Cosmic Queries - Cream of the Universe Soup

Can we go to warp speed? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice answer a grab bag of fan questions about the expansion of space, higher dimensions, and more!

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gravity as the curvature of space.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  This is so great.

• 0:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The photon follows the curvature of space.

• 0:06Chuck Nice?

  Amazing.

• 0:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It knows no other job in this world but to do that.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in addition.

• 0:13Chuck Nice?

  So cool.

• 0:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The original 1919 eclipse expedition by Sir Arthur Eddington to test Einstein's general relativity that light would bend near a gravity source. So you wait for a total solar eclipse because now you can see stars right up to the edge of the sun and you can see is their position the same as when the sun isn't there? And then you can see that the light bent. Here's something that nobody talks about. The light would have bent even without Einstein's theories, but it would only bent half as much.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, and this one is Grab Bag. Chuck, I think that's your favorite one, Grab Bag. Is that right?

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I kind of did the Grab Bag, you know, just because.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You reach in and whatever comes out.

• 1:13Chuck Nice?

  It's a potluck.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A potluck is never a bad thing, right? It's just a different thing.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Potluck is great because you don't know what you're getting. You get there and there's a bunch of good stuff.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Normally. And usually it's people's best stuff, right? They don't bring their worst stuff.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Nobody brings their, you know, crap dish to potluck.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Their B-list dish, right?

• 1:33Chuck Nice?

  And you say like, what are you bringing to the potluck? And they're like, my string bean casserole. It's like, no, you gotta go. You can't be here.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like string beans. I like string beans.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  I like string beans too, but you can't be bringing the recipe off the Campbell's Soup to the potluck.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  You know, now if you have an original recipe for a string bean casserole, that's a different story.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That one was from the mushroom, uh, cream of mushroom soup.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  Cream of mushroom soup, yeah.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dumped that in, that made everything.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. You can make anything with cream of mushroom soup.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Campbell's, it had enough salt to serve an army.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was thick enough to, but anyhow, wait. So you got a whole set of questions? I haven't seen them or heard them, so let's bring them on.

• 2:17Chuck Nice?

  All right, well, we can jump right into this. I love this first question. This is from Amanda, and Amanda, uh, clearly.

• 2:26Chuck Nice?

  Uh, believes that everybody knows who she is because that is all there is.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just Amanda.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  It just says Amanda and that's like, if you don't know, then you blew it, bro. If you don't know, you blew it, bro.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody who, everybody who needs to know, knows Amanda.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  Knows Amanda. So, um, Amanda says, you get a lot of questions about a lot of things. What is the question you wish people would ask you, but they normally do not?

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see, I don't, I don't, I don't wish people to ask questions. I, that's not how I think about life. I see myself as a servant of people's curiosity that gurgles up natively within them.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not as people who will serve my needs or my wants by asking me questions that I wish they would.

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  However, I think what she's saying though is, what is the question that would excite you? That people may not know to ask.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You helping out that question. You helping her out in that question.

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  I am helping her out because, you know, I, I, I get exactly what you're saying. And so I'm just reframing Amanda's question in such a way.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one. Uh, here's one. Here's one that no one has asked and I don't know why.

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, I spent a whole chapter on it in my book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, the title of the chapter is Unearthed as It Is in Heaven. And the question is, how do we know that the laws of physics we discover here on earth?

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apply elsewhere in the universe. Is that an assumption? Is it a article of faith? Is it, and if we, if they apply across the universe, how do we know they also apply throughout time? Because as we look out in the universe, we're looking back in time. And so, no one asked that. And so, I get, I guess I get to put that one in.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's awesome. And if you want to know the answer to that, people, all you gotta do is go buy Neo's book. Buy the book. That's all you gotta do. Go buy, go buy the book. You get the answer.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question.

• 4:58Chuck Nice?

  Next question.

• 5:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, by the way, these are all asked by Patreon members, correct? I think, and you, you have access to this currently with our new tier system. At the entry level Patreon.

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get, it's five dollars a month, I think.

• 5:13Chuck Nice?

  Yep. Anybody who joins Patreon, if you join Patreon and support StarTalk Radio at Patreon slash, Patreon.com/StarTalkRadio, then you automatically get to ask us questions.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And last I checked, isn't like an entry level cup of coffee at Starbucks, five dollars?

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  That's actually cheap. That's just a regular cup of coffee.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you know, I mean.

• 5:37Chuck Nice?

  Once you add the plutonium to it, it costs a lot more, you know? That's, that's what they're doing. There's so many, I, I, I only get coffee. I, the other stuff is just too deep for me at Starbucks.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  And it's all sugar.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I mean, unless you say no sugar, or you say.

• 5:54Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm saying though, it's like a caramel macchiato, half-caf, you know, whatever. Uh, I, I can't, like, it's all, like, it, it's a dessert. Then they, they like deliver a dessert to you.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, half of them are the, the frappuccino?

• 6:10Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right, right, okay.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I can't do it. I can't, you know, I mean.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, if you get one of those every day, you can surely become a member by paying that once a month.

• 6:20Chuck Nice?

  Per month.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah.

• 6:21Chuck Nice?

