Quasar Quirks & Sky Surveys with Matt O’Dowd

Did the Milky Way used to be a quasar? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore quasars, the high energy universe, and the movie we’re making of the night’s sky with astrophysicist & host of PBS Space Time, Matt O’Dowd.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I love having Matt O'Dowd back on.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  Definitely.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catch us up on quasars, on the Vera Rubin telescope, on big data and AI.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I found out that Vera Rubin is actually not a sandwich.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, got with me Chuck Nice.

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, baby.

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  What's happening?

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing?

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Doing well.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what edition of StarTalk this is?

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Which one would that be?

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Matt O'Dowd edition.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, that's always good.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt O'Dowd, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:49Matt O'Dowd?

  Such a pleasure to be here. It's my favorite subject.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, it would be. I got you an associate professor up at CUNY, Lehman College.

• 0:57Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and that's right across the street from my high school.

• 1:01Matt O'Dowd?

  The Bronx High School of Science, don't I know it?

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was, yeah, oh, yeah.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Is that a feeder school too?

• 1:08Matt O'Dowd?

  I think the Bronx High School of Science go to, straight to the Ivy League.

• 1:13Chuck Nice?

  They go straight to Ivy League, huh?

• 1:14Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, oh, well.

• 1:16Matt O'Dowd?

  But some, some of them do.

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  That's CUNY's law.

• 1:18Matt O'Dowd?

  Some of them come and hang out. Yeah, it's, it's a good.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can hang out there. We've been home to hang out.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're a research associate here at the museum.

• 1:26Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and you're a host and writer of one of just the coolest YouTube channels, just PBS Spacetime.

• 1:36Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just, I just so appreciate the work you put into what you, what's on it, how you deliver it, and you're just so casually smart.

• 1:44Matt O'Dowd?

  Casually, but I work very hard.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, that's what I'm saying. The effort, I see and I feel the effort, all behind you just being casually smart on those videos.

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  It's like those eight hundred dollar rock star haircuts.

• 2:01Matt O'Dowd?

  To make it look like you just got out of bed.

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Matt O'Dowd?

  But you just spent 12 hours at the salon. Exactly. That is the perfect metaphor for PBS Spacetime.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a research specialty in quasars, if memory serves. Is that correct?

• 2:15Matt O'Dowd?

  Quasars are a star, no pun, of my research. There are one or two things involved, but yes, the quasar is the coolest thing in space.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I cannot argue with that. And also lately you've been into AI and machine learning?

• 2:32Matt O'Dowd?

  AI and machine learning, exactly. I found that regular I was insufficient for my needs.

• 2:39Chuck Nice?

  Regular I.

• 2:40Matt O'Dowd?

  Turning to the artificial.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  I got regular I. That's where I am. You have sub regular I, sir.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Add about the Veruven Telescope, which had first light last year, I think, didn't it?

• 2:54Matt O'Dowd?

  First light, you know, they kept pushing it. It was actually just a few months ago, the official first light. So it was a little more recent. So it's like it's in the calibration mode at the moment.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so engineering mode.

• 3:07Matt O'Dowd?

  The survey has not yet started.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the official data taking survey. Excellent. Okay. Well, so welcome back. Now, tell me, quasars, remind us what that is an acronym of?

• 3:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 3:22Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay, so, and there's a whole history, you know. I'm just gonna say it's quasi-stellar radio source.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:29Matt O'Dowd?

  The etymology is disputed, but quasi-stellar means, so like a star, as in a little pinprick of light on the sky. Faint far away, only see it with a telescope.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, observationally, it's like a star.

• 3:43Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stars are not pinpricks of anything.

• 3:46Matt O'Dowd?

  Indeed. If you traveled to one as you have, Neil, then you would know that it's a giant ball of fusion. The quasar is something very different to that, but to us, us mere Earthlings looking out, we see these pinpricks of light with telescopes. You can't see them with the naked eye. Some of them also blare radio emissions, so they have these jets, all this cool stuff. And so when these things were first discovered, there were these pinpricks of light on the sky that were associated with these confusingly loud radio blobs. And so quasi-stellar radio source.

• 4:19Matt O'Dowd?

  Was a bit of a mouthful.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the latest on quasars? Because when I was coming up through graduate school, they were frontier. We were still figuring out. We didn't have the black hole model in place yet. It was contested, not badly contested, but it was, do we really need a black hole? There's got to be some other way. And they're all far away. How come there's none nearby? So catch us up on quasars.

• 4:42Matt O'Dowd?

  All right, let me catch you up on quasars. So you know, there were the pin bricks. There was the radio, the like, the big, you know, the watershed moment was realizing that they were far away. Uh, when we first took their spectra, we could see that they were moving away from us very quickly, explained by the expanding universe, but they have to be very far away for that. And at those distances, even though they look faint to us, they're insanely bright. So once you calculate how much light there really is, maybe a thousand times the light of an entire galaxy from a point in right in the middle of a galaxy. And so, you know, people came up with all sorts of the swarms of neutron stars, you know, supernova, you know, storms.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anytime we're on the frontier, we don't know what's going on.

• 5:26Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That opens the floodgates for theorists.

• 5:28Matt O'Dowd?

  Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So many papers. But to get a lot of energy out of a very condensed region of space, you know, the black hole is a good way to do it because there's no way to fit so much energy.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if black holes suck, how are you getting energy out of it?

• 5:43Matt O'Dowd?

  That's true, that's true. Stuff gets in, but it doesn't all get in. Uh, I mean, so the thing, like, let me give you a painted picture of the quasar. So you've got a galaxy with what we call a supermassive black hole, a million to a billion times the mass of the sun, huge gigantic ball of nothing and gravity. It's a thing of gravity. And so when something happens to drive material too close to it. When the Milky Way has one, it's quiet, it's almost invisible. Sometimes they're not invisible. When something happens to drive a bunch of gas, stars, et cetera, then you end up with this screaming vortex of material.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say driving, you mean a mechanism to move stars, gas and other material from wherever its orbit is down into the center.

• 6:27Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, from the galaxy, yeah.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has to drop in somehow.

• 6:29Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, like galaxy collisions or like, you know, close, you know, there are ways to do it.

• 6:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it wouldn't otherwise have an excuse to be there. You have to find a way.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Something has to move it, right?

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody's got to take it out of its orbit.

• 6:42Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, just like Earth doesn't fall into the sun, you know, like that. Gas doesn't fall into the center of the galaxy like that. It has to be perturbed.

