Cosmic Queries – Quantum Queries with Hakeem Oluseyi

Do we really know the age of the universe? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Paul Mecurio answer astrophysics questions about the big bang, gravitational waves, and the speed of light with astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi.

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. We've got another Cosmic Queries edition for you. An all-purpose general astrophysics Cosmic Queries. And we've got an old friend of StarTalk, he's been on once or twice before. Hakeem Alusey. Did I pronounce that right, Hakeem?

• 0:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Close, close. Yeah, yeah. It's a O and a sh. Olu Shayy. Think Olu Shady. Olu Shady. But it's Olu Shayy.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's great to have you back on, and I got as my guest co-host, Paul Mecurio. Paul, good to see you, man.

• 0:47Paul Mecurio?

  Hey, good to see you again, Hakeem. Great to meet you, and great to be back.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's been too long, Paul. And you're a host of the Inside Out podcast. So, and I was once a guest on that program.

• 1:01Paul Mecurio?

  You were, and we got to get you back on. It's been a while. You were great.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 1:05Paul Mecurio?

  There's a lot of sobbing during the interview, but we cut that out.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Hakeem, you're a fellow astrophysicist.

• 1:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Educated at Stanford, and you're right now a professor at George Mason University.

• 1:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've been a busy guy. You've got a memoir, came out a couple of years ago. When did that come out?

• 1:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  This past June. Yeah, June. Yeah, June 2021. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your story, you're in the military, you were... Weren't you homeless for a while or something, or in the streets?

• 1:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I had a couple of bouts with homelessness. You know, not really sleeping on the street homeless, sleeping on somebody's couch on somebody's floor homeless.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Two different levels, right?

• 1:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  There's different levels, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but anyway, I grant all that has worked out and

• 1:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I encourage people to read that memoir. Memoirs, I think, as a genre, are packed with all the lessons anyone ever needs.

• 2:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I'm delighted to have yours as part of that, part of that community of storytelling.

• 2:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Thank you.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To help people bring shape to their lives. So Paul collected questions from our Patreon supporters.

• 2:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Nice.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're just all-purpose grab-bag astrophysics. So I know a little bit. You know probably more. So we'll, we'll knock this out.

• 2:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We'll see.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But just before we begin, what was the title of your thesis, your PhD thesis?

• 2:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, yeah. My PhD thesis was titled, "Development of a Global Model of the Sun's Atmosphere, With an Emphasis on the Solar Transition Region."

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 2:42Paul Mecurio?

  That is so weird, because mine was exactly the same thing.

• 2:48Paul Mecurio?

  It's like, it's like we're brothers from another mother. What?

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So, so we, we need sun expertise, right?

• 2:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, absolutely, yeah.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun is, seems to always be misbehaving. It burps up gases and it's, it unleashes solar flares. It's got spots. And what have you been doing to the sun?

• 3:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So, you know, I look at how energy and mass are transferred throughout the solar atmosphere. So traditionally, the way we look at it is, you know, about the mid 20th century, we thought we understood stars really well. But it failed at the surface of the star. Because if you look at the, the surface of a star, you see all these plasma loops and jets and, you know, weird stuff happening, right? That's due to action of magnetic fields. So, um, you know, I'll tell you what really was cool for me. Now, this, you know, Paul, you're gonna probably have thought the same thought. But to me, it was-

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he had the same thesis. He's studying the same subject.

• 3:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. But, you know, what we do as astronomers and astrophysicists is that we look at light and we say, oh, here's what the matter, millions of miles away, are doing, and the fields are doing, based on our analysis of this light. So I really got into, you know, the interaction of light and matter. So I, I, I left graduate school and went into Silicon Valley, and my first patents were on using spectroscopy in semiconductor manufacturing. Ta-da.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, what were your first patents on?

• 4:18Paul Mecurio?

  I invented this thing called sunglasses, Mr. Wise Guy. Okay, so there, which everyone gets to look at the sun. What about solar cycle? Can we, I just have a question. Solar cycle, right? Is that still an under and not sort of something that we have our head around yet?

• 4:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, so we say solar cycle. What we're talking about, for those people who might not know, is, you know, just like planets are like a bar magnet, a planet like the earth that's spinning fast and have a liquid iron core, so is the sun. Uh, but the difference is, the sun doesn't have a solid surface. It's plasma. And so, you know, when it gets fully separated, one pole at the top, the opposite pole at the bottom, they then migrate and mix up. And when they're mostly mixed is when we get the biggest flares and coronal mass ejections. And then they pass by and it flips, right? And it just does that over and over. And each time.

• 5:04Paul Mecurio?

  That's an 11 year cycle, right?

• 5:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, that's 11 year cycle or 22 if you go back to the original configuration, right? Yeah, and so, the thing is, is that this so-called source of these magnetic fields, we call the solar dynamo. And the people who do helioscismology have somehow, I don't know the details. You know, if you look at the interior structure of the sun, there's the core where the fusion reactions occur, then there's this, this region known as a radiative zone where the energy moves out via light, then there's the outer 30% that's like boiling. We call it the convective zone. So, the magnetic fields appear to be generated at the boundary between the convective and the radiative zone. Exactly how? Who knows? I don't know, maybe someone does.

• 5:49Paul Mecurio?

  And if you can answer that, then you can explain the solar cycle and sort of what's behind that.

• 5:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 5:55Paul Mecurio?

  If you can answer that question.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, part of it is that the sun does not rotate as one physical solid object, right? It's that the equator rotates faster than other latitudes, right?