  That's only one that skip. Skip the banana frappe for one day. You know what I mean? Skip the banana frappe with double the whipped cream for one day, and you support us for the entire month. There you go.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so my answer for Amanda is very simple, actually. Um, we, initially, we didn't know, and here's an interesting little historical note. Isaac Newton comes up with his laws of gravity, and, and he's rocking the house with these. He can explain Earth's, uh, the moon's orbit around the Earth, Earth's motion around the moon. He explains Jupiter's satellites in orbit around Jupiter.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which was the first time we calculated something orbiting something else other than either ourselves or the sun. So it's like, oh, my gosh, this is badass uni- universal law of gravitation. And then, uh, Herschel, William Herschel, discovers planet Uranus with his telescope. This is a planet orbiting just beyond Saturn. Okay, so it's a modern planet, was not known to the ancients, even though it's named with a, with a Roman god. And so, uh, Uranus, right, was Greek, and then it was very close to that in Roman, any, in, in Latin. Anyhow, that planet, it has, it's orbiting the sun, but they kept tracking it.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was not matching Newton's laws. It was deviating.

• 7:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people said, okay, we found the limit to Newton's laws. It only goes out to Saturn. Beyond Saturn, we gotta make other laws to apply to the rest of the universe. And somebody else said, nah, Newton was too badass for that. Let's, let's assume his laws are correct, and then wonder what could be perturbing Uranus's orbit.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the way that we see. And so some brilliant mathematicians got together. A French mathematician primarily, Le Verrier. And he calculated with Newton's laws. And you have to invert the equation mathematically, which is not easy to do. Instead of having an equation saying, here's an object. What's the field of gravity at this distance? You have to ask a different question. Where would an object have to be? And at what distance? To influence this object in this way? That's a whole other way to use that law of physics. And the arithmetic and the calculus. So he does that. Predicts that if Newton's laws are accurate.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't come to the end of Newton's laws. If they're accurate, there should be a planet right over here. Take a look. Take a look. And sure enough. They put the, that night. That night.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was a telescope in Germany. I forgot the guy's name who was tasked, who tasked himself to this.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  We'll call him Wilhelm for the hell of it.

• 9:25Chuck Nice?

  Wilhelm.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ludwig Wilhelm.

• 9:27Chuck Nice?

  Ludwig, right. Gunther, we'll just call him Gunther.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, Chuck, that's racist. I'm pretty sure.

• 9:37Chuck Nice?

  I'm pretty sure it is too. But let me tell you something. If there's one people that cannot complain about racism. It is the Germans.

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm like, really, bro? We want to go down that road? Do you really?

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's clear Chuck is still in his race therapy classes.

• 9:57Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. All right, so.

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  So this German, this German astronomer.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll come to me in a minute.

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he, so that, that night. He said, I'll look here in this little box that Le Verrier is telling me to look. And sure enough.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Planet Neptune is discovered. Look at that. Where it should have been and at the distance it needed to be to perturb the orbit of Uranus. And so Newton's laws. Still works. Intact. Correct. Then sometime later, we found binary stars orbiting each other. Mm hmm. Far outside of the solar system. They're following Newton's laws of gravity. Then we find galaxies in orbit. We find, uh, and we take this out to the edge of the universe. Wow. Okay, now it turns out there's a limit to Newton's laws. We find out they do fail in the regime of extremely high gravity. And so you need Einstein's laws to describe where Newton's laws fail.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not a matter of place and time. It's a matter of severity of how much mass and energy have you compacted into a small volume? So you can't use Newton's laws to describe black holes, for example. Right. But you can just describe practically everything else in the universe. So they're highly useful. We got to the moon on Newton's laws in 1968 and 69. So, so, and, and we can look at spectra. You can take carbon or nitrogen or oxygen and, and, um, and you burn it and it can send off features in a spectrum. Mm hmm. Which is the fingerprint of each element. And each element has a unique fingerprint on the periodic table. Right.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some are complex, some are simple, some are fascinatingly ordered, but each element is unique. Now we look out in the universe. Oh my gosh, halfway across the universe, carbon showing up exactly as it would have on Earth. Oh, but wait a minute, the universe is expanding. So there's a shift in the wavelength of light. Oh, by how much? Well, by this much. So let's shift in the spectrum here on Earth. There's the carbon fingerprint. Wow, look at that. Right, in exactly the configuration it needs to be, but the whole pattern was shifted according to how fast the thing is expanding away from us. And we could take that to the edge of the fricking universe, which takes us not only

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  across space, but through the depths of time itself. And the spacing of those features is very sensitive to quantum physics and the speed of light. Mm hmm. And so that also tells us that the law, not only do the basic laws that we know of apply, but also other things like the speed of light. Uh, the quantum, other things that that are tied up with other measurements that enable those measurements to even exist at all. Those work out too. Hence, they call the universal laws of physics.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what gives you that obnoxious thing, which is kinda true. There's the laws of physics and everything after that is opinion.

• 13:07Chuck Nice?

  Wow, look at that.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's completely obnoxious.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Nah, I don't, I don't think it's obnoxious when it works.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's kinda mostly true.

