Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Things You Thought You Knew - Timeline of the Universe About this episode How far back in the universe’s timeline can the JWST see? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the Coriolis Effect, hurricanes, the gridiron timeline of the universe, the physics of spinning objects, and much more!
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, the Things You Thought You Knew Edition. I got Gary O'Reilly. Gary? Hi Neil. All right, over from Sports Edition, and of course Chuck.
0:26 Gary O'Reilly? Hey man.
0:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck is Chuck my explainer man. We got this.
0:29 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
0:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We got this Chuck. So, so you guys called me into this, Gary. Yes. What do you want me to do? What are some things you thought you knew, but maybe you didn't, and so here I am? Your assignment, Dr. Tyson, if you choose to accept it.
0:48 Gary O'Reilly? To accept it?
0:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what that is.
0:50 Gary O'Reilly? And this tape will, etc. So, there are some very, very big scientific names attached to things, and then all of a sudden you find they appear. Their theories, their principles appear in places, well, you know what? I never knew that was the case. Now, if we took the great and the good Coriolis, and then said to you, "Field goal kick", I think you would have a thought.
1:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I indeed would and do. So, but let's, we should talk about the Coriolis force, first of all, okay? It's not really a force. In fact, we officially call it a fictitious force. It feels like you're a force if you're in the middle of experiencing it. But it's not actually a force.
1:38 Gary O'Reilly? Okay.
1:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pure and simple. Okay?
1:40 Gary O'Reilly? All right.
1:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, it's what happens if you try to move in a straight line on something that's rotating. Uh huh. Then your path on that rotating object is not a straight line, even though you swear you're moving in a straight line. Uh huh. So, so take for example, a spinning platter. We used to call those record players, okay? Oh, nice. You could, so spin it, you know, put it at thirty-three and a third RPM and take a little bit of chalk and start at the edge and make a straight line to the spindle. If you do that and then stop the thing and look at what your chalk line did,
2:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? it will be this curve from the edge of the platter to the center. Right. So if you are on that platter, you would say there's some force pushing this chalk in a direction that's to the side. Hmm, okay. This is how you would interpret what you saw. And so you would invoke, you'd say there must be a force. Right. And in this case, we would call that the Coriolis force. Meanwhile, there's no such force act- acting on the system. So that's, that's what's going on there. So, so this would happen to anybody trying to do a straight line or any kind of path on something that's in motion.
3:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you try to do it on a, on a, a merry-go-round, okay? Uh, you could try to walk in a straight line, but it's not gonna work relative to the merry-go-round. So, that's all it is. You'll also look like a drunk person. Yes. I've tried it, I've tried it. You've tried it, you've tried it, you've tried it. But wait, Chuck, it was stationary when you did it. Ah!
3:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright. So, the, perhaps the most common invocation of the Coriolis force is that which forces winds on Earth to curve into storms. Uh huh. Oh no. Okay, so there's, there's an a- air, you know, air moves. Okay, on Earth's surface. Mm-hmm. But Earth's surface is rotating with the solid Earth. So here I am, and I see a, a low-pressure system. And I'm a nice puffy cloud, okay? And if I see a low-pressure system...
4:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm gonna go towards the low pressure system. Because that must mean there's a higher pressure behind me. And I get pushed into the low pressure system. Okay? And I'm gonna make a beeline for it. Or a cloud line for it, okay? So there I am. But wait. If I'm going north to meet my low pressure system. And I'm a cloud south of it, we're in the northern hemisphere now. Wait a minute, as I go north.
4:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I find myself overtaking the low pressure system.
4:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because my sideways motion. Is faster where I started from than where the low pressure is. And we've done this before. The equator is moving a thousand miles an hour sideways. And if you're up at northern Florida, or DC, or in New York. You're moving slower from west to east than the equator is. Yeah, you're all part of the same solid object, yes. But. You complete one circle in the same amount of time as folks at the equator do. And they travel a longer distance to do it. So therefore, you must be traveling more slowly. They must be traveling faster than you. Here's the point. I'm a cloud birthed near the equator.
5:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm going sideways a thousand miles an hour, now I start marching north. I'm not touching the earth. I'm floating in the atmosphere. And I see the low pressure system. And I find myself overtaking it. And I end up veering to the right.
5:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And by the same token, a puff of cloud north of that low pressure system. It too wants to reach the low pressure system. Except it's traveling slower than the low pressure system. So it goes south and it lags behind.
6:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So all the air migrating north goes, ends up ahead of the storm and all the air going south ends up behind the storm. You put all this together, you get a counterclockwise circulation around the low pressure system, otherwise known as a storm. Because the cloud carries moisture and if you're a cloud magnet, all right, and low pressure systems are nucleate storms for this reason. So what speed do I need to do to overcome Coriolis force?