• 6:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right, that's right. So, you know, it, it, so it's really weird, you know? And it also has, if you look at Jupiter's bandit structure, it also has a bandit structure in the subsurface that the helioscymologists have figured out. And, uh, you know, and these bands go at different velocities, right? So, you know, you have this big, you know, difference, like you said, slower at the poles, faster at the, at the equator, but then, you know, there's details within there.

• 6:32Paul Mecurio?

  And it's the equal same speed at each pole?

• 6:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I have no idea if that's the case or not. I don't know.

• 6:38Paul Mecurio?

  Can you get back to me on that?

• 6:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, I'll go.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we have a mission going to the sun, but the sun's very hot, so we're gonna go at night.

• 6:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  With a glass of water.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Paul, give me some questions.

• 6:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  What questions?

• 6:55Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, we got a lot of great questions. We have a lot of great questions today. So I'm gonna start with Kevin Bond. We know that the Big Bang Theory created the universe and it's been constantly expanding. Then it begins to shrink and implode on itself. So, when the universe reaches that final point of imploding to the smallest point, is that event what recreates a Big Bang Theory and recreates the universe? Now, there's a second part to this, but I think we should do it in two parts, and that's the first part.

• 7:24Paul Mecurio?

  I got this, guys. Don't worry about it.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can take this, Hakeem.

• 7:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay.

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is no observational evidence ever in the history of cosmology to say that we're gonna recollaps.

• 7:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  None.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All data has always shown a one-way trip, which has been very unsettling to people who prefer tidy stories where, you know, it expands and contracts and expands and contracts. And it's like, no, it's a one-way trip, and it's philosophically unsettling to me.

• 7:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Paul Mecurio?

  Do we know why it's only a one-way trip scientifically?

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explosive energy exceeds the gravitational energy that would pull it all back together. That's all there is. It's that simple. So, deal with it. And I'll say, I say it often, I'll say it again. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

• 8:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I think I've seen that on a t-shirt somewhere.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 8:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Bumper sticker or what? Yeah. You know, that's the interesting thing about this Big Bang thing. Is because, you know, if you hear people talk about it in the public sphere, you know, there's some sort of, there's one train of thought that leads me to believe that people think that every 30, 40, 50 years, all the world's scientists get together in a room, and the topic is, what's the big lie we're all gonna agree on?

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 8:42Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right?

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they think is happening.

• 8:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's what they think is happening, right? Little do they know, nobody can agree on anything. So, yeah, so the Big Bang, um, you know, it it was one of those things where it really shows you the power of science and what we do, you know, so I was reading, um, I was just reading a book written by Albert Einstein or someone else in nineteen thirty-eight, right, and so he was, it's called The Evolution of Physics, and one of the things he was talking about is how physical thought, uh, you know, what we call the scientific method developed. And so, you know, in the in the Western world, we start with Galileo.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know the other author, it's Leopold Infield.

• 9:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's, that's right, yep, yep. And so the thing that he picked up on that I was unaware of, so, you know, one thing I knew that, you know, my fellow Western scientists typically don't know is Ibn al-Haytham, you know, the guy who wrote the Book of Optics and and, uh, you know, was sort of like, you know.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Golden Age of Islam.

• 9:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The Golden Age of Islam, around the year ten twenty-one, right? So I was like, why weren't we celebrating a thousand years of the scientific method in twenty twenty-one, because he wrote the Book of Optics in ten twenty-one, but he insisted that what we believe to be true about the universe should be consistent with what we observe to be true about the universe. And the thing that Einstein points out is that what we observe can only take us so far, because the universe is deceptive and it throws you these clues that can lead you astray.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time.

• 10:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, and so like Aristotle and Al, they took all the clues in and they came up with a model that was wrong, but was consistent with what they observed. Then Galileo decided to do these mental experiments that you could never actually do in real life, right? He's like, you know, he was noticing that if I roll a ball down one plane, it goes almost to the same height up the next plane, but then if you, you know, make the the the second plane have a shallower angle, it still tries to reach the same height. Now, he imagined, what if I got rid of all the friction on the between the the the ball and the floor and I got rid of the friction within the wheels, it would go forever, is what he realized, right? And that's what overturned everything, was him imagining an experiment that we could never do.

• 10:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Now, here's the thing about that, you can take that idea and you can make predictions. And I feel like the Big Bang is the best example of how powerful that technique is, because unlike other experimental science, where you can like control variables, you can't do that.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a Petri dish.

• 11:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, you can't do that with the universe.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Universe is not in a Petri dish, right?

• 11:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right, so you gotta say. If this happened, what must have occurred and then go look for it. And the fact that we have all these crazy predictions that have all, you know, the high precision have come to fruition. So I, I, I get on that because the good doctor said, observations, right? Everything we observe shows that the universe is not going to collapse. But the big bang has gone even further. It's not just what we observed, it's what we could have imagined must have occurred. And then we find that it's there with high precision. So it's not like one idea in competition with others. Like the, the whole idea of the universe being small and dense and hot and expanding to this point is observed fact.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I, I would, I would add to that in a more simple terrestrial example. If there's a cave and it just snowed and you see bear prints in the snow entering the cave, without ever having seen the bear. You have evidence that there was a bear in the cave.

• 12:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are ways to know without actually seeing. Right.

• 12:11Paul Mecurio?

  But is there some sort of, is it, is there some hesitation to sort of theorize on things? You know, I mean, obviously not. I mean, that's what science is about. It's not just observation, but it's about going the next step. I mean, like the fact that the, the earth, the, the big bang, it's 13.86 billion, but there's a star out there that's 14, 15, 16 billion, right?

