#ICYMI: Out of This World Sports, with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Repeat)

This week, Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice explore what it would be like if we held the Olympics on Mars, or went ice skating on Europa, or played baseball on the Moon, using Neil deGrasse Tyson’s popular tweets that look at sports through the lens of science. Their only guest: astrophysicist and master tweeter, @neiltyson. Don’t miss an episode of Playing with Science. Subscribe on: iTunes Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/playing-with-science/id1198280360?mt=2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-science TuneIn: http://tunein.com/radio/Playing-with-Science-p952100/ SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-science GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjq NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly

• 0:12Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice

• 0:13Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science! Today, we enter Twitterdum through the vast multiverses of Neil deGrasse Tyson's mind and light up the cerebral spheres that engage with the complex and ever-evolving world of sport.

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so, uh, did you, did you change your meds, cause...

• 0:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Slightly.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Neil deGrasse Tyson has many opinions and many things which he chooses to share on a regular basis, but he has a heartfelt connection to sports that's constantly filtered through his scientific lens on Twitter.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So, when you play with science, there can be no better playdate than the man himself.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes, thanks for joining us right now, it's the one...

• 0:57Gary O'Reilly?

  The only...

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  The inevitable...

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson!

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  You like that?

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Scared?

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  That's alright.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where'd you get the gong? My gosh!

• 1:12Gary O'Reilly?

  The gong!

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Normally that's how you get someone off the stage, right? I saw the gong show.

• 1:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Alrighty, no, no, don't take it personally.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  No, that is, uh, that is a royal entrance right there, that's what the gong is for.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, normally I'm sitting there.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  That's right, sir.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you just took, you just took your own damn show! And now I'm a guest on your damn show!

• 1:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Weirding you out, are you comfortable, are you okay?

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll get, I'll get used to it, that's alright.

• 1:36Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't happen without you, no matter what, though. What's up?

• 1:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil's gonna start asking us questions, you won't be able to help him, so...

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, I, I'll be, I'll happily be your guest on this show.

• 1:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's when, there, please don't ask us any questions.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It means I feel loved. I feel loved, yeah.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool, thanks for being here, man, we appreciate it. And of course, you are a prolific tweeter.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but it's not, uh, well, so a couple of things. First, you said I have many opinions, which I do, but I hardly ever tweet opinions.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  This is true.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the most opinionated tweet I ever posted, which was clearly an opinion, was after Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I said, "BB-8 is way cuter than R2-D2." That was clearly an opinion.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  That's an opinion.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and of course, there were fights and things.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  You kidding me? Yeah.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was generational fights.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, without a doubt.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what I try to is not give you an opinion because frankly, I don't care if you share my opinion on anything.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I care is that whatever opinion you come up with, it is informed with objectively verifiable truths.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  Nice. There you go. This man is always about science education, right down to the tweets.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then make whatever old damn opinion you want. I don't care, but I mean, I care broadly, but specifically person to person.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just I'll give you more information that you may have had before.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To help you understand your decisions, that's all.

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  It's funny, so.

• 2:56Gary O'Reilly?

  You're on behalf of the universe.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. I like that. I'm representing the universe in my presence here today.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  And the funny thing, when you talk about opinions, and I caught the tail end eavesdropping of you having a conversation with somebody, and you were saying that when scientists talk to people, if you say things that are just patently unscientific.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or just false.

• 3:15Chuck Nice?

  Or false.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Chuck Nice?

  And you just refuse, you just, you just, you just blindly adhere to those things.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Chuck Nice?

  We're not gonna argue with you.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just walk away.

• 3:23Chuck Nice?

  You just walk away.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. There's the old adage, which is mostly true.

• 3:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That if an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 3:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, there's a timeline on an argument.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense, though, you know, you think about it.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Because facts are facts and, you know.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and by the way, in science, it's not like we don't argue, but when we argue, we argue with a certain fundamental premise, which perhaps does not exist with other kinds of arguments, other spheres of argument. In science, you and I argue, it's built on the premise that either I'm right and you're wrong.

• 3:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong.

• 3:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the fact that we're arguing is that there's insufficient data to resolve this yet.

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we use our arguments to help shape what next data we're gonna put on the table, so that we can get over with that argument, agree, and go on to the next problem.

• 4:12Chuck Nice?

  Right, but the argument in science is not for the sake of argument, like, I know I am, but what are you?

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know you are, but what am I?

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Your mama, right, you know.

• 4:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Ninety-nine percent of the normal arguments.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  Right. It's really.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in science, there are no yo mama jokes.

• 4:27Chuck Nice?

  Right, no yo mama jokes.

• 4:30Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a good thing.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be fun. If I get up and give a talk at a scientific conference and somebody doesn't like it, say, "Yo mama."

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd have no rebuttal to that.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. So what we're talking about today are the tweets of Niels with respect to sports, which is...

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You called all my sports tweets?

• 4:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did, my friend.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's not, I mean, there's a few, but it's not like that's what I do, right?

• 4:56Chuck Nice?

  No, but there's more than 40 of them.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forty? Okay, out of 5,000. Okay, so there's 1 in 100 is a sports tweet.

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  100 is a sports tweet, and a lot of times they surround very significant sporting events.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, just to keep it in the mood.

• 5:13Chuck Nice?

  Right. So it's like the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

• 5:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Your grey matter.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it does.

• 5:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Even if it's 1 in 100.

• 5:17Chuck Nice?

  And you are an athlete, you know, I mean...

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forty pounds ago, yes.

• 5:24Gary O'Reilly?

  I think we've established we're all, everyone here is an ex-athlete.

• 5:30Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, I'm sure that, you know, you're a person who looks at, so as a former athlete, you were a wrestler.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just can I tell you, since we're like three guys here, so you know where my, how I wear my 40 pounds? So a lot of it is everywhere, but of course, we're guys, so most of it just goes to the belt. But I've always had broad shoulders and a large chest. And my chest, even at my chubbiest, was always bigger than my waist. So all you have to do is cut a jacket, a sport coat, to come in at the waist a little bit.

• 6:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then it still cuts and you don't look like some slob that, you know, that clearly was once in shape but is no longer.

• 6:09Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've been able to fake this extra weight in my, in my...

• 6:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Next week on Playing with Science, we'll have colours for spring and, as well as tailoring and other...

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Haberdashural advice from playing with science.

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  You know, we like to start off every show with a clip, a sporting clip that is significant. So we have something, you made a, um, you, you, you wrote a tweet about Usain Bolt. I thought it was very cute, uh, but, uh, speaking of Usain Bolt, who by the way, for those of you who are interested, we are going to be doing a show with Usain Bolt, who has, uh, expressed his.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's gonna come on your show?

• 6:48Chuck Nice?

  No, he wants to talk to you.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He wants to talk to me?

• 6:51Chuck Nice?

  Wants to do an interview with you that we will then take and put on the show.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:55Chuck Nice?

  We can catch him. If we, oh, look at that.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can catch him, that was good.