6:40 Chuck Nice? Forty-five. Instead of thirty-three and a third.
6:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, well played. I got you. I got you. The seventy-eight? You don't want the seventy-eight? You all some old farts there on the other side of this call. So the point is, the storms have so much weather going on in them. Yeah. Because all the weather is trying to get to the low pressure system and the low pressure system is the center of the storm. That's why there's rain at a hurricane. Okay, oh, and by the way, you know about the eye of the hurricane? Maybe.
7:13 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
7:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. I'm not gonna say something and have you tear me to pieces, am I? Chuck, that sounds like a no, right? Do you know what's happening? Well, I think I do. So, so the eye of the hurricane is completely clear, right? No rain and it's perfectly quiet, okay? And I saw a movie called Marooned. It was a nineteen-sixties pre-moon landing movie, but we knew we were headed there. So we, you know, Hollywood started making movies about this. So the astronauts were marooned in space. I don't remember why and we gotta save them, all right? So there's another launch vehicle that this is in Florida.
7:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Florida like likes hurricanes, don't they? Yeah. Okay, so they're, they're, they're, they're ready to launch the rescue vessel because they're running out of oxygen, but they can't launch it because a hurricane is coming. Because then they'll put the other astronauts at risk. So everyone's giving up hope on this rescue mission until someone points out, wait a minute, the path of this hurricane goes right over Cape Canaveral. Oh. So. How about that? We can, how about that? So we can launch right over Cape Canaveral.
8:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When the all the weather dies down, so I was like nine years old or something. I said, that's kind of cool. And so from then on, I was highly intrigued by hurricanes.
8:36 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
8:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That this can happen.
8:37 Chuck Nice? Here's the problem. Uh, the hurricane would have ripped apart the rocket before it got, you gotta get it from the outside of the hurricane to the eye of the hurricane.
8:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, so it's, it's the, the, the, the spaceship is attached to the gantry. It's fine.
8:53 Chuck Nice? Okay.
8:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's fine and it's round, so it's not, it's not like a, it's not like a.
8:56 Chuck Nice? So it's not like, it's not like a building where it's going to be ripped apart.
9:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
9:00 Chuck Nice? It's aerodynamic.
9:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it'll, it's, it's fine.
9:03 Chuck Nice? It's.
9:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
9:04 Chuck Nice? Okay.
9:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh huh. It's fine for that, for that purpose.
9:07 Chuck Nice? We should all build houses shaped like rockets with gantries.
9:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That whole.
9:12 Chuck Nice? Yeah. And we'll all be hurricane proof.
9:15 Gary O'Reilly? I'm not, I'm not going to volunteer to test that theory.
9:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's probably some wind speed that would knock over a rocket. Uh, oh, by the way, the rocket that they worried would get knocked over in the movie, The Martian.
9:28 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. That's why they left Mark Watney on the ground.
9:31 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They, so he's probably dead. We better take off now before this dust storm on Mars knocks us over.
9:37 Chuck Nice? Going to kill us, right. Ground us.
9:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kill us. Okay. So let's leave him, give him up for dead. And of course he was alive, but, but the atmospheric pressure on Mars is one one hundredth that of the atmospheric pressure on Earth. One one hundredth.
9:51 Chuck Nice? Oh.
9:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if you have a hundred mile an hour wind on Mars, there ain't much air there doing it.
9:57 Chuck Nice? Yeah. It's like an infant going.
10:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
10:03 Chuck Nice? Like, oh.
10:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's it. And so they could have so easily waited and then saved Mark's ass, but they didn't. They just left that boy to die.
10:11 Chuck Nice? Mm hmm.
10:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Anyhow, so.
10:12 Chuck Nice? And he was a scientist, so you know what he said. Y'all just left me. Cause you know, I, you, you don't think I know what the atmospheric pressure is here on Mars?
10:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
10:23 Chuck Nice? You're not getting that by me. I'm not going for it. I'm not going, y'all left me and you know it. I'm going to try to play.
10:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Y'all know the atmospheric pressure wouldn't have toppled you over.
10:32 Chuck Nice? Right. Yeah. I don't want to hear it.
10:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So here's the thing. Because all of this air has sideways motion to the center of the low pressure system, it never actually reaches the center. That's why it's clear in the center. It's a fascinating fact. Okay? That, that's why it never actually gets there. So where were we? All right. So that's how you get hurricanes.
10:54 Chuck Nice? Yes.
10:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you repeat that scenario for the southern hemisphere. Then what you find is that the forces operate such that the storm rotates in the opposite direction. So storms in the southern hemisphere rotate clockwise, storms in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise. When I say storms, I mean low pressure storms. By the way, air circulates the opposite way for high pressure centers. But if, because the air wants to leave, it will still circulate. But since high pressure systems repel clouds, no one thinks of them as a storm. But it's essentially a high pressure storm. Have you ever been completely cloudless
11:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? days and it was very windy?
11:40 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
11:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what you're experiencing. Okay, you're experiencing air escaping away from the high pressure system, gaining speed relative to you on the rotating earth. So yes, you can have high winds with no clouds, because the clouds are not collecting. If they're not collecting, you don't have rain or storms or hail or anything.
12:02 Chuck Nice? They do call them windstorms when the winds are high enough.
12:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can have them, right, and they'll knock stuff over, but not because it carries precipitation.
12:09 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all. Turns out, I'm watching a football game. I'm watching, it was like a quarter to six on a Sunday, and I finished watching some show. I forgot, no, it was another football game, and I have a show coming on at six, and I'm channel surfing, and I came upon the Cincinnati Bengals playing somebody. Was it, who, the Seattle folk, the Seahawks? Seahawks. I think it was the Seahawks. It was definitely Cincinnati Bengals, okay? And right at that time, I tuned in. It was a tie, and the game ended. So they went into a full period overtime. Okay, now you know the rules. I think they've even changed since I last memorized them. But
12:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? each team gets possession, all right, and if they score a field goal, the other team gets a chance to score a field goal. If nobody scores with each possession, then it's sudden death, okay? That's the state of this game at the time, in the 15 minutes that I watched. So.
13:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's sudden death overtime at this point. Cincinnati has the ball. They're at the fif- fifty yard, forty-five yard line plus ten yards. Mm-hmm. Or whatever, whatever is the hike with the kick. They had to make a fifty-five yard field goal. And if they make it, it's for the win. If they don't, the game continues. But they could win it on this kick. So I'm watching this. And the kick, it goes up. And it tumbles. This is where no one breathes, okay? In the stadium, nobody breathes. And you see the ball tumble. And it's tumbling. And there it goes. And it hits the left upright. And careens in for the score. And the Cincinnati Bengals win.
13:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I said, wait a minute, hold on. And I did a fast calculation. It was airborne for like three and a half seconds, something like that. I did the math. I checked the orientation of the stadium. The stadium is oriented north-south. And I said, oh, my gosh. The Cincinnati Bengals for the win field goal kick was aided by a third of an inch deflection to the right. Yeah. Caused by the rotation of the earth. People lost their minds. I tweeted it. People lost their mind. People wrote in and say, God help Cincinnati win. I know that kicker loves you. The kicker was just like, the earth hates me.
14:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, because you know from baseball, if you take a round object and hit it with another round object. All right? A fraction of an inch can make all the difference in how the thing bounces away from it. Absolutely. All right? So you have a round bat hitting a round ball, a cylindrical bat, but it's still round and it's cross-section. Hits a round ball, a fraction of an inch is a ground out, homerun, or a pop out. Okay? Same is true with a round football hitting the cylindrical upright. So, I think that third of an inch made a difference. And you can ca- that's how much Coriolis force operated in the 55 yards of the field goal.
15:24 Chuck Nice? Well, the Coriolis owes a lot of people some money.
15:29 Chuck Nice? Cause you know, everybody who had money riding on that game.
15:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nah, you checking the bets.
15:34 Chuck Nice? They were just like, how did we find this Coriolis?
15:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, now, just cause I'm an educator, I, I, I said the rotation of the earth, but I didn't mention Coriolis. Cause if you label it, then people get distracted by the name and it prevents them from understanding the concept. Okay. So I said from the rotation of the earth. Well, how does that happen? The next two tweets, I said, this is like the Coriolis force. And then I mentioned storms and this sort of thing. So now for all the north, south oriented stadiums, I, I watch for this, uh, when that happens. So there you have it. Coriolis force on storms and football games. And it putting chalk on old fashioned record players playing at any speed at all, Chuck.
16:16 Chuck Nice? Yes.
16:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You got it.
16:17 Chuck Nice? Cool.
16:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What that is. Yeah. All right. So is that enough for you there, Gary? That works. Thank you. Okay. I, I just, I'd live to please you, Gary. Don't put chalk on my records anymore. Okay. That's all I'm just gonna say. I, I think when we come back, Gary's gonna hand me another topic. Mm-hmm. In the world of things you thought you knew on StarTalk. Uh, so let's see when we return.
16:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk. Things you thought you knew. So here, I want to talk about the gridiron timeline of the universe. All right. Okay. So what's that about?
17:07 Chuck Nice? It's really, it's really small because, uh, football started in like 19 what? You know?
17:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
17:14 Chuck Nice? So the gridiron timeline is only like, what, 75, 80 years old?
17:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That ain't what I'm talking about. Plus you're in a fog. You're in a COVID.
17:22 Gary O'Reilly? And the field's, the field's only a hundred yards long, so I'm guessing, I'm guessing we're gonna stretch stuff here.
17:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plus Chuck is in a COVID fight. Alright, so, so here's how it goes. You take the, the age of the universe, which is about fourteen, round it to fourteen billion years. Okay, and you can ask, how do you think about that? How do you, how do you measure that? How do you, and so. Cause honestly, you can't, you can't even think. Nobody, nobody can get their mind around fourteen million. Much less. Let them miss fourteen billion. Correct, correct, right. Okay, or, or fourteen thousand. Yeah, well, in years, we could never really think about what fourteen thousand years are.
18:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right. It's, it's outside of, that's called deep time and no one even thought anything in the universe was as old as that until relatively recently. Right. Right, in the last hundred and fifty years or so. Yeah. So, think of all of the history of civilization and what our understanding was about time. Part of the problem is, we think time intervals are, you know, somehow
18:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? cosmic time intervals somehow matter to human time intervals. Right. And they don't, at all. So. The universe don't care. Nope, universe don't care. We have other indications of time scales that are different. For example, that of a dog. Right. Alright, you come home, the dog is jumping, licking you in the face, happy to see you. And all you did was forget your keys. You were just there, a minute and a half ago. Came back, came back from the mailbox. So, the dog is so fully living life. Think about that. Wow. No, humans don't carry on, dogs do. Yes.
19:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yet every day a dog lives is like seven days to a human. Wow, now I have another reason to be jealous of dogs. Yeah, you can say that both ways. You can say, one day unto a human is seven days unto the dog. Right, cause we live seven times as long as a dog. But I'd rather think of it the other way. That the dog lives seven days of life. In one of your days.
19:41 Chuck Nice? Wow.
19:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's what it'll sleep when you're not there. But when you're there, it is all up in your face, begging for your food, even though it just ate, looking all cute, uh, get wanting to get pet, get his tummy rub. So these are two very different timescales. And the life forms are reflecting that.
19:59 Chuck Nice? That makes sense, cuz you go, you take him out for a walk in the morning. And then when you come home from work, they're just like, you know, let's go, let's go.
20:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you know. Let's do it. Yeah, come on, come on.
20:07 Chuck Nice? Let's go, man. It's been three days since you walked me.
20:12 Chuck Nice? What is your rap? How could you leave me here for three days, man?
20:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, cuz that's half of one day. Right, right. The morning to evening. Chuck did the math on that one.
20:22 Gary O'Reilly? See, the thing is, you've got, you've got insects that have a lifespan of maybe twenty-four, forty-eight hours.
20:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I think the mayfly might be at least legend, legend has it. Right.
20:32 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that's just, that's just unfortunate.
20:36 Gary O'Reilly? There you go.
20:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, did you see, was it Saturday Night Live skit of when, when it came out that Wilt Chamberlain had like thousands of lovers?
20:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, in his biography, and no one believed it. But it's like, but you're not Wilt Chamberlain, right? So who, who are you to say it wasn't? So Saturday Night Live did a skit. And it was called The Love Diaries of Wilt Chamberlain. It's so funny. So he's in a hotel room and a woman shows up. And it's like, our eyes met. And it was love at first sight. Where has she been my whole life? Uh, I don't know. Our moments were so tender and so soft. And then, then it says, six minutes later, we began to grow apart.
21:23 Chuck Nice? That's funny.
21:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Every, every, every five-minute encounter had a full romantic.
21:31 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
21:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Relationship.
21:33 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool.
21:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In and out of the, yeah, it was. Anyhow, so timescales, you wanna try to get a sense of them. And usually you have to do that by putting them into another kind of reference frame. So one way to do it is, if you take a hundred meters, let's say. Right? It's a little longer than a hundred yards. It won't make much of a difference for what I'm about to describe. So take a hundred meters, that's more international to think of it that way. And we can ask, if the timeline of the universe were placed onto those hundred meters.
22:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where would things happen on that field? Okay, and I guess, you know, the gridiron football, they mark out the hundred, the hundred yards. So let's, let's go back to yards here, okay? Hundred yards, let's map fourteen billion years into a hundred yards. Okay? Big Bang is right at the beginning at one end zone. Okay. Right, and let's keep walking down. You have to go ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. Now it's going, it's counting down to like forty to thirty. You gotta go to the opponent's thirty yard line before the solar system is born. Wow.
22:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The universe has spent nearly two thirds of its life without the solar system. To this day, there are religious people, or people motivated by religious philosophies, who say that the conditions in the universe are just right for life. Just right for human life. Cause had any of these parameters been different, then we wouldn't be here. So it's perfectly tuned. And I'm saying, if two thirds of the history of the universe, there was no solar system, what does it mean to say that it was perfect for life? That sounds really inefficient. See, if it was perfect life, you'd have life going right away.
23:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But no, you have to slowly make the heavy elements from the light elements. All that happened in the first three minutes. Okay, well, you made, made hydrogen. And then you start making stars after the dark ages. The, the James Webb Space Telescope is exquisitely tuned to look just at the end of the dark ages in the early universe where we had matter and energy, but no stars yet. Hmm. They had to be made and then assembled into galaxies and have enough of these to make enough heavy elements to make planets. Cause planets have a lot of heavy elements in them and they're made in the centers of stars. That takes time. We are second, third generation star system that made the sun.
24:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we see stars being born today, looking deep inside gas clouds. And those stars have planets in orbit around them, all of them made of the heavy elements that occurred later. So you gotta get to your opponent's 30 yard line before you even see the solar system. Now you keep trudging along. You'd say, well, when, when are we, you know, when did life kick in? Life kicked in pretty quickly after Earth cooled down. Okay, take a few steps. You have evidence, earliest evidence of life on Earth. Microbial life. How about life that looked interesting? How about anything such as that?
24:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, you gotta get down a, uh, down to the four yard line. The four yard line, single celled organisms become multi celled organisms. And the multi celled organisms can do things like they have legs and antennae and eyeballs or early, early versions of eyeballs, sensory sensors of what is happening in their environment. That's at the four yard line. The four yard line. Keep walking. You keep going. You keep going. Now what? Okay, well, when do we get to human civilization? How about just civilization? Now how about, no, forget civilization. How about just cavemen? Okay, troglodytes, which is the gender neutral version of cavemen.
25:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cave dwellers. How about, where are they? Cave dwellers appeared at the near side of the thickness of a blade of grass
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? at the zero yard line.
25:58 Chuck Nice? So right before the next end zone. You are one thickness of the blade of grass towards the end zone to find cave dwellers.
26:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cave dwellers, correct.
26:08 Chuck Nice? We're in the goal line.
26:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Correct. And now you move your way through the thickness of that blade of grass. And find, okay, the development of agriculture, that's like, that's two thirds of the way, two thirds of the way through the thickness of the agriculture. Then you keep going, okay? And then you get like Moses go half again through the what remained of that. You get Moses and then Jesus and then Mohammed. And all of this in the last one third to one tenth in that range of the blade of grass that is at the end zone. After you traveled a hundred yards to get there.
26:51 Chuck Nice? It's fourth and a tenth of a blade of grass. We're not sure.
26:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's he gonna go for it.
26:57 Chuck Nice? Apparently the coach doesn't have a lot of confidence in his offense.
27:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're gonna, they're gonna kick.
27:04 Chuck Nice? It looks like they're gonna kick the field goal.
27:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They only made it to Chicago days, they can't.
27:10 Gary O'Reilly? So what's, what's the theory, Neil? When things move like that, that all of a sudden just completely accelerate at a ridiculous speed comparative to what we've experienced through that time?
27:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, so what happens is what civilization did and the discovery of science as a tool to shape civilization, we can have rapid progress. Or if you don't want to value judge the inventions of science, we can say we have rapid change.
27:36 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
27:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, you know, a hundred and 10 years ago, horses was, was the way to go. And a hundred and, and a hundred years ago, you couldn't give away a horse. That was a very fast change, especially in cities. Agriculture take a while before they had good tractors. But point is, yeah, you can have change because it happens quickly. It's sort of hidden in this timeline. You have to like zoom in and expand it, zoom in, expand it, zoom in and expand it. And only then do you get to see what's going on in our lives.
28:09 Chuck Nice? In all fairness to the change with horses, it was motivated by poop. So.
28:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
28:16 Chuck Nice? I mean, that will, that will speed things up.
28:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Horse manure.
28:20 Chuck Nice? Horse manure will speed some things up.
28:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, because there were no pooper scooper laws.
28:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If your horse dropped some dump.
28:30 Chuck Nice? That was it.
28:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You didn't get off and clean that stuff up.
28:32 Chuck Nice? That's it. They didn't have Central Park diapers. They didn't have those. They didn't do that.
28:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just stepped in some steaming horse.
28:40 Chuck Nice? There you go.
28:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you came behind. So Gary, you'd have to zoom in. Yep. On this timeline to see where we are in our modern civilization, which has been so significantly touched by the progress of science. So, so I get that. The point of this exercise, however, is to see what we are relative to the universe. And for those who say, oh, the universe was created just for us. And all these stars are just for me. And the people, or, or Mercury's in retrograde and Mercury is affecting my life. Really? Mm-hmm. Really? Look at this universe.
29:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Look at how big it is. Look at how old it is. Look at how many stars are in it. Really? And so this transformation of a timeline into a distance line, I think is one way to familiar, to, to gain perspective on this. And of course, we did something similar to that in Cosmos. First done in the original Cosmos with a Andruyan co-writer with, with Steve Soder and of course Carl Sagan. They have what's called the Cosmic Calendar. What they did was there was they took time and they put it into time. Right? They took the history of the universe and laid it from January 1st to December 31st.
30:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so that's a little different. We did time into a distance. They did time into a time. Why did they do that? Because we have words for those time units. We have things called months. We have a year, we have months, we have weeks, we have days, we have hours, we have minutes, we have seconds. So because we have ready-made vocabulary to describe much smaller units of time than a year, it became very helpful to represent it in that fashion.
30:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's a matter of when was civilization just like a minute ago or two? I have to recalculate that to get the numbers right. But we have words for this. And when was, when was, you know, the automobile invented? Like a fraction of a second into the past?
30:50 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
30:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you say, damn, we haven't been here any amount of time at all.
30:54 Gary O'Reilly? So do things like the James Webb Telescope? Will that make us think about the calibration of time and the universe in a different way? Or just it literally enlighten us as to what happened?
31:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent, excellent question. So, okay, so the James Webb Space Telescope, I just did a fast calculation in real time. Uh, will go back to the seven yard line.
31:17 Chuck Nice? Oh, wow. Now, the real question is, who's returning this kickoff? Because that will make a big difference in how long that timeline really is.
31:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. But think about it, I mean, it's a lot of universe between one end zone and the other.
31:35 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
31:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But what that means is we will have access to almost the entire playing field, almost the entire timeline of the universe. From seven yards up to 100 yards. This is an extraordinary triumph of modern astrophysics enabled, empowered by brilliant engineers that enabled us to, to work with this telescope to begin with.
32:02 Chuck Nice? All so that science can tell you, you ain't so special.
32:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Science is really good at that. And that's to tell you right now. What we really want to know is be able to look in the other direction and predict the future. Which we do with some, I can tell you about solar eclipses in 10, 100, 1,000 years from now. And what exact minute the sun will disappear as viewed from any point on Earth's surface? I can do that, all right? Some other predictions are a little fuzzier, but still have real foundations to them. Like humans are warming the Earth.
32:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, and that can melt the polar ice caps and flood our coastal cities. All right, oh, you want to know what minute that will happen? The calculations are harder than it is for an eclipse to give you the exact minute that's going to happen. But I can speak statistically of the likelihood that storms are going to wash over your beachfront property. At a point not always mentioned, the storms that take out resort beachfronts destroy people's, rich people's, second homes. And in some other low-lying countries, it destroys people's only homes.
33:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there's an important difference there. And what's going on? Getting all green on you right here. Nothing wrong with that. It's good stuff. So there you have it. Gary. Well, thank you. Gridiron Timeline. And it's some fast cut. You just take ratios. It's an exercise in ratio-taking. It's so simple, Gary. So simple. So all I did, just I can tell you, so James Webb Space Telescope is observing galaxies maybe back to a billion years after the Big Bang. So you take the ratio of 1 billion to 14 billion. All right, and what is that fraction? Then you multiply that fraction by 100 yards. And that'll tell you how many yards you'll back it seems.
34:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I get about seven yards. And you know why we don't have to do that? Because you did it for us.
34:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't like calculating? It's fun with calculations. We probably don't have as much joy doing it as you do. Yeah. So, all right, that's our segment here. All right. So when we come back, we'll do one more of these. Yes. And then we'll call it a day. Yay. This is StarTalk. Things You Thought You Knew. We'll be right back.
34:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Guys, we're back. Third segment of Things You Thought You Knew. And Chuck, you really do have COVID right now.
34:46 Chuck Nice? I do, and uh...
34:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is heroic. We need a medal.
34:49 Chuck Nice? There was a thing I thought I knew, which was I thought I didn't have it, and then I found out. The thing I know now is that I do.
34:59 Gary O'Reilly? And all because of science.
35:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, because of science. Yes, I'm glad to know you're not in the hospital.
35:05 Chuck Nice? Yes.
35:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you're...
35:06 Chuck Nice? I am not.
35:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Vaccinated fellow. Mm-hmm. So, what I want to talk about is the stability of rotating objects.
35:14 Chuck Nice? Ah.
35:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Stability of them. There's a lot of applications to a lot of things. But let's look at Earth for a moment. And if you have some sport reference you want me to kick in later, I probably forgot a way to...
