A Universe of Inspiration

Geometry, physics and the other sciences describe the world we live in, and artists often play with these properties in their own imaginative investigations. From the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci to high tech computer graphics, Neil and Lynne paint a picture of how science has inspired art through the ages. NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/a-universe-of-inspiration/

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Our universe is filled with secrets and mysteries, leaving us with many questions to be answered. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves searching for those answers as the very fabric of space, science, and society are converging. Here, for the first time, these worlds collide as we give you the knowledge that breaks the barrier between what is science and what is merely pop culture. This is StarTalk.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Now, here's your hosts, astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Lynn Copelitz. StarTalk.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I am your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, joining me, my co-host Lynn Copelitz. Lynn, you've been gone for two weeks.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  I know, did you miss me?

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I did. I hope you were making people laugh wherever you were.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  I was in Schaumburg, Illinois, and I did make people laugh. I had a lot of fun there, thank you.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Well, welcome back to the show. You're my co-host, don't go away again.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Thank you, Neilie, I missed you too.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, we talked today, we're gonna talk about the universe as it inspires the creativity of artists, artists throughout time, and artists of all kinds, not only painters, but sculptors and the like.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  That's very interesting.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I've liked it because I've, you know, scientists, we hang out together and sometimes we're not appreciated as much as we would like to be, for whatever reasons, and occasionally, we see some of what we, our handiwork, reflected in the creativity of artists themselves, and we say to ourselves, "Maybe we're becoming mainstream."

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Maybe we're creative and we're not nerds.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, no, we, we...

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Let's take credit for that. Okay, I'll take credit for it too.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, actually, I saw enough of this happen, so a few years ago, I wrote an essay for Natural History Magazine called "The Universe as the Artist's Muse."

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Dude, you have a family, do you ever not, you're always writing, you're like, "I wrote a book about that."

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, 'cause I got, what I do, okay?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  That inspired the symphony I wrote.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  You're great, Neil. I'm happy that I get off the couch, but that's great.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, it was an essay because I was impressed by how often I was being called by artists to get the latest image from the Hubble telescope, where they wanted to find out the latest understanding of the Big Bang, or black holes, or Mars, so that they can paint a scene, something inspired by it.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I mean, even as a comic, you know, artists tend to look at, where people, all artists, whether it's writer, comedian, or visual artist, you know, we tend to look at the whole world. We look at everything, over, under, and out.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree. I just don't think science was in that portfolio until recently.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Well, science is part of the world.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is definitely part of the world. In fact, it shapes the world. And so I think science has come a long way in terms of being felt by the general public. And so, let's see what Bill Nye has to say.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Oh, Bill Nye.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, he's my boy, Bill. You know, Bill is, Bill, he's got to set the tone.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  He's a shaky little manic man we love.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, give it to me.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Hey, Bill Nye, the science guy here. When you think of a planet in your mind's eye, what do you see? Many of us see Saturn, but no one could envision such a thing until astronomers, starting with Galileo, drew sketches of this and other worlds. I've seen Saturn rings, Saturn brooches, Saturn ladies' pumps, dress shoes with jeweled Saturns instead of bows. How sexy is that? With images of distant stellar clouds and our so-called nearby worlds, we can make planetary art from photographs. If you've never taken a bit of time with the Voyager spacecraft's pale blue dot, well, you must. And thanks to a spacecraft named after another astronomer, Cassini, you can see our world through the thin rings of another. You can see the Earth beyond the rings of Saturn, backlit by the

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Sun. It's a photo, it's astronomy, but for me, it's inspirational, it's art. This is Bill Nye, hoping that after we're done star talking, you do a bit of star looking at the works inspired by distant worlds and heavenly wonders.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  That was very deep, Bill Nye.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill is deep in one minute. That's a Bill Nye minute for you.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  It's inspirational.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. And, you know, when you think of the first of the artists to be fully scientifically inspired.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, who are we gonna talk about first?

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta, it's gotta be Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci. There's no, no, there's nobody like him before or since. I mean, here's a guy who, who was on top of science. He was all over engineering. He was in architecture. And, oh, by the way, he painted on the side. You know, this guy, and he, he used to do experiments in physics, physics experiments. The word physics didn't quite have, was defined back then, but he would do experiments in motion and weights and...

• 4:48Speaker 03

  And wait, now he did this for his art?

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I, I don't know if it's for his art, but he did it in a way that then influenced his art. I don't know if that was the point of why he did these experiments. He was a smart, curious guy. You're smart and curious, you play with stuff.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  So he was one of those guys that activated both sides of his brain?

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, completely. If you did like one of these scans on his brain, it would be firing at every, every cubic inch that was in there.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Oh, great guy to date.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the matter?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  No, but I think he sounds great. I just, I'm just saying, some of these guys in history, I go, oh, he'd be a good, like, Galileo, great boyfriend. Da Vinci, not so much.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he's okay, well, because he'd be too distracted by his own thoughts, rather than by you.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  And I like someone who's, yeah, like, who's manipulated easily, not someone like that.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would not happen with Leonardo, for sure.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  No, but, but tell me more about him.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so first, he's considered one of those brilliant people who ever lived, and you look at his writings, all the, the subjects that he touched. Geology, physics, biology, and on, on the side, he, he was a painter, right? And so, one of my favorite parts, oh, by the, you, you know about his, he drew a first, a, a, a model for a helicopter. It, it turns out it wouldn't work if you actually built it, but, but he's thinking about flying. He's thinking about flying and not just saying, gee, wouldn't it be great if I had wings and I flew like a bird? He's actually trying to draw a machine that could make that happen.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Oh, so he was one of the first people to start it with machinery?

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. To bring machinery to the, to the task of ideas, rather than just imagining that you had wax wings, like, like Icarus trying to fly to the sun. He says, look, dude, you need some machines to do this.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  And that's more like who I would date.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you've got this, and, and with Leonardo, he's, he's, he's, he embraced all knowledge, and with all of that knowledge... Infused into his artistic expression.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  How did it infuse in his art? What did it do?