• 6:59Chuck Nice?

  If you can catch him. So anyway, he is the fastest man in the world and probably the greatest sprinter of all time. And here's a little ditty from him in something called the Rio Olympics.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Gatlin got a good enough start. Bolt was a bit slow to begin. He's got some work to do. Gatlin's in front. Bolt's stretching out now. He's coming after him. He's immortal now.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Usain's done it. Gatlin challenged for the silver medal. Nine point eight zero all the way from Beijing to London and now to Rio. It is one of the greatest athletic achievements of all time, if not the very greatest.

• 7:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow. There you have it. What was great about it?

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the way, I gotta jump in right now?

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  Jump right in right now.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, so he's not the fastest man in the world. He's the fastest human there ever was.

• 7:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  It's a distinction.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, this is why we have measuring devices. So for him to say, possi- uh, uh, one of the greatest, no, if he's the fastest human there ever was.

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  It is the greatest.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 8:10Chuck Nice?

  It's, there's not one of the greatest.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not about an opinion at that point.

• 8:13Chuck Nice?

  Right. These are numbers that we're talking about.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the good thing about the methods and tools of science.

• 8:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It renders opinions irrelevant.

• 8:19Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, right, so, so I know where you were going with that. The winner of the hundred meter dash is considered the fastest man in the world.

• 8:26Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You set a world record in it, you're the fastest person there ever was.

• 8:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's pretty cool, actually, think about it.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you got my tweet.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  Where you got my tweet? That's your tweet, okay. It's so, it's, I really liked it. You caught some flack on this from some haters because you used Bolt, the dog. Who, by the way, great movie if you have kids, which I do, young children. Uh, I took them a few years ago. And it's a, it's a cute movie and it's about a dog who's super, super fast. And so, why don't you read the tweet?

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, in, in this tweet, uh, uh, this is not from memory. You have it up on a screen that I'm looking at, okay? So, I just thought, uh, uh, people should know how fast bolts are.

• 9:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I said, how many bolts can I come up with? So, there's Usain Bolt.

• 9:10Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lightning bolt.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I thought I remembered some other sort of cartoon character bolt. And sure enough, there was the dog from the movie.

• 9:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, then I looked up the speed, the average running speed of that species of dog. Okay, cuz there was a real species of dog portrayed in the film. So, I got all these three numbers together and I put it up in metric units. So, here we go.

• 9:29Chuck Nice?

  So, here's the tweet.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One hundred thousand meters per second.

• 9:33Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lightning bolt.

• 9:35Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 9:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thirteen point four meters per second bolt. Ten point four meters per second Usain Bolt.

• 9:44Chuck Nice?

  Usain Bolt.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I, and I, and I mashed three images together. One of the lightning bolt, the dog and Usain. That's, that's all I did. And, and it's, it's, that's not an opinion here. I'm just giving you information.

• 9:54Chuck Nice?

  And so, a lot of people were incredulous that a human being could run ten point four meters in one second.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, they never, they didn't see it in this context.

• 10:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cuz there, there's ten meters.

• 10:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One second is short. Ten meters is how far you gotta go in four downs to get a first down.

• 10:15Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they couldn't quite.

• 10:17Chuck Nice?

  People were like, okay.

• 10:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Conceptualization.

• 10:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:19Gary O'Reilly?

  So, time and distance becomes an issue.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I did not know, cuz I can't track everybody's comment about it.

• 10:24Chuck Nice?

  So, I, I read the comments after I read this. And a lot of people were like, that's impossible. Ten, uh, so, ten, ten point four meters in one second, but it's over a hundred meters.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and in fact, he doesn't, it looked like he didn't hit his stride until seventy meters or so.

• 10:43Gary O'Reilly?

  He doesn't. He never does.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he's still accelerating at a hundred meters.

• 10:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but that's the whole thing about Usain Bolt. Against the shorter sprinters, he takes one or two steps less.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So the power transference from when his foot hits the track and then goes

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:58Gary O'Reilly?

  allows him to to become that much faster in the latter stages.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's probably also more efficient because he takes fewer steps to go the same.

• 11:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. And the experts are saying he may not be the apex of human sprinting. Somebody at some stage, another outlier will turn up and go even faster.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what's that person going to look like?

• 11:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, how long are their legs going to be?

• 11:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, that's just it. He has redefined the shape. If you think of sprinters in the past, they were little pocket rockets.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:25Gary O'Reilly?

  He's come along at six foot five. He's probably, you remember the great athlete Carl Lewis?

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, uh-huh.

• 11:30Gary O'Reilly?

  He's probably five inches taller.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carl Lewis is five ten or something.

• 11:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Six five.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Gary O'Reilly?

  And much bigger.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Gary O'Reilly?

  And just that much quicker.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So it was so it was a delight to watch him run, of course. I mean, on TV, I saw it, but, but, yeah. So, yeah, ten foot, so the meters per second transfer of of how to think about speed, uh, to whatever extent that would have helped, that's great. What concerns me is that we have an educational system where someone could think that's wrong.

• 12:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then assert that it's wrong.

• 12:02Chuck Nice?

  And which they did, by the way.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So rather than say, wow, I never thought about it that way before. Let me investigate to see if Tyson is right. Rather than assert that I'm wrong.

• 12:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People, just so you know, I think about this stuff before I tweet it. This doesn't, that'll just like randomly, oh, let me throw down some numbers. No, no, I put way more thought into my tweets than you will ever believe, given how much thought most people put into their tweets. Don't put into their tweets.

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So just, just so you know.

• 12:36Chuck Nice?

  But the fact is, um, it's possible to run ten point four meters per second.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because a hundred meter dash takes ten seconds, therefore it's ten meters per second.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  There you go. It's really simple.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Simple math.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's math, not even one oh one. That's like

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  The thing is, I think for a lot of people is, like you say, you see ten meters and you see one second and you think of somebody Coming from a standing, a standing position and going one second and it've gone ten meters.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's the way people.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another, another impasse in this, mental impasse.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Occurred as trains were getting faster.

• 13:14Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, right.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone said, oh, will we ever go a mile a minute?

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was that mile?

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A minute. You never had those in the same sentence before.

• 13:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and hell, that's just sixty miles an hour.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  That's all it is, is sixty miles an hour.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sixty minutes in an hour.

• 13:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mile a minute.

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 13:30Chuck Nice?

  And people, and nobody would blink twice at that right now.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not today, cause we, but.

• 13:33Gary O'Reilly?

  You'd complain if you were doing sixty miles an hour.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only sixty miles.

• 13:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Bullet train or one of the super fast trains in Europe, yeah.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  Right, well, that was great, man. That was, that was really cool and I just love the fact that no matter what you tweet, it's always controversial to someone.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's not my, I'm not trying to be controversial. By the way, I have tweets that I read them and say, no, that's probably controversial. I'm not gonna tweet that. One day, I'm gonna collect all the ones that I knew in advance would be controversial and chose not to tweet them.

• 14:00Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:01Gary O'Reilly?