• 12:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, yeah, those.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he remember that one. Those keep popping up. You still can't get to sleep on that one. They'll pop up, they'll pop up every now and then, you know? And so, yes, it's a conundrum. And so that's, I mean, that's the fun part about being on the frontier. The frontier is full of conundrums. Only some of them get the interest of the press and the public. But, but what they want to think is that, see, scientists have no clue about anything. And they're all there, no, we keep working on it and we figure it out.

• 12:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, an example I, I like to give is, you know, it's not new to me. I mean, I didn't invent it, but it's the damselfly. It lives but a day in a forest, right? Now imagine you're a damselfly scientist and you're in a forest and you see a tree standing, you see a rotting log and you see a seed on the ground. You could not think, oh wow, the seed must grow into the tree, which we, right? You gotta get lucky.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which then dies and rots in the.

• 13:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, right. You gotta get lucky. You need many generations. You need to make lots of observations. You need people to say, oh, I noticed that when the tree falls, it looks like the, oh, and I saw the seed fall, right? And you can begin to piece things together, but you still have some gaps. Okay, so we just launched the James Webb Space Telescope. One of those gaps is from when the Big Bang radiation was set free, what we call recombination 380 million years ago, all the way up until we have stars and galaxies, right? There's a big gap of no knowledge, the, the, the, the dark ages, reionization, the first stars and galaxies, you know, so even though you know a lot, you don't necessarily know everything, but because you don't know everything, it doesn't mean you don't know a lot.

• 14:07Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, right. That's a perfect way of putting it.

• 14:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Love it.

• 14:11Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 14:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's not dumb to me, but okay.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's brilliant. It's brilliant. I didn't say a damn thing while you were talking.

• 14:19Paul Mecurio?

  If you want to rationalize your laziness and lack of knowledge that way, good for you. Go for it.

• 14:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. Look, as the one white dude in the conversation, I don't sure, I'm not sure lazy is the word.

• 14:32Paul Mecurio?

  No, no, I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean that.

• 14:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I know, I'm teasing, I'm teasing.

• 14:36Paul Mecurio?

  All right, I got another one. We're gonna move on. Uh, I apologize to the person, this is a tough one to pronounce, Slawick Walzik, nice Irish boy. Um, hello, wonderful people. When will we be able to create gravitational waves and use them to send information like we do with electromagnetic waves now? Listen, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure when it's possible, the airlines are gonna keep it from happening because.

• 15:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I've been, I've been doing that forever, man. I, like, I could, like, flex my pecs and send, like, you know, gravitational waves out and, you know. Then you woke up, and then what happened? Then I started flexing my trapezius ease.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, with that question, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, more Cosmic Queries with Hakim Olishe.

• 15:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Dr. O.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dr. O. I love it. All right, we'll be right back.

• 15:40Paul Mecurio?

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Cosmic Queries, a grab bag edition on all things astrophysics. So I got one of my colleagues from Professor George Mason University, Hakeem Oluse... Yee! Yee-haw! Oh, yee! That's... I hear that... Dr. O. When I'm up in New York...

• 16:21Paul Mecurio?

  Dr. O.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I'm up in New York, walking through the streets, I hear people yelling "Yee-haw!" all the time.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oluse... There you go. I finally did it right. Oluse...

• 16:31Paul Mecurio?

  You just need a cowboy hat. When you put that on, you can go "Yee-haw!"

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, just before we begin, you do stand-up, right?

• 16:39Paul Mecurio?

  I do.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, I'm not during COVID, but you're a stand-up guy.

• 16:41Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 16:43Paul Mecurio?

  Stand-up and act, yeah.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did we first meet on Colbert's Late Show?

• 16:47Paul Mecurio?

  We first met... it might have been The Daily Show. I was writing on that show.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So you go way back.

• 16:53Paul Mecurio?

  And then we connected, and I was a fan.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you warm up the crowd there at The Daily Show?

• 16:57Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, and I... yeah. Well, I was writer on the show, performing on the show, the warm-up, and then I went to The Colbert Report, and then went to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and we've kind of been attached at the hip, and...

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great. It's great to have that tracking. It's great to hear that.

• 17:12Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, we're kind of in the same mindset. Like, there's sort of a core group of us that started at The Daily Show, that started that kind of point of view. And Stephen came in a few years after we started the show, and, you know, obviously, he was great on the show, and then that led to his own show. So we kind of have a shorthand, know how we like to parse the news and all of that. And when we first started on The Daily Show, we weren't doing just politics and the media's coverage of politics. We were doing everything: music, pop culture. And when John came on board, like, three years in... Jon Stewart, he focused the show a little, pretty much on, you know.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. People forget that The Daily Show long predates Jon Stewart. Yeah, right.

• 17:52Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, it was three, over three years with Craig Kilborn.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Craig Kilborn, right.

• 17:56Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 17:57Paul Mecurio?

  And very lovely locks of golden hair that he had. And, uh, and he was great because he would read anything. He didn't care about offending anybody or whatever. And he had that very dry, Doug Herzog was a president of Comedy Central. He was involved in creating the show, really liked, uh, Craig from SportsCenter. And that's how he got to know him. So he kind of, yeah.

• 18:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Let me put my idea by you, Paul. I call it the monthly show.

• 18:24Paul Mecurio?

  I listen, uh, I think we're gonna, it might be a little dated. That's all I'm saying.

• 18:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It might be, it might be.

• 18:32Paul Mecurio?

  I have a yearly show I want to do.

• 18:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what was the, what questions did you leave off with at the, at the break?

• 18:39Paul Mecurio?

  So it says, um, uh, when will we be able to create gravitational waves and use them to send information like we do with electromagnetic waves now?