• 13:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's, it, you know, it's, you're not obnoxious with it's, it's, it's a little Jordan-esque.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  You know, like Michael Jordan was like, you know, you ask him, who's the greatest player of all time? And he'll just be like, man, we don't need to have that conversation.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's how you answer that.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  But you know what he means when he says that. You know exactly what he's saying. What he's saying is, I am the greatest player of all time. But he's like, man, we don't need to have that conversation. Cause he's not going to say it himself. So, yeah, there you go.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay, so, so I'm just remembering now, uh, with the help of our producers. Uh, Johann Gottfried Galle, G A L L E. In German, I'm not sure how you would pronounce that. But he, he's the guy who went to the telescope and found Neptune. At the commands of the math, the French mathematician, uh, Le Verrier. So, yeah, there it is.

• 14:09Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laws of physics. That's why it's, you know, physicists, I think, have good right, good justification to have a certain, uh, cocky confidence when we invoke our laws of physics that we know apply throughout the universe and all of time.

• 14:26Chuck Nice?

  Cause listen, that, when the stuff works halfway across the damn galaxy and then it works when other galaxies, they're doing the same thing.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  It's like, it's hard not to feel, you know, just a bit confident, you know?

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't mean, it's not justification to be an a-hole in your character and personality. Just when you're declaring your confidence in a discovery or a state, you know, it's okay.

• 14:52Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah, no, that's pretty cool, man. That, and listen, Amanda, what a, what a great way to get us rocking on the show, man.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I took down the whole damn segment there.

• 15:01Chuck Nice?

  Who cares?

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drop another one. Let's see what we can fit in here.

• 15:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let's go to Brittany Menacotti. Men- Menkotti, not Mena, Menkotti, Brittany.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Menacotti is like one of my favorite pasta dishes.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So she says, hi Neil, hey Chuck, I'm an aspiring chef in Louisville, Kentucky. I was wondering what the future of the culinary arts may look like with, if and when we colonize elsewhere in our solar system or even further.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, okay. I'm gonna answer that real quick and then we go to a break.

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you'd have to make adjustments for different atmospheric pressures.

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if we, let's assume we could recreate the air mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. Um, the different atmospheric pressure will affect it. And if it's not the exactly the same amount of oxygen, then things will burn at different rates. If you have a coal oven or even your, your, your gas burning. Because more oxygen, it'll burn more violently because oxygen promotes combustion. All of that, you'll have, you'll be a diff, you'll be, you'll have the moon cookbook and the Mars cookbook.

• 16:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And something else we discovered, and we're not quite sure what causes this. In orbit, people's taste buds wane. So the foods that they tend to, people who'd never had it before, they add hot sauce to their foods. Just to sort of punch it up.

• 16:28Chuck Nice?

  Punch it up.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Punch it up a notch. We don't know if it's because you're weightless or because the pressure is a little different in the air. It's like being on a mountaintop. You don't, you don't put spacecraft at the same pressure as atmospheric pressure. It's just not necessary because you're not, you know, running marathons, right? You can breathe a thinner air, like on a mountaintop. You can breathe a thinner air and you'll be fine. But all the forces that operate on your olfactory senses, you might need a special version of your recipe for it to work on the moon. But here's something before we take it out to the break that, um, you have to watch out because even if you have a delicious meal on the moon, if you open a restaurant, it's not going to have any atmosphere.

• 17:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I got it. I see what you did there.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a dad joke, but I'm allowed because I am a dad. All right, let's take, we're gonna take a quick break.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say that joke cratered.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, oh. Good one, Chuck. Good one. Get to get out joked. That's good. I like that.

• 17:36Chuck Nice?

  That's just pun on pun.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's take, let's take our first break and we'll come right back to StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag Edition with my co-host Chuck Nice.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, segment two, Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag Edition. Chuck, you just pulling them out random out of there.

• 18:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, so what else you have?

• 18:20Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Let's go to Kayla Nickel from Boise, Idaho.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's Boise.

• 18:28Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Boise.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boise.

• 18:31Chuck Nice?

  Boise. And by the way, it just feels so unnatural to say Boise.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boise, but if you're from there, that's what they say. I'm pretty sure that's, that's how they say it. What's the person's name again?

• 18:41Chuck Nice?

  So this is Kayla Nickel from Boise, Boise.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, Kayla.

• 18:44Chuck Nice?

  Boise says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, do you think warp drive for interstellar travel is possible?

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I, uh, we know how to do it on paper. So the question is not, is do laws of physics prevent it? The question is do engineering abilities or knowledge or material substances enable it? That's really what that comes down to. So is it possible in principle? And so in principle, it's possible.

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  So the math works?

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Math works.

• 19:19Chuck Nice?

  You can take space in front of you and create a density field and collapse it and then move through it and then you're moving faster than the speed of light, but you're not moving.

• 19:32Chuck Nice?

  No, you're traveling faster than light speed, but you're not moving faster than the speed of light.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Chuck says that perfectly. Oh, Chuck.

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuckie, baby. So, so there, there are two ways you can think of this. One of them is you bunch up waves of spacetime in front of you.

• 19:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you sort of surf them.

• 19:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, on the crest of those waves. And then you stretch the waves out behind you.

• 20:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in that way, you go faster than light. But it may be that wormholes get invented before that.

• 20:10Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because a wormhole is a tear through your location in space and time. It crosses through a higher dimension and re-enters.

• 20:20Chuck Nice?

  In another location.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In another location.