  You're gonna data dump them on everyone.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna do a data dump. I said, you think, you think I'm trying to be controversial?

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  It's the controversy.

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have no idea. Here you go.

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 14:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Tyson's new book of controversy.

• 14:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. We gotta find a way to make that into a book. Neil Tyson.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got one here. This is from the two thousand and twelve Olympics.

• 14:22Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, how about a Mars Olympics? Yes, all athletes would suffocate. Ignoring that complication, way cooler than an Earth Olympics, that's all.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  Way cooler than an Earth Olympics.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm setting you up for tweets that follow.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I was gonna say, cause when you say way cooler, then you actually give us some examples of why.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:41Chuck Nice?

  An Olympics on Mars, or pretty much any sporting event on Mars might be cool.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's also a couple hundred degrees below zero on Mars, so way cooler has double meaning there.

• 14:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, no, I think we picked that one up.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You picked that up, okay.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let's look at one of the Mars tweets, and this is cycling on Mars.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right.

• 15:01Chuck Nice?

  All right, so go ahead.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, uh, this is again during the, the summer two thousand and twelve Olympics. If there was cycling on Mars. Try Olympic Mons, a volcanic mountain five times taller than Mont Blanc in the Alps.

• 15:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think you got tall mountains here. No, the tallest mountains and the deepest valleys are not on Earth. In the solar system, they're on Mars, they're on the moon, so we ain't got, we. Yeah, we're not. We're not winning those contests.

• 15:33Gary O'Reilly?

  As you know this, the atmosphere on Mars is how much less than the Earth's atmosphere.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's about one one hundredth.

• 15:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we had.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pressure, atmospheric pressure. So in other words, for every breath you take on Mars, there's one one hundredth the amount of air in that breath.

• 15:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Cause.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it would be on.

• 15:49Gary O'Reilly?

  As an athlete, altitude becomes your enemy in terms of the oxygenation.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're performing an altitude, but the ideal way to do this is you train in altitude.

• 15:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And compete at sea level.

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:00Gary O'Reilly?

  What we need to do is go to Mars.

• 16:01Chuck Nice?

  Sherpas.

• 16:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Chuck Nice?

  Don't have any problem getting up the mountain while all the tourists are like.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 16:07Gary O'Reilly?

  All the baggage.

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  Right, I need more oxygen.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's what you do.

• 16:10Gary O'Reilly?

  You gotta train on Mars.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been making suggestions, never been made before. You ready?

• 16:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, here we are.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drain the Pacific Ocean.

• 16:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then hold the Olympics at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you train at high altitude, but now you compete at the bottom, which is.

• 16:27Chuck Nice?

  Trench.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Six miles down. Now every breath of air has way more oxygen.

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at sea level. And so now you have heroic feats before. You don't even have to dope your blood. The air itself will put the oxygen and force it right into your lungs.

• 16:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Sure the IOC are gonna stump up for that draining of.

• 16:47Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I just like the fact that you're thinking like a supervillain.

• 16:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd have gone the other way and said, let's all go train on Mars.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:54Gary O'Reilly?

  On the, on the mountain.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the Olympic Mons.

• 16:56Gary O'Reilly?

  And come back to Earth and compete.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Problem is, it's only forty percent the gravity of Earth, so the weight that you are carrying is not as much going up the hill.

• 17:04Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Chuck Nice?

  So there's some trade off.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some trade offs.

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  Some trade off there.

• 17:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Let it suits.

• 17:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, just led, led, led yourself down. Another thing, once you've drained the Pacific Ocean, that had nothing to do with sports, just while we're on the topic. If you drain the Pacific Ocean, that is the great toilet bowl of dead satellites.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, because they always splash down in the Pacific.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, look, they crash down. If it's a dead satellite, they're not splashing.

• 17:29Chuck Nice?

  They're not splashing down, they're crashing down.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the reason why is the Pacific Ocean is almost a third of all possible longitudes on Earth.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you de-orbit and you do it, you have a lot of latitude, no pun intended, to where you begin the de-orbit so that it's gonna plunk down in the Pacific no matter what. And, and people don't live there, so, not over the great bulk of the expanse.

• 17:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a safe place to drop your stuff out of orbit. The day we de-orbit Hubble, it's going straight into the Pacific.

• 17:56Chuck Nice?

  Going into the Pacific Ocean.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's the size of a Greyhound bus, by the way, if you didn't know.

• 18:01Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble telescope.

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Chuck Nice?

  So this is one of my favorite.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:05Chuck Nice?

  Uh, you, uh, we, we actually talked about this in, in a different forum on StarTalk. Uh, and it's swimming on Mars.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so here it is, again, in the same, same week. Uh, if there was swimming on Mars, the low temperature and low air pressure would force the pool to simultaneously freeze and boil.

• 18:28Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 18:29Gary O'Reilly?

  That, how many hours does Michael Phelps have to train? To cope with freezing and boiling simultaneously? Cause he's up to about 50,000 hours.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is gurgling, and there are chunks of ice in there as well.

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  So at the exact, at the same time, so can you explain that, but so the?

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder how you get to that situation?

• 18:47Chuck Nice?

  How do you get to that situation?

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so in, in chemistry, in physics as well, it's called the triple point.

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, which is a cool name.

• 18:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The triple point of a, of a substance is the point where it is happy being solid, liquid, and gas all at the same time.

• 19:01Chuck Nice?

  All at the same time.

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So now, now, that sounds freaky because it's outside of our common life experience.

• 19:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's less so than you might think.

• 19:08Chuck Nice?

  Well, no.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, take a look at, um, uh, dry ice, okay, CO2.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's in a double point of its state. So it is simultaneously a solid.

• 19:19Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a vapor.

• 19:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's happening all at once.

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you open the thing up, the vapor comes out and it's solid.

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a double point that it's occupied. That's not as interesting as the triple point.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  But it does make for awesome concerts.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here, uh, so, so here's how, I think they use other smoke for that, rather. I, I think there's other, they got that done.

• 19:38Chuck Nice?

  They used to use dry ice back in the day, but you're right, they use smoke machines now.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, eh, 80 years ago, yeah.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When Twisted Sister performed in in Ought 3, you know, so, so here's how it works. You, you know that when you go to high altitude.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It affects cooking times because water boils at a lower temperature.

• 20:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know this. Instead of 212, if we're all using imperial units, it could, it could boil at 200 degrees or 180 degrees. So you have to increase the cooking time because the food is not at the high temperature for as long and you can't get boiling water hotter than the temperature that it's boiling at.

• 20:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. One of the earliest experiments I did with my kids, so they understood this. You, I, I would start boiling a pot of water. I say, I give them a thermometer, say, measure the temperature. And it's like 100 degrees. Three minutes later, measure it again, 110 degrees, 120. They keep doing this. And I say, there's heat going into it. I say, yep, we see the flame. My kids are like six and seven and eight. So then it's like 200 degrees. They check it again. 205, 210, 212. Okay. 10 minutes later, measure it again. Still 212. Where's the energy going?