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me, let me start that out and I'll go hand off to Hakeem. Gravitational waves travel the same speed as electromagnetic waves. So you're not gaining anything by this. Plus they're very hard to make. They take a lot of energy, more so than, you know, turning on your laser. So I, I don't know, Hakeem, can you, do you think of any advantages to using gravitational waves?

• 19:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Uh, yeah, encrypted communications in a way, right? It's like, you know, I'm gonna take my little, two little pulsars, binary pulsars, and I'm gonna move them in this way to create a series of, uh, you know, X's and O's, dots and dashes.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also secret messages.

• 19:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is, is that they'll pass by things that, you know, will attenuate light. So, you know, you could, but, but again, you still have the same speed.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I hadn't considered that, of course, gravitational waves pass through everything.

• 19:42Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you participate in the space-time continuum, gravity waves will go right on through it. They don't even care. So what you're telling me is you're gonna send me some secret message with orbiting pulsars.

• 19:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I decode it on the other side and no one can block it.

• 19:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one can do anything. Okay.

• 20:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Unless they know, you know, if the Ferengi or the Klingons or, you know, the Borg are trying to intercept.

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh oh.

• 20:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We got them.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh oh, we have a geek in the house.

• 20:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Do we ever?

• 20:10Paul Mecurio?

  Well, why is this not, is this, is this being experimented with at all? Or is it just too?

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, he used to work in the Navy, so he can't divulge.

• 20:18Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, okay. You'd have to kill me if he tells me. I don't wanna die right now.

• 20:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, I could bring you into the lab forever to entertain, uh.

• 20:26Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 20:29Paul Mecurio?

  So is it's not, is it conceivable that this could be developed for that kind of use?

• 20:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, the key thing is what the good doctor said, and then you notice he talks about the amount of energy required. And you notice that I invoked pulsars, you know, neutron stars.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 20:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So that, yeah, doing it, making them happen is, so the other question I have is, you know, that's detectable gravitational waves. I don't know it to be the case, but I would imagine that moving any mass will create some sort of, you know, gravitational ripple, just like.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just have to accelerate the mass, that's all. So it's not, it's not movement so much as acceleration.

• 21:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And that creates the ripple. Got it, got it. Yeah, yeah. So it's a matter of, you know, how sensitive can you detect? And to signal the noise back, you know, for your system.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So what you, what you're suggesting, implying, is that LIGO, Laser Interferomancy Gravitational Wave Observatory, which is our first means of detecting colliding black holes, though that costs a zillion dollars and a grant from the National Science Foundation and, you know, monies from Congress, that's just our first foray.

• 21:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in a hundred years, maybe we get way more. That's like Galileo in his first telescope.

• 21:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and wait a little while and we'll, we'll be knocking this out. And I, I can, so I can catch you walking down the street, just wiggling your arms in a particular way. And I'll go there. So in the future, maybe, Hakeem's walking down the street and does an arm, a Hakeem arm jiggle, that'll create a specific. gravitational wave signature that only comes from him.

• 22:04Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, it'll have only his, it'll have his imprint on it and only his.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 22:08Paul Mecurio?

  It'll have an unbelievably sexy voice. Whatever that wave is, it'll be an incredible deep voice.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, what's, what's next up?

• 22:18Paul Mecurio?

  What do you think is the, uh, what do you think is the best?

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's asking the question, Paul? I want to know who these people are.

• 22:24Paul Mecurio?

  William D A.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I got, I gotta step up here. That's three questions from dudes. I'm stepping in for the women. I need a question from a woman. You know, they're there.

• 22:34Paul Mecurio?

  All right. Okay. We'll get you on, on the next one.

• 22:39Paul Mecurio?

  What do you think is the best strategy to expand broadband internet access to rural areas? I've seen lots of talk about satellite, high altitude tech, but also the concept of using unused TV frequencies uh, between the active ones in the V H F and U H F, which seems far more practical. I think this is important, especially in a pandemic to achieve anything close to equity in education. And I couldn't agree more. I've said it once. I've said it a thousand times. Rural Kansas needs Squid Game. And uh, let's get on that, will you? So what, what is the, what is the viability?

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just rural Kansas. There, there are a lot of very desolate parts of China, um, Siberia. And people, you know, live there in Alaska. So you got any ideas, Hakeem? I'm thinking, isn't that what Elon is trying to do?

• 23:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, he is.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every time he launches, there's a hundred satellites that get deployed.

• 23:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. And that's, you know, that's why it's fraught with danger to comment on the topic. But uh, you know, there's the Starlink satellites, right? He's attempted to do that, but I think he's not the only game in town. I cannot say what the best uh, option is, but I think we all agree that um, you know, there's an injustice in it, not being uh, available to everyone. And you know, it's, it's going to further, you know, it, you know, one, one thing I think about is, is how, if you look throughout history, I love to study human history over, you know, the universe's history. Dirt poor versus, you know, well off, you know, you look at these um, old movies, right? Today, the average person lives better than a king or a queen in ancient times.

• 24:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Just because we have air conditioning and clear water, right? Clean water. But.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, we can all, we can all buy and eat a turkey leg.

• 24:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  There is that, there is that.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the evidence.

• 24:34Paul Mecurio?

  And there's court jesters, there's court jesters like myself that are everywhere now.

• 24:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  See? We got, she's minus the hat.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what he is.

• 24:41Paul Mecurio?

  With the hat and then I do a little thing and you know.