• 6:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, did you know that he?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Probably not, but go on.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he basically pioneered, well, he didn't invent perspective. That's something that's been around since ancient Greece, but it got lost. It got lost until the Renaissance. And Renaissance is French for rebirth, and so it's a rebirth.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  And Leonardo was in the Renaissance?

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he was. Yes, he was.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  I'm gonna show my ignorance. Okay, so until then, let's go back a minute. So, let's go back to like the Greeks and Egyptians and all these kind of people. Like, first, okay, Egyptians, when they did hieroglyphics, they were flat.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all those dudes are flat. Right, right. You look at them, they're all flat, and you never see like a three-quarter face of an Egyptian, right? They're always like side on.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, you didn't see them walking into the distance. There's none of that.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. None of that. They're flat.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  And there were arrows pointing like, then they went that way, then they went that way.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, they were flat.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Right, and then the...

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the absence of perspective that does that, right?

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Okay, then who? The Greeks?

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so...

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Did they have perspective?

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, so, so, so perspective comes in, but it doesn't really take off, right? It's there, it's discovered, they know about it, and it's used in the architecture, right? It's there, but you don't, you don't see paintings that make full use of this until the Renaissance. And so my point is that the, the physical principles of light and optics and ray tracing and, and in the case of Da Vinci, he was, he studied the laws of physics. Not, they were not known as laws of physics back then, but he wanted to know how things balanced and how things would look if they were imbalanced. Because if you draw something that your eye and brain told you doesn't quite look right, it's not as convincing to you. So, he wanted to make sure he understood how things worked.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  I took art in college, and my mother is an artist, and as a kid, I remember one of the things she always used to make me do, and they make you do this in art class in, in school, is they make, or in college, they'd make you look at what you thought you saw and what you really saw. And that's what it sounds like you're saying, like, because sometimes what you think you see

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is not what's actually there.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Is not exactly what's there.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your brain is messing with what, what it is you thought you saw. And he's trying to get the, the basic data there so he gets it right.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  My mom makes me squint. When you squint, you see what it really is.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know who we have for this week's StarTalk? I spent some time with Peter Max.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a big clue, yeah, of course.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know Peter Max? Remember Peter Max? And he's still around?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  He's a big pop artist.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pop artist. And did you know he's deeply inspired by cosmic themes?

• 8:55Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be surprised by that.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, let's check out what Peter Max had to say. Peter, I understand the universe inspires you. Is that a recent phenomenon, or does it go far back?

• 9:03Speaker 04

  It started when I was about ten, seven years old, living in China. And I was near Tibet, and I met an older man who started talking to me, "Do you know about the stars and the planets?" And I had no clue, and every day would talk about it. And by the time, I think, five, six, or 10 days went by, that's all I would think about. And I would go to sleep dreaming about it, thinking about it.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it took only a week for it to just infiltrate your mind and body?

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, to jumpstart that. And believe it or not, it just grew and grew and grew. There's not a single day in my life where I'm not preoccupied with things about planets, stars, the universe. What is this whole thing? There's not a day that goes by where I don't think about it. I wake up in the morning, and it's amazing, like some cosmic alarm clock opens my eyes, and I think about the universe. I don't think the bed I'm sleeping in, I don't care what day it is, I don't care what day I have to, what it is I have to do today. The first thing is the universe, the cosmos. Then I gotta calm this down, and then I look at my sheet, what I gotta do today. But the first thing is the universe.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got it bad?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  I got it bad.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it so bad it's good?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's unbelievable. That's why when I'm with you, see you on TV, talk to you, even hear your name, forgive me, but I get so inspired by that.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's so nice to me.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  "Forgive me," he says, "that's so beautiful, you're his muse."

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't have to say that, but that was so nice. So Peter Maxx, if you remember Peter Maxx, he wrote all those love posters from the 60s, and, yeah, and it's like, he was the artist of a generation back then.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, you still see all the t-shirts that have the peace sign and the hearts, the big hearts that he did. And I wanted to say, what he said I thought was so sweet about waking up and how the universe inspires him, like he doesn't think about his bed. That's what I'm saying, like artists are so neat, because they think in such a bigger...

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A bigger canvas, yes.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the universe, I think, is inspirational, because it's infinite.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder, I wonder if any listeners, if anything about science or space inspires them, either artistically or otherwise. Because I know it inspires me, and I'm a scientist, it inspires Peter Maxx, and...

• 11:10Speaker 03

  And inspires me.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then he's an artist, and Lynn.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  And I'm, you know, something like an artist.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, with Da Vinci...

• 11:16Speaker 03

  So call us, wait, call us, right?

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, sure, I gotta give you the number.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  At 877-5STAR-TALK. Tell us what inspires you from art, I mean, from, from science.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, let us know, because there are many people who are inspired, who are creating art, who are making a difference in this world. And I'm, I'm charmed by that, because like I said, to see artists get mainstreamed in that way, if it becomes the subject of, of art, to see science get mainstreamed in that way. When science becomes the subject of artists, I think science has arrived in the culture, in the ways that no one had ever imagined for it. Do you know, you know what Leonardo?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  You're just excited about, about scientists being cool.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know what Leonardo did to try to become a better artist?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  What did he do, Neilie?

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's drawing people, and so he dug up cadavers.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Really?

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dug them up, peel them open to see.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Oh, gross.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gross, but if you're committed to your art, you'll do whatever it.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  What did he do? He peeled them open? See, this is, again, we give, we.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're dead. What do they care? They're dead. Who's gonna know?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Jeffrey Dahmer did the same thing, and he didn't get credit for being, he did the same thing.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He killed them first. That's different. Leonardo didn't kill them first. They're already dead.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Oh, he just dug them up. That's fine.

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dug them up. That, who's gonna know? He dug them up, peeled back the skin.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  That's weird.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looked at how the muscles came together, how they formed. He wanted to know what was going on beneath the skin of his subjects.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Well, don't, don't they have an exhibit now that bodies exhibit?