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you have a mechanism. It seems to me that would have been the challenge. How do you get a black hole to release these copious amounts of energy?

• 7:00Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the energy of falling. And this gas falls a long, long, long way.

• 7:06Chuck Nice?

  Can you elaborate on that? The energy of fall.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did, we did a whole thing on this. You get in an elevator.

• 7:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It takes you to a top floor.

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  Right. And then you store up all the energy as potential and then when you drop, that's energy release. That's, that's the energy.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly what he's talking about.

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  Is that what he's talking about?

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:25Matt O'Dowd?

  Oh, so it works. Hydroelectric dams work by the energy of falling.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 7:28Matt O'Dowd?

  The water falls on a turbine.

• 7:29Chuck Nice?

  I get it. Because the black hole has gravity, so there, that, there you, I got it now. Never mind.

• 7:35Matt O'Dowd?

  So, so the falling, the gas ends up moving at really insane speeds. Forms a whirlpool because things form whirlpools and tries to get in, but the black hole itself is this incredible choke point. It's like trying to cram a galaxy worth of gas into this little, little point. And so it screams into this black hole, heats up by friction at these speeds and that friction liberates. So mass is energy, et cetera. And mass holds a ton of energy, hence nuclear power being so powerful. We liberate something like 10% of the rest mass of this in falling gas is just pure energy in the form of light photons.

• 8:15Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:16Matt O'Dowd?

  And so they shine out, some of the gas gets in.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to, just to bring closure to this elevator with you on the rooftop.

• 8:23Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That energy. Is recovered if you jump and it becomes kinetic energy.

• 8:29Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However.

• 8:30Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now it's just kinetic energy.

• 8:33Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you turn it into light? That now take me from there.

• 8:36Matt O'Dowd?

  Wow.

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have fast moving gas.

• 8:39Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something has to now eat that kinetic energy and turn it into light.

• 8:43Matt O'Dowd?

  So the simplest answer is it's it's hot. It's searing. It's it's so it's thermal energy in the end. You've got this whirlpool, these the gas rubbing against itself and it it reaches these insane temperatures. So that right in the middle, you know, your heater is infrared hot. The sun is visible light hot at the center. This stuff is X ray hot. It's just it's the temperatures are insane, but it's also violent. I mean, it's it's a vortex of crazy gas pouring into black holes. So you've got these fits and bursts and, you know, energy blasting outwards and.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm old enough to remember the first X ray telescopes.

• 9:22Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We were excited because if they found X rays being emitted from a place where, well, we don't know what else is happening there. It must be a black hole and the gas got so hot. It's now glowing in X rays.

• 9:36Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, and we see those inside our galaxy also on a much smaller scale. The X ray binaries, which are black holes that are eating their companions.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Sounds very cannibalistic.

• 9:46Matt O'Dowd?

  It's very cannibalistic, yeah.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's it. So we have agreement on this model.

• 9:52Matt O'Dowd?

  We have a I mean, the evidence is in, I think. You know, we've we've now built telescopes that are good enough that we can, you know, for more nearby ones, we can see the gas that in that whirlpool. And we can measure its velocities and we can say, well, in order for those velocities, there needs to be this gravitational field. And literally nothing but a black hole can produce that.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So is it safe to say that a quasar? I think this is correct, but I've been out of it for so long and I just want to get updated. A quasar is like any other galaxy, except it's a black hole in its center. Is having dinner.

• 10:29Matt O'Dowd?

  Its black hole is in its feeding phase. So the Milky Way black hole has been in that phase before.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's already been down that road.

• 10:38Matt O'Dowd?

  Maybe more than once.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So could it be that a galaxy at the edge of our observable universe sees us at the beginning of the universe, because that's the light only just now reaching them.

• 10:50Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're seeing our supermassive black hole dining upon gases. And could we be a quasar to them?

• 10:59Matt O'Dowd?

  With one exception, I can almost guarantee that. The exception is nomenklatcho. Quasar is for the brightest ones. The Milky Way would have been a different class of active galactic nucleus.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, got it.

• 11:11Matt O'Dowd?

  But a quasar-like object, for sure.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:13Matt O'Dowd?

  For sure.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why would it be so different? Because of the size?

• 11:16Matt O'Dowd?

  The size, man, yes.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the size.

• 11:17Matt O'Dowd?

  The Milky Way's black hole at only four million suns in mass is piddling for a supermassive black hole, but quasars have more like a billion. So they're...

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 11:27Matt O'Dowd?

  They're the big bus.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. Okay, so how about M87, the big elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster? That's a hunk of black hole right there in its center.

• 11:37Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how massive is that?

• 11:38Matt O'Dowd?

  Is it a billion or is around that?

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's a galaxy that might have been a quasar.

• 11:43Matt O'Dowd?

  And it was, and it's still an active nucleus, but it doesn't have the size of what we call the accretion disk, the whirlpool, that it probably once had. But we can still see the jet, so there's like some magnetic fields shooting.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, isn't that the black hole that the telescope imaged?

• 11:59Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do we call it?

• 12:01Matt O'Dowd?

  The Event Horizon.

• 12:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Event Horizon Telescope.

• 12:03Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the black hole.

• 12:04Matt O'Dowd?

  So I'm talking about, oh, we can see the velocities of the gas. No, we have a picture of a black hole now.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Matt O'Dowd?

  It's like...

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. Yes, that was banner headlines when it came out.

• 12:13Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a tremendous collaboration around the world.

• 12:17Matt O'Dowd?

  Collaboration of people, but also of telescopes.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 12:20Matt O'Dowd?

  Because there were radio telescopes literally across the planet that stitched together their data to be able to get the resolution needed to see that.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 12:27Matt O'Dowd?

  Wild stuff.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is...

• 12:29Matt O'Dowd?

  Do you know about the data transfer process for the Event Horizon Telescope?

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 12:35Matt O'Dowd?

  Planes. There was too much data for them to send over the cables. So they had to put them in boxes on planes and send them and stitch it together.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is the bandwidth.

• 12:46Chuck Nice?

  What if fax machines weren't available?

• 12:49Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, exactly.

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  Is that the problem?

• 12:53Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, we're gonna talk about big data. This is an example of...

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, in my day, I'd be at the telescope and the the World Wide Web was in its infancy. And it wasn't even in public yet. I mean, just we had we had our own channels to get to to move data. And there's a point where we had to compare the data rate transfer from our telescope to our office versus FedEx.

• 13:17Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, no, I...

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You load up a tape in FedEx and reload the tape on the other side.