• 24:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Healthy and comfy jesters is what we have in the, in the, in the modern world. But, but, but the thing is, is dirt poor is still dirt poor, right? Dirt poor in the Mediterranean, I mean, excuse me, in the med- med- medieval times, dirt poor today. They're still pretty darn dirt poor and uh, you know, the, the, the top keeps moving further and further away. Right? And so when you move the bulk of humanity, like we are the knowledge animal, right? We're the technology knowledge animal. So what you're doing is you're giving a percentage of humanity access to all of humanity's knowledge. And another group of people are just like, uh, y'all go fetch some water. You know, I mean, it, it, you know, it's terrible.

• 25:22Paul Mecurio?

  Well, this feels like something sort of going back to what Neil was saying a minute ago, sort of, you know, why doesn't science know everything? But, but is this, is this sounds conspiratorial, but is it these large carriers have the ability? And are sort of holding on to the technology for later? Like this seems not that complicated to achieve.

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's my read on that. Well, no, first of all, one of the problems is the, uh, it depends on what you needed the communication satellites to do. If it's to actually speak to one another in real time, you can't use geosynchronous satellites for that. Because as fast as light moves, the time delay is mostly unacceptable to people. If you want witty repartee in a conversation. If it's streaming, then it doesn't matter. You just wait there and it streams and gathers and it buffers and then you play it. The problem is orbiting satellites mostly are equatorial. And so if you are at very high latitudes or very low latitude, you know, high pole, polar latitudes, it doesn't have much satellite coverage.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, um, and you always need a satellite over you in order to be sending you the signal. So if you have low lying satellites.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, you need more of them for there always to be a satellite above your head. If they're far away, it can be over everybody's head, right? But if they're really low, they can only see a couple hundred miles at a time. So that's Starlink is putting up, I, I lost count. Uh, I can't, how many satellites this boy is putting up in orbit?

• 26:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, yeah, same here. I just see a new, uh, this number of new satellites went up, right? You see these announcements.

• 26:56Paul Mecurio?

  And then there's, isn't there a practical limit to what, how many can be, be up there at one time and function and not crash into each other? Isn't there that?

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the Kessler effect. Hakeem, you know about the Kessler effect?

• 27:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The Kessler, Kessel Run? The Kessel?

• 27:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Would you get Star Wars out of your way?

• 27:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  What?

• 27:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I would be a no.

• 27:24Paul Mecurio?

  It's, uh, it's called, it's called the Wookiee effect and, uh...

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Kessler effect is, uh, there's a guy named Kessler, uh, I think it was, when was it in the seventies? Uh, he did a calculation. He noted that as our satellite population increases, okay? We're more susceptible to what would happen if a satellite broke apart and then destroyed other satellites and broke them apart.

• 27:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so suppose two satellites collide. Then each one, let's say, makes 10 pieces. Moving at 18,000 miles an hour. So then each of those 10 pieces hits another satellite, breaking them into 10 pieces. Right? So we go from one to 10 to 100 to 1,000 destroyed satellites. He cited a threshold of satellite density in orbit above which we are at risk of if one satellite gets damaged, they all come out. Because it becomes a catastrophic, uh, avalanche of destroyed satellites. So yes, there is a limit. We're not there yet, but, and by the way, they showed that in the movie Gravity. And I saw that sucker in, in an IMAX. That, that was the Kessler effect.

• 28:34Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, you saw it when it breaks, when it hits and breaks up, you mean?

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything breaks up and it kept breaking up and, and there's mass of satellite debris. That's why their communication links got taken out.

• 28:45Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We already have a solution for this. Because this is how we run our, uh, nuclear fusion, fission reactors. So all we need is control rods. Just drop some control rods in orbit. Blip, blip, blip, blip. They'll absorb the pieces. Reaction stopped.

• 29:00Paul Mecurio?

  Like giant magnetic poles. It just, anything that's metal, like just that.

• 29:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay. See, that's the problem when you're a scientist and you also have a sense of humor. You might say something wild and crazy and somebody take you seriously.

• 29:12Paul Mecurio?

  I know. That's because I'm an idiot. I don't know.

• 29:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna stop now with that sort of humor.

• 29:20Paul Mecurio?

  You could, no, you could, no. Keep it. You, you could sell me a bridge and I would buy it. So I'm, I'm an idiot when it comes to some of this stuff.

• 29:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We gotta take a break. When we come back, we'll have the third and final segment of our Astral Physics Rap Battle. Cosmic Queries.

• 29:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, Paul.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Cosmic. Wait, wait. Can I, can I bring the show back in, please? Damn.

• 29:58Paul Mecurio?

  I love it.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna talk it faster. StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Akeem Alushay.

• 30:09Paul Mecurio?

  You got it.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, as you were.

• 30:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes, yes, yeah. So I, you know, I just made a mistake I made once before. And I just wanted to tell Paul the story. So I used to teach, I was working in Silicon Valley in the daytime. And I was teaching astronomy course at night at Foothill Community College in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an international. Yeah, you know, and, um, our guy, Andy Fracknor, wrote the textbook.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our guy is there, yeah.

• 30:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So anyway, uh, I like to make jokes. And so one of my jokes is, a lot of my jokes are self-deprecating humor. Okay? And where I come from in Mississippi, we often turn the TH that occurs at the end of words to an F. Okay? So breath is breath, you know? So I would joke in my classes and say, "Erf." And I'd even write "Erf" on the board. E R F, right? But being, I get my first quizzes back and I see that some of the students for whom English is a second language have written "Erf" on their exam.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you just tested my. Oh, why you do, why you gotta do that?

• 31:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No humor.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you do that?

• 31:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I know, I know, I gotta think my human through. Yeah.

• 31:18Paul Mecurio?