35:28 Gary O'Reilly? We utilize stabilizing spin with just about everything. I mean, if you think of a golf shot when you're chipping out of the sand trap. If you think about a two-point shot where you're rotating backspin.
35:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In basketball.
35:44 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, the spiral pass, literally, from a quarterback on a Hail Mary. We use in soccer to hit one side of the ball so it will spin and rotate and give itself a true trajectory. So yeah, this is something that manifests itself regularly in sport.
36:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Correct. So what I think we talked about in a separate one of these is what effect spinning the ball has on its otherwise ballistic trajectory moving according to the forces of gravity. Because then you have air forces pushing on it. So that's one thing. I'm now just referring to a spinning object with or without air forces. Just what does it do for it? And a spinning object has its path stabilized because it's spinning.
36:30 Chuck Nice? Oh, I thought it was due to really good therapy.
36:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was to stabilize it. Chuck, every time I use the word stable, you think it emotionally. I gotta tell you, yeah, there's. You can be physically stable. There's a reason.
36:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can be physically. Rain fog again. Rain fog, yeah. So, so when we, when you look at a, a, a perfect spiral thrown by a quarterback, uh, the ball is, it's, it's arc is true. Yeah, if there's wind on it, that'll have an effect. But if, if it's, you don't have wind, you know exactly where that ball is gonna land. And from the arc that it has, uh, been given. So knowing where it's gonna land is the reliability of its arc brought to you by the fact that it's spin stabilized. Okay? So in baseball, Chuck, what is the pitch where the ball does not spin?
37:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Um, I think they call that the flubber pitch. No, that's the knuckleball. Knuckleball. The knuckleball does not spin. Have you ever seen a knuckleball? No, I haven't. Okay. Yeah. I mean, now that we have the high-speed cameras in baseball, you can just see the, the, the, the stitching without not spinning, and there it goes. When you have a knuckleball, it is completely susceptible to the slightest breeze, the slightest gust of air, the slightest, will move it from its appointed path. And that's why a knuckleball is notorious for pass balls.
38:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Chuck, tell Gary, cause he's a Brit, what a pass ball is. Um, I don't know. I guess it's where you confuse the pitcher. I mean, you confuse the catcher? Yeah, well, not on purpose. So the pitcher throws the ball in a catchable way. But it's like, it's moving to the left, to the right. So the catcher puts up the catcher's mitt where the ball should land. And then it lands six inches to the side and then they miss the ball.
38:39 Chuck Nice? Wow.
38:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A completely catchable ball that they could not track using their normal senses. Because the ball was not spinning and it was not spin stabilized.
38:48 Chuck Nice? Ah.
38:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is not to be confused with a wild pitch.
38:52 Chuck Nice? Right.
38:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where no matter what the catcher did, they're not going to catch it. It's like three feet outside.
38:56 Chuck Nice? It's in the stands.
38:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It bounces off the ground and it throws it in the stands.
38:59 Chuck Nice? It.
39:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Those are wild pitches.
39:01 Chuck Nice? It went over to first base and hit somebody's mom in the head.
39:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a wild pitch. That is wild. And, and a little subtle point, a baseball subtle point, Gary. Is the pitcher and the batter are in every play of every game. If the pitcher throws a wild pitch or the catcher has a pass ball, it is not counted as an error. Okay. They handle the ball so much that you gotta cut them some slack. Okay. But so Earth. Yes. Okay, is spinning in its orbit. Oh, by the way, the moon is tugging on Earth. If you tug on a spinning object that is tipped, because you know Earth is tipped on its axis. Yes. Then it will precess. So Earth precess, you know, there's another word for precess. Precess. It's called wobble. Yes.
39:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wobble. You ever played with tops? Nobody does this anymore. You play with the top, I, I love tops. I love gyroscopes, things like that. You, you, you, you spin the top and as it slows down, it tips over and it begins to, to wobble. Okay, that's because Earth is tugging on its center of mass and in response, it precesses. This is a battle of forces going on with the rotating object. Because the rotating object doesn't want to do what you want it to do. But as a consequence, it precesses. So Earth's precessional period is 26,000 years. So in other words, our North Pole is pointing to the North Star right now. 13,000 years from now, we are pointing in the whole other direction.
40:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you gotta find other North Stars for us. Uh, as that happens over the, to, over the period of history that, uh, we've been even tracking this stuff. So, uh, so now, not only are we precessing, we're also bobbing up and down.
40:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so we're tipped at twenty-three and a half degrees now. Uh huh. But over time, our spinning axis will bob from like twenty-one degrees to twenty-four degrees. And we're back and forth up, so the earth is twerking. Ah, ah, ah, ah. The earth is spinning, processing, bobbing.
41:10 Gary O'Reilly? And twerking.
41:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And orbiting, all at once, all at once. That's earth for you. What are you saying, Gary?
41:16 Gary O'Reilly? Is that, that angle likely to change? I know you said there's a twenty-one to twenty-four.
41:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, by the way, in fact, that affects climate.
41:24 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
41:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That affects climate.
41:25 Gary O'Reilly? That's.
41:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because it tells how we are tipped towards or away from the sun, at what time of year that happens. So, yes, and when you combine all these factors, there's something called the Malkovich Cycles, which is a long-term climate cycle that our best understanding tells us is what gives us the periodic ice ages. I think you said Malkovich, not Malankovich. Malankov- wait a second. I was thinking of the actor. It would be kinda cool, though. Thank you. If it was the Malkovich. Okay. Get out of my head, Earth. I saw that movie. That was a great movie. Okay, so, yeah, so the Malkovich Cycles. Thank you for correcting me there.
42:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, um, so it turns out, on Mars, it doesn't have, it's got two moons, but they're lame excuses for moons.
42:14 Gary O'Reilly? Okay.
42:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I won't even count them as one. It has essentially no important moons. But Phibos and Demos are smaller than the island of Manhattan, okay? So give me a break here. So, uh, it turns out, the moon prevents it from bobbing too far, okay? And it's a restoring force to it. Mars has no such restoring force. So it would bob much more significantly in its, in its, uh, variations, creating much more extreme climate on Mars than what you'd get on Earth.
42:45 Gary O'Reilly? And we wanna go and live there.
42:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some people wanna go and live there. My favorite person who wanted to go live there, I think Chuck was my co-host at the time. Chuck, you remember this guy? He was, signed up for the Mars One, uh, one-way trip to Mars? And one of us asked him, "So how does your family feel about this?" And he said, "My wife encouraged it. She's so loving. She encouraged me to go on this one-way trip to Mars." Yeah. You're the pool boy, buddy. So anyhow, I'm just, so have you ever done the experiment where you take a bicycle wheel? And hold it on each side and then you spin it? Yeah.
43:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, if you take a bicycle wheel, hold it, the ones in the physics labs have handles on them, but your regular one won't, but that won't matter. Just grab it by, I was gonna say grab it by the nuts, excuse me. Grab, grab it by the- Do exactly that. Grab it by the axle. There you go. AKA nuts. Grab it by the axle and then have someone spin it, okay? While they're spinning it, I will ask you to just tip it. You will find that the spinning wheel is fighting you to prevent you from doing it. And it's weird to feel this. Now, if you are on a spinning chair, like one of these boardroom nicely lubed chairs where you do, you, you spin yourself once and you go three or four times around?
44:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In one, in one pump, okay? If you have this spinning bicycle wheel, then you try to spin it.
44:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your body responds by taking some of the angular momentum of the wheel and giving it to the chair.
44:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you try this, just remove your, your front wheel of your bicycle, that's the easy one. Hold it in front of you on a spinny chair, lift your legs off the ground, of course. So lift your legs up and out, like you're on a, on a swing. And then have somebody spin the wheel just as fast as they can with their hand and just try to tip it. Tip the wheel, you will start spinning in the chair, because you are a coherent system. Okay, where all the forces have to balance out. And so anyhow, I just, spinning objects are fascinating. Not only for the Magnus effect that we spoke about in, in another show, but for the fact that you can be spin stabilized as you move through the vacuum of space. And I love it. Oh, by the way, rifle bullets. Yes.
45:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're spun up. That, in fact, that's what rifling means, okay? If you rifle the inside of a gun, you are putting curves in it that force this fast-moving bullet as it comes out to spin. And that stabilizes the bullet as it, as it goes forward. Nice. There it is. Everything you wanted to know about spin, stabilized, anything. Thank you. So that's what we have time for, guys.
45:43 Chuck Nice? That was fascinating.
45:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
45:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and Chuck, you gonna have COVID next time? Are you on the mend?
45:51 Chuck Nice? There's no more COVID left for me to get. I've had them all.
45:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you put your mark on those strains, right?
46:00 Chuck Nice? That's right.
46:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was like Chuck has been here on the COVID.
46:03 Chuck Nice? They're gonna name a strain after me, the next strain. The Chuck Resistance Strain, that's what I'm waiting for.
46:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, there you go, there you go. And Gary, always good to see you, man. My pleasure, Neil. Thank you for explaining. This has been StarTalk, Things You Thought You Knew Edition. Kissed by sports. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astronaut physicist. Keep looking up.
Previous Cosmic Queries – Dinosaur Discoveries with Kimberly Chapelle Next Cosmic Queries – Predicting Earth’s Climate Future with Kate Marvel, PhD Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