• 13:21Matt O'Dowd?

  I traveled back from Chile a couple of times with a bag full of tapes of data. You gotta think about, oh, make sure they don't go through the X-ray machine and stuff like that, otherwise it's gone. Nowadays, it just goes to the archive.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  Or you send somebody, you know, the data over the wires and then it gets there and they're like, it's okay, Timothy showed up, he walked here and bought us the same information.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bandwidth of Timothy.

• 13:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Imagine this, an alien spacecraft lands, an alien comes out, and you are the first human it ever meets. What do you do? What do you say? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I offer a guide to how to survive that first alien contact, not only scientifically, technologically, culturally, and even socially. Not only for yourself, but in that moment, you are a representative of the entire human species. You want to leave a good impression.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me what role gravitational lenses have played in this. Again, I'm old enough to remember the first lenses shown where one had to demonstrate that this curvy little image of a galaxy was the exact spectrum of a curvy image of a galaxy on the other side. That the image had been split.

• 14:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming around a source of gravity. And we were partying to this. Because just what Einstein had predicted. And so now you guys have taken this to the next level.

• 15:09Chuck Nice?

  But I think before you do that, you might want to say exactly what gravit... even though you just gave, like, if somebody knows what it is. But it's kind of confusing when I first read about gravitational lensing, because I'm thinking of actual lenses and looking through, like, binoculars.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is how you do it. You say, "Okay, Mr. PBS Space Time, explain that."

• 15:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so like...

• 15:32Matt O'Dowd?

  You want me to explain stuff? No. So, all right, so in Einstein's universe, gravity mass bends the paths, it bends the fabric of space, and that changes the path of light. It takes the shortest possible path, which is now curved. And so when a beam of light passes by a strong gravitational field, it arcs around that field. This is how Einstein's theory was first validated. Arthur Reddington goes to see an eclipse, finds that the positions of the stars behind the...

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A solar eclipse.

• 16:02Matt O'Dowd?

  A solar eclipse, exactly. To see the night sky behind the sun, and the stars have moved because of the sun's gravitational field. And we see this everywhere now. When we look into the distant universe, we see, you know, giant clusters of galaxies, and the galaxies behind them have been stretched out, like this funhouse mirror of gravity bending their light. And also, multiply image. So you can see the same galaxy at the bottom of the cluster as at the top of the cluster, which you can verify through the spectrum. In the case of quasars, it's particularly cool, because the most often scenario is you have a very distant quasar, a more nearby galaxy, and the light from that quasar will take two or maybe four different paths around that galaxy.

• 16:44Matt O'Dowd?

  And so, to us, you know, we only know where the light comes from, so it looks like there are two or four images of the same quasar.

• 16:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that called the Einstein Cross?

• 16:52Matt O'Dowd?

  The most famous one is called the Einstein Cross.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because it was a quadrupally lensed object.

• 16:58Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly. One of the early ones that was found.

• 17:00Chuck Nice?

  And so... What you're saying is, there's four pictures and they're the same. Because it's the same, the same source is making the four pictures.

• 17:12Matt O'Dowd?

  One key difference is that they're often at different times because the path lengths are different. So you're seeing the same quasar with offsets of somewhere between hours and weeks. And that, that's crazy powerful.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, hold on. You only know that if something happened on the quasar. Then you can start the clock.

• 17:30Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's just a static image, you wouldn't know.

• 17:33Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 17:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 17:34Chuck Nice?

  That's fantastic.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it?

• 17:35Chuck Nice?

  I mean, that's just fricking fantastic.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means you can predict.

• 17:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you know, you can say, oh, this, this burped over here.

• 17:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Watch this right here.

• 17:42Matt O'Dowd?

  Wait for it.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait for it.

• 17:43Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait for it.

• 17:45Chuck Nice?

  It's almost like you have like a tiny little reset time machine that you're able to observe what's happening. You know?

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you say, well, let me see that again.

• 17:54Matt O'Dowd?

  They're called gravitational lenses because it's gravity kind of acting as this galaxy sized lens in addition to your telescope. It's a crappy lens because it's made up of stars and you know, it's not very well ground. And so what you see is a little messy, right? You see magnification, yes, very helpful, but you also see new fluctuations in the quasar due to the fact that the galaxy itself is made of stars. And the stars are moving compared to the galaxy. And so you see all these new effects of a, a kind of crappy lens. But if you can model all of it, then you can use the gravitational lens to actually map the inner regions of the quasar. Which is still very hard because they're still very tiny and very far away.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute. You're saying the lens gives you access, deeper access to the quasar than you would otherwise have with just an image of a quasar?

• 18:49Matt O'Dowd?

  Very much.

• 18:50Chuck Nice?

  So it's a telescope booster?

• 18:51Matt O'Dowd?

  It's a telescope booster, yeah.

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Very good, Chuck. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man.

• 18:55Matt O'Dowd?

  It's um, not, it's not.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or enhancer, I would say.

• 18:58Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. I mean, you gotta do a little bit of work, you know? It's like, it's like when they first put the Hubble mirror up and it, it was ground wrong and they had to do a lot of work to recover the images. Likewise, these crappy lenses.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say the word ground, you mean when you take the shape of the, of the mirror, it's.

• 19:14Matt O'Dowd?

  The geometry needs to.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Wait, that's happened?

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't remember that? It had the wrong shape. Where were you?

• 19:21Chuck Nice?

  Where was I?

• 19:24Chuck Nice?

  I'll tell you where I was.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble had the wrong.

• 19:26Chuck Nice?

  I was watching Japanese anime.

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  That's where I was.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble had the wrong shape. By the way, it had the wrong shape, but it was perfectly ground to the wrong shape. So rather than replace the mirror, we took the other optics and compensated for that other shape and then put it right back in.

• 19:45Matt O'Dowd?

  Like laser surgery.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:47Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The reason why that happened, not to get so off topic, is the mirror was tested in situ and it had a perfect shape.

• 19:55Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the other lenses were tested in situ, but they were not tested together.

• 19:58Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until it was too late.

• 20:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, still a dumbass mistake.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 20:04Matt O'Dowd?

  Which is great.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean now, the farther away the quasar, the more likely you'll have lensing opportunities for things to be in your line of sight?

• 20:13Matt O'Dowd?

  Why, yes, that would make sense.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now it's farther away, but now it's dimmer.