  They call him into the administration. Listen, you're making our students dumber. We have to fire you.

• 31:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I know.

• 31:24Paul Mecurio?

  You're the only...

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to get the names out there.

• 31:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I self-corrected.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The guy we're talking about is Andrew Fracknoy, who's a big astronomy educator. And if you go to the Foothills College website, you'll see that there's a Silicon Valley lecture series, a speaker series there. So, this relationship goes way back. So, good to hear that.

• 31:44Paul Mecurio?

  So, Hakeem, if it's T H, if it's T H E V, where do you put the F?

• 31:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, it's when it occurs at the ends of words.

• 31:51Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, it's gotta be the end.

• 31:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, truth would be truth.

• 31:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, truth, that's right.

• 31:58Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 31:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Love it.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I do it on purpose. How to promote illiteracy?

• 32:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, listen. Oh, it's the exact opposite. It's the exact opposite. Let me tell you my, my idea here.

• 32:13Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, here we go.

• 32:14Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know, this is from the Cosmic Queries. So, I was reading about, you know, linguistics, and I was reading about how the language of intelligentsia went from, you know, Greek to Latin to English. And one of the reasons why this, whatever I was reading claimed, is because the languages are more and more efficient. And one thing about the English language, that it doesn't have as many of the like, gendered, uh, you know, stuff. But here's the thing.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just a bit. So, the Romance languages, almost all nouns are gendered, right? So, and you have to then

• 32:45Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  structure the sentence to accommodate the gender of the noun, which has nothing to do with sex. It's just, in fact, that was the first

• 32:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...of the term gendered, was, was in languages. Yeah, so go on.

• 32:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Interesting.

• 32:58Paul Mecurio?

  It is, it is, it is he that did not answer the door, like that kind of thing.

• 33:02Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So, so anyway, if you look at what linguistics think of what they call Black Vernacular English, or Ebonics, which is, you know, the, the, the, the language of my homeland, then one characteristic it has in comparison to normal English is, it's more efficient. So, my prediction is that all the highly educated people gonna be saying truth, and breath, and death, because it's so much more efficient.

• 33:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's so much more efficient.

• 33:33Paul Mecurio?

  What's up is, what's up?

• 33:35Hakeem Oluseyi?

  What's up?

• 33:36Paul Mecurio?

  Like, so it's, it's not, what's up? Or it could be what up? So you're right.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, in fact, but you don't need the what. It's just, no, it's just, Paul, Paul, it's just, what's up? Nah.

• 33:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 33:47Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, my God, you're right.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You all right? You all right?

• 33:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. You all right?

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. All right.

• 33:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ain't no party like a StarTalk party. Cause StarTalk party don't stop.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, so I try to come up with a word.

• 34:02Paul Mecurio?

  I'm getting dumber by the minute talking to you guys.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I try to come up with a slang that had the most number of collapsed syllables in it. Okay, and I worked with this with my son, and this is what he came up with. Ready? Know what I'm saying?

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what is that?

• 34:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Know what I'm saying? Know what I'm saying?

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Know what I'm saying? Do you know what I am saying?

• 34:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Do you know what I am saying? Right, right.

• 34:26Paul Mecurio?

  That's impressive.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Know what I'm saying?

• 34:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But you know what? You brought up another.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't beat that.

• 34:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Another story. You can't beat that.

• 34:31Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, that's impressive, that's impressive.

• 34:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Know what I mean? Know what I mean?

• 34:35Paul Mecurio?

  That sounds, that sounds like a question that would be a final on Akeem's class that he teaches, where he makes people dumber. Like, that would be the question. You have, you have to take that sentence that Neil just said and make it into the shortest.

• 34:51Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I love what you just said, Paul, because I do make people dumber. Right? Because.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's not the intent of StarTalk.

• 34:59Paul Mecurio?

  You're brilliant.

• 35:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Listen, hear me out. Hear me out.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got hardworking Patreon members. Okay, what?

• 35:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I, I, listen, did you know, and their Patreon members are gonna love this. Did you notice how often I have used the phrase, "I don't know"? Right? To me, the, the, the key thing is knowing the difference between when you know and when you don't know. And you leave my classes understanding that distinction. Very rarely do people walk in understanding it. I didn't understand it, right? I was in my PhD program, and then Art Walker would say to me, "Do you know that"? And I'd be like, "Uh..." Yeah, cause he's like, "Do you know that"? And I'm like, "Oh, okay, I'll be back." Yeah, so, you know, that's right. I'm making them dumber. I'm making them know they don't know.

• 35:44Paul Mecurio?

  Ah, no, you're brilliant. Come on. Um, you wanna jump to the next one?

• 35:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, yeah, go for it.

• 35:49Paul Mecurio?

  Next question? All right. I'm Leonard Letty. Good morning. A two-part question. Why is the speed of light 186 miles NPS and not 190, 170 or some other speed? And the second part is if I'm in a spaceship going point six C and have an oncoming spaceship at point six C, isn't the other spaceship traveling faster than that's the speed of light according to my frame of reference? I just want to say, Leonard, I think it's inappropriate for you to ask Hakeem and Neil to help you with an astrophysics exam.

• 36:25Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right.

• 36:26Paul Mecurio?

  Clearly, you're taking a test right now.

• 36:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Exactly.

• 36:29Paul Mecurio?

  And you're cheating. You are cheating, Leonard.

• 36:34Paul Mecurio?

  I don't know, but I'm going to turn into StarTalk and get this answer right on this test. So, so there you go.