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yeah, which I haven't seen yet, but I've read about it.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  You got downright kidding.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, cuz I wanna go. I wanna take my kids to see it, so they can see, they're, they're creeped out. They're, my kids are eight and 12, and they're, they don't wanna go.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  You should not see that right now, Neil.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're completely creeped by it, but I'm gonna drag them kicking and screaming, so they can see what bodies are.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Are you really?

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's human physiology.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  And if you create little serial killers, I don't be surprised.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, that's maybe the modern version.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Take them to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, where all the normal kids belong right now.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the prob, so, here, here's what's interesting. Had, if we had the bodies exhibit, which is in a lot of the big cities across the country right now, where they have, they have, they have people formally alive, shown without their skin, and you can see how the muscles and all their rest of the body parts come together in different poses and shapes and forms.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Really? So, it's like, it's really like a serial killer Disneyland.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no creepy, uh, uh, demented serial killer Disneyland. Yes, because yeah, serial killers just kill people. You've got to be demented enough to peel their skin back and see what the muscles are doing.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  But I do understand why Leonardo would have done that.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If bodies exhibit existed back then, he wouldn't have to dig up cadavers. That's my point.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  And I just saw a thing on National Geographic, because you know, all my knowledge of everything is from you or television. I just saw a thing on National Geographic where they had found these, um, pterodactyls.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And they did that very thing. They had found just a fossil, just the skeleton, and they took it and they put the skeleton through a CAT scan.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Which I thought was really weird, but there was nothing inside, of course, because it was a skeleton.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  But they drew art, artistic pictures of, and then they could figure out what would have gone in there by what was missing.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Isn't that kind of cool?

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have a pterodactyl cadaver, a little cadaver, so you do the best, the next best thing you can.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  What's missing, that's how you figure it out.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, these bodies that are in the exhibit, they're preserved. You know, there are different ways you can preserve human flesh, and one of them is you'd sort of dip it in acetone, right? That gets rid of sort of the moisture and the water. So you know! And then they have to sort of keep, then they have to like keep it, keep its shape. So they infuse it with silicone, which then hardens the tissue so that then it can stay on display.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Like Pamela Anderson.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, she's alive. I don't know what fraction of her body weight is silicone.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  I don't know about that, Lisa Rina, Pamela Anderson.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they would not need to be prepped if they donated their body to this exhibit? Is that, was that what you're saying? Because they, you know, they're pre-made for the exhibit.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm saying they're going to last for a long time. They'll be around with roaches and cheese whips.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Twinkies, don't forget. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. My day job is as director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Uh, we are live in Los Angeles and Washington DC, and I'm here with Lynn, Lynn Koplitz. Give us a call if you have something about space that inspires you, science, or space or science in general. If you're an artist in particular, or if you're just somebody on the street.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Or a writer or poet.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Tell us how creatively it's.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to hear what it is that might influence you, because we'll hear more from Peter, from Peter Max, learning about how science infused his creativity. Our toll-free number is 1-877-5-Star-Talk. And we are live streamed on the web on StarTalkRadio.net. Let's take a break. We'll be right back.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  We want to hear from you. The phone lines are open. Call now. This is StarTalk.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson with Lynn Kopelis, my co-host, professional comedian. Yes! We'll make you a space brigadier general by the end of these programs. Lynn Kopelis, a professional stand-up comedian who performs around the country. Lynn, and you've been gone for a couple of weeks. I'm so happy to have you back.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  I'm happy to be back. Neil, now, before we move on, I want to go back to Leonardo da Vinci for a minute. And we were talking about bodies and the bodies exhibit.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he dug up bodies to get the artistic form of what he drew.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And then on the break, we were talking about the bodies exhibit now.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, during the break, yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  And then you told me a little something that I didn't know, which was that those were prisoners? Like Chinese prisoners?

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're told that the bodies on display in the bodies exhibition, which is shown in many cities now, were not necessarily people who donated their bodies to this cause. That they were the bodies of prisoners.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Oh, that's much better then. I like that better.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it became a little controversial because the prisoner might not have had a choice in the matter.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Who cares? He was a prisoner!

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. I'm just not voting for sides here. I'm just saying that it may be as controversial as it was in Leonardo's day when he's digging up cadavers.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Now, was it controversial when he was digging them up?

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he was. You dig up a body and the bodies are sacred burial grounds in a church yard or wherever people were? Of course!

• 17:19Speaker 03

  But people didn't, people, they didn't, did they know he was doing that?

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He did it in the dark of night.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  He did it late at night, right. With an assistant who made nothing, probably.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, you know, one of the most famous illustrations from Leonardo's era is that, you know, the Vitruvian Man? Have you ever seen this?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Is that the one with the man in the circle and the square?

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  He's hot!

• 17:40Speaker 03

  What? I mean, seriously?

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I never thought of it that way. It's just like a little homunculus inside of a circle.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  I just like from back then, everything's got abs. Jesus, Vitruvian Man.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true, yeah. Well, because it's drawn by people who like muscles.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  And have never been to Pittsburgh.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Have you ever seen that? There's no abs in Pittsburgh.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No abs in Pittsburgh. You just performed there a few weeks ago.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the great sports teams, but no abs.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sports players have the abs, not the, not the viewers.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is this gonna be on their next, like, tourist motto? Visit Pittsburgh with no abs?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Don't worry about your abs, come to Pittsburgh. So, talk to me about the Vitruvian Man.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here's, here's where you get into trouble. Because if you, if you have an aesthetic, no, okay. But if you want to believe that somehow the human form is some epitome of aesthetics, this is what went into the Vitruvian Man. And so, you, you all remember this image. It's this man with his arms outstretched and his legs slightly parted, and it's a perfect circle drawn around him, and the arms are just touching the edge of the circle, and his feet are at the bottom of the circle.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  So, you're saying this isn't just art, this was to prove something?

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's to prove that the human form had some aesthetic beauty to it, because the circle was a thing of beauty. And in the center of that circle, you know what was there?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  His weenie?