• 20:17Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. I mean, you also want, like, there's a perfect configuration of distance, so the lens distance to the quasar. And so there's some factors. But it's true that very nearby ones are very unlikely to be lensed. And so.

• 20:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's less stuff, less chance of stuff being between you and it.

• 20:34Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And nearby would be how far away?

• 20:39Matt O'Dowd?

  Downtown New York, no.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nearest quasars, how far out are those?

• 20:44Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, the nearest ones are, you know, so M51 is one of the nearest.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me take it off of that. When I see maps of the large-scale structure of the universe, the quasars are the most distant objects in these maps. Is that because they are the most distant? Or is it because? They're the only things you can see that far away. And but other galaxies, ordinary galaxies are populated among them and you just can't see them.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes, okay.

• 21:18Matt O'Dowd?

  No, let me, let me, so yes, yes, and and one more thing. So first of all, there was a quasar epoch when quasars were, the brightest quasars were the most common. And this is like the the middle third of the age of the universe, basically. And we're now, we're now post that. There are still some some big ones locally. The other thing is that the brightest quasars are quite rare. And so you just buy statistics, you have to look a long way to see the first one, right?

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 21:41Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay, so if you're in a a sparse forest, the nearest tree is likely far away. Uh, and lastly, they are the things that we see to the greatest distances. So when you see these surveys and we can't see the galaxies, we see these pinpoints of light.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:55Matt O'Dowd?

  Oh, there's a galaxy there, but we see it because of the quasar.

• 21:58Chuck Nice?

  Right, and you can't see the galaxy because it's not as bright as the quasar.

• 22:01Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 22:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there are galaxies we wouldn't otherwise seen were it not for the fact that they were far away and lensed.

• 22:07Matt O'Dowd?

  That's also true, yeah.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 22:09Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, we see, we see galaxies far away now.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  So you're getting a real assist from the universe itself.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 22:14Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, no, lensing is very powerful.

• 22:16Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy.

• 22:17Matt O'Dowd?

  It's the best.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Predicted by Einstein, another crumb that just fell off Einstein.

• 22:21Chuck Nice?

  He wasn't even thinking about it.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He wasn't even thinking about it.

• 22:23Chuck Nice?

  He's like, you know what, there might be some gravitational lensing. I don't know.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  That's exactly. F that, who cares?

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is exactly how that went down.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Matt, you know that's how it, how that went down.

• 22:34Matt O'Dowd?

  He actually didn't think we would ever observe like gravitational lensing out in space. He thought it would be too weak and too far away and.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I think too rare because he was only thinking of it in an exact alignment of two objects.

• 22:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you get an Einstein ring.

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you're slightly off, then it splits the image.

• 22:52Chuck Nice?

  It distorts the image.

• 22:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's exactly on it.

• 22:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the the light is equally likely in any direction coming around it and you get a ring. I think he figured an exact lineup was rare.

• 23:04Matt O'Dowd?

  But also in 1915, when General Relativity was published, we didn't even know that the universe existed outside the Milky Way Galaxy.

• 23:09Chuck Nice?

  Very good point.

• 23:10Matt O'Dowd?

  Uh, I mean, maybe Einstein did, but.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, Hubble, Hubble, like 15 years later.

• 23:16Matt O'Dowd?

  Twenty nine, yeah.

• 23:17Chuck Nice?

  Hubble came along and was just like, yeah, there's a lot more, yeah.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so thanks for catching me up on on on quasars. So these sound like complicated problems that need more than just I to solve.

• 23:30Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, I spent my research life staring at these things with. My human eyes, but until recently, it's been possible. You know, when I started out, we had maybe a hundred of these lensed quasars. You know, then, then 300, but we're about to find many thousands.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This comes to you from surveys?

• 23:50Matt O'Dowd?

  It's all going to change with Ruben, which will discover many thousands of these lensed quasars.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:57Matt O'Dowd?

  Countless other things. And so.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is normal eye, normal intelligence, not good enough to handle this problem?

• 24:05Matt O'Dowd?

  It's barely good enough to do it even when you have one, because the systems are so complicated.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Matt O'Dowd?

  You can't, you can't, you can't model it easily. You've got, you've got these stars in the galaxy moving around. You don't know where the stars are. You have to do that kind of statistically.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Within the quasar, stars moving around within the quasar.

• 24:22Matt O'Dowd?

  Stars moving around within the lensing galaxy.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:25Matt O'Dowd?

  That changes the way the lensing works.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 24:28Matt O'Dowd?

  It's, it's very messy.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 24:30Matt O'Dowd?

  But it's powerful because those stars, they like sweep across the inner structure of the quasar. Like this kind of radar, vroom, vroom, and they can, they can map it. They can map it at the same resolution as the Event Horizon Telescope, the thousands.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so I, okay, I misunderstood. You're saying the galaxies that are lensing the quasar. The movement of stars within those galaxies give you varying patterns.

• 24:58Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the quasar itself.

• 25:01Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you were saying.

• 25:03Matt O'Dowd?

  That's what I'm saying, yeah. Yeah, you have a quasar, you don't really know what's happening in there.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh!

• 25:10Matt O'Dowd?

  But I imagine this distant quasar, it's very small, but you've got this lens and you're kind of sweeping these complicated magnification bands across it. So you see different parts of the quasar change over different times. You can even see when it sweeps across the black hole in principle and see it darken for a little bit. All of this is going to be seen by Ruben.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:32Matt O'Dowd?

  Butts.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Butts.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, like P B Herman said. Everyone has a big butt.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 25:40Matt O'Dowd?

  So, so, so, so our big butt is big data. It's the, it's the fact that, that we need to now model thousands of these things and we could barely do one. And so we are indeed turning to A I machine.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So not just I, intelligence.

• 25:54Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Artificial intelligence.

• 25:56Matt O'Dowd?

  Artificial, exactly.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which presumes that the artificiality of it is better at it than you are.

• 26:02Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, I mean, it's such a, such a catchall term and it's not, you know, we're not, we're not putting them into chat G P T where.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, right.

• 26:09Matt O'Dowd?

  Sophisticated neural networks of different types to do various of these.

• 26:15Chuck Nice?

  But I mean, I don't, I don't want to sound glib, but it's kind of a matter of just pattern recognition at that point, right?

• 26:22Matt O'Dowd?

  You're not glib, that's, that's exactly what it is.

• 26:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:24Matt O'Dowd?

  These things can be very good at pattern recognition.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better than we are?

• 26:29Matt O'Dowd?

  They can, they can find.

• 26:31Chuck Nice?