• 36:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  All right. So I'll jump in here. So light travels as a wave. And waves, one of the things that surprised me about waves when I was learning about waves as a student is what comes from where? So here's what I mean. Suppose I have a long string and I do my hand like that, shakagah, right? And I send a wave traveling down, right? Let's say I do it over and over, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, right? Now those, that wave that's produced is going to have certain properties. It's going to have an amplitude, it's going to have a wavelength, the distance between the peaks, it's going to have a frequency, how many peaks occur in a certain interval of time. And the wave is going to move at a particular speed. And so it turns out that the frequency of the wave is determined by how, and amplitude is determined by how, how fast and how

• 37:25Hakeem Oluseyi?

  much I move my hand, right? But the speed of the wave is determined by the string itself. It is determined by its, its resistance to its change of state in motion. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's material density and it's also, you know, related to how tight it's strung, right? It's tension, right? So one wants to stop it from moving and the other wants to move it back to equilibrium. But it's just that. So the question is, if I see a wave moving, like when we talk about the speed of sound, right? What we're talking about is the speed at which waves move through that medium.

• 38:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay, so if it's a table, I knock on my table, that sound wave moves through it. It's a different speed than when I speak through the air. It's a different speed than when I clap my hands underwater. And it's because of not what I'm doing, but the nature of the medium itself. So light is an electromagnetic wave. It's moving through the vacuum of spacetime. And so, the speed of light is a constant, right? So is it set by the medium, which is the vacuum?

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Woo! All right, so that's, so that's why it's not, wait, wait, so Paul, that's not why, that's why it's not higher than that. But you can sort of slow down light by passing it through other media. And so, through diamond, a transparent diamond, it, it goes at only forty percent of the speed of light in a vacuum. But that's a little bit of a cheat, because through the diamonds, it's actually still going at the speed of light, but it takes breaks.

• 39:02Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Paul Mecurio?

  It's tired.

• 39:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. But you know, it's the nature of spacetime.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so as light goes through a medium, it is stopping and then getting re- re-emitted in the same direction it came in. And so, and that pause effectively slows down the speed of light in that medium. But between stops, it is going the speed of light. But, but we don't generally speak of it in that way. We say light slows down in glass, in air, in a diamond, as long as it's a transparent, um, medium for that. But yeah, so that's good. So, so what you're saying, Akim, is the property of the vacuum is such that you get that speed for that wave.

• 39:45Paul Mecurio?

  But, but it, but, but is there a vacuum? In other words, you mentioned the table and sound going through a table versus in underwater. It is about the environment that you're in as well, right?

• 39:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But spacetime is different, right? So if you look at, you know, so we do these things in these weird diagrams called spacetime diagrams, right? And so light is all, happens to be the speed of causality in our universe, right? Nothing can happen faster than that speed. So in the, you know, so it's one of those things where if you look at a spacetime diagram, you see, oh yeah, it makes sense where, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, negative energies backwards in time, you get all this weird stuff happening. So, you know, so I kinda was in a way misleading the audience by saying the vacuum, but it's more like spacetime itself. Got it, got it. Yeah, but here's the other thing to know about the vacuum and whether or not it's something. So we have the Michelson-Morley experiment, which allegedly showed that there's no ether,

• 40:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  because electromagnetic waves, all mechanical waves that we know of require some medium to trans, to travel through, but light was different. So physicists say there must be some medium in space, because how is it this wave we call light propagating without a medium? And so Michelson and Morley did the experiment, and they found that, oh, I don't see any differences, but then, uh, in, in these perpendicular directions along the, the Earth's orbit and perpendicular to it, you know, if you were measuring a relative speed, it would be different. But then you have this person called, um, what's his name? Uh, contraction, Fitzgerald, not Fitzgerald, what is it? Uh, Lorenz. Lorenz, yeah, Lorenz, Lorenz, Fitzgerald, yeah. So Lorenz comes along and says, well, you know, there's another interpretation of the

• 41:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  data, and that is if, you know, one arm got shorter, shorter by what we call Lorenz contraction now. So spacetime itself, so, so anyway, now we understand in our highest understanding of knowledge that everything is fields, space is a field. You know, the reason why every electron is identical is because they're not actual independent entities. It's just like every C note on a piano is identical because it's a, it's a vibration on a string of a particular length with a particular, you know, density and such, right? Tension. Uh, and radius, yeah. So, you know, these electrons are just evidence of this so-called electron field or lepton field.

• 42:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, you know, the universe that we live in is not the universe we see, right? And so when you look at these subatomic particles, they get closer and closer to that fundamental nature of the universe, right? So things start to get weird. But I'll stop there because I'm using up so much time.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 42:26Paul Mecurio?

  All I know is that you-

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or not!

• 42:28Paul Mecurio?

  No, I mean, you, you, you just said that you were misleading people like you did in your class using the word, the letter F when it should be TH. I think there's a consistent thing with you with misleading people. No, you are-

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how he rolls. Just, he just wants to mislead people, yeah.

• 42:47Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, we have another question? Should we move on?

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, give me, we got time for like one more question, Paul.

• 42:52Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, this is, uh, Sandra. Okay, we have a woman here. Hi, uh-

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, Paul, you only know that it's a woman's name. You don't know that it is a woman. That's right. I, I thought that after I said that earlier.

• 43:05Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Paul Mecurio?

  Sandra, whoever you are, uh, is it possible that we found the star that's 16 billion years old? Methuselah is the star I'm referring to. It's a puzzle to me.

• 43:20Paul Mecurio?

  Hmm.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 43:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  A puzzle to us all. So, when you hear that number, there's a second number that is, or a third, that is always cited when scientists talk to each other. And that is the uncertainty.