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, his belly button.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, what we-

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we learned-

• 18:53Speaker 03

  I'm thinking about-

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we learned was that some people don't have those proportions. It was assumed that your, your distance from fingertip to fingertip equaled your height. And then, that was considered the ideal form. And then, you actually measure people. And some people's hands are shorter, some are longer. Mine are actually especially long. Some people have what, they have a, a, a high ape index. It's what's been joked about. If your arms are really long compared to your body height, my arms are a foot longer than my height. So, I can touch your nose, sitting right where I am right now.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  How do you know that?

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, because you know. So, the point is, in that circle-

• 19:26Speaker 03

  No, no, you don't know. Did you measure them?

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Measure my arm, the distance from fingertip to fingertip, yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  You're hilarious.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's 84 inches. And so, that's- So, I'm just telling you that that's, it's not, not everybody, I'm not alone in those who don't fit this circle.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  But people are bigger now, right? They were smaller then.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if it's in proportions-

• 19:43Speaker 03

  And they just draw a bigger circle.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a bigger circle, everything would be in proportion. So, that didn't really turn out the way anyone had hoped. But it remains an iconic vision. It remains an iconic vision of what humans would have looked like. And then, there's this thing with the golden ratio, you remember that? Many people have heard of it, but don't quite remember it. It has a mathematical form, I'll tell you what it is mathematically, but it's more interesting artistically.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Oh, really? Mathematics is not more interesting than art? Hmm, that's a new idea.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, if you take a, a line segment, and you could split it exactly in half, if you wanted, right? And then, it'd be half and half. But if you don't split it in half, and make one segment a little longer than the other, okay? You want to cut it into two pieces where A plus B divided by B.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Tell me more.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A plus B divided by B is in the same ratio as A to B, as B is to A. Now, that's what it is arithmetically, okay? So, now you can write that out as an equation. It's 1 plus the square root of 5 divided by 2 to 1.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Neil, I'm so sorry. I don't want to be disrespectful, but I'm going to shoot myself in the face if you keep. What does this mean?

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, so if you do the math, you get a ratio of 1 to about 1.6. In other words, back then, back then, if you designed form, you would design it so that the base was 1.6 units long and the height was 1 unit high. And that would feel aesthetically pleasing to you. And that was called the golden ratio.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Oh, that's very, now that's very interesting.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what they've done lately?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Can they do that with your face?

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. They're measuring people's faces, the width of the face and the height of the face and the nose to the eyes to the mouth. And the claim is, those people where those measurements capture the golden ratio are considered more beautiful than other people.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  I was going to say, that's very creepy because that's like that movie Gattaca. That's saying that those people are more perfect.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, could this is the one where they make to genetically choose your offspring. So you choose one that has more golden ratios and then more people will think you're attractive.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  But that's not fair either because in different cultures, in different places, the ratios are going to be different, right? Like, if you go to Africa, facial features are going to be different than facial features maybe in certain parts of America.

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is the challenge.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Or eastern.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They claim they've done it for people all around the world and everyone focuses back on this golden ratio. I have my, I'm suspicious of it, but, but I'm just reporting what they've, what they've said. And it's fascinating that there might be some genetic.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  It sounds a little Aryan to me. I don't like it.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That there might be some genetic propensity for that.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  I don't like it.

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, do you know about the, not only that, in Da Vinci's most famous painting is what? Do you know what his most famous painting is?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Oh, don't do this to me. You make me feel stupid. Mona Lisa?

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Mona Lisa, of course.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  I have it in my room. She looks like a dude.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a copy of the Mona Lisa. Let's get that straight.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, not the real one. I mean, I live in a three-floor wall cup that smells like trash and says, "Wash me," on the Sharpie marker on the wall. I don't think the real Mona Lisa's in my apartment.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what, she looks masculine to you?

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, she looks like a dude.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know what they found? They were able to study the painting. You can expose it to a certain wavelength of light that penetrates the top surface of paint, and you can see a whole other painting, a whole other illustration below it. And it's rumored that that was a self-portrait of Leonardo himself. That was the first attempt at whatever he was doing on that canvas.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Oh, and then he painted like his inner Mona Lisa?

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, I don't know. Is that why you think he looks like a, she looks like a dude?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  I didn't know that, I mean, until you just said it, but yeah, she does look like it. I look at her every morning. She's right, like, in front of my bed, and she looks like a dude.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, okay, so...

• 23:11Speaker 03

  A sweet dude.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is Leonardo in drag, is what you're saying?

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm just saying, it was a little bit like there was a review back then.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  But, but, um, yeah, because she's got kind of a thick, like, forehead, and she's kind of cross-eyed a little bit.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta look again. I gotta look again to check that out.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  She's a little Eliza Minnelli-od.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put her in a review? Is that in Vegas? Uh, let's, as you...