• 20:23Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that reminds me of my fast story. I've said it a couple of times, but now is a good time to say it. I was at Charlotte Airport. I had to go from a big plane to a little plane and my luggage didn't have wheels. It was like a garment bag and, and, and my backpack. And I said, I regret this. I felt like I walked three miles. But it was, it was probably only a mile, but it felt like three miles. I got to my little plane gate and I thought I'd be clever, geeky. And I tweeted, this is back when tweeting was a, a fun thing to do rather than dipping your toe into the cesspool of,

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of human hatred, right? Okay.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back when you just tweet thoughts, right? Fun thoughts. So I tweeted and I said, can't wait till the day we have wormholes because then all gates will be adjacent to one another.

• 21:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought that's, you know, I'm card carrying geek. That's a good tweet. And then however geeky you are, there's always someone who's geekier than you.

• 21:26Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that spectrum goes to infinity.

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  You only get to be king geek for a day. Sometimes not even a full day. Not even a full day. Somebody's there to unseat you and go.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word gets out.

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  Go a little geekier.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the new, I'm new geek in town. What do you got? So the person said, uh, Dr. Tyson, the day we have wormholes, you won't need airports. There you go. It was like, whoa, whoa. How to get out geeked in real time. Nice. So, so wormholes might just make all that obsolete is my point. Right. But no, we're not anywhere close. And, and just to be clear, when people said, oh, we'll never have heavier than air flight. You know, people like to cite that as well, that scientists were wrong when they would say that. Scientists never said that. Right. Okay. Idiot engineers said that. Right. All right. Here's, here's how you know they're idiots. Of course, the owner of dirigible companies.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That they said that too.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Graff Zeppelin family said that. Right, right. So, so the reason why you know that is because birds are heavier than air. Right. And they can fly. There you go. This was not a hard thing. So what you should have said is we don't have to imitate a bird yet. One day we might, rather than say we never will. Then came, we'll never travel faster than the sound barrier. The word barrier started you getting used for it. Like, oh my gosh, you can't cross it. Well, why did you use the word barrier in the first place? All right. Why don't you just sort of say the sound, speed of sound? Right. It's just a speed. Sound threshold. Threshold, thank you. Thank you. They said sound barrier. And then you had people that will never cross the sound barrier.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Meanwhile, rifle bullets at that time routinely travel faster than sound. Uh, so does the crack of a whip at the very tip of the whip. That little crack is like a mini sonic boom as it goes faster than sound. We had things travel faster than sound. Plus, everybody knew Mothra travels faster than sound. I mean, come on now. But that wasn't evidence enough. That's true. You know? Right. No, no, was it Mothra or was it? Um, no, it wasn't Mothra. It was Rodan.

• 23:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Rodan, yes.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that is. The Mothra was the moth.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  Mothra's a big, we have furry one.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Rodan is like the pterodactyl.

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes, the pterodactyl.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so, uh, but, but my point is, we had things in nature that could do it. And so to say we will never be able to do it is very little confidence in our own ingenuity.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because all we had to do is mimic nature on that level. So right now, we don't know anything that's making wormholes and things, so, but with the math works. So, maybe one day, but not any time that I can foresee.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Well, that was fun. Thanks, Kayla. Thank you, Kayla.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From Boise.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  From Boise. Boise.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:28Chuck Nice?

  Uh, yeah, Boise. Um, this is, of course, the Violetta, our.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Violetta?

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Violetta, our.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is she married with children by now? How old is this child?

• 24:40Chuck Nice?

  No, she's still just.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's like our oldest questioner.

• 24:43Chuck Nice?

  Uh, yeah, uh, no, she's just fourteen and, uh, she's.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, I knew that. I knew that. You know why I knew that?

• 24:49Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know why I knew that? Because her mother brought her to New York City.

• 24:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. And I said, well, we, we gotta come visit. So they visited my office.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, but the child still kept asking questions.

• 25:06Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, is she ever gonna shut up?

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 25:11Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's, it's a, it's a level of curiosity that people often lose right around her age right now. Age thirteen, fourteen, and so if she may sustain that, I said, I asked the stupid grown-up question, what do you want to be when you grow up? I felt stupid asking it. And she said, yeah, I would be a scientist. And, uh, she's on the right path, so.

• 25:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, listen, when we started, she was like Violetta, the nine-year-old.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think she was nine years old.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  And now she's Violetta, the fourteen-year-old astrophysicist.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, she's into sports and things, so good. She'll have a whole, a full, complete life.

• 25:42Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming down the pipe.

• 25:44Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what do you got, Violetta?

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Violetta says this, I was wondering. We have various measurements for traveling at X velocity through space, which is distance divided by time, like meters per second. But what would or do-

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, right there, she's showing off.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  A little bit, a little bit.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Throwing some algebra in there.

• 26:04Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna let her flex, though. I gotta let her flex. You know what I mean? I'm like, go ahead, girl, go ahead and flex.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. All right, you go, girl.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Do you think, do you think? She says, but what would or do we call the measurement for traveling through time? And what would it or does that look like?

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 26:24Chuck Nice?

  Traveling through time.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've never thought of that. Because when you're traveling over distance, the thing of the metric there that we all care about is your speed.

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your distance divided by time. Now, if time is what you're traveling through, do we, are we thinking about the speed with which you travel through time? That's a different one. No, I haven't thought of that.

• 26:50Chuck Nice?

  But here's the other thing. Does speed make any real difference when you are, when time is the medium through which you're traveling?

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, because usually when you talk about speed, you say, do I really have an hour to kill to do this?