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, it stops going because water cannot be liquid at that temperature and at that air pressure.

• 20:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got to become.

• 20:57Chuck Nice?

  It's got to become a gas.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So now you lower the air pressure, the boiling point drops.

• 21:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the more you lower the air pressure, the lower the boiling point drops.

• 21:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And eventually the boiling point meets the freezing point of water.

• 21:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now you have frozen water, liquid water and boiling water all in the same pot.

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  That's great. Awesome. That's fantastic, man. That is fantastic. All right. So, uh, instead of getting into another one, why don't we, because we're up against a break, let's take a break and we'll come back with more.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I gotta do this one real quick.

• 21:31Chuck Nice?

  All right, go ahead, go ahead.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Uh, still Olympics on Mars?

• 21:34Chuck Nice?

  Olympics on Mars.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I want to say, because I, my side of my eye caught it.

• 21:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A corner of my eye and I don't want to, and we could pick it up after, after the break, but.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Go for it.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Women's beach volleyball on Mars. No protective ozone layer there. Solar UV would irradiate all exposed legs, buns and tummies.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't hardly wear clothes in women's beach volleyball.

• 21:58Chuck Nice?

  Which is, you know, that's why I don't watch it because I'm very, very modest. Although your wife doesn't let you.

• 22:09Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's listen.

• 22:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's do that break before we're in trouble.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  We're gonna take a little break and we're gonna come back with more of Neil deGrasse Tyson's tweets on sports, right after this.

• 22:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back, I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm Chuck Nice, I forgot who I was.

• 22:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't worry, we're here for you. We're here, we're your backup team. And this is Playing with Science. We have Neil deGrasse Tyson with us.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta work on that, this is Playing with Science.

• 22:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, go.

• 22:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Reprimanded. Okay.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want...

• 22:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Two. No, no, no, you're in now, you're in. Now you're wanting the gong back as well, next. And a butler, and a servant. We...

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't ever lose an opportunity to...

• 22:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Are Playing with Science, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is here with us, and his tweets, his many tweets, not opinions.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  Not opinions, but their tweets. Hey, before we jump back into it, I just realized something. So, everyone's once, when you were talking about volleyball on Mars, burning the skin, because no UV protection.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, Mars is farther away from the sun than is Earth. So, the, was it 1.4, carry the two.

• 23:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't you get it wrong?

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll get, so Mars has about one half the solar intensity than does Mars. So, in any given amount of time, all other things being equal, it would take you twice as long to get, to get sunburned. But Mars does not have a UV layer. I mean, an ozone layer. Right, because there's no free oxygen on Mars. So, on Earth, free oxygen is the oxygen we breathe, that's O2. Oxygen binds with itself. The ozone layer, high up in the atmosphere, is three oxygen atoms. And the reason why that blocks UV, do you ever wonder why, how?

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  I did not.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this molecule is sitting there fat and happy in the upper atmosphere. And one of its bonds, that binds these molecules together...

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the same energetics as that of an ultraviolet particle of light, an ultraviolet photon.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ultraviolet photon comes in, it is just what it needs to bust it open.

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the energy of the light is gone, and it got converted to breaking apart this molecule.

• 24:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So basically ate the UV molecule.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  So that.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The UV photon.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  That, that, that actual molecular bond.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:30Chuck Nice?

  Becomes a natural block.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Block.

• 24:33Chuck Nice?

  It's, it's literally like a, like a blocking tackle.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Literal block. And, if there's a very close explosion to us in our solar system.

• 24:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Supernova, you can calculate, because it takes a while to regenerate the ozone.

• 24:48Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because it's a stable layer, you, you win some, you lose some.

• 24:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Re-manufactured.

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, Al Gore.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so watch what happens. So, if you have a nearby supernova, which has a lot of UV, the waves of UV light take out your ozone, and then the next wave goes through without, uh, without conflict.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So, the first wave.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just like an army. It's exactly like army wave, waves of armies. And so, the ozone can only protect you so much before it has to rebuild itself if you have a, a, a major flux of UV coming in.

• 25:23Gary O'Reilly?

  What's the timeline on a rebuild?

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I have to calculate that.

• 25:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It, it has many sources, lightning can actually regenerate, um, you can put energy back in, uh, to recreate this, um, uh, because different chemical reactions are exothermic and endothermic, and it's the balance of all of these that creates the chemi, the, the chemical cocktail that is our atmosphere.

• 25:44Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so other mechanisms can regenerate it, and I, whatever those mechanisms are, you can construct actual things in the universe that will override them, such as supernova explosions. Yeah.

• 25:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Any other planets or moons in our solar system with a similar ozone layer?

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because we get our oxygen from life.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I used to think in Star Trek, "Oh, Captain, this is an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, we can go down and breathe it." I said, "Oh, all we have to do is look around the universe for a planet that ha, that happens to have the, the, the chemical mixture that Earth has."

• 26:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I realized, no, that's not how it works. It's not that every planet's got its own mixture, it's that Earth has oxygen because we have life.

• 26:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we, because the, the, the photosynthesis, all the, the, the green plants make that oxygen. And that then, that's like rocket fuel for animals. Then animals can now rise up, metabolize oxygen, and we have this harmony of plants and animals.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. I'm just saying.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  So let's move on to, uh, some other tweets and, uh, we're gonna kind of group these as, you know, kind of like to, to deal with ice. So think of it as like, you know, maybe skating on Enceladus or

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 26:58Chuck Nice?

  Ropo or

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  Something like that, but you, you happen to have some, um, some, some skating facts that you tweeted about.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder if this was during the Winter Olympics. This is February 2014. I don't probably remember the dates.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Right, yeah. So, so here's one. So you're watching the Olympics in Sochi? I'm loving me some Olympics. I love me some Olympics, okay. Uh, so I, if this is titled obscure fact.

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, by the way, I tweet a hundred and twenty-five characters, not a hundred and forty.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  You see, now you're just showing off.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah. Every single time.

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  By the way, uh,

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pretty much every single time.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  You know, I, I try to leave, uh,

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rare exception.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  Characters, I like to leave characters on the table. Just saying, in case I need them for it.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just in case you need them.

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  In case you need them.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the bank, in the character bank. Uh, okay, obscure fact. Skating is possible only because compressed ice melts. So skaters glide on slippery water, not on slippery ice.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  Sweet. So now are you saying that the friction between the blade and the ice?

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The friction, the pressure.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  The pressure?

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:59Chuck Nice?

  Between the blade and the ice?

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Is melting the ice?

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  So that there is an ever so thin layer of water?

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:09Chuck Nice?

  That the skater is actually gliding, like a snail makes its little

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is it lubricant?

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  Like makes a little slimy goo?

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've never heard skating analogize to snails, snail slime?

