bill Nye?

  Has it become comprised of darkons?

• 34:07Chuck Nice?

  Darkons. Awesome. So the answer is maybe.

• 34:12Bill Nye?

  Maybe.

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  Maybe.

• 34:14Bill Nye?

  A clear maybe.

• 34:15Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Okay, let's, um, let's go.

• 34:18Bill Nye?

  It's lightning, Chuck, let's go.

• 34:20Chuck Nice?

  Let's go, here we go. Um, this one is from Mark, um, and he wants to know this. Can we protect a spaceship with an artificial magnetic field, the same way it's around our earth?

• 34:30Bill Nye?

  Hypothetically, people talk about this quite a bit, quite a bit. If you had a huge power source, by power, I mean electricity power source, some reactor with a stirling engine and a generator out there on your spacecraft. You could maybe make a magnetic field so powerful that you would deflect, uh, solar, uh, the solar wind and all those particles and cosmic rays that could, maybe not cosmic rays, the things that could cause you trouble.

• 34:53Chuck Nice?

  All the radiation.

• 34:53Bill Nye?

  Could be, the radiation could be deflected around your ship.

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  Ah. So the answer is?

• 34:59Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes. Number one, shields up. Okay, this one from at.

• 35:04Bill Nye?

  Field forest bucklings.

• 35:08Bill Nye?

  Shield 4, it's always trouble. Lead on.

• 35:12Chuck Nice?

  This is from at Laura Lee Biology. Can Bill comment on Hawking's new claims regarding event horizons?

• 35:21Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's apparently he's, things that fall into black holes may not come out at another part of the universe at another time. You may be a way to get the energy back. That's the way I understand the paper.

• 35:32Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 35:33Bill Nye?

  And she asked, can I comment? I did. Ignorantly.

• 35:36Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic. All right, this one from at CJ Robinson wants to know this. What would happen to our atmosphere if gravity was turned off for one minute? So no gravity on Earth for one minute. What would the effects be?

• 35:54Bill Nye?

  Well, you remind you, inertia is a property of matter. So I guess if we turned off the gravity for a minute, the, everything would continue to spin through space for a while, but then you'd start getting a lot of outgassing, random collisions. The atmosphere would be warmer than space, so those molecules would bounce off each other and disappear forever.

• 36:13Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. Okay, so we're running out of time. We're down to the wire. This is from Scott Avion, and he wants to know, what advice can you give a new science teacher from K to 12 trying to really engage their children and get them excited about sciences?

• 36:26Bill Nye?

  Oh, that's a fabulous question. Chuck, what was your favorite thing about your favorite teacher?

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Uh, they made me want to learn.

• 36:32Bill Nye?

  They're passionate. They're passionate. So, Guy, what's his name?

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Scott.

• 36:38Bill Nye?

  Scott, let your passion come through. And we'll see you next time on StarTalk Radio. I'm here with Chuck Nice, and we have had nothing but fun. Thanks for listening.