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas in time, you just wipe out the hour because you're traveling through time.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Because you're trapped, time is the medium. So, you know.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:12Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, right?

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time is, yeah. Yeah, like if you have access to a time machine, these, these words will never come out of your now, your mouth. We don't have time to finish the report.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Said no one ever who had access to a time machine. Right. All right, so let me think. How about this? You will need a device that when you travel through time, keeps track of how far you have traveled in distance.

• 27:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not how long it took.

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  Not how long it took to get there.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The time doesn't matter, just how far.

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  Just the distance.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, as I've said before on this program, if I have a time machine right here and I go back one day, okay? If that's all I do is go back one day.

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will reappear in the vacuum of space because Earth is not in this position one day ago.

• 28:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in fact, I'll be in the way and Earth will slam into me. So, because things are moving, you can't just go through time and land in a place you expect to land unless you also plot a trajectory through space. So, if you want to be where that time machine is in that room, a day later, six months later, whatever, you gotta move with to Earth's spot. If it's six months, you're on the other side of the sun, thank you. It's two seasons later, thank you, alright? You gotta track all of this. So I bet it's not a speed calculation, it's a distance calculation that we're gonna have to carry in our hip pocket.

• 28:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless we all die suffocating in the vacuum of space.

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and let me tell you something, Violetta. If you were 14 years old asking these type of questions,

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  don't ever smoke weed.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 29:06Chuck Nice?

  Just leave it alone, you don't, you don't need it.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't need it, other people need it to get to that kind of thing.

• 29:12Chuck Nice?

  When the kids come and they say, yo, you wanna hit this? You just say, yo, I'm all, I'm hitting that all the time in my mind. My mind is just constantly hitting that on the universe. Cause you don't, you just don't need it if you're already thinking of questions like this at 14.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's funny you say that because one out of four of my tweets, when I comment or reflect on an observation I've made, somebody's always saying, Neil, put down the weed.

• 29:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  I've seen that.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of them, the one that got the most was,

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in a mirror, you can kiss yourself, but only on the lips.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? People lost their minds on that, and it's very simple optics. But then people said, Neil, are you high? Are you? So, I guess it's how to get high thoughts for free. Just think deep thoughts about the physical universe and you're there. You know, Violetta is old enough to like do stuff because her earliest queries were sent via her mother.

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember that?

• 30:13Chuck Nice?

  That's right, now she's, now she's writing in herself.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, of age, okay. So bring it on.

• 30:19Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Uh, this is Evan Fenwick. Dear Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice, I'm Evan from Ontario, Canada. And my question is, as a science communicator, how do you maintain your cool when dealing with outspoken science deniers? And what advice could you offer to people who struggle to maintain their composure when confronted by the same?

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Me, how to not punch someone in the nose?

• 30:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. You know?

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you know what it is? It's a state of mind. As an educator, it's not my duty to educate the educated. If you confront someone who does not know something, that's what your life is about. That session that is ready to happen is what you live your life for. Not just giving lectures just to entertain people or to... It's the person who has a twisted mental pathway, knotted in some way, that needs to be unraveled, uh, uh, unwoven,

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  because whatever it was weaving was losing track of objective reality. And so what you have to do is, yeah, it, it needs infinite patience, but I don't think of it that way. The, to say it needs patience implies that without patience, you would be angry and frustrated.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you know what? I don't say angers me. What frustrates me, if someone is no longer curious about learning what is true, and then they're angered, they dig their heels in and say, "Let me explain to you why the earth is flat." That's, uh, it's harder to be an educator in that, in that setting. You know, well, you know, a professor in a classroom, that's not who's sitting there in class. You know, a hundred people angry with the professor because they want to keep believing what they're, that they're there, ready to listen to a new thing. So all I would ask is, I, if I have the patience, the least you could do is have the, the, um...

• 32:28Chuck Nice?

  Openness?

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The open, just to listen to what I'm going to tell you.

• 32:32Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About what it is you think is true.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let's take it from there.

• 32:37Chuck Nice?

  That is so much more compassionate and understanding than what my answer would have been.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 32:47Chuck Nice?

  Which is...

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be sure to leave you at home next time.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz my answer is, listen here, you obtuse, ignorant,

• 32:58Chuck Nice?

  homunculus.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a hunk of homunculus is a tiny human being imagined to be the embryo before we had any clue how reproduction worked.

• 33:11Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. And they were, and they were misshapen in every single way.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tiny, a tiny little man.

• 33:16Chuck Nice?

  A tiny little man who was misshapen in every way. And of course, because had no intelligence at all, you know?

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It was just, so, uh, my, so another point there is, I guarantee you that if I'm gonna engage you in that conversation, it's because as an educator, I know more about what it is you believe to be true than you know about what I know to be true.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. Now, listen, that's a great place to be if you are trying to help someone.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, by the way, cuz, because if I don't know all their reasons for why they think Earth is flat, I can't have that conversation.

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just lecturing and I'm just hoping they're listening. But if I know what's in their brain wiring, I can access it and work with that.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And work with them to help disentangle.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  So you gotta meet them where they are?

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. Correct. And to me, that's an educator's challenge, not an educator's frustration.

• 34:15Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So you find, find where they are, find that spot, meet them there, and then try to bring them along to a place of enlightenment.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is my job.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  While resisting the urge to punch him in the face. Dumbass. You dumb ass.