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like snail slime. Oh, that's exactly, yeah. Okay Chuck, yeah. Who's the one that needed meds this morning? I don't know. I think we're gonna share.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, how is it? So, so is this, is this surface tension? Can we back, can we back up for a minute? Sure. Okay. Cause I'm really fascinated by this. Generally, people's understanding of the word force is accurate to how we use it in physics. It's generally the same. Okay. Okay. I need more force to open this door. Okay, so you put in a force. There's another term called pressure. Which is less familiar as a physics term in the public. Okay? So, pressure is force divided by the area over which the force is operating. Got you. Okay? Mm-hmm. So, so watch what happens. If I have a knife. And it's not cutting because it's dull.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm putting a force on that knife and it's not working. You have to ask yourself, what is the area of the cutting blade? What is the area of the thing that's touching the thing you're trying to cut? It's dull, so you may, it's not very big, you know, let, let's say it's one square millimeter over the entire length of the blade, let's say. Okay. Okay? Now you sharpen the blade. What does that mean? You're reducing the surface area of the cutting it. Now, it's one hundredth of a square millimeter. Cause that stuff would, you can't even, it's, it's, and now the force divided by the area creates an enormous pressure. Right.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the lower the pressure, the lower the area is of that cutting blade. The higher the pressure. The pressure is for the same force that you're using to cut. That's why sharp knives cut. That's why it, that's what it means when you sharpen a knife. You're shrinking the denominator of that equation. Pressure equals force divided by area. So, if you've ever, I skated. I used to, I used to be a skating guard, actually, uh, long ago, long ago. Um, and I used figure skates, by the way. Uh, so, um, so, okay, so when they quote sharpen skates, what you do is you actually put a concave cut, uh, the, the bottom of the blade is concave. That's right. Okay, if you ever look closely at this.

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't, so I'm, every day's a school day. Okay, go every day's a school day. So it's concave, the full length of the blade. So that means if you lean to the left or to the right, all of your weight is on basically a knife edge of the skate. And so that creates extreme pressure on the ice. And how thick is the ice? It's like a fraction of an inch, did you know this? Okay. Ice skating rinks, it's like a fraction of an inch. Didn't know that. So now you put pressure on the top of that ice and, and it melts the ice in the instant your skate comes over it. Wow. Okay, now, but I didn't explain why the ice melts. I was about to say. That is one of the most profound facts in the universe. But are you, are you ready? I don't know if you're ready for this.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Set down anyway, so let's go. Okay. Go ahead, go ahead. Are you ready? Okay, so you with me now that the, the sharper the, the edge, the higher the pressure? Right. Okay, you got that? All right, so now, we all know that ice floats. Okay. That is rare among materi-, among substances. Usually if you freeze something, cool it and freeze it, it gets smaller. Right? Right, but. Okay. Water, however. Expands. When it gets to about four degrees Celsius, by the way, water is shrinking down to about four degrees Celsius and not freezing yet, freezing would be zero. Right. Forty degrees Celsius, then it says, I'm now gonna get bigger. Right. So between four and zero. Right. It becomes puffier.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it becomes less dense than the water it's sitting on and it floats. Okay, that's why it is almost impossible to completely freeze a lake in the winter. Because if a chunk of ice forms anywhere, it floats. And you will freeze the top of your lake. And that'll insulate the rest of the lake from the cold temperatures that are above it. Right, it'll keep the temperature. Basically prevents the bottom, so all the fish just get lower and lower and lower. And they hang out until springtime and then they come back. Right. Otherwise, we would be killing all life forms in every lake for every winter. Okay, so now, watch what happens. Now, I now have this ice cube.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is bigger in volume than the, than what it's melted, uh, uh, than what it would be melted, okay? With you? I wanna now squeeze that ice cube. That's not allowed. You can't do that. Because the ice has to be that volume. That's it. Right. It has to be that volume to be ice. So it has to return. Yes. Yes. To stay before you froze it. Yes. Which means that it's gotta turn back to water. It's gotta turn back to water under pressure. Oh my god, that is so awesome. It's got, okay, okay, wait, wait. That's amazing. No, it's freaking, it, it. Okay, so wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So check this out. Wait, wait.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can anyone else see that light bulb? Chuck is having a brain orgasm. Chuck is brain orgasming. This little brain orgasm. So wait, wait, I gotta tell you this. Okay, wait, wait, so by the way. Okay, go ahead. This is also why pipes break in the winter. Right. What happens is water is sitting there, okay? How come they don't break at, at, um, oh wait, so water's sitting there in the pipe. Now, watch what happens. So the water tries to expand, but the pipe is preventing it. Right. Okay, so you can get down to thirty-one degrees. No, nobody's pipes freeze at thirty-one degrees. Right. Or thirty degrees, you know? The water is still there contained, okay? Then you reach a point where the pressure of the pipe.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't make, can't, can't keep this thing as water. And the water changing state becomes more powerful than the frickin' copper pipe itself.

• 34:29Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it says, I am now Iceman.

• 34:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bust out of the pipe, it'll break practically anything. But if you make something that's kinda unbreakable, it'll stay water all the way down.

• 34:40Chuck Nice?

  So check this out, with that in mind.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  There, I love Scotch, okay? I, I enjoy drinking some Scotch.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:47Chuck Nice?

  Malts. And they have these giant copper weights. And they are hollowed out so that it's a sphere on the inside of this giant copper weight.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is in the vat where the.

• 34:59Chuck Nice?

  Well, not where they're making it, this is for, this is for a ice cube so that you can make a, an ice cube to put in your Scotch.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without diluting your.

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  Without diluting your.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:07Chuck Nice?

  What they do is they take a block of ice, they sit it, and they put the giant copper weight that is concave.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:15Chuck Nice?

  On top of it. The pressure of the giant copper weight.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Pushes down on the ice.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:21Chuck Nice?

  And the ice melts into a ball.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 35:25Chuck Nice?

  And it's exactly what you were just talking about, with the, which happens when the skater is on the ice.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what also happened? You could take a screen, a grid, like a, like a, like a screen that would be on a screen door, but just to make this a little more interesting.

• 35:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Increase the size of the gr- of the, the, the screen hole.

• 35:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make it like maybe a, a half a centimeter, uh, on a side. And hold it horizontally, take a block of ice.

• 35:48Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And place it on this screen. And it's gotta be really heavy ice, and the screen is not too fine a, a grid. So what will happen is, the, the ice in contact with the screen will feel the weight of the entire block, and it's gonna melt it.

• 36:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it melts it, but just to get around the screen.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it comes out on the other side. I'm, I am melted ice at thirty-one degrees, cuz I was under pressure, but now I'm back to thirty-one, thirty-two, I, I mean, thirty, did I say that right? It melts in a in a below freezing temperature. And when it comes out the other side, it just freezes again because it's no longer under pressure.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  Under pressure.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you come back in a half hour. Half of the block has passed through the screen.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  But it's still ice on the other side.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ice on the other side.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Wow, and see this? And all this happens when you watch hockey and you don't even know it. Speaking of skating and ice, any tips for skating anywhere else in the universe?