• 43:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It hardly ever cited when a press report-

• 43:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And that is the uncertain, the error bar, right? And there's two types, systematic and statistical errors depending upon, you know, how you're creating it, the number. Um, and so, my guess is that if you look at the error bars of the star's age, the error bars of the universe's age, that both are consistent. But if you look at the central value, it appears to be an inconsistency. This has happened before, will happen again.

• 44:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  All the science is in the error bar.

• 44:09Paul Mecurio?

  Or, or could the star be lying about its age?

• 44:14Paul Mecurio?

  Just putting it out there.

• 44:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  See, first you said it was a woman. Now you're saying you're lying about the age. Well, I'm beginning to see a shred with you too, man. Once we make the monthly show, you're gonna see.

• 44:28Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly. We gotta make the monthly show. But wait, didn't the astronomer Howard Bond with his team come up to bring the number down to like, you know, 14.8, we're using luminosity, oxygen in the star and rates of nuclear, you know, reactions and... And then there was a margin of error around that?

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Akeem is right. What you want to look at is not the the number that's the center of the average that you obtained from the observations. You want to look at the the uncertainty in that estimate. And every single measurement ever reported in a scientific journal, when properly reported, comes along with the uncertainty, sometimes called the error. Right. But error makes you think they made a mistake, but they didn't. It's just an uncertainty. Okay? So, so I have no doubt that the uncertainties overlap between the age of the universe and the age of this star. The problem, there's a deeper problem here. We actually have two independent ways of getting the age of the universe? Forget the star, the universe.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And those two numbers are statistically different from each other, where they don't even enter each other's error bars. And it's a cosmic conundrum right now? And the two numbers look like they're close, so what are you worried about? It's because the uncertainties have been beaten down to be so narrow that they don't overlap anymore. And so either we need new physics or something with something else deeply that we don't understand. So this can and does happen, and it's happening right now with the age of the universe.

• 46:06Paul Mecurio?

  And which of those two methodologies do you more subscribe to in terms of measuring the age of the universe?

• 46:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, you know, you're looking at it like Newton versus Maxwell when Einstein was looking at it. But, you know, it could be, they're taken at very different times in the age of the universe, right? One is made using the cosmic microwave background radiation, highly precise, very early in the universe, and the other is using...

• 46:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Different types of standardized candles that are calibrated one off the other. Here's what I mean by that. The way we find out distances astronomically in most cases is by, the first method is parallax. So we have a new satellite, Hipparchos, which is doing that with super high accuracy within our galaxy. Then we find stars of known luminosity. They're in various types. The brightest ones pulsate, right? These so-called Cepheid variables. And then we have these exploding stars, type 1A supernovae, which are calibrated off of the Cepheids. So now the question becomes, are Cepheids identical in every galaxy such that we can trust that we know their brightness to within the same percentage within every galaxy?

• 47:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  There's some evidence that that may not be the case, right? And so, you know, if there is a variation, I learned the word autoctonous. I used to propose to study this. So formed where found. Geologists use that word. So, you know, is a Cepheid period luminosity relation universal? Or is it formed where found, right? And then it's the same thing with the type 1A supernovae. Do we understand everything about them and their environments and intergalactic medium? So there's so much detail and so much to understand that the cosmic microwave background radiation seems like a much cleaner measurement?

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're a betting man, that's where you're gonna put down your money?

• 47:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's where I will put down my money. But then there are some things, so here's the other problem, right?

• 48:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I have to interject. So what you just said over the last four minutes is an entire chapter in the StarTalk book called Cosmic Queries on that subject. And it's called Cosmic Tension, and it tells you how you get the distances and the standard candles and the background and the conflict. It's all in a book. Cosmic Queries, inspired by the fact that we actually have these kinds of conversations.

• 48:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Doggone it, your book is always number one in astrophysics, and I'm getting tired of you, okay?

• 48:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's like you, hidden figures, the baby book.

• 48:42Paul Mecurio?

  Hey, can I say something? I have a book. It's How the Cow Moved, all right? It's the top of the charts of the, I think people should get both books.

• 48:54Paul Mecurio?

  Between the two books, your book, Akeem's book and Neil's book, StarTalk book.

• 48:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'm like, wait a minute. Shaq is getting all the commercials. Neil is getting all the book sales.

• 49:06Paul Mecurio?

  Like, come on. Give the guy something.

• 49:11Paul Mecurio?

  You gotta come out with your own cellphone. How about that? Like, forget Google.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Wait, Paul, you actually have a book out?

• 49:19Paul Mecurio?

  I would. I'm actually looking to write a book about my life story because people have told me there's a story.

• 49:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I thought because if you can write a book about cows saying moo. You know, the whole story about the cow jumping over the moon, maybe they're actually saying moo.

• 49:34Paul Mecurio?

  Let me write this down and let me steal this idea. Hold on.

• 49:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I've already tweeted.

• 49:40Paul Mecurio?

  Make sure it's a spherical cow.

• 49:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spherical cow. We gotta up him on that. So guys, we gotta call it quits there. This has been great. Loved this grab bag astrophysics. And, and by the way, two astrophysicists are always better than one. This is what I think I've completed here.

• 49:56Paul Mecurio?

  Absolutely.

• 49:59Paul Mecurio?

  It's just a lot of astrophysics love right here.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're feeling it. Totally feeling the love.

• 50:04Paul Mecurio?

  A big group hug right there.

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Akeem, good to have you back. Thank you, sir. I trust this won't be the last time. I sure hope not. And Paul, it's been too long. Good to see you. Don't be a stranger.

• 50:15Paul Mecurio?

  No, absolutely. Great to see you.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking out.