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Like I said, I'll be leaving you at home on that pilgrimage. Okay. Where, where's Lord, Lord Nice and Uncle Chuck? Nah, I didn't bring him on this educational route here.

• 34:49Chuck Nice?

  We couldn't afford the bail money this time. That's why. We didn't take Chuck.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta take a quick break. When we come back, our third and final segment, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Grand Bass.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Grab Bag Edition. I'm with Chuck Nice. Chuck, you're in some video projects lately. What have you got going on?

• 35:28Chuck Nice?

  Well, right now, I'm just, I mean, my Disney show is still running. Nat Geo Panel, if you have Disney Plus, you can watch Brain Games on the Road.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 35:38Chuck Nice?

  I'm still doing that, and I am, you know, I will announce it here because we are settling up on the final details, but StarTalk fans will be the first to receive an invitation to come to the taping of my comedy special, which will be only about science.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  I'm doing a comedy special just science, nothing but science.

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so, and I took some of the, some of the material for discussion or jokes from Neil's latest book, so it's kind of, it's kind of cool.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the book is just touches everything in our civilization.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  It certainly does.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's what comedians, that's the fodder for comedians, right? Is civilization.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm happy to serve that role. Will you give us details when it's ready?

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we will totally, totally get on it.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  We're settling up the final date for the taping right now, so it's gonna be great. And I told them that before we make a public announcement, that I want to invite only StarTalk fans first.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they can get first access to the tickets?

• 36:51Chuck Nice?

  They get first access to the tickets, because we're doing four shows.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Chuck, are you inviting StarTalk only because they're more likely to laugh at your jokes?

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  No, no, because they're more likely to understand them.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Understand the jokes, oh, okay.

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  I don't want no dumbasses at my shows, is what I'm saying.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you say there?

• 37:12Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. What do you mean by that? You should have kept your dumb behind home.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a difference between "that wasn't funny" or "I didn't know enough to understand why that was funny."

• 37:24Chuck Nice?

  And guess what? The result is the same, the person doesn't laugh, but, you know. But one of them, the stuff was funny, you're just stupid.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is the third segment. Let's see how many more we can slip in here. I'll try to be my, my soundbite mode.

• 37:42Chuck Nice?

  Let's do it. Let's do it. This is Trevor C. Mills. And Trevor says, greeting Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice. Trevor from Augusta, Georgia here, and my daughters love listening to your podcast with me. My daughter Lucy has a question. And she would like to know, how does space continue to grow? What causes the expansion of spacetime? And how can we slow it down? So, well, first of all, Lucy, space drinks its milk every single day.

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gross. You know, they don't advertise that anymore.

• 38:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right. I'm too old. Look at me, giving away my age. Got milk. It's just got milk now. It used to be milk makes you strong. It used to be.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, one of my favorite jokes from David Brenner, the old comedian from the seventies.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  From Philly?

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, is that right?

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he's a Philly guy.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the bravest person, the bravest human there ever was. Okay, we say, well, who's that? He says, okay, that's the person who saw a female bovine creature walking the countryside and decided to drink the liquid secretions out of its.

• 38:53Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bravest human there ever was.

• 38:56Chuck Nice?

  That is a brave human.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I forgot, what was the question?

• 39:00Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, space, it's, it's still growing.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  Why does it continue to grow? And what, what's going on with the growth of space?

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I can answer one out of three of those questions. Okay, the space is expanding because of the energy endowed in it from the Big Bang.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, that expansion is also accelerating opposite the collective wishes of all the gravity of all the galaxies in the universe. We do not know what is causing that. But we measure it and we call it dark energy.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does it expand? What is it expanding into? What? We don't know. But however much vacuum of space there is today, there's more of it tomorrow, and more the next day. And that will continue all the way up to the big rip, unless something prevents the big rip. And we talk about big rip in the Stark Talk book Cosmic Queries. Cosmic Queries, a fun book. And if you pick that up, there's a whole section on ways the universe can end.

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  There it is.

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of them is in the big rip, where we, the accelerated expansion happens so rapidly that the fabric of the spacetime continuum cannot keep up with it. And it no longer stretches, it rips. And I've lost sleep thinking about what that even means. So.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, we don't have answers to the two of those. But the first one, yes. The Big Bang had enough energy to expand for the 14 billion years that are going on now, and then some. Yet, there's this other phenomenon that has kicked in. And we call it dark energy. Yeah.

• 40:52Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Look at that. Nice job there, Lucy.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 40:57Chuck Nice?

  Keep it up.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I only, I can't, I don't have all the answers there.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  Listen.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When it's not, when I say I don't have it, it's not just me, my, the, my people. All right? It's not my personal.

• 41:07Chuck Nice?

  You're not gonna find it someplace else.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, thank you. Okay.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  So, don't worry, Lucy. Don't be like, Neil, let me down.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, let me go to that other podcast where they.

• 41:17Chuck Nice?

  We're brain cops. What's going on with the expansion? No, you don't have to worry. You're gonna get the same answer anywhere. All right?

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right.

• 41:28Chuck Nice?

  This is, uh, Zeki Mashad. And Zeki Mashad said, hello, Neil, sir, nice. We can observe the first, second dimensions, but if there was life bound to them.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  Would they be aware of us? If not, does that mean that there's possibility of higher dimensional life forms that can observe us? But we can't process their existence? Would we be able to use the laws of physics or gravity to communicate if this was the case?