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ice, Earth does not have ownership of all the ice that's going on. So Mars has polar ice caps, as does Earth. That shrink and grow seasonally, as does Earth. And while we're there, Mars rotates about once every 24 hours.

• 36:57Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As does Earth. So that's why Mars is such an object of our affection. As a possible second planet that we might inhabit after we trash Earth. But if you want to go beyond Mars, one of my favorite objects out there, celestial objects, is a moon of Jupiter called Europa.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  Europa.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me some Europa. This is far beyond the warm habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone, where the temperature is just right to sustain liquid water. Too close, if you have water and you're too close to the sun, it evaporates. Far away, it freezes. Europa is well outside of the zone, but beneath this surface of frozen water is a liquid ocean that's been liquid for billions of years. There's an energy source from Jupiter stressing the shape of Europa in ways

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in ways that are not fundamentally different from, if you ever played racket sports, they say, let's warm up the ball.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  Right, yes, yes, yes.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you doing? You are compressing the ball for every hit. And then the ball restores its shape, ready for you to smack it again.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pumping energy.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  This is through gravitational?

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what's happening is there what we call tidal forces that distort the physical shape of Europa. And as Europa goes around Jupiter, it's then distorted in another way. And then in another way, so it's constantly getting getting harassed.

• 38:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By Jupiter and other surrounding moons, so that collects as energy deep within and it melts the ice.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  So it's like when you bend a um paperclip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, so so it's matter getting stressed and heat and and why does it get hot? You're putting energy into it by bending it back and forth.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Jupiter's putting energy into Europa.

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And surrounding moons are conspiring to to make this happen. Okay, so now watch. So you have a nice surface of ice on Europa.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In principle, you could go skating there. However, this ice is not on top of a this ice is not on top of a rigid surface as a as a normal skating rink would be. It's a float, an ocean.

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happens? The ocean moves, the ice cracks, water seeps up, refreezes. So do you there is no smooth Zamboni-fied surface.

• 39:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Europa. So I don't know that skate, well, you I guess you could bring a Zamboni there. That that would be a really wealthy civilization.

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  Hey, let's smooth out Europa, guys.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so we go ice skating on it.

• 39:26Chuck Nice?

  Let's go sky, we're gonna, yes, more than wealthy.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a quick thing about Europa is, of course, I've said this many times, I want to go ice fishing on Europa, cut a hole and see if anything swims. Did anything evolve in that ocean for in over the last billion years? But here's the thing.

• 39:42Gary O'Reilly?

  You're bargaining for.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, yeah, you watch what you wish for. But I have colleagues of mine, they said that might not be necessary. Because Europa keeps breaking apart and refreezing.

• 39:51Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you break apart, the water gurgles up and then refreezes very quickly. Okay, because it's a spontaneous crack.

• 39:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water, so you might be able to find fish that got caught in the updraft of the water.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so then you there and it's just frozen fish. You didn't have to dig for it. It's in the cracks.

• 40:11Chuck Nice?

  Right. It's it's a TV dinner, just waiting.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  It's a Europa TV dinner.

• 40:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Frozen food section.

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frozen food section.

• 40:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Frozen food section, there you go.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it would be a very big challenge to smooth that out. And by the way, the surface of Europa looks just like what the North Polar regions used to be. It's ice sheets on an ocean, because there's no land in the North Pole. Contrary to any representation of Santa you have ever seen at home. Because you'd think they have to show pine trees around his, his, no. That doesn't happen. Dude's on the North Pole, he's on an ice floe, and, and he's no different from the polar bear that's about to be stranded because the ice is melting. Right, so that means there's probably no reindeer up there either. Not, not only that, uh, he'll, he'll be overdressed for the warm weather that's to come. So, in the future, he'll be Santa with fewer clothes on, sitting on, on the, sitting on the ice floe.

• 41:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't worry, children, he'll be there next year for you. Don't worry, don't worry about that bad Mr. Meele was saying.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't mean to put that image in your head. Santa on a beach chair? Yeah. That's why he's working on his abs.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Santa abs. Santa abs, baby.

• 41:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Santa abs, baby.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there's also, uh, another moon, Enceladus. This is a fun moon because there are pressures under the surface, and when we think of Yellowstone, I think of Yellowstone.

• 41:30Gary O'Reilly?

  It's Yogi.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, thank you. Yellowstone Park with the geysers and things. Why are there geysers? The, the water gets heated, uh, pressure builds up, it blows.

• 41:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Old faithful.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's not, it turns out after an earthquake, it's not faithful anymore. That's what you haven't heard about in the last decades. When's the last time anyone even mentioned all faithful to you? Think about it. Yeah, so, what I read was there was an earthquake and it messed with the under areas, and now it's just not faithful in it. It's still, still blow, not like. Not the way it used to. Yeah, not the way it used to. Yeah, so it's the old unfaithful.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So. So we've got, um, so Enceladus has geysers and volcanoes.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That blow from the pressure of evaporating ice. Rather than from uh the steam that would build up from high temperatures. So on Enceladus, you've got geysers spewing, hurling chunks of ice.

• 42:29Chuck Nice?

  Right. Whoa.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And volcanoes that blow other chunks. So the pressure is from cold things uh subliming uh evaporate like like CO2 would.

• 42:38Chuck Nice?

  CO2, right.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's the cold volcanoes. It's a fun idea.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  That's a great idea.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Think park.

• 42:43Chuck Nice?

  Fascinating.

• 42:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:45Chuck Nice?

  That stuff. Good, good stuff.

• 42:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, we're gonna take a break. More of Neil's tweets, more of Chuck's discovery of ice and a brain orgasm and me being quiet, probably learning lots. Join us in a minute.

• 43:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 43:05Chuck Nice?

  I'm Chuck Nice.

• 43:05Gary O'Reilly?

  This is Playing with Science. Before the break, we got a little bit glacial.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 43:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And um we learned plenty about ice, water.

• 43:15Chuck Nice?

  And how skate, how you cannot skate without pressure melting the ice.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Chuck Nice?

  So that you can glide on a little thin stream of water. Fascinating stuff.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that water refreezes immediately.

• 43:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the other side, because it's not, the water is not above the melting point.

• 43:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just forced it into the liquid state under pressure.

• 43:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Self-healing.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  That is self-healing. Healing ice. Look at that. Yeah. And I'm sure that most people were under the impression that you're just carving through the ice and that's what makes the skate work, but that's amazing.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And hence the way they sharpen the blade.

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To make the thinnest possible edge on each side. And that's why in in figure skating, it's that my my daughter's figure skates, and I did a little bit of it long ago. The most of what they do is on one edge or another edge. Rarely are they ever just going straight forward.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  And it's all about the curve because you're on the edge. And that's how you do it. That's how they judge.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do all the fun things.

• 44:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So this is great. Let's let's move forward because right now.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just realized that that this is that this is like the cheap ass show because like I'm in the family and I'm your entire guest this whole show.

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  Yes. That was the idea. Well, some cheap.

• 44:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Some people would look at that and saying, I'm that important. This whole show's about me. You took a different stance.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying.