• 23:33Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio, and for this episode, I spent some quality time with Peter Max, pop artist from the 1960s, and he's still at it, right on through to today, and let's see what more he has to say about how the universe has inspired him.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  He's interesting.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  We are part of something that is so enormously big. You know, when you talked about the molecules in one glass of water, there are more molecules in one glass of water than there are glasses of water on planet Earth. Well, that line that you gave me about this feeds me for the next six months. I want to think about this at least once a day. I love it so much.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm happy to be your fuel supply. So, let me ask you, are you, are you more influenced by science directly, or is there a bit of philosophy that folds in?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  There's science. There's the mystery of the science, because there is so much more we don't know than we do know, and we do know a lot, and so that we must probably not know a billion times as much, but it's wonderful what we do know. But I was also lucky, in 1966, just about the same time, I met a swami, a holy man from India.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you would use pure science as your source of objects and imagery, but the philosophy is a means of how you would interpose them?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, so it was nice through meditation, I was able to get very, very peaceful and quiet, but through looking at the universe, I would get excited. And so in between the peacefulness and the universe is where the art world lived.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Peter Max, he's just so in tune with his own sense of art and self and science.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  He sounds so like, like a cool hippie guy, like very like down to earth and calm. He calms me just listening to him.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, isn't it? He's got one of these calming voices. It's so, it's so, it's so beautiful.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  And you two, the two of you are like a glass of warm milk and a cookie.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Our phone number is one eight seven seven five StarTalk. If there's some aspect of science that has influenced you, inspirationally, as a creative person, or just in your thoughts, give us a call. We have Nancy from Santa Monica. Nancy, you're live on StarTalk.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Hi Nancy.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  Hi, hi.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hi.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  So, I'm dabbling in art, I'm actually an environmental scientist, but I like art a lot and I've observed a lot of artists who've been inspired by environmental science. And I thought I'd just share this something with you. We have a bunch of art galleries here in Santa Monica called Mbergermont Station, and there was this really cool exhibit on hyperbolic crochet. And what this is, you guys were talking about Leonardo da Vinci and perspective, right? Well, that's about flat planes as a geometry. Apparently, there's another kind of geometry that was, I guess, driving mathematicians crazy, the hyperbolic space, which is the geometric opposite of a sphere.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  And I guess I was taken by this because I actually photographed the captions here. So in 1997, there was this Cornell mathematician who was trying to figure out how to model this geometry, and so he wound up crocheting it. And you wound up finding that corals, kelp, sponges, all these different kinds of anatomical features are actually hyperbolic geometry. So these artists have gotten together and crocheted these incredible kind of landscapes of these objects with hyperbolic crochet. And that was the exhibit at Mbergermont Station.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are a lot of children now going around without mittens because the crochet effort is going to art.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  I love crocheting. It's very difficult, but it does have a lot of that spiral and it is very interesting.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you saying that crochet is the natural artistic way to express these forms of nature?

• 27:11Speaker 05

  Um, well, no, crochet was a technique that humans could use to model this geometry, which was very hard to do mathematically, otherwise, or I guess even on a computer.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's very cool. And so, anyone near Santa Monica, go check it out. Definitely.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  That sounds so interesting. I'm gonna look it up online. Thank you, Nancy.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Nancy.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  You know what I like about that, too, is because if you're using yarn or whatever is what you use or rope to crochet, that is also going, that's great for studying the body, too, because it is like tendons and muscles.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, how it holds together and how it doesn't.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can pull it and make twist it and make it do things that you can't do with just charcoal and it brings in perspective.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd use yarn as a substitute for muscle.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  It brings in, shut up, Neil. I have lots of crochet things. I just told Neil to shut up.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One other thing about perspective, another very famous painting is The Last Supper. The Last Supper.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesus's dinner party.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jesus's Last Supper. And they call it supper rather than dinner. I was intrigued by that.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  I like to call it Jesus's dinner party. I just love a man that throws a dinner party at the end.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you look at that, there are lines of perspective that reach what they call a vanishing point. And the vanishing point is where all the lines that are horizontal in a room or in a painting end up focusing down in the backdrop of the painting, and it focuses right on Jesus's eye.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Really? That's very interesting.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. So wherever you are in the painting, the lines take you right to the center of his face. And so this is...

• 28:33Speaker 03

  For those who don't know, when you're drawing or painting perspective, a vanishing point is one of the first things you draw, so that you can...

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because everything else works into that.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Everything comes off of that, works into that.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  So that's very interesting that the vanishing point, so that was no accident, that the vanishing point was Jesus's eye.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No accident at all. And plus his 12 dinner guests.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  And he was the center of the whole thing. So that's kind of cool.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a tweet, but you can tweet us at StarTalk Radio. We have a tweet. Someone asks, "Do you think Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings are a combination of science and art?" And...

• 29:07Speaker 03

  And anatomy.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anatomy.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  They're vagina, aren't they?

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're flowers.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  They're vagina flowers. Get, oh, come on, they're vagina flowers, tweeter.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're flowers.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  They are not flowers. Look at them. Oh, please.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Look into those flowers. They're not just flower. You know what, Neil?

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. I'm just, all right.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  This is what annoys me about men, right there.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sometimes a flower is just a flower.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Well, sometimes it needs you to look for the G-spot on it.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what we're saying is Georgia O'Keeffe took the flowers of the southwest and folded them with her knowledge of human anatomy to create a whole new expression of, a whole other way to communicate with the viewer.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what Georgia O'Keeffe and many artists do, and great artists do, is that they are, they make you look at something a different way. They make you see the other possibilities in it.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then that, okay, all right, I'll give, I'll give, other possibilities?

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think Leonardo did that. I think all the great artists and painters, and they've all done that. Writers, they've taken things that everybody looks at every day, and they, they've twisted it and showed you other sides to it.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got another tweet. They're asking, is the golden ratio, which we talked about a moment ago, only about aesthetics, or is it indicative of the health of an organism? And that's a fascinating point.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  What a great question. What kind of geniuses do we have listening to this? My family's clearly not tuning in.

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, what's good about that is, if, if the, if that aesthetic, if the aesthetic is sort of hardwired into our brain, and we identify beauty that way, and then you turn ill, or you, something happens to your bodily form...

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Don't put the horns on me. You pointed at me.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you turn ill, then your body starts taking a shape that does not fulfill that golden ratio, and you, and you look less attractive to others. It's a fascinating concept there. So maybe it is hardwired...

• 30:56Speaker 03

  I'm angry.

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my, so my question is, I don't know the answer to that, but it's an intriguing possibility.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Like osteoporosis.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. Your bones start becoming misshapen, and you no longer fulfill the golden ratio.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Well, I think there should be a golden ratio for different ages.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So there should be like a silver ratio, a platinum ratio.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, just like the average, what your average weight should be, or whatever. It should just be like, here's the, right, the silver ratio, the golden.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an excellent, excellent thought.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  The platinum.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent thought. We've got some more of my interview with Peter Max. I was in his studio in New York City, and he's got this huge studio where he's, he's still painting. He's still doing it. The guy is still doing it.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Why don't I get to go to this? I take you to my thing. I love Peter Max.

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't ask. Let's see what more Peter Max has to tell me.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  While I was a realist and I started painting realism like Michelangelo, I couldn't get any work. I did, there were no galleries were interested in it, no museums, nothing. And I used to sit in a little cafe, which back then was almost like what is a Starbucks today? And I would make my astronomical drawings every day because I loved it. And I had maybe a hundred little drawings with me. And one day an art director said to me, Peter, what's this on the bottom of your portfolio? And I go, oh, oh, it's nothing because I was shy. I was a realist. I was a classical guy. Because at the top of your portfolio was all your realistic. Yeah, I wanted to be like Michelangelo. I wanted to be revered as like I was because I was so good in realism. Anyhow, and one day he said to me, what's this on the bottom of your portfolio? I said, no, it's nothing. It's nothing. And he insisted I take it out.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  And when he looked at it, he went, oh, my God, this stuff looks unbelievable. Hey, guys, fellas, girls, come over here. See what this guy does. And I walked out of there for the first time in my life with 14 projects that paid like, you know, a few hundred dollars each, which was today like a few thousand each. And when I delivered them about 10 days later, I walked out of there with 22 projects. And in the next 18, 20 months, I won 66 gold medals in art and design for my creativity and for my inventiveness. And I suddenly realized that the stuff I was doing, which was these cosmic characters and cosmic stars and cosmic runners and all these characters with wings that I invented

• 33:09Speaker 04

  only because of my interest in, in the space area that I invented characters that lived there that really weren't anything I could see in the regular world. So it's fair to say that the universe birthed your career as an artist? Completely.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you want to be a great artist, study the universe. That's the.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  I think that's very cool that that's his inspiration.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so, rather, it wouldn't have to be the universe in particular, but I think it's fair to say that you can be a new kind of an artist, or as an artist you can reach another dimension of reality if you come to it with some kind of science literacy. Is that fair?

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think it is fair, but I think the other thing that our show keeps bringing up is that science makes you ask questions.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  It keeps you asking questions.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probing the nature of reality, yes.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  And I think when a creative person keeps asking questions, it keeps broadening their, you know, their view of things, and that's what happened to him. He kept asking questions and he kept creating these characters and people built on that.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not just science ideas, it's actually, there's math even beyond the golden, the golden ratio that we talked about earlier. There's algebra, so there's a branch of-

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Look at the Matrix.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well-

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Movies and things are being built around this whole thing now.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, and there's a, there's a branch of algebra called linear algebra, which is, you don't normally greet that in, in high school, but you can take classes in it in college, where there's 3D computer games that are enabled because of a huge mathematical engine that's driving them.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I guess so.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, so that's how-

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Like Grand Theft Auto.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I don't know the extent of math-

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Because of science and math, you can kill a hoe. And steal a car.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't checked the math engine on that, on that, on that particular game.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  You know what scares me?

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it allows them, what it does is, they're trying to create a, a virtual world for you that you move through, and if you're stealing cars in it, fine, that's your virtual world, but the perspective that changes as you run down the street, and as doorways open, and as corridors show up, they have to calculate-

• 35:05Speaker 03

  I know.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -at every split second what the new scene looks like as you travel through that world.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  And what it will look like if you do this move or that move.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  They don't know what you're gonna do.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't know what you're gonna do next, so it has to be ready for that, and that's the computing power.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  That's true, because I play Lara Croft Tomb Raider, and when you dive in the water, all of a sudden you're in the ocean and the music stops.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you wanna be Lara Croft?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Um, no, she's way too active.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She was, I had to, I gotta admit, I liked the movie when I saw it.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  I did, but the video game is very active and annoying. At one point, I just started jumping off the slide. But, but here is what concerns me as an, as an actress, aspiring actress and comic. You know, CGI now, computer graphic imaging, is really taking over. I went to see Bolt, the 3D, when it was 3D, with my friends.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bolt is with the dog?

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, with my friend's sons, and I have to grab little kids from out of nowhere, so I can go to these movies and not look scary. But, and I went to see it, it was great. But when I was a kid, 3D movies were not as intense as they are now. I mean, they're so realistic. And as an actress, it started bothering me, Neil, because I started thinking, wow, when are we gonna fade out? Like, the way talkies took over silent films.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Like, I'm finally getting acting roles, and I'm done. They're gonna start just drawing people.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you draw people and animate them in 3D, and then they won't need you anymore.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  So, isn't there a chance that, that regular actors and actresses are gonna become obsolete?

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what they can do? They can fully scan your body in various motions, and then fully get you to read, like, a whole encyclopedia of words. And then they have all your vocabulary, they have all your body motions, and they can just cast you in a 3D animated movie.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  So, they might not need us anymore?

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, yeah, you just sort of sell your body that one time, and then they're used, you get used later on, yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Well, I know there are people in LA listening to this show right now. If this scares you, because you're waiting tables and you're thinking, what now? Call us at 877-5STAR-TALK.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're worried about being out of a job, is that what you're...

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, some of this science stuff, when it comes into the creative form, scares me, because like, for example, I don't like nude digital film. I hate it.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nude digital film?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  No, the digital film versus like 16 millimeter things.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Let's shoot everything on digital. Now, all of a sudden, I don't wanna see people with lines in their face. I can see that in the mirror myself. I want pretty people. I want the old grainy imaging. I want the Barbara Walters lens that looks like it's got Vaseline over it. That's what I want.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The soft focus lens.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Yes, thank you.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know, photography is a, you know, it's...

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Did I make you nervous?

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  All of a sudden Neil's like, "I'm never gonna be on The View." What has Linda done?

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. We're gonna go to break and we're gonna come back. Give us a call, 1-877-5-Star-Talk. And we're tweetable at StarTalkRadio. And we'll be right back. And we're gonna talk about photography and the universe and how that's inspired whole generations of artists and movements, social movements, simply because of images we've obtained from the night sky. See you in a moment.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Bringing space and science down to earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalkRadio, Neil Tyson on the line here. We've got Lynn Koplitz, my co-host.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hello, we've got a caller who called into 1-877-5-Star-Talk. With our question, they have a question about the relationship between science and art and inspiration.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who is the muse for whom? We have Rick from LA. Rick, you're live on StarTalk.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Hi, Rick.

• 38:27Speaker 06

  Hey, how you guys doing today?

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  We're doing good. How you doing, Rick?

• 38:31Speaker 06

  Big fan, big fan.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you. So what you got for us?

• 38:36Speaker 06

  Well, you know, you're talking about how science has inspired art over the years. And I just wondered if you could think of any examples where art has inspired science.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good question, Rick.

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Well...

• 38:51Speaker 06

  Scientific discoveries.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let me, here's the best I could do for you there. For example, before the era of photography, when people nonetheless had telescopes and they wanted to be able to tell others about what they saw, they had to draw what they saw. So they needed an artistic talent just to communicate their science to other people. And if they were not good at their art, they'd be showing something that was not really what they saw to other people. And that would confound any attempt to have sort of a level-headed assessment of what was going on.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Well, also, the constellations. At first, they came up with like, what the stars, they came up with pictures, correct?

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but there's no science anywhere in that. No, there's just mythological... Well, no, they're connected dots points. I mean, they are, they are scientific subjects themselves, but things we only learned much later, long after anyone was drawing pictures with them.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Okay, so Rick, the question, the answer is, we don't really know.

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I, let me, no, let me offer a little insight. I can say that artists, not to speak for artists, because I don't claim myself among them, although my brother's an artist, I can say that all artists I know are driven, often, if not all the time, by some aesthetic. And it's the aesthetic that drives, that fuels their attempt to create a form. And I can tell you, without hesitation, that as a scientist, we approach the universe, we approach the natural world with a similar expectation, that what we're going to discover is something aesthetically pleasing, something beautiful, something that will make you say, "That is nature at its finest."

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, I can tell you that we share a common driver. But whether or not there's some art that inspired a scientific discovery, it may be that...

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Also, if you're talking about what kind of art you're talking about, because we've already discussed on this show that there are films that have probably, and television programs like Star Trek, that have inspired scientists.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So what happens there is, the art triggers someone to be interested in a subject.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it affects them in an emotional way, and then they become charged, and then they want to learn about the science.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  What we're saying is, we all need each other.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Kumbaya. So, Rick, thanks for calling in.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Thanks, Rick.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. And we still, we still have some more from Peter Max. Peter Max, you gotta love him. And like you said, Lynn, he's such a soothing voice. I could just listen to him all day.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  He's like Venus flytrap. Remember him on KRP in Cincinnati? They've got that really smooth...

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see what more he's got to tell us.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  I was in Cleveland, I had an art show, and I wake up in the morning, and I go back to sleep, and I wake up again about 10:30, and I'm flip-flopping around the TV set, and suddenly I see Neil Tyson, with his khaki pants rolled up past his knees, squatting down, lifting up a handful of sand, and saying, "You see all the sand? There are 10,000 beaches in the world. They're like 10 or 20 miles long." And then he lifts up another big... pile full of sand and he said as it's running through his fingers he said for every grain of sand that we have on these 10,000 beaches there are more planets in the universe and I meant oh my god I can't this is so big it's so gigantic that all the grains

• 42:11Speaker 04

  of sands in 10,000 beaches that are like probably 10 feet deep and 10 to 20 miles long that there are more planets than this the first thing I looked is for my phone I found Neil Tyson's phone number and I called him up and said is this real he said to you he said to me it's probably bigger than that

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  well I'm honored to have blown your mind without drugs how what do you think of that

• 42:36Speaker 04

  it is like there's nothing that's nicer to be blown away by than the cosmos the universe these complete unbelievable facts that exists and the more you think about it the more you dream about the more it starts making sense and you still know that you're just this little microscopic little thing in the universe thinking about all the bigness the largest thing I mean isn't it true now that because of this thing they call the string theory they think that there could be other universes

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there are a couple of ideas that lead to the idea that there could be a multiverse and we're just one bubble within an uncountable number of other cosmos

• 43:14Speaker 04

  just like when Hubble discovered the first few galaxies

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  exactly

• 43:18Speaker 04

  and now they're discovering maybe more universes

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's philosophically the same thing because back then we imagined it was only one galaxy and then he discovered a universe of galaxies

• 43:27Speaker 04

  yeah you gotta there must be a place you can hide it is too big it's too big to imagine you know sometimes you gotta take a tranquilizer to calm it down it's just so amazing

• 43:37Speaker 03

  okay now I didn't think this could happen but Peter Max made me like you more

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  really so I got dibs from Peter Max and now it

• 43:46Speaker 03

  he actually makes you sound even cooler

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know he'd go off on that that way. I was just trying to get some-

• 43:52Speaker 03

  It was so sweet that you touched him so much.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Content for our show, but I didn't know that.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  And he's an amazing artist, an amazing influence and person, and that's really neat.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you know.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  I have a homeless person in my neighborhood who says I really inspire them.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that that guy that was on the sidewalk when I visited you the other day?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  It was the lady who wears these big crazy Erykah Badu wraps in her hair.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So photography can inspire people. Do you remember, I don't know how old you are Lynn, but in the nineteen, in nineteen sixty-eight, Apollo Eight went to the moon. It didn't land, but it actually circled the moon and came back and took a picture of Earth rise above the lunar landscape.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  I was very little when that happened.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but you've certainly seen that photo. It's called Earth Rise. By the way, Earth does not rise on the moon because the moon doesn't rotate compared to the Earth. So Earth is just always in the sky. So the picture is, is, misrepresents what actually happens on the moon. It rose because they were in orbit around the moon when they took the picture. That's what, just so you know.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  That's great. Yeah, thanks. But, um, now-

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Is a, no, no, I'm saying, that's great, thanks. Um, is a moon camera different than a regular camera?

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's bigger and more expensive and take better pictures than most cameras you'll ever see in your life.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Do you have one?

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I don't. No.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  You do, don't you?

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. So what I'm saying is that picture, who, that showed Earth-

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without any lines of continents or states or cities, it was just this blue orb juxtaposed as part of the scenery of another world, transformed our understanding of our place in the universe. And the modern green movement is traceable to that photograph. And so there's, there's scientific photograph that became iconic art that influenced a generation of people to take action. I just had to share that with you.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Interesting. Now the Hubble images and things, are the, is that the same kind of camera?

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, uh, Hubble, no, it's a digital camera. That was a regular sort of film camera back in the days of Apollo Eight. And now Hubble pictures is digital. It's, it's a very expensive version of the detector that's in the camera that all of us have, the digital cameras that we all use. It's called a CCD, charged coupled device camera. So I'm just, you asked, I'm just telling you. You asked. Did I volunteer that?

• 45:50Speaker 03

  LOL.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You asked, and so the Hubble photos are today's generation of exposure to the rest of the world.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Which are better?

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, definitely digital pictures are far superior.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Because they're more accurate.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're far superior.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  But they're not as romantic. That's why I'm a Luddite.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In terms of romance, do you know there's a scene in the Carl Sagan film Contact? I don't know if you saw the film.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yes, of course.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember where Jodie Foster was taken by the aliens into their distant land?

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she's looking and it's so beautiful, and you remember what she says?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She says, because she's speechless, by the beauty of it all, she says, "They should have sent a poet."

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's just...

• 46:29Speaker 03

  That's poetical in itself.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Poetical or political?

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Whatever, poetical.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just... And other thing...

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Really, Neil?

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a big fan of...

• 46:38Speaker 03

  I'm not Peter Max, you better watch what you say.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a big fan of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Oh, you think?

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inspired a song.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Just so everyone knows, who doesn't know Neil, Neil has starry night stuff all over his office. Everywhere, like pillows, books, which is great, because it's beautiful.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was the cover of one of my books, too. I can't, because it's a starry night, it's an artist who, he could have named that painting Sleepy Village.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Neil, you know what, we had this argument before, no we couldn't.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he could.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  It's all stars in the sky, it's about the sky, not about the village.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm agreeing, so the man came through, I'm totally with you on that. And then there's other art that got inspired, you know, the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal?

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, you took me there and showed the ceiling to me.

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, you didn't need me to take you there, it's Grand Central Terminal.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  I know, but I never really looked up at it till you took me there.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's different. Okay, so that ceiling, did you know that all the stars are backwards? And that pissed me off when I discovered that.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  And who did that? What was that artist's name?

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot, Paul Hail-Yu from 1912.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Was he dyslexic?

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  French artist, I think he was not sufficiently scientifically literate to know that the image of the sky he was looking at in a map was the reverse of what he had to put on the ceiling.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Or he might have been dyslexic, Neil.

• 47:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can't be that dyslexic, dyslexic is flip a few letters or a few words, not an entire sky. So there's no excuse, I don't forgive him at all.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  I wonder if he still got paid.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, with those Hubble photos, some of the colors are vivid. They're, they, they can represent colors that you would see if your eyes were huge. And if your retina was sensitive to the filters that the Hubble telescope uses. You wouldn't necessarily see what Hubble sees. You would, however, if you've got, if you can tune your eyeballs in the way we tune the Hubble telescope.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  I don't get that. What does that mean? So it means the colors that I think I see on there are not the colors that really, if I'm in, up in space?

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great. If you had special eyeballs, you would see it that way. You would see it just that way. We have feeble eyeballs.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  So in space, when I see, if I was in spacecraft looking at it, it wouldn't look like that?

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it would look like something else that was commenced with your eyeballs. But in Hubble, we want to see-

• 48:34Speaker 03

  That's aggravating.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm sorry, but it's just, you know, what happens when people put on makeup before they get photographed? It's not what you really look like. It's something else. I'm just letting you know.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  But if you were there on the planet, would it look like that?

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would look different.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Like is Mars really red?

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. You're acting like you're getting angry with me.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Because I just find that aggravating.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go, a fast clip of Peter Max, our final clip with him. Let's see what more he has to tell us about how he's been inspired by science.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  How much he loves you.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  I want to make an animated film. I told you about it earlier. And this film has a lot to do with the universe. And it's with like, you know, us suddenly connecting with another species from far, far away. Who have some common interest with us. And it's a beautiful, it's a musical. It's a two-hour musical. And I'm about maybe halfway through designing it, conceiving it. And I'm going to go to some of my friends in Hollywood and see how I can get it made.

• 49:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we got to get you back when that comes out.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Listen, Peter Max, it's been great having you on StarTalk. And thanks for your hospitality, inviting me into your studio where I'm inundated by paintings ready to fall on me. This place is, this, this place, you need like three more floors of this warehouse.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Thank you, thank you. We just have a couple of floors here with about 100 people. But it's my playground. I, in the morning, I can't wait to get here. At night, I don't want to leave. That's how all jobs should be. Peter Max, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 49:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Peter Max.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  I love him!

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god. Why do you love all the guests that I have on the interview?

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Well, I don't love... I think he's my new favorite.

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Until our guest next week. She's my real favorite, but it's really awesome.

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I don't know if you know, that NASA is not unmindful of the fact that art matters in our culture and in society. So, it's not just fighter pilots, flyboys, and scientists they send into space.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  They send artists?

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, they don't send artists into space, not yet. But, there's an Arts in Space program where artists are invited to capture the discoveries of NASA, the voyages of NASA, in whatever is their artistic means of expression. And it was started in 1962, and they've commissioned artists such as Norman Rockwell and others, and it chronicles the history of space exploration through the eyes of artists and others. And there's more than 2,000 works of art by 350 artists in their archives.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  That's interesting. And listen, next week, this has been a great show, but next week, tonight, we need everyone to watch the Joan Rivers Rose.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joan Rivers is being... She's a buddy of yours, apparently.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  She's my dear friend, and she's on our show next week.

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, indeed. Thanks to your connections. I could have never had access to this woman.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  We had so much fun with her.

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's an icon of comedic... She's gonna be riffing on all the science that we're trying to take seriously here, and tell us where that fits and where it sits. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Good show, Neil.

• 51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Funded by the National Science Foundation. We'll see you next week.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  Keep looking up!

• 51:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.