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  All right, and thank you, Zeki. Now let's move on. Let's go to sister roll.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, stop, stop. So, so, so here's an interesting thing. All right, two dimensional life.

• 42:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, let's say they exist in just this, you know, in a flat surface. Um, how would they see each other? Well, they would only see each other along their perimeter.

• 42:24Chuck Nice?

  Edge on.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so their edge on, so their skin, if you will, is just their perimeter. That's all they are, the perimeter and guts on the inside. Well, we, we are three dimensional people. We can see inside their bodies. Because there's no skin separating their two dimensional existence from our three dimensional existence. Their skin is only in their two dimensions.

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the perimeter. So we, so we could go in and do, we can do surgery on them without cutting them open.

• 42:57Chuck Nice?

  Skinless flounder people.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, by the same analogy, we three dimensional people, if there's a four dimensional creature that sees us, they see our entire innards. And I would love to write a science fiction story where they have four dimensional medicine. Where the surgeon jumps into a fourth dimension.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sees every one of your organs just on display. The way we see all the organs of a two dimensional, uh, uh, creature. And they just reach in, clear out the arteries, replace the organ, fix the organ, and then they never had to cut you open for it. And cutting you open part is a big part of the recovery from surgery.

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Healing from having been cut open. Now, how might we communicate? I'm guessing we could write some letters in our three dimensions and they'd be able to see it. They can see our innards, they can see what our writing is.

• 43:56Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is writing if not two dimensional information? When you think about it, right?

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes, correct, not right, but correct.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so I don't see why we could. And they would have to then write something, they'd have to stoop to create something in three dimensions that we could then read, or ideally in two dimensions, which is our more familiar form of communicating in the written word. If they speak, their sound waves, I don't know how they'd get into our.

• 44:22Chuck Nice?

  What's a four dimensional sound wave look like?

• 44:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I'd have to think about that.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What that would mean for us, yeah, yeah.

• 44:28Chuck Nice?

  I'm still stuck on like, you know, like a Klein bottle, like I can't even. When I look at the renderings of that, I mean, you know, that's a four dimensional.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A four dimensional bottle, yeah.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  And I can't, I'm telling you, it's.

• 44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole other show.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  Dude, we should do a show. I could, I have spent way too much time.

• 44:52Chuck Nice?

  Sitting and trying to figure out. It's really rough.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Klein bottle, a Klein bottle has no inside.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  No inside.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It's an interesting.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's really, really cool, but you know, but it's four dimensional. So I can't even, I can't even wrap my mind around a four dimensional sound wave.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I have to think about that. Because if we use sound, they might have some other sensory way to receive information.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sound might be too primitive for them.

• 45:19Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly, yeah.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 45:22Chuck Nice?

  Dude, that's amazing.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, next.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that was so good, so good. Okay, how about this? Cicero Artifon says, hey, Dr. Neal, Lord Nice, Cicero from Toronto, Canada. I want to know, when we use a pillow, it is fluffy because it has air between the foam or the feathers, but what would a pillow look like in space? So now, I don't know if he means like in the actual vacuum of space where you're gonna lay down? Or like just out in the, like the space station?

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, no, in the vacuum of space.

• 45:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have to be in a vacuum. It's not just zero G, it's the vacuum.

• 46:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not, a pillow is soft not simply because it has air in it. There are plenty of things that have air in it that are not soft.

• 46:09Chuck Nice?

  Like your tires.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, okay, sure, that's a good example. But I was trying to think of something more rigid, like a dry sponge.

• 46:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow, look at that.

• 46:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would not use a dry sponge as a pillow, because it's kind of...

• 46:23Chuck Nice?

  I would, because I cry when I sleep.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, yes.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's not, oh no, it's not tears, it's snot that comes out of your runny ass nose.

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And drool, and drool.

• 46:36Chuck Nice?

  He's a drooler.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's because the material is flexible, okay? So, and it has a restorative texture to it. I, so, two things would happen. If you took a pillow that had air in it and took it out into space, the pillow would flatten instantly.

• 47:01Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, because there'd be no air holding up the things. But then, the, the texture, the, the restorative force of the material will bounce it back. And I think you would still have spongy things. Because the spongy, because you're not being spongy on the air, you're being spongy on the stuff. On the material, correct.

• 47:26Chuck Nice?

  Memory foam.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The material makes all the difference in the world. It's just, it's not just simply if there's air in there. It's, does the thing restore its shape once it's compressed? So you, it'll have to go through a decompression moment, where all the air comes out. Then it goes back to shape and then it's a regular pillow at that point. But you'll still need to breathe, you know, you'll need to, a breathing apparatus.

• 47:48Chuck Nice?

  Well, you'll be dead because you're...

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll be dead.

• 47:51Chuck Nice?

  You're in the vacuum of space.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your pillow will be fine.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Rest in peace with that pillow. All right, this is Frederick Johansson. And this is, Frederick says, hello, Frederick here from Sweden. Um, and it's Friedrich, he gave me the pronunciation. It's Friedrich.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And does the Johansson have like extra As and extra S's in it?

• 48:13Chuck Nice?

  No, it's just two S's.

• 48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just two S's, Johansson, okay.

• 48:16Chuck Nice?