• 44:28Gary O'Reilly?

  You took a different stance.

• 44:29Chuck Nice?

  I see what you guys are doing here. I know. You know, when I'm hosting the show, I get, I'm getting people in and from, from around the world. But Al Gore doesn't want to talk to us. Okay, all right, all right.

• 44:39Gary O'Reilly?

  But he was very short.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  Right. So let's jump into a little baseball.

• 44:44Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's go summertime.

• 44:45Chuck Nice?

  Before we look at the tweet on baseball, because you had a really interesting tweet about the slowest you could make a pitch, which made me think about. In other words, there's a slowest possible pitch. Slowest possible pitch, which can actually happen, at the physics of a slowest possible pitch. But it also got me thinking about one of the most unique pitches in baseball, which is the knuckleball. And there's a guy by the name of R.A. Dickey, who throws the nastiest knuckleball in baseball. So let's take a look at this clip, and, and then I just want you to comment on the knuckleball for me. Toronto versus Boston. Yeah, Boston versus Toronto, and Dickey's on the mound, and take it away.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  The Blue Jays, because R.A. Dickey's throwing today, Josh Tolent. He told me today, he said, trying to catch the knuckleball is tough. Trying to catch the knuckleball in the shadows on a four o'clock game is nearly impossible. So we will watch that tomorrow for Steven Wright. Yeah, might be a problem for Ryan Hannigan. Russell Martin will be back there for Marcus Strowman.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Boy, that was a terrific knuckleball.

• 45:49Chuck Nice?

  That was, that was an 0-1 pitch to Blake Swire, and who's.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Was waved by to Blake Swire. What just happened there? I mean, that, that was a funky delivery. Took a little something off of it. It was wiggling, and then watch the swing from Blake Swire.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  He swings and.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  See, the bat just sits down in his hand.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing but air.

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  Nothing but air. And so what the...

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of air. Wasn't like he just came near the ball.

• 46:16Chuck Nice?

  Not only, the bat wrapped, the bat wrapped around his waist and then flew out of his hand.

• 46:20Gary O'Reilly?

  He lost control of it.

• 46:21Chuck Nice?

  So, but the thing that made that interesting is when you hear the announcer say, "The ball gets to the plate and just wiggles." So what's going on from a physics standpoint i- in that instant?

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we know from basic physics 101 is, well, physics 102.

• 46:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's that?

• 46:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Second semester.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second semester. Is, is the stability of an object is improved and enhanced if you rotate it.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you might have heard the notion of something being spin stabilized.

• 46:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 46:55Gary O'Reilly?

  You see it in NFL with the spiral...

• 46:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, spin stabilized. So the spiral goes and it's, it's very stable in that, in that configuration.

• 47:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Just a simple gyroscope.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gyroscopes, for example. Planets are stable spinning, spinning objects. So, uh, we might spin a satellite to stabilize it in its, in its location. So, so, all right. A knuckleball does not spin. It is therefore not spin stabilized. And if it's not spin stabilized, it is susceptible to any possible puff of air that goes transverse to its path to the plate.

• 47:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the slightest breeze will just take it.

• 47:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And breezes are kind of, it's strong in one instant and a little less in another instant. And, and we just take that for granted walking down the street. It's not always constant in your face.

• 47:43Gary O'Reilly?

  You've just given me an idea for one of our little mini-series.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 47:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Weird Science.

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Weird.

• 47:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Because that's weird. Because when we see a pitch, it does all the things.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's only weird if you're unfamiliar with the science.

• 47:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Which people are.

• 47:56Chuck Nice?

  That's not as good a segment.

• 47:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Think about it. All right. It's on the to do or to don't do list.

• 48:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right.

• 48:03Gary O'Reilly?

  But not for me, watching that. It's weird.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  This segment is called, "It's Only Weird If You're Unfamiliar With Science."

• 48:09Gary O'Reilly?

  But go ahead.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so a knuckleball, uh, so one thing I would be interested in testing. Yeah. Is if the air is perfectly still. Hmm. And I would, I would wonder whether knuckleballs in domed stadiums are as effective as knuckleballs in the open, in open air stadiums. You can have, you know, in any stadium you've been in, the air can just come in and circle around. Swirls around, it does all different kinds of. All kinds of different things. And now you do have air currents in a closed dome. Yes. Because you have air conditioning ducts and they cycle the air. You have doors that are opening and closing. Right, so there's some, there's some air currents, but I would be curious, and I'm sure the saber metricians, you know, the folks who calculate what every little detail that has ever happened in the history of baseball. Yes. In the universe, uh, maybe they have thought about this, I don't know, but the, I would

• 48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  guess that in a closed stadium, your knuckleball just does not do as many things as it would otherwise do. And, and it also means if it's a windy day, you can't even trust the knuckleball because the catcher will never catch it. Because it'll just go off one foot away in an unpredictable way. You end up throwing a ball every time, if, if, if it's too windy. If it's too windy, you can't even, it's, it's, it's a crap shoot at that point.

• 49:19Gary O'Reilly?

  So what's, what's the worst that'll happen? If your catcher doesn't catch it, or if the batter doesn't hit it? So what would you rather, if your catcher doesn't?

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the people on base, you don't want the catcher to not catch it.

• 49:30Gary O'Reilly?

  But I'm just saying, if it's, if it's loaded.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It matters, it changes the dynamic. So, the catcher doesn't catch it, the, the runner advances. Right. And it's a, it's a passed ball. So, so, uh, you're a Brit, you know the difference between pass balls and an error? Nope. Okay, so, we have a Brit in the house. Uh, so, the, the pitcher and the catcher handle the ball on every single play. Right. So, they get a, they get a, a dispensation if they do something wrong for the fact of handling the ball on every single play. So if I, the pitcher and I throw the ball, and it's way outside, you can't re- recover it, and the batter advance, it's not an error, it's called a wild pitch. Right, right, with you? And if I'm a catcher, and I should have caught the ball, but I just messed up, it's

• 50:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  called a, a, a pass ball. Okay. Those do not accrue to your record of errors.

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, whereas I'm a pitcher, it hits back to me and I throw to first base and I throw over the guy's head. Error.

• 50:29Chuck Nice?

  That's an error.

• 50:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, I'm trying to catch the ball, I'm at home plate and it bounces off my, my web and goes over my head. That's an error. So, catchers tend to have a lot of, a lot of pass balls. Uh, when they have pitchers who throw knuckleball.

• 50:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they cannot anticipate, they cannot anticipate where the ball's gonna be.

• 50:50Chuck Nice?

  Anywhere. So with that in mind, with that in mind, you wrote a really cool tweet, uh, uh, about baseball. And we were just talking about air currents.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:59Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this is, uh, just the opposite. So go ahead and read your tweet.

• 51:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want, where, where's the tweet about the, the, the minimum speed of a throw?

• 51:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's what.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we do that?

• 51:08Chuck Nice?

  We got the wrong, we got the wrong tweet up. I'm sorry.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. So here we go.