  They may see Jesus in a piece of toast.

• 26:33Matt O'Dowd?

  If you, if you train, if with the right training.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tortillas, you get them all the time.

• 26:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, so tortillas.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's just seeing a tortilla.

• 26:39Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The answer is absolutely, they're particularly good at that, but you know, when, when we come to some data and we look for the patterns, we look for the patterns that we think are going to be there. Right? Or the relationships between the, the parameters that we think are important with, you know, different types of A I model, you can, you know, you can throw in the data and it will find the patterns, even if they're patterns that weren't expected.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but my question too is, we are excellent pattern recognizing creatures. So good at it that we will see patterns even that aren't there.

• 27:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is A I equally as susceptible?

• 27:15Chuck Nice?

  Is it that good that it's as bad as we are? Is it so good it's as bad as we are?

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a sentence I wanted to stay, but that's it. It's so good, it's bad.

• 27:24Matt O'Dowd?

  So there is that, and there's also the fact that it will find what it's expecting to find, just like we will. And we see what we expect to see. Do you remember, I mean, it's only a few years ago, but it's now like the ancient era of A I when you train these neural networks to recognize whether something's a cat or a dog.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:41Matt O'Dowd?

  And you show it a cat, a hundred percent of the time it knows it's a cat, a dog, it knows it's a dog.

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:45Matt O'Dowd?

  If you show it a chipmunk. It will definitely say it's either a cat or a dog, right?

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Matt O'Dowd?

  So it'll see what, it all depends on how you train it.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chipmunk.

• 27:56Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay, we trained it on chipmunks. Okay, we trained it on, so these are some of the challenges. It's as good as what you put in.

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if you are training it for what you expect, it's not going to find something that nobody expects, which is the serendipity on the frontier of science that we all cherish so highly.

• 28:13Chuck Nice?

  But what you could do, if, I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but you could just allow it to find whatever pattern it wants, like whatever pattern is there, just find me a pattern.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have to know what pattern means.

• 28:27Chuck Nice?

  But it already does. It can extrapolate from the patterns that you already trained it on. So then what you can do is-

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then it's still extrapolating from a given pattern. Can you find a pattern for which there is no template?

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the question.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so can AI find a pattern on which it has not been trained?

• 28:44Matt O'Dowd?

  Uh huh, yes.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that can be an authentic pattern, not something in its imagination, like when we find patterns that aren't there.

• 28:52Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, so there is a power to, you know, in our case, it's putting the physics in and training it on what you think the physics is. That's actually quite a powerful approach, like this sort of simulation-

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's foundational, yeah.

• 29:05Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, and it tells you what is happening in the context of what you put in, but what if you didn't know what was in there? So, but there are, so, you know, we talk about supervised learning and unsupervised learning, and there are techniques for unsupervised learning where you, you can tell it anything, you just said, "What do you see? What do you see?" And then, you know, it'll tell you something, and then it's your job to interpret what that means and why those patterns emerged.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  And has the answer ever come back, "A bunny rabbit"?

• 29:32Matt O'Dowd?

  It's usually chipmunks, actually.

• 29:34Chuck Nice?

  Well done, sir.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that precisely how you're using your AI?

• 29:37Matt O'Dowd?

  We do a bunch of things, and, you know, Ruben and the other survey's do a bunch of things. In our case, it's- We use variational auto encoders to take these, in our case, it's the fluctuation over time of these light curves, compact them down into a much more compact space in what we call the latent space, and then use that latent space to try to reproduce the data. In that latent space, we know the patterns are hidden, and so we have further neural networks to extract things like, what is the mass of the black hole? How fast is it spinning? All of this good stuff. Because in principle, the network has learned what the fundamental parameters that went into generating those fluctuations were.

• 30:20Matt O'Dowd?

  Right, you need to know the physics of everything going on. If you miss some physics, you don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, but you can expand the input physics well beyond what you think is in reality. And we try to do that. We try to say, alright, well, what is the span of all possible physics of these quasars and lenses, et cetera? Let's go much bigger than that to make sure we encompass the true space. And then you can also test how brittle it is, like you can break it and see if it still gives you a reasonable answer. So, you know, there's ways around the chipmunk problem. You're checking the sensitivity of the system. Sensitivity. When you break it. And brittleness. And see how you... Exactly right, yeah. Okay.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild, man.

• 30:59Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, by the way, I want to say, these are all done by my graduate students and postdocs.

• 31:05Chuck Nice?

  Good for you.

• 31:06Matt O'Dowd?

  You're the Bahamas while they're doing this? Well, the Bahamas did come into it, actually. No, that's another story. I don't need to hear your Bahamas stories. That's fine. If anything, I found just the smartest people to do this. I mean, these days, I learned programming on FORTRAN, right? As did I, I confess. FORTRAN 4 for me. It's quite difficult for me to really grok the ins and outs of all of this. So I just try to... You an old fart.

• 31:38Chuck Nice?

  Doesn't make a difference, you already did your time.

• 31:41Matt O'Dowd?

  I did my time.

• 31:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you did your time. That's how it works. You did your time, and now you get to take credit for their work. That's how it goes. And one day they'll get to do that to the next generation. That's how it goes, you know what I mean?

• 31:53Matt O'Dowd?

  It's beautiful, really. So we've seen photos of the Ver Rubin Telescope in the Andes Mountains of Chile, where we have a lot of telescopes. And...

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the dome, and then there's this whole other section sticking out the side.

• 32:07Matt O'Dowd?

  The shoe, yeah.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I thought about it that.

• 32:09Matt O'Dowd?

  To me, it always looked like a shoe.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks like a shoe sticking out because it has a rounded front.

• 32:14Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I presume that's where all the data, the big data, is happening.

• 32:19Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, I think they stacked the data in there. I think, I mean, there's a lot of.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  And then they fly it up to whatever.

• 32:25Matt O'Dowd?

  There's a lot of onsite processing because you can't just ship it all.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So is it because this telescope is uniquely in need of data processing support that it was conceived and designed this way?

• 32:41Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, there's also, you know, there are people there doing important engineering things. Um, they haven't been, you know, replaced by AI like we have. Uh, so engineering support, uh, but, you know, also the, the computing facilities that are there. And, yeah, I, I've never been. I want to go and take a tour.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the shoe?

• 33:03Matt O'Dowd?

  You have the shoe.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So what it seems to me, I don't want to speak for you, but tell me if I'm correct, that most people's fear of AI is that it'll take their job.

• 33:12Matt O'Dowd?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas when you're a scientist on the frontier, such as yourself, the AI allows you to step where you could not have stepped at all. So, so it's, it's not the same thing as replacing a job. It is empowering you to think more creatively about your thoughts on the scientific frontier. Is that a fair characterization?

• 33:36Matt O'Dowd?

  It's, it's such early days in this revolution that it's hard to say where it's going to land.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 33:41Matt O'Dowd?

  Right now, it's insanely powerful, okay, in, in many, many respects. Uh, it takes away work that, you know, we, we didn't want to be doing anyway.

• 33:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it's a lot of grunt work.

• 33:52Matt O'Dowd?

  It, it's incredibly powerful, but it's also, you know, the new reasoning models are able to do things that previously graduate students were doing. And the hope, the hope is, oh, well, now graduate students can be freed up to do better things.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More creative things, yeah.

• 34:12Chuck Nice?

  That's the hope, but the reality might be that the AI is like. Look at you dumbass.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you stop.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Can't believe you thought that this was something viable. God, who hired this dude?

• 34:26Chuck Nice?

  That's a little scary.

• 34:27Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, the stuff that graduate students use to have to do, which is stare at this boring data forever.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:34Matt O'Dowd?

  You know, an AGI, artificial graduate student intelligence.

• 34:41Chuck Nice?

  Very good.

• 34:41Matt O'Dowd?

  Canal.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  That was nice.

• 34:43Matt O'Dowd?

  Do that. Do a thesis in it afternoon, essentially. And so the hope is that the professors won't say, oh, I don't need graduate students anymore. They'll say, oh, graduate students.

• 34:52Chuck Nice?

  Now do this.

• 34:53Matt O'Dowd?

  I don't get this stuff. Please do this.

• 34:54Chuck Nice?

  Now do this. Now let me ask you this. Is there any benefit to the graduate student doing the grunt work? Does that, is there something that can come out of that for our brains?

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to say no. Here's why.

• 35:09Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in my day.

• 35:10Chuck Nice?

  In your day.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, pre-AI.

• 35:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But computer power was growing exponentially. There used to be a course in graduate school on spherical trigonometry.

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  Which nobody needs now.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the computer does it.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, spherical trigonometry, you know, trigonometry normally on a flat piece of paper, but on the dome, you have angles between stars and moving the telescopes and what's the shortest slough path between two, that was, that's all spherical trigonometry. Gone. We just push a button.

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  And it's done.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Telescope calculates it.

• 35:44Chuck Nice?

  Now let me ask you this, you took spherical.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I do not.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  But you took it, right?

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, it was, it was like two years before I got there, we stopped, they stopped teaching it.

• 35:51Chuck Nice?

  And do you understand spherical trigonometry?

• 35:55Chuck Nice?

  That's the real, that's the real question.

• 35:57Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, the question is, are there intuitions that?

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I can.

• 36:01Matt O'Dowd?

  That we miss now. I think, I think there could be.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an intuition thing.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's really what I'm talking about.

• 36:07Matt O'Dowd?

  Going through the wax on, wax off of graduate school. Oh, what were you learning? I don't know, but now I know Kung Fu.

• 36:15Matt O'Dowd?

  We don't know what we lose, I guess.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, so, so I, okay, let me give a counter story to that.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I was in graduate school, a member of our department, faculty member, was world's expert. On galaxy classification, okay?

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World's expert.

• 36:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's never been an expert such as him either before or since.

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And so I'm in one of his classes, we are classifying galaxies.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, this is stupid. Why, why am I doing this?

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And nowadays, computers classify galaxies. You don't need to do this. But when I look at a galaxy that you just took a picture of, I have a whole other relationship with it that you don't. I'm feeling it. I'm, because I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of these, maybe thousands of these. And so it's in me in a different way. It's almost a muscle memory of what it is and why it looks that way and what I.

• 37:12Chuck Nice?

  And to what I was saying earlier, who knows what inspiration that is inspired by just that reservoir of seemingly useless knowledge.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like you said, the wax on, wax off.

• 37:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's precisely the.

• 37:30Matt O'Dowd?

  And, and, you know, knowing what's under the hood, knowing how the sausage is made. You know, the, these days, right? Future generations of graduate students won't know how to code because they talk to the computer, they vibe code.

• 37:42Chuck Nice?

  AI will code.

• 37:43Matt O'Dowd?

  And they, they don't, they never make an if statement. And what do we lose? Maybe nothing. But I feel, I feel like there's something about knowing what's under the hood that, you know, when.

• 37:54Chuck Nice?

  That kinda helps.

• 37:55Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, that help, you know, it helps you know what the true capabilities are.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know how your smartphone phone works? No, you don't.

• 38:00Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. Like you, you don't know what the vulnerabilities are if, if, if it's just a black box, I guess.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's a perfect black box, there are no vulnerabilities.

• 38:08Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay, so we just need to build that.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Hey, this is Kevin the Sommelier and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just bring closure to this data challenge that we now have. We are awash in data. The data rate for the Rubin telescope will exceed that of any previous telescope in our portfolio. Orders of magnitude. By orders of magnitude. Wow. I'm reminded of what was the first time they turned on the telescope and they discovered like a thousand new asteroids crossing the sky. Right. And you could do that because it's taking its repeated imagery, which is the only way you'll know if something moves. Yeah. Because otherwise it's a still frame. It's a static shot. It's a static shot. And is that a star or is it in? Right. Is it something that goes bump in the night? So that forced us, our field, our community, to innovate

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in ways we didn't have to before, right? So it was all good, it headed in the right direction there? Yeah.

• 39:30Matt O'Dowd?

  Do you mean as astronomers or as a conversation? All of the above.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were so incredulous, you're like, yeah.

• 39:40Matt O'Dowd?

  I'm offended.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Neo, I'm wasting my life. It's funny because it's true. I only say that because we had needs for imaging the universe that exceeded what Kodak now, many decades ago, routinely produced. And so we, they put a special team on our needs and created special emulsions that were more sensitive, that were larger, that... And so when CCDs came out, we were the first to fully exploit them. And before anyone even knew what they were. And poor Kodak did not take advantage of that. Kodak, it's just a flash in the pan.

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  They're like, we're gonna do this for these nerds.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People love film. Yeah, these hag heads need these LCDs. They'll love film all the time. So only when it became a commodity did, where we no longer... The leading edge of that, but it seems now with this level of data, is this more data than anyone has had to think about before? Or are advertisers mining data off of social media accounts? And is that a greater repository of data for them to sell us product?

• 40:55Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, it's greater for them in terms of bits. I don't know if it's greater.

• 41:01Matt O'Dowd?

  So it's enormous. It's for the first time taking a full image of the entire southern sky every three nights for 10 years.

• 41:10Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:10Matt O'Dowd?

  It's, I can give you some numbers about how much data that is. Like the CCD is enormous. It takes like 400 HDTVs to show one image.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  400.

• 41:24Matt O'Dowd?

  400. And that's one image. And you know, the southern sky is like 3, 4,000 of those images.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, the Hubble telescope field of view

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is a fraction the size of the full moon.

• 41:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:35Matt O'Dowd?

  And this is like 40 times the size for one of those images.

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the full moon.

• 41:39Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's how you can, because so if you said, Hubble, give me an image of the whole sky. Okay, call me in 30 years when I finally.

• 41:48Chuck Nice?

  Because I'm gonna have to stitch this all together.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna mosaic this.

• 41:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so.

• 41:52Matt O'Dowd?

  Call me in three days.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's for the whole sky.

• 41:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's a very rule of the.

• 41:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 41:57Matt O'Dowd?

  But like you said, it's a movie of the sky. So we see things changing, things going bump in the night. We see the quasars flickering at the edge of the universe, all of it. And it's all just gonna be like mainlined for 10 years. And what do we do with it? Well, we work very hard.

• 42:16Chuck Nice?

  You guys are making like a flip book of the universe.

• 42:20Matt O'Dowd?

  It's a flip book of the universe. It really is.

• 42:22Chuck Nice?

  Holy crap.

• 42:23Matt O'Dowd?

  But it's a big flip book. It's hard to flip pages. It's like several football fields.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Across the, you put the thumb across the page edges.

• 42:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's funny. I got a paper cut. Yeah, I lost my hand.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to anchor this in proper context. At the risk of repeating myself, in my day, you know, you go to the telescope, you take a picture and you take the picture home and analyze it. Right. If something moved, you would have no idea. No idea. And it was not that big a problem because stars live 10 billion years, 5 billion years. And you're there getting a 30 minute exposure of it. You're not expecting fireworks. Right. In that moment, you're looking at it, but maybe there are somewhere in the universe.

• 43:07Matt O'Dowd?

  Well, there definitely are. We know there are. We know a lot of what the fireworks are, but there's a lot that we don't know also. The universe is pretty violent. It's quite dynamic.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 43:18Matt O'Dowd?

  It's tough.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So it'd be a shame for us to sit this close to each other and not compare notes. So you've got a YouTube channel. You bring delivered content that's fun and interesting and exciting to hear. It's a mix of not only what is frontier science, but what also is fun science. So it's clear that you're doing some cherry picking of what you could be talking about. Plus, you look like the sexy professor that one might daydream about.

• 43:48Matt O'Dowd?

  Why, thank you. The other things that we go.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So share with me some of your tools and tactics that you've found most potent in your efforts to bring the universe down to earth.

• 44:02Matt O'Dowd?

  You know, so PBS Spacetime fills a particular niche, I think, which is that we do go hard. Like, we, you know, we've covered the holographic universe and quantum mechanics.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been out there, yeah.

• 44:16Matt O'Dowd?

  All the way to the edge of the holographic universe and, you know, as well as, you know, more traditional space stuff. So we found very early that there's a huge appetite for kind of seeing under the hood, like how science happened, how scientists actually talk. And I think for the longest time, people have felt a little bit babied by a lot of popular science media.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they know when they're being talked down to.

• 44:44Matt O'Dowd?

  They know when they're being talked down to. And so. I think one thing that I do well is I have a good jargon detector. I know when something's jargon. And, you know, jargon doesn't have to be like a specialized word. It can even be a specialized use of a word. And so the point is that so much of science, even the stuff that's hard.

• 45:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:03Matt O'Dowd?

  Is accessible to human language and it can be talked about in human language. And I think that scientists are not the best people at doing that because they talk professionally. They talk in professional.

• 45:12Chuck Nice?

  It's all shop talk for scientists. It's all shop talk.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but all professions have shop talk.

• 45:17Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So what's different about science?

• 45:20Matt O'Dowd?

  Science is hyper, hyper specialized just because it's old. We know so much about the world that to make any progress, we have to dig deep and narrow to make any progress. And so the language around each subfield tends to be very specialized.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And every time you get a subfield of a subfield of a subfield.

• 45:38Matt O'Dowd?

  It's excluding of others because of the language and because it's, you know, it attracts a certain type of people. Nerds who are really into.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's true. And they enjoy going granular on information.

• 45:50Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. So I think over time, science has become, I kind of think of it as genrefied. So, so, you know, something is sciency if it's hyper focused and detail oriented when really it's about curiosity about the world. Right. So I think, I think the beginning of science and what it really is, is just a, it's curiosity with, you know, organization. And, and, and this is where we are now after centuries and millennia of doing this. We are, we know a lot, right? But, but a side effect of that is the siloing of fields between each other and between scientists and non-scientists. And just the fact that the scientist and science feels like an other type of thing. It's a certain type of person who becomes a scientist and is into science, whereas.

• 46:37Matt O'Dowd?

  You know, one thing we try to do is to make things sound a little more collective. You know, I rarely say

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inclusive.

• 46:44Matt O'Dowd?

  Inclusive and collective in the sense that, you know, yes, we should be very proud of Albert Einstein for coming up with general relativity, but we should be proud of humanity also for coming up with, you know, for one of us, for figuring this stuff out, you know, we figured this out.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think about that all the time. That's why I have an active disinterest in my genealogy. Because I want to be what I want to be based on what I know humans are capable of.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Right, not based on Uncle Fred. Somebody before you. Right, right. But also, it's lazy when people do that.

• 47:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's completely lazy.

• 47:20Chuck Nice?

  Very lazy, because what you're saying, it's like when people say, "We did it! We won the World Series!"

• 47:26Matt O'Dowd?

  Who's "we"?

• 47:27Chuck Nice?

  And I'm like, "Really? What, now, when's your contract up?" Like, shut the hell up.

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but you're allowed to participate as a species in the achievements of your species.

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you're allowed to do that.

• 47:40Chuck Nice?

  Without a doubt, but the fact is that...

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna say, we figured out how to build a suspension bridge and figure out how to go to the moon.

• 47:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 47:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't want you coming behind me saying, "Well, what part of the project did you work on?"

• 47:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, that's a different story, that's different, though, and here's why.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's my tax money that went in?

• 47:56Chuck Nice?

  Not even that, you did, your tax money did help build that. But, the thing is that, science is not so specialized like a sport or something else like that, that you can't do it. You can actually do it. If you want, you can understand, and believe me, I'm speaking from experience. You can understand this stuff. It's a little difficult, takes a little bit of work, but once you do that, it's like, "Oh, my God."

• 48:27Matt O'Dowd?

  But I think the public sense is the opposite. I think the public sense is that sport is more accessible than science.

• 48:34Chuck Nice?

  And that's my point, but what my point is this, that's how you... Sport is not more accessible. Of course. You can never hit a home run in a major league park. I don't give a damn what you think you can do, it's never gonna happen.

• 48:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's like, it's like the person... graduating high school saying or college saying I want to be a professional a basketball player let's say and they're way more neurosurgeons or or aerospace engineers but they so that's too hard I want to do this

• 49:02Chuck Nice?

  I want to do this easy and it's it's the hardest thing in the world you're never gonna do it

• 49:06Matt O'Dowd?

  but the thing is kids play basketball and it's not you're not really into so you're not genrefied for liking basketball you're a kid

• 49:14Chuck Nice?

  right

• 49:14Matt O'Dowd?

  and you and you play it not because you might one day make the NBA but because it's fun but science doesn't have that nearly as much

• 49:21Chuck Nice?

  right

• 49:21Matt O'Dowd?

  the kids who do science they're the nerds

• 49:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but you guys are trying to do science

• 49:25Chuck Nice?

  I think I think you're not giving yourselves enough credit here okay you what you do is make science like basketball and quite frankly there's an audience out there that really feels that and they appreciate it greatly

• 49:42Matt O'Dowd?

  yeah well thank you Chuck I feel like um that is a big part of the goal I think we have a lot of work to do

• 49:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  can I tell you my transition thank you for saying that that was insightful

• 49:53Chuck Nice?

  oh cool listen even a broken clock is right twice

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  okay broken clock

• 49:59Matt O'Dowd?

  so you got one more

• 50:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  okay so in my sort of rise invisibility in the early days people would come and say are you Neil Tyson I said yes I am said okay tell me about black holes and what you said the other day so all I was was a a food for them it wasn't the fame was the fact that I had excited their curiosity okay they didn't care what my favorite color was okay as my visibility got higher and higher more and more people would just say oh can I get your autograph at pre selfies can I get your autograph and wouldn't it don't you I don't you want to ask me about the universe no I just want your autograph so I felt I felt cheap

• 50:41Matt O'Dowd?

  when was the last time you told someone about black holes

• 50:46Matt O'Dowd?

  everyone you tell about black holes

• 50:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so this continues and more and more people now they want to take selfies that's fine and I oblige but I was I felt incomplete by this until someone told me I said Neil do you realize you're a scientist

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people want your autograph?

• 51:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a scientist and people want to take a selfie with you? Like a rock star or athlete? And so, I had to, real, because they're not gonna go to the, they're not gonna go to the athlete and say, "Please explain your..." They just want to-

• 51:21Chuck Nice?

  They just wanna, they wanna be, they wanna connect with the athlete.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just wanna connect in that one way. And so I realized, oh my gosh.

• 51:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the science is sharing this space that had only previously been occupied-

• 51:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By-

• 51:36Chuck Nice?

  And it's happening more and more. By the way, I gotta, Alex, our producer, you were not here, I've never said this to you, but I'll say it now, because he was here and we were talking about you and I said- We were talking about you and I said to Alex, "Do you know how hard it is to be world famous off science?"

• 52:03Chuck Nice?

  Am I lying, Alex?

• 52:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, there might be just a few dozen people, scientists who became-

• 52:12Chuck Nice?

  It's what I'm saying, but what's great is, I love what you said about the accessibility and not talking down and allowing people to find the wonder in, in science. Because I think that not only is it necessary for, for science to continue to thrive, you know, socially, but I think it's imperative for democracy, for our species, for the future of the, not just the country, but the world with respect to the things that, information that we know that will save us as a species, like climate, you know?

• 52:56Chuck Nice?

  And all these things really are very deeply connected to science and scientific literacy. And that's the truly important thing that you guys are doing.

• 53:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's running for office soon.

• 53:08Matt O'Dowd?

  You got my vote. But it's also, it's not just what science can do for us, it's this suite of modes of thinking and tools of thought and just ways to apply curiosity and rationality-

• 53:19Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 53:20Matt O'Dowd?

  That are- Absolutely not restricted to what we now think of a science. It's just thinking, it's just thinking carefully.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Absolutely.

• 53:26Matt O'Dowd?

  And it's so important in all walks.

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A state of mind, a state of thought, a state of curiosity. I love it. Yeah. The last thing I'll say here is I had to learn this after I stopped teaching classrooms and started writing books and doing podcasts. There's no obligation in a person's first encounter with your expertise for them to learn everything on your syllabus. Throw out the stuff that's boring or uninteresting. Yeah, it's got to be there in a classroom because you need the sequencing, but pick the stuff that's really cool. Teach them that, then they say, this is cool. I want to learn more. And then they're at a level where they can get the nuances that you left out in the first place.

• 54:06Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, yeah. But also like throwing in a few, like little deep views is nice also. It's like.

• 54:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, these are no.

• 54:14Matt O'Dowd?

  Teasers for the future.

• 54:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying often there's detail that's just simply unnecessary.

• 54:21Matt O'Dowd?

  Sure, yeah.

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the first pass.

• 54:23Matt O'Dowd?

  And it's hard, it's hard to know how to spot that and excise it. We're very precious about our details, us nerds.

• 54:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it is, it is. Dude, we got to end it there. Yes. Oh, yeah. Matt.

• 54:34Matt O'Dowd?

  This was fun.

• 54:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks, Matt. Always good having Matt on the show.

• 54:38Matt O'Dowd?

  It's nice to come down to the fifth floor and chat about quasars.

• 54:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. And your special is still, your comedy special, still airing on our YouTube channel. And it's called what? Chuck Nice, Just Smart Enough. Because I'm sitting between these two. So that's, that's about as good as it's going to get for me.

• 54:58Matt O'Dowd?

  I love that.

• 54:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you're smarter than just smart enough. But all right, this has been another installment of StarTalk, the Matt O'Dowd Edition. Yes. Until next time, keep looking up.