  Johansson. He says, my question to Lord Nice and the good doctor is, if photons have energy, and energy equals mass, does that not mean that photons have mass?

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, he, okay, so two, two fast points here. Photons are pure energy. There is a mass equivalent of that energy. But while the photon is energy, it does not have mass. Okay, it is pure energy. And so, uh, now, you can ask, well, if it doesn't have mass, why should it bend according to gravity? Right. But it turns out, gravity, as the curvature of space. This is so great. If the photon follows the curvature of space. Amazing. It knows no other job in this world but to do that. That's awesome. But in addition. So cool.

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The original 1919 eclipse expedition by Sir Arthur Eddington to test Einstein's general relativity that light would bend near a gravity source. So you wait for a total solar eclipse, because now you can see stars right up to the edge of the sun, and you can see, is their position the same as when the sun isn't there? And then you can see that the, the light bent. Here's something nobody talks about. The light would have bent even without Einstein's theories, but have only bent half as much. Because with Newton, with Newton, you don't need mass to then respond to the existence of a gravitational field.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The mass actually divides out. And it's the, it's what the, what effect the field has on anything there. Energy, objects of any size, it is the same for them all. That's why all objects fall at the same rate. Heavy objects, light objects, no matter how light you made that object, neglecting air resistance, it'll fall at the same rate as a heavy object, right to the point where it has no mass at all, such as a photon. Look at that. So, yeah. That is so fascinating. Oh, here's an experiment you can't do, but it would work, right? So you take a, take a BB and drop it. Right. Okay? And it, let's say it takes a tenth of a second to, to hit the ground. Right. Whatever is the distance you drop. You take a beam of light and beam it out horizontally. Right.

• 50:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, take, take a, take a BB and send it out horizontally. At the same moment you dropped this. Right. It'll go down, wind downstream from you, but it will fall at exactly the same rate as the one falling straight down. And it'll hit the ground at the same time.

• 50:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter how fast you send it out sideways, it will hit the ground at the same time as the BB you dropped straight down. It'll land miles down the road, depending on the speed you sent it, but it'll hit at the same time. Right on up to a beam of light. Send a beam of light, a tenth of a second later, it hits the ground.

• 51:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is crazy.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it would have gone, you know, 18,000 miles off to the left.

• 51:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wouldn't be on Earth at that point. But, the point is, gravity operates on all objects in the same way. And even when it's not an object, if it's energy such as light. So it's a great question.

• 51:36Chuck Nice?

  It really is a tremendous question. Thank you Friedrich in Sweden. It's very cool, man.

• 51:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Friedrich in Sweden. I don't have any more time, Chuck.

• 51:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man.

• 51:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a fast one? Is there like really, really, really fast one?

• 51:50Chuck Nice?

  Let me see here.

• 51:54Chuck Nice?

  Here it is. Hey, this is Cameron Bellamy. Hey Chuck, hey Neil. My wife Brooke Bellamy from Baltimore wants to piggyback on my Patreon account to ask. You cheater!

• 52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You cheater!

• 52:08Chuck Nice?

  You tell Brooke she better give us five dollars. This question costs five dollars! Okay.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, don't play. I'm a nice guy here, but Chuck is the mean one.

• 52:21Chuck Nice?

  She said, Brooke says this. Would it be possible to see evidence of previous life on planets that may have once had life but evolved out of being able to sustain it? So...

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it wouldn't continue to influence the atmosphere?

• 52:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 52:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As we do, as life on Earth? Actively? Adds oxygen, not, we don't add it, but the plant life adds oxygen to our atmosphere.

• 52:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's evidence of life on Earth.

• 52:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you can see from a distance using spectra without having to visit the planet's surface. But if there was once a civilization, and it's no longer there, and the atmosphere had a chance to equilibrate and be its own thing.

• 53:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without the presence of life, you're gonna have to go to the planet.

• 53:03Chuck Nice?

  Gotta go to the planet.

• 53:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you got to, unless.

• 53:05Chuck Nice?

  You won't be able to see it.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. Or you need some kind of powerful scope.

• 53:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 53:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That can see the remnants of apocalyptic cities and things.

• 53:13Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 53:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which we don't have the resolution to do for distant planets. But otherwise, you gotta go there and dig around.

• 53:17Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 53:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what we're doing with Mars. There's no evidence of life on the surface. Uh, maybe there's life, uh, under the soils, under the, and so with awkward.

• 53:26Chuck Nice?

  You need a probe, baby. You need a probe, Brooke.

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get me there. So, that's all the time we have. And Brooke, yeah, I gotta go with Chuck on this one. She's Bo Garton. Brooke is Bo Garton, you're the husband's.

• 53:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's right. Join Patreon, Brooke.

• 53:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next time, it'll be under a pseudonym, right?

• 53:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Right. He'll be like, hi.

• 53:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brookeina from Baltimore.

• 53:50Chuck Nice?

  Next time, he'll be like, hey, it's Cameron Bellamy. I got divorced and my new wife, Joyce, went like, oh, okay. Like, we know it's you, Brooke. We know it's you.

• 54:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we, we gotta go.

• 54:06Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 54:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, this has been Cosmic Queries Grab Bag. I still, I think it's your funnest category, Chuck.

• 54:11Chuck Nice?

  Lot of fun.

• 54:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grab Bag, it is. All right, till next time on StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.