• 51:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so go into that.

• 51:12Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm. So with that in mind, you wrote a tweet, because the knuckleball, as you say, is, you know, kind of, uh, um, subject to the whims of air currents.

• 51:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and they don't tend to go very fast.

• 51:22Chuck Nice?

  And they don't tend to go very fast.

• 51:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fastball hitter, you might as well just give up and go back to the dugout.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  Right. Which, which brings me to this tweet that you wrote about slow pitches.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 51:32Chuck Nice?

  And, so go ahead and read this one.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Slowest pitch in baseball to reach the catcher? Thirty miles per hour, thrown at a forty-five degree angle. Any slower and at any other angle, it hits the ground. So that is the slowest possible pitch.

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  And, and, and, and so here's what's funny about this tw- not funny. Here's what I love about this tweet, uh, and, and working with you, period, is you say a lot of things and people, which I appreciate. I appreciate that people go behind you and actually say, okay, I'm gonna see if this is right.

• 52:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's good, but the, the making, trying to prove Tyson wrong as a sport.

• 52:13Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's, listen, there's nothing you can do about that.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't be right. Let me try to.

• 52:16Chuck Nice?

  But, the great thing is, there is a guy, uh, which, uh, we don't have it and it doesn't make a difference. He took your calculations and diagrammed it out and put it up on Twitter and was like Neil deGrasse Tyson, absolutely right. This is the absolute, and it's the, the actual calculation is thirty point four miles per hour.

• 52:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I rounded, I rounded.

• 52:38Chuck Nice?

  You rounded it, but it's thirty point four miles per hour, thrown from, it has to be a forty-five degree angle, factoring in the mound.

• 52:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The mound.

• 52:45Chuck Nice?

  The mound is already factored in.

• 52:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and the catcher is not actually at home plate.

• 52:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the arm of the pitcher. The ball leaves the hand of the pitcher well forward of the of the rubber on the mound.

• 52:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you gotta.

• 52:58Chuck Nice?

  You gotta put those things in.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I did a rough estimate to.

• 53:02Chuck Nice?

  But the thing is that he actually proved your calculations in a diagram and and put it up on Twitter, which I thought was fantastic. And that is, that is the slowest you can pitch a ball.

• 53:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Possible pitch. And the thing about a 45 degree angle, we all know what that is. It's it's equal amount forward as up.

• 53:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you learn in physics 101 that it's an interesting question. How do I make, by the way, this comes from military, military Napoleon, Napoleon, I visited Napoleon's library.

• 53:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Elba, when he was there.

• 53:34Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The entire wall of engineering and physics books.

• 53:37Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he wasn't just a little tyrannical guy.

• 53:40Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He knew, he knew not only how to make his cannon, he knew where the cannonball was gonna fall.

• 53:44Chuck Nice?

  Listen, you gotta know where to put those cannonballs if you wanna rule the world.

• 53:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta know where your balls go, right?

• 53:48Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you wanna hit your enemy as far away as they are, what angle should you put your cannon?

• 53:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 53:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can calculate that angle for a given speed of the ball coming out of the nozzle, whatever the the the hole, 45 degrees.

• 54:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you angle it higher than that, you're wasting some of the speed in altitude rather than in distance.

• 54:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you angle it lower than 45 degrees, it doesn't stay airborne long enough to go as far as it could have.

• 54:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  45 degrees maximizes the the hang time and the distance so that you can go as far as you possible possibly can on that hit. Now, if they're closer than that maximum distance, then you'll wanna adjust the height. So what do you call those things that they go boom, boom? That they.

• 54:37Chuck Nice?

  Molars.

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're more, yeah, those.

• 54:38Chuck Nice?

  Mortar shells.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So that's a fixed speed that it comes out. And if they're not as far away at the maximum speed, you gotta change the angle higher.

• 54:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, then, so that's how you do it.

• 54:48Chuck Nice?

  That those were what the first computers were used for.

• 54:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sweet spot of war, right. So you apply that same calculation to a pitch, you get you get a 45 degree angle, 30 mile an hour pitch.

• 54:56Chuck Nice?

  Sweet, man. I just thought that was really interesting.

• 54:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's why, that's why sometimes they have people, first pitch, ceremonial first pitches.

• 55:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 55:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And sometimes people throw it, it just never makes it to home plate.

• 55:06Chuck Nice?

  Right, cuz they throw that 28.4 miles an hour.

• 55:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And if you ever wanted to to have the evidence of Neil thinking deeply about his tweets before he tweets them, that's exactly it.

• 55:16Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 55:17Gary O'Reilly?

  You've sat there, you've calculated, you've thought about it.

• 55:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, it's not that I. Distracted my day to make that tweet. I just had that thought anyway.

• 55:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I said, well, let me make it rigorous with the calculation. So that did take extra time.

• 55:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this was a thought I was having anyway while I was watching a baseball game.

• 55:34Chuck Nice?

  Cool. All right, let's get to our probably will be our last tweet. What do we have?

• 55:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The segment, okay.

• 55:39Chuck Nice?

  Next up.

• 55:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm. Oh, you can play baseball on the airless moon. But only if you find a way to not suffocate.

• 55:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 55:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you don't care about curveballs.

• 55:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 55:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because a curveball requires a difference in pressure from one side of the ball to the other.

• 55:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 55:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have air alter the course of that, of that ball. And a curve it like Beckham or what's the?

• 56:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Like Beckham, yeah.

• 56:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bendy Beckham? That, that's no different from what he's doing on, uh, when he can kick it forward. But with a spin and he's relying on the aerodynamics of the ball moving through the air. For the air to then push the ball sideways. Looking like it has some magic arc to it. But it's really just aerodynamics.

• 56:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Resistance.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's like, it's the aerodynamic version of putting English on the ball. Uh, when you play billiards.

• 56:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 56:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They call it putting English on the ball in the UK? Or is it putting American on the ball? What is it?

• 56:35Gary O'Reilly?

  The answer is yes.

• 56:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay.

• 56:38Chuck Nice?

  My old Neil, I gotta tell you, man, this was fantastic. So much fun.

• 56:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We didn't get through most of my tweets.

• 56:42Chuck Nice?

  Oh, we didn't.

• 56:43Gary O'Reilly?

  You'll have to come back and do it all again.

• 56:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'll be a cheap date for you guys. I'm already in the StarTalk family. Just call me up and I come by because I'm a sucker for this thing.

• 56:55Chuck Nice?

  Now, well, we certainly appreciate it, man. Seriously, that was a lot of fun, very informative and, uh, you know, a little different twist on the show. So we're, we're glad that we did it, all right?

• 57:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I'm Gary O'Reilly, you're Chuck Nice. This has been Playing with Science, but if you think about it, we've spun the Playing with Science just a little bit differently. So thank you to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has been entertaining as always, informative, and a great sport for going back through all of those tweets over the recent years.

• 57:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 57:22Gary O'Reilly?

  From us on Playing with Science, see